Author: marynewsom

Smart city? Raleigh wins round 1

They may think they’re so smart in the Capital City and the Bull City (aka RDU) but the QC has something up its sleeve. More on that below.

First, if you haven’t seen this, it’s a fun survey from the blog, The Daily Beast. Today even the august Observer editorial board weighed in.
The Daily Beast has ranked a bunch of cities as “America’s Smartest Cities” and our Tar Heel colleague up I-85 snagged first place. Raleigh-Durham, says the Beast, “has just about every intangible useful in attracting and developing a smart populace: It’s a university hub, including two of the nation’s elite schools (Duke and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and those schools led to one of the nation’s great technology incubators (Research Triangle). On top of that, Raleigh, as the state’s capital, attracts engaged political minds, as well.” (You may insert favorite joke here about Raleigh politicians.)

Charlotte hit No. 16 – sort of, well, unremarkable. We were deemed less smart than Hartford-New Haven, Baltimore, Milwaukee and Salt Lake City (ouch). But we bested Hotlanta (No. 23) as well as No. 30, Grand Rapids-Kalamazoo-Battle Creek (but where’s the sport in that?), and Greensboro and Jacksonville, Fla., tied for No. 37.

Here’s what the editorial board had to say. One might say we were bemused, and noted the lack of mention of N.C. State.

But remember that hornets nest? The Queen City is a fighter. So if you are interested in seeing this region become smarter – catch up to Baltimore, anyone? – consider this Oct. 15 event: “A Smarter Charlotte.”

A group of people put together by Mark Peres (above, right) of the online magazine Charlotte Viewpoint and Tom Low (right) of Civic by Design will host, “A Smarter Charlotte: Enhancing Our Community Intelligence for the 21st Century.” It’s 5:30-8:30 p.m. at the just-will-have-opened Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture at South Tryon and Stonewall streets. Tickets cost $20, which includes refreshments. For an agenda and to register, click here.

“Good things occur when good people convene in the right way,” say the organizers.

Recycling, redux

If you didn’t see my Saturday column on recycling in Charlotte, take a look here. And in a related matter, in a previous posting, I promised follow-up information on the new recycling bins, and whether we could recycle the old red ones.

Some answers, courtesy of Gerald Gorbey, deputy director of solid waste services for the City of Charlotte.

Can or will the city recycle the old red bins (which are No. 2 plastic)?

Gorbey: The city will not require that red bins be returned. Citizens will be allowed to use them for marshalling bins for their recyclables or for storage use, etc. If citizens prefer to throw their red bin away, the City will collect it and recycle it. The exact process for doing the bin pick-up has not been determined yet. The bin will be recycled either through the county’s material recycling center or through a contractual arrangement with the roll-out cart company that provides the new recycle carts.

What color will the new, rollout recycling bins be:

Green

Any plans to begin recycling of compostables/kitchen scraps?

No plans are underway for providing this service.

And to repeat:

The new rollout recycling will be “single-stream” which means you don’t have to sort it, just dump it all into the bin, which will have a lid to keep it dry and, in theory, keep out varmints. However, they are not raccoon- or possum-proof. Yes, I once encountered a possum that had crawled into our gray rollout bin. And another time, a trail of peanut shells led away from the bin, where I had tossed some stale peanuts after a trip to the circus.

As to whether we’ll ever see the sort of easy recycling bins uptown that I mentioned in my column, well, who knows? City council member Edwin Peacock told me today that “phone calls have been made.”

Sound off on city’s energy policy

A city press release informs us that Charlotte-Mecklenburg residents can submit ideas and suggestions online about how the city should spend $6.7 million, part of a federal Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant.

The grant is to invest in projects to reduce fossil fuel emissions and energy consumption and to create “green jobs” and renewable technologies.

To give your ideas or take the Community Input Survey, visit www.charlottenc.gov and click on City Energy Strategy. The survey ends at midnight Monday (Oct. 5).

Can we recycle the recycling bin?

As of next summer the city of Charlotte is changing the way it collects recyclables. The red bins will give way to large rollout containers (an example is shown above) where you’ll dump everything and roll it to the curb every other week. This will, in theory, inspire more people to recycle more things. (Clarification: You’ll have a recycle rollout bin as well as a regular garbage rollout bin.)

Even if it doesn’t, at least now you can roll it out instead of having to haul a bin loaded with newspapers, magazines, cans, glass, etc.

But what should the city do with the red plastic bins? I was talking today with council member Edwin Peacock III, who chairs the council’s environment committee, and he said he’d be interested in hearing suggestions.
He noted his own family’s red bin had been used for sledding and for washing a dog, as well as recycling. At our place we have three red bins (we read a lot of newspapers), and two are held together with duct tape, having had close encounters with various vehicles.

I vote for recycling the bins. But are they No. 1 or No. 2 plastic?
If not, maybe there’s a public art project awaiting, involving a collage of red plastic shards …

Charlotte’s energy strategy

Tuesday night, the public’s invited to a meeting at Charlotte’s city-county government center uptown to discuss and share ideas for the city’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy (Energy Strategy). The city got a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, and if it can develop and submit an energy strategy in 120 days it will be eligible for the first half of more than $6.4 million in grant funding.

The public workshop starts at 6:30 p.m. in the council chambers, then “idea sharing” in the lobby. If you can’t make it you can watch it on TV on Channel 16 (if you have Time Warner Cable) or online at http://www.charlottenc.gov/

Here’s my 2-cents worth. If you have yours, go tell the folks next Tuesday:

1. Figure some sort of horrific punishment for office building managers who set the A/C too cold during the summer. Maybe chain them to large blocks of ice in January? Force them to pick cucumbers in 95-degree sunlight? Think of all the energy we’d save if indoor summertime temps were normal (75 or so) instead of 68. I went around with a thermometer earlier this summer and noted numerous uptown offices that were icy.

2. Change the tree ordinance to require large maturing shade trees (not teeny crape myrtles or narrow cypress trees) planted in all surface parking lots and located so that they provide shade for the parking places, especially in the afternoon. Hint from a long-time Southerner: If you can park in the shade, your car won’t be 150 degrees when you get inside. The tree ordinance already requires trees, but apparently shade hasn’t been much of a value, hence the shrubby little things you see.

Art comes to Central Ave.

My Twitter buddy @underoak (aka Merry Oaks resident and free-lance journalist and social media expert Andria Krewson) shares this photo of one of the murals going up along Central Avenue, part of the city-funded streetscape project. If you’d like to see sketches from the other artists selected for the series of murals on vinyl, visit the UnderOak blog.

Andria tells me the stencil-like bike wheels at the mural’s bottom are the artist’s nod to freelance photographer and avid biker Nancy Pierce, who lives in Merry Oaks, and other neighbor bikers.

Growing church vs. historic bungalows

It was easily the most interesting of the rezoning cases the City Council heard last night – and the one that brings up the trickiest issue of the evening: What rules, if any, should the city have to limit institutions that encroach into neighborhoods? And how do you deal with big ugly surface parking lots? They’re not pedestrian-friendly, nor do they contribute to the much-loved-by-planners “vibrant urban village.” They’re also polluters, due to polluted storm runoff.

A church in the Wilmore neighborhood wants to expand and build a large new building and a big surface parking lot on a street now holding several historic bungalows. (By “historic,” here, I don’t mean designated landmarks or in a designated historic district, simply a neighborhood that dates to the turn of the 19th-20th century and has an ambiance akin to Dilworth, Elizabeth and Wesley Heights.) The church has said it won’t demolish the five houses but will move them to other property it owns.

The matter was a public hearing on zoning case 2008-158. The council vote should come next month.

Several things made this an interesting presentation. First, the council chamber was virtually filled with members of the church, Greater Galilee Baptist Church, whose current sanctuary (shown above, photo courtesy of the church) is on South Mint Street at West Park Avenue.

Second, one speaker in favor of rezoning had a great line: “We, as people, are in noncompliance. With Jesus.”

Yet opponents had some good points: Why should a church be allowed to remove five houses and put up a surface parking lot? As neighbor Chip Cannon put it, this would be putting “a suburban mega-church in the center of a small-scale pedestrian neighborhood.”

Some political realities are in order. This church is African American. Two at-large council members are running for mayor and both want African American votes (though black candidate Anthony Foxx has an edge there). Among nine at-large candidates (for four slots), three of the four Democrats are African American. Two at-large incumbents – Democrat Susan Burgess and Republican Edwin Peacock – will have to vote on this petition. Burgess, in particular, will want as many Democratic votes as she can get in November. If she faces black voters’ triple-shotting for the three black at-large candidates, she’ll have a problem.

Another political reality: No one wants to vote against a church, especially an obviously growing church. Maybe they’d do that in some other city in some other state, but in oh-so-Christian Charlotte? Not on your (eternal) life.

Yet another political reality: How fair would it be to crack down on an African American church when Carolinas Medical Center has been allowed to devour vast tracts of Dilworth with, near as I can tell, hardly a peep of protest from the city? And the affluent and predominantly white Myers Park United Methodist plopped a surface parking lot (nicely landscaped, though) at the prime corner of Providence-Providence-Queens-Queens. No one told them, “No.” (Note to out-of-town readers: That intersection is for real. Don’t even ask.)

Final political reality: I chanced to be sitting near Planning Director Debra Campbell and asked if there were any zoning standards that said you can’t put in a parking lot, and she said, only in the UMUD (uptown) zoning. I asked if planners had considered cracking down on surface parking lots in other zoning categories. She just laughed – heartily, I must add – and said, “No way.”

Corbu? Or You?

Yesterday I posed the question of who should be on the list of worst urbanists – spinning off Planetizen.com’s entertaining Top 100 Urbanists list.

The easy, cliched choice would be Le Corbusier, the brilliant but destructive architect whose vision for the city of the future was one of tall towers surrounded by large lawns and big highways. In other words, this guy invented Charlotte’s suburban office park development Ballantyne, as well as this nation’s many failed public housing towers. But Corbu was avant-garde and influential, and many others took up his theories. This was especially true in the U.S., where they dovetailed nicely with the auto and petroleum industries’ push to get everyone into automobiles and driving a lot.


But thinking of Le Corbusier made me think of General Motors and its famous Futurama display at the 1939-40 New York Worlds Fair, depicted at right. Surely the automobile and petroleum industries – with their powerful influence on Congress and highway funding and with GM’s purchase of many urban streetcar systems in order to dismantle them – did more to shape the nation’s cities for the worse than any one architect could.

But then, of course, it’s worth remembering that while Le Corbusier did influence huge numbers of architects in this country, Walter Gropius and his colleague Sigfried Giedion (who wrote “Space Time and Architecture”) probably influenced more, during Gropius’ many years at the Harvard School of Design. So maybe Gropius and Giedion should be on the list.
But again, wait. Architects challenge us to think. They may be wrong but who, really, decides what gets built? It’s government that makes the rules that shape our cities. What about Herbert Hoover, who before he became president was Commerce Secretary and commissioned the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, which to this day underpins most land use ordinances in America and whose very foundation rests upon the theory that separating uses is the way to a safe and healthy city or town. As Jane Jacobs later showed us, it really isn’t.

The federal government funded the interstate highway system, envisioned as a way to connect cities. But when it entered the city it caused open, ugly wounds to the urban fabric that continues to damage cities to this day.

It was the federal government whose rules for backing mortgage loans created the redlining that cut off access to credit for anyone who A) was black, or B) lived anywhere near black people, or C) was one of a variety of so-called undesirable ethnics, such as Mexican or Bohemian or D) lived anywhere near any of those so-called undesirable ethnics.

It was the federal government, again through its financing rules, that encouraged the sprawling, low-density suburban subdivision design that vanquished more urban dwelling forms.

Consider: The government is by the people, for the people and of the people. It’s all of us. So maybe that worst urban thinker arrow should spin around and start pointing at all of us?

But who oughtta be ‘Worst Urbanist’ ?

My colleague Jack Betts, who writes our This Old State blog, read the last post – Who tops ‘Top Urbanist‘ list? – and suggested this, “Be fun sometime to do a list of the Ten Worst urban thinkers… There’d surely be some NC nominees.” And he’s surely right.

I saw that a commenter on my previous posting nominated Bissell Hayes to top the “sub-urbanism list.” Right away, I started thinking about other Charlotteans (Bissell Hayes is a company, not a person, and now it’s part of Cottingham-Chalk/Bissell-Hayes) who might be on that “worst urban thinkers” list.

Of course, A.G. Odell leaped to mind. He was a big proponent of uptown, to be sure, but his ideas for “improvement” were derivative of Robert Moses, or maybe Corbusier–esque. One reason downtown Charlotte has so many blocks and sectors that seem dead is that our civic leaders (Hugh McColl among them) kept following Odell’s 1966 master plan for uptown development, when they shouldn’t have. It tries to impose a single-use pattern, as in “here is your cultural district, there is your government district, here is your entertainment district” and so on. BAD idea.

At first I thought Henry Faison deserved a spot, for Eastland and other suburban shopping malls that wither, long after he’s made his money and sold to others. But then, I thought, Faison isn’t really an urban thinker, per se. He’s just a developer doing what the city zoning and policies allow.

Here are Betts‘ suggestions:
• Whoever designed the Research Triangle Park – granted, it wasn’t urban then but now it’s an urban fortress, with concrete moat, in the midst of one the south’s largest areas of urban academic sprawl.
• And how about whoever was mayor when the old Charlotte Coliseum was built way out yonder? [The first time that happened the mayor was Victor Shaw, but this being Charlotte he appointed a committee, headed by department store executive David Ovens, to work up a plan for a coliseum-auditorium project built in 1955 way out on Independence Boulevard. And the architect for both the old coliseum and Ovens auditorium? A.G. Odell. And while its location is horrible, and the big ugly parking lots are horrible, I do like the old Coliseum itself, with that great silver dome. And this being Charlotte, we did it again in the 1980s, when Harvey Gantt, an architect and planner was mayor. Built another coliseum way out on Tyvola Road./ mn]

• Or whoever was in charge of letting Raleigh’s RBC Center get built in a place that makes visitors stand around in the parking lot after games or performances looking around in puzzlement: where are the bars, the pubs, the cafes, the restaurants, the museums? What were they thinking??????

• Or Tom White when he insisted the N.C. Museum of Art be built in an area where….(see RBC, above….) but at least there was a youth prison (Polk) handily right next door for the arts-and-petty theft crowd.