Category: Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission

In 1969 planners imagined Charlotte’s University City. Did their vision come true?

1969 University City Planning Concepts

This is part two of my “I Love Old Maps” series.  In addition to ferreting out that fun 1986 map of Charlotte, retiring UNC Charlotte Associate Provost Owen Furuseth also handed me a 1969 city plan for University City, the part of Charlotte that surrounds UNC Charlotte, where I work.

The plan was produced by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission — “William McIntyre, Planning Director; Richard C. Hauersperger, Chief Planner; Gary L. Sieb, City Planner, and W. Earl Long, Planning Intern.” The university, which now has 27,000 students, at the time had 2,350 students in nine buildings. The plan predicted that eventually the university would serve 15,000 students.

Its goals are laudable, if imprecise. “This report outlines the Planning Commission’s concept of the kind of community University City might become if its development is fashioned to create an environment of quality.” It lists some goals, among them:

  • “To create a community designed for the convenience of its people.” Since the whole area can basically be navigated only by car once you leave the campus, I’d score that at a 3 on a scale of 10.
  • “To carefully fit the development of the community into the land so that it preserves the assets of the natural landscape.” I’d score that about a 4 on a scale of 10. 
  • Other goals would get a higher score from me: Providing housing, developing public and private facilities, etc. Then this final one, which I’ll let you score on your own:
  • “To create a community that is distinctive in the character and quality of its development — a community of beauty.” (Note, this is not about the UNCC campus, but the rest of the area.)
 THE GENERAL DEVELOPMENT PLAN

On page 19 is the General Development Plan, shown below.

Click on map to zoom in.

Observe several things:

  • Notice how the area surrounding the university campus (the cross-hatched area) and its few related apartments (vertical stripes) is coded for single-family residential development (the small dots). At the time, much of that area was rural, either pastures, farmland or woods. No thought, apparently, that farmland might be worth keeping around as farmland. That reflects the general thinking at the time, from what I’ve heard: Rural land would of course be with us, somewhere (but just not here) so no need for special farmland preservation, and in any case “Growth Is Good.”
  • Note the proposals for Open Space and Recreation beside most creeks in the area. That was far-sighted.  Of course, having the idea in 1969 did not mean those recreation areas would get built swiftly, or ever. One university-area greenway along Toby Creek is finally being built this year, after 18 years of planning. 
  • Notice how little space is planned for commercial development, compared to today’s stripped-out big-box development and strip centers along University City Boulevard (shown on the map as N.C. 49) and North Tryon Street, (shown on the map as U.S. 29). 

THE TOWN CENTER

Admirably, the plan does have a small area set out for a Town Center, where today’s Town Center Plaza sits, a strip shopping center that is most definitely not a town center. The images in the plan are straight out of a Modernist playbook, with engineered people standing in concrete plazas with plantings in concrete planters, and, yes, some sculptural looking tree-like artifacts.

An image of the envisioned Town Center for University City, circa 1969.

But the idea of the place is not at all bad: “With some skill and imagination in the planning and development of the Center it can become a delightful community magnet — a place where people come not only to do business but where they gather to have group meetings, see exhibits on subject of interest, enjoy terrace dining, window shop in a pleasant atmosphere, see a movie or engage in a variety of enjoyable activities. The Town Center should become an integral part of the social, cultural and architectural character of University City.

The final page of the booklet’s text says this:  “The Center should be designed to create an environment of distinguished architectural and landscape quality.” I’ll let you score that one.

Sigh.

Town Center Plaza across University City Boulevard from UNC Charlotte. Photo: Google Street View

WHAT GOT BUILT AND WHY

How could a plan be so unlike what ended up getting built? Many things played a role, but one important one still at work today, almost 50 years later, is that unlike many other cities, in Charlotte plans are thoughts, not rules. The rules for what people must build based on the zoning exist in a whole other document, the zoning ordinance.

If the zoning ordinance had required a different kind of development, then we would have seen a different kind of development in University City. That holds true today. The city plans call for walkable urban neighborhoods near the new transit stops along the new Blue Line Extension. But near the stations? Here is what is getting built:

City zoning allows new strip-style development in the shadow of the parking deck for a light rail stop (not visible here). Photo: Google Street View

Based on the zoning. I checked the online zoning map for the city. As the 1969 plan outlined, that chunk of land is zoned for industrial development. The light rail route was planned in 1998.  In almost 20 years no one with the city bothered to change the zoning to require transit-oriented development. Again, a sigh.

Can Charlotte become more walkable and bikeable? The conversation continues

AARP volunteers get ready to begin a walkability audit uptown with guest speaker Gil Penalosa of 8-80 Cities in October.  Photo: Juan Ossa

It isn’t every day in Charlotte that within five hours you hear the World Health Organization invoked in conversation about planning and livability. But as a Charlotte discussion continues about whether the city needs to purposefully shift its primary emphasis away from motorists and toward to bicycles, pedestrians and transit, the “livability” term just keeps coming up.

Monday morning, I learned that the Town of Matthews in southern Mecklenburg County is the first, and to date only, municipality in North Carolina to sign on as an AARP Age Friendly Community.
That AARP initiative, as it turns out, is an affiliate of the WHO’s Age-Friendly Cities and Communities Program, a global effort dating to 2006 to help cities prepare for both increasing urbanization and for an aging population, as the huge Baby Boom generation hits retirement age.
Michael Olender, the Charlotte-based associate state director for AARP, says he’s in conversations with the Charlotte mayor’s office about whether Charlotte should also seek to join.
What does “age-friendly community” have to do with walkability and livability? Simply this: As planners and policymakers focus on the wishes and needs of the huge Millennial generation, Olender says, not much attention is being paid to the needs of what the older generation wants. But, he says, “What Boomers want mirrors very closely what Millennials want. They want to walk. They want good public transit.”
Fast-forward a few hours. I’m at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission’s monthly work session. Planning commissioner Deb Ryan, an associate professor of urban design at UNC Charlotte, is giving a short presentation on the role of livability and public health in city planning. She pointedly did not call it “sustainability.”
“ ‘Sustainability’ means everything and nothing,” Ryan said. Instead, she talked about becoming a “livable city.”
“While you may be opposed to sustainability, you can’t be opposed to better public health,” she said.
But what about the World Health Organization? As Ryan described how cities throughout history have acted to improve the health of their residents, she showed the WHO’s definition of health: “A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
“We’ve created a world where it’s much easier to drive than to walk,” Ryan said. “We’ve created neighborhoods where to get anywhere you have to drive. People have grown up with this. They think it’s normal.”
To show how transportation choices are a public health issue, Ryan pointed not only to the air pollution from auto exhaust, but to the role of physical exercise and to diseases today. In 1900 tuberculosis was the second leading cause of death in the U.S., with pneumonia (often related to TB) and influenza No. 1. By 1998 the leading cause of death was cardiovascular disease, with cancer a distant second. And research from the Activing Living Research project has found, for instance, that people who live in walkable communities are two times as likely to get enough physical activity as those who don’t.
  
The planning commission is an appointed advisory body that offers recommendations, not final decisions, on rezonings and planning policies. Nevertheless, Ryan urged her fellow commissioners to consider taking a stand in favor of stronger measures to move the city toward livability. “We have such a car-centric city now,” she said. “Are we stuck with what we have?”
And I’ll go out on a limb to note that not many people or neighborhoods in Charlotte can claim to have “complete physical, mental and social well-being.”  But can we do better at the way we’re building the city? Absolutely

.

Council member says planning IS included

City Council member David Howard just phoned to comment on my previous post, “Charlotte’s disappearing focus on planning.” Howard chaired the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission before he was elected to an at-large Charlotte City Council seat.  He wants to make this point: The council committee, which he chairs, is still named Transportation and Planning. I’ve corrected the previous post to make that change.

The council’s committees essentially divvy up the workload, vetting issues before they reach the full council. So his committee hears and gives preliminary approval to many – but not all – area plans, land use policy changes, etc.  The so-called focus areas are the issues the council makes its top priorities. He said planning has never been a council focus area, “because it’s infused in everything.”

Since I was fortunate enough to have the chairman of the Transportation and Planning committee on the horn, I asked him about another tidbit I had spotted while burrowing through Charlotte City Manager Curt Walton’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year. This is on page 70. Deep in the text accompanying the summary of the Planning Department’s accomplishments and focus, etc., under “Service Delivery Challenges,” is this:

“One of Planning’s challenges is updating this [zoning and development] ordinance so that it reflects desired community characteristics and recently adopted land use and urban design public policy. A more comprehensive update is necessary. This will require a tremendous amount of resources and technical expertise that Planning does not have available in-house and funding is not available. The impact of which will be the inability to fully implement adopted area plans and [not] achieving the highest quality development Planning can in our community.” 

In other words – and if you follow my writing this will sound familiar because I have been beating this drum for years – the city-county zoning ordinance needs a top-to-bottom rewrite. The types of development it allows and in some cases requires can all too often completely undercut the city’s adopted plans and policies.

I asked Howard about that. He said he had had conversations with Planning Director Debra Campbell about that issue while he was on the planning commission. I asked if the idea of a comprehensive re-do of the city’s zoning ordinance had come up at the City Council level. “It hasn’t come up to that level,” he said.

As a postscript I’ll note, just because Charlotte and Raleigh NEVER compete, that Raleigh has in the past few years finished a massive re-do of its comprehensive plan, adopted in 20090, and is embarked on the huge task of rewriting its whole zoning code so that it upholds the plans.  That process is in the public comment period.

Planning commissioners get tough

Here’s a heartening (well, sort of, as you’ll see) little event that took place at a little-heralded government meeting this week. It involves planning commissioners pushing to get a better outcome on a proposed rezoning.

The rezoning in question involves a highly visible corner at East Boulevard and Scott Avenue, in the heart of the Dilworth neighborhood’s commercial district. If you’ve lived in Charlotte for a long time, you’ll remember it as the site of the still-missed Epicurean Restaurant, home of fabulous steaks and The World’s Best Biscuits, small morsels of buttery heaven which perfectly trained waiters brought around to your table throughout the evening, so you ended up consuming several thousand calories in biscuits alone, along with your steak and potato.

The Epicurean closed about 12 years ago. The Castanas family that’s owned the property since 1959 tried to redevelop the site in the late 1990s but couldn’t get the financing, owner George Castanas told me on Wednesday.

They want to put a parking lot at that key intersection. (Actually, people have been parking there already, in violation of existing zoning, NS, which doesn’t allow parking lots.) So they’re seeking a rezoning. It’s complicated, involving something called a “Pedscape Overlay” for East Boulevard. But the upshot is that the new zoning category they seek would require an improved, wider sidewalk along East. The owners want to keep the same old sidewalk, which a Charlotte DOT staffer estimated at 5 feet with a small planting strip, or none, depending on where you look.

The planning staff is OK with letting the rezoning go forward without an improved sidewalk. Indeed, because the rezoning would be to something called “optional” – B-1 (PED-O) instead of B-1 (PED) – the better sidewalk wouldn’t, technically, required. The “optional” means you can do pretty much what you want as long as the city will let you get away with it. (Some optional options are more palatable than others, of course.)

Throwing aside the larger question of why you’d have a supposedly pedestrian-friendly zoning standard (i.e. PED) at one of the key intersections in the main commercial area of one of the city’s most historic neighborhoods that allows a surface parking lot — after all, can you say “pedscape”? – why didn’t the planning staff at least push the owners to improve that bad sidewalk?

At Wednesday’s meeting of the Zoning Committee (which is a sub-set of the appointed Planning Commission, the one that makes recommendations to the City Council on rezoning petitions) several commissioners began pushing the staff on this very question. Nina Lipton, Tracy Dodson, Greg Phipps and Claire Fallon all chimed in, diplomatically, of course, to suggest that something better for the public could be accomplished. The planners’ point had been that the parking lot isn’t likely to be the permanent development at that corner, so whatever happens now is likely just interim.

But commissioners Lipton and Fallon both questioned how long “interim” might be, since the lot’s been sitting undeveloped for 12 years already.

With the property owner really wanting that parking lot, and really needing a rezoning to make the parking lot legal, the planners actually have some leverage in this case. Yet they didn’t appear to have tried to use it.

In the end, the Zoning Committee voted to delay making their recommendation on the rezoning until September to give the property owner time to “work with the neighborhood” – i.e. the Dilworth community association – to come up with an idea that’s closer to the spirit of the pedscape designs.

Planning commissioners get tough

Here’s a heartening (well, sort of, as you’ll see) little event that took place at a little-heralded government meeting this week. It involves planning commissioners pushing to get a better outcome on a proposed rezoning.

The rezoning in question involves a highly visible corner at East Boulevard and Scott Avenue, in the heart of the Dilworth neighborhood’s commercial district. If you’ve lived in Charlotte for a long time, you’ll remember it as the site of the still-missed Epicurean Restaurant, home of fabulous steaks and The World’s Best Biscuits, small morsels of buttery heaven which perfectly trained waiters brought around to your table throughout the evening, so you ended up consuming several thousand calories in biscuits alone, along with your steak and potato.

The Epicurean closed about 12 years ago. The Castanas family that’s owned the property since 1959 tried to redevelop the site in the late 1990s but couldn’t get the financing, owner George Castanas told me on Wednesday.

They want to put a parking lot at that key intersection. (Actually, people have been parking there already, in violation of existing zoning, NS, which doesn’t allow parking lots.) So they’re seeking a rezoning. It’s complicated, involving something called a “Pedscape Overlay” for East Boulevard. But the upshot is that the new zoning category they seek would require an improved, wider sidewalk along East. The owners want to keep the same old sidewalk, which a Charlotte DOT staffer estimated at 5 feet with a small planting strip, or none, depending on where you look.

The planning staff is OK with letting the rezoning go forward without an improved sidewalk. Indeed, because the rezoning would be to something called “optional” – B-1 (PED-O) instead of B-1 (PED) – the better sidewalk wouldn’t, technically, required. The “optional” means you can do pretty much what you want as long as the city will let you get away with it. (Some optional options are more palatable than others, of course.)

Throwing aside the larger question of why you’d have a supposedly pedestrian-friendly zoning standard (i.e. PED) at one of the key intersections in the main commercial area of one of the city’s most historic neighborhoods that allows a surface parking lot — after all, can you say “pedscape”? – why didn’t the planning staff at least push the owners to improve that bad sidewalk?

At Wednesday’s meeting of the Zoning Committee (which is a sub-set of the appointed Planning Commission, the one that makes recommendations to the City Council on rezoning petitions) several commissioners began pushing the staff on this very question. Nina Lipton, Tracy Dodson, Greg Phipps and Claire Fallon all chimed in, diplomatically, of course, to suggest that something better for the public could be accomplished. The planners’ point had been that the parking lot isn’t likely to be the permanent development at that corner, so whatever happens now is likely just interim.

But commissioners Lipton and Fallon both questioned how long “interim” might be, since the lot’s been sitting undeveloped for 12 years already.

With the property owner really wanting that parking lot, and really needing a rezoning to make the parking lot legal, the planners actually have some leverage in this case. Yet they didn’t appear to have tried to use it.

In the end, the Zoning Committee voted to delay making their recommendation on the rezoning until September to give the property owner time to “work with the neighborhood” – i.e. the Dilworth community association – to come up with an idea that’s closer to the spirit of the pedscape designs.

The sad secret behind Charlotte plans

Just got back from a City Council committee meeting where that darn Michael Barnes – the District 4 representative who is running for district attorney – kept asking some impertinent questions.

The topic at hand was a draft of the Catawba Area Plan, which the planners are working on to address an area in the west of part of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, up next to the Catawba River and north of I-85. Part of the plan’s aim, it says, is to encourage “developments that are compatible with the surrounding natural environment” and to “integrate environmentally sensitive design elements” by incorporating natural features, minimizing paved surfaces, “preserving and creating open space and greenways” and using green design to try to reduce storm water runoff. Excellent goals, to be sure.

Barnes asked the planner, Alberto Gonzalez, to describe what the city’s doing to encourage developers to save more trees and for open space protection. Gonzalez replied that they’d encourage cluster development, where a developer puts houses closer together than usual in order to leave a bigger chunk of undeveloped land in a subdivision.

Barnes: Are we doing anything to increase the tree save on the interior of a development?
Gonzalez: The plan encourages developers to save more trees. … “There’s only so much we can go in terms of requirements.”

After some more back and forth about the proposed revisions to the city’s tree ordinance (the revisions are for commercial, not residential development) and the tree canopy study the council heard about last week (see report here, starting on page 72, see my recent posting here, and see editorial here) Barnes pointed out, ” ‘encouraging’ clearly doesn’t work.”

What he was getting at what this simple reality that many people don’t understand. Charlotte’s plans and policies talk a lot about the need to be environmentally sensitive, or pedestrian-friendly, or any of a number of other laudable goals. They have absolutely no teeth.

What has the teeth are the ordinances – the subdivision ordinance, the tree ordinance, the zoning ordinance, and so on. Until those ordinances require what the planners say they are “encouraging” then we don’t get much of it.

Yes, the planners “encourage” developers to do things during the rezoning process. But remember, approximately 75 percent of residential development here doesn’t go through any rezoning. And remember, too, that every rezoning, even those that are in direct conflict with any area plan, automatically “update” the plan. Sweet, eh?

Even the Catawba Area Plan PowerPoint presentation itself noted that in the “summary of citizen concerns” was this: “Need strong tools (regulations) to implement environmental recommendations.” (To see the PowerPoint presentation of the Catawba Area Plan that was given at the meeting, follow this link. To read the draft plan, follow this one.)

“I suggest we should start demanding more, so this city looks the way we want it to in 20 years,” Barnes said.

Spoken like a guy running for countywide office … But that said, he certainly hit on a good point.

When cultures collide … uptown

If you’re paying big bucks for a room at the Ritz, do you really want to hear loud bands playing at a huge collection of bars right across the street? Apparently, according to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Rodney Monroe, the answer is no.

Monroe was giving the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission a presentation Monday and mentioned the police were getting noise complaints from patrons of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which just opened Oct. 1.

Above the eighth-floor in the hotel, he said, you can really hear the sounds of bands on the rooftop patios. “It’ll rattle your windows,” he said. “When you pay a thousand dollars a night you don’t want your windows rattled.”

(Note of responsible journalism here: I checked the Ritz-Carlton web site and a weeknight room can be had for roughly $300-$370, less on weekends. I didn’t see any $1,000 possibilities. But then, I couldn’t find a room rate for the Presidential Suite, which looks rather lavish.)

Monroe was answering a question from a planning commissioner about how or whether zoning and plans affected crime rates. He pointed out that both the EpiCentre and the Ritz were developments everyone had wanted. “Be careful what you ask for, you just may get it!”