Author: marynewsom

The Central Avenue challenge

Wonderful discussion about retrofitting suburbia. If you haven’t read the comments, I recommend them.

Retrofitting can be expensive for taxpayers, when a city has to build sidewalks, add storm drains and so on. The city’s changes in recent years — requiring sidewalks, better street designs, etc. — help with new construction only. Even the city’s admirable, if slow-moving, sidewalk-building gets at only part of the problem.

Most of the potential retrofitting happens as part of the natural economic evolution of a city: A business closes, another business buys the building and renovates it, or tears it down and build again. Or a business expands its building.

The city’s passivity is hurting those small-scale opportunities all over town. Here are two examples, both a couple of years old, are the Bank of America branch at Kings Drive and Charlottetowne Avenue (a.k.a. the old Independence Boulevard), and the Bojangles at Third Street and Charlottetowne. Plenty of other examples abound all over the city, especially along the so-called International corridor of Central Avenue, between Eastway Drive and Eastland Mall.

That branch bank and the Bojangles are welcome businesses. I just spent a year in Massachusetts, suffering withdrawal from good fried chicken and biscuits, so believe me, I value Bojangles. The bank replaced one that was demolished for the Little Sugar Creek Greenway and was needed in the neighborhood.

BUT … The two buildings — not the businesses within, but the buildings and lot designs — are awful for the location. They’re suburban in design — one-story buildings with deep setbacks from the street and huge parking lots out front. They’re unsuitable for an in-town location, especially an area where other developers are trying to build more urban patterns. Those two small buildings should have helped with the urban retrofit of Midtown area, yet they didn’t. Why not?

The city’s old-fashioned zoning codes are to blame. Although I often praise the city’s planners for devising a variety of urban codes in the past 10 or 15 years (MUDD, PED, TOD, etc.) those standards apply only to property that holds that zoning. If your property has the older, suburban-style business zoning (B-1 or B-2) you can build suburbia with no trouble from the city. You’re virtually required to, in fact, because of the required setbacks and buffers. You have an economic incentive as well, because going through a rezoning costs money. Keeping your old zoning doesn’t.

Plenty of other examples abound along Central Avenue. Small owners, small buildings, and old zoning codes add up to lost opportunities for small retrofitting steps over time.

If you’re one of the hundreds of people deeply wishing to see a Central Avenue revitalization, you should push the city to change its B-1 zoning standards. I’m getting tired of visionary plans that don’t address this issue. Central Avenue still looks like bedraggled suburbia because the underlying rules that govern building designs haven’t changed under the old zoning that exists along Central Avenue. To change the way things look, change the rules that govern how things look.

(UPDATE as of 7:30 p.m.: Got an e-mail this afternoon that said the city had adopted a PED overlay for Central Avenue. If that’s the case it would do exactly what I’m hoping for — require more urban-style development. But I can’t find it listed on the planning department’s web page. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, but means I can’t, tonight, confirm or deny it.)

And before you go off about how the city shouldn’t set design standards, let me just open your eyes to the reality that B-1 zoning, which requires deep setbacks, is less favorable to property owners than a zoning that would allow them to build closer to the property line and cover more of the land with buildings and less with setbacks and buffers. If you’re required to keep 35 feet of property vacant in front, you can’t build as much income-producing square-footage as if you’re required to keep only 15 feet of property vacant in front. I’m not proposing ADDING a lot of design controls, only altering the ones that already exist.

Any hope for ’60s suburbia?

Excellent question at the end of the previous comment string, from “Tom” from Nashville.

“Suggestion for your next blog topic: Is it possible to “retrofit” a suburb, particularly the middle-ring suburbs that are struggling, to be more connected and urban? Can a ’60s-style neighborhood be made to behave like a ’30s-style neighborhood?”

You won’t be surprised to hear I have thoughts. But this afternoon I have other tasks. So I’ll toss out the question and let others take it on. Maybe Dan Burden of Walkable Communities Inc., can weigh in, or someone from the Congress for the New Urbanism, or some developer/designer who’s done a retrofit project and can talk about how it went.

See you later.

Walkable rating – We’re not last!

Walkscore.com, a cool site I plugged a year ago, looked at 2,508 neighborhoods in 40 cities. Charlotte didn’t do too well. That’s a euphemism. Charlotte was in the basement: No. 38 out of 40. (Cherry, Fourth Ward and Downtown Charlotte were rated our most walkable neighborhoods.)

The site measures walkability with a walkability checklist which assesses stuff such as whether a neighborhood has a discernible center, mixed-use development, sidewalks, traffic that doesn’t go too fast, narrow streets (calmer traffic), parks and public spaces, etc. The software used for measuring is based on Google maps, U.S. Census data, Zillow neighborhood boundaries and Yellow Page information, and it assigns values to locations such as schools, workplaces, supermarkets, parks and public spaces based on how near they are to an address. (Based on some comments I saw elsewhere, the software has some glitches.)

USA Today had a piece on the list, noting the bottom three: Charlotte, Nashville and Jacksonville, and the Huffington Post had a short blurb on the Bottom 10 as well.

Why is Charlotte so un-walkable? It’s hard to find just one villain; there are several. The part of the city built before World War II (as in Cherry, Fourth Ward, and downtown) is much more pedestrian-friendly. After WWII, traffic engineers and planners embraced some theories, based on the ideals of Modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, that have proven to be ill-suited for urban life. The federal government was in thrall to the automakers and began subsidizing auto travel with vast new highways while shrinking subsidies and passing laws that hurt rail transportation.

Single-use zoning was considered modern and progressive — yet another reason not to let yourself be blinded by an idea just because it’s labeled “progressive.” The traffic engineering profession promoted neighborhood layouts that didn’t have connecting streets.

In addition, elected leaders in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County rarely did anything that developers didn’t like, such as require sidewalks to be built or require subdivisions with lots of connecting streets, or require subdivisions to connect to the subdivision next door. Neighborhood activists fought street connections — witness the silly closure of East Kingston in Dilworth. After all, if you live on a street that doesn’t connect you understandably prefer the lack of traffic to what you’d have with through streets. Private comfort for a few trumped street networks that would have benefited the greater community.

The city’s transportation department in recent years has pushed admirably for more pedestrian amenities, and it’s making progress, although the rate is slow. Retrofitting the mistakes of 50 years will take money and time — lots of it.

The candy bar approach to city planning

Thank you, anonymous commenter from 5:20 p.m. Tuesday. I am not against density or height. I am against height in the wrong place. You can make a case that next door to the Arlington is an appropriate spot for density, and I won’t get in your face about it, although I think the proximity to the Dilworth Historic District makes it problematic, for reasons I’ve mentioned before. Overall, I tend to agree with Charleston Mayor Joe Riley, who says that six five-story buildings are better than one 30-story building.

But here’s the crux of my objections to the South End rezoning: The whole point of a small station area plan is to plan what heights and densities are appropriate on which spots. If the planners who wrote the South End Station Area Plan and the City Council who adopted it in 2005 believed that site was appropriate for buildings twice the height of the rest of the area’s height limit, why not have the plan say that? Why limit the appropriate height there, in the plan, to 120 feet? Those kinds of issues are precisely why your tax money pays for planners and why your elected representatives adopt small area plans.

Why even bother with any plan if it’s routinely disregarded?

It reminds me of taking a kid to the grocery store. You say before you go, “I’m not buying you candy in the check-out line.” If you then buy the kid a Snickers in the check-out line, that kid will cry for candy on every visit to the store for the next 20 years. And you will have undermined any credibility your authority might have had.

One last thing, responding to a commenter on the post about the Piedmont Town Center project: I LOVE Filene’s Basement. Offer one of those up and I’ll be out there with my chainsaw. (Joke, people, joke.)

South End tower wins swift OK

Reporting live, from City Council:
(See previous post, also from council meeting, about a first — a developer urging council to reject his own rezoning petition.)

The City Council launched the vote-on-rezonings part of its meeting at roughly 6:25 p.m. By 6:39 p.m. it had finished its rezoning decisions. They ripped through 18 rezonings, all except one of them approved unanimously with no discussion on any, except for about 30 seconds on the one that was approved 7-2 (for a day care center at The Plaza and Barrington Drive).

That proposal to allow a 250-foot high-rise tower in South End? The one that was in violation of the South End Transit Station Area Plan, which set a 120-foot height maximum? I didn’t have a stopwatch, so I couldn’t tell you whether it was 5 seconds or 10, but there was no discussion, nothing. Unanimous approval, and on to the next agenda item.

Sure, the council’s rezoning meetings can drag. The public hearing part of the meeting tends to bring out developers and neighborhood opponents. It’s 7:34 p.m. and they’re just on No. 6 in a 15-item public hearing agenda. And council member Michael Barnes just pointed out that there have been numerous violations of the Northeast District Plan in recent years. So why didn’t he — or anyone else — think it was worth maybe a little public discussion about why they were violating the South End station area plan, adopted in 2005?

Maybe there were good reasons. Maybe the 120-foot maximum height limit adopted as part of the Transit Station Area Principles isn’t a good idea after all. You, the voting public, have no way to know why the council members decided to treat their own adopted plans as virtually irrelevant.

They’re on auto-pilot. The biggest issue facing the city for decades has been growth and how to deal with it and pay for its impacts. You’d like to think your elected officials are thoughtfully debating the pros and cons of different growth proposals. Guess what. I’m watching them tonight, and it’s pretty hard not to conclude they’ve abdicated that responsibility.

Developer wants own project nixed

Reporting live from City Council:

This has got to be a first. Bailey Patrick, the dean of local developers’ lobbyists, just got up and urged the City Council to vote against his own rezoning petition.

It’s a rezoning proposal from Crescent Resources, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, which wanted to change its plans, approved in 2005, for the Piedmont Town Center development near SouthPark. They wanted to change approvals for retail and office space into residential space.

The planning staff opposed it. Neighbors opposed it and signed a protest petition against it which means it would need a super-majority vote from the City Council.

The proposal would have wiped out a stand of immense old trees. During the 2004 rezoning — after some publicity from yours truly — the developer agreed to leave a large wooded buffer, giving the trees a reprieve. I visited those trees — immense white oaks along a small stream. The new development would have cut them all down to form a retention pond along the creek.

The real crime here is that it would have been perfectly legal. If you think the city’s tree ordinance protects trees, may I suggest you probably also believe that the U.S. found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11.

It appears Crescent decided to cut its losses. Council member Andy Dulin, generally a good friend to developers, made a motion to deny the petition even before the public hearing opened. Which would have been illegal. “I gotta have a public hearing,” Mayor Pat McCrory reminded him.

At which point Bailey Patrick got up and urged the council to reject the rezoning. His client, Crescent, would have withdrawn it, he said, but because the protest petition wasn’t withdrawn it couldn’t legally do that.

Surely it was a first. I happened to be sitting next to 23-year Keith MacVean — who has, as the joke goes, gone to the dark side and now works for developers (one of his new clients made that joke so I figure it’s OK) — who couldn’t remember it happening before.

He also confirmed that the rejection by council means the developer can’t come back with another proposal for two years — unless it seeks a more intense zoning, such as UMUD.

At 9:27 p.m., after hearing a negative recommendation from the zoning committee of the planning commission, which met quickly after the regular council meeting, the council did as Patrick asked — they voted down the rezoning.

When property rights hurt markets

This may be like throwing gasoline onto a fire, but here goes. Because I’m busy today writing a column for Saturday’s Observer — which I hope you’ll read at www.charlotte.com/opinion — I’ll toss out some red meat to the libertarians and free-marketeers among you. Check this book review from Slate.com about “Gridlock Economy,” by Michael Heller, an academic who studies property theory. The subtitle: “How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives.”

Heller argues, says reviewer Tim Wu, that creating too many property rights can actually wreck markets. Wu then critiques both the book and Weller’s thesis, but concludes that even though it has some flaws it’s one of those concepts that helps you see the world in a different way. The idea is that too many property owners means there are too many stakeholders and that can impede the functioning of the marketplace. As Wu puts it, “The basic idea that too many stakeholders can kill a project is well-known to anyone who has ever worked on a committee or spent 15 minutes in Washington, D.C.”

Read before you rant. And please recognize that just because I link to an article I find interesting, it doesn’t mean I necessarily agree with everything in it. It usually means I’m working on my full-time job as an editorial writer and oped columnist and don’t have time for lots of blogging. Full disclosure: I haven’t read the book and until today had never heard of Michael A. Heller.

Waning faith in the free market

In the category of things found while looking up other things, here’s an interesting front-page piece in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times, “Americans may be losing faith in free markets.”

The writer, Peter G. Gosselin, quotes several experts, including Kevin Hassett, at the American Enterprise Institute.

William Galston of the Brookings Institution in Washington says, “We’re at a hinge point. The strong presumption in favor of markets, which has dominated public policy since the late 1970s, has been thrown very much into question.”

Even the American Enterprise Institute’s Hassett concurs in the existence of the backlash. “There may be a backlash against markets at the moment,” he says, though he goes on to say he doesn’t see any alternative view of how things should work.

They cite the convergence of issues: a housing meltdown that resulted from an unregulated corner of the mortgage market (high-risk loans), the price of gasoline (generally blamed on the laws of supply and demand and oil market speculation), disappearing U.S. jobs and worries about retirement investing based on the assumption the stock market will always rise.

“We’re [he means Americans] not ready to throw out markets altogether,” says economist Robert E. Litan of the Brookings Institution and the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., “but we want government to do something about the excess.

Optimistic about Charlotte pessimism

(Note: Reworked as of 1:58 p.m. to more clearly reflect Peres’ remarks.)

This has to be a quick post, as I’m buried in other matters today.

I caught up with Mark Peres yesterday. Peres is the founder/editor/publisher of Charlotte Viewpoint, a nonprofit online magazine that aims to offer intellectual discourse about Charlotte, especially center city.

“I’m optimistic about the current pessimism,” Peres said. (Or words to that effect. I wasn’t taking notes.) Um, why? Because, said Peres, maybe the current pessimistic scenarios — including but not limited to Wachovia’s problems, although like most of us he doesn’t wish more harm to befall one of the city’s two Big Banks — might tamp down on speculation and “get us back to more sound management principles.”

Interesting point. But is there really any pessimism around here? Charlotte’s relentless optimism, or some might say boosterism, is as deeply rooted and unquenchable as kudzu.

So feel free to start commenting on optimism/pessimism/boosterism or even kudzu. (I remember reading about one farmer who kept his cattle alive during a horrible drought when he learned they’d eat kudzu.)

Finally, feel free to keep jawing to one another about NoDa, as the comments are fun. But warning: I’m deleting comments that insult others or use words I decide are outside the bounds of polite discourse.

Why razing NoDa really isn’t a good idea

Plenty of you disagreed with my previous analysis of the threat to NoDa from the transit-oriented development. Many people said, in essence, it’s dump, tear it town. I predict you’ll get your wish within the next 10 to 15 years.

Those of you enthralled with all-new development that wipes away anything that was there before seem to think it’s about nostalgia. It isn’t. It’s about entrepreneurs and small businesses, the very basic elements that build a local economy.

New buildings have expensive rents. Old buildings have cheaper rent. Old buildings breed entrepreneurs. It’s not the architecture, it’s the price of the space.

As urbanist writer Jane Jacobs put it, “Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. … If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. … New ideas must use old buildings.”

In addition, companies that lend money to developers to finance new developments typically require that the space be leased to “proven” retailers, in other words, chains. That’s why you don’t see small, local businesses going into new buildings. Starbucks is welcome. Smelly Cat Coffeehouse isn’t.