Author: Mary Newsom

Trees, grass, drought and the future

Can lush lawns be sustained with future droughts and water supply issues looming? Photo: Mary Newsom
Water and our supply of it is on my mind this week, as a smoky haze drifts around Charlotte, reminding us of the wildfires in the tinder-dry N.C. foothills and mountains west of the city. It’s been abnormally hot and dry  for months in the Appalachians and the Southeastern U.S. Two Western North Carolina counties are now in exceptional drought and seven others in “extreme drought.” 
In the Charlotte region we’re currently in Drought Stage 1 (moderate drought, voluntary watering restrictions). Boat ramps at lakes Norman and Wylie just outside the city have been closed. Some of our shrubs are succumbing. And my guess is we’ll move into Stage 2 (severe drought) shortly after the start of December.
The city’s water-sewer utility, Charlotte Water, has a keen interest in encouraging people to conserve water, and not just in a drought, although they tend to concentrate the mind, so to speak.
Taking the long view, Charlotte Water officials see that relentlessly sucking more water from the local reservoirs – Mountain Island Lake and Lake Norman – is not a strategy that can sustain the area’s growing millions of residents in future decades. Further, towns and cities downstream of Charlotte use the same river (dammed decades ago into a series of lakes by what’s now Duke Energy ) for their water supplies, so draining it is not an acceptable option.
So Charlotte Water officials are eyeing the area’s beloved lawns as a way to reduce water use. On an average day, the utility pumps 100 million gallons of treated water each day, says Jennifer Frost, public affairs manager at Charlotte Water. But during the summer that’s been from 130 to 135 million gallons a day – due to people irrigating lawns. “I think we hit 143 one day in August,” she said recently.
But Frost notes that suggesting people reduce the size of their lawns in favor of more drought-tolerant plantings hasn’t, in the past, been a winning message. So she hopes the utility can, instead, join with local efforts to encourage more tree planting and better care for existing trees.
“Inherent to growing a canopy is that reduction in turf grass,” Frost says. And, she says, “We will not get to the next level of water conservation without reducing the level of irrigation that we use.”
For the record, here are the requested water restrictions for Charlotte, for now:
  • Irrigate only on Tuesdays and Saturdays between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m.
  • Limit landscape watering to 1 inch of water per week, including rain.
  • Conserve water indoors and outdoors.
  • Refrain from outdoor water use during the day (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) to reduce evaporation losses.
  • Don’t fill swimming pools, and top off full pools only on Thursdays and Sundays, 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.
  • Turn off water fountains and other decorative water features.
  • Use commercial car washes that recycle water, not your home hose.

Another Independence Boulevard – lost opportunity or potential future?

Bologna’s Independence Boulevard on a Monday morning in October. Photo: Mary Newsom

On a recent trip to Italy, we stopped for a night in the northern city of Bologna, home to some famous pasta sauces, the world’s first university and a basilica where, legend has it, a German priest was so disgusted by the church’s opulence he went back to Germany and – his name being Martin Luther
– started the Reformation.

It’s also home to an Independence boulevard.  I didn’t capitalize “Boulevard” because the official name of the street is Via dell’ Indipendenza. In any case, it’s a powerful reminder that a busy city thoroughfare need not be ugly.

Photo: Mary Newsom
Under the arcade

I took these photos about 9 a.m. on a Monday, and I took them during breaks in traffic, so they don’t accurately convey the traffic, although it’s safe to say it’s far less than Charlotte’s Independence Boulevard, which carries more than 100,000 vehicles a day in places.

Our Indy Boulevard began life in the 1950s as a four-lane U.S. highway (U.S. 74) that sundered a white, working class neighborhood as well as the city’s first municipal park and its rose garden. Today, Independence Boulevard in Charlotte is either a freeway-style highway lined with sound walls or, where the freeway hasn’t been built yet, a seemingly endless strip of bleak, now-bedraggled highway commercial development that had its heyday in the 1970s and ’80s.

But in Bologna, first settled about 1,000 BC, via dell’ Indipendenza looks different. We arrived on a Sunday evening and the street was jammed with people, and no cars. The street and several others are pedestrianized from 8 a.m. Saturday to 10 p.m. Sunday.

The street itself, like many of the old streets in the city center, is lined with an arcade, which protects pedestrians in bad weather. Under the arcades, many with vaulted ceilings, the sidewalks are terrazzo tile, or something similar. No chewing-gum-stained concrete or crumbling asphalt.

Is there any hope for our Independence Boulevard? I confess to being a pessimist about that. Streets, I’ve observed, set a development pattern that’s difficult to change unless the government decides to buy up all the land, tear everything down, and start over with new development. They have tried that before here, and urban renewal was a brutal disaster.

Charlotte’s Independence Boulevard, 2014. Photo: Nancy Pierce

100 years of N.C. state parks, but never one for Mecklenburg

North Carolina’s Mount Mitchell State Park turned 100 this year. Photo: By Two Hearted River – CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16397075

The 2016 commemoration of the 100th anniversary of North Carolina’s first state park scored a huge win last week with the announcement that 2,744 acres will be added to that first park, Mount Mitchell. That will more than double the park’s size, and is a welcome tribute.

But if you visit the Find a Park website for the North Carolina State Parks Department, you may notice that unlike the Triangle, which boasts five, there is no state park or recreation area in Mecklenburg County, the state’s most populous county and one of the larger ones in size as well (ranking 38 of 100).

But did you know a state park was once proposed for Mecklenburg County? The city-county 2005 plan, dated 1985, proposed a state park in the northeastern corner of the county, east of Davidson. It did not happen. Sadly, that area, which for two decades was protected by the town of Davidson’s decision not to allow sewer service there, is now being proposed for sewer service, which likely means subdivisions, not rural farmland, will be the future.

If you’re in Charlotte, especially in the part of town with the bulk of the population (south and southeast of uptown) you may note Google’s assessment that it’s 45 minutes from Charlotte to Crowders Mountain State Park in western Gaston County, but
that simply proves Google has never actually driven to Crowders Mountain. Google says it’s an hour from Charlotte to Lake Norman State Park, which means it’s really more like an hour and a half.  Those are our state park options, folks. Any others are a couple of hours away unless you are driving at 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning, in which they’re, maybe, an hour and 45 minutes.

About that lost opportunity for a Mecklenburg state park: It says on Page 81 of the Generalized Land Plan 2005: “A major state park should be developed in the Rocky River basin, in the county’s northeast corner, to serve Mecklenburg and adjoining counties. … The county park and recreation department should enter into negotiations with the state and adjacent counties to determine and appropriate size and location.”

And I should lose 20 pounds. Some things just never happen.

I am not sure why Mecklenburg County came up short for state parks. My guess: A combination of the once-Democratic-dominated state government not being fond of the once-Republican government here, added to the likely disinclination of power brokers in “growth is good” Mecklenburg to set any prime chunk of develop-able land off limits to subdivisions.

Could a state park be built here today? I think that train has left the station. Few large sections of the county remain undeveloped. The lake shorelines are in private hands or else owned and preserved by county taxpayers. Indeed, Mecklenburg taxpayers have shouldered most of the load of preserving our parkland and natural areas, helped by a few nongovernment programs such as the Catawba Lands Conservancy. We’re left with just some words from a dusty plan – and regrets.

In 1969 planners imagined Charlotte’s University City. Did their vision come true?

1969 University City Planning Concepts

This is part two of my “I Love Old Maps” series.  In addition to ferreting out that fun 1986 map of Charlotte, retiring UNC Charlotte Associate Provost Owen Furuseth also handed me a 1969 city plan for University City, the part of Charlotte that surrounds UNC Charlotte, where I work.

The plan was produced by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission — “William McIntyre, Planning Director; Richard C. Hauersperger, Chief Planner; Gary L. Sieb, City Planner, and W. Earl Long, Planning Intern.” The university, which now has 27,000 students, at the time had 2,350 students in nine buildings. The plan predicted that eventually the university would serve 15,000 students.

Its goals are laudable, if imprecise. “This report outlines the Planning Commission’s concept of the kind of community University City might become if its development is fashioned to create an environment of quality.” It lists some goals, among them:

  • “To create a community designed for the convenience of its people.” Since the whole area can basically be navigated only by car once you leave the campus, I’d score that at a 3 on a scale of 10.
  • “To carefully fit the development of the community into the land so that it preserves the assets of the natural landscape.” I’d score that about a 4 on a scale of 10. 
  • Other goals would get a higher score from me: Providing housing, developing public and private facilities, etc. Then this final one, which I’ll let you score on your own:
  • “To create a community that is distinctive in the character and quality of its development — a community of beauty.” (Note, this is not about the UNCC campus, but the rest of the area.)
 THE GENERAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN

On page 19 is the General Development Plan, shown below.

Click on map to zoom in.

Observe several things:

  • Notice how the area surrounding the university campus (the cross-hatched area) and its few related apartments (vertical stripes) is coded for single-family residential development (the small dots). At the time, much of that area was rural, either pastures, farmland or woods. No thought, apparently, that farmland might be worth keeping around as farmland. That reflects the general thinking at the time, from what I’ve heard: Rural land would of course be with us, somewhere (but just not here) so no need for special farmland preservation, and in any case “Growth Is Good.”
  • Note the proposals for Open Space and Recreation beside most creeks in the area. That was far-sighted.  Of course, having the idea in 1969 did not mean those recreation areas would get built swiftly, or ever. One university-area greenway along Toby Creek is finally being built this year, after 18 years of planning. 
  • Notice how little space is planned for commercial development, compared to today’s stripped-out big-box development and strip centers along University City Boulevard (shown on the map as N.C. 49) and North Tryon Street, (shown on the map as U.S. 29). 

THE TOWN CENTER

Admirably, the plan does have a small area set out for a Town Center, where today’s Town Center Plaza sits, a strip shopping center that is most definitely not a town center. The images in the plan are straight out of a Modernist playbook, with engineered people standing in concrete plazas with plantings in concrete planters, and, yes, some sculptural looking tree-like artifacts.

An image of the envisioned Town Center for University City, circa 1969.

But the idea of the place is not at all bad: “With some skill and imagination in the planning and development of the Center it can become a delightful community magnet — a place where people come not only to do business but where they gather to have group meetings, see exhibits on subject of interest, enjoy terrace dining, window shop in a pleasant atmosphere, see a movie or engage in a variety of enjoyable activities. The Town Center should become an integral part of the social, cultural and architectural character of University City.

The final page of the booklet’s text says this:  “The Center should be designed to create an environment of distinguished architectural and landscape quality.” I’ll let you score that one.

Sigh.

Town Center Plaza across University City Boulevard from UNC Charlotte. Photo: Google Street View

WHAT GOT BUILT AND WHY

How could a plan be so unlike what ended up getting built? Many things played a role, but one important one still at work today, almost 50 years later, is that unlike many other cities, in Charlotte plans are thoughts, not rules. The rules for what people must build based on the zoning exist in a whole other document, the zoning ordinance.

If the zoning ordinance had required a different kind of development, then we would have seen a different kind of development in University City. That holds true today. The city plans call for walkable urban neighborhoods near the new transit stops along the new Blue Line Extension. But near the stations? Here is what is getting built:

City zoning allows new strip-style development in the shadow of the parking deck for a light rail stop (not visible here). Photo: Google Street View

Based on the zoning. I checked the online zoning map for the city. As the 1969 plan outlined, that chunk of land is zoned for industrial development. The light rail route was planned in 1998.  In almost 20 years no one with the city bothered to change the zoning to require transit-oriented development. Again, a sigh.

Charlotte in the ’80s


I love how old maps show what the mapmakers valued. 
I recently came across this map of Charlotte circa 1986. (You’ll want to click it to zoom in.) It was among the things Owen Furuseth found as he cleaned out his office after almost 40 years at UNC Charlotte. Furuseth left June 30 as associate provost of Metropolitan Studies, the wing of UNCC academia under which nestles the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work.  Because Owen is a geographer and planner, he was keeping the map but he let me borrow it to copy the image.
The map’s credit line says “Charlotte Mecklenburg Planning Commission 1986.” That probably helps explain why the route for the then-unbuilt I-485 is shown, although construction on the highway didn’t start until 1988, and the full outerbelt was not completed until 2015. Notice, also, how the I-485 route shown on the map is pretty much where it eventually was built. One small exception: The northern section is south of Eastfield Road, which is farther south than shown on the 1986 map.
Those of you who’ve been in Charlotte only a decade or so might get a chuckle out of seeing the “New Coliseum” west of I-77 off Tyvola Road. The “New Coliseum,” was just under construction in 1986, the year this map was made. After it was replaced in 2005 by the Time Warner Cable Arena uptown, the Tyvola coliseum was demolished in 2007 (see its implosion here).*
Note the prominence of Eastland. That was Eastland Mall.  It’s now a vacant city-owned plot of land, after the mall failed about a decade ago. 
Note city limits of Charlotte. “Rea Road Extension” south of N.C. 51, the huge chunk of south Charlotte south of N.C. 51, and UNCC and University Place were not inside the city in 1986. 
Finally, note the relative lack of prominence of “UNCC” compared to University Place, a shopping center and suburban-form mixed-use development north of the university. I wonder what that reveals about the university’s prominence in the minds of the city-county planners. I’ll leave that to your imagination. Today the university is almost 28,000 students, a campus surrounded by some of the most gawd-awful strip-shopping-center and big-box unwalkable and unbikeable suburbia that you can envision. 
* About that Coliseum implosion video.  I had never watched that until I dug up the link today. It made me cry.  At that just-opened venue in November 1988, I and 23,000 other people watched the old Charlotte Hornets – including Dell Curry, father of today’s more famous Curry – debut to a tuxedo-and-formal-gown wearing crowd, lose by 40 points. They got a standing ovation.  Less than 2 months later, on Dec. 23, Kurt Rambis’ last-second shot defeated Michael Jordon’s Chicago Bulls. (Read the Chicago Tribune story here.) The old Coliseum hosted 364 consecutive NBA-game sellouts. We loved the Hornets in those days. Loved Dell and Muggsy and for a time even loved George Shinn, though that came to a bad end. Our then toddler daughter loved Scott Burrell.  Look him up. He was a bouncy jumper.
The coliseum also hosted Frank Sinatra, Springsteen and Mother Teresa among other icons, and the 1994 Final Four, complete with then-President Bill Clinton, various and sundry FOBs (Friends of Bill), and an Arkansas victory.
The Coliseum was built in the wrong place and was poorly designed for what NBA arenas came to need just 10 years later. But it was fun while it lasted.

Do you live in the ‘real’ Charlotte?


Plaza Midwood, a neighborhood that is not south of Fairview. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Do you live in “the real Charlotte”? I was chatting with a guy at a recent party who opined that only the part of the city inside Route 4 is “the real Charlotte.” (Route 4 is the Woodlawn-Runnymede-Wendover-Eastway thoroughfare that’s approximately 4 miles from uptown Charlotte.)

Au contraire, I said, or words to that effect. Actually, I said, a more accurate boundary would be Fairview Road, as in “I try never to go south of Fairview,” an expression I hear now and again from certain friends and acquaintances whose lives, like that of the aforesaid guy at the party, focus more on the center of the city than the far-flung edges. (Happily, the shopping mecca of SouthPark perches on the north side of Fairview Road.)

But more to the point, huge expanses of this city are outside Route 4. A circle with a 4-mile radius covers about 50 square miles. The 2010 Census tells us Charlotte covers almost 298 square miles. So the “real Charlotte” would be one-sixth of the actual city. I don’t think that makes it real, although most of the city inside Route 4 dates to the era preceding the overwhelming suburban-style growth that started in the 1950s and exploded by the mid-1960s.

But he also had put his finger on a cultural/social reality that’s been building here over the past 15 or 20 years: A lot of residents in the older, inner neighborhoods have a completely different view of their city than people who live in the far-flung, newer
areas. But which is the “real” view? Is this a city of horrific traffic, found in south-of-Fairview land? Or is it a pleasant and easy-to-manage city of cohesive and distinct neighborhoods where you tend to run into people you know all over the place – especially if you try never to go south of Fairview?

I think both are the real Charlotte, but I am not sure they are always on good speaking terms.

Symptom No. 1: Occasional talk in the far south neighborhoods – I’m talking to you, Ballantyne – about seceding from Charlotte and becoming a new town. Because they don’t like the rest of us very much, apparently.

Symptom No. 2: The not uncommon terminology, from people who do not live south of Fairview, that uses “Ballantyne” as short-hand for “way too far from the places I like to hang out.” As in, “I really want to live in an older, walkable neighborhood near transit but I can’t afford it, and I don’t want to have to go live in Ballantyne.”

I am not sure what that says about Ballantyne, other than it’s a very well-branded place and a large place and so it pops to mind in a way that, say, Piper Glen doesn’t.

The iconic gateways at Ballantyne. Photo: Nancy Pierce

But it clearly says something about Charlotte – that this is a geographically spread out city with a lot of places where people may not feel they have much in common with people 24 miles away. It’s 24 miles, by the way, from the Ballantyne area in south Charlotte to the Highland Creek subdivision in the far northeast corner.

Maybe Ballantyne, in fact, is the “real” Charlotte, and people who live north of Fairview are just wrong. Or is NoDa the “real” Charlotte? It didn’t even exist, by that name, until about 20 years ago. Before that it was North Charlotte. Maybe we’re all wrong and McCrorey Heights and Hyde Park are the “real” Charlotte.

I think the “real” Charlotte is elusive, and changes over time. Or is it that, as Einstein is reported to have said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

Skywalkers, Luke or otherwise, and the problems they cause for cities

People fill a plaza at the Mint Museum in Uptown Charlotte. In many cities overstreet skywalks are blamed for taking too many people off the sidewalks.  Photo: John Chesser

Uptown Charlotte is not alone in having a series of overstreet walkways that keep pedestrians off the streets and in so doing, damage (by splitting up) the potential customer base for uptown retail.

As pointed out in this Associated Press article in Salon, “Cities face new urban problem: their own skywalks,” points out, “a debate is growing over what to do with the cozy corridors, bridges and tunnels that have helped create urban ghost towns.”

Cincinnati dismantled half of its system. Baltimore took down seven bridges. Other cities are questioning them.

Charlotte imported its idea from Minneapolis in the 1960s, when suburban expansion and white flight were in full flower. In the 1960s and ’70s the city bus stops were along uptown sidewalks, so the sidewalks were crowded with bus riders, many of them people of color.  The overstreet walkways went from white-collar office to white-collar office. Hence an informal segregation took root.

Today of course you see people of all races both on the sidewalks and in the overstreet walkways. The Transportation Center is where people wait for the buses, in a covered facility with seating. And I must disclose that I, too, sometimes take the overstreet walkways when the weather is particularly nasty.

Many urban planners don’t like the skywalks, but … too bad! The city of Charlotte gave away the air rights over its public streets to the corporations building the office towers, which wanted to connect them to other towers or to parking decks. In general they have 99-year leases. For a brief time in the 1990s the city planning department tried to discourage new skywalks. But planners were no match for the pressure from the banks formerly known as First Union and NationsBank and others who were building tall towers.

So it appears we’ll be skywalking in Charlotte for at least another half-century.

About that greener-looking grass in S.C. roads program

In Charlotte, a lot of local officials in the transportation world have cast envious eyes over the state line into South Carolina, where counties can enact sales taxes specifically for road projects. (No, I don’t know whether, for this program, “transportation” includes transit or bike-ped or only pavement for motor vehicles.) York County, just over the line south of Charlotte, almost 20 years ago was the first S.C. county to levy a one-penny sales tax on a program called “Pennies for Progress.” Several other counties have adopted similar taxes with similar names.

Over the years, multiple Charlotte and N.C. business leaders or transportation honchos have said, in essence, “See, if only we could levy a small sales tax for roads we could do what York County does. They get millions to use on highways and roads, and it all works out great.”

Well, maybe not so great.  Turns out there have been major cost overruns, or maybe lowball cost estimates, or both.  A citizen panel found cost overruns totaling more than $100 million and has just warned that unless the program improves it risks losing the fourth round of funding, which requires voter approval and which is set for 2017.  The three previous referendums were in 1997, 2003 and 2011.

Sometimes the green grass over on the other side of the line is a little ragged when you look at it up close.

Density and parking: W.W.J.J.(Jane Jacobs) D.?

View of proposed development from Caswell Road. Image from documents filed with City of Charlotte

I’ve spent the last few days re-reading parts of the writings of Jane Jacobs, in advance of a talk I’m giving Thursday in the NoDa neighborhood (6 p.m. at the Evening Muse, free and open to the public) as well as the 100th anniversary of her birth May 4, 1916. (See an inspiring list of Jane’s 100th events at janes100th.org.)

So when I read about neighborhood opposition — and more significant, opposition from District 1 City Council member Patsy Kinsey — to a proposed development in the Elizabeth neighborhood on the basis of density and a worry about parking, I was primed to consult Jacobs’ writing. WWJJD? What Would Jane Jacobs Do? Spoiler: I think she would be OK with the development but would be more worried about what she called “the self-destruction of diversity.”

Ely Portillo’s article in The Charlotte Observer lays out some of the opposition. The proposal (see the rezoning documents here) is for a 60-foot-high development of 123 apartments, with 15,000 square feet of shops and restaurants, at a triangular corner at East Seventh Street and North Caswell Road.

Portillo quotes neighborhood association member Melanie Sizemore saying that while developers and the neighborhood have worked together they haven’t resolved all the issues. Two big sticking points: density and parking. They’re afraid the number of proposed parking spots isn’t generous enough and will mean congestion in the surrounding neighborhood.

Today, Charlotte Agenda writer Jason Thomas, referring to remarks at Monday’s public hearing, opines that it shows “just how lost our City Council is.” (See “The City Council is making baffling decisions on urban planning.“) Thomas praises it as beautifully
designed and well-thought-out and compares it favorably to other recent apartment projects the council approved, including one right across Seventh Street, that he says are uglier.

But the supposed need for more parking? Listen to Jane Jacobs, a brilliant observer of and thinker about cities: “The destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This is in the book’s introduction, in which she excoriates planners for cluelessness and for oblivion to reality as they blindly follow theories of how cities should work and ignore evidence that their theories are flawed. “… Planners … do not know what to do with automobiles in cities because they do not know how to plan for workable and vital cities anyhow — with or without automobiles.”

One of those failed planner theories is that density in cities is bad. Jacobs’ book proves the opposite: It’s essential to a healthy, functioning city.  But during the 20th century the “density is bad” theory embedded itself in the minds of well-meaning, “progressive” planners and neighborhood advocates. So did the idea that traffic congestion and lack of parking will kill a neighborhood. Jacobs’ observations showed how that’s another fallacy. In recent decades many planners themselves have abandoned the “density is bad” theory. But it’s clearly foremost in some people’s minds.

(An aside: Jacobs’ assumed that cities would have demolition protection for older buildings and the courage to impose height limits, which are tools used to protect the needed diversity of building age and scale. But demolition protection and height limits are lacking in Charlotte.)

Is Thomas fair to expect all City Council members to be urban designers or planners? That would be nice, but it’s unrealistic. That’s why the city pays a whole department of people to advise them on such matters and to ensure that city ordinances produce the kind of development the city’s plans call for.

Quick quiz:

1. Are the plans what they should be, or are they vague feel-good statements?
2. Do the ordinances produce what the plans call for?

OK, you score 100. The policies set forth in many of the plans are vague (“Protect and enhance the character of existing neighborhoods.”). And the ordinances don’t produce what the plans call for. The city hired consultants (Clarion) who told them so. Three years ago. Moving at a pace that makes glacial melting look rapid, the city is only now starting work on rewriting its zoning ordinance.

Why not, in the interim, apply a few patches for areas that need them? I’m thinking of places facing rapid demand for new buildings, where the old multifamily zoning allows developments that deface the sidewalk experience: South End, Elizabeth and Plaza Midwood for starters. Patches could be some tailored-to-the-area zoning overlays, or they could boost the urban design standards in a few of the zoning categories such as MUDD and TOD.

But back to Jane Jacobs. What was that about the self-destruction of diversity? She noticed that successful, popular neighborhoods with a diverse set of buildings, businesses, homes and uses tended over time to lose that blend:“Self-destruction of diversity is caused by success, not by failure. … The process is a continuation of the same economic processes that led to the success itself.”
As a neighborhood becomes more popular, she wrote, the new development will tend to be whatever is most profitable. That’s how capitalism works. Over time, the neighborhood loses its diversity. “So many people want to live in the locality that it becomes profitable to build, in excessive and devastating quantity (emphasis mine), for those who can pay the most. These are usually childless people, and today they are not simply people who can pay the most in general, but people who can or will pay the most for the smallest space.”

Does that sound familiar?

What’s a city and what’s a suburb, and what’s their future?

Large totems mark the “center” of the Ballantyne development in south Charlotte. Photo: Google Street View

I’ve long been interested in how people use the terms “suburban” and “urban,” because their definitions seem to wobble all over the map. Thanks to the state’s formerly easy annexation law, the city I live in, Charlotte, has large areas well inside city limits – places that in another metro area would be separate municipalities or unincorporated sprawl. People here call them “suburbs,” though by some definitions they’d be “city,” not “suburb.”

But the issue of suburban vs. urban living is just as lively here as anywhere. So I’ve been interested to read two recent articles that tackle that broad topic, though in different ways.

First, Josh Stephens’ review in the California Planning and Development Report of the latest Joel Kotkin book, The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us, dissects, or at least tries to dissect, what Kotkin means by “the rest of us.” Who is his “us”? And why does he assume that everyone who lives in a suburban-form landscape does so by choice, rather than because of housing affordability or job location or doubts about schools?  Hat tip to Planetizen for alerting me to this excellent piece, Fetishizing Families: Review of ‘The Human City.’

Next is an analysis from Daniel Hertz in the sometimes wonderfully contrarian City Observatory, about DuPage County, Ill., just outside Chicago. In “A Mystery in the Suburbs,” he looks at the county, where growth in recent decades has been of the ubiquitous automobile-centric, focused on highways pattern focusing on highways. Once robust, in recent years DuPage has seen some siphoning off of economic energy, as companies move back to downtown. 

This put me in mind of Ballantyne, a large suburban-style development at the far southern reaches of Charlotte city
limits built over in the past 20 years. There is, in fact, more mixing of uses in Ballantyne than in most 1980s or 1990s developments, but it’s in the style of houses here, shopping center there, offices across the street. It’s jammed with cars and not at all walkable unless you like to get mowed down on multilane freeway interchanges or giant thoroughfares. The developers have just announced a vast new development at the far western edge of the city.

Hertz writes:  … The spread-out nature of development means that no one bus line can have easy access to many homes or businesses either—and even someone who steps out of a bus relatively close to their destination has to navigate roads and parking lots that aren’t designed for walking. Partly as a result, the buses simply don’t come that often: at best, every 15 minutes at rush hour, which may be on the edge of acceptability for show-up-and-go service in the afternoon or late in the evening, but is a burden for someone who really needs to be on time for a job. Other buses come much less frequently, even at rush hour.”

Gee, does that sound like anywhere I know? Charlotte’s development pattern has made bus service difficult with the never-adequate funding available.

Hertz goes on: “Someone who wanted to commute to their job in DuPage County by transit would discover 26 rail stations which are probably within walking distance of neither their home nor their job, and a network of buses that aren’t much better, most of which come too infrequently to be reliable for very time-sensitive trips like a commute, and which require getting to and from stops that are located on roads that are hostile or dangerous for walking.

“In other words, the decisions of planners and developers over the last several decades have created a land use pattern that essentially locks in transportation choices for all future residents, who are now stuck commuting in ways they say they’d rather not. And DuPage, like other car-dependent suburbs around the country, may be losing some of its economic base as a result.”

Is that the future of Ballantyne, 30 years out? Will Charlotte, seeing massive population growth, continue to wave into being more large, suburban-style developments at the edge of the city where transit service is at best iffy, and whose future may be less than anyone would wish?