Category: Debra Campbell

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.”

Study: ‘Gated’ doesn’t equal ‘safer’

Chief Rodney Monroe had some other interesting things to say, in addition to spilling the beans about the Ritz-Carlton-EpiCentre noise issue.

After giving a short presentation Monday to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, planning commissioner Nina Lipton asked the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police chief whether he had any data on safety in gated versus nongated communities.

“We looked at that,” Monroe said. The police and planning departments matched up communities as closely as they could, looking at income levels, multi-family, single-family and other factors. In terms of crime rates, Monroe said, “We saw no difference.”

What matters in terms of neighborhood safety, he said, is who’s living there: Are residents looking out for their neighbors? Are they taking responsibility? If it’s a rental community, is there professional management? Are renters being screened for criminal records?

Lipton noted that planners often hear “safety” as a reason to avoid following the city’s connectivity standards. Monroe essentially shot down that rationale for gated communities. Just making a development gated doesn’t make it safer, he said. “Sometimes it creates an opportunity for me to charge you more.”

I asked Planning Director Debra Campbell after the meeting for a copy or a link to the study. She said the department was still looking at the methodology to make sure, as she put it, that they were really looking at “apples to apples” comparisons. She said the topic had been a hot one last winter and spring but with the development market so slow the department hadn’t seen any reason to rush to give the information to the City Council. (If I were on the council I might ask them for it again.)

Indeed, I wrote a column about that very topic on Feb. 28, after City Council twice winked at its adopted policies on connectivity, despite planning staff opposition. That column isn’t available online for a link. (Update: CharlotteObserver.com’s fabulous Dave Enna found it. Here’s link.) But it described a a Feb. 16 rezoning for a gated apartment complex near Arrowood Road. The other was a Nov. 17, 2008, rezoning for 300 apartments on Woodlawn Road that didn’t want the city-desired connecting street. (That development isn’t happening; the Charlotte Housing Authority hopes to put a development there.) Not surprisingly, neighbors near both of those proposed developments didn’t want more traffic on their streets. Neighbors aren’t always right, you know. As I wrote in February, “Facing a double-whammy of developers and neighbors against connectivity, council members’ spines tend to take on a jelly-like consistency.”

Do gates really keep out crime?

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Director Debra Campbell tells me city planners and the city-county police department will study crime rates in and around gated communities to see if the gates really do reduce crime. (So, will they also be looking at crimes such as tax fraud, insider trading or Ponzi scheming? If you’ve lost your retirement savings, you might consider those white-collar offenses worse than just simple auto break-ins.)

Campbell said at a recent City Council meeting that the city doesn’t currently have a policy about gated developments, although its street connectivity policies would discourage them. Planners generally think gated subdivisions work against such things as a sense of community, social capital and mixed-income neighborhoods, in addition to bollixing up general traffic flow.

It’s a welcome attempt. Gated developments derive much of their popularity from the general belief that they’re safer. Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. I know we have often vacationed at a gated beach community, in which there are gated developments inside the gated development. So, um, if you need those extra gates, does that mean the first set of gates doesn’t work? Who, exactly, are you trying to keep out? If it’s that journalistic riffraff, well, the gates aren’t working.