Mary Newsom – Page 20 – The Naked City Blog

Why greenways matter

UNCC student Jamie Prince and her dog, Tolstoy

I took a brisk walk today on the Ruth G. Shaw Trail along the Toby Creek Greenway through the UNC Charlotte campus. It was part of my job. Really. I was taking photos of the greenway for an article we’ll be publishing, with luck this week. (Update: It’s now posted here.)

It was warm-ish for January, and as I walked to where the trail intersects with the Mallard Creek Greenway I saw runners, bicyclers, one skateboarder, and a woman with a child in a stroller. Except for roller skates and hand-powered wheelchairs, I think I saw just about every non-motorized mode of transportation. Which makes the point: Greenways are a transportation venue as well as a recreation venue. If I had had the time and inclination, I could have used the greenway to head south instead of north and I’d have arrived at N.C. 49, aka University City Boulevard, at a light where I could have crossed to get to the strip shopping center at Harris Boulevard which has many useful businesses: grocery, drug store, bank, restaurants, etc.

Greenways are good for exercise and recreation, and most of the people I saw today were using it that way. But they’re also a good way to get from one place to another without using gasoline or creating carbon emissions. In the University City area and other suburban-developed places that lack sidewalks and pedestrian crossings and lights, greenways can provide essential, off-road walkways and bikeways.

But while the Mecklenburg County greenway system (sections of which are part of the larger Carolina Thread Trail) are welcome and much-needed, here’s something that makes me sad. Most of the greenways run alongside creeks, on land that A) is difficult to develop anyway, and B) parallels the county sewer system’s sewage lines. That leads to unpleasant sights such as this one:

Pipe crosses Mallard Creek near the Toby Creek Greenway

This is a sewer pipe that crosses Mallard Creek just below the spot where the Shaw trail intersects the Mallard Creek trail. It’s not a pleasant sight, especially with the debris clogged against the column holding the pipe up. The many raised concrete cylinders holding manholes along the Shaw trail don’t exactly make one’s heart soar, either. It all makes me wish that the county and its taxpayers valued greenways enough to find the money to build more of them through places where our sewer system isn’t quite so noticeable. Not that I’m not grateful for what we have … just wishing.

(One more greenway note: In watching Showtime’s series “Homeland,” filmed in and around Charlotte, I noted that one key scene, in which one important character kills someone, appears to have been filmed in one of the spots along the new Little Sugar Creek Greenway near uptown, where the path goes through a concrete tunnel under a street. Given the nature of the scene, it’s clear the spot was chosen for its eerie sense of being a concrete-flanked, urban no-mans’-land. I had to muse over the situation: We Charlotteans are celebrating the arrival of our wonderful new uptown greenway, yet an out-of-town location scout has chosen a piece of it for a scene of creepy ugliness. Hmmm.)

Is sustainability for Commies?

Here’s something I keep wondering: If you drew a Venn diagram with one circle being people who say they believe free markets need little intervention and that government has no business telling people what to do with their property, and another circle being people who think there’s a liberal conspiracy to force apartment buildings and stores into suburban residential neighborhoods now restricted to single-family houses on large lots, how big would be the part of the Venn diagram where the two sets overlap?

My guess: Huge.

Somehow some people have gotten the idea that land in a city (and suburbs) would, if left to the natural laws of economics, shape itself into quarter-acre and half-acre lots with one house sitting in the middle. They don’t seem to get it: Valuable land, without zoning restrictions, would attract higher income-producing uses. Apartment buildings. Stores. Office towers. It’s government intervention that is keeping all those high-priced neighborhoods near Charlotte’s SouthPark mall as single-family homes. Large-lot subdivisions are often built in times and places where that’s considered the highest and best use (to use real estate speak) of the dirt. But as cities evolve, a lot of those neighborhoods hold land that becomes more valuable for other uses. Examples: Myers Park, Dilworth, Elizabeth, Barclay Downs. Keeping those valuable areas zoned for single-family residential may or may not be wise public policy – that’s a debate for another day – but it’s clearly not letting the free market have its way. So why have some parts of the tin-foil cap crowd decided that efforts to build more high-density neighborhoods, i.e. “sustainable development,” is a global socialist plot using a U.N. policy called Agenda 21 to co-opt municipal governments all over America?

Think about it: Wouldn’t big-government socialists be the ones wanting regulations to override private ownership, via single-family-housing zoning?

It’s part of a larger mystery.

Why did preserving the environment come to be seen as “liberal” instead of just, well, smart? Seems to me the liberal-conservative battles ought to be fought over the best methods with which to ensure resources aren’t depleted and water and air remain clean. After all, those things are important necessities for human life, not to mention long-term local and national economic health. Some would argue government regulations are the best method. Others would argue that regulations don’t work, or aren’t enforced, or that a private market approach works better, as in cap-and-trade programs. But why would anyone argue that to be a true conservative you shouldn’t care about the environment?

After all, the environmental movement has had plenty of Republican champions, including President Richard Nixon. Former N.C. Govs. Jim Martin and Jim Holshouser and Charlotte’s long-time U.S. Rep. Alex McMillan are all Republicans who understood the importance of conserving land and using government to try to ensure clean air and water.

Indeed, after Republican City Council member Edwin Peacock III, who chaired the council’s Environment Committee, lost his seat in November, I called longtime Charlotte environmental activist Rick Roti to get his sense of Peacock’s role. “He has been, especially for a Republican, a more balanced leader,” Roti said. Understand, Roti doesn’t just blindly compliment politicians. He has served on multiple stakeholder committees, chaired the Charlotte Tree Advisory Commission and is now president of the nonprofit Charlotte Public Tree Fund. He has seen the sausage being made, from up close, and probably has psychic scars to prove it.

So what I’m about to say probably betrays my own inadvertent stereotyping. Out of routine, I asked Roti what party he was in. “Republican,” he said. “People are often surprised when I tell them that.” Uh, yep.

He favors Republican financial policies, he said. “When it comes to the environment, they’re [the Republican party] not where where they need to be.”

What does this have to do with sustainable development and Agenda 21? Only this: One of the key goals underpinning advocacy of sustainable development is to improve and protect the environment by helping people live in ways that use less energy: Less driving, more walking and bicycling and transit. Living closer together, to save building energy and make transit easier (see the part about less driving). Of course, one hugely important reason to do this, in addition to saving a lot of money and energy, is to try to combat human-caused global climate change. But for some reason, that, too, has become a red-blue litmus test. If you believe the world’s climate scientists, you must be a liberal elitist.

Again, it seems to me the liberals and conservatives ought to be arguing over what’s the best way to fight climate change, not about whether it exists.

Here’s a final thought about the relationship between sustainable development, and policies, and politics. It’s in an op-ed in the Boston Globe, “A frugal answer to zoning pitfalls, needlessly slashed,” in which Paul McMorrow, an associate editor at CommonWealth magazine, writes about the congressional move to de-fund an Obama initiative, the Sustainable Communities program. Lodged in Housing and Urban Development, the program was trying to get multiple federal agencies – EPA, HUD and the Department of Transportation – to work more efficiently together and to promote policies to curb sprawling development. (Clarification, 1/6/12: I consulted with officials in the HUD Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, which coordinates federal policy with DOT and the EPA. They say the office remains very much alive, as is the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the collaboration among the three agencies. What lost funding is the grants program, which in 2011 awarded a $5 million regional planning grant to the Charlotte region, among $96 million in regional planning and community challenge grants around the country.)

McMorrow notes that sprawl is fiscally wasteful for governments: “If we’re going to build new homes and businesses anyway, we should at least construct them in a way that’s not deliberately wasteful,” he writes. “This wastefulness applies to the open space that sprawl consumes, as well as the enormous cost of developing and maintaining the infrastructure serving new suburbs and exurbs.”

Locust beer and scuppernong petards

An article about locust beer on the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s website – Ruth Ann Grissom’s Locust trees (and locust beer) from Nov. 10 – brought this intriguing reminiscence from reader Richard Lasater of Raleigh, recalling other Tar Heel wine-making from years gone by. Lasater’s emailed note:

I’m from Durham and most of my grandfather’s generation had been raised in the country and went to Durham to keep from being farmers. He was a great fan of making locust beer

and other folk beverages. According to my father, locust beer was only slightly alcoholic, but was fizzy from fermentation. Usually, men were the beer- and wine-makers.

North Carolina voted for Prohibition by county before WWI. When temperatures dropped into the teens, people would set out locust beer (and scuppernong wine) in shallow pans on the porch overnight to freeze. The frozen slush was then put into cheesecloth and suspended over a pan. All of the alcohol would drip out first, producing a very potent brandy. This is called freeze separation.

Pod from honey locust, used for beer

Back then, nobody had home freezers. My father said that every house in the neighborhood would be freezing locust beer or wine on a very cold night. I have read that this is also done by French Canadians using red wine or fermented maple sap. Supposedly, freeze separation doesn’t separate out the unwanted “fusel oils” that can be removed during distillation (save only the middle part of the distillate) which will cause hangovers.

My other grandmother ran a boarding house and bought chickens, butter and eggs from a farm family behind what’s now Northern Hill School on Roxboro Road. Pearl and Sam Moore had the biggest scuppernong arbor that I’ve ever seen. When I was very small, I couldn’t reach around the main vine. My grandfather would make a batch of scuppernong wine every fall using a stoneware churn. He would put a weighted plate on top of the fermenting grapes to keep out air until fermentation had stopped.

Pearl made “roasting ear wine” by taking a lot of fresh corn cobs and packing them in a stoneware churn. She would cut off the corn kernels, but not scrape the cobs. She would then fill the churn with boiling water and cover it with cheesecloth until fermentation started. Then she would put a weighted plate on the top until it quit working. The end result was clear as water, but strong! The wine was then bottled.

One year, our family had to go to Baltimore suddenly because of a family emergency. My grandfather’s wine was in mid-ferment Someone told him that if he could cover the churn and keep out air after it quit fermenting, the wine wouldn’t turn to vinegar. He cut a piece out of an automobile inner tube that had an air valve in it and secured it over the churn’s mouth with string and wax. After pulling out the valve stem, he connected a piece of air hose and put the other end of the hose in a bucket of water. This let the carbon dioxide from the fermenting grapes bubble out but kept out air.

When they got back a week later, they entered a dark, very quiet house. They didn’t hear the gas bubbling up from the hose. When they cut on the kitchen light, they saw that a grape hull had floated and stuck in the hose, and the piece of inner tube had swollen like a balloon. You could see through it. My grandmother told my grandfather that she wasn’t going into the kitchen to cook until he defused his bomb. When he touched it, it burst, throwing grape hulls and wine everywhere. There were grapes stuck to the ceiling. All wine-making was thereafter banished to the coal shed.

Photo from Ruth Ann Grissom

Why Charlotte needs that ‘noose’ study

As expected, the Charlotte City Council on Monday approved the measure to allow a study of the uptown loop and all its interchanges. As I wrote in Time to neuter that noose around uptown Charlotte? the idea to put a cap onto part of Interstate 277 (leaving the highway there, but creating usable space above it) has been proposed since at least 1997.

During discussions for the Center City 2020 Vision Plan, the idea was broached of converting the section of the loop at the north end of uptown into a boulevard, although the final plan only recommended further study.

I checked with Charlotte Department of Transportation’s manager of planning and design, Norm Steinman, about the I-277/I-77 study. He pointed out that the study – which might or might not end up making recommendations for a freeway cap or boulevardization – is needed for a more essential reason. It’s been at least 40 years since the I-277 loop was designed, with its early alignment concepts more than 50 years old. “Obviously,” he said in an email, “a lot of growth has happened since then.” The NCDOT and the Federal Highway Administration essentially have said no more changes can happen to any of the I-277 interchanges without a study.

“For the first time in 50 years we’re taking a look at what should be done,” Steinman told me.

I have in my possession a copy of the 1960 master highway transportation plan for the city of Charlotte, prepared by Wilbur Smith and Associates. It shows the route for I-77 and for a loop around uptown a lot like what eventually opened in the 1980s. (It also shows the Independence Boulevard Freeway, which remains unfinished. Gee.)

Atop this blog is a not-great-quality cellphone photo of that map. Notice how similar it looks to today’s configuration. The study is dated April 1960, so the designs for I-277 must be more than 50 years old. Goodness knows how old the original concept is.

Another highway-street design tidbit: Monday night the council also OK’d a “roadway classification study” for the Brookshire Boulevard and W.T. Harris Boulevard. This is deep in the weeds of transportation policy, but it could be potentially significant. The classification for roadways affects lane widths, speed limits and whether, for instance, they’d have bicycle lanes and sidewalks, which aren’t appropriate along a freeway. The study is necessary, the agenda says, because these two roadways today contain a variety of different roadway classifications, and “are being affected by discrete land development and transportation investment decisions.”

And, let me add, both are high-volume city corridors that, today, look like highways but cut through neighborhood and commercial areas that maybe would be healthier if they weren’t next to freeway-style highways? But that’s just me ….

The huge significance of the Red Line proposal

MOORESVILLE – “Revolutionary is not too strong a word for plans being laid out today to a room full of government officials, consultants and interested laypeople. We’re at a “summit” to discuss ideas for reviving a long-stalled proposal to build a commuter rail line to Iredell County.

For starters, the plan involves regional cooperation. Second, the current public money crunch has forced a creative new way of thinking about transportation financing.

Even for a region that’s had plenty of regional “discussions” for decades, what’s being proposed is a major leap forward for working across county boundaries. The complicated proposal depends, in part, on seven governmental bodies agreeing to form a new legal entity, called a joint powers authority. Members would be Mecklenburg and Iredell counties, and Charlotte, Huntersville, Cornelius, Davidson and Mooresville.(The JPA wouldn’t have taxing authority.)

Not since the great Mecklenburg annexation/spheres of influence agreements of the 1980s and the formation of the Mecklenburg-only Metropolitan Transit Commission in the 1990s have so many local governments been asked to come to a formal, legal agreement of this sort. And this time the agreement must cross county lines. That’s a rare proposition around here, where crossing the county line can put you into a place with an entirely different political culture, and where most of the counties outside Mecklenburg harbor, if not fear, then at least wariness of Charlotte’s behemoth footprint.

But if there’s to be any hope of prudently guiding this huge and sprawling metro region away from financially unsupportable growth, it’s going to have to come with a large dose of inter-county cooperation. The choices at hand are these: Cooperate, and continue to progress? Or maintain geographic silos and find the region bypassed by other, more cooperative metro regions?

Viewed that way, what happens to the Red Line proposal could well be a harbinger of the region’s future.

The other reason today’s summit and the Red Line plan carries major significance is this: For the first time since the 1998 transit sales tax campaign, the MTC and member governments are putting on their thinking caps about financing.

Here’s a link to the slide show presentation Tuesday.

Until now, most people here pretty much figured transportation money – including roads, not just transit – would eternally flow down from the feds and the state. For transit, you’d also add in the local revenue stream from the half-cent sales tax, collected only in Mecklenburg. (Individual cities, of course, also use local tax money for local street projects that aren’t part of the vast state road network.)

Even before the 2008 financial crash, it was starting to look as if the MTC couldn’t build out its five-corridor plan in 25 years without more money than it could expect from the half-cent sales tax and expected state and federal funds. Since then, the recession and continuing high unemployment have battered the sales tax revenue. Until a year ago the MTC appeared to believe it had few options beyond delaying transit construction for decades, pushing for a politically unlikely sales tax increase or passively hoping the sales tax revived.

Finally, with help from the N.C. Department of Transportation and some savvy consultants, it has gotten smarter and more creative about finding money. They have looked around the country at other metro areas that are building transit systems. Two important words arose: Value capture.

That means recognizing that building infrastructure such as highways and transit lines makes nearby property more valuable. (It’s why land speculators like to buy property 20 years before the state highway goes through.) Instead of letting public spending enrich private landowners with little monetary benefit to the public, why not “capture” some of that increased value for public purposes?

A value-capture set-up would use some of the new, higher tax revenues from the now-more-valuable property to pay off bonds sold to build those same infrastructure improvements. The Washington Metro, the Dallas Area Rapid Transit System and the Portland, Ore., streetcar system have all used value capture in their construction.

The Red Line plan proposes two value-capture techniques. One is tax-increment financing (TIF) – using some of the expected higher property taxes to pay off bonds. Another is a special assessment district, formed when a majority of the income-producing property owners (i.e. not owner-occupied residential homes) along the Red Line rail line agree to an extra property tax (.75 per $100 in assessed property value is what’s been proposed). Most of that tax revenue would help fund construction, but 25 percent would go to the general fund of the local governments.

The proposals laid out today must undergo weeks of examination and discussion among elected officials before any decisions. And nothing is certain. For instance, Iredell County is a key player, yet not one Iredell County commissioner was at today’s meeting in Mooresville. All other affected elected bodies had representatives in the room. What does that mean for the proposal’s chances?

But even if the proposal ultimately fails, the precedents it’s setting, in pushing for smarter transit financing and in pushing for cross-county cooperation, will have far-reaching resonance.

Time to neuter that noose around uptown Charlotte?

Is Charlotte finally making a move toward taming the uptown noose – I mean, the uptown loop? The freeway encircling uptown, made up of Interstate 277 and a section of Interstate 77, strangles uptown, eliminating easy pedestrian and bicycle connections and creating bottlenecks for traffic flow into and out of the center city.

It was Feb. 15, 1997, (but who’s counting?) when I first heard the idea to cap the below-grade section of I-277 between South End and the south part of the center city. The idea keeps being proposed, and being dismissed as too expensive, or too difficult. But it’s a great idea that deserves serious study.

Now, at last, something may be happening. The Charlotte City Council tonight is supposed to vote on an agreement with the N.C. Department of Transportation to launch a study of the whole uptown freeway loop. Here’s a link to the city council agenda. Go to agenda page 19.

Despite misgivings, capping a freeway, or more precisely, sending it through a tunnel, is comparatively inexpensive and has been done in many other cities. It’s neither revolutionary nor extreme. It is NOT as expensive as digging a tunnel, a la Big Dig in Boston. The digging took place years ago, before I-277 opened in the 1980s.

Other cities are going further, pushing to turn old freeways into high-volume boulevards, which can move plenty of traffic but are designed so that shops, restaurants, housing and workplaces can grow along their sidewalks. The classic example of a high-volume boulevard is the Champs Elysees in Paris. Here’s a list of other projects, some still in planning phases.

Uptown needs better connections to neighborhoods around it, and this includes street connections. If you ever drive in from south Charlotte on a weekday morning you’ll probably hit a tie-up on Providence Road as it nears uptown, and on Third-Fourth streets or Seventh Street. You may wish longingly for more connecting streets into uptown, which would divert some of the traffic load onto those other streets. (Morehead usually isn’t as crowded, nor is Stonewall, but they apparently are too far from the center of uptown to get as much of the traffic load.) We could use more connections via Second (MLK Boulevard), Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth streets, but I-277 and its spaghetti bowl interchanges block those possibilities.

Back to the freeway cap: I know the date was Feb. 15, 1997, because I first heard the idea at an all-day workshop organized by the old Charlotte Urban Forum public interest group. Open to the public, the event was to draw up possibilities for redesigning uptown. The impetus was an ill-considered plan to build a new arena uptown (that part was OK) and “development,” drawings for which resembled a suburban shopping mall plopped into the city.

The workshop had no official purpose, but we did get then-Mayor Pat McCrory to drop by, as well as some planning commission officials (the commission was one of the sponsors) and some of the developers and uptown boosters calling themselves 24-Uptown Partners. The Partners’ goal was to build that arena and shopping center-esque “entertainment complex” – well-intended but clumsily suburban in its proposed execution.
In order to write the preceding paragraph, I looked back at the 1997 articles I wrote for the Charlotte Observer and spotted some interesting notes of what had been proposed at that workshop. How about the idea of a NASCAR museum? Hmmm. That may fall in the category of “be careful what you wish for., because you may get it.” The list contains so many projects that were built in the next 10 years that in hindsight I wonder how many of the architects and developers there already knew what they were planning?

Among the other discussion topics were, and I warn you that these will sound familiar:

• Put more housing uptown.

• Mix uses, not just on the same block, but within a building, so that the vacant areas of uptown fill with five- or six-story buildings with retail space on the street, offices above, and housing above that.

• Expand the trolley system.

But here’s a list of some of the ideas that, at the time, I characterized as not among the predictable ones:

• Bury I-277 where it crosses South Tryon and fill the land created atop it with mixed-use, five-or six-story buildings.
• A NASCAR Museum next to the NFL stadium, with condos topping the museum. [The NASCAR Hall of Fame opened on Brevard Street in 2010, and has drawn far fewer visitors than projected, losing money.]

• Put housing back into Second Ward, where the old Brooklyn neighborhood was demolished for urban renewal. [A development deal to do this stalled after the crash of 2008.]
• Move the Amtrak station from North Tryon to West Trade. [This is in N.C. DOT rail plans.]• Put a convention hotel next to I-277. [Done.]
• Convert the old convention center to a museum or city market. [Old convention center was demolished to build the EpiCentre, a slightly more urban-style entertainment complex than was envisioned in 1997. It’s tied up in an acrimonious bankruptcy case.]• Rehabilitate the Carolina Theatre.[Not done. But not demolished, either.]
• Concentrate retail on South Tryon Street. [Other than art museum gift shops, little retail beyond restaurants has come to South Tryon Street.]
• Build a zoo. [Insert quip of your choice here.]

In looking at my 1997 articles I noticed that other sponsors of the workshop were the UNC Charlotte College of Architecture, the Charlotte chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, my current employer.

Charlotte transit plan makeover goes beyond cosmetic surgery

The stalled-for-years proposal to build a commuter rail line from downtown Charlotte north to the booming suburban towns of Huntersville, Cornelius, Davidson and Mooresville is getting a significant makeover, not just cosmetic surgery. The state and local officials involved are looking to find funding with freight-oriented development, a sort of cousin to the more widely recognized transit-oriented development (a.k.a. TOD).

The project has been stalled because it hasn’t qualified for federal funding, which typically pays half the cost of a transit line. After years of patiently sitting by, towns in northern Mecklenburg County and Mooresville in Iredell County formed the Lake Norman Transportation Commission, which succeeded in kick-starting a fresh look at the so-called Red Line (which honors the Davidson College school color).

A Wednesday meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Commission heard a detailed presentation of the financing plans. I couldn’t make it, but here are several looks at the presentation: The Charlotte Business Journal’s Erik Spanberg “Red Line rolls toward 2012 vote” and DavidsonNews.net/CorneliusNews.net’s Christina Ritchie Rogers’ “Homeowners won’t see tax hike in Red Line plans, consultants say.”

Here’s a link to the various presentations and handouts from the MTC meeting.

Nothing’s been decided yet, of course. The Lake Norman Transportation Commission will hold a four-hour summit on the proposal Dec. 13 in Mooresville (10 a.m.-2 p.m. at the Charles Mack Citizens Center, 215 N. Main St.).

Then the different governments, who’d have to agree to create a joint powers authority, must study the proposal and decide whether to opt in. From my observations, I’d predict Charlotte, Mecklenburg County and the Mecklenburg towns are on board. The trickier discussions will be in Mooresville and Iredell County. Although many in Mooresville have favored the transit idea, Iredell County commissioners have traditionally been wary of anything that might be viewed as a tax increase.

This proposal would create a sort of self-imposed tax assessment on owners of income-producing property (that is, not residential property) along the line. A part of the tax revenue from the new development would be used to help pay the costs of the rail construction. A portion of the new tax revenue generated from rail-related development would go to local general funds. ~~This proposal would create a sort of self-imposed tax increase on property owners along the line, although it would send a proportion of those extra revenues into local general funds.~~ (2:50 p.m.: Wording refinement on details of the proposal.)

Adding the freight proposal, which takes advantage of a national boom in freight rail fed by rising gas prices rise and freeway congestion, makes the Red Line plan more clearly an economic development maneuver. Luring freight-oriented industry might be a strategy Iredell leaders can be comfortable with, as opposed to simply building a commuter rail line that will draw more Charlotte-bound workers, which will bring homes and children needing county-funded services.

Like the $5 million regional HUD planning grant, the Red Line joint powers authority proposal is one more example of the need to treat the Charlotte region as more than a disconnected set of individual governments, but as, well, a region.

Did rogue columnist hit, or miss, in Charlotte critique?

Reading the happy Tweets out of Charlotte this afternoon, as the Chiquita headquarters announcement came through, I stumbled on a link from former Charlotte Observer business editor Jon Talton, who decamped years ago for Phoenix and Seattle. Talton always had an astute, if acerbic, analysis on Charlotte and its civic pride (or boosterism, take your pick).

After Talton (@jontalton) sent out this Tweet: “Chiquita: Say goodbye to world-class symphony, museums, architecture in #Cincinnati. Say hello to Waffle House,” he started getting some replies from Charlotteans who didn’t like seeing their city reduced to a Waffle House stereotype.

“That’s kind of a harsh statement. Have you actually been to Charlotte?!” asked one Charlottean. Talton, of course, had lived here for years, though he confessed he rarely went outside the uptown beltway, because that gave him the “fantods.” And his comeback to critics who said he was offending them and their city: “Oh, hell, I’ve been offending Charlotteans for years.”

But Talton had an insightful, if gloomy, assessment of the relative merits of Chicago and Charlotte, in this 2009 piece, “Tales of Two Cities: What Chicago and Charlotte Say About The Future Of America.” It contains a wonderful quote from Pericles, “All good things come to the city because of the city’s greatness,” and one characterization I’d take issue with. The Bank of America Corporate Center was not built in “one of downtown’s most blighted areas.”

But is Talton too gloomy about the long-term prospects of Charlotte and other postwar, Sun Belt cities, built as though 1965 and its gas prices would last forever? I fear he’s right. And I hope he’s wrong.

What’s up with the federal courthouse?

The majestic federal courthouse on West Trade Street, while stilled used by the federal courts, is owned by the City of Charlotte now. Monday night the City Council unanimously OK’d a change to the city’s agreement with Queens University of Charlotte, which has an option to purchase the building.

The previous agreement was for Queens to use the building as a future law school. Now that the for-profit Charlotte School of Law has opened, Queens requested a change in the agreement to give the school more leeway in what it could use the building for.

The Charles R. Jonas Federal building, built in 1917 and expanded in 1934, is not a local historic landmark although by most definitions of the term it should be, given its role in such historic federal cases as Judge James McMillan’s Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, 1971. And the building also holds the only remaining courtroom that looks and feels like a courtroom. Whatever happens, let us hope Queens honors its history and ambiance.

Here’s a link to the council’s agenda packet. The courthouse section is agenda item 18.

The U.S. General Services Administration plans eventually (I am not holding my breath) to build a new courthouse at 500 E. Trade Street, over in the part of uptown that has been steadily deadened with courthouses, the Federal Reserve building, the government center and the jail. Not much room over there for many uses that will help create lively sidewalks along East Trade or Fourth or Third Streets, other than Occupy Charlotte at Old City Hall (which if you take the long view is temporary) and the occasionally excellent people-watching in front of the new Mecklenburg County Courthouse way down at McDowell and Fourth streets.