Author: Mary Newsom

Charlotte area snags $5 million regional grant

Rebecca Yarbrough of Centralina COG, with check

It was just a bit of horseplay at Monday morning’s announcement that the 14-county Charlotte region won a $4.9 million federal grant for sustainability planning. But it was a metaphor for one of the historic hurdles that the initiative may at last be able to overcome.

As always a Big Fake Check was on display for photo opps, and after the ceremonial presentation, Charlotte Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon made a jokingly fake attempt to stash the $5 million check in his coat pocket.  Martha Sue Hall, the Albemarle City Council member who chairs the Centralina Council of Governments, the lead agency that pulled together the grant application, wrestled the big check out of Cannon’s grasp. Everyone laughed at the light moment.

But of course, even if inadvertently, it exemplified the fear communities outside Charlotte have: that the region’s big city will take most of the pie, leaving smaller places with just a few crumbs. [Never mind that on a per capita basis, many state and federal expenditures give large urban areas short shrift.] That fear, and the lack of trust that resources will be shared judiciously rather than snatched and hoarded, is one of many dynamics that make attempts at regionalism tough, no matter where you are. My article last week for Citiwire.net, “Regionalism: Wonky but Real,” explores the issue of urban regions more thoroughly. A longer version, with more Charlotte and N.C. information, ran on the website of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work, www.ui.uncc.edu. (That site is down for tinkering today and tomorrow. Check it out later this week.)

The grant dwarfs the $1.6 million each won last year by two other N.C. regions, the Piedmont Triad (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point) and the Asheville-area Land of the Sky. Other N.C. grant winners announced Monday were the Wilmington region, $1.1 million, and the City of High Point, $240,000 for a new downtown plan. The only larger grants than Charlotte’s announced Monday were $4.9 million to the San Francisco Bay area and $5 million to a 13-county area in northern New Jersey.

Unless you’re a regional planner, by now your eyes are probably glazing over at the idea of a “regional plan” among 10 N.C. and 4 S.C. counties. It all probably seems remote from what you do every day. But it isn’t. Think about it. Throughout the Charlotte region people routinely cross city, county and state lines in the Charlotte region. We all drink water from rivers that flow through many jurisdictions and that sometimes hold cities’ treated waste water. The air we breathe flows invisibly (we hope!) across the landscape. People live in one place and work in another – if they are lucky enough to have jobs.

In other words, plenty of things that affect all of us daily – jobs, our water and air, farmland preservation, traffic congestion and the availability, or not, of transit or walkable/bikable routes – need to be approached regionally, not city council by city council or county board by county board.

The grant won’t solve all those problems of course. But the intent is to build on some work that started in 2007, which you probably never heard about. A 17-county bi-state group began hashing out a series of regional goals in the areas of economic development, the environment, growth, education, and so on. They include aiming for well-managed growth; for improving air and water quality and protecting wildlife, trees and rural areas; for improving social equity and inclusion, for collaborative approaches to economic development; for collaboration on educational initiatives, etc.

Those goals are laudable, but essentially they are just the result of a lot of conversations among a lot of people over several years, i.e., not backed by specific data. The grant will translate that large vision into an implementable plan, using yet-to-be-devised performance metrics. In other words, as the COG’s Rebecca Yarbrough put it, they’re now switching from anecdotal evidence to getting metrics for what represents sustainable growth for the whole region. It isn’t implementing anything, but trying to continue the difficult work of getting a lot of different people with different interests to pull together on common goals, using commonly shared and trusted information.

The grant is from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, a partnership among HUD, the EPA and the U.S. Department of Transportation. The partnership works to get the three branches of the U.S. government to working together instead of, as sometimes happens, at cross purposes.

(Disclosure: The the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work, is a partner in the grant, and will get $179,000 for research to provide those metrics. The UNCC Metropolitan Studies program, which houses the institute, will get $253,000 for a regional affordable housing market study. The UNCC Urban Design Program in the School of Architecture will get $46,000 to help provide urban design guidance to the plan.)

More than 100 public and private sector partners will work on the process, but the core partners on the grant are: the Catawba Regional Council of Governments, UNC Charlotte, The Lee Institute, Urban Land Institute, Mecklenburg County CONNECT council, City of Charlotte CONNECT council, Charlotte Housing Authority, Regional Workforce Alliance, Charlotte Regional Partnership CONNECT council, Johnson C. Smith University and Winthrop University.

Why cities need Republicans

When a Wake County district school board election is being hailed nationally as evidence that the whole Tea Party movement is defunct, as in this not-at-all-objective piece from the Huffington Post, you know the hyperbole is hyper, indeed. Should the Charlotte City Council election be considered another piece of evidence that Republican power is withering nationally?

I am not at all sure it should be. Nevertheless, it’s still worth pondering the implications of moderate Republican Edwin Peacock’s loss in a Democratic sweep of all four at-large positions. In addition to Mayor Anthony Foxx, Democrats will have a 9-2 edge, with district representatives Andy Dulin (District 6) and Warren Cooksey (District 7) the council’s only Republicans.

I sought the thoughts of a well-known local political observer, Bill McCoy, a political scientist who handily for me is the emeritus director of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work. “I don’t remember anything like a 9-2 split on City Council,” McCoy said.  “I was totally surprised that Peacock lost.”

He went on to say this, about such a heavily Democratic council: “Although I might fall in the category of a yellow dog Democrat, I believe a balance among the parties is a good thing, particularly when the other party has a person like Peacock – a great role model for what a moderate Republican should be like.”  Whether a “balance” has to be 6-5 or could be 7-4 or even 8-3 is debatable, he said, but 9-2 is beyond the pale for a “good balance.”

Charlotte has become more Democratic-leaning in recent years, although Mecklenburg County commissioners are less so (5-4 Democrat-Republican). The legislative delegation is also mixed: 6-4 Democrat-Republican in the N.C. House, and 3-1 in the N.C. Senate, or 3-2 if you county Tommy Tucker, whose district is mostly in Union County.

McCoy’s point is one I heard articulated in slightly different form at a roundtable discussion last month in New York, where the topic was urban regions and their relationships – political, economic and otherwise – with state governments. Sitting next to me was Joe McLaughlin, a former lobbyist, former adviser to Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and now director of Temple University’s Institute for Public Affairs in Philadelphia. As we all chewed over the issue, McLaughlin said that one overlooked need cities have is, as he put it, “rebuilding” the Republican Party in urban areas.
He elaborated on his thinking to me this week, sharing a 2003 paper he wrote which said, “Particularly in a competitive two-party state like Pennsylvania, Philadelphia benefits from having two viable parties; many big cities do not.”
That reminded me of the oft-told story of how then-Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, a Republican, and then-Mecklenburg County commissioners’ chair Parks Helms, a Democrat, teamed up when they visited Washington to lobby for transit funds. McCrory courted the Republicans, Helms the Democrats.

In many states, large cities are viewed with suspicion or jealousy at the state level. Georgia legislators have been known to compare Atlanta to Sodom and Gomorrah. Last year two former presidents of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, ex-Mayors Manny Diaz of Miami and Greg Nickels of Seattle, told me they knew of no U.S. cities whose relationships with their states worked well.  And of course we know the derisive term, “The Great State of Mecklenburg,” has not vanished from the halls of Raleigh.

So it’s important for urban regions to be able to speak with a unified voice on important topics such as transportation, economic development and the environment. If suburban jurisdictions are Republican-dominated and city ones are Democratic, that poses one more hurdle to a region’s effectiveness at the state and federal levels.

Depending on how one defines “moderate,” Peacock may well be the last of the moderate Republicans elected to a partisan office from Charlotte, a tradition that includes, among others, former Gov. Jim Martin, former U.S. Rep. Alex McMillan, former county commissioners Carla DuPuy, Tom Cox and Peacock’s father, Ed Peacock, and former council members Velva Woollen, Lynn Wheeler and John Lassiter, to name just a few. (Whether some of today’s conservative Republicans might be more moderate if the Republican Party itself hadn’t veered strongly to the right is essentially unknowable.)

Finding ways for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground in solving common local problems remains important. But it’s likely to get a lot harder.

Voters oust GOP, raise their own taxes

Durham County voters OK’d a transit tax Tuesday

Tuesday’s municipal elections in Charlotte and across the state offered some unexpected results, especially if one considers that the state legislature is dominated by conservative, anti-tax Republicans. Voters in four N.C. counties voted to tax themselves, with Durham voters opting for two new taxes, one for transit.

In Charlotte, voters re-elected Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat, over a conservative Republican and political newcomer, Scott Stone. That wasn’t unexpected. But voters swept into office all four Democratic candidates for at-large City Council seats, ousting moderate incumbent Republican Edwin Peacock III  in favor of Claire Fallon, a planning commissioner and neighborhood activist, and Beth Pickering. Pickering had never run for office and just arrived in Charlotte five years ago from Denver, Colo.

That gives Democrats a 9-2 council majority, which I believe is more than at any time since the council went to districts in 1977. (Are any political historians out there to confirm or deny this?) The two lone Republicans, Andy Dulin and Warren Cooksey, didn’t have Democratic opposition in their districts; Cooksey dispatched a Republican opponent in the primary.

But across the state, voters in four counties made a kind of history by agreeing to raise their own taxes, something that conventional political wisdom has said isn’t likely during an economic downturn, or in a state that just last year sent to the General Assembly a slew of conservative Republicans.

A quick rundown:

– Durham County voters approved (about 60-40 percent) a half-cent sales tax for transit, making it the state’s second county, after Mecklenburg in 1998, to do so. Voters in Orange County (Chapel Hill) and Wake (Raleigh) are expected to face similar ballot measures next year, with Orange voting in the spring and Wake sometime later.  That should finally give the Triangle area a funding stream hefty enough to start building a long-awaited rail transit system of light rail and commuter rail.

– Durham County voters also OK’d (57 percent) a quarter-cent sales tax for education.

– Orange County passed a quarter-cent sales tax for school building improvements and economic development infrastructure. The county voters rejected the tax a year ago. This year it passed with almost 61 percent of the vote.

– Buncombe County voters approved a quarter-cent sales tax increase to pay for renovations and new buildings at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College.

– Montgomery County voters also approved a quarter-cent sales tax, for buildings at Montgomery County Schools and Montgomery Community College.

The N.C. Association of County Commissioners’ website tally shows a clean sweep for those taxes for this year, with Cabarrus voters approving one in May, Halifax County in February. Compare that to 2010 results. The same quarter-cent sales tax was on the ballot in 23 counties at various times throughout that year. Of the nine votes before Nov. 3, seven were successful. Of those Nov. 2, all lost, including in Orange and Montgomery counties.  Does this mean the Nov. 2, 2010, anti-tax fervor was a one-time blip? Or was Nov. 8, 2011, the oddball election?

Sales taxes, of course, are an easier sell to most taxpayers than other types of tax. Suzanne Leland, a UNC Charlotte associate professor of political science, tells me voters usually prefer sales taxes over income or – the most hated – property taxes. Sales taxes, as Leland and many others point out, disproportionately hurt low-income households, where a higher proportion of income has to go for necessities such as housing, transportation, food, etc. Nevertheless, many voters consider them a more fair way to assess a tax.

The problem of pedestrian crossings

After a customer at an Elizabeth neighborhood bar was killed while crossing Seventh Street, the bar’s owner is trying to begin a campaign to add safety measures to the street. (The Observer ran a moving article today on the life of the victim, an Air Force veteran who was engaged to marry.)

A safer Seventh Street is an excellent goal, but the problem is not just for one street in one neighborhood. In another accident late Tuesday, a 14-year-old boy was killed when several cars hit him as he crossed W.T. Harris Boulevard.

The city, to its credit, has been working hard to add sidewalks and tame traffic on many neighborhood streets and thoroughfares.  But those measures, by themselves, aren’t all that’s needed to make conditions comfortable and safe for people traveling on foot. Pedestrian crossings are essential. Charlotte doesn’t have enough of them.

In my possession is the 2008 draft of the City of Charlotte’s Pedestrian Plan. It remains unfinished, and thus unadopted. One of the most interesting maps in it shows the distances between signalized intersections (click here for a larger view. If the link doesn’t work, we’re working on that.). Segments greater than a half-mile (a 10-minute walk) are shown in purple, those greater than a quarter-mile (a five-minute walk) are in brown.

Except for a nugget in the center of the map (uptown) the map is a snake-pit of brown and purple squiggles. And I know, from driving around and checking the odometer, that many signalized intersections are farther apart than a half-mile.

For instance, yesterday I used the odometer to check distances between signals (where one could safely cross) on heavily traveled Eastway Drive, North Tryon Street and University City Boulevard, all of them bus routes. I frequently see pedestrians perched on tiny concrete medians as cars whiz past, or crossing in front of cars, typically to get to bus stops on the other side.  My findings:

Eastway Drive: From Central Avenue to Kilborne Drive, no signal for crossing for .9 mile. I saw two pedestrians in the median.
From Kilborne to Shamrock Drive, one-third of a mile between traffic signals.
From Shamrock Drive to the signal at Sugar Creek Road, at Garinger High, .4 mile but no pedestrian crosswalk at the light.
Sugar Creek to The Plaza, .4 mile.

North Tryon Street: From Old Concord Road to Tom Hunter Road (served by two bus routes), 1 mile.
From the newly opened I-85 Connector Road to University City Boulevard, a stretch served by two bus routes but with huge gaps in the sidewalk network, .5 mile.

University City Boulevard: No sidewalks from the light at North Tryon to the light at the Target near W.T. Harris Boulevard, no way to cross for .4 mile.

On first glance you’d say a five-minute walk to go 1/4 mile to a signal isn’t so bad. But consider that you have to walk to the light, then back again if, for instance, you’re trying to get across a busy street to get to a bus stop. Humans are not prudent, and most people resist walking 20 minutes out of their way just to cross the street. If the street looks clear, they will cross where they can.

I know trade-offs exist. The more pedestrian lights you have the slower traffic will flow. In spots where motorists aren’t expecting to see a light they tend not to stop, even if the light is red. Pedestrians who believe they can safely cross might get hit. (Update 6:48 p.m. 11/4/11: One unfortunate example took place Thursday night, when a Davidson professor was badly injured when he was hit while in a pedestrian crosswalk.) (Update Nov. 13: The injured man died Nov. 11.)

I ran much of this past Malisa Mccreedy, the pedestrian program manager for the Charlotte Department of Transportation. She replied, via email: “Your effort to bring attention to pedestrian crossings is much appreciated. While the City has a history of working to address the inherited challenges of how our land use and road networks function, it is an ongoing balancing act.” CDOT will focus anew on its Pedestrian Plan starting in 2012, she said.

Tell them where you really go

Where do you really travel, and how do you get there, and how long does it take? The collection of transportation planning groups in the Charlotte metro area (a group I like to call the Seven Dwarfs), is undertaking a survey to learn more.

I learned this tidbit in reading the Oct. 28 memo to Charlotte City Council from City Manager Curt Walton. (This is why the world needs journalists; someone has to read these things and sort the chaff from the wheat. Whether this survey is chaff or wheat remains to be discovered.)

The memo reports:

Over the next few months, a sample of residents of Mecklenburg, Gaston, Union, Cabarrus, Iredell, Rowan, Cleveland, Lincoln, and Stanly counties in North Carolina and residents of York and Lancaster counties in South Carolina will be contacted by phone to participate in the regional household travel survey.  ETC Institute, the firm conducting the random survey on behalf of the planning agencies, will be recruiting 4,000 households to participate based on geographic location, household income, and household size. 

Households participating in the survey will have each household member keep a travel diary for one day.  They will be asked to record the destination address, travel time, travel mode, and vehicle occupancy for their trips throughout the day.  The travel diary results will be used to understand travel patterns, and specifically, how, when, and where people travel.  All information collected is confidential and individual responses will not be released.

Wondering about the reference to Seven Dwarfs?

The memo goes on to list the multiple transportation planning agencies in the Charlotte region, saying, “This study was programmed by Mecklenburg-Union MPO (MUMPO), Cabarrus-Rowan MPO (CRMPO), Gaston Urban Area MPO (GUAMPO), Rock Hill-Fort Mill Transportation Study (RFATS), NCDOT, SCDOT, Rocky River RPO (RRRPO), and Lake Norman RPO (LNRPO).”  Where’s the seventh dwarf? That would be the Hickory-area MPO, also known as GHMPO.

Getting better information about how and where people travel is sound planning. If you worry that it’s sort of Big Brotherish you don’t have to take part in the survey. Plus, your cellphone is keeping a record of everywhere you go, anyway, courtesy of AT&T or Verizon or whoever.

But the larger point about transportation planning is this: How in the world can the Charlotte region think it is doing anything that is even in the same hemisphere as “sane transportation planning” while it is split among seven different planning groups, each jealously guarding its own projects and only one of them (MUMPO) shouldering the very real need for regional mass transit?  Merge them all. Even consider – gasp! – merging  transportation planning and the Charlotte regional land-planning agency, the Centralina Council of Governments. Many, many large and successful metro areas did that years ago. It’s not a cure-all. But it’s a smart start. 

Charlotte Trolley to roll through new neighborhood?

The nonprofit Charlotte Trolley has won a $15,000 grant from Wells Fargo to work toward putting historic Car 85 back on track, this time through the Wesley Heights neighborhood just northwest of uptown.

The organization hopes to start another demonstration project, like the one along South Boulevard that in the 1990s ignited enthusiasm for light rail. This time, the route would be the rail line adjacent to the Stewart Creek Greenway, said Charlotte Trolley board president Greg Pappanastos. It was the site of an original line of the former Piedmont & Northern electrified passenger railroad. Charlotte Trolley is exploring how it could use that still-existing pathway.

Here’s why Charlotte Trolley’s role is more than just that of a bunch of history and rail buffs.

As I wrote in a piece for Grist.org last year:

Back in the 1980s, many of top leaders of both political parties in Charlotte knew regional transit was needed. But any suggestions for taxes to fund it were DOA at the rural-dominated state legislature, whose permission was needed. Two barriers had to fall: Convincing a conservative electorate that transit wasn’t a frill, and finding millions to build it.

Enter Charlotte Trolley, a volunteer group of rail buffs and enlightened developers who decided to restore an antique trolley car (found being used as a rental home outside Charlotte) and run it on an unused railbed near downtown. In 1996, after eight years of fundraisers, Charlotte Trolley launched a 1.8-mile ride, drawing throngs who loved the taste of old-fashioned streetcar travel. Keen-eyed developers built rail-oriented mixed-use projects, betting light rail service would follow.

Car 85, the last Charlotte streetcar to be put out to pasture in 1938, wasn’t allowed to run on the Lynx Blue Line tracks for safety reasons and was put out to pasture again. The Charlotte Area Transit System, in a budget-cutting move, scrapped the trolley service that was using replica cars.

“Their [Wells Fargo’s] support helps us pursue our mission to engage the community and put a vintage trolley back on tracks,” Pappanastos said. “We’re excited about the possibility of running historic Car 85 again, and believe we have a viable prospect for doing that on the city’s west side.”

The group will hold a “Vision Launch” on Wednesday, Nov. 2, at the Trolley Museum to celebrate the Wells Fargo grant and kick off planning and neighborhood outreach for the new line.

A reminder for rail purists: A streetcar runs in the street. A trolley runs from an overhead electric wire. Sometimes a trolley is also a streetcar. But if it doesn’t run in a street, it isn’t.

(Disclosure: Until a few months ago my husband, Frank Barrows, was on the Charlotte Trolley board, an unpaid volunteer position.)

Suburbia, dissected

Jason Griffiths writes a short essay, “Colonial Vista,” to the suburban Colonial-style house he found in a subdivision in Charlotte – a style ubiquitous in these parts. It’s part of his slide show on “Manifest Destiny: A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing” on the online forum, Places.

Griffiths is an assistant professor of architecture at the Design School at Arizona State University, hence the prominence of Arizona landscapes in his slide show. He was in Charlotte a few years back, he reports, to help review work at UNC Charlotte. (Want his book? Here’s a link.)

The Colonial-style of housing, he notes, is perhaps more appropriate in North Carolina (which was, for a time, an actual colony) than other places, but, he points out the oddity that “the most abject facade of this building enjoys the most commanding view while the actual front elevation is stubbornly fixated by an abbreviated prospect of the road and the house opposite.”

What do they (the creatives) really want?

What is that big armadillo-like edifice, and will it really attract the creative class to Kansas City, Mo.? Philip Langdon of the New Urban Network poses that question in his article, “Injecting spontaneity into urban development.”

He writes: “I peered at The Atlantic’s photo of what Kansas City is building to lure the creatives, and thought for a moment I was viewing a gigantic armadillo. Oops, my mistake. The picture isn’t of an armadillo inflated to enormous size (though it certain looks like one). It’s the Kauffman Center, a $326 million performing arts facility [designed by architect Moshe Safdie] — purportedly a means for enticing talented young people to Missouri’s second-largest metropolis.

“Excuse me, but aren’t gigantic performing arts centers the sort of thing that cities were erecting thirty years ago? My understanding of the Richard Florida take on urban development is that bright young workers are less interested in vast cultural and entertainment institutions than in having access to stimulating everyday locales — places they can walk to from their workplaces or their homes.”

I hope that message from Langdon and others can get more traction in Charlotte, where building big cultural institutions draws plenty of support and attention, (and don’t get me wrong; I love the new Mint and Bechtler museums and Gantt Center uptown) but preserving “everyday locales” has gotten short shrift. The remaining walkable, everyday locales (Plaza-Central district, NoDa, Elizabeth, a few parts of Dilworth and by some measures the Q2P2 corner) have survived mostly out of neglect by large corporations and officialdom combined with strong neighborhood support.

The city even, for a time, had a plan to raze almost all the retail spots in the gentrifying Belmont neighborhood and build a suburban-style strip shopping center to replace the stores. Thank heavens that plan got scrapped in 2007 after then-Mayor Pat McCrory vetoed a 10-1 council vote. The next week the council voted 10-1 to study the proposal. (It had arisen without going through the council’s committee system.) It’s those small, human-scale retail spots that, when fixed up and cleaned up, become the spaces that neighborhood residents walk to – what Langdon termed “stimulating everyday locales.” This city needs more of them.

And finally, a short word of thanks that our new arts campus uptown doesn’t look like the Michelin Man mated with an armadillo. I don’t know that anyone has completely fathomed what it takes to attract young artistic and creative residents. Maybe, in fact, they are looking for large Dasypus novemcinctus. But somehow I doubt it.

A planning and ‘public input’ dilemma

Is it just me, or have others also been spotting an increasing trickle of  articles that might be viewed as anti-planning. Consider this one: “The false hope of comprehensive planning,” from Michael Lewyn, an assistant professor at Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville, Fla., on the Planetizen.com website.

Lewyn uses the Jacksonville comprehensive plan to point out that a city plan can be a sprawl-promoter or a sprawl-fighter. The devil is in the details. Just having a comprehensive plan for your city doesn’t mean your city will necessarily grow in a prudent way. This has been one of my concerns about Charlotte and much of this metro region. The city’s plans say all kinds of wonderful things, but the underlying zoning ordinances allow much that the plans don’t call for – examples being the very suburban-style, highway-oriented retail development along North Tryon Street, which has been a designated light rail corridor since 1998.

But how can planners even hope to do a good job of listening to their communities AND promoting sensible provisions for growth, when apparently the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t want to see ANY development?

Andres Duany, the visionary architect and planner who was instrumental in founding New Urbanism and in changing the way many professionals write zoning codes and transportation plans, has been pooh-poohing the idea of too much public involvement, especially when the NIMBYs carry too much weight (not traditionally a problem in development-happy Charlotte, let me add). In this piece in January’s Architect magazine he discusses the relative merits of top-down planning (more efficient) and bottom-up planning (involves people but takes a lot longer and is more expensive. Here is a counterpoint from Della Rucker, in NewGeography, who still trusts the public to know what’s best in the end.
 But what if the public really doesn’t want any development at all? A survey from The Saint Index found that 79 percent of Americans said their hometown is fine the way it is or already over-developed. Some 86 percent of suburban Americans don’t want new development in their community. The anti-development sentiment is the highest in six years of Saint Index surveys.

So if you try to involve the community and listen to what they want, do you end up with a plan that forbids growth? How smart is that? Should planners heed community wishes, even if they know what the community wants is impossible or imprudent?  If the community wants cul-de-sacs and single-family subdivisions and no retail near where they live and also hates traffic congestion (the inevitable result of spread-out development that requires you to drive everywhere, and of cul-de-sac street patterns that funnel everyone onto a few arterials), what’s a planner to do?

Duany used to say that people hate growth because for the past 50 years it’s mostly been soul-searingly ugly and has, indeed, made life more unpleasant for the neighbors. I think he’s onto something. When people today imagine “development” the image they have is  big-box strip centers, single-family subdivisions, grassy and boring office parks or apartment complexes scattered around a site like dead earthworms. No wonder they’re NIMBYs.

The challenge for planners, it seems, is first to educate people on the repercussions of their choices and then, to show them choices for other ways to develop: tree-lined urban streets, with shops and shop windows on the sidewalks, to choose one example. But the planners can’t stop there. Step Three has to be to make sure the supporting ordinances and standards require the good and disallow the bad. Without Step Three, too many plans will, as Lewyn points out, produce development that pleases neither the planners nor the NIMBYs. 

N.C.’s mayors: Who won, who’s still campaigning?

Courtesy of the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, here’s the skinny on mayoral elections so far this fall in N.C. cities:

Election results are in.  Nancy McFarlane is the new mayor of Raleigh, and Raleigh voters passed bond referendums for transportation and housing.  Cary Mayor Harold Weinbrecht and Monroe Mayor Bobby Kilgore each won re-election.  Durham Mayor Bill Bell and Fayetteville Mayor Tony Chavonne won their primaries.   Incumbent Greensboro Mayor Bill Knight will face off against City Council Member Robbie Perkins next month.
 The following mayors will stand for election on Nov. 8:  Apex Mayor Keith Weatherly, Burlington Mayor Ronnie Wall, Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton, Chapel Hill Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, Greenville Mayor Pat Dunn, Huntersville Mayor Jill Swain, Jacksonville Mayor Sammy Phillips, Salisbury Mayor Susan Kluttz and Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo.