Category: big box retail

City weapon against big box blight advances

A Charlotte City Council committee today unanimously approved a proposed new code for nonresidential (i.e. commercial) buildings. This isn’t a building code – those already exist. It’s akin to a housing code, only it applies to buildings that aren’t housing. I’ll add a link soon as the city PR folks send me a pdf version. The draft ordinance isn’t posted online.

It’ll likely be up for final action on Sept. 28.

The issue is important for neighborhoods where retailers have left buildings behind and the buildings sit, empty, for months. (Take a look at the photo above, of the old Albemarle Road Upton’s, built in 1978, photo taken in May.) Sometimes the vacancy occurs because a retail chain goes belly up; other times the company opens a new store, typically on a suburban greenfield site, and leaves the older building. Those vacant and decaying stores have the effect of signalling to other retailers: “Don’t move here, retail doom awaits!” And the aura of decay can send a clear signal to other potential investors, too, of an area in decline.

The new code has been in the works since February 2008, when the council told staff to study and develop one. The council’s Housing and neighborhood Development Committee has reviewed it three times: April, May and July, and a public hearing was Aug. 24.

To their credit, the city planners have begun pushing developers of new big box stores to agree to language in the rezoning agreement that puts some requirements on the retailer if the store goes vacant: keep up the building, help market it to new tenants, don’t put a noncompete clause on the property. But that doesn’t give the city any leverage against abandoned commercial properties built without any such requirements.

The city currently requires vacant nonresidential properties to be secure. The new code would extend to occupied buildings, and would require properties to be sanitary and safe, too. It would require property owners to maintain exterior walls, roofs, windows, etc. Broken windows and doors, holes in roofs and walls, garbage on the site and rodent or insect infestations would be potential violations. Near as I can tell, there’s very little opposition to it from anywhere, so it should pass easily in a few weeks.

(And an aside, to forestall the inevitable suggestions that abandoned big box stores should be turned into public schools: School architects have studied that suggestion and concluded that state building requirements for schools make renovation of old big box stores more expensive than building from scratch. A charter school on North Tryon went into an abandoned K mart, but charter schools don’t have to follow the same building rules as regular public schools. )

Quaint (??!!) Pineville

I came across this article about Pineville, by two planners: Kevin Icard, city planning director, and planner Travis Morgan.

“Pineville is a historic city filled with landmarks, rustic antique shops and bustling downtown district reminiscent of the 1950s,” they write. Well, true that, if you’re talking about downtown Pineville. The town is right to try to protect it. But what they have done — requiring new buildings to have brick facades — won’t protect the cozy turn-of-the-century downtown at all.

Even more significant, compared to the rest of Pineville, its downtown is like a b-b rolling around a six-lane highway. The rest of Pineville is the worst of suburban retail sprawl: strip centers, power centers, a enclosed regional mall, big box stores clear to the horizon — all of it unwalkable, all of it a traffic nightmare at virtually all times of day. Pineville is famed throughout the metro Charlotte region as the worst possible example of unplanned retail development — not that that has stopped other places (Concord Mills in Concord, University City, Albemarle Road, etc.) from trying to steal that designation.

It is famous in local circles, also, for refusing to let Charlotte’s newly opened light rail line into town. The wildly successful transit line now ends at the Pineville city limits.

I will give Pineville kudos for saying no to a Wal-Mart supercenter a few years back, and I will give its planners kudos for trying to save downtown Pineville. But I’m pretty sure that an ordinance requiring every new building to have a brick facade isn’t the way to do it, however.