Author: Mary Newsom

A greener home for cars

I stumbled onto what’s below after Wagner Murray Architects posted a notification and link on the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s Facebook page. (If you haven’t “liked” us, now’s your chance: Click here or,  on Facebook, search for Facebook.com/unccui.)  The link led to the Charlotte architecture firm’s newly redesigned blog, and what especially caught my eye was the entry proposing a vertical green wall.

Update, Saturday Jan. 5: I ran into architect David Wagner this morning at the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market. (And yes, Nise was there with her fabulous lettuce, the last day until the spring crop. Mostly these winter days you’ll find local meats, sweet potatoes, kale, turnips and carrots.) He confirmed that he’s the author of the Wagner Murray blog, so I’ve edited what’s below to reflect that.

Here’s an illustration, below, courtesy of the Wagner Murray blog:

The idea architect David Wagner proposes is to convert an existing parking deck in uptown Charlotte into a green wall (constructed with living plants) topped with a photovoltaic installation. Here’s a link to the item.

It’s reminiscent of ideas others have proposed here and there to try to enliven, visually, some of the many dead spots built in our downtown during the design-bleak years of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

Here’s a link to an essay, from Charlotte writer Tracey Crowe, in the PlanCharlotte.org website I run, in which she proposes using green walls to spruce up (pun intended) some bleak areas: “Turn uptown’s street canyons green.”

And PlanCharlotte’s Keihly Moore has suggested similar ideas, among others, to soften those dull walls: “The great walls of Charlotte.”


How many of you recognize the spot where the proposed green wall is illustrated?

 It’s this uptown parking deck on College Street at East Third Street:

It’s always seemed to me a wasted opportunity for some whimsy. If the green wall thing doesn’t work out, I’d like to see a game where you can drop a large ball at the top and watch it spiral all the way down to the ground floor.  

Why funding Charlotte’s streetcar is tough

Maybe this item’s headline should be Yet Another Problem with Single-Use Zoning.

There’s been chatter among city policy types about finding some creative finance tools for Charlotte to use to build the second phase of what would ultimately be a Beatties Ford Road-West/East Trade Street-Hawthorne Avenue-Central Avenue streetcar route.One tool being talked of is a special tax assessment district.

(For the purposes of this post, let’s set aside whether said streetcar is a good or bad idea. I tend to think it’s a good idea, as a way to shape and lure development to parts of the city that could use a development boost, but I know others disagree with that. Topic for another day. For now, let’s talk about financing.)

Because of a reluctance to use regular property taxes (for reasons that have not been clearly articulated, at least not in my hearing, but that seem to be taken as gospel), some folks have talked of special tax assessment districts, akin to those that fund Charlotte Center City Partners or University City Partners, along the streetcar route. It’s a tool used around the country to help municipalities pay for infrastructure seen as helping specific neighborhoods.

But here’s why that tool isn’t very sharp in Charlotte, at least not along the part of the streetcar route that is already
funded and ready to start construction this year (Presbyterian Hospital up to the Transportation Center at Brevard Street) as well as the proposed-but-unfunded second leg (from Presbyterian out Hawthorne to Sunnyside Avenue and from the Transportation Center up West Trade Street to Johnson C. Smith University). If you know what’s along that route you’ll notice that huge chunks of land along it are tax-exempt, owned by government or educational or other nonprofit institutions. The hospital. Independence Park. Central Piedmont Community College. The I-277 right-of-way. The old county courthouse. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Old City Hall. The Federal Reserve Building. The Transportation Center. The arena is city-owned, too. Once you pass The Square you’ve got First Presbyterian Church, the federal courthouse and Johnson & Wales University land. The I-77 right-of-way and, a few blocks later, Johnson C. Smith U.

Yes, there are some taxable parcels along the route, too. I’m just saying …

Years ago, the old and lamentably too-well-followed Odell Plan for uptown Charlotte called for a zone of government buildings, mostly on urban-renewed land appropriated from what once was a black neighborhood called Brooklyn. By creating a district of mostly government buildings, we’ve created a district without much privately owned land. And thus lowered any potential tax revenue for projects like the streetcar. It’s a good illustration of why a fine-grained urban fabric (meaning a lot of different, smaller uses close to each other, instead of huge-footprint, single-use projects) really does seem to be healthier, economically, in the long run.

Of course once you get past JCSU to the west and hit Central Avenue on the east, the amount of potential redevelopable land is much greater. But those sections aren’t even in the city’s long-range capital plan (which hasn’t been adopted anyway).

Want to read more about the streetcar’s potential economic impact under varying scenarios? To download the first part of a 2009 economic development study click here. For the second part click here.

Who owns the street outside your house, and who gets to park there?

Parking. It’s a dilemma for cities, towns and even hamlets. The more you make accommodations for drivers (that is, most adults) who need to park vehicles, the uglier and less functional you are likely to make your city.

Yes, you can find exceptions: Parking decks lined on all sides with stores or condos or offices. (Want examples? Visit the Gateway area of uptown along West Trade Street across from Johnson & Wales University.) But those projects are notably more expensive than your basic surface lot that slicks a coat of asphalt over the dirt. That’s one reason a large chunk of uptown Charlotte, beyond the main corridors, is a dead-zone of surface parking lots. Fully one fifth of First Ward is covered with surface parking lots. In a city with some 75,000 uptown workers and limited transit service, people are going to drive. Just saying, “Don’t drive,” is not a helpful option.

On-street parking in College Downs will be restricted. Photo: Corbin Peters

As many have noted – with UCLA planning professor Donald Shoup maybe the most prominent among them – free parking isn’t. Wal-Mart may be surrounded by acres of “free” asphalt for you and your Camry, but Wal-Mart has to pay for that land and for the paving and repaving. The parking cost is built in to the price of what you buy there. Even if you don’t shop at Wal-Mart, you pay for their lot, because as a taxpayers you foot the bill for storm drainage systems and anti-pollution measures to accommodate the torrents of rainwater that run off, most of it carrying pollutants.
So on-street parking emerges as one of the most cost-effective and sensible ways to provide parking. The streets are already built and paved, and publicly owned by all of us, and publicly available to all of us. But …

Ever had some dingbat park at the end of your driveway so you can’t back out? Ever had to weave through landscapers’ trucks and massive SUVs parked on both sides of a narrow neighborhood street? On-street parking isn’t always comfortable for everyone.

Now, imagine you live in an established neighborhood right across a busy street from a 26,000-student state university, which charges its students and employees for parking – as it should because, after all, it costs N.C. taxpayers to build those lots and decks. The non-student residents in the College Downs neighborhood, understandably, got fed up with students and others parking all up and down their streets. They asked the city to ban on-street parking. So the city did.

The problem of managing parking raises plenty of questions, and not just near UNC Charlotte. Few of the answers are easy. PlanCharlotte.org writer Corbin Peters examined the College Downs situation in “As the city urbanizes, who gets to use the streets?“

Now imagine, for a minute, what would happen in Manhattan if a group of residents asked the city to ban on-street parking on a street because they didn’t like it. They’d be laughed off the island. But even in other large, parking-stressed cities, odd notions of ownership will arise around streets and parking places. In Boston, some people who have to park on the street will shovel out their cars in winter, and before they drive away, “reserve” their spot with a chair or other place-holder until they return. After all, shoveling out is hard work and why should somebody else benefit from your work?
 But Charlotte is not Manhattan, or Boston. Here, we mostly assume we’ll be able to park easily and for “free.” At least, for now we do. In 20 years, I predict, those assumptions will have changed.

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Region’s planning footprint set to expand

How sane is transportation planning in the Charlotte region? Depends, I guess, on how you define sane. Plenty of sane people take part in the planning, of course.

But the organizing device, the Metropolitan Planning Organization (a.k.a. MPO,) is not configured in any sane way. For instance, the MPO for Charlotte – you know, the city of 750,000 or so in the middle of the huge metro region – does not include Cabarrus, Gaston, Iredell, Lincoln or York counties. It now includes only a portion of Union County and a teeny sliver of Iredell. This Charlotte-area MPO is known as MUMPO – the Mecklenburg-Union Metropolitan Planning Organization.

That’s about to change, bringing a modest improvement. Based on the 2000 Census, the federal rules that define what can/should be in an MPO mean the Charlotte-area MPO must expand. It’s all based on what’s called an “urbanized area,” which is a “metro region” which is not the same as the many, many other “metro regions” you may have heard of, such as the Centralina Council of Governments‘ region, the Charlotte Regional Partnership‘s region, the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s region, etc.  (Want to see a mash-up map of all those regions laid atop each other? Try this link.) Note of clarification here, added at 2:44 p.m.: Unlike many metro regions, MUMPO plans ONLY transportation projects. It’s a separate organization from the Council of Governments, which is ostensibly a regional planning group. Sort of. And of course, one of the first things you learn in Planning 101 is that land use planning and transportation planning are, or should be, joined at the hip. Whatever.

So I’m sitting at the policy-wonkish session of the Charlotte City Council’s Transportation and Planning Committee, hearing a report on MPO expansion. Here’s a link to download the proposed new map. Pictured above is a small version of the map.

The good news: Expanding the MPO is much smarter than not doing so. It’s not expanded out to what it should be (for Pete’s sake, why not include Cabarrus and Gaston?) but it’s clearly better. After all, as MPO secretary Robert Cook just told the panel, Marshville is now considered part of the “urbanized area.”  As is all of southern Iredell County, north to north of Interstate 40.

But will the name change?
I’ve proposed MILUMPO although, I admit it, it was sort of tongue-in-cheek. I’ve had fun in the past with the names of all the regional MPOs and RPOs. (Yes, there are rural planning organizations, too.) GUAMPO, RFATS, RRRPO, etc. are just too funny to pass up.

But Robert Cook just said the MUMPO members think they’d rather keep the acronym and come up with new words to match the letters. “Metrolina Unified something or other …” was one name mentioned here.  Council member Patsy Kinsey piped up with, “I hate the word Metrolina.” She is not alone.

There’s a lot of minutiae being discussed, though the details in this sort of thing matter. Do towns under 5,000 population get a vote? Previously they did not. Should the MPO members pay a piece of the local matching money required to get federal funds to help run the MPO? Currently Charlotte pays the whole local match, about $400,000. (Note, as City Council member David Howard has reminded the group several times, the local “match” is not the same as membership fees. Those are paid on a sliding scale based on population.)

And this is a biggie: Should the group continue with its system of weighted voting? Currently there are 38 total votes, with 16 allotted to Charlotte. Other members have one or two votes each. Under the new setup, Charlotte will have 53 percent of the population. Should it get 53 percent of the vote? As is, when the Charlotte representative does not show up the group pretty much lacks a quorum. Currently, the voting is structured so that Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, by themselves, could not carry the day; they need at least one other member for anything to pass.

So one idea is to have two types of votes, one not weighted, for things that are minor and not procedural, and the other for important matters that need weighted votes.  The City Council committee by a show of hands was strongly in favor of weighted voting, all the time.

Update (5:37 p.m.): What happens next? The memorandum of understanding among the various MUMPO members, setting out the number of members, who gets a vote, whether and how votes will be weighted, etc., must be negotiated and approved by MUMPO members. So today’s input from the City Council was not an official vote on anything. Final action on the memorandum of understanding is scheduled for March.

Lost in Cary, an American suburb

I was amused recently by an article about the state’s über-suburb, Cary – “Lost in Cary? Officials hope to show the way.”  It seems people get lost there – a lot.
If you’re not familiar with Cary, it’s a municipality just west of Raleigh. With 135,000 people, it’s now the state’s seventh largest municipality, bigger than the historic port city of Wilmington and furniture-famous High Point. But because Cary has grown so dramatically during the past few decades – America’s age of suburban-style growth – it doesn’t really have what most of us would think of as a downtown.
Bing Maps view of Cary Town Hall in “downtown” Cary
 “We used to hear a lot of people say that they didn’t know Cary had a downtown, they didn’t know where it was, particularly from people who said they didn’t live in Cary,” the News & Observer article quotes Cary  Planning Manager Philip Smith as saying.

The article also says the town has set aside tens of millions of dollars to make its downtown a destination again, not just to west Cary but to the entire region. “The plan is to seed the old town heart with arts and cultural venues, a new reason to make a half-hour trip across Cary,” the article says.

It’s a dilemma for more places than just Cary. Cornelius and Huntersville, two robust Charlotte suburbs in northern Mecklenburg County that began their lives as hamlets along a railroad line and sprouted vast subdivisions and strip shopping centers, have each been trying to build something like a downtown for a couple of decades now.  The Charlotte suburb of Harrisburg, perched just over the Cabarrus County line from UNC Charlotte, took a stab at building a downtown-type center, too. Here’s what the website I run, PlanCharlotte.org, reported earlier this year about Harrisburg’s town center: “Harrisburg N.C.: In search of a town center.”

Can Cary figure out how to make different parts of the town look different enough so that people don’t get lost? Should it? I have my own ideas (you’ll not be surprised to learn!) but I wonder what others think. I should also note here that Cary has had a reputation among many of North Carolina’s planners as a well-planned municipality.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/2012/11/26/2508857/lost-in-cary.html#storylink=cpy

Rail matters: the South End lesson

A local television station yesterday did a short feature on the South End neighborhood in Charlotte. If you click here, you’ll see my colleague Bill McCoy, the director emeritus of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, describe how the area has changed. As just about anyone i Charlotte could tell you, a huge transformative event was the launching of the city’s first light rail line, the Lynx Blue Line, in 2007.

The Ashton apartments in South End. Photo: David Walters

Nov. 24 marks the five-year anniversary of that launch, so a little retrospective is fitting. But it’s also important to know that South End was reviving before 1998, the year Mecklenburg County voters passed a half-cent sales tax for transit and we all knew, finally, that we’d get a light rail line. Three important lessons:

1. Zoning and design matter.  The city created transit-oriented development zoning categories to allow and encourage the form of development that best serves public mass transit: walkable and mixed-use, and denser than single-family-only residential or office-only or industrial-only. You’d think that would be a no-brainer, but many cities made the mistake of launching rail transit in 1980s and early 1990s yet did not change development codes. What they got was not much transit-friendly development.

2. South End’s development was sparked before the 1998 transit vote by a small-time, volunteer trolley run. So it was the hope of light rail, and a modest little rail ride, rather than mass transit service itself, that was key.

The nonprofit Charlotte Trolley volunteer group launched a historic trolley car ride down some railroad tracks the city had bought because the city hoped someday it might use them for light rail. This trolley run (not a streetcar; it didn’t run in street) was barely a mile and didn’t even cross I-277 and go into uptown. Yet it was enough to encourage developers. It didn’t hurt, of course, that the former industrial area later dubbed South End abutted uptown as well as the prosperous Dilworth neighborhood. By the time the Lynx launched in 2007 plenty of transit-oriented development had already occurred. Alas, the historic trolley run itself was booted from the line by a combination of federal safety regulations and a Charlotte Area Transit System revenue crunch after the 2008 financial crash. Beloved old Car 85 awaits a new neighborhood with which it can work its magic.

3. This is last, and most important: It was not adding public mass transit that sparked the development. It was adding rail transit.

Proof? For years, city bus No. 12 has traveled up and down South Boulevard. Yet the area languished until the spark from the old trolley coursing on the rails. Why didn’t the bus spark development? Because rails mean permanence. A regular old city bus can be rerouted. Few developers would peg their future to a bus route.

The city says it wants to help other languishing areas (can you say “Eastland Mall”?). City council members should remember the lessons of South End. If you want developers to commit, then the city should commit – to rail. 

Measuring the value of city development

How should we measure the return that the city (or the county) gets from different kinds of development? An Asheville developer/planner is turning the answer to that question on its ear, by looking at the numbers per-acre, instead of per-project.

He’ll be in Charlotte on Tuesday (Nov. 13) giving a presentation that’s open to the public. (For details, see below.)

Joe Minicozzi has been written about in TheAtlanticCities.com (The Simple Math That Can Save Cities From Bankruptcy),  Planning Magazine (log-in required) (Sarasota’s Smart Growth Dividend), and Planetizen.com, among other venues. American Planning Association president Mitchell Silver is so keen on Minicozzi’s approach that he’s having staff at the Raleigh Planning Department, which Silver directs, work up Raleigh-based numbers.

I’ve blogged about him, too. (To read more: click here, and here.)

He’s giving a presentation at Civic By Design, at 5:30 p.m. at the Levine Museum of the New South. Come hear how one mixed-use building in your downtown can be a much sounder investment for your municipal coffers, if you look at return on investment with a standardized measure, than even a luxury shopping mall on the edge of town. 

Minicozzi (left, photo courtesy of Planetizen.com) is a founding member of the Asheville Design Center, a nonprofit community design center dedicated to creating livable communities across all of Western North Carolina.  He received his Bachelor of Architecture from University of Miami and a Master’s in Architecture and Urban Design from Harvard University. He is a principal of Urban3, LLC, and formerly the new projects director for Public Interest Projects, Inc. (PIP). He is a member of the American Institute of Architects, the International Association of Assessing Officials and the American Institute of Certified Planners. For more examples of his studies, please visit www.urban-three.com.

What McCrory’s win really means

Tuesday’s gubernatorial election was a watershed for North Carolina, but for a reason that’s gotten a lot less ink than the Red State-Blue State lines. For the first time in the history of this once-rural state, a big-city mayor moves into the Governor’s Mansion. Pat McCrory’s election may well mark North Carolina’s transition from rural to urban.
 
To have elected the mayor of the state’s biggest city – whose whole political career has been in Charlotte city government – is a huge transition. It’s bigger, in my view, than the state switching from red to blue (in 2008) back to red in the presidential election, as N.C. this year went narrowly (by 96,600 votes) for Republican Mitt Romney.

McCrory will be North Carolina’s first Republican governor since Jim Martin was elected in 1984 and only the third since since Reconstruction. And it’s a big change, too, that for the first time since the 1880s, Republicans will hold the governorship and both chambers of the N.C. General Assembly. But for one party to control all three is not new; Democrats did that for decades. It’s also noteworthy that McCrory is the first Charlottean elected governor since lawyer Cameron Morrison in 1920. Among a string of Charlotte mayors who tried for statewide office –  Eddie Knox, Harvey Gantt, Sue Myrick and Richard Vinroot – only McCrory succeeded. “The curse is over,” he joked election night. (Aside: Martin was a Davidson College professor and a Mecklenburg County commissioner but campaigned as, and governed as, a resident of “Lake Norman.”)

Sitting around after midnight on election night, waiting for the Romney and Obama speeches, I started digging into N.C. history to see if I could find any mayor of a sizable city elected governor. The closest I found was Raleigh’s Joseph Melville Broughton, governor 1941-45. In 1940, Raleigh had 47,000 people. That’s not a big city. (Gregg Cherry, a former Gastonia mayor, was governor 1945-1949. Wikipedia tidbit: “It was joked  in Gastonia that he was the best lawyer in town when sober, and the second-best lawyer in town when drunk.”) Otherwise, nada.

 While the rest of the country probably still thinks of North Carolina as a land of tobacco farms, sharecropper shacks, textile mill villages and kudzu – with a lone, high-tech splotch of intelligentsia in the Triangle –  we who live here know better. This state has more urban/suburban residents now than rural ones. We’re a large state, so we have plenty of rural areas, but the urban crescent that follows I-85 from Gastonia through Raleigh-Durham is large and growing in clout – not to mention problems of transportation, sprawl, housing and the usual assorted urban problems.

Because of the state’s history of rural poverty, rural areas are the focus of numerous initiatives to provide economic development, and rightly so. Yet traditionally, the state’s cities have had little clout in state government. And while individual projects can win state blessings, the idea of an “urban strategy” has been MIA. If there are any holistic efforts to address urban poverty statewide, I have not heard about them. Yet urban poverty here is a huge problem, and a growing one.
 
With help from my colleague Laura Simmons, we pulled some census numbers. Looking only at the four most populous of the state’s 100 counties (Mecklenburg, Wake, Guilford and Forsyth) you find 390,238 people living in poverty. Then we looked at the same data for rural Eastern North Carolina, which I calculated as all 38 counties east of, or touched by, I-95. It’s more than a third of the state. Those numbers are higher, but not dramatically: 489,318. In other words, the number of poor people in four urban counties is 80 percent of the total in 38 other counties. And that tally does not even include Durham, Fayetteville, Asheville or Wilmington.

Charlotte’s light rail line. Photo: Charlotte Area Transit System

McCrory has been careful to say he’ll be governor of the whole state, and I expect he will. But to be mayor of the whole state means understanding city issues as well as rural ones.

He is also one of the founders of the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, a group of mayors from the state’s larger cities that “promotes the interchange of ideas and experiences among municipal officials for the continued development of urban areas.” He won national fame as a strong champion for Charlotte’s transit system, which led to the 2007 launch of the Lynx light rail line. He took a courageous stand to battle the city’s influential subdivision developers by pushing for sidewalks to be required on both sides of new subdivision streets. He battled NCDOT over the lack of bike lanes or sidewalks on NCDOT highway bridges.Unless he was asleep for 14 years as mayor (and trust me, he was not) he understands how the end of annexation has the potential to gravely damage N.C. cities’ financial stability. 

None of those things necessarily predicts how he’ll govern. After all, there is this legislature over on Jones Street that decides budgets, programs and a gazillion other matters large and small, even dictating the public school calendar. All you have to do is glance south to Columbia to see that party affiliation does not guarantee intraparty harmony. Further, a Charlotte transit champion in 1998 might find Raleigh in 2013 to be a steep, rocky and barren landscape.

But when cities head to Raleigh to try to pitch their causes, for the first time, they’ll have a governor who – even if he may not give them what they want – when he says, “I feel your pain,” they’ll know he really does.

Transit? ‘It’s going to take decades and decades’

Streetcar in Portland, Ore. Can Charlotte’s project find funding? (Photo: David Walters)

The big picture may have gotten buried Tuesday as Charlotte City Council members chewed over, and chewed and chewed, different alternative revenue strategies that might enable the city to build the second leg of its proposed streetcar.

Most of the discussion was about finding ways to pay for the streetcar project that weren’t a simple, citywide property tax increase. But here’s the big picture, as articulated by City Manager Curt Walton: “The Blue Line Extension is likely to be the last project of its kind.”

That $1.1 billion project recently won federal funding for half its cost.

Don’t expect Congress to continue to fund a public transit program that pays half the cost of building, Walton said. As for the other proposed 2030 Plan transit projects – the Red Line commuter rail, the Silver Line corridor to the southeast, the West corridor  toward the airport, Walton said, “We’re not going to get those anytime soon. It’s going to take decades and decades and decades.”

The first streetcar leg – from Presbyterian Hospital to the Transportation Center on East Trade Street – is being built with a $25 million federal grant and $12 million in city funds. The $119 million second leg – from the Transportation Center to Johnson C. Smith University and from the hospital to Sunnyside Avenue near Central Avenue – was a piece of a $926 million, eight-year Capital Improvement Plan that did not win council support in June. The whole CIP would have required a 3.6-cent increase in the city property tax.

Meeting for the second in a series of budget-specific sessions, the council spent most of two hours talking about different revenue tools for the streetcar. Although the streetcar project (from Beatties Ford Road at Interstate 85 to the former Eastland Mall site) is a part of the Metropolitan Transit Commission’s 2030 transit plan, it’s far down the list of projects, and the transit sales tax isn’t bringing in enough revenue to let the MTC build any projects after the Blue Line Extension, due to start construction next year.

 So the City Council decided to move ahead on its own with the streetcar project, using only city money. But council members haven’t agreed how or whether to pay for the extension. Tuesday, most council members agreed to keep looking for tools such as Tax Increment Financing, Synthetic Tax Increment Financing, Special Assessment Districts and Municipal Service Districts to help with the streetcar funding. (To read more about what all those things are, click here to download the city staff’s presentation from Tuesday. Bonus: You’ll get a copy of a consultant’s economic analysis of the streetcar’s development potential from 2009.) All are essentially property taxes but would use the higher property tax revenues from the development the streetcar is expected to lure to the route. For instance, a Municipal Service District assesses a special property tax over a certain part of the city, to be used for specific purposes to improve that area. Examples are Charlotte Center City Partners and University City Partners.

Unlike cities in some other states, Charlotte council members aren’t empowered can’t decide to raise sales taxes or create a local income tax, or even create a parking space surcharge. In North Carolina, cities have little leeway beyond property taxes and some specific fees (water/sewer services and development-related fees) for raising revenue. (For more about the ways cities around the U.S. lack the ability to chart their own financial destinies, see this AtlanticCities.com piece,”To Fix Municipal Finances, States Need to Back Off.“)

Some city council members have asked city staff for more information about the possibility of using a Business Privilege License Tax  (which N.C. cities can levy, under certain conditions) that would apply to parking businesses, on a per-space basis. The city staff said its very rough estimate of what would be needed to raise $5 million a year via the BPL tax on parking spaces would cost roughly $110 per space per year.

My prediction: This will not be the last time you hear of all those tools – TIFs, MSDs, STIFs, SADs, BPLs, and so on – discussed as possible ways to pay for transit projects. As Walton warned, cities across America will have to look to urban-region taxpayers to fund their own transit projects. Whether that’s fair or wise national transportation policy is a question for another day. Regardless of the answers, it’s likely to be reality for the coming decades.