Author: Mary Newsom

If you ask the public, they might answer

(Update, 9/19/12 at 1 p.m.: A more complete version of this article, with photos, “Neighbors deliver earful on zoning ordinance,” is now available at PlanCharlotte.org.)

You’d expect a room full of developers, developer consultants and lobbyists invited specifically to  bellyache Tuesday afternoon about Charlotte’s zoning ordinance would have had plenty to say. And they did have comments. But it was the group who followed them, about two dozen neighborhood activists and non-developers at a later public comment session, who all but scorched the paint off the walls.

“My concern is that this whole process will turn the zoning ordinance over to the developers,” said Bea Nance of the College Downs neighborhood in northeast Charlotte.

“We’re no match for the developers with money,” said John Wall of the Hidden Valley and North Tryon Street neighborhood.

“The problem is, there are no teeth in plans. They mean nothing,” said Susan Lindsay of east Charlotte.

“Quite honestly, the staff doesn’t support their own plans,” said Cindy Schwartz of Dilworth. “We never see them oppose anything.”

The two forums were held Tuesday ….
to solicit comments from the public about a zoning ordinance assessment. The city Planning Department has hired Clarion Associates of Chapel Hill and Denver to look at the city’s zoning ordinance and at whether it helps or hurts in implementing city policies and plans, and then offer ideas for reorganizing, restructuring and updating the ordinance. A 4-6 p.m. public comment session was aimed at developers and other regular users of the ordinance. A 7-9 p.m. session was aimed at other members of the public.

As consultant Matt Goebel of Denver repeated several times, the consultants aren’t writing a new zoning ordinance as part of the project. It’s an assessment, not a rewrite, he said.

Nevertheless, participants at both sessions questioned why more public input wasn’t included in the project. At the night meeting, even the consultants’ intent to get city planning staff to edit a draft of the assessment report they’ll write in the next few months raised suspicions and complaints among several people in the audience.

“You’re getting paid out of public dollars,” Susan Lindsay said. “I’d like to see what you have to say without the staff editing it.”

Not all the comments were in agreement with each other. Bea Nance said plenty of residents like having grass and trees and weren’t necessarily interested in more public transit service. ” ‘Suburban’ is not a bad word, people,” she said.

It’s not that the earlier session, with developers, was filled with the bluebirds of happiness. Among the issues raised, in addition to a wish for more public input, were:

From developer David Furman: A suggestion that, especially in more well-developed areas, measuring development intensity by counting units per acre isn’t particularly effective. A better measure, he said, would be to use what planners call Floor Area Ratio, which measures the square footage of the building compared to the size of the site.

From developer and consultant Karla Knotts: It’s difficult to look things up in the ordinance the way it’s presented on the city’s website. Also, she said, “Unless you know you’re in an overlay district there’s no way to know you’re in an overlay district.”

From lobbyist Joe Padilla of the Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition: Some broad-brush restrictions, such as height limits, would be more effective if they were tailored to different parts of the city instead of imposed one-size-fit-all.

Add your own input. Take an online survey: Click here, or visit the city Planning Department department web page for the project by clicking here.

Funnertime in the city

From guerrilla urbanism such as Matt Tomasulo’s Walk Raleigh project, to International PARK(ing) Day, in which people take over a parking place and transform it into an instant park, to this experiment at a London bus stop (be sure to click that link and watch the video; it’s charming), the idea is clear: Make cities more fun.

Call it tactical urbanism, or guerrilla urbanism, or just call it a fad. But it’s bringing a welcome touch of whimsy and creativity to the urban design field. Ideas are popping up all over the world, with help from social media.

So, has whimsy-challenged Charlotte gotten into the act?  If UNC Charlotte urban design student Keihly Moore gets here way, the city will. She’s organizing a PARK(ing) Day event in Charlotte for Friday.  Disclosure: Keihly is my graduate assistant at PlanCharlotte.org, and is a master’s student in urban design and architecture (dual degree) at UNC Charlotte. She also writes for the PlanCharlotte website.

With approval from the city’s Department of Transportation, Keihly and collaborators with the UNC Charlotte School of Architecture and the Charlotte Urban Farm Project will take a few spots in South End on Camden Road near Park Avenue – where the Food Truck Fridays event is held – and convert them, temporarily, to a park. Here’s her diagram.

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She plans sidewalk-chalk activities, among other things. Read more about it by clicking on this link. It’s all volunteer-led, with no budget to speak of. If you’re interested in helping, you can email Keihly (it’s pronounced KEE-lee.)

If you know of more tactical urbanism – maybe we should call them Random Acts of Urbanism? – let me know.

Europe’s great untapped revenue source: property taxes

The piece I’ve been working on for most of the summer, about the financial health of cities, was accepted and published today by TheAtlanticCities.com.

Europe’s Great Untapped Revenue Source: Property Taxes 

Its key point: Headlines about financial crisis focus on nations, but it’s on city streets that the trauma plays out. And local government experts say for cities in the U.S. and Europe, things are going to get even worse before they get better. And in Europe, economists are urging more reliance on property taxes, which typically make up far less of a local government’s revenue stream.

The article emerged from a conference in Paris sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University International  Urban Fellows Program.

Among the many lessons I learned there was this small observation: In Paris, when a regional planning agency offers a lunch to a visiting conference, it will include pate de foie gras. Not what you’d see at a Council of Governments or MPO meeting in the U.S., I think.

N.C. court to counties: ‘Raise taxes, already’

In August,the N.C. Supreme Court threw out Cabarrus County’s adequate public facility ordinance. Here’s the Charlotte Observer article on the ruling: “Ruling favors developers.” You can download a copy of the ruling here, courtesy of Joe Padilla at the Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition (REBIC). 

The ruling is of interest, of course, but as a practical matter APFOs, as they are known, were already virtually dead in North Carolina, as Mae Israel wrote in June for the UNC Charlotte website I run, PlanCharlotte.org. (See “With ordinances dead or in limbo, planners ponder next steps.“)

Under APFOs,  the local government sometimes assessed a fee on development if, for instance, local schools were already overcrowded and the county did not have the money to build new ones, or the planned new schools weren’t yet built. Or the developers would delay building until new schools opened.

Since the ordinances were invented as a way to help counties (and a few municipalities) find some money to pay for the schools, parks, etc., the question arises: How does a fast-growing county like Cabarrus pay for the services its thousands of new residents require? A number of studies have shown that typical suburban-style large-lot subdivisions don’t generally bring in enough property tax revenue to pay for the services they use. (More expensive houses, obviously, produce more property tax revenue, and at some price point the housing will start to pay for itself.)

 It’s unusual to live in a state where developers essentially pay no impact fees. Whether that’s fair or not depends, of course, on what “fair” is. Typically the cost of building, which would include impact fees, is mostly passed on to buyers, although sometimes it can work backwards and affect what developers are willing to pay for the land they buy instead of raising the price point of the houses.

But in opposing both impact fees and the adequate facility ordinances, the state’s Home Builders Association and related lobby groups say it’s more fair to spread the costs around the community rather than imposing them directly on developers and buyers of new houses. The Charlotte Observer article quotes Gary Embler, past president of the Cabarrus County Building Industry Association, who “praised the ruling, saying: ‘Public education is the responsibility of the community at large, not just those building new homes.’ “

The community at large? That would be the general county taxpayers.

The question of which is more fair – impact fees for some or higher taxes for all – a meaty tax policy question. But no one should be surprised if this ruling means property taxes will rise to pay to build more schools, maintain more streets and provide more police and fire services. Did the high court just tell counties to raise taxes and stop whining?

Taxpayers lose $4 billion on sports venues

One of many links someone shared with me last week during the DNC, when I was too busy hopping from event to event to sit reading links, is this from Bloomberg.com, which adds up some VERY BIG sums of what U.S. taxpayers really pay to subsidize sports stadiums and arenas: “In Stadium Building spree, U.S. Taxpayers Lose $4 Billion.”

With groundbreaking Friday for the Charlotte Knights ballpark in uptown Charlotte, it’s particularly timely reading. Bloomberg reporters looked primarily at tax-exempt muni-bonds issued for places including Charlotte’s Time Warner Cable Arena, where the NBA Bobcats play.

The reporters write: “During the past decade, studies by Grant Long; Robert Baade of Lake Forest College near Chicago; Victor Matheson, an economist at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts; and others have found that stadiums are poor municipal investments. Nonetheless, political leaders are still willing to offer taxpayer-funded aid to team owners – including muni-bond financing – to lure or avoid losing a franchise and the civic pride and event-related jobs that go with it.”

The link takes you to a 2006 article in Growth and Change: A Journal of Urban and Regional Policy, where the article abstract says: “The evidence presented here is that the presence of a new or renovated stadium has an uncertain impact on the levels of personal income and possibly a negative impact on local development relative to the region.”

Note: The Knights ballpark is getting direct subsidies from Mecklenburg County worth some $20 million (depending on how one values 8.6 acres uptown for $1 a year), $8 million over 20 years from Mecklenburg County, and $7.25 million from the City of Charlotte. I’m fairly sure tax-free municipal bonds aren’t being used. If someone knows different, please alert me.

Many people say the money is worth it: Bringing baseball to uptown Charlotte will enliven the city and spur development, they say.

And if you were uptown during the Democratic National Convention you saw an event that would not have happened if George Shinn had not taken his Charlotte Hornets elsewhere, and the city decided it really did need a new uptown arena.

But isn’t it better to have those debates when you know the full cost of things? Are sports arenas the best use of $4 billion in U.S. treasury funds or should there be other priorities? Depends, I suppose, on how much you love pro football, basketball and baseball.

Has Charlotte single-family home market revived?

Tree down at site of old Charlotte Coliseum, once slated for mixed-use development. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Mecklenburg Times reporter Tony Brown pored through five years’ worth of housing permit records and concluded that July 2012, with 283 single-family housing permits, was the best July for home construction in Mecklenburg County since 2008. Maybe, he suggests, the housing bust has ended.

Construction of single-family homes is almost back to 2008 levels, when 304 similar permits were issued, Brown reports.

His article, “Residential revelry,”  is behind a pay wall, so only Mecklenburg Times subscribers can read it.

It will be interesting to see how development in the county and nearby areas plays out in coming years. Plenty of academics and others have analyzed the housing market and concluded that the country is overbuilt with single-family housing, given demographic trends (aging boomers, for instance) and modern lifestyle preferences. Will Gen Y-ers opt for suburban tract houses as they move into their 30s and 40s and start to have children? Or will they decide they can still have the urban lifestyles they’re seeking now and raise children in the city?

Will planners and elected officials allow an overbuilt single-family home market to get even more over-built, as they did for a couple of decades worth of commercial space, with the carcasses of failed stores hurting multiple thoroughfares and neighborhoods in Charlotte? Or is Charlotte a healthy enough market that housing won’t be overbuilt?

One note to consider: Unless Charlotte-Mecklenburg changes the land development rules, the question of overbuilding is mostly moot. Most subdivisions don’t need a City Council rezoning to get built; they just have to get planners’ administrative approvals for following the subdivision ordinance (and other permits, of course).

Another note to consider: A recent study found the city’s families more “asset-poor” than the state average. In Charlotte, 36 percent of residents lack a basic financial cushion to survive for three months at the poverty line if they were to lose their primary source of income.That compares to 30 percent statewide and 29 percent nationally. What do trends such as that portend for the city’s ability to absorb more single-family housing?

Final note: Remember that city of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County are not exactly the same territory.

Media-watchers with good memories will recall Tony Brown’s years as theater and arts reporter for the Charlotte Observer. He has spent more than a decade at the Cleveland Plain Dealer but has recently moved back to Charlotte for family reasons. Follow him on Twitter at @tonymecktimes.)

New lawsuit against Gaston toll road

Two Charlotte area environmental groups, assisted by the Southern Environmental Law Center, today sued challenging the proposed Garden Parkway toll road that would cut across southern Gaston County.

Clean Air Carolina and the Catawba Riverkeeper contend that the 22-mile highway would destroy homes and communities, pollute the Catawba River basin and add to air pollution. Read Clean Air Carolina’s press release here.

The group says, “In their complaint, conservation groups allege many of the same concerns that were raised in the recent victory challenging the Monroe Bypass.” In May, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rebuked the N.C. Turnpike Authority, finding it had erred in its environmental review and misrepresented key facts. “The conservation groups allege that many of the same flaws infect the analysis for the Garden Parkway,” the CAC press release says.

And in today’s Charlotte Observer (read the article here), attorney Kym Hunter of the SELC, says, “We think (the Garden Parkway study) is worse than Monroe.”

Here’s a 2011 piece I wrote while at The Charlotte Observer about the Garden Parkway and the Monroe Bypass:  “Road planning from the disco era.” The link to the Observer piece must have died but thanks to the Yadkin Riverkeeper for re-running the article. And if you’re really really interested, here’s an Observer-sponsored blogpost I did on the same topic: “Road planning from the disco era – the rest of the story.”  

(Editor’s note: Those articles are the opinions of the Observer associate editor, a post I held at the time, and are not necessarily the opinions of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute or the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.)

Images of near-dead suburbia

Some of you may be shocked to learn this, but the Naked City Blog is only a small part of my job. I’m the director of the new PlanCharlotte.org website, part of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. The site’s goal, since its launch a few months back, is to cover, in a journalistic way, events and trends in growth, planning, environmental and urban issues from the greater Charlotte region.

Castlebrooke in Kannapolis, about 20 miles northeast of Charlotte

Yesterday PlanCharlotte and the UNCC Urban Institute posted a series of what I think are stunning images by local photographer Nancy Pierce, of a sampling of abandoned subdivisions in the region. They are haunting, depicting nature reclaiming street drains, kudzu climbing over roll-over curbs, a swimming pool in the middle of a scraped-earth lot, subdivision entry gates looking like ancient medieval ruins.

Some of the developments remain stalled, or maybe dead. The top photo is from Apple Creek in Gastonia and Gaston County, about 20 miles west of Charlotte. The one at the end of this is from the site of the former Charlotte Coliseum, where City Park was to have been a large mixed-use development of homes, offices, stores and a hotel. (A proposal to build apartments there is now in the works, the article says.)

Others, too, such as Castlebrooke (shown directly above), may be stirring to life again. As planner Kris Krider of Kannapolis tells PlanCharlotte writer Josh McCann, in retrospect, it might not have been wise for Kannapolis to annex land so far from its core, because that can strain the city’s police force and require new fire stations and water and sewer infrastructure. But the city has already made those investments, and so it needs houses to materialize, to generate revenue to cover costs.

But the photo series and the article, together, should serve as a caution to government leaders as well as private businesses. Is all growth “good” regardless or where or what it is? Can we ever knit these developments into a town or a city, or will they remain isolated pods in remote areas? Or will the kudzu overtake them in the end?

Where Charlotteans once went to see Charlotte Hornets Dell Curry and Muggsy Bogues in action

 
Click here for article.
Click here for photo gallery. 

Fads and the city

Uptown Charlotte skyline. Photo: John Chesser

An excellent package of articles is running in the Charlotte Observer, examining how much taxpayer money the city spends on its convention center (up to $30 million a year), questioning whether the payoff justifies the expense. Here’s a link to Sunday’s article: “Selling Charlotte: Convention business requires millions from taxpayers.” Look for another piece Tuesday, examining why the city for years hasn’t questioned the assumption that conventions do, indeed, help the city’s overall tourism climate. (Update 8/21/2012: Here’s a link to the Tuesday article in the Observer, which looks at the apparently overblown estimates of local spending by conventioneers: “Visitor spending more fiction than fact.”) And I might note, here, that the tourism industry is not known for high-paying jobs, either. Here’s the link to an Observer article today exploring job-creation and wages: “Far fewer jobs than promised.“

Currently the city and the city’s Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority spend as much as $30 million a year for construction debt, operating losses and convention subsidies for the convention center. The Observer‘s editorial board today says it’s time to “Consider being unconventional,” i.e. to discuss whether to end the “arms race” of convention centers.

The discussion was needed years ago. The nation is overbuilt with convention centers, all chasing too few conventions to fill the available space. Charlotte’s CRVA is mostly funded with the “prepared foods tax,” a special 1 percent sales tax  paid every time you eat out or even buy a sandwich or roasted chicken at a grocery store deli. Here are some projects $30 million might pay for if spent differently: a center city park, expanding the greenway trail system, streetcars, reviving the historic Charlotte Trolley rides, restoring the Carolina Theatre or many other tourism-related projects.

The whole question of what, really, works in invigorating a downtown is one more cities should ask. I’ve watched, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with angst, as Charlotte pursued various fad-of-the-moment projects to try to pump life into what was, by the 1980s, a downtown (here, we call it “uptown”) that emptied after office hours.

Yes, those efforts were important and valuable, and it’s to the credit of the city’s so-called “uptown boosters” that they didn’t give up on the vision of having a center city that was a real center of activity.
But … but …

Having that goal plus having deep-pocketed uptown boosters with easy access to elected officials in a place with a certain lack of self-confidence in Charlotte’s inherent charms has made this city an easy mark for the fad-of-the-moment, regardless of whether the resulting projects were in fact, good medicine for what was ailing the city at the time or thoughtfully designed to endure.

A few examples:

1. Cityfair. Where the Hearst Building sits today used to sit – for what seemed like about 20 minutes – a festival marketplace named Cityfair, built in the era of Harborplace and Faneuil Hall. The fact that Charlotte had no harborside or historic market halls did not deter the fad-of-the-moment gang. Cityfair opened in October 1988 and closed by fall 1991; it reopened for a few years then died for good. The city lost $4 million in the end. Cityfair’s flaws were many: Its design was vintage suburban shopping mall, not fit for an urban streetscape. Its food court was popular but, set on the ground floor, it sent little traffic into shops on higher floors. Cityfair arrived just as Belk closed its uptown store, so hoped-for foot traffic from an overstreet hamster tunnel never materialized. Category: “Fail.”

2. The Blumenthal Performing Arts Center. This public-private partnership has added a quality to uptown that was badly needed when the Charlotte Symphony was playing out at Ovens Auditorium on Independence Boulevard. Although I have griped over the years about its hamster-tunnel-to-the-parking-deck design and the suburban-shopping-mall-design of the nearby Founders Hall, its category overall: Winner .

3. NASCAR Hall of Fame. Overblown projections, a deal negotiated amid machismo hype, and a design that pretends it is a space ship, not an integrated part of a city. Category: May come to define “Fad-of-the-Moment Fail.”

4. Tryon Street Mall. You don’t even know what this is, do you? Those odd looking bus shelters and fancy pavers along Tryon Street were part of a “streetscape” design the city undertook in the early 1980s, back when the national fad-of-the-moment was the idea that fancy pavement would make people come to uptown. No, really, they believed that. The shelters, which did not even keep bus riders dry, cost as much as $80,000 each. The artfully designed newspaper racks never got used by actual newspapers. The fancy pavers in the street cracked and were replaced by concrete faux-brick pavers. Yet the street trees and the wide sidewalks have blessed Tryon Street ever since. So this fad ended up having a legacy that people take for granted today, even if they’re still scoffing at those silly $80K bus shelters. Category: A fad with unexpected positive benefits despite itself.

5. The aquarium. At least we did not build one. Aquariums were all the rage about 15 years ago, after Chattanooga, Atlanta and Charleston built theirs. Discovery Place (itself a child of the 1970s fad for children’s science museums, and not a “fail”) wanted to freshen the uptown science scene. I always thought we had enough sharks already along Tryon Street. Category: Potential fail averted.

Today’s fads: Streetcars. Bike-share programs. Even larger convention centers, and convention hotels.
Which will succeed, and which will fail? I’d bet on the first two to be winners. The last one? Not so much.

NCDOT moves ahead with new uptown train station. But …

After years of planning, the N.C. Department of Transportation and the City of Charlotte are officially seeking developers for the proposed new passenger rail station in uptown Charlotte. They’re issuing a Request for Qualifications (RFQ), with proposals due Sept. 21.

If you’re an interested developer, click here for more information.

“This RFQ is the next step in selecting a master developer for the project,” says the NCDOT press release issued Thursday morning. What’s being called the Charlotte Gateway Station is envisioned as a central hub for Amtrak, Charlotte Area Transit System bus and streetcar service, the long-proposed-but-still-unfunded Red Line commuter rail project to north Mecklenburg County, Greyhound Bus service and the county greenway system.

Unfortunately for the Red Line and possibly for the streetcar, Mayor Anthony Foxx said in an interview Wednesday that, when it comes to any transit services beyond the Blue Line, “We’re stuck.” (More from that Q-and-A format interview will be posted at PlanCharlotte.org as soon as I can type up the transcript.)
The streetcar has funding only for about a mile and a half between Presbyterian Hospital and The Square at Trade and Tryon. An expansion proposal using city funds only, that would take it to the Gateway Station site on West Trade Street near Johnson & Wales University, was killed by the City Council in June.

The N.C. General Assembly has, for two years in a row, tried to kill funding for the planned-but-not-yet-built Blue Line Extension. Both times the BLE was saved in closed-door bargaining.

But this year the legislators decided to make any rail transit projects compete head-to-head with funding for highway projects, a prospect that most transit supporters believe will all but doom any further rail transit in the state.

But to end on a more cheerful note, replacing the dreary Amtrak station a couple of miles north of uptown on North Tryon Street will be a relief to many rail passengers who use the state’s three daily trains to Raleigh and back.