Author: marynewsom

Want to know what Charlotte is like? Charlotte is the kind of place where city bureaucrats are talking about how to come up with a strategic plan to add “grittiness” to part of uptown. Imagine Beale Street, they say.

Interestingly, in July I visited Beale Street – the downtown Memphis street filled with blues bars, many in ragged old buildings. I’m pretty sure Beale Street didn’t arise because of a strategic plan for “placemaking.” It came about because it was a part of Memphis nobody else wanted, real estate was cheap and being the Northern End of the Mississippi, as Memphis likes to say of itself, some blues musicians happened to be handy.

At 6 p.m. Thursday Sept. 21 in the Government Center, (probably room 267), there’s to be a public meeting to talk about “placemaking” along Brevard Street between the to-be-built NASCAR Hall of Fame and the already built Bobcats Arena.

The idea is that the street could blossom with bars, cafes, restaurants and other attractions.

As the Jetsons’ dog used to say: Rotsa ruck.

For one thing, Brevard is a one-way street and so wide it looks to have the engineered standards of a freeway. More important, it’s hard to do “gritty” in new buildings, and not just for ambience reasons. New buildings are more expensive. So if you’re a bar, leasing space in a new building is more expensive. Thus you have to charge more for your drinks – hard to do in a competitive environment – or go for the high-end, luxury clientele who can afford to pay for pricey food with higher mark ups. In other words, the glamour gang, not the gritty gang.

The part of uptown that’s already “gritty” – sort of – are the bars along College Street, where – duh! – some old buildings were upfitted into bars a decade or more ago.

Another difficulty is that Brevard Street holds several Large Monoculture Buildings: The windowless hindquarters of the convention center. A bland Southern Bell office building. The modernist-suburban-style United Way Building. The side of the Transportation Center (a.k.a. bus depot).

A lot of the street just goes past surface parking lots – where new buildings presumably would go.

A few buildings have promise, though: Part of the United Way complex includes the building once home to the McCrorey YMCA, which served the black neighborhood that was blasted to oblivion by urban renewal. A couple of old buildings on the south side of East Trade Street survived the arena-led destruction. The Grace AME Zion Church building, whose congregation moved to the ’burbs, has been sold to the Historic Landmarks Commission which will protect it, then renovate and resell it. The historic storefronts at Third and Brevard are almost all that remains of the black, Brooklyn neighborhood.

Here’s my contribution to the goal of “grittiness” on Brevard Street: Move the Coffee Cup restaurant – yep, the historic little soul food restaurant that’s to be demolished by Beazer Homes – to one of those Brevard Street parking lots. Now that would add grittiness.

After my Saturday column about the probable demise of the Coffee Cup restaurant (“It’s just an old building sitting on pricey dirt”), I got this semi-rant from reader Ed Stone. I’m posting it with his permission.

What do you think? Is Stone on target? Is Charlotte’s destiny to become a characterless Atlanta wannabe?

(I have to disagree with his smear of vanilla, in the fourth paragraph, as though it is soulless and lacking in character. But that’s a topic for another day.)

It is the mission of our City Council and the Charlotte Center City Partners to turn Charlotte into Atlanta. As rapidly as possible, with minimal, insincere lip service to what is viewed as the commerce-blocking detritus of the past. Once you accept that perspective, you will have far fewer surprises and be better prepared to navigate the changes.

Just as council put a few million bucks into restoring a trolley so as to pretend some little link to history, just hang on and you’ll see them spend a few million to get some of today’s buses running routes and reconstructing a micro-dairy farm near Selwyn. With dollars, we can build some simulated-genuine-fake-old new stuff to look substantial.

Charlotte’s motto, in action, is “to seem, rather than to be.” We’ve torn down what we were, now we are bulldozing what we are. The goal is to be just another installation of a “chain” city, as cookie-cut as the next McDonald’s burger joint.

Cities are following the model of airports, and we’ll not see much difference among them, as our airports and cities are being rebuilt to function as standardized, vanilla, soulless, high-density conduits for passers-through and cash.

The Coffee Cup’s land tax value issue is just an egregious example of what every Mecklenburg homeowner is facing. Time to cash in, and let Chi Chi’s, Sak’s, Wal-Mart, Johnson and Wales, light rail, Bobcats, Panthers, baseball, a “stroll district.” NASCAR, NoDa, “South End” and the “no cul-de sac” ordinance, et al, have it. Tear-downs and high-density condos. Maximize the tax value per square foot. Oppose the “growth agenda” of council and you’re a pro-unemployment Luddite.

Quite a shame, as we are throwing away the single claim to competitive advantage and distinctiveness we could have as a city, in favor of being an Atlanta Jr. lookalike-wanna-be.

The world is not clamoring for another Atlanta, as far as I know.

The e-mail asked me:

“Is there any way you can find out why the city allowed the new Bojangles at 3rd and Independence to be placed in a typical suburban form? Here is a prominent corner between two high-profile projects, Elizabeth Avenue/CPCC and Pappas’ [Pappas Properties] Metropolitan and what do our planners allow? Suburban schlock. The store is pushed as far back from the corner as possible, meanwhile, the new store at Highland Creek will be urban (pulled to the corner with parking in the back). What do you think about this? Can you find out why what happened has happened?”

Full disclosure: I’ve been a Bojangles fan since they were founded in Charlotte in the 1970s. One night fellow copy editor Hank Durkin (who bailed out years ago, for Microsoft) took me to this fast-food joint at South Tryon and West Boulevard, and I’ve loved it ever since. (That original Bo’s, btw, was demolished and is now a parking lot for the newer Bo’s next door.)

But say it ain’t so, Bo. Your new spot at Third and Independence is essentially a huge parking lot, with a building distantly visible far away, behind the asphalt. It’s about as “urban” as the Costco on Tyvola. The rest of the area is shaping up so much more nicely, with the new CPCC buildings, the offices farther down Third with ground-floor retail, and the aforementioned Pappas project at the old Midtown Square. Too bad Bojangles dumped such inappropriate development at the corner.

My correspondent also sent a link to a discussion forum at urbanplanet.org, devoted to the ugly new Bojangles. Someone in there reports that Bojangles wanted to do a more urban design and “planning” wouldn’t let them. That didn’t ring true. I checked with Keith MacVean, land development program manager at the city-county planning staff.

The villain is the old B-2 zoning at the site. It allows suburban schlock – or as MacVean called it “highway commercial.” It does NOT, require it. Bojangles could have pulled the building up to within 20 feet of the Independence right of way, he said. The company didn’t. Because no rezoning was requested, the company didn’t even need to talk to the city planners, who would likely have tried to negotiate a more appropriate design.

There’s an upside, though, MacVean said. “I think they took down a billboard.”

With schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and around the region open, seems like a good time to toss out some information about school traffic and school parking.

Why does morning traffic get so much worse when schools open? It isn’t just the buses. CMS’ 1,200 buses are only a drop in the bucket, traffic-wise, even if they do stop on the streets. For example, the city’s Transportation Department list of 2006 traffic counts shows that on Monday May 15, the average daily traffic, midblock on Fairview Road, west of Barclay Downs Drive, was 38,800.

What makes traffic get so much worse are the thousands of parents driving their kids to school.

I know this is a complicated issue. I’m not saying no parents should drive kids to school. Sometimes bus schedules are just too early/inconvenient/weird. Most of the CMS buses serve several schools – to use buses and drivers cost-efficiently – which means they have to start early. If you want one bus per school, be prepared to cough up more tax money. And yes, teens will whine relentlessly about how they need – need! – a car to drive to school instead of taking the bus which is for geeky freshmen, and so on.

But consider the following factoids I extracted from the folks at CMS who design new schools. When CMS buys land for schools, and has to design them, here’s what they’re required to supply:

High schools: Student parking for 350 cars. Staff parking for 170-200 cars. Visitor parking, 35 cars. The bus lot has to hold 40 buses.

It costs $4,000 to build one automobile (non-bus) parking space, in labor, asphalt, etc. That figure doesn’t include the land costs. So let’s see, figuring space for 200 staff cars, auto parking at a new CMS high school costs $2.34 million to build. That doesn’t include the cost of school bus parking, or land. Student parking alone is $1.4 million.

Let’s talk land. Figure a 9-by-18-foot student parking space, and you get 56,700 square feet for student parking. Figuring roughly $60,000-an-acre land costs (CMS director of architecture Tony Ansaldo cautions that’s a blunt estimate, and that each site is different, etc., etc.), and 43,560 square feet per acre, that’s $46,080 in land cost alone, for a 350-car student parking lot.

Here are stats for middle and elementary schools:

Middle: Staff parking, 138 cars. Visitor parking, 50 cars. Bus lot, 25 buses. Cost of parking (again, not including bus parking or land): $752,000.

Elementary: Staff/visitor parking, 125 cars. Cost of parking (not including bus space or land), $500,000.

Here’s something else driving up school-building costs. Schools have to build plenty of on-site “stacking” – a technical term that means driveway space to allow cars to line up one behind the other, as in car pool lines. The city of Charlotte doesn’t want any of those cars out on city streets, even small neighborhood streets. And in many cases CMS would want the stacking space regardless of CDOT requirements, for safety reasons.

High school stacking: 1,170 lineal feet, typically 12-foot-wide lanes, for 14,040 square feet of “stacking” – a hair shy of a third of an acre, and roughly $20,000 in land costs. (This doesn’t count paving cost.)

Middle schools: 2,003 lineal feet, totalling 24,036 square feet, or .55 of an acre, with estimated land cost of $33,100.

Elementary schools: 1,323 lineal feet, totalling 15,876 square feet, or .36 acre, land cost $21,600.

High schools have less, because more kids drive themselves. And park.

Obviously it’s not a good idea to let schools’ dropoff and pickup traffic clog busy streets, such as thoroughfares. But this IS a city, after all. We have a large and growing city bus system. Plus CMS runs its own public transit system, the school buses. It’s time to look closely at how much we’re spending to let students park and let parents sit in long carpool lines, at schools that are already paying to provide transportation.

Finally, consider this: If it’s a question of building a neighborhood school close enough to a neighborhood so kids can easily walk, and letting some cars back up on a neighborhood street for 15 minutes twice a day, or else building on a site big enough to accommodate more than a third of a mile of driveway on site (2,003 feet is .38 mile — and remember, it takes up to half an acre more land), that’s a no-brainer.

Eastover Elementary was built in 1935 on a tight site smack in the middle of a neighborhood. I hear cars do stack up on Cherokee Road when school opens and lets out. Guess what? Neighborhood drivers may be annoyed now and again, but Eastover doesn’t seem to be hurting from it. It’s one of the city’s most desirable places to live.

Schools and transportation folks need to rethink how much parking and driveway space they’re having to build.

With schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg and around the region open, seems like a good time to toss out some information about school traffic and school parking.

Why does morning traffic get so much worse when schools open? It isn’t just the buses. CMS’ 1,200 buses are only a drop in the bucket, traffic-wise, even if they do stop on the streets. For example, the city’s Transportation Department list of 2006 traffic counts shows that on Monday May 15, the average daily traffic, midblock on Fairview Road, west of Barclay Downs Drive, was 38,800.

What makes traffic get so much worse are the thousands of parents driving their kids to school.

I know this is a complicated issue. I’m not saying no parents should drive kids to school. Sometimes bus schedules are just too early/inconvenient/weird. Most of the CMS buses serve several schools – to use buses and drivers cost-efficiently – which means they have to start early. If you want one bus per school, be prepared to cough up more tax money. And yes, teens will whine relentlessly about how they need – need! – a car to drive to school instead of taking the bus which is for geeky freshmen, and so on.

But consider the following factoids I extracted from the folks at CMS who design new schools. When CMS buys land for schools, and has to design them, here’s what they’re required to supply:

High schools: Student parking for 350 cars. Staff parking for 170-200 cars. Visitor parking, 35 cars. The bus lot has to hold 40 buses.

It costs $4,000 to build one automobile (non-bus) parking space, in labor, asphalt, etc. That figure doesn’t include the land costs. So let’s see, figuring space for 200 staff cars, auto parking at a new CMS high school costs $2.34 million to build. That doesn’t include the cost of school bus parking, or land. Student parking alone is $1.4 million.

Let’s talk land. Figure a 9-by-18-foot student parking space, and you get 56,700 square feet for student parking. Figuring roughly $60,000-an-acre land costs (CMS director of architecture Tony Ansaldo cautions that’s a blunt estimate, and that each site is different, etc., etc.), and 43,560 square feet per acre, that’s $46,080 in land cost alone, for a 350-car student parking lot.

Here are stats for middle and elementary schools:

Middle: Staff parking, 138 cars. Visitor parking, 50 cars. Bus lot, 25 buses. Cost of parking (again, not including bus parking or land): $752,000.

Elementary: Staff/visitor parking, 125 cars. Cost of parking (not including bus space or land), $500,000.

Here’s something else driving up school-building costs. Schools have to build plenty of on-site “stacking” – a technical term that means driveway space to allow cars to line up one behind the other, as in car pool lines. The city of Charlotte doesn’t want any of those cars out on city streets, even small neighborhood streets. And in many cases CMS would want the stacking space regardless of CDOT requirements, for safety reasons.

High school stacking: 1,170 lineal feet, typically 12-foot-wide lanes, for 14,040 square feet of “stacking” – a hair shy of a third of an acre, and roughly $20,000 in land costs. (This doesn’t count paving cost.)

Middle schools: 2,003 lineal feet, totalling 24,036 square feet, or .55 of an acre, with estimated land cost of $33,100.

Elementary schools: 1,323 lineal feet, totalling 15,876 square feet, or .36 acre, land cost $21,600.

High schools have less, because more kids drive themselves. And park.

Obviously it’s not a good idea to let schools’ dropoff and pickup traffic clog busy streets, such as thoroughfares. But this IS a city, after all. We have a large and growing city bus system. Plus CMS runs its own public transit system, the school buses. It’s time to look closely at how much we’re spending to let students park and let parents sit in long carpool lines, at schools that are already paying to provide transportation.

Finally, consider this: If it’s a question of building a neighborhood school close enough to a neighborhood so kids can easily walk, and letting some cars back up on a neighborhood street for 15 minutes twice a day, or else building on a site big enough to accommodate more than a third of a mile of driveway on site (2,003 feet is .38 mile — and remember, it takes up to half an acre more land), that’s a no-brainer.

Eastover Elementary was built in 1935 on a tight site smack in the middle of a neighborhood. I hear cars do stack up on Cherokee Road when school opens and lets out. Guess what? Neighborhood drivers may be annoyed now and again, but Eastover doesn’t seem to be hurting from it. It’s one of the city’s most desirable places to live.

Schools and transportation folks need to rethink how much parking and driveway space they’re having to build.

Amid the back-and-forth about uptown parking (see comments at my previous post) I’m surprised no one pointed out the truth about free parking. It’s not free.

“Anyone who owns an office building knows parking is never free,” is how David Feehan put it. Feehan, president of the International Downtown Association, was the moderator at Monday’s parking workshop, sponsored by Charlotte Center City Partners and the City of Charlotte.

The cost of “free” parking is hidden in what you buy, in your rent, even your paycheck. Think about it. Let’s say I want to build a store. I buy 10 acres in a place where the going rate is $10,000 an acre, paying $100,000 for land. (I’m using easy numbers, not realistic ones.) I put the store building on five acres, and set aside the rest for “free” parking. I’ll be making income from store sales with half my land, but not the other half.

So when I figure out how much to charge, part of what I have to figure in – in addition to my competitors’ prices – is the $50,000 I paid for the land under the parking lot, as well as the cost to pave it and resurface it now and again, and taxes and insurance, etc. etc. Yet that land isn’t producing any income for me.

Of course, other store owners have to do the same thing. So everyone’s absorbing the cost of their parking lots. (Ditto office developers or condo tower developers. What they paid for the land they’re using for parking gets built into the price at which they sell the project, or else the lease rates if they lease it.)

But if I could build my store and not need that parking lot (say, if I could offer my customers beam-me-in-Scottie transportation, for free), I could offer my goods for less. Or pay my workers more. Or both.

Obviously, with most people driving most places, you have to offer parking if you’re a store, office building, apartments and so on. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. Just pointing out it isn’t really “free.” The main reason you pay more uptown is that uptown land costs more, because it’s in high demand. If restaurants offer “free” parking, they just raise the prices for the fettucine alfredo. If governments offer free parking at government buildings, it’s paid for through taxes.

A UCLA professor of urban planning, Donald Shoup, has studied parking and written a book, “The High Cost of Free Parking,” in which he estimates Americans in 2002 paid $127 billion to $374 billion a year in subsidized parking. Here’s a link to an NPR interview with him from 2005.

He thinks too many cities and towns require developers to build excessive parking, and that many stores choose to build too much, trying to accommodate all the shoppers on the Saturday before Christmas, so the lot is half-filled most days of the year.

I think he’s right. But of course, most people would rather not have to see (and openly pay) the cost of their not-so-free parking.

A study group from the International Downtown Association and a national consulting company, Carl Walker Inc., are looking this week at parking in uptown Charlotte. They’re holding stakeholder meetings today and tomorrow, and then Wednesday will present some recommendations.

Turns out some cities have a parking services manager, or a parking management division in their transportation departments. Other cities have private, nonprofits groups that oversee parking management. Charlotte doesn’t.

Here’s some of what they were asking a workshop group this morning about parking uptown. Feel free to offer your own thoughts in the comments section (below):

– Is finding parking uptown a real problem, or a perception problem, or some of both?

– Do people have a hard time finding where the parking lots and parking decks are?

– Does fear of not finding a parking spot keep people from going uptown?

– How much difference does the lack of uniform signage make, or the lack of uniform pricing and ticket validation rules?

– How much of a problem, if any, is the so-called “Cinderella parking” – spots that magically appear or vanish, based on whatever day of the week it is, or whether there’s an event at the Bobcats Arena?

– What’s the going rate for monthly parking? When the moderator, David Feehan, president of the International Downtown Association, asked the crowd that, hardly anyone piped up with numbers. I began to suspect people who own parking lots/decks may not like their rates revealed.

– Do you have any uptown parking secrets you’d like to share?

I’ll share my “secrets.” I figure word will get out anyway so what the heck.

One: Park free for 90 minutes underneath ImaginOn, if you validate your ticket upstairs. Enter off Sixth Street. I’m honest, though. I’ve used it only when I had business at ImaginOn.

Two: Park up to 90 minutes at Seventh Street Station (enter off Sixth or Seventh streets), even during those expensive Event Parking Nights, if you buy something at Reid’s and get your ticket validated. It so happens that Reid’s is one of the few places here selling Blue Bonnet brand ice cream, about which Johnny Apple raved in the New York Times’ food section recently. So …

A study group from the International Downtown Association and a national consulting company, Carl Walker Inc., are looking this week at parking in uptown Charlotte. They’re holding stakeholder meetings today and tomorrow, and then Wednesday will present some recommendations.

Turns out some cities have a parking services manager, or a parking management division in their transportation departments. Other cities have private, nonprofits groups that oversee parking management. Charlotte doesn’t.

Here’s some of what they were asking a workshop group this morning about parking uptown. Feel free to offer your own thoughts in the comments section (below):

– Is finding parking uptown a real problem, or a perception problem, or some of both?

– Do people have a hard time finding where the parking lots and parking decks are?

– Does fear of not finding a parking spot keep people from going uptown?

– How much difference does the lack of uniform signage make, or the lack of uniform pricing and ticket validation rules?

– How much of a problem, if any, is the so-called “Cinderella parking” – spots that magically appear or vanish, based on whatever day of the week it is, or whether there’s an event at the Bobcats Arena?

– What’s the going rate for monthly parking? When the moderator, David Feehan, president of the International Downtown Association, asked the crowd that, hardly anyone piped up with numbers. I began to suspect people who own parking lots/decks may not like their rates revealed.

– Do you have any uptown parking secrets you’d like to share?

I’ll share my “secrets.” I figure word will get out anyway so what the heck.

One: Park free for 90 minutes underneath ImaginOn, if you validate your ticket upstairs. Enter off Sixth Street. I’m honest, though. I’ve used it only when I had business at ImaginOn.

Two: Park up to 90 minutes at Seventh Street Station (enter off Sixth or Seventh streets), even during those expensive Event Parking Nights, if you buy something at Reid’s and get your ticket validated. It so happens that Reid’s is one of the few places here selling Blue Bonnet brand ice cream, about which Johnny Apple raved in the New York Times’ food section recently. So …

Reading last Sunday about Ron and Nancy Bryant’s move to Stanly County got a bunch of us in the newsroom talking about whether Charlotte is “activist-challenged,” as in, not as many citizen activists kicking up a grass roots fuss about things as many other cities seem to have.

I’m among those who think Charlotte has less of that sort of activity than you’d expect for a city this big and this lively. Over the years I’ve opined on my own theories about this. For instance, are we a City of Squelchers? (My column by that name, and a follow-up column, ran in April and May 2003.)

Then, at one of the cultural stakeholder meetings run by the Artspace Project folks, someone – I don’t remember who it was – asked why Charlotte seemed so different from, say, Minneapolis in terms of getting its cultural act together. The Artspace guys, one of whom is a Republican ex-state legislator from North Dakota, made some quips about there not being a lot to do in Minnesota in the winter so they had to offer more diversions.

My theory on this has several components:

First, bankers aren’t as likely to be activists as many other professions.

Second, colleges and universities breed activists. UNCC until recent years was young, small and didn’t attract the kind of students interested in activism. I think that’s changing, though. Queens and JCSU are too small to have a huge, lasting effect on the local civic culture. And Davidson students live in the “Davidson cocoon.”

Third, if you’re trying to make money and climb the social ladder, political or environmental activism is not the way to do it. You might tick off someone you want to do a business deal with. Or his or her spouse. Or their relatives. Instead, you write thank you notes and never criticize anyone in public about anything.

Fourth, Charlotte had plenty of activists a century ago. They were labor organizers, mill workers and streetcar motormen. The activists were scorned by the business establishment, fired from their jobs and in some instances killed.

Business won that battle – Charlotte remains one of the least-unionized places in the country, for better or worse. But the violence and repercussions from those days set a tone here for working people: Don’t raise your head. Don’t draw anyone’s attention. Just keep quiet and do your job. This used to be a very big milltown. The textile mills are gone. But maybe the sense of obeying the mill owner (a.k.a. B of A or Wachovia) lives on?

More people now are open environmentalists than a decade ago, which is good. But I wonder, how much of that is simply that environmentalism today is so mainstream. I mean, isn’t everyone an environmentalist by now?

OK, here’s my list of good guys and bad guys. I’m not as grouchy on Mondays as I’ll be by Friday, so it’s heavier on the good guys than bad guys. And please don’t complain that I’ve left off person X who is a wonderful asset to the community. Of course I have. I can’t remember everyone, or know everyone. Want to disagree? Add your thoughts below.

Some caveats, in addition to the concept of my last post, that people are complex. Sometimes politicians do things I agree with, but I keep wondering if they’re just sticking a finger in the political wind. There are other people who I’d put on the list, but I haven’t met them or don’t know enough about them, or I just didn’t happen to think of them.

Enough throat-clearing. Here are a few elected officials who don’t get a lot of on-camera time, so you may not be as familiar with them as with the same old faces, but are among the “good guys in government from this area: Michael Barnes, Dan Clodfelter, Anthony Foxx, Molly Griffin, Randy Kincaid, Don Lochman, Patrick Mumford, Wilhelmenia Rembert, Jennifer Roberts. (They’re in alphabetical order)

Do I agree with everything they do? Course not. But they’re trying to make the place better and doing it with thought, integrity and – far as I can tell – keeping the greater good in mind, as opposed to self-aggrandizement.

More names, on my local “good guys” list: Phil Dubois, Shirley Fulton, David Furman, Harvey Gantt, Mary Hopper, Francis Haithcock, Michael Marsicano, Bill McCoy, Dale Mullinax, Tony Pressley, Dennis Rash and Betty Chafin Rash.

The bad guys? Bill James. Larry Gauvreau. Each, in my opinion, is more interested in perpetuating racial discord than in solving anything.

There are others I’m not high on, including not a few politicians who I think are just wrong about issues, but who try in their own, misguided ways to do what they think is right. And there are some who I think are right about issues but who are just too annoying to put up with, or clueless about how to be effective. That last category is, sadly, rather large.