Author: marynewsom

Is it Smart Growth or something else?

What does the term “Smart Growth” mean to you? It’s one of those terms whose original meaning has been washed away under a deluge of rhetoric, obfuscation, bureaucratic co-option and developer-marketing brochures.

Two things reminded me of what we ought to be thinking about, if we’re trying to grow in a smart way in this region.

Today, I ran across this article (link) from David Crossley of Houston Tomorrow about a Texas Smart Growth bill that Gov. Rick Perry vetoed. Crossley writes that Perry (and many large developers) prefer the status quo of land speculation and intense government subsidies of sprawl development. It’s an interesting look at how another fast-growing Sun Belt state is dealing (or not dealing with) with its challenges.

That piggybacked on a discussion yesterday with Rebecca Yarbrough of the regional CONNECT effort (in which two Charlotte area Councils of Government and the Charlotte Regional Partnership are working on regional growth/environment initiatives). She was trying to describe what happens when incremental growth decisions add up to a larger, more costly future.
Imagine a Farmer Jones, she said. He’s getting old and decides not to farm anymore. So he starts selling off his land, piecemeal, to developers. After all, his land is his version of a pension or a 401(k) – his retirement fund. He’s perfectly free to make these decisions, of course. We all make decisions like that.

But as his land is developed over time into several subdivisions, those decisions have significant impacts on the taxpayers of his county. That’s because government services to suburban subdivisions typically cost more than the government recoups in taxes. (Numerous studies bear this out, although obviously it isn’t universally true. Very expensive or very dense mixed-use subdivisions would show different results.) The subdivisions also cost more than the services typically provided to farmland. So Farmer Jones’ private and understandable decisions about retirement eventually add significant costs to his county government – and his county’s taxpayers.

A smart county trying to make smart decisions about its growth would recognize that it needs to help the Farmer Joneses AND make growth decisions with more forethought than simply reacting to the ad hoc results of disconnected private decisions. That the challenge that many metro regions face.

‘Spoofer’ hits homer with flea market pitch

“The Spoofer” maybe meant it tongue-in-cheek, but it’s a great idea:

One of the comments on the “Recreating Rome” posting, (scroll down to after 11 PM July 6) about how to enliven the Fourth Street-Graham Street-West Trade Street vicinity uptown, came from someone calling herself/himself “The Spoofer,” who said:

“The solution is rather simple: Get city council to declare that area a 24/7 flea market and yard sale mecca. Citizens should be told that the space around those streets would be available for free on a first-come, first-served basis. Residents would be allowed to bring their own card tables any time they wish, and sell all that junk that Charlotteans spend most Saturdays driving from neighborhood to neighborhood to buy. Voila! Instant retail in center city without spending millions of taxpayer monies to alter infrastructure or to subsidize businesses.
It could turn into another Anderson Jockey Lot, only bigger. And talk about activity! There’s nothing more active than a gigantic city yard sale district. Tourists would flock there for bargains.

“Those pocketing cash at the end of the day from their efforts would no doubt spend part of it on uptown attractions or dining, further boosting center cityism. The only drawback would be the futility of trying to impose a system of sales or use tax on the vendors so that government could grow bigger from the proceeds. Gee, maybe that’s not a drawback after all.”

I think it’s a fabulous idea. Michael Smith (CEO of Charlotte Center City Partners) , I hope you’re reading. It’s akin to architect Murray Whisnant’s idea a few years back (in the pre-EpiCentre era) to take the old civic center building, knock out its side walls and turn it into “the agora” – a farmers and flea market for anyone who wanted to sell there.

Seriously, small-scale retail begets larger-scale retail. And I’d love it if I didn’t have to drive all the way up to the Metrolina Expo for a good flea-market experience.

Kudos to The Spoofer. (But your idea to flood uptown – see comment at 8:36 PM – for a lake is somewhat less workable, dontcha think?)

Less highway, less congestion – no, really

Uptown thinking, Part 2:

Some counterintuitive thinking comes in this blog item (link) about three cities (Seoul, South Korea; San Francisco; Portland, Ore.) that tore down four mid-century freeways and found congestion didn’t get worse.

I’ve heard one highly placed uptown executive muse privately about the prospect of tearing down the Interstate 277 loop that encircles (and isolates) uptown Charlotte and replacing it with a boulevard. I think it’s a great – albeit very expensive – idea. (And of course you’d recycle the concrete.) Maybe it’s a public-private partnership kind of proposition, as it would create more on-the-tax-rolls land for development. Witness the city/state deal reconfiguring the Brevard Street/I-277 interchange into a smaller ROW footprint and selling the land to private owners. A smaller I-277 footprint puts land back on the tax rolls. Just as important it removes those vastly overbuilt, Robert-Moses-woulda-loved-’em interchanges, designed for the middle of farmland, from the heart of the city’s most pricey real estate.

If you agree, please make sure the idea emerges during the upcoming Center City 2020 Plan process. After all, it was a remark at a Center City 2010 public workshop by the late Dave Ritch – picked up and championed by then-City Council member Lynn Wheeler among others – that led to the uncapping of Little Sugar Creek and the greenway along Kings Drive. Ideas with champions really do make a difference sometimes.

Uptown thinking, Part 1 is yesterday’s item (link) about Rome, the Pantheon, and Charlotte.

Recreating Rome in uptown Charlotte

This month’s Civic By Design discussion will be an exercise in imagining how to enliven a dead zone. Last summer, the zone was the intersection of Kings Drive and Morehead Street. This month is the “seas of asphalt of our Center City around West Trade Street, Fourth Street, and Graham Street.” Click here for a Google maps/street view – and you’ll see why it’s an appropriate spot to re-imagine.

I want to throw this topic open for discussion early, because I want to throw out an idea into the mix of ideas people inevitably will have. Last summer, as groups of people sat around tables with big maps of the Kings-Morehead area and little photos of buildings that we were supposed to arrange, it became obvious this was an exercise less of imagination than of fantasy. Further, it was a demonstration of how what people say they want sometimes is exactly what they shouldn’t want.
Everyone always suggests that what is needed is a park and open space. Well, OK. But parks and open space aren’t what make the Pantheon piazza so wonderful. If you think they will enliven uptown Charlotte here in 2009, you aren’t paying attention to what’s really on the ground in uptown.
What makes the Pantheon section of Rome wonderful are, of course, the magnificent Pantheon itself, and the art in the churches nearby, but more than that, it’s the buildings and activities that surround the piazza and its fountain (with drinkable water – that might be a start!). A big stone piazza holding a fountain but with nothing around it would be about as lively as a parking lot with a fountain in the center.
Uptown Charlotte is dying from too much open space – in the form of parking lots and large corporate plazas and small corporate plazas and fountains out the wazoo. What do we need? Stores. On the street. Good old-fashioned window-shopping-inducing retail. And many of the retail spaces in most of the uptown buildings built since 1960 – what’s the technical term? – suck.
Retail likes to be around other retail. (Note shopping malls. Note downtown Asheville, and Boston’s Newbury Street and Madison Avenue and Strøget in Copenhagen.) Uptown is full of large projects (courthouses, government center, Federal Reserve, arena, stadium, convention center, transportation center, performing arts center, multiple churches, and office towers all in a relatively small area). Because they are large and typically dead along the sidewalks, they kill their area for retail. The retail space that remains is fragmented, and the bulk of it is invisible from the street.
It will be hard to spark retail synergy. So that’s the major challenge for uptown Charlotte, and for enlivening any area, including the incredible dead zone we’ll be looking at next Tuesday night.
While the Pantheon is probably my favorite building in all the world, I don’t think we ought to put one uptown. At least, not in today’s uptown. What we ought to import, instead, is the Caffe Tazza d’Oro, the Giolitti and Della Palma gelaterias, the caffe Sant’Eustachio, the arts supply shops, antique furniture shops, grocery stores, shoe stores, purse stores, jewelry stores and fashion boutiques that make up the Pantheon neighborhood.

Have your say:
Civic by Design: 5:30-6:30 p.m. Tuesday July 14, at the Levine Museum of the New South. If you RSVP by Friday to brenda@dpz.com you can have gelato – alas, not from Rome.

A farmer considers freedom

I wasn’t planning to write anything today – holiday and all, plus I wrote a column earlier on Beazer Homes – but my farmer friend Maria Fisher of Fisher Farms (the BEST tomatoes at the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market) wrote a sparkling and moving essay about freedom and honor and stewardship of the land that is worth sharing. Happy Independence Day to all:

On the forth the blackberries are ripe, the tomatoes start to come in and for a day we go to the local fair and spend more money than I want to on short rides and sickening food.

September 12th, 2001 I went to the local t-shirt place and begged them for a flag – they were sold out and did not want to give me the one they had promised to someone else. I cried. I had lost a client in the Pentagon and was so sad that I had not taken time before to honor our country and that I had never said a proper thank you to a servicemen. They sold me the flag.

When I was teaching I had it hanging in my classroom. It is a HUGE flag. I have no place to hang it on my house – I have a little house. I will probably give it to my neighbor – she has a pole to hang it on. I will like to look at it while I am harvesting tomatoes.

We are funny about our country – no one is going to tell us what to do – we have to figure it out, figure it out, figure it out again. We have the right to PURSUE happiness – obviously, it is trite to remind anyone that we are not ENTITLED to it. We have an amazing government that most of us completely neglect at the local level and when things get out of hand – we still have the right to try to correct it and figure it out once again.

I heard the son of a farmer from another country tell me in person about their large production and how after 20 years of large production, crops went down. There was no cure and now today – there are not even birds and the land is used up. He was in his fifties when he told me this. Silent springs for the last 15 years. We as farmers, as caretakers of the land, working as much as anyone else, trying to “make it” – still need to be mindful that for all the freedom we are granted to pursue our happiness, that we are not entitled to it and that the land requires good care regardless and foremost before all else. If we as a nation continue to devalue each other and are left devaluing others – care of the land will most likely fall to the wayside and we will create silent springs. Bottom line.

Pursue wisely. Value now. Remember to THINK. OK – no more soap box – go find some fair and try not to eat too much. Happy Independence Day.

West Va. an environmental leader?

At least, that’s what I’m hearing. The state of West Virginia has adopted a set of Smart Growth-oriented storm water rules. Here’s a link.

Lynn Richards of the EPA’s Office of Policy, Economics, and Innovation Smart Growth Program said in an e-mail that was forwarded to me, “This is really big news!”

Those readers with more expertise than I in such matters, please weigh in on what you see – good rules? unenforceable rules?

It appears part of a kind of underground movement to try to bring 21st-century and urban-oriented thinking to the unavoidable subject of storm water runoff and by extension, civil engineering.

Detention ponds and the BMPs (Best Management Practices) of the 20th century are generally anti-urban in their design. How do you marry good urban design with strong measures to prevent the water pollution caused by rain water than drains off pavement and fertilizer-laden lawns? Tom Low and his DPZ and other New Urbanist-oriented colleagues are making headway with their “Light Imprint” initiative.

Sane planning? Not for transportation

BRIDGEWATER, N.H. – Gather a bunch of people interested in urban regions – as opposed to just cities – and it’s only a matter of minutes before the acronym MPO comes up, and the grumbling starts.

MPO means Metropolitan Planning Organization, and it’s a federally mandated way to plan “transportation” “regionally.”

Those quote marks are intentional.

To too many MPOs, “transportation” means only roads, and of the highway genre, not of the city street genre and certainly not transit or pedestrian or bicycle paths.
And for an alarming number of MPOs, including in the Charlotte region, the “regional” part is a farce. The metro area most people recognize as the Charlotte metro region is home to four separate MPOs, or five, depending on how you count. So transportation planning here is completely fragmented – and Charlotte gets shorted when dollars are divvied.

Further, the Mecklenburg-Union MPO, affectionately known as MUMPO, rates about a 3 on a scale of 10, if 10 is to be completely multimodal in focus, and 1 is all-roads-all-the-time.

At a conference among members of the Citistates Group’s associates – an association of writers, thinkers, practitioners and government officials who share an interest in metro regions – I heard several MPO horror stories. Consider: In San Jose’s region, the largest city in the region (San Jose) in effect has no voting representative on its MPO.

But here’s what Tom Downs (former New Jersey transportation commissioner, former CEO of Amtrak, among other things) suggested: Too many MPOs are in violation of Title 23 of the U.S. Code (here’s a Wikipedia link), particularly the part that says the MPO should cover the whole metro area:

“Each metropolitan planning area —
(A) shall encompass at least the existing urbanized area and the contiguous area expected to become urbanized within a 20-year forecast period for the transportation plan; and may encompass the entire metropolitan statistical area or consolidated metropolitan statistical area, as defined by the Bureau of the Census.”

Ahem. Mecklenburg and Union counties are most decidedly not “the contiguous area expected to become urbanized within a 20-year forecast period for the transportation plan. ” Can you say, “Cabarrus County” or “Mooresville” or “Belmont-Gastonia-Mount Holly” or “Rock Hill-Fort Mill”?

What is to be done? Downs noted that the law has a process for decertifying an MPO that isn’t following the code. That’s a big hammer to use.

The multiple MPOs and RPOs (R as in rural) in this region – MUMPO plus Gastonia, Cabarrus-Rowan, Greater Hickory and Rock Hill-Fort Mill, S.C., MPOs and the Lake Norman and Rocky River RPOs – have not tried to consolidate, although any rational person can see that’s what should happen. Is it time for the hammer?

Don’t cry, I’ll be back

Just an alert for whatever faithful readers are out there: I’m working on several other in-house duties this week and next and won’t be posting to Naked City as often as usual. You may now begin your lamentations or celebrations accordingly.

Look for more regular Naked City blogging starting the first week in July.

Stumpf to Chamber: Banks ‘don’t build buildings’

This will be news to retired BofA CEO Hugh McColl, and his multiple lieutenants:

Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf (left, in file photo), speaking to the Charlotte Chamber’s kickoff breakfast for its inter-city visit described the role of banks. “We don’t build buildings,” he said. ” … We listen to dreams.” (His point, to be fair, is that banks finance what others do.) But in the QC, of course, we believe that banks do build buildings, and lots of them. Indeed, the breakfast was taking place on the 40th floor of a building that a predecessor of Stumpf’s bank (First Union) built. (Technically, I suppose, Childress Klein built it.)
McColl is to speak today at a Chamber lunch, on “Vision for Center City.” I expect he’ll mention a few buildings that banks have built around here.
Stumpf again, talking about TARP: “It was not a bailout.” Hmmmm.
Interesting tidbit: Stumpf says he grew up on a farm in northern Minnesota, one of 11 children. UPDATE 11:03 a.m.: Our own Observer Minnesotan, cartoonist Kevin Siers, says “Uff da!” His Google research turns up a hometown of Pierz, in Morrison County, in central Minnesota. I told him to the rest of the U.S. anything north of the Twin Cities is Northern Minnesota.
Spotted on Realtor Allen Tate’s lapel: A green sticker with a circle around an I-485 logo, saying “CLOSE THE LOOP.” Who wants to bet I’ll see more of those?
UPDATE: 11:05 AM: Want to see Jim Rogers on the Colbert Report: Here’s a link.
More later. Follow Tweets about the trip @nakedcityblog and at hashtag: #icv09

Chamber: Don’t blame us for Overstreet

Charlotte Chamber president Bob Morgan, on the eve of the Chamber’s annual intercity trip (this year to – ta da! – Charlotte) called to report that an oft-repeated story that uptown’s overstreet walkways emerged from a Chamber inter-visit to Minneapolis is, well, wrong.

Morgan said he, too, had repeated that story. But (because of a question from yours truly seeking other examples of Chamber-trip-inspired developments) he hauled out the entire list of Chamber intercity visits dating to 1956. The only Minneapolis trip was in 1993, two decades after the first overstreet walkway went up.

Photo: Skywalk under construction in 2001 photo

Why “blame” in that headline I wrote? (It’s my word, not the Chamber’s.) I’m among many who criticize the walkways for hurting the possiblities for uptown retail. They make it hard to find the stores, unless you know they’re in there. And they make the street-level experience blander, because you can’t window-shop because the stores are hidden. I’ll be fair, now, and note that in cold, rainy weather they’re very popular. Yes, I use them too, upon occasion, typically the “ice storm” occasion.

I dug into our electronic archives which date to 1985 and found a painful number of references – some written by me, others by esteemed Observer reporters such as Doug Smith, Jeff Elder and M.S. Van Hecke – to this mythological, walkway-inspiring Chamber trip to Minneapolis.

Morgan speculated that the walkways were inspired by Minneapolis, but not on an official Chamber inter-city visit.

He may well be right. Here’s the earliest mention of them I found. (No, I didn’t take time to visit our newsprint clips, fun though such visits can be.) This was written in a 1986 news article by Ted Mellnik who, then as well as now, is noted in our newsroom for his reportorial precision: “The Overstreet Mall was proposed in a 1971 center-city development plan by Vincent Ponte, who said it would create ‘a city within a city.’ Development was spurred in the mid-1970s when a group of Charlotte business and civic leaders visited Minneapolis, which has a walkway system.”

Update: 6:45 p.m.: Got an e-mail from Carl Johnson who offers this info: “Mary, my recollection is the Gibson L. Smith, real estate man and civic leader (on council, I think, and ran for mayor but lost) deserves a lot of credit as a promoter (I say that in the neutral sense) for the overstreet walkways. Carl Johnson”

(I’ll be going on as much of this week’s Chamber “visit” as I can manage away from the job. So blog postings may be sparse. I’ll try to Tweet @marynewsom or @nakedcityblog. The Chamber is asking all Twitter-users to use this hashtag: #icv09.)