Author: marynewsom

Politics vs. planning

I’ve had this bit in my notebook for a week, and finally have time to write about it:

Mayor Pat McCrory was right – but wrong – at last week’s City Council meeting (March 9) when he badgered a planner about why planners removed a street connection from the Arrowood Transit Station Area plan.

He was right to question it and to say city planners should give their best professional planning judgment, not bow to political pressure. (At least, that’s what I think he was trying to point out. And I must note that many elected officials get similarly huffy when planners act oblivious to political reality. But I digress…)

But McCrory shouldn’t have hectored planner Alberto Gonzalez, who was presenting the plan.
In fact, Gonzalez ended up fainting or passing out – apparently because he hadn’t eaten for some time – which made the scene even more dramatic.

The staff had originally proposed a street connection from Sharon Lakes Road to Hill Road. But neighbors in Starmount didn’t like that idea. (See my Feb. 28 column, “Aiming at where the future will be,” about connectivity.)

So, Gonzalez told the council, “We went back and took a closer look.” And they deleted that street connection. Their thinking, he said, was that such connections are made when property is developed or redeveloped, and since the property in question was relatively newly developed, it wasn’t realistic to think it would be redeveloped again any time in the near future.

McCrory wouldn’t let him off the hook. He said, in essence, “Your job is to give us the planning perspective, not make judgments about what will or won’t fly politically.” So, he continued, was your recommendation during the public hearing incorrect? The poor planner was going to have to say, “Yes, we were wrong,” or “Yes, we caved politically.” I can’t remember at what point he blacked out. It might have been right about then.

Warren Cooksey hopped into the discussion to note that the plan should probably have the connections that planners think are needed, because a redevelopment might occur even if it is, today, deemed unlikely, and you’d want that street connection to be in the plan.

The upshot: The City Council adopted the plan with only Cooksey voting against. The mayor doesn’t have a vote on those matters. Here’s a link that will let you look at the Draft Plan and the revisions. The original street connection proposed is on Page 13 of the Draft Plan.

Feeling parched?

A few years back I heard local Democrat-about-town David Erdman give a talk on Charlotte geography, which included this memorable nugget: southern Mecklenburg County is the hottest, driest part of the state. He had rainfall and temperature maps to prove the point.
I’m reminded of that, looking at the map accompanying this USA Today story that the first two months of 2009 are the driest on record in this country. (Figures that the year of horrible news would include a huge drought as well.) Note on the map how the only part of North Carolina in the red, “extreme drought” zone is — surprise! — not southern Mecklenburg. Looks more like Rutherford, Polk and Cleveland counties, where there are, indeed, farmers who need the rain instead of city- and suburban-dwellers who just want lawns.
Which brings me to my two points:
1. First, patronize local farmers because it’s smarter, long-range, to ensure that we have a good food supply in this part of the country and don’t have to depend on veggies trucked in from California and other faraway places. If you want to “save open space” and “preserve farmland” then for pete’s sake, think about preserving farmers as well. Here’s a link to a column I wrote on the topic in November.
2. And second, what’s with watering the lawn all summer? It’s a huge waste of a precious resource. If you have fescue grass — which most people here do — it naturally goes dormant in hot weather and will revive in the fall. Water it every 2 or 3 weeks to keep it from dying. If you see someone with a green lawn in July, you’re looking at someone wasting our water.

Chamber stays home. What should they see?

As I wrote in the Saturday Observer, the Charlotte Chamber isn’t going on an inter-city visit this year, opting to stay home and study what’s here. I gave some suggestions for what they should do and see, such as have a locavore dinner and hear from artists and people with lots of piercings.

But what would you recommend they see? (And for the purposes of this blogposting, let’s all assume those who wish to have already visited whatever topless bars they care to.) If you want to vote on the Chamber’s online poll, here’s a link.

Chatting with Chamber president Bob Morgan, I asked if he, too had observed more people uptown dressing more formally? Just in the past several months, it seems, I’ve seen more guys in suits and ties and fewer in khakis and knit shirts or jeans and sport shirts. Morgan said he’d noticed the same thing. We speculated people afraid of being laid off are dressing up more, and those already laid off are trying to look professional as they look for new work.

Then, he noted something else. In conversations he’s hearing, he said, “It’s no longer about work-life balance. It’s now about ‘work ethic.’ “

Not unexpected, of course. When times get tough, companies want workers who’ll put in long hours, not whine about pay/benefits and not have to deal with those pesky “family” problems such as sick kids or ailing parents.

Where are all the foreclosures?

A USA Today story last week uses data from RealtyTrac to show that more than half of the nation’s foreclosures last year took place in just 35 counties, in about a dozen states. Outside those foreclosure hot spots, the article says, “the foreclosure wave was barely a ripple — at least until it started swamping major banks that had invested heavily in mortgages.” Wachovia, it points out, was hammered by foreclosures in California and Florida. And we all know the rest.

Do gates really keep out crime?

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Director Debra Campbell tells me city planners and the city-county police department will study crime rates in and around gated communities to see if the gates really do reduce crime. (So, will they also be looking at crimes such as tax fraud, insider trading or Ponzi scheming? If you’ve lost your retirement savings, you might consider those white-collar offenses worse than just simple auto break-ins.)

Campbell said at a recent City Council meeting that the city doesn’t currently have a policy about gated developments, although its street connectivity policies would discourage them. Planners generally think gated subdivisions work against such things as a sense of community, social capital and mixed-income neighborhoods, in addition to bollixing up general traffic flow.

It’s a welcome attempt. Gated developments derive much of their popularity from the general belief that they’re safer. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I know we have often vacationed at a gated beach community, in which there are gated developments inside the gated development. So, um, if you need those extra gates, does that mean the first set of gates doesn’t work? Who, exactly, are you trying to keep out? If it’s that journalistic riffraff, well, the gates aren’t working.

Commuter rail: Finally?

A couple of rail-related news bits:

Item No. 1: Why hasn’t much commuter rail been built in the country in recent years? The Bush administration’s Federal Transit Administration had written some requirements for how to calculate such things as projected ridership when submitting requests for federal transit money. It’s complicated, but the upshot was that the rules made it impossible for commuter rail — which goes faster and has fewer stops than in-town light rail — to compete for the limited federal transit dollars.

That’s why the North Corridor transit line that the Charlotte Area Transit System wants to build had that “gap” in its funding plan — it’s the gap where federal funds might have gone, but weren’t available. The Triangle Transit Authority in Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill was stuck for the same reason.

Now comes word the FTA has rescinded those old parameters, CATS chief Keith Parker said late last week. He didn’t know yet what the new parameters would be or whether new money would be available for commuter rail projects. But it’s got to be good news for CATS and the many people who’ve been hoping to see a rail line from uptown Charlotte to Davidson and even beyond, if Iredell County would cough up some money (not to mention good news for the TTA and our fellow North Carolinians in the Triangle.)

Item No. 2: A new Elon University poll finds 77 percent of North Carolinians would like to see commuter rail developed in urban areas, and 69 percent support regional rail systems.

While 51 percent of North Carolinians oppose collecting tolls to fund
statewide transportation projects, 77 percent would like to see commuter
railways developed in urban areas and 69 percent of citizens support regional
rail systems. Sixty-seven percent of respondents support a state-wide bond
referendum to raise money for transportation projects, while 57 percent of
residents support giving local governments the option of using a half-cent sales
tax to finance local projects. Residents oppose a fee based on the number of
miles they drive annually (74%) and increasing the cost of the driver’s license
renewal fee (55%).

Poll: New roads don’t top preference list

Interesting poll out from the National Association of Realtors and the advocacy group, Transportation for America, finds a majority of Americans believe upgrading and repairing existing roads and bridges and expanding transportation options (i.e. transit, bicycling and pedestrian options) should take precedence over building new roads.

A press release from the Realtors’ association says: “When asked about approaches to addressing traffic, 47 percent preferred improving public transportation, 25 percent chose building communities that encourage people not to drive, and 20 percent preferred building new roads. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed believe the federal government is not devoting enough attention to trains and light rail systems, and three out of four favor improving intercity rail and transit.”

You can download a PDF of the full report here.

Frank Gehry at 80

Big-name architect Frank Gehry turned 80 on Saturday, and the L.A. Times ran a profile and assessment of his work, from architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne. (Gehry’s Disney Hall in Los Angeles is at left, courtesy of the L.A. Times.)

The recession has hit his practice hard: Two major projects, Grand Avenue in Los Angeles and Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, have been put on hold, and Gehry has half the staff he did a year ago. Interestingly, the piece points out that the reputation of the once-hailed Gehry is shifting.

” … The virtuosic approach to design that Gehry has embodied since his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, opened to rapturous acclaim in 1997 faces an increasingly pointed critique within his profession.”

And it has this interesting rumination about younger architects’ view of Gehry’ work and that of other celebrity architects:

“They are less interested in the bravura, photogenic icons that Gehry has lately produced – so-called signature buildings by a so-called starchitect – and more compelled by eco-friendly designs or anti-poverty efforts such as those aimed at providing affordable housing in rural areas. Other young architects are looking beyond the star model of architectural practice and toward communal, even anonymous, design initiatives.”

NYC banning traffic on Broadway

(Photos show Herald Square before and after, courtesy of www.nyc.gov)

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced this week he’ll bar auto traffic from several blocks of Broadway. It’s a way to try to reduce congestion in the Times Square and Herald Square areas. While it may sound like a crackpot idea, there’s some counterintuitive evidence that, in other cities where streets were barred to traffic, the overall traffic did, in fact, diminish. Newsweek has a rather in-depth article on the proposal and the underlying thinking.

The New York Times web site has a kind of pro-con debate among urban observers such as architect/planner Alex Garvin and the Cato Institute’s Randal O’Toole.

Conventional wisdom in the U.S. has been that pedestrian malls didn’t work – cities that tried them gave them up. Even our own Rock Hill, which turned its downtown into a covered-roof shopping mall, eventually had to pop the top and revert to a more traditional downtown, complete with sky, clouds, rain and sun.

But, as the Newsweek article points out, New York is unique among U.S. cities, due to its population density, rigid street grid, high proportion of residents without cars and excellent public transit services. It’s certainly an idea worth watching. That said, Charlotte doesn’t have density, a grid or extensive transit, so anything learned from the NYC experiment isn’t likely to be applicable here, regardless.

Perdue: N.C. DOT office stays in Stanly

In one of those Relics From Another Era kind of situations, the N.C. DOT’s regional office in the Charlotte area is not in the city of 670,000 but in the lovely Piedmont city of Albemarle, population 15,000, in bucolic Stanly County.
Charlotte officials aren’t the only ones who think that’s a little nuts. The District 10 office covers Mecklenburg, Stanly, Union, Anson and Cabarrus counties. All, of course, have legitimate DOT needs and issues. But come on.
But WCNC reports, Gov. Bev Perdue isn’t thinking of moving that office to Charlotte. “Right now, I’m just thankful to not be closing offices down,” Perdue said when asked about the Department of Transportation’s office for the Charlotte region.
And why, you may ask, Stanly County? Old-timers say it’s because, in an earlier era, the road department offices were put in counties with state prisons, so they could more easily use prisoners to work on the road gangs.