Author: marynewsom

As it happens, Bill Fulton, to whose article I linked yesterday, was in North Carolina last month at a policy wonk gathering in Greensboro, sponsored by the Institute for Emerging Issues at N.C. State, where the topic was dealing with strains on the state’s infrastructure due to growth.

In a piece he wrote afterward about North Carolina, “Is More Growth Bad For The ‘Good Growth’ State?” Fulton says, “The wonks are gingerly beginning to address the question of whether growth should be managed.”

Fulton also spoke at the conference, as an out-of-state expert, saying North Carolina and other parts of the Southeast have the nation’s most wasteful and costly patterns of development.

In his article, he writes, “As a Californian, I was struck by how similar the situation in North Carolina today is to what we in California experienced during the postwar boom.”

The biggest problem in North Carolina now, he suggests, is the growing divide between urban North Carolina and rural North Carolina.

Fulton is publisher of the California Planning & Development Report, whose web site says it’s the only independent publication in the nation covering planning and development issues in a single state.

Things learned while looking up other things:

You’d think the state legislatures of North and South Carolina had covered just about every state symbol possible. We have the N.C. state mammal (grey squirrel), the N.C. state reptile (Eastern box turtle), the N.C. state vegetable (sweet potato, although you can insert political joke here about various not-very-energetic elected officials). South Carolina has a comparable list, including the S.C. state snack food (boiled peanuts). Want to know more? Click here.

But we lack a state soil. Turns out a number of other states have adopted state soils. Examples: Illinois — Drummer silty clay loam. Massachusetts — Paxton soil series. Kentucky — Crider soil series. Florida — Myakka fine sand.

North Carolina has a variety of regionally distinct soils. I don’t know the scientific names for them, but the flat sandy expanses of Eastern North Carolina are not the same as the thick red clay of the Piedmont. And smack between them lies the Sandhills, which is of course white sandy soil.

But let me propose, if not a state soil, then an official Charlotte soil: Bull tallow.

Ever heard of it? Welcome to my world, or at least, my garden. It’s a thick, yellow-gray clay with, near as I can tell, no plant-supporting properties whatsoever. Red clay soil is heavy, but put some compost and humus in it and it will grow all kinds of wonderful things. Not so bull tallow.

A bit of online research I did seemed to point to bull tallow being a folk name for kaolin, a clay used for pottery and ceramics. Hmmm. But here’s why I nominate bull tallow: You really shouldn’t build on it, because it expands and contracts dramatically when wet or dry, making the land unstable. So, um, why again have so many houses around Charlotte, and in Union County as well, been built on it? (I’ve even heard it called the Foxcroft bull tallow.) Guess some developers just wanted to make a little money, and the specter of perpetually cracking home foundations for decades to come wasn’t really their concern.

Which, of course, makes it quintessentially “Charlotte.”

OK, I should have left the office by now, but instead I peeked at my ever-welcome Planetizen.com automatic e-mail of interesting growth-related stories. This one — Why the 2-Hour Commute Is A Public Policy Success” — leaped out as being pertinent to the How Far Will They Drive discussion. It’s from a California Planning and Development report, a blogger named Bill Fulton.

You knew it would happen, and it is.

“Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas,” reports Peter Goodman of the New York Times. See Fuel Prices Shift Math for Life in the Far Suburbs”

I’ve written about this before, but a lot of people buy houses without really calculating the cost of their transportation to and from work, shopping, schools, etc. So that house in the far reaches of an urban area may cost a lot less, but when you have to drive 30 or 40 miles to work, your living expenses can be more expensive than you had figured. And guess what? Bigger houses also cost more to heat and to air-condition.

Goodman reports: “In Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis, homes beyond the urban core have been falling in value faster than those within, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com.”

Some planner-pundit types are now hyping the end of the suburbs, based on reports of this sort. Consider this essay in the Washington Post.

I think that’s extreme. But it seems obvious that many more people are going to be discovering the allure of living closer to the city — or even in the city — because of high fuel prices.

Here’s that link I mentioned to a paper presented at a conference last week at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Here’s a remark from a reader who must have an RSS feed or something on The Naked City, because the comment came only minutes after I posted it late last night.

The real news is that the Charlotte Observer and Charlotte.com are continuing their slide into total irrelevancy. Hope you didn’t come back here expecting your job to be around for a long time. 6/24/2008 12:38:00 AM

Well, now, thanks for reading, but I’m pretty well up to speed on conditions at the Observer. (If it’s so irrelevant why read this?) I’m fully aware the Observer isn’t perfect. And the layoffs have hurt everyone, even those of us who keep our jobs, because of the emotional trauma and damage to the newsroom’s staffing levels.

But is there any other source of news about Charlotte and environs that is substantially better, in terms of breadth, depth and scope?

The financial problems the Observer and other newspapers face are caused essentially by a huge dropoff in classified advertising. Welcome to Craigslist world. If you count daily circulation and online, readership is up for the Observer and many other papers.

I just read an academic paper on the topic of newspapers, that provides some facts that run counter to the prevailing word-of-mouth stuff I’ve been reading. If I can dig up the link, I’ll post it here. Later. Got to unpack and run errands.

Rolled into town at dusk, after two days on the highway from The People’s Republic of Cambridge. Was it a good year? One of the best in my life. I’ll miss a lot about Cambridge and the Boston area — but more about that later.

I’ll be back at work at week’s end, though likely digging through stacks of old mail, and then — way to make someone feel glad about being back at work after 10 months! — I get to go to computer classes next week because the Observer has a new pagination-editing system and I’m expected to understand how to use it. Go figure!

So watch this space, but don’t get too worried if my postings are catch-as-catch-can.

Until then, what have I missed?

I’ve been reading charlotte.com, of course, and talking to friends and work colleagues. I know the light rail has been carrying scads of people and the park and ride lots are jammed. I know about those water mains, and that Mayor Pat’s running for the Governor’s Mansion in Raleigh.

But what’s the REAL NEWS? Help me get up to speed, friends.

Family and friends, if you’d like to read occasional dispatches from Cambridge you may visit my personal blog, Heading North, at marynewsom.livejournal.com. I’ll try to update it every few days or at least weekly.

But if you’re seeking punditry, or opinions on topics in the news, you should look elsewhere until my return next July.

Have a great year in The Naked City!

Some of you already know this, but at the end of this week I’ll have to close down The Naked City for a year, while I take part in a fellowship program for midcareer journalists at Harvard, called a Nieman Fellowship.

It’s a wonderful opportunity for me and my family: I can take any courses I want to at Harvard. But I’m not allowed to do any professional work. (Throw me into that briar patch!) That means no Naked City. Sorry, folks. Maybe you can convince Ed Williams to start a blog or something. (And for you conspiracy theorists, I applied for the fellowship last winter, long before I had ever heard of Lizardking or Edd Hauser … )

My last posting will be tomorrow or Friday. Until then, here’s a cool link my buddy Joe Sovacool showed me. This site rates the “Walk Score” of your neighborhood.

Example: “90-100 = Walkers’ Paradise: Most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car.” Or, “0-25 = Driving Only: Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!” My neighborhood rated a 35.

Warning: The site is slow, and earlier today it was having a spasm. Seems to work better on Firefox than IE. It isn’t up-to-date. Told me I was only half a mile from Providence Hardware — which closed in 2003. And I don’t think it measures threatening dogs or places where poison ivy is growing too close to the sidewalk. Still, it’s fun. Check out your own area’s walk score.

The site’s principles are based in part on those of Dan Burden, a consultant who’s been to Charlotte several times to try to infuse the city DOT with info on pedestrian and bicycling needs.

If you want to keep arguing about transit, please do so, on the comment string from my previous post. This is about other topics.

Booming ‘burbs: What’s the country’s fastest-growing suburb? Not Marvin. Not Fort Mill. See this Forbes magazine story for the answer, and for a list ranking suburbs by growth rate. (Want to skip Forbes’ annoying full-screen ad before reading the article? Click on “Skip this welcome screen” in upper right corner.) The chart, ranking growth from 2000 to 2006, tallies Holly Springs at No. 18, and Wake Forest at No. 20. Both are in Wake County. You might say Holly Springs is a suburb of Fuquay–Varina … Huntersville is No. 46, and Cornelius No. 51.

Back off, bulldozers: Salisbury, which takes more pride in its historic buildings than, say, Charlotte, on Tuesday will consider (but not vote on) an ordinance to require the City Council to issue a permit for any downtown demolition. Here’s the Salisbury Post’s article.

Hummer Houses in Hotlanta: Here’s a link to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s article last month about a proposal to limit the size of large houses on small lots. (A Nexis search didn’t find any follow-up articles.)

On the verge of importance? UNC Charlotte’s Ken Lambla, dean of the College of Architecture, offers a thoughtful look at the role of art and architecture in this month’s Charlotte Viewpoint. He starts, “We all know that Charlotte is on the verge of something big; the question that follows is whether we are on the verge of something important? After 24 years of teaching at UNC Charlotte and being involved in architectural and urban practices, I am convinced that we are just about ready to make a shift in substance.”

Anti-sprawl in Greensboro: Read about an “un-sprawl” development in Greensboro, from terrain.org, “A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments.” Here’s a link. It’s about Southside, one of that city’s first significant mixed-use infill projects, and winner of an American Planning Association award in 2003 for Outstanding Planning: Implementation. The photo shows Southside infill housing (in yellow) and renovated housing.

Driving drives down volunteering: Long commutes have a negative effect on community volunteering, a new study finds. The study says four factors influence the rate at which a community’s residents volunteer: (1) residents’ attachment to the community, (2) commuting times, (3) socioeconomic characteristics such as education levels, and (4) the capacity of a community’s nonprofit groups. The study found that volunteer rates in central cities are lower (24%) than in suburbs and rural areas, which rates (29%). Here’s a link to the study. Charlotte ranked No. 9 nationally for volunteering, below Milwaukee and above Tulsa. Minneapolis-St. Paul ranked No. 1.