Center City Charlotte – The Naked City Blog

My Park(ing) Day blues spark a contrarian proposal

Park(ing) Day in Charlotte in September 2012, next to a food truck round-up event. Photo: Keihly Moore

I missed this year’s Park(ing) Day event in Charlotte because I work on a campus 12 miles from uptown and because Park(ing) Day takes place only on the officially approved sites on Charlotte’s main uptown street. (So much for guerrilla urbanism.)

And to be honest, I didn’t really miss it. But it wasn’t until I read this Next City piece by Josh Cohen,“Stop Building Mediocre Parklets, Start Building Pavement Parks,” that I realized my own dissatisfaction with how Park(ing) Day has evolved in my city. Cohen critiques the way Seattle’s parklet movement has turned into seating areas for nearby businesses. Since I’m not in Seattle, that’s not my issue. My frustration is different, because my city is different.

Don’t misunderstand. PlanCharlotte.org, the online publication I oversee, has been a champion of Charlotte Park(ing) Day events since my then-graduate assistant Keihly Moore organized one in 2012 on Camden Road in South End. The following year – also spearheaded by Keihly, who again rounded up plenty of partners – it was on North Davidson Street in NoDa.

Each of those events took an on-street parking place in a gritty neighborhood and converted it into a small park-for-a-day. Last year and this year the event took place on Tryon Street with a long list of collaborators that included Charlotte Center City Partners, the uptown advocacy and marketing group.

The whole idea behind Park(ing) Day is to transform a parking spot into a small park for a day, to show how places for people matter more than places for cars. It’s a way to make people think about the tyranny of parking in America and how our cities deserve more than huge expanses of asphalt. The message is particularly needed in Sun Belt cities like Charlotte, which are so thoroughly car-focused that the whole city gets a pitiful little Walk Score of 24.

In Charlotte the car rules every street and road and stroad (look it up). Except one: Tryon Street. Tryon Street uptown is the one street where pedestrians rule. Yes, there’s traffic, but it’s slowed by inconveniently timed traffic lights, service trucks, parallel parking and huge clumps of pedestrians. The Walk Score along North Tryon Street is an admirable 95.

Not only that, but Tryon Street is already studded with numerous benches for sitting, plenty of street trees, and a variety of parks (The Green, Polk Park), parklets (at Sixth and North Tryon) and plazas with seating and tables. Does Tryon Street need parklets? What Tryon Street needs is stores and window-shopping (a topic for another day).

The places that need parklets are the innumerable parking lots uptown and the hideous parking decks
that mar most of the uptown streets that are not Tryon. Indeed, uptown Charlotte needs more on-street parking, not less. The Walmart on Independence Boulevard needs parklets. Asian Corner Mall needs parklets. Eastway Crossing Shopping Center needs parklets. All the fading 1990s-vintage shopping centers near UNC Charlotte need parklets.

You get my point. Putting parklets on Tryon Street won’t open people’s eyes to needed improvements. Sure, they’re fun to hang out in. But getting people to hang out in uptown Charlotte is like dynamiting fish: too easy to even be sporting. If this were 1980, parklets on Tryon Street might cause a revolution in local thinking. But by 2015? Even the city DOT is now welcoming private efforts to install parklets in city rights-of-way.

Any anyway, Charlotte is no concrete jungle of hardscape. This city is so full of post-1950s-era single-family subdivisions and cul-de-sacs that we have no lack of grassy areas. If anything we need less grass and more buildings, designed close to each other so you can live, work, shop and play within a small area without driving.

So here is my contrarian suggestion: Instead of a no-longer-very-guerrilla movement that puts parklets on the city’s least car-dominated street, maybe Charlotte needs an unsanctioned, guerrilla urbanism movement to showcase actual urbanism. Buildings that are close together and front on a sidewalk. Storefront shopping. Apartments over offices over stores.

How about some creative acts of well-designed urbanity? How about, in addition to Park(ing) Day, for our spread-out, sprawling Sun Belt city, someone comes up with a Density Day?

Fads and the city

Uptown Charlotte skyline. Photo: John Chesser

An excellent package of articles is running in the Charlotte Observer, examining how much taxpayer money the city spends on its convention center (up to $30 million a year), questioning whether the payoff justifies the expense. Here’s a link to Sunday’s article: “Selling Charlotte: Convention business requires millions from taxpayers.” Look for another piece Tuesday, examining why the city for years hasn’t questioned the assumption that conventions do, indeed, help the city’s overall tourism climate. (Update 8/21/2012: Here’s a link to the Tuesday article in the Observer, which looks at the apparently overblown estimates of local spending by conventioneers: “Visitor spending more fiction than fact.”) And I might note, here, that the tourism industry is not known for high-paying jobs, either. Here’s the link to an Observer article today exploring job-creation and wages: “Far fewer jobs than promised.“

Currently the city and the city’s Charlotte Regional Visitors Authority spend as much as $30 million a year for construction debt, operating losses and convention subsidies for the convention center. The Observer‘s editorial board today says it’s time to “Consider being unconventional,” i.e. to discuss whether to end the “arms race” of convention centers.

The discussion was needed years ago. The nation is overbuilt with convention centers, all chasing too few conventions to fill the available space. Charlotte’s CRVA is mostly funded with the “prepared foods tax,” a special 1 percent sales tax paid every time you eat out or even buy a sandwich or roasted chicken at a grocery store deli. Here are some projects $30 million might pay for if spent differently: a center city park, expanding the greenway trail system, streetcars, reviving the historic Charlotte Trolley rides, restoring the Carolina Theatre or many other tourism-related projects.

The whole question of what, really, works in invigorating a downtown is one more cities should ask. I’ve watched, sometimes with amusement and sometimes with angst, as Charlotte pursued various fad-of-the-moment projects to try to pump life into what was, by the 1980s, a downtown (here, we call it “uptown”) that emptied after office hours.

Yes, those efforts were important and valuable, and it’s to the credit of the city’s so-called “uptown boosters” that they didn’t give up on the vision of having a center city that was a real center of activity.
But … but …

Having that goal plus having deep-pocketed uptown boosters with easy access to elected officials in a place with a certain lack of self-confidence in Charlotte’s inherent charms has made this city an easy mark for the fad-of-the-moment, regardless of whether the resulting projects were in fact, good medicine for what was ailing the city at the time or thoughtfully designed to endure.

A few examples:

1. Cityfair. Where the Hearst Building sits today used to sit – for what seemed like about 20 minutes – a festival marketplace named Cityfair, built in the era of Harborplace and Faneuil Hall. The fact that Charlotte had no harborside or historic market halls did not deter the fad-of-the-moment gang. Cityfair opened in October 1988 and closed by fall 1991; it reopened for a few years then died for good. The city lost $4 million in the end. Cityfair’s flaws were many: Its design was vintage suburban shopping mall, not fit for an urban streetscape. Its food court was popular but, set on the ground floor, it sent little traffic into shops on higher floors. Cityfair arrived just as Belk closed its uptown store, so hoped-for foot traffic from an overstreet hamster tunnel never materialized. Category: “Fail.”

2. The Blumenthal Performing Arts Center. This public-private partnership has added a quality to uptown that was badly needed when the Charlotte Symphony was playing out at Ovens Auditorium on Independence Boulevard. Although I have griped over the years about its hamster-tunnel-to-the-parking-deck design and the suburban-shopping-mall-design of the nearby Founders Hall, its category overall: Winner .

3. NASCAR Hall of Fame. Overblown projections, a deal negotiated amid machismo hype, and a design that pretends it is a space ship, not an integrated part of a city. Category: May come to define “Fad-of-the-Moment Fail.”

4. Tryon Street Mall. You don’t even know what this is, do you? Those odd looking bus shelters and fancy pavers along Tryon Street were part of a “streetscape” design the city undertook in the early 1980s, back when the national fad-of-the-moment was the idea that fancy pavement would make people come to uptown. No, really, they believed that. The shelters, which did not even keep bus riders dry, cost as much as $80,000 each. The artfully designed newspaper racks never got used by actual newspapers. The fancy pavers in the street cracked and were replaced by concrete faux-brick pavers. Yet the street trees and the wide sidewalks have blessed Tryon Street ever since. So this fad ended up having a legacy that people take for granted today, even if they’re still scoffing at those silly $80K bus shelters. Category: A fad with unexpected positive benefits despite itself.

5. The aquarium. At least we did not build one. Aquariums were all the rage about 15 years ago, after Chattanooga, Atlanta and Charleston built theirs. Discovery Place (itself a child of the 1970s fad for children’s science museums, and not a “fail”) wanted to freshen the uptown science scene. I always thought we had enough sharks already along Tryon Street. Category: Potential fail averted.

Today’s fads: Streetcars. Bike-share programs. Even larger convention centers, and convention hotels.
Which will succeed, and which will fail? I’d bet on the first two to be winners. The last one? Not so much.

Is sustainability for Commies?

Here’s something I keep wondering: If you drew a Venn diagram with one circle being people who say they believe free markets need little intervention and that government has no business telling people what to do with their property, and another circle being people who think there’s a liberal conspiracy to force apartment buildings and stores into suburban residential neighborhoods now restricted to single-family houses on large lots, how big would be the part of the Venn diagram where the two sets overlap?

My guess: Huge.

Somehow some people have gotten the idea that land in a city (and suburbs) would, if left to the natural laws of economics, shape itself into quarter-acre and half-acre lots with one house sitting in the middle. They don’t seem to get it: Valuable land, without zoning restrictions, would attract higher income-producing uses. Apartment buildings. Stores. Office towers. It’s government intervention that is keeping all those high-priced neighborhoods near Charlotte’s SouthPark mall as single-family homes. Large-lot subdivisions are often built in times and places where that’s considered the highest and best use (to use real estate speak) of the dirt. But as cities evolve, a lot of those neighborhoods hold land that becomes more valuable for other uses. Examples: Myers Park, Dilworth, Elizabeth, Barclay Downs. Keeping those valuable areas zoned for single-family residential may or may not be wise public policy – that’s a debate for another day – but it’s clearly not letting the free market have its way. So why have some parts of the tin-foil cap crowd decided that efforts to build more high-density neighborhoods, i.e. “sustainable development,” is a global socialist plot using a U.N. policy called Agenda 21 to co-opt municipal governments all over America?

Think about it: Wouldn’t big-government socialists be the ones wanting regulations to override private ownership, via single-family-housing zoning?

It’s part of a larger mystery.

Why did preserving the environment come to be seen as “liberal” instead of just, well, smart? Seems to me the liberal-conservative battles ought to be fought over the best methods with which to ensure resources aren’t depleted and water and air remain clean. After all, those things are important necessities for human life, not to mention long-term local and national economic health. Some would argue government regulations are the best method. Others would argue that regulations don’t work, or aren’t enforced, or that a private market approach works better, as in cap-and-trade programs. But why would anyone argue that to be a true conservative you shouldn’t care about the environment?

After all, the environmental movement has had plenty of Republican champions, including President Richard Nixon. Former N.C. Govs. Jim Martin and Jim Holshouser and Charlotte’s long-time U.S. Rep. Alex McMillan are all Republicans who understood the importance of conserving land and using government to try to ensure clean air and water.

Indeed, after Republican City Council member Edwin Peacock III, who chaired the council’s Environment Committee, lost his seat in November, I called longtime Charlotte environmental activist Rick Roti to get his sense of Peacock’s role. “He has been, especially for a Republican, a more balanced leader,” Roti said. Understand, Roti doesn’t just blindly compliment politicians. He has served on multiple stakeholder committees, chaired the Charlotte Tree Advisory Commission and is now president of the nonprofit Charlotte Public Tree Fund. He has seen the sausage being made, from up close, and probably has psychic scars to prove it.

So what I’m about to say probably betrays my own inadvertent stereotyping. Out of routine, I asked Roti what party he was in. “Republican,” he said. “People are often surprised when I tell them that.” Uh, yep.

He favors Republican financial policies, he said. “When it comes to the environment, they’re [the Republican party] not where where they need to be.”

What does this have to do with sustainable development and Agenda 21? Only this: One of the key goals underpinning advocacy of sustainable development is to improve and protect the environment by helping people live in ways that use less energy: Less driving, more walking and bicycling and transit. Living closer together, to save building energy and make transit easier (see the part about less driving). Of course, one hugely important reason to do this, in addition to saving a lot of money and energy, is to try to combat human-caused global climate change. But for some reason, that, too, has become a red-blue litmus test. If you believe the world’s climate scientists, you must be a liberal elitist.

Again, it seems to me the liberals and conservatives ought to be arguing over what’s the best way to fight climate change, not about whether it exists.

Here’s a final thought about the relationship between sustainable development, and policies, and politics. It’s in an op-ed in the Boston Globe, “A frugal answer to zoning pitfalls, needlessly slashed,” in which Paul McMorrow, an associate editor at CommonWealth magazine, writes about the congressional move to de-fund an Obama initiative, the Sustainable Communities program. Lodged in Housing and Urban Development, the program was trying to get multiple federal agencies – EPA, HUD and the Department of Transportation – to work more efficiently together and to promote policies to curb sprawling development. (Clarification, 1/6/12: I consulted with officials in the HUD Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, which coordinates federal policy with DOT and the EPA. They say the office remains very much alive, as is the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the collaboration among the three agencies. What lost funding is the grants program, which in 2011 awarded a $5 million regional planning grant to the Charlotte region, among $96 million in regional planning and community challenge grants around the country.)

McMorrow notes that sprawl is fiscally wasteful for governments: “If we’re going to build new homes and businesses anyway, we should at least construct them in a way that’s not deliberately wasteful,” he writes. “This wastefulness applies to the open space that sprawl consumes, as well as the enormous cost of developing and maintaining the infrastructure serving new suburbs and exurbs.”

Time to neuter that noose around uptown Charlotte?

Is Charlotte finally making a move toward taming the uptown noose – I mean, the uptown loop? The freeway encircling uptown, made up of Interstate 277 and a section of Interstate 77, strangles uptown, eliminating easy pedestrian and bicycle connections and creating bottlenecks for traffic flow into and out of the center city.

It was Feb. 15, 1997, (but who’s counting?) when I first heard the idea to cap the below-grade section of I-277 between South End and the south part of the center city. The idea keeps being proposed, and being dismissed as too expensive, or too difficult. But it’s a great idea that deserves serious study.

Now, at last, something may be happening. The Charlotte City Council tonight is supposed to vote on an agreement with the N.C. Department of Transportation to launch a study of the whole uptown freeway loop. Here’s a link to the city council agenda. Go to agenda page 19.

Despite misgivings, capping a freeway, or more precisely, sending it through a tunnel, is comparatively inexpensive and has been done in many other cities. It’s neither revolutionary nor extreme. It is NOT as expensive as digging a tunnel, a la Big Dig in Boston. The digging took place years ago, before I-277 opened in the 1980s.

Other cities are going further, pushing to turn old freeways into high-volume boulevards, which can move plenty of traffic but are designed so that shops, restaurants, housing and workplaces can grow along their sidewalks. The classic example of a high-volume boulevard is the Champs Elysees in Paris. Here’s a list of other projects, some still in planning phases.

Uptown needs better connections to neighborhoods around it, and this includes street connections. If you ever drive in from south Charlotte on a weekday morning you’ll probably hit a tie-up on Providence Road as it nears uptown, and on Third-Fourth streets or Seventh Street. You may wish longingly for more connecting streets into uptown, which would divert some of the traffic load onto those other streets. (Morehead usually isn’t as crowded, nor is Stonewall, but they apparently are too far from the center of uptown to get as much of the traffic load.) We could use more connections via Second (MLK Boulevard), Fifth, Sixth, Eighth and Ninth streets, but I-277 and its spaghetti bowl interchanges block those possibilities.

Back to the freeway cap: I know the date was Feb. 15, 1997, because I first heard the idea at an all-day workshop organized by the old Charlotte Urban Forum public interest group. Open to the public, the event was to draw up possibilities for redesigning uptown. The impetus was an ill-considered plan to build a new arena uptown (that part was OK) and “development,” drawings for which resembled a suburban shopping mall plopped into the city.

The workshop had no official purpose, but we did get then-Mayor Pat McCrory to drop by, as well as some planning commission officials (the commission was one of the sponsors) and some of the developers and uptown boosters calling themselves 24-Uptown Partners. The Partners’ goal was to build that arena and shopping center-esque “entertainment complex” – well-intended but clumsily suburban in its proposed execution.
In order to write the preceding paragraph, I looked back at the 1997 articles I wrote for the Charlotte Observer and spotted some interesting notes of what had been proposed at that workshop. How about the idea of a NASCAR museum? Hmmm. That may fall in the category of “be careful what you wish for., because you may get it.” The list contains so many projects that were built in the next 10 years that in hindsight I wonder how many of the architects and developers there already knew what they were planning?

Among the other discussion topics were, and I warn you that these will sound familiar:

• Put more housing uptown.

• Mix uses, not just on the same block, but within a building, so that the vacant areas of uptown fill with five- or six-story buildings with retail space on the street, offices above, and housing above that.

• Expand the trolley system.

But here’s a list of some of the ideas that, at the time, I characterized as not among the predictable ones:

• Bury I-277 where it crosses South Tryon and fill the land created atop it with mixed-use, five-or six-story buildings.
• A NASCAR Museum next to the NFL stadium, with condos topping the museum. [The NASCAR Hall of Fame opened on Brevard Street in 2010, and has drawn far fewer visitors than projected, losing money.]

• Put housing back into Second Ward, where the old Brooklyn neighborhood was demolished for urban renewal. [A development deal to do this stalled after the crash of 2008.]
• Move the Amtrak station from North Tryon to West Trade. [This is in N.C. DOT rail plans.]• Put a convention hotel next to I-277. [Done.]
• Convert the old convention center to a museum or city market. [Old convention center was demolished to build the EpiCentre, a slightly more urban-style entertainment complex than was envisioned in 1997. It’s tied up in an acrimonious bankruptcy case.]• Rehabilitate the Carolina Theatre.[Not done. But not demolished, either.]
• Concentrate retail on South Tryon Street. [Other than art museum gift shops, little retail beyond restaurants has come to South Tryon Street.]
• Build a zoo. [Insert quip of your choice here.]

In looking at my 1997 articles I noticed that other sponsors of the workshop were the UNC Charlotte College of Architecture, the Charlotte chapter of the American Institute of Architects, and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, my current employer.

Why cities need Republicans

When a Wake County district school board election is being hailed nationally as evidence that the whole Tea Party movement is defunct, as in this not-at-all-objective piece from the Huffington Post, you know the hyperbole is hyper, indeed. Should the Charlotte City Council election be considered another piece of evidence that Republican power is withering nationally?

I am not at all sure it should be. Nevertheless, it’s still worth pondering the implications of moderate Republican Edwin Peacock’s loss in a Democratic sweep of all four at-large positions. In addition to Mayor Anthony Foxx, Democrats will have a 9-2 edge, with district representatives Andy Dulin (District 6) and Warren Cooksey (District 7) the council’s only Republicans.

I sought the thoughts of a well-known local political observer, Bill McCoy, a political scientist who handily for me is the emeritus director of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work. “I don’t remember anything like a 9-2 split on City Council,” McCoy said. “I was totally surprised that Peacock lost.”

He went on to say this, about such a heavily Democratic council: “Although I might fall in the category of a yellow dog Democrat, I believe a balance among the parties is a good thing, particularly when the other party has a person like Peacock – a great role model for what a moderate Republican should be like.” Whether a “balance” has to be 6-5 or could be 7-4 or even 8-3 is debatable, he said, but 9-2 is beyond the pale for a “good balance.”

Charlotte has become more Democratic-leaning in recent years, although Mecklenburg County commissioners are less so (5-4 Democrat-Republican). The legislative delegation is also mixed: 6-4 Democrat-Republican in the N.C. House, and 3-1 in the N.C. Senate, or 3-2 if you county Tommy Tucker, whose district is mostly in Union County.

McCoy’s point is one I heard articulated in slightly different form at a roundtable discussion last month in New York, where the topic was urban regions and their relationships – political, economic and otherwise – with state governments. Sitting next to me was Joe McLaughlin, a former lobbyist, former adviser to Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell and now director of Temple University’s Institute for Public Affairs in Philadelphia. As we all chewed over the issue, McLaughlin said that one overlooked need cities have is, as he put it, “rebuilding” the Republican Party in urban areas.

He elaborated on his thinking to me this week, sharing a 2003 paper he wrote which said, “Particularly in a competitive two-party state like Pennsylvania, Philadelphia benefits from having two viable parties; many big cities do not.”

That reminded me of the oft-told story of how then-Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, a Republican, and then-Mecklenburg County commissioners’ chair Parks Helms, a Democrat, teamed up when they visited Washington to lobby for transit funds. McCrory courted the Republicans, Helms the Democrats.

In many states, large cities are viewed with suspicion or jealousy at the state level. Georgia legislators have been known to compare Atlanta to Sodom and Gomorrah. Last year two former presidents of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, ex-Mayors Manny Diaz of Miami and Greg Nickels of Seattle, told me they knew of no U.S. cities whose relationships with their states worked well. And of course we know the derisive term, “The Great State of Mecklenburg,” has not vanished from the halls of Raleigh.

So it’s important for urban regions to be able to speak with a unified voice on important topics such as transportation, economic development and the environment. If suburban jurisdictions are Republican-dominated and city ones are Democratic, that poses one more hurdle to a region’s effectiveness at the state and federal levels.

Depending on how one defines “moderate,” Peacock may well be the last of the moderate Republicans elected to a partisan office from Charlotte, a tradition that includes, among others, former Gov. Jim Martin, former U.S. Rep. Alex McMillan, former county commissioners Carla DuPuy, Tom Cox and Peacock’s father, Ed Peacock, and former council members Velva Woollen, Lynn Wheeler and John Lassiter, to name just a few. (Whether some of today’s conservative Republicans might be more moderate if the Republican Party itself hadn’t veered strongly to the right is essentially unknowable.)

Finding ways for Democrats and Republicans to find common ground in solving common local problems remains important. But it’s likely to get a lot harder.

Voters oust GOP, raise their own taxes

Durham County voters OK’d a transit tax Tuesday

Tuesday’s municipal elections in Charlotte and across the state offered some unexpected results, especially if one considers that the state legislature is dominated by conservative, anti-tax Republicans. Voters in four N.C. counties voted to tax themselves, with Durham voters opting for two new taxes, one for transit.

In Charlotte, voters re-elected Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat, over a conservative Republican and political newcomer, Scott Stone. That wasn’t unexpected. But voters swept into office all four Democratic candidates for at-large City Council seats, ousting moderate incumbent Republican Edwin Peacock III in favor of Claire Fallon, a planning commissioner and neighborhood activist, and Beth Pickering. Pickering had never run for office and just arrived in Charlotte five years ago from Denver, Colo.

That gives Democrats a 9-2 council majority, which I believe is more than at any time since the council went to districts in 1977. (Are any political historians out there to confirm or deny this?) The two lone Republicans, Andy Dulin and Warren Cooksey, didn’t have Democratic opposition in their districts; Cooksey dispatched a Republican opponent in the primary.

But across the state, voters in four counties made a kind of history by agreeing to raise their own taxes, something that conventional political wisdom has said isn’t likely during an economic downturn, or in a state that just last year sent to the General Assembly a slew of conservative Republicans.

A quick rundown:

– Durham County voters approved (about 60-40 percent) a half-cent sales tax for transit, making it the state’s second county, after Mecklenburg in 1998, to do so. Voters in Orange County (Chapel Hill) and Wake (Raleigh) are expected to face similar ballot measures next year, with Orange voting in the spring and Wake sometime later. That should finally give the Triangle area a funding stream hefty enough to start building a long-awaited rail transit system of light rail and commuter rail.

– Durham County voters also OK’d (57 percent) a quarter-cent sales tax for education.

– Orange County passed a quarter-cent sales tax for school building improvements and economic development infrastructure. The county voters rejected the tax a year ago. This year it passed with almost 61 percent of the vote.

– Buncombe County voters approved a quarter-cent sales tax increase to pay for renovations and new buildings at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College.

– Montgomery County voters also approved a quarter-cent sales tax, for buildings at Montgomery County Schools and Montgomery Community College.

The N.C. Association of County Commissioners’ website tally shows a clean sweep for those taxes for this year, with Cabarrus voters approving one in May, Halifax County in February. Compare that to 2010 results. The same quarter-cent sales tax was on the ballot in 23 counties at various times throughout that year. Of the nine votes before Nov. 3, seven were successful. Of those Nov. 2, all lost, including in Orange and Montgomery counties. Does this mean the Nov. 2, 2010, anti-tax fervor was a one-time blip? Or was Nov. 8, 2011, the oddball election?

Sales taxes, of course, are an easier sell to most taxpayers than other types of tax. Suzanne Leland, a UNC Charlotte associate professor of political science, tells me voters usually prefer sales taxes over income or – the most hated – property taxes. Sales taxes, as Leland and many others point out, disproportionately hurt low-income households, where a higher proportion of income has to go for necessities such as housing, transportation, food, etc. Nevertheless, many voters consider them a more fair way to assess a tax.

Bike-share idea moves forward in Charlotte

Charlotte City government officials will discuss whether to push ahead with what’s now a fledgling idea for the city to launch a bike-sharing program, preferably in time for the Democratic National Committee in September 2012.

The City Council’s Transportation and Planning Committee this afternoon (Monday, Aug 22) heard a presentation from Alison Cohen, president of Alta Bicycle Share, which operates the Washington, D.C., bike share program, Capital Bikeshare, launched in September 2010. Also at the meeting was John Cock of the affiliated Alta wing, Alta Planning + Design.

Bike-share programs let customers pay (via memberships, or kiosks) to rent bicycles temporarily from a system of stations around the city. In Washington, yearly membership is $75, which buys you an electronic key you insert to free the bike from its locked slot at the station. Day-pass users ($5) get an unlocking code to use. The first 30 minutes of a ride have no other fee bu the longer the ride, the more it costs.

It’s important to have places for bicycle riders to ride, Cohen said. Washington went from 3 to 50 miles of bike lanes in the last 10 years and saw bicycle commuting rise 86 percent, 2000-2009. The average distance of a Capital Bikeshare ride is 1.2 miles, Cohen said. (Charlotte is up to 50 miles of lanes, city bicycle coordinator Ken Tippette said.)

Today’s meeting had no specific proposal on the table for council members; it was an information session arranged by Tippette with the encouragement of City Council member Edwin Peacock III, who chairs the council’s Environment Committee and who described his experience using Capital Bikeshare when he was in Washington recently for a National League of Cities meeting.

Cohen said the D.C. bike share program is the nation’s largest to date, although New York City plans to launch one in 2012 with 10,000 bikes. Other cities with programs: Denver, Minneapolis, Boston – even Spartanburg, S.C., which has only two bike share stations according to Cohen. Also in the works are programs in Chattanooga, Tenn., San Antonio and Miami. And yes, you read that right. Spartanburg.

Council members David Howard, Patsy Kinsey and Nancy Carter had questions for Cohen and Cock, but no one pooh-poohed the idea. At the end of the meeting, Howard, who chairs the committee, asked Assistant City Manager Jim Schumacher to talk with City Manager Curt Walton about what, if anything, the city should try to do.

Reading the tea leaves, as we pundits try to do, I predict the city will explore some sort of small-scale bike sharing program limited to center city and possibly one or two nearby neighborhoods, and will look for private sponsors to help with costs. A year is a short time frame for setting up a full program, but with enough push it could be done. After all, if you were in Charlotte in 1994 for the Final Four you saw center city enthusiasts create a fake nightlife scene, setting up bars inside vacant buildings. It worked. Doubters saw the huge crowds of people willing to come uptown for a night out, and it helped spark more authentic night life uptown. Setting up a real, if small, bike share program might have the same kind of inspirational effect.

The council committee also, with little discussion, unanimously recommended approval of the Center City 2020 Vision Plan, which goes to the full council Sept. 12 Here’s a link to the draft of the plan, and here’s a link to some commentary from my UNC Charlotte colleague David Walters and me. Also, here’s a previous Naked City Blog item from me.

Envisioning a new downtown Charlotte

Lunching outdoors in the center of Charlotte. Photo: John Chesser, UNC Urban Institute

Baseball stadium – yes or no?

The new plan for downtown/uptown/center city Charlotte says yes. No surprise there: One group helping fund the plan is Charlotte Center City Partners, the nonprofit tax-funded downtown advocacy group whose CEO, Michael Smith, was a key architect of the land swap that helped make the stadium plan work. Or, at least, it worked on paper, until the 2008 recession meant most of the land swap’s moving parts stalled out.

The plan also calls for a large new convention center expansion and new convention center hotel. Again, no surprise. The City of Charlotte is another funder of the plan.

And it calls for an uptown shopping center. Yet again, no shock. The idea of an uptown shopping center has been dangled by governments and developers for years, although one school of thought exists – expressed notably by architect/consultant Michael Gallis – that that ship sailed years ago, when the city OK’d a contentious rezoning to let SouthPark mall, some 5 miles south of the middle of town, expand to build a Nordstrom and Neiman-Marcus.

But, as I wrote in an op-ed for the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, (picked up Sunday by the Charlotte Observer), building large-footprint “catalyst” projects works against what downtown Charlotte really needs now. It needs what planners call “urban fabric,” and what laymen would just say are interesting streets for window-shopping, walking and living. Can you get easily to stores that sell things you need and want? Does it have a lively feel to it, a sense of possibilities, encounters, discoveries?

Urban fabric, to be strong and endure, needs to be more like silk than burlap – fine threads pulled together, not big chunks of things that, once broken, unravel the whole fabric. It needs some large projects and buildings, to be sure, but it also needs the possibility of smaller things.

It’s all but impossible now, though, for small-scale things to happen in downtown Charlotte. The small old buildings have mostly been demolished, for a variety of reasons which I won’t go into now. (One lovely exception is Latta Arcade and Brevard Court, but they aren’t large enough to make a difference, and they’re inside a passageway, not along the sidewalk.) Downtown is a collection of too many big-footprint things too close together: NFL stadium, NASCAR Hall of Fame, Charlotte Convention Center, large office towers, multiple museums, two large libraries, a huge performing arts complex, etc. No single one of those is a bad thing; many of them add to the city’s quality of life. But they’re too big to be that close to each other. And too much of what lies in between has been demolished.

That’s why downtown Charlotte has no hope in our lifetimes of resembling the beloved downtown Asheville, or to look at larger models, Back Bay Boston, Georgetown, San Francisco, New York (except for a few overdone big-block developments in Midtown) or most other loved and well-visited cities. Even downtown Raleigh – with its preserved buildings and revitalization that inches, block-by-block – has a better chance, long-term, of providing the true urban feel that distinguishes a city from a collection of development projects.

The new plan doesn’t really address that problem with real solutions. It doesn’t address the incongruity of recommending a new skyscraper at a redeveloped Charlotte Transportation Center and the impact that will have on land prices a block away, down a Brevard Street that it recommends as a “shopping and entertainment” street. I don’t know how much of this is the fault of the consultants, or how much of it results from their having multiple bosses in this project, which include the city. Over the years the city’s leaders have been sadly ignorant of how their decisions can undermine their own goals. Note how the city’s approval of the multistory EpiCentre has effectively sucked a huge amount of the restaurant and bar market into one very big block. So much for that Brevard Street idea – one the city has been pitching for several years. (Compare the EpiCentre to Raleigh’s Glenwood South area, where multiple blocks along Glenwood Avenue have been animated by similar restaurant/nightlife development.)

The plan has a lot of feel-good words like green, sustainable, diverse, welcoming, vibrant, etc. It also has many good suggestions for projects that would help downtown Charlotte. It’s welcome, and important, that the plan emphasizes that “center city” isn’t just the land inside that horrible freeway noose, but that we all need to think of “center city” as, well, the center of the city, which includes a ring of excellent neighborhoods. It calls for capping part of the freeway for a park. It calls for much more emphasis on bicycling – a City of Bikes. It pushes for better transit connections, stronger links among higher education institutions, and an Applied Innovation Corridor from South End up to UNC Charlotte.

Read the draft plan (warning, it’s in multiple chapters that must be downloaded separately) at http://www.centercity2020 .info.

Disclosure: I’ve only skimmed most of the full draft. I read thoroughly a synopsis CCCP provided for journalists and board members.)

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably an urban design junkie and would enjoy seeing this online gallery I pulled together, of selections from the 1966 Odell Plan for central Charlotte. Take a look here if you get a kick out of Corbusier-like, mid-century Modernist city planning.(One drawing is reproduced below.)

For reasons I can’t fathom, city officials still feel compelled to bend a knee to this plan. Why? It was a bad plan. It pushed for the highway- and auto-mobile-focused, single-use-zoning development that got downtown into this mess to start with.

Finally, my UNC Charlotte colleague David Walters, who heads the School of Architecture’s Masters in Urban Design program, has his own take on the proposed 2020 Plan. He calls it a failure of nerve.

1966 Odell plan looks up East Trade Street toward an envisioned new convention center and hotel

How some Charlotte neighborhoods are going green

Seven Charlotte neighborhoods, ranging from a high-rise uptown condos to a suburban subdivision, have been selected to receive $80,000 in grants as part of the city’s Neighborhood Energy Challenge Grant program. That program is one of 17 projects to be paid with a $6.5 million Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant the City of Charlotte won from the U.S. Department of Energy. The idea is to approach energy conservation efforts at a neighborhood level.

The neighborhoods are: The Avenue condos (210 N. Church St. uptown), the “EcoDistrict” (Villa Heights, Belmont, Optimist Park neighborhoods), Merry Oaks in east Charlotte, the NoDa neighborhood just northeast of uptown, Plaza-Midwood just east of uptown, Wilmore south of uptown and Spring Park in northeast Charlotte.

Daria K. Milburn, community energy conservation coordinator in the city’s Neighborhood & Business Services department, says projects include bike rack installations, neighborhood light-bulb and shower-head swaps (where you turn in your old ones and get new ones that save electricity or water), promoting alternative transportation such as transit and bicycling. Spring Park is going to try to integrate solar power into street lighting. The Avenue will use different lighting in its parking garage to cut its electricity usage by about half. All their applications included education/awareness campaigns, she said.

Want to read more? Here’s the memo on the project that went out to City Council members.