Category: Citistates

New look at old problem: Paying for transportation

RED WING, Minn. – Planning consultant Scott Polikov from Fort Worth, Texas, has an idea that needs a bigger audience. It’s about how you find money to build transit systems. That’s a problem Charlotte is facing, along with dozens of other U.S. cities. Based on his thinking it’s something Charlotte has possibly mismanaged, along with many other places.

The key understanding is that building a transit system (or any transportation system, whether it’s highways or canals) creates huge profits for real estate interests. Example: A transit authority will announce it’s building a line, and where the stations will be. Then it will go out and buy right of way, often through eminent domain, along that planned route, paying now-higher land prices, since the building of the line will make that land worth more.

“In Europe, the landowner pays for the right to have the station,” he said.

Why shouldn’t the government (that is, all of us, since we are the government) capture some of the value that it’s creating (that we’re creating) by building that infrastructure?

Indeed, in the pre-crash era there were developers who were seriously thinking about putting up millions to build Charlotte’s proposed commuter rail transit lines, because they knew it would make their development significantly more valuable. The same was true for the Triangle Transit proposed transit line.

Sometime, credit for real estate development will re-emerge. When that happens, why shouldn’t the Charlotte Area Transit System, for instance, auction off the development rights at the transit stations? And then use that money as a revenue stream? (Yeah, yeah there are a lot of legal issues involved, not to mention political ones.)

Consider how development has occurred along the Lynx light rail line through South End. The line was fixed. In an understandable effort to lure transit-oriented development at the station areas, the city has doggedly gone in and pro-actively up-zoned land to the TOD zoning – thereby giving away huge land value to the property owners. It also gave away any real power the city planners might have had to force better urban design onto that TOD development. If you’re already allowed by right to do your TOD, why should you listen to the city’s request that you do something different – for instance, including some affordable housing units?

(I’m at a yearly conference among people affiliated with the Citistates Associates, a loose coalition of planners, economists, think-tankers, current and former elected officials, Chamber of Commerce execs, etc., who share an interest in metro region growth issues.)

Best tax revenue bang for the buck? Not what you’d think

RED WING, Minn. – If you’re worried about local government’s fiscal crisis – and if you’re not, you should be; it’s why hundreds of local teachers are getting laid off, libraries closed and hours slashed – then you should read this.

I’m listening as Peter Katz, a local government official from Sarasota, Fla., shows a series of charts and graphs and talks about property taxes in Florida. In terms of land development in Florida, he says, “It’s like we’re falling off the edge of the earth. People are completely freaked out.”

So he decided to look at exactly where local property tax revenues come from. He shows bar graphs showing residential property tax revenue per acre in Sarasota County. The biggest revenues come from city residential areas.

Next he shows bar graphs showing revenue per acre for retail development. Here comes surprise No. 1. Wal-Mart/Sam’s Club development brings in only about as much, per acre, as city residential. (Think of all those acres of parking lots.) The biggest revenues come from Southgate Mall, an upscale shopping center. That’s not so surprising.

Then he shows the one that blows away the room – and this is a room of growth policy geeks, remember. He shows a bar graph on a whole different scale. In terms of property tax revenue per acre, high-rise downtown urban mixed use projects bring in more local revenue than even Southgate Mall, by what looks to my eye as a factor of about 10.

Next highest is mid-rise urban mixed use projects.

“From a fiscal standpoint this really puts hair on your chest,” Katz says to chuckles in the room.
Less than an acre of downtown high-rise mixed use urban development brings in more property tax revenue than a 21-acre Wal-Mart Supercenter, he says.
Update here, Thursday 7/1, after I get some information from Katz: He says, ” Less than an acre (.75 actually) of downtown high-rise mixed use urban development brings in more property tax revenue than a combination of the 21-acre Wal-Mart Supercenter and the 32-acre Southgate Mall, the county’s highest end commercial property with Macy’s, Dillards and Saks Fifth Avenue.

Then they looked at the payback time for the infrastructure costs for the development. The payback time (measured in property tax revenue, I believe) for the urban mixed use development was three years. Want to guess the payback time for infrastructure built for a planned mixed use development out at a highway interchange? It was a whopping 42 years.

Some disclaimers: Katz notes that they weren’t measuring sales tax, only property tax. He also notes that there’s obviously a limit on the market for high-rise mixed use projects in any downtown. And I’ll note that this posting is a real-time one, and I haven’t had time to check with Katz to ensure that I’ve totally gotten his stats correct.

Update No. 2: Katz notes that the tax analysis was done by Joe Minicozzi of Public Interest Projects, Inc., in Asheville.

(The event is a yearly conference among people affiliated with the Citistates Associates, a loose coalition of planners, economists, think-tankers, current and former elected officials, Chamber of Commerce execs, etc., who share an interest in metro region growth issues.)

Sane planning? Not for transportation

BRIDGEWATER, N.H. – Gather a bunch of people interested in urban regions – as opposed to just cities – and it’s only a matter of minutes before the acronym MPO comes up, and the grumbling starts.

MPO means Metropolitan Planning Organization, and it’s a federally mandated way to plan “transportation” “regionally.”

Those quote marks are intentional.

To too many MPOs, “transportation” means only roads, and of the highway genre, not of the city street genre and certainly not transit or pedestrian or bicycle paths.
And for an alarming number of MPOs, including in the Charlotte region, the “regional” part is a farce. The metro area most people recognize as the Charlotte metro region is home to four separate MPOs, or five, depending on how you count. So transportation planning here is completely fragmented – and Charlotte gets shorted when dollars are divvied.

Further, the Mecklenburg-Union MPO, affectionately known as MUMPO, rates about a 3 on a scale of 10, if 10 is to be completely multimodal in focus, and 1 is all-roads-all-the-time.

At a conference among members of the Citistates Group’s associates – an association of writers, thinkers, practitioners and government officials who share an interest in metro regions – I heard several MPO horror stories. Consider: In San Jose’s region, the largest city in the region (San Jose) in effect has no voting representative on its MPO.

But here’s what Tom Downs (former New Jersey transportation commissioner, former CEO of Amtrak, among other things) suggested: Too many MPOs are in violation of Title 23 of the U.S. Code (here’s a Wikipedia link), particularly the part that says the MPO should cover the whole metro area:

“Each metropolitan planning area —
(A) shall encompass at least the existing urbanized area and the contiguous area expected to become urbanized within a 20-year forecast period for the transportation plan; and may encompass the entire metropolitan statistical area or consolidated metropolitan statistical area, as defined by the Bureau of the Census.”

Ahem. Mecklenburg and Union counties are most decidedly not “the contiguous area expected to become urbanized within a 20-year forecast period for the transportation plan. ” Can you say, “Cabarrus County” or “Mooresville” or “Belmont-Gastonia-Mount Holly” or “Rock Hill-Fort Mill”?

What is to be done? Downs noted that the law has a process for decertifying an MPO that isn’t following the code. That’s a big hammer to use.

The multiple MPOs and RPOs (R as in rural) in this region – MUMPO plus Gastonia, Cabarrus-Rowan, Greater Hickory and Rock Hill-Fort Mill, S.C., MPOs and the Lake Norman and Rocky River RPOs – have not tried to consolidate, although any rational person can see that’s what should happen. Is it time for the hammer?

Do ‘uptown leaders’ still rule the roost?

Vacation over. No more outerbelt opinions — at least for a while. Onward to other things.

Is the Saturday Observer so slightly read that a huge package on the future of Charlotte — one suggesting that the city’s “business leaders” weren’t the leaders anymore — got only two comments? Maybe everyone was busy dying Easter eggs or playing in the sunshine. Even a column from UNC Charlotte’s Jeff Michael attracted little reader attention online. He writes that based on planning textbook factors, Charlotte shouldn’t have been an urban success at all.

So take a look. Do you agree that the local oligarchy of business leaders is gone? If so, who should take their place, and how should that process happen?

I wrote, “I keep hearing people asking who Charlotte’s next leaders will be – as though some king-maker somewhere gets out the royal staff and taps a few CEOs, who become The New Leaders. I think Charlotte is too big and too diverse for that old pattern of oligarchy to work, even if we wanted it to.”

Put your comments here, or on the article, if you care to comment. Reactions (those that are civil and have some thought informing them) will help shape comments at a series of forums around the region next week, with 2008 Citistates Report writers Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson and local elected officials, business leaders, environmentalists and others.

The forums are free and open to all. To Register: www.ui.uncc.edu.
They’ll be:
Tuesday, April 21, Gaston County: 2-4:30 p.m. at Gaston Citizen’s Resource Center, U.S. 321 North, Dallas.
Wednesday, April 22, York County: 1-3:30 p.m. at Rock Hill City Hall, 155 Johnston St., Rock Hill.
Thursday, April 23, Cabarrus County: 1-3:30 p.m., Cabarrus Arena and Events Center, 4751 N.C. 49 North, Concord.

I’m moderating the panels on Tuesday and Wednesday. I hope I’ll see some of you there.

Keep Charlotte ‘Starched’


Long time, no Naked City. Too many candidates for editorial board members to research, too little time. More and better items to come tomorrow, I vow. I’ve been tucking tidbits aside. But here’s a quick one now.

Architect/planner Tom Low was talking with Citistates Report writer Curtis Johnson last summer, thinking about Charlotte’s bank-town soul. As it happened, he was wearing a “Keep Austin Weird” hat. That city has built a national reputation as a place where eccentrics and local color are both tolerated and celebrated — not exactly the reputation Charlotte has. We’re more of a starched-shirt kind of city. What would Charlotte’s version of “Keep Austin Weird” be, Low wondered. Johnson quipped, “Keep Charlotte Starched.” And thus, a movement was born. Or to be more accurate, a movement may be born or not, depending.

Low has launched — well, he’s trying to launch — a “Keep Charlotte Starched” movement. There’s a Keep Charlotte Starched Web site, as well as some stickers, if you’re really keen on the idea.

But without one of our two banks, will Charlotte remain so starched? “How can we keep Charlotte starched?” Low asks. I’ll ask, do we want to? Best three comments win a KCS sticker.