Author: marynewsom

How Detroit is reinventing itself

Rick Tetzeli of Time Inc. runs the company’s multi-platform, multi-publication effort to cover the transformation of Detroit. They have bought a house in Detroit and reporters are covering the city’s transformation for Time mag, Fortune, even Sports Illustrated, as well as blogging, et al. He just talked to “The Reinvented City” conference I’m attending in Cambridge, Mass.

Here’s his quick rundown of how Detroit is having to and is reinventing itself:
-The city is shrinking. The population is down from 2 million to 800,000. Within the confines of the city of Detroit you could put the footprint of Manhattan, Boston AND San Francisco.
-The school system is such a disaster that they’re considering “all different kinds of things.” Example: public boarding schools.
-They’re considering light rail between the city and the suburbs, to help connect both geographically and socially.
-Urban farming is, er, taking root.
– “A huge psychic change – nobody expects the car industry to save them anymore.”

Housing: Will we escape a second dip?

Blogging from “The Reinvented City,” in Cambridge, Mass., a conference sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Wellesley economist Chip Case, who studies housing bubbles (and who founded the Case-Shiller real estate report) says this downtown is odd because typically a housing oversupply means production slows, and the supply gets soaked up as new households form. But new household formation is lagging – it’s going away almost as fast as production is going away. Rental vacancies are up to 11%. This is odd. If people are getting kicked out of their houses (foreclosures, etc.) you’d think they’d be turning to rental housing. But they aren’t. (I’ll get to the why in a minute but it partly involves immigration.)

So the lack of household formation is disrupting the traditional pattern of how a downturn turns around. His verdict: “Jobs have to start coming back.”

There are positive omens: New housing starts are up. The existing inventory is down – a year ago the estimate was the housing inventory was an 11.5-month supply and now it’s 6.7 months. Sales of existing housing (which he thinks is a better gauge) are up to 5.35 million, up from 4 million of recent years/months. But 27 percent of those sales are auction sales (i.e. foreclosed houses).

His conclusion: There’s a greater than 50 percent chance we’ll get out of this recession without a second dip (the so-called W-shaped recession, as in the 1980s). But not as high as an 80 percent chance.

And immigration? I asked what was the cause for the lack of household formation. His reply: He thought it was people doubling up, as in college graduates without jobs moving back in with parents, families moving in together, etc. That’s some of it, he says, but a demographer he talked with recently told him that immigration is turning around.

And that doesn’t mean that there’s just less of an increase. People are going home, he said. “And that’s bad for us – despite what the talk show guys say.” The reason is that the shrinking number of households is keeping the recovery from, well, recovering.

The anti-government Smart Growther

Blogging from “The Reinvented City,” in Cambridge, Mass., a conference sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

9:45 a.m. – Andres Duany, founder of Duany Plate-Zyberk and one of the founders of the New Urbanism movement, is proving that Smart Growth and “New Urbanist” are not synonymous with “bog-government liberal.” He’s talking about rebuilding New Orleans:
“The government has made affordable housing impossible, so that only government can deliver it.”
In America, he says, “We did three centuries of housing immigrants without a nickel. Then government busted in.” His point is that building standards, adopted with the best of motives, make it impossible to build the rudimentary housing that can serve as places for people without much money to live in.

And more on the problems in the U.S. planning process:
“We dumbed it down too much.” And we make decisions at the wrong level. Decisions that should have been made at the block level are made citywide – example: Chickens. “Chickens are so in.” Cities outlaw chickens citywide. That’s a decision that should depend on the different situations in different parts of town. But bike paths will be defeated if you make the decisions at the neighborhood level – people will always protest bike paths and greenways, Duany notes. That’s a decision that should be made at the regional level, because those amenities are important to the overall community.

Reinventing the City – Numbing the NIMBYs?

Here at “The Reinvented City” conference in Cambridge, Mass. First up, the always provocative Andres Duany, “a rock star of New Urbanism,” in the words of Anthony Flint of the sponsoring think tank, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. (Other sponsors: Nieman Foundation, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design).

9:15 a.m. – Duany – “For me the century started in 2007-2008. The pivotal events all occurred about 2008.” They were the bursting of real estate bubble, the public recognition of global warming, and the erasure of public confidence in government.

And he’s got a great riff going about the problem of the public process in planning. “There’s something radically wrong with the public process” in planning. “We dumbed it down too much.” And he says, the immediate neighbors are a special interest. Currently the immediate neighbors carry extra weight. But, he notes, “they are not the community as a whole.” They will block things that are in the larger interest – bike paths, schools, power lines for new alternative energy projects, etc.

“Large shopping malls are perfectly located to be future town centers. “

And for those who think New Urbanists and Smart Growth advocates are always pro-government. New Urbanist guru Duany is ow trashing government standards. His firm was trying to design a flood-proof house, which could be flooded and not be damaged. “And then we ran into government.”

Re New Orleans: It’s a Caribbean culture. “The Caribbean culture is not about the accumulation of wealth. It’s about the accumulation of leisure.” You can’t have leisure if you’re in debt. People lived in houses granddaddy owned, so there wasn’t much debt. “All the do-goody people are actually destroying the culture of New Orleans by eliminating leisure. And by raising the housing standards.”

Deluged with democracy

Sorry I’ve been absent these recent weeks. Took a week of vacation, earlier, and a day last week, and the rest of the time I’ve been bailing like crazy to keep the boat afloat. Here’s the situation: Too many candidates, too little time! We on the editorial board try to offer endorsements, and that involves researching the people running and trying to interview as many as we can.

This year, what with Tea Party candidates and anti-health care reform candidates and Democrats running against other Democrats, including some pro-health care reform candidates, we’ve got something like 68 candidates to deal with. Democracy is a grand thing, but you can have too much of a good thing.

So while I’ve been squirreling away interesting blog items I haven’t had the time to post them. Next week should be better, and I might even have time to dish a little about candidates. So don’t give up on The Naked City.

Friday and Saturday of this week I’ll be at a conference on “The Reinvented City,” in Cambridge, Mass., sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. My plan is to blog from there, although last year my Mac seized up with something called a kernel panic (don’t ask) and I was thwarted. Let us hope for better computer vibes this time.

Sneak a peek at uptown plans

Here are some ideas to chew on:
– An “applied innovation corridor” stretching up North Tryon Street from uptown to UNC Charlotte, along the to-be-built light rail line.
– A “culinary corridor” from Johnson & Wales University to Central Piedmont Community College’s new culinary building.
– Create a consortium of the higher education institutions in and near uptown, so they can pool their resources with shared facilities. CPCC, Johnson & Wales, Johnson C. Smith University, Queens University of Charlotte, even UNCC with its new uptown presence could all be players. (Sorry, Davidson College, you’re just too far away.)
– With the growing numbers of college students, why not build a shared student union uptown?

That last idea came from a focus group for high school and college students.
The others came from Daniel Iacofano, one of the consultants for the ongoing Charlotte center city planning (public workshop tonight at 5:30 at the Convention Center.) I caught up with Iacofano this morning to hear where he and the consultants are headed in their thinking on the Charlotte Center City 2020 Plan.

He talked a lot about the economic underpinnings, and he offered some of the many ideas the California-based consulting group MIG (the I is for Iacofano) are tossing around. He’ll talk about some of them tonight at the public workshop.

Cheryl Myers, the Charlotte Center City Partners senior veep of planning and development, said the consultants had gotten 80 ideas from Center City 2020 Plan working groups alone. (Disclosure: Observer publisher Ann Caulkins is a co-chair of the steering committee for the 2020 Plan. She doesn’t know that I’m writing this, or what I’m writing. And I have been supportive of having uptown plans since I’ve been writing opinions for the Observer.)

Iacofano said the I-277 loop is “kind of a noose” around uptown.
I asked, “How do you tame the loop?”
Iacofano: “There’s a menu of interventions.” They could range from capping it – there are places where that could work – to simply enhancing the connectivity under and over it with better lighting, artwork, and so on. Other possibilities would be to put development closer to the highway, or to put things under the freeway overpasses.

Tonight, expect a lot of attention to the issue of creating “seams” rather than “dividers” between uptown and the neighborhoods that surround it.

N.C. adds Charlotte-Raleigh trains

Starting June 5 two more passenger trains will run between Charlotte and Raleigh, the N.C. Department of Transportation announced today. One will leave Charlotte at 12:30 p.m., arriving in Raleigh at 3:43 p.m. The other will leave Raleigh at 11:50 a.m., arriving in Charlotte at 3:02 p.m.

That will make a total of six trains between the two cities. The Carolinian, which leaves Charlotte at 7:30 a.m., continues past Raleigh to Selma, Wilson, Rocky Mount, Richmond, Washington and New York. The Piedmont, which leaves Raleigh at 6:50 a.m., arrives in Charlotte at 10:02 a.m., then heads back to Raleigh, leaving Charlotte at 5:15 p.m., arriving 8:28 p.m.

I spoke today with Patrick Simmons, director of the N.C. DOT’s Rail Division, who mentioned that, among other things, they’ve been interested to see that students living in Raleigh are now commuting to college in the Triad on the daily trains. (The Greensboro stop is very near N.C. A&T State.) I also asked when we’d see a passenger train from Charlotte to the beach and the answer, in a nutshell and delivered much more diplomatically, was not in my lifetime.

No, it isn’t high-speed. But I figure anything that can get some traffic off of I-85 and N.C. 49 is a good thing. See bytrain.org for schedules and train information and information on buying tickets.

Parking, planning and bypasses

Today’s post is a grab bag of interesting items for your perusal.

1. Envisioning development, and making planning more accessible to citizens. The Town of Cary has created a Virtual Interactive Planner. Here’s what Dan Matthys, communications and information planner with the town, had to say about why they did it:
Our development process is actually pretty complex, and it involves processes that have a lot of “it depends” and “maybes,” and it wasn’t clear to our citizens when they had a chance to speak and when they didn’t have a chance, how long the process was or what the different steps are to that process. So the mayor asked us to develop something that would be more intuitive, and we decided we needed something fancier than some sort of PowerPoint decision-making tool.
Read more about it, on this planetizen.com story, “Making Planning More Accessible.”
(Hat tip to Planetizen.com for that one.)

2. Parking space census. The City of San Francisco is probably the first in the country to have actually counted ALL its parking spaces. Here’s a Streetsblog.org piece on the effort. The magic number, it appears, is 442,541 spaces, 280,000 of which are on-street spaces. Its part of a federally funded parking management experiment (“SF’s parking experiment to test Shoup’s traffic theories”) in which the city will experiment with dynamic parking demand management, intended to tell people where the parking spaces are at any given moment so they don’t circle and circle, searching. The experiment is funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant.
Parking is a conundrum for most cities. “How we love/hate our parking lots” was my recent op-ed on the topic.

3. USA Today tells us “More cities ban digital billboards.” Among U.S. cities that have banned the billboards: Durham; Knoxville, Tenn.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Dallas and Fort Worth and Houston, all in Texas.

And Charlotte? It had the chance to ban them several years ago and after a lengthy stakeholder process (see my stakeholder thoughts “Pulling back the stakeholder curtain” here) opted to allow them.

4. The South Tryon Street road diet experiment has begun (“Another road diet, this one for South Tryon”). I know this because it is right in front of The Observer building, and because I have walked to work twice since blogging about it and I can verify that the bollards are up, AND that Hill Street between South Tryon and Church Street is now two-way.

5. Your highway dollars at work. Ground was broken today on the Sanford bypass. Here’s a photo of pols with gold shovels. Sanford is a town of about 27,000 people. The fact that our tax dollars are building it a bypass should raise many, many questions in your mind. The Good Roads State has become the State of Pointless Bypasses.

My theory: No city gets more than one bypass. (Monroe, Shelby et al have failed to control their land use development and have both clogged their bypasses – both of them U.S. 74, as it happens – and in so doing managed to all but gut their downtowns. They aren’t the only towns that have done this, they’re just two I’m familiar with. And both want new, bypass-bypasses.)

High water bills? Whose fault really?

Who’s really overseeing Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities?

Obviously, City Manager Curt Walton is the top boss. And the Charlotte City Council is Walton’s boss.

But if you’ve followed city government very long you’ve noticed the elected officials tend to let CMUD (technically it’s CMU) have its own way. That’s because CMU is an “enterprise fund” – like the airport – and runs off its own revenues. Because council members don’t have to raise taxes for CMU, they haven’t given it much scrutiny. (Yes, I know that fees come out of people’s pockets, too. But trust me, fee increases don’t raise nearly the political wars that tax increases do.)

So who scrutinizes CMU? I took at look at the CMUD Advisory Committee? That’s a seven-member committee (3 members appointed by the city, 3 by the county, 1 by the mayor). They are to “review and make recommendations to City Council” concerning: all water/sewer capital improvement programs, changes in policies for extending water/sewer service as well as proposed changes in how fees are determined, and pretty much anything else.

Why is this important? Many cities have used utilities as a way to strategically manage growth. It’s less expensive, in the long run, not to have to build and maintain water/sewer lines over every square foot of land. But Charlotte’s powerful developers have never wanted any land set aside from development. Shrinking the supply of land would raise the price of their raw material – undeveloped land. What better way to ensure that no land got set aside than to control the CMUD Advisory Committee?

Another reason it’s important: It’s in the best interests of this whole urban region to encourage more water conservation. What sucks up a disproportionate amount of unnecessary water use?Expansive suburban lawns. But suburban subdivision developers have little interest in not offering suburban lawns.

So who’s on this board? It’s required to have a real estate developer, a water and/or sewer contractor, a civil engineer, a financial expert, a representative from the non-Charlotte towns in the county, and a neighborhood leader.

I took a look at the board. It’s revealing.

The chairman is James Merrifield, a developer with Merrifield Partners, formerly with Crosland. Last year he replaced former chairman Charles Teal, an owner of Saussy Burbank, a developer.

The two engineers are Robert Linkner with HDR and Erica Van Tassel with Kimley-Horn. The contractor is Marco Varela of CITI-LLC, a systems design company. Varela was mentioned in an Observer article in several years back (before his 2008 appointment) as selling wastewater treatment equipment to the city.

So far it’s rather predictable. You’d want some civil engineering expertise, for sure, as well as developer expertise. Yet it’s worth noting that engineering firms are generally hired by developers so they’d have little business reason to tick off potential clients by, say, pushing for using your utility department as part of a growth strategy that might involve setting some areas aside from development. Even if that would probably have been a lot more fiscally sound than stretching water-sewer pipes all over Mecklenburg County and asking all the rate-payers to fund those capital and operating costs.

But what about the people who are presumably supposed to add the non-developer points of view – the neighborhood leader, the towns representative?

The “neighborhood leader” turns out to be a Charlotte Chamber executive, Keva Walton. I suppose he lives in a neighborhood, but you wouldn’t exactly expect him to be a voice in opposition to any business-developer interests.

And that towns representative? It’s David Jarrett, vice president at Rhein Medall Interests, a Charlotte-based developer.

The end.

Atlanta hears Charlotte’s footsteps gaining

Seems Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed a bit worried that Charlotte may be gaining on Hotlanta.

Reed apparently told the Hungry Club (a civic discussion group at the Butler Street YMCA) that Atlanta’s in danger of falling behind Charlotte if the city and the State of Georgia don’t make strides on transportation, education, water and the arts. All this is from the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Jim Galloway and his blog.

Reed also noted that the N.C. Piedmont got some big chunks of federal high-speed rail money, and Atlanta didn’t.

For more fun, read the comments on Galloway’s blog, e.g.: “Not that Atlanta’s a model city, but I’ve been to Charlotte many times and it’s boring as hell. It may be on the rise, but there’s nothing interesting about Charlotte either historically or culturally.”