Category: Charlotte

Not just unwalkable. Charlotte is ‘least dense city in world’

 A new article from Wendell Cox at New Geography, “The Evolving Urban Form: Charlotte,” is probably bringing glee to suburban real estate champions and heartburn to uptown boosters and those who support a more transit-supportive city.

” … among the urban areas with more than 1 million population, Charlotte ranks last in urban population density in the United States (Figure 1) and last in the world,” Cox writes. Wow. This, on top of the Walk Score analysis that found Charlotte the least walkable large city in the U.S. (See “Charlotte trails nation in walkability rankings.”)

Cox is a long-time critic of cities’ pursuit of public transit systems and of trying to focus development policies on more compact neighborhoods that allow people to drive less and walk more. His Wikipedia page says, “Cox generally opposes planning policies aimed at increasing rail service and density, while favoring planning policies that reinforce and serve the existing transportation and building infrastructure.” It also says, “He has authored studies for conservative think tanks such as the Cato Institute, Heartland Institute, Heritage Foundation and the Reason Foundation, and for industry groups such as the American Highway Users Alliance, a lobbying and advocacy group for automobile-based industries.”
Even if you don’t agree with where he lands with his analysis, the simple numbers of urban density are worth noting. Of course, it’s always worth remembering that the geography that any Metropolitan Statistical Area takes in can make a big difference in what you’re calling “city” and that the MSA is different from what’s deemed the “urbanized area.” See “Boundary change boosts Charlotte metro population” and “Carolina metros, changes in the landscape.”
Take a look. Comments welcome.

Update, 2:48 p.m. Jan. 8: One reader points out that using the larger geography of zip codes tends to mask pockets of higher density, and also points to the U.S. Census listing of the most populous counties, which includes population per square mile, as shown here via Wikipedia. I looked, and it shows Mecklenburg County (not the Charlotte metro region, not the “urbanized area”) as in no way at the bottom of the density scores. Mecklenburg is denser than Maricopa County (Phoenix), San Diego County (Calif.), Miami-Dade County (Fla.), Honolulu County and Salt Lake County, among others. In other words, results depend a lot on which specific set of statistics one chooses to view.

When planners insist, Walmart gets urban


Multistory Walmart in Washington, in a mixed-use building.

Ed McMahon, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington — and a keynote speaker here in June for the RealityCheck regional planning exercise — sends along a photo of the new, urban-styled Walmart that opened Wednesday in Washington, on Seventh Street NW. “It shows what Wal-Mart can do, if you push them,” he writes.
In a later email, he said, “Wal-Mart* wants to be in hot urban markets like DC because cities are the only place left in America with more spending power than stores.” Because Walmart’s intention to build in Washington was controversial, he wrote, “The City Planning office pushed hard for good urban design.”

The huge retail chain has proposed six stores in D.C., McMahon writes. Two opened Wednesday. The other is on Georgia Avenue. A rendering is below. While the Seventh Street store has housing above the retail, the second one is single-use. but at least it’s sitting on the sidewalk like a respectable city building, and has parking underground rather than splayed out on an asphalt parking lot.

Now, just to get you thinking, just below is the new(ish) Walmart that opened near UNC Charlotte on North Tryon
Street north of University City Boulevard. The tract had been zoned for a conventional suburban-style shopping center since before the city even had plans for its light rail transit line or passed the transit tax in 1998. 
Bing maps photo
Despite knowing by 1998 that light rail would eventually be heading up North Tryon Street, the land was never rezoned for transit-oriented style development. Nor was other land along North Tryon Street.
Just a thought: The entrance to Walmart off North Tryon Street is roughly 1,500 feet (.28 mile) from the planned light rail station at McCullough Drive. It’s generally accepted by planners that the most important areas for transit-oriented development are those within a half-mile of transit stations; a quarter-mile walk is generally considered as far as most people will willingly walk. (Although I question that convention wisdom.)
Today, any piece of property if it already holds the city’s old-style commercial zoning, even if it is right smack-dab at a transit station, could sprout another Walmart-style building. And that does not mean DC-Walmart-style.
I just thought you’d like to know.
—
* Copy-editors and punctuation enthusiasts may wonder why I switch from Walmart to Wal-Mart and back? Two reasons. First, the stores are Walmart. The corporate entity is Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  Second, I was directly quoting McMahon’s email, and he called it “Wal-Mart.”
 

Least walkable city in U.S. is – wait a minute, that’s us!

Uptown is one of Charlotte’s most walkable areas, along with First and Fourth wards. Photo: Nancy Pierce

(Friday, Nov. 15: I’ve updated this with comments from Charlotte transportation officials. To see that expanded version, visit the article in PlanCharlotte.org: “Charlotte trails nation in walkability rankings.”)

Want to guess the large U.S. city rated worst for walkability by Walk Score, the national rating system?

That would be the Queen City. Take a look at the 2014 report. New York rated No. 1, followed by San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Miami.

But what does this ranking measure? The Walk Score website says it “measures the walkability of any address using a patent-pending system. For each address, Walk Score analyzes hundreds of walking routes to nearby amenities. Points are awarded based on the distance to amenities in each category. Amenities within a 5-minute walk (.25 miles) are given maximum points. A decay function is used to give points to more distant amenities, with no points given after a 30-minute walk.
Walk Score also measures pedestrian friendliness by analyzing population density and road metrics such as block length and intersection density. Data sources include Google, Education.com, Open Street Map, the U.S. Census, Localeze, and places added by the Walk Score user community.”

If I read that correctly, Walk Score doesn’t measure the existence of sidewalks (although Charlotte wouldn’t rank very high in that regard either). So this city’s typical Sun Belt-all-spread-out, low-density development means anything you’d want to walk to is probably farther away than in a more densely developed area.

Charlotte also would ran low in block length and intersection density – which essentially measures how well networked the city is with plenty of streets and street corners.Many parts of Charlotte developed during the cul-de-sac era, when streets intentionally did not connect to anything.
Even uptown, which at least had a strong grid when it was laid out a couple of centuries ago, has seen many instances of streets being eliminated to accommodate large-footprint projects such as ballparks, stadiums, convention centers and parks.

I’m seeking comment from Charlotte Department of Transportation officials, but I doubt this ranking will surprise them. 

What’s up (or not) with a zoning ordinance re-do?


It’s been almost three months since a consultants’ report concluded the city’s zoning ordinance is seriously in need of updating. (See my PlanCharlotte.org article, “Report: Charlotte ordinance confusing, lacks modern tools” from July.

What’s happening next?  Planning Director Debra Campbell discussed that at an Oct. 7 meeting of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, an appointed advisory board to the city’s Planning Department and City Council. 
Campbell said the planning staff is discussing how to link the zoning ordinance assessment process with their planning process. The planners want to look at whether a revised zoning ordinance would mean revising the way plans are done, which today are the “Euclidian model,” Campbell said. For non-planners, that means based on single-use zoning districts.  (The term “Euclidian zoning” isn’t about Euclidian geometry, but is named for the 1926 Supreme Court case, Village of Euclid, Ohio, v. Ambler Realty Co., which ruled that land use zoning is constitutional. The Euclid zoning ordinance was based on single-use districts, a type of land use generally considered suburban or rural, not suitable for large cities.)

 

“Our plans are very use-based,” Campbell said. “They’re colors on a map.” In other words, local plans tend to map large areas and, with color-coding, delineate land uses should go where. Instead, Campbell said, “I want them to focus on both use and character.” Sometimes, she said, getting too deep into the planning process can seem dry and boring to the general public. “In general people want to be involved with what’s it going to look like, what’s it going to feel like?”
Laura Harmon, the department’s director of development services, said the staff would have a better idea of how to link plans and the zoning ordinance “in the next month or two.”
Said Campbell: “If there’s a fatal flaw that I have, it’s that I like to go slow … I like to bring folks along with me.”

What McCrory’s win really means

Tuesday’s gubernatorial election was a watershed for North Carolina, but for a reason that’s gotten a lot less ink than the Red State-Blue State lines. For the first time in the history of this once-rural state, a big-city mayor moves into the Governor’s Mansion. Pat McCrory’s election may well mark North Carolina’s transition from rural to urban.
 
To have elected the mayor of the state’s biggest city – whose whole political career has been in Charlotte city government – is a huge transition. It’s bigger, in my view, than the state switching from red to blue (in 2008) back to red in the presidential election, as N.C. this year went narrowly (by 96,600 votes) for Republican Mitt Romney.

McCrory will be North Carolina’s first Republican governor since Jim Martin was elected in 1984 and only the third since since Reconstruction. And it’s a big change, too, that for the first time since the 1880s, Republicans will hold the governorship and both chambers of the N.C. General Assembly. But for one party to control all three is not new; Democrats did that for decades. It’s also noteworthy that McCrory is the first Charlottean elected governor since lawyer Cameron Morrison in 1920. Among a string of Charlotte mayors who tried for statewide office –  Eddie Knox, Harvey Gantt, Sue Myrick and Richard Vinroot – only McCrory succeeded. “The curse is over,” he joked election night. (Aside: Martin was a Davidson College professor and a Mecklenburg County commissioner but campaigned as, and governed as, a resident of “Lake Norman.”)

Sitting around after midnight on election night, waiting for the Romney and Obama speeches, I started digging into N.C. history to see if I could find any mayor of a sizable city elected governor. The closest I found was Raleigh’s Joseph Melville Broughton, governor 1941-45. In 1940, Raleigh had 47,000 people. That’s not a big city. (Gregg Cherry, a former Gastonia mayor, was governor 1945-1949. Wikipedia tidbit: “It was joked  in Gastonia that he was the best lawyer in town when sober, and the second-best lawyer in town when drunk.”) Otherwise, nada.

 While the rest of the country probably still thinks of North Carolina as a land of tobacco farms, sharecropper shacks, textile mill villages and kudzu – with a lone, high-tech splotch of intelligentsia in the Triangle –  we who live here know better. This state has more urban/suburban residents now than rural ones. We’re a large state, so we have plenty of rural areas, but the urban crescent that follows I-85 from Gastonia through Raleigh-Durham is large and growing in clout – not to mention problems of transportation, sprawl, housing and the usual assorted urban problems.

Because of the state’s history of rural poverty, rural areas are the focus of numerous initiatives to provide economic development, and rightly so. Yet traditionally, the state’s cities have had little clout in state government. And while individual projects can win state blessings, the idea of an “urban strategy” has been MIA. If there are any holistic efforts to address urban poverty statewide, I have not heard about them. Yet urban poverty here is a huge problem, and a growing one.
 
With help from my colleague Laura Simmons, we pulled some census numbers. Looking only at the four most populous of the state’s 100 counties (Mecklenburg, Wake, Guilford and Forsyth) you find 390,238 people living in poverty. Then we looked at the same data for rural Eastern North Carolina, which I calculated as all 38 counties east of, or touched by, I-95. It’s more than a third of the state. Those numbers are higher, but not dramatically: 489,318. In other words, the number of poor people in four urban counties is 80 percent of the total in 38 other counties. And that tally does not even include Durham, Fayetteville, Asheville or Wilmington.

Charlotte’s light rail line. Photo: Charlotte Area Transit System

McCrory has been careful to say he’ll be governor of the whole state, and I expect he will. But to be mayor of the whole state means understanding city issues as well as rural ones.

He is also one of the founders of the N.C. Metropolitan Mayors Coalition, a group of mayors from the state’s larger cities that “promotes the interchange of ideas and experiences among municipal officials for the continued development of urban areas.” He won national fame as a strong champion for Charlotte’s transit system, which led to the 2007 launch of the Lynx light rail line. He took a courageous stand to battle the city’s influential subdivision developers by pushing for sidewalks to be required on both sides of new subdivision streets. He battled NCDOT over the lack of bike lanes or sidewalks on NCDOT highway bridges.Unless he was asleep for 14 years as mayor (and trust me, he was not) he understands how the end of annexation has the potential to gravely damage N.C. cities’ financial stability. 

None of those things necessarily predicts how he’ll govern. After all, there is this legislature over on Jones Street that decides budgets, programs and a gazillion other matters large and small, even dictating the public school calendar. All you have to do is glance south to Columbia to see that party affiliation does not guarantee intraparty harmony. Further, a Charlotte transit champion in 1998 might find Raleigh in 2013 to be a steep, rocky and barren landscape.

But when cities head to Raleigh to try to pitch their causes, for the first time, they’ll have a governor who – even if he may not give them what they want – when he says, “I feel your pain,” they’ll know he really does.

Charlotte transit plan makeover goes beyond cosmetic surgery

The stalled-for-years proposal to build a commuter rail line from downtown Charlotte north to the booming suburban towns of Huntersville, Cornelius, Davidson and Mooresville is getting a significant makeover, not just cosmetic surgery. The state and local officials involved are looking to find funding with freight-oriented development, a sort of cousin to the more widely recognized transit-oriented development (a.k.a. TOD).

The project has been stalled because it hasn’t qualified for federal funding, which typically pays half the cost of a transit line. After years of patiently sitting by, towns in northern Mecklenburg County and Mooresville in Iredell County formed the Lake Norman Transportation Commission, which succeeded in kick-starting a fresh look at the so-called Red Line (which honors the Davidson College school color).

A Wednesday meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Commission heard a detailed presentation of the financing plans. I couldn’t make it, but here are several looks at the presentation: The Charlotte Business Journal’s Erik Spanberg “Red Line rolls toward 2012 vote”  and DavidsonNews.net/CorneliusNews.net’s Christina Ritchie Rogers’ “Homeowners won’t see tax hike in Red Line plans, consultants say.”

Here’s a link to the various presentations and handouts from the MTC meeting.

Nothing’s been decided yet, of course. The Lake Norman Transportation Commission will hold a four-hour summit on the proposal Dec. 13 in Mooresville (10 a.m.-2 p.m. at the Charles Mack Citizens Center, 215 N. Main St.).

Then the different governments, who’d have to agree to create a joint powers authority, must study the proposal and decide whether to opt in. From my observations, I’d predict Charlotte, Mecklenburg County and the Mecklenburg towns are on board. The trickier discussions will be in Mooresville and Iredell County. Although many in Mooresville have favored the transit idea, Iredell County commissioners have traditionally been wary of anything that might be viewed as a tax increase.

This proposal would create a sort of self-imposed tax assessment on owners of income-producing property (that is, not residential property) along the line. A part of the tax revenue from the new development would be used to help pay the costs of the rail construction. A portion of the new tax revenue generated from rail-related development would go to local general funds. This proposal would create a sort of self-imposed tax increase on property owners along the line, although it would send a proportion of those extra revenues into local general funds. (2:50 p.m.: Wording refinement on details of the proposal.)

Adding the freight proposal, which takes advantage of a national boom in freight rail fed by rising gas prices rise and freeway congestion, makes the Red Line plan more clearly an economic development maneuver. Luring freight-oriented industry might be a strategy Iredell leaders can be comfortable with, as opposed to simply building a commuter rail line that will draw more Charlotte-bound workers, which will bring homes and children needing county-funded services.

Like the $5 million regional HUD planning grant, the Red Line joint powers authority proposal is one more example of the need to treat the Charlotte region as more than a disconnected set of individual governments, but as, well, a region.

Did rogue columnist hit, or miss, in Charlotte critique?

Reading the happy Tweets out of Charlotte this afternoon, as the Chiquita headquarters announcement came through, I stumbled on a link from former Charlotte Observer business editor Jon Talton, who decamped years ago for Phoenix and Seattle. Talton always had an astute, if acerbic, analysis on Charlotte and its civic pride (or boosterism, take your pick).

After Talton (@jontalton) sent out this Tweet: “Chiquita: Say goodbye to world-class symphony, museums, architecture in #Cincinnati. Say hello to Waffle House,” he started getting some replies from Charlotteans who didn’t like seeing their city reduced to a Waffle House stereotype.

“That’s kind of a harsh statement. Have you actually been to Charlotte?!” asked one Charlottean. Talton, of course, had lived here for years, though he confessed he rarely went outside the uptown beltway, because that gave him the “fantods.”  And his comeback to critics who said he was offending them and their city: “Oh, hell, I’ve been offending Charlotteans for years.”
 
But Talton had an insightful, if gloomy, assessment of the relative merits of Chicago and Charlotte, in this 2009 piece, “Tales of Two Cities: What Chicago and Charlotte Say About The Future Of America.”  It contains a wonderful quote from Pericles, “All good things come to the city because of the city’s greatness,” and one characterization I’d take issue with. The Bank of America Corporate Center was not built in “one of downtown’s most blighted areas.”
But is Talton too gloomy about the long-term prospects of Charlotte and other postwar, Sun Belt cities, built as though 1965 and its gas prices would last forever? I fear he’s right. And I hope he’s wrong.

Pedestrians get better press

Pedestrians – and their safety – got national attention this week. And in the process, a redesigned Charlotte intersection got some national attention, too.

Tuesday, a national transportation advocacy group, Transportation for America (T4 America) released its report, “Dangerous by Design 2011,” looking at what it called an epidemic of preventable pedestrian deaths. From 2000 to 2009, it said, 47,700 pedestrians were killed in this country – the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of passengers crashing roughly every month. More than 688,000 were injured. Nearly 12 percent of total traffic deaths are pedestrians, but, the report says, state departments of transportation have pretty  much ignored pedestrian safety if you look at how budgets are allocated. Only 1.5 percent of available federal money goes to projects to retrofit dangerous roads and streets or create safer alternatives.

The report uses a pedestrian danger index based on a variety of factors and ranks the U.S. metro areas. The most dangerous, in order: Orlando, Tampa-St. Petersburg, Jacksonville, Miami-Fort Lauderdale (all in Florida), Riverside-San Bernardino Calif., Las Vegas, Memphis, Phoenix, Houston, Dallas-Forth Worth. All are Sun Belt cities, and all but Memphis saw major growth booms in the last half of the 20th century, when suburban-style development catered almost exclusively to automobiles. 

Atlanta was No. 11. Raleigh-Cary was No. 13. Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord hit No. 17.

Fully a third of Americans can’t or don’t drive, and for most, being able to walk places is important. They are our children, our young teens, our elderly and our disabled. The City of Charlotte has pushed hard, and admirably, in the past 10 years to make the city better and safer for pedestrians, by ordering sidewalks to be built in new subdivisions, building sidewalks where they’re lacking in earlier developments, and retro-fitting intersections to add crosswalks and pedestrian refuges.  Here’s to an even lower spot on the next ranking.

One of those retrofitted Charlotte intersections (at top) got national display at npr.org, with a Tuesday piece on “Morning Edition”  – “As America Ages, A Push To Make Street Safer.”   The piece talked about efforts to improve safety for the elderly, both pedestrians and drivers.   Although Charlotte isn’t mentioned in the piece, see that photo at the top? That’s Rozzelles Ferry Road, redesigned by the city to add bike lanes, crosswalks and extended sidewalks.

Photo credit: NPR and National Complete Streets Coalition.

20 cities to avoid – or not?

CNBC.com has put together an interesting slide show of 20 cities you don’t want to live in … yet.
With each are a few paragraphs about that city’s problems and its good points, too. Not surprisingly, Detroit tops the list. Flint, Mich., is on there, too. And Fresno and Stockton, Calif., as well as Jackson, Miss., Little Rock, Ark., and Birmingham, Ala.

But I started looking at the unemployment rates listed with each of the so-called loser cities – and I don’t think they’re loser cities, but certainly troubled ones in many cases. The Charlotte regional jobless rate tops those of Cleveland, Buffalo, St. Louis, and possibly even Detroit. The blurb just said Detroit is “above 10 percent.” As is this region’s jobless rate: 10.7 percent in February. Mecklenburg’s rate in February was 10.2 percent. Hmmm – unemployment worse than Detroit? That would not be a Charlotte Chamber slogan you’ll be seeing anytime soon. Though it does portend sinking pay and desperate workers, which might attract some jobs …

Seriously, it’s a quick and interesting snapshot – based on someone’s set of criteria – of some cities. As the article quotes Bert Sperling of BestPlaces.net saying, in many cases young urban pioneers are moving back into the distressed cities such as Detroit, Cleveland and New Orleans, attracted by the housing prices and urban opportunities.

(Naked City is taking another long weekend break. I’ll be speaking Thursday in Beaufort, S.C., at 6:30 p.m. at the Technical College of the Lowcountry, 921 Ribault Road. The lecture’s free and open to the public so if you’re in that neighborhood, come on by. Sponsors are the Beaufort chapter of CNU Carolinas, the City of Beaufort, and Brown Design Studio.)

Our mayor in Spandex?

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, at his regular news briefing Thursday, mentioned that he’s been teaching his kids, 6 and 4, to ride bikes and said he went out and bought himself a road bike, the kind with toe clips that he’s still learning how to use.

The last few days, he said, “I’ve gone out at 5:30 in the morning and gone down to the Little Sugar Creek Greenway.” He talked about wanting to make the city friendlier to bicycling.

All of which leaves the obvious question, which yours truly was the only journalist in the room willing to ask: “So, are you wearing Spandex?”

Foxx: “I’m not answering that.”

Which I think means he must be.

So, dear readers, if anyone wants to volunteer to be a citizen journalist and go down on the greenway at – as my friend Brenda would say, “O-dark-thirty” – and try for a mayoral Spandex sighting, please let me know what you discover.