Category: Charlotte

After Covid-19, what happens to cities? What we know – or think we know

Uptown Charlotte’s Brevard Court, before Covid-19 shut down bars. Photo courtesy of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute

 After Covid-19, cities will change forever. Here’s a sampling of predictions I’m seeing:

People will avoid close physical encounters. Or maybe not. Maybe they’ll flock to crowded bars and restaurants after weeks of lockdown.

Stores, bludgeoned by pandemic closings and high rents, will close. So will smaller, non-chain restaurants. Cities will become blander and more homogenized.

Or maybe this: For a while small businesses will die and renters will flee. But that will reduce demand, so landlords will lower rents. Newly cheap spaces will lure innovators and entrepreneurs, artists, restaurants and shops to formerly homogenous, high-dollar areas. Their return will reinvigorate neighborhoods once dominated by national chains and luxury homes.

People will move to small towns, smaller cities or suburbs because they’re afraid – even more than before – of urban density and urban protests. Or, maybe, they’ll move after enduring years of extreme housing costs.

At the same time, more workers will telecommute – willingly or not – and office real estate will go begging. That, too, will change property values in cities, and hurt stores and restaurants catering to office workers.

As more workers telecommute, rush-hour congestion will melt away. Or maybe, rush-hour congestion will spike as people who once commuted on transit will opt to drive to work. And as more people move to suburbs, traffic there will get worse.

Or maybe none of those things happen.

We who write about cities are quick to make predictions. Some will prove prescient. Some won’t. But nobody really knows. Cities aren’t all alike. New York’s texture, way of life and pandemic experience are not Charlotte’s, or
Houston’s, or Seattle’s. And this: We humans have a long history of behaving both predictably and unpredictably.

Of course cities will change. They’re already changing – witness the widespread protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd, other police killings of unarmed black citizens and over-the-top reactions in many cities as police tear-gas peaceful protesters, mow SUVs into crowds and shoot rubber bullets and pepper balls at journalists. Those peaceful protests, not to mention the window-breaking, brick-throwing acts of a few, will probably lead to change. But will that change mean efforts to end police bullying and racism, or the militarization of public spaces? We never know how cities will change until we see the changes.

It’s always tempting to accept conventional wisdom when making policy decisions. But conventional wisdom may not be based on observed reality. An example to remember: urban “renewal” and “blight clearance,” widely touted by presumed experts as improving the lives of the poor by bulldozing slums, proved to be the opposite of “renewal,” clearing away people (mostly people of color) and neighborhoods lacking money or power to stop it.

It’s likely the Covid pandemic will accelerate trends already happening: Even as the lure of urban spaces remained powerful, high housing prices had been pushing some people out of expensive cities toward less expensive places. For example, the city of Charlotte’s population grew 21% from 2010 to 2019 – despite an affordable housing shortage, but one that pales in comparison to New York or San Francisco.

You can make a good case that the country as a whole will be stronger if cities like Memphis (city growth 2010-19 was only 0.65%) and Kansas City (city growth 2010-19 was 7.7%) develop more of the strong urban magnetism that for the past few decades funneled hundreds of thousands of newcomers into New York, Washington, the Bay Area and even Charlotte. The re-urbanization and allure of smaller cities is another trend predating Covid that’s likely to speed up.

Brick and mortar retail was already ailing from online shopping in general and specifically Amazon. It’s convenient, and Americans have repeatedly proved willing to jettison even things they love like independent bookstores or browsing boutiques, in favor of convenience. (Need proof? Takeout coffee in Styrofoam cups.) We have, by many accounts, a surplus of per capita retail square footage. According to Derek Thompson in The Atlantic magazine: “By one measure of consumerist plentitude – shopping center “gross leasable area” – the U.S. has 40% more shopping space per capita than Canada, five times more than the U.K., and 10 times more than Germany.”

With extended closures from the pandemic, even more stores will probably close. However, it’s possible enough Americans will decide they like real stores – having been barred from them for months – that their behavior will change. After all, Starbucks made a fortune when Americans x realized coffee can taste better than gas station joe in Styrofoam.

Cities evolve, and not always for the better. Should we be pessimistic? I go there probably more often than is mentally healthy. But sometimes changes are for the better. Here are a few of my optimistic hopes for cities, including Charlotte, post-Covid:

  • People will keep up outdoor activities. With gyms closed and Covid transmission believed to be weaker outside, people went walking, bicycling and hiking so much the state and the county closed the crowded parks and greenways for a time. I’m rooting for those habits to continue
  • I envision residents (see above) growing more vocal pushing for accessible public outdoor spaces – parks, greenways and well-designed plazas. The national Park Score measure from the Trust for Public Land annually finds Charlotte, where parks and greenways are a county responsibility, hugging the bottom of the list. And with outdoor dining encouraged, many cities are giving over street spaces and relaxing parking requirements to let restaurants move outside. Those changes are welcome.
  • As sunshine and fresh air are found to inhibit Covid transmission, and HVAC systems suspected as enablers, the value of windows that open and easy access to sunlight may change workplace building design.
  • Pedestrian and bicycle needs may get more attention. During the lockdown, people who wanted exercise noticed Charlotte is not built for pedestrians. That led to crowded parks and greenways (see above). I’m hopeful more residents will pressure the city – and the state, which owns many thoroughfares in the city – to improve things.
  • The reality that Covid is more of a threat to black and Hispanic people than others is sobering evidence of health care, employment and income inequalities all around the nation. A continuing spotlight on the health risks low-income service workers face could open more people’s eyes to the need for systemic changes.
  • We may pay more attention to pollution. With traffic reduced, the air has cleared remarkably around the globe. Will people simply resume fossil-fuel-burning ways, or will the prospect of cleaner air and water inspire changes?

Will cities change after Covid-19? Absolutely. Anything as traumatic as this pandemic will change us, and our surroundings. We’ll mourn not just the people we’ve lost, but the places – the stores, coffee shops, restaurants, dive bars, art house theaters and everything being taken from us seemingly so fast.

But cities are always changing, and would have changed regardless. We would have lost some, and maybe many of those places anyway from the forces of finance and gentrification and real estate speculation.

I keep thinking of this quote from Greek philosopher Heraclitus: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river. And he is not the same man.”

The city won’t be the same after Covid. And we won’t be the same. That’s the prediction I’m most

*  *  *

(This post ran originally on the website of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. My thanks for their permission to republish it here.)

Time to have that uncomfortable talk. I mean about parking.

A Walmart in east Charlotte offers a gracious plenty of parking. Photo: Google Maps satellite view

It’s a question without easy answers. But that just makes it even more important to confront, and find a guiding strategy. It’s time for Charlotte to talk about parking.

Parking is both blessing and curse for any city built – as Charlotte mostly was – around private automobile use.

There’s a lot to curse. An admittedly incomplete list of problems parking lots cause would include the way they devour valuable land space that could hold housing, stores, workplaces, parks, community gardens, tree canopy, pretty much any use valued by city residents. (See below for a short list of what could go into one parking space.) They send storm water runoff cascading into local surface waters (i.e. creeks), polluting them and causing more frequent flooding onto the floodplains where foolish development was allowed. Remember Hurricane Florence in September? Get used to it, as climate change brings more heavy rainstorms. They add to the urban heat island effect, pushing the rising summer temperatures even higher. And the need to provide parking creates significant headaches for small businesses.

And finally this: With so much parking both “free” and available, we almost always hop into the car instead of asking, could we walk? Bicycle? Take a bus or light rail?

But parking lots can also be a blessing in a city built to make driving the automatic choice for almost all of us. For most residents here, any alternatives to private automobile travel – walking, bicycling, scootering, transit or ride-shares – aren’t available or competitive in terms of time, hassle and cost. And when we drive, we need temporary lodging for our vehicles.

I was reminded of this late last month. Rain was pelting the asphalt as I wheeled into what looked like the last available parking spot at Cotswold shopping center, then sloshed across the asphalt for last-minute Christmas shopping. I was glad to find even that terrible parking place.

But should two weeks in December really determine the size of parking lots year-round? It’s January now, and across
most of Charlotte those huge lots at our shopping centers revert to their 50-other-weeks-a year condition: plenty of open, “free” spaces.

It’s time for Charlotte policy-makers to figure out how to get a handle on parking. How can we encourage smarter use of our land while admitting cars will be with us, even if, we hope, in smaller numbers? Can we acknowledge the social inequities embedded in our autopilot acquiescence to providing all the parking anyone needs for the Saturday before Christmas? Can we ask:

• How much parking should be required? How much should be allowed?

• Why isn’t more parking shared between day- and night-time uses, and how can the city encourage more sharing?

• Why should churches, schools and other institutions get a free pass to expand surface parking lots into nearby neighborhoods almost without limit?

• How in terms of parking regulations, do we treat places differently, since places in the city are different? Ballantyne is not NoDa, and University City is not Myers Park.

• Can the city lead on this issue? Could it assist with financing private, shared parking decks, more space-efficient and environmentally prudent but more expensive to build?

• Couldn’t some parking lot and meter revenue help fund something helpful?

City planners are rewriting ordinances governing development in light rail station areas, called Transit Oriented Development (TOD) zoning. They propose eliminating any required minimum number of parking spots except for restaurants within 200 feet of single-family homes. They believe (with reason) that providing easy, “free” parking close to light rail stops encourages people to drive when they could walk, cycle or take transit.

The problem, of course, is that not offering easy parking doesn’t stop people from driving in from areas where transit isn’t readily available and walking isn’t safe or efficient. Yes, I personally will sometimes drive 15 minutes to get to a light rail station where I can “park for free”* and then ride to South End or NoDa, but I am not a typical Charlottean. Example: For me to leave home and arrive at the Evening Muse in NoDa for an 8 p.m. event would be a one-hour transit trip, and that’s with a bus stop a quick, 5-minute walk from our house. Driving is 15-20 minutes.

Further, developers will tell you that lenders require a certain amount of parking, even if the city doesn’t. Yes, easing the TOD parking requirement may well be a smart thing, but it’s no silver bullet that kills the parking monster.

Just imagine what could go in one 220-square-foot parking space: room for 10 bicycles, space for lunch with 15 friends, 3 office work spaces, or one small studio in Paris. That fun factoid comes courtesy of author Taras Grescoe (@Grescoe on Twitter) and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York (@ITDP_HQ on Twitter).

So as Charlotte dives into a new comprehensive plan, Charlotte Future 2040, can we please take a harder look at parking? We’re going to need some of that space for other things.

————

* Why is “free” in quote marks? Because parking is never really free. The cost is embedded in rents you pay, the cost of goods you buy from merchants who must build those parking lots or pay the cost in their leases.

Planner and author Daniel Shoup studies parking and believes it’s been subsidized in a way that’s inequitable. “Wherever you go – a grocery store, say – a little bit of the money you pay for products is siphoned away to pay for parking,” Shoup says (as quoted in this 2014 article in Vox). “My idea is simple: if somebody doesn’t have a car, they shouldn’t have to pay for parking.”

Shoup estimates the national tally for public subsidies for parking at $127 billion.

Apparently Google’s Satellite View camera did not take the photo of this south Charlotte church lot on a Sunday morning.

Waiting for the creek to rise

Now demolished, the Midtown Sundries building was in a floodplain and flooded regularly. Photo courtesy Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services.

Now and then, during extremely heavy rainstorms, my daughter and I used to hop in the car and drive about a quarter-mile away to see if what we call the Creek House was inundated.
The house was built in the 1990s on a you-can’t-believe-it’s-legal site: within about 6 feet from a small creek.

That creek (one of about 3,000 miles of creeks in Mecklenburg County) has the boring official name of Briar Creek Tributary #1 and is neither large nor impressive. Except during a heavy rain. Then it deepens and widens – muddy and dangerously fast-flowing.

At one point, when the Creek House was being built, it was so close to the creek there was a two-by-four propped between an exterior wall and the far side of the creek.

It was a shocking example of how slack Charlotte and Mecklenburg County environmental regulations were, even though they were in some significant ways stricter than the state’s. I sent a copy of the photo to a fellow I knew in the county water quality program; he used it in a slide show urging Charlotte-Mecklenburg elected officials to require undisturbed vegetative buffers beside creeks. I can’t claim that photo is what led the county commissioners to enact the buffer ordinance. But I hope it helped.

Tonight, in Charlotte, N.C., we’re awaiting what may be 10 inches or more of rain from what’s left of Hurricane (now
Tropical Storm) Florence. Flooding is on everyone’s mind. It’s not likely to be as big a disaster as what we are seeing in Eastern North Carolina. But however bad it is here, it’s probably not going to be as bad as it might have been, because of some welcome environmental regulations and government programs.

Floods here tend to be different from those in North Carolina’s flatter, Coastal Plain, or in Houston after last year’s disastrous Hurricane Harvey flooding. Charlotte is a city of ridges, ravines and creeks, and our rainwater and storm drains head straight into the county’s 3,000 miles of creeks and then, usually rapidly, into nearby rivers.

But we’re also a car-oriented city. We have a lot of pavement: streets, highways, surface parking lots as far as the eye can see. It all creates runoff, polluted runoff.

One inch of rain on one acre of impervious surface pavement creates 27,000 gallons of storm water runoff. A few years back I calculated how much runoff one inch of rain on all of Mecklenburg County’s impervious surfaces would create: roughly 2.4 billion gallons. That’s hard to visualize. Think of it this way. If you put 2.4 billion one-gallon milk jugs atop one another, they’d reach to the moon and halfway back.

That’s one inch. Not 10 inches. It’s safe to conclude that 10 inches will likely cause flooding in places here that don’t usually flood.

As in many cities, in Charlotte people have built a lot of things in floodplains – like that Creek House – because they’re flat, which makes building easier. Houses, stores, offices and parking lots perch next to creeks throughout the city.

Even with a floodplain ordinance – which the real estate and developer lobby fought bitterly – houses are still built in floodplains. Today, though, they’re perched on piled-up dirt so floodwaters don’t get in but are, instead, displaced and spread farther out, thus causing flooding in places that used not to flood. But whatever.

After some heavy rains and floods in the late 1990s, the county began using federal funds to buy flood-prone properties and demolish them. In some spots greenways and eco-gardens have been created.

Will the buffers, the floodplain ordinance and the eco-gardens reduce the flooding? Will the Creek House, after all, survive another torrent of rain? That’s the hope. But for the results, ask me later, after Florence moves on.

The Chantilly Ecological Sanctuary at Briar Creek, in the Chantilly neighborhood, was once the site of an apartment complex that flooded regularly. Today it’s a more natural area, where floodwaters can spread without causing the damages they once did. Photo: Mary Newsom

Should affordable housing be treated as basic city infrastructure?

Here’s an interesting piece in The Washington Post today that should be provoking some discussion among people concerned with housing affordability: In expensive cities, rents fall for the rich – but rise for the poor.

The conventional wisdom is that a housing oversupply will cause the costs to go down – the famous law of supply and demand. If we just allow developers to build plenty of housing, rents will sink. But that appears not to be happening.

The article, which is pegged to information from Zillow, does not address Charlotte specifically. So while maybe the same is true here it′s also possible that given the growth pressures in this fast-growing city – named by Zillow as the nation’s fourth-hottest housing market – the top rents here are staying high.

The most significant ponderable here, I think, is whether – if that old law of supply and demand appears not as reliable as we′ve been led to think – the free market on its own can provide enough housing at a price more city residents can afford. The City of Charlotte is helping with its housing trust fund, but it seems doubtful we can simply build our way out of the problem.

I was talking last week with a zoning and planning lobbyist in Charlotte – a guy whose planning background doesn′t stop him from generally hewing to a basic free-market approach. He said he′s starting to believe cities should consider housing affordability as part of the basic package of infrastructure the local government provides like streets, police and fire service, parks, public health services, etc. Maybe the city builds it, maybe it helps other people build it, maybe it helps people afford it, or maybe there′s another way to accomplish this, he said.

For a generally fiscally conservative guy to propose that speaks, I think, to the reality Charlotte and many other cities face: Too many residents don′t earn enough money to afford much of the available housing. And beliefs about how the marketplace can provide it may need some readjusting.

The ever-present dilemma of paying for transit

The topic of transit – or the lack of it – arose during public hearings on the vast new River District development that won city approval last month. The almost 1,400-acre development will grow west of the Charlotte Douglas International Airport in what today is a rural and thinly settled area.

The development is expected to generate 120,000 vehicle trips a day. That number got the attention of Charlotte City Council members, who talked about transit but did little beyond talk before approving the developers’ rezoning request.  That’s because the city’s plans for transit to that part of town are, for now, vague and – like most of the 2030 Transit Plan beyond the Blue Line Extension – unfunded.

The city isn’t allowed to impose impact fees without state legislative approval. And don’t hold your breath for that. Further, state courts struck down some counties’ attempts at adequate public facility ordinances – where developers either had to wait until local governments could afford to offer public facilities such as classrooms and police/fire service to serve the new development, or pay a fee to help the local government provide them.

So Charlotte can’t do what Sacramento, Calif., is proposing: a transportation impact fee on most new construction to fund
more and wider streets and improve biking and pedestrian facilities. See Sacramento asks developers to open wallets to keep city streets from clogging. (The Sacramento fee would range from a few hundred dollars for some rental units to more than $2,000 per single-family home in some areas. It’s expected to generate about $3 million a year.

But N.C. local governments still have negotiating power. In Charlotte, developments expected to generate a lot more motor vehicle trips have to pay for a traffic impact study, and talks between city planners and developers often produce a “voluntary” agreement for the developer to provide a turn lane or a traffic signal or some such. That’s called an “exaction,” although developers joke it’s more of an “extraction.”

As I listened at the River District public hearing in October, I wondered whether the city could put some transit funding on that list of negotiated agreements. It’s fairly routine for the city to ask for, and get, a slightly upgraded bus stop, generally a concrete pad to bus riders don’t have to stand in the mud in wet weather. But why not expand the menu for those asks, especially for a development expected to generate 120,000 trips in a part of town not built for that much traffic?

The city has a fee-in-lieu mechanism for its tree ordinance. Could there be something similar for transit needs?

Would that solve the cavernous funding gap between our local transit plans and our local transit revenue from the countywide half-cent sales tax? No. But it would help – and it would instill into local practice the idea that transit should be among those things developers could “volunteer” to assist with. 

Charlotte in the ’80s


I love how old maps show what the mapmakers valued. 
I recently came across this map of Charlotte circa 1986. (You’ll want to click it to zoom in.) It was among the things Owen Furuseth found as he cleaned out his office after almost 40 years at UNC Charlotte. Furuseth left June 30 as associate provost of Metropolitan Studies, the wing of UNCC academia under which nestles the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work.  Because Owen is a geographer and planner, he was keeping the map but he let me borrow it to copy the image.
The map’s credit line says “Charlotte Mecklenburg Planning Commission 1986.” That probably helps explain why the route for the then-unbuilt I-485 is shown, although construction on the highway didn’t start until 1988, and the full outerbelt was not completed until 2015. Notice, also, how the I-485 route shown on the map is pretty much where it eventually was built. One small exception: The northern section is south of Eastfield Road, which is farther south than shown on the 1986 map.
Those of you who’ve been in Charlotte only a decade or so might get a chuckle out of seeing the “New Coliseum” west of I-77 off Tyvola Road. The “New Coliseum,” was just under construction in 1986, the year this map was made. After it was replaced in 2005 by the Time Warner Cable Arena uptown, the Tyvola coliseum was demolished in 2007 (see its implosion here).*
Note the prominence of Eastland. That was Eastland Mall.  It’s now a vacant city-owned plot of land, after the mall failed about a decade ago. 
Note city limits of Charlotte. “Rea Road Extension” south of N.C. 51, the huge chunk of south Charlotte south of N.C. 51, and UNCC and University Place were not inside the city in 1986. 
Finally, note the relative lack of prominence of “UNCC” compared to University Place, a shopping center and suburban-form mixed-use development north of the university. I wonder what that reveals about the university’s prominence in the minds of the city-county planners. I’ll leave that to your imagination. Today the university is almost 28,000 students, a campus surrounded by some of the most gawd-awful strip-shopping-center and big-box unwalkable and unbikeable suburbia that you can envision. 
* About that Coliseum implosion video.  I had never watched that until I dug up the link today. It made me cry.  At that just-opened venue in November 1988, I and 23,000 other people watched the old Charlotte Hornets – including Dell Curry, father of today’s more famous Curry – debut to a tuxedo-and-formal-gown wearing crowd, lose by 40 points. They got a standing ovation.  Less than 2 months later, on Dec. 23, Kurt Rambis’ last-second shot defeated Michael Jordon’s Chicago Bulls. (Read the Chicago Tribune story here.) The old Coliseum hosted 364 consecutive NBA-game sellouts. We loved the Hornets in those days. Loved Dell and Muggsy and for a time even loved George Shinn, though that came to a bad end. Our then toddler daughter loved Scott Burrell.  Look him up. He was a bouncy jumper.
The coliseum also hosted Frank Sinatra, Springsteen and Mother Teresa among other icons, and the 1994 Final Four, complete with then-President Bill Clinton, various and sundry FOBs (Friends of Bill), and an Arkansas victory.
The Coliseum was built in the wrong place and was poorly designed for what NBA arenas came to need just 10 years later. But it was fun while it lasted.

Do you live in the ‘real’ Charlotte?


Plaza Midwood, a neighborhood that is not south of Fairview. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Do you live in “the real Charlotte”? I was chatting with a guy at a recent party who opined that only the part of the city inside Route 4 is “the real Charlotte.” (Route 4 is the Woodlawn-Runnymede-Wendover-Eastway thoroughfare that’s approximately 4 miles from uptown Charlotte.)

Au contraire, I said, or words to that effect. Actually, I said, a more accurate boundary would be Fairview Road, as in “I try never to go south of Fairview,” an expression I hear now and again from certain friends and acquaintances whose lives, like that of the aforesaid guy at the party, focus more on the center of the city than the far-flung edges. (Happily, the shopping mecca of SouthPark perches on the north side of Fairview Road.)

But more to the point, huge expanses of this city are outside Route 4. A circle with a 4-mile radius covers about 50 square miles. The 2010 Census tells us Charlotte covers almost 298 square miles. So the “real Charlotte” would be one-sixth of the actual city. I don’t think that makes it real, although most of the city inside Route 4 dates to the era preceding the overwhelming suburban-style growth that started in the 1950s and exploded by the mid-1960s.

But he also had put his finger on a cultural/social reality that’s been building here over the past 15 or 20 years: A lot of residents in the older, inner neighborhoods have a completely different view of their city than people who live in the far-flung, newer
areas. But which is the “real” view? Is this a city of horrific traffic, found in south-of-Fairview land? Or is it a pleasant and easy-to-manage city of cohesive and distinct neighborhoods where you tend to run into people you know all over the place – especially if you try never to go south of Fairview?

I think both are the real Charlotte, but I am not sure they are always on good speaking terms.

Symptom No. 1: Occasional talk in the far south neighborhoods – I’m talking to you, Ballantyne – about seceding from Charlotte and becoming a new town. Because they don’t like the rest of us very much, apparently.

Symptom No. 2: The not uncommon terminology, from people who do not live south of Fairview, that uses “Ballantyne” as short-hand for “way too far from the places I like to hang out.” As in, “I really want to live in an older, walkable neighborhood near transit but I can’t afford it, and I don’t want to have to go live in Ballantyne.”

I am not sure what that says about Ballantyne, other than it’s a very well-branded place and a large place and so it pops to mind in a way that, say, Piper Glen doesn’t.

The iconic gateways at Ballantyne. Photo: Nancy Pierce

But it clearly says something about Charlotte – that this is a geographically spread out city with a lot of places where people may not feel they have much in common with people 24 miles away. It’s 24 miles, by the way, from the Ballantyne area in south Charlotte to the Highland Creek subdivision in the far northeast corner.

Maybe Ballantyne, in fact, is the “real” Charlotte, and people who live north of Fairview are just wrong. Or is NoDa the “real” Charlotte? It didn’t even exist, by that name, until about 20 years ago. Before that it was North Charlotte. Maybe we’re all wrong and McCrorey Heights and Hyde Park are the “real” Charlotte.

I think the “real” Charlotte is elusive, and changes over time. Or is it that, as Einstein is reported to have said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

‘Do not try to design neighborhoods through a computer screen’


The photo at right arrived about 10 days ago from Davidson-based transportation planner John Cock.
Cock and I were among a group of fans of the late Warren Burgess, who died at age 56 in May 2005.
The plaque was installed a few weeks ago beside a bald cypress tree that had been planted in his honor in Davidson’s Roosevelt Wilson Park shortly after Burgess died.
Burgess – or Warren, as I’m more comfortable saying – was for more than 20 years an urban designer on the staff of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission. He was Davidson town planner from 2000 to 2003. To this day, he has a fan club of sorts, people like Cock and former Davidson planner Meredith Judy whom Warren mentored, as well as other urban designers and planners in the area, like David Walters, the just-retired head of UNC Charlotte’s Master of Urban Design program.
You may have noticed over the years that there are some occupations that lend themselves to memorial plaques,
statues, road-namings and the like. City planner is not typically one of them. But Warren was cut from a different bolt of cloth, and gave so much of his heart to Charlotte and Davidson that it’s only appropriate that it be noted somewhere.
After seeing the plaque photo, I looked back at two columns I wrote about Warren when I worked at the Charlotte Observer.  The first was in 2000, when he left Charlotte city hall for Davidson. I noticed something unusual at the sheetcake-and-punch ceremony for him at the government center. As I wrote then:
“Among the people saying nice things were Dottie Coplon, a relentless neighborhood activist who has battled both planners and developers, and Bailey Patrick Jr., lawyer and lobbyist for some of Charlotte’s most successful developers. It’s not often those two are singing from the same song sheet. But getting people together is one of the things Burgess does best.
“… The Thursday event symbolized something important about him. …  When you think about it, Warren is really just a bureaucrat, but he’s a bureaucrat with a difference: He wears his heart on his sleeve. … Sometimes, when people talk about “fighting City Hall,” it’s planners and zoning laws that they’re fighting. Burgess , who works at City Hall, understands that, but he still tries to help.” 
 He always walked over and over through neighborhoods where he was doing a plan, to get to know its terrain, its history and its residents. He sketched relentlessly, making drawings at meetings to supplement his notes. He cared – as the plaque notes – about trees, but also about creeks, front porches, sidewalks, plazas and parks, all the things that make up a city. He had these words of advice to other planners:
“A city is made up of people,” he told the farewell party. “Do not try to design neighborhoods through a computer screen.” 
When Warren died in 2005, I wrote: 
“Burgess left his fingerprints all over this city, in the plans he drew, the enduring vision he had for his city and the people and places he touched.
“Cities need catalysts, and Warren was a catalyst. He was always putting one person in touch with just the right other person, and dropping a good idea in just the right place, and in doing so altering the course of the planet.”
He spoke for the trees. But just as important, he spoke for the people who plant the trees, for the people who make up a city.

Charlotte history, hiding behind a wall

Can you find the Jane Wilkes statue behind the brick wall along Morehead Street? (See below) Photo: Mary Newsom

One of the best statues I’ve ever seen sits atop Rome’s Gianicolo Hill. A series of Busts of Important Men lines an avenue, and there is the obligatory statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the Italian hero of the Italian unification movement in the 19th century.

But a short walk away is another statue. It’s Anita Garibaldi. She is sidesaddle, atop a rearing horse, holding a small child in her left arm, close to her breast. With her right, she aims a pistol at the sky. What a woman!

Anita Garibaldi. Photo: “Blackcat” via Widkimedia Commons


Charlotte, in some ways being even more traditional than Rome, does not memorialize its women with statues. Heck, it barely memorialized anyone with statues – at least, not until the Trail of History project came along, since representational statuary today is about as fashionable among artists as bustles, spats and top hats. 

That’s a group of local donors and history buffs who are working to erect a series of statues of historic personages along the Little Sugar Creek Greenway. Their first was a monument to Capt. James Jack, who rode from Charlotte to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1775 carrying (according to local legend) a copy of the May 20, 1775, Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Meck Dec skeptics say he only carried the Mecklenburg Resolves, adopted May 31, 1775. Whatever.  There’s a guy on a charging horse, in a pool of water across Kings Drive from Central Piedmont Community College.
Now Trail of History monument No. 2 is up, and by golly, it’s a woman: Jane
Renwick Smedberg Wilkes. Read more about her here. She was a New Yorker who married her first cousin, John Wilkes, and moved to Charlotte in 1854. After the Civil War she was active in founding the first two civilian hospitals in Charlotte, including Good Samaritan, the now-demolished hospital for blacks during that segregated era.

Jane Wilkes. Photo: Tom Hanchett

The statue, designed by Wendy M. Ross of Bethesda, Md., depicts a woman with a slight smile (and not brandishing a pistol). It’s the smile of someone who is possibly about to ask you to support a project for which she is raising funds, and whose smile is also a bit stern, as if to show that even if you do not give her any money, she will not rest until you – and others – make her project a success.

While it’s excellent that our monuments are honoring one woman among the seven people planned to have statues (see the list here), it’s a bit odd that this statue is hiding behind a very long brick wall along Morehead Street, where it crosses Little Sugar Creek. Why have a wall between the sidewalk and a public park area? That seems to me inappropriately suburbanistic for this part of the city.  Plus, it obscures the existence of the statue and the nice flowers planted around it. When you are walking on the Little Sugar Creek Greenway on the other side of the creek, you have no idea the monument to Jane Wilkes is even there.

I asked Mecklenburg County Park and Recreation Department greenway planner Gwen Cook for details on the design of the garden. She relates, via email: “At Robert Haywood Morrison Gardens [the formal name for the small garden in which the statue resides], the wall is an essential element of the garden. The noise from Morehead Street is terrible. You couldn’t hear yourself think, and if we hadn’t got that right, we’d have no garden. We had to add the wall to manage the ambience of the garden.” She said the garden, but not the statue, are on maps along the greenway.

The only way I knew the statue was there was having read about it in the Charlotte Observer. As her great-great granddaughter, Margo Fonda of Charlotte, told the Observer, “Jane Wilkes was from a time when women didn’t vote, didn’t hold jobs and stayed in the background, but she did incredible things. And she was really humble about it, not even acknowledging it in her autobiography. The idea of a statue to her is really cool.”

*Once you get behind the brick wall, you discover Jane Wilkes’ statue. Photo: Mary Newsom

Tree ordinance proposal raises alarms around N.C.

Photo: Nancy Pierce

Charlotte likes to boast of its tree canopy, so a proposal at the state level to gut N.C. cities’ tree ordinances has gotten Charlotte City Council’s attention. At the council’ Environment Committee meeting on Wednesday, after a briefing about the measure, the committee referred the issue to another committee to devise a lobbying strategy with N.C. legislators. Here’s the PlanCharlotte.org article I wrote yesterday after the meeting.

But if you’d like to burrow a bit deeper into the issue, here are links to news coverage from around the state:

 It’s not entirely clear how the proposal emerged late in April from a state study panel, the Agriculture and Forestry Services Study Commission, its members appointed by the legislature and the governor.

But at one March meeting, the commission heard from an Iredell County nurseryman upset over municipal regulations in some cities over who pays for trees that get planted and aren’t acceptable to local government officials. And some state legislators, as well as developer lobbying groups, have said for years that some cities over-reach in their ordinances affecting private property.

Here’s a link to the agenda materials for the study commission’s March 28 meeting, with a copy of a
presentation from John Allen of Shiloh Nursery in Iredell County. Allen’s presentation shows a variety of news clips about an incident in 2011 in which the city of Charlotte fined Albemarle Road Presbyterian Church after a church member severely pruned crape myrtle trees (horticulturists call this kind of pruning “crape murder”) on church property but which apparently had been planted because of a requirement in the city’s ordinances. After a national outcry city officials dropped the fine, and said they were working with the church to educate members about pruning techniques that would not harm the trees.

Meanwhile, in Greensboro, civic discontent continues over what many believe to be extreme tree-trimming practices by Duke Energy. Last week a confrontation between a local couple and tree-trimmers led to police and an assistant city manager being called to the scene, and Mayor Nancy Vaughan getting involved. Here’s the report in Triad City Beat. Residents there have been so angry for so many years that last year the Greensboro City Council created a new tree ordinance aimed at preventing some of the more severe tree trimming.

Over the years utility tree-trimming has also infuriated residents in Charlotte neighborhoods. Some years back, when I was at the Charlotte Observer, I got a surprise phone call from then-Planning Director Martin Cramton, as angry as I had ever heard him, complaining of a contractor for Duke Energy who showed up in his back yard intending to, from what Cramton described, essentially clear-cut a part of the yard. Cramton, phoned by his wife, had rushed home and got the tree-cutting delayed for a time. But — maybe because Duke is headquartered in Charlotte, and then-Mayor Pat McCrory was an employee, or maybe because of how often fallen limbs disrupt power here — the Charlotte City Council never seriously discussed an anti-tree-trimming ordinance. The Planning Commission discussed possible ways to get more power lines buried. Those talks went nowhere, either.