Category: HUD

Charlotte area snags $5 million regional grant

Rebecca Yarbrough of Centralina COG, with check

It was just a bit of horseplay at Monday morning’s announcement that the 14-county Charlotte region won a $4.9 million federal grant for sustainability planning. But it was a metaphor for one of the historic hurdles that the initiative may at last be able to overcome.

As always a Big Fake Check was on display for photo opps, and after the ceremonial presentation, Charlotte Mayor Pro Tem Patrick Cannon made a jokingly fake attempt to stash the $5 million check in his coat pocket.  Martha Sue Hall, the Albemarle City Council member who chairs the Centralina Council of Governments, the lead agency that pulled together the grant application, wrestled the big check out of Cannon’s grasp. Everyone laughed at the light moment.

But of course, even if inadvertently, it exemplified the fear communities outside Charlotte have: that the region’s big city will take most of the pie, leaving smaller places with just a few crumbs. [Never mind that on a per capita basis, many state and federal expenditures give large urban areas short shrift.] That fear, and the lack of trust that resources will be shared judiciously rather than snatched and hoarded, is one of many dynamics that make attempts at regionalism tough, no matter where you are. My article last week for Citiwire.net, “Regionalism: Wonky but Real,” explores the issue of urban regions more thoroughly. A longer version, with more Charlotte and N.C. information, ran on the website of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work, www.ui.uncc.edu. (That site is down for tinkering today and tomorrow. Check it out later this week.)

The grant dwarfs the $1.6 million each won last year by two other N.C. regions, the Piedmont Triad (Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point) and the Asheville-area Land of the Sky. Other N.C. grant winners announced Monday were the Wilmington region, $1.1 million, and the City of High Point, $240,000 for a new downtown plan. The only larger grants than Charlotte’s announced Monday were $4.9 million to the San Francisco Bay area and $5 million to a 13-county area in northern New Jersey.

Unless you’re a regional planner, by now your eyes are probably glazing over at the idea of a “regional plan” among 10 N.C. and 4 S.C. counties. It all probably seems remote from what you do every day. But it isn’t. Think about it. Throughout the Charlotte region people routinely cross city, county and state lines in the Charlotte region. We all drink water from rivers that flow through many jurisdictions and that sometimes hold cities’ treated waste water. The air we breathe flows invisibly (we hope!) across the landscape. People live in one place and work in another – if they are lucky enough to have jobs.

In other words, plenty of things that affect all of us daily – jobs, our water and air, farmland preservation, traffic congestion and the availability, or not, of transit or walkable/bikable routes – need to be approached regionally, not city council by city council or county board by county board.

The grant won’t solve all those problems of course. But the intent is to build on some work that started in 2007, which you probably never heard about. A 17-county bi-state group began hashing out a series of regional goals in the areas of economic development, the environment, growth, education, and so on. They include aiming for well-managed growth; for improving air and water quality and protecting wildlife, trees and rural areas; for improving social equity and inclusion, for collaborative approaches to economic development; for collaboration on educational initiatives, etc.

Those goals are laudable, but essentially they are just the result of a lot of conversations among a lot of people over several years, i.e., not backed by specific data. The grant will translate that large vision into an implementable plan, using yet-to-be-devised performance metrics. In other words, as the COG’s Rebecca Yarbrough put it, they’re now switching from anecdotal evidence to getting metrics for what represents sustainable growth for the whole region. It isn’t implementing anything, but trying to continue the difficult work of getting a lot of different people with different interests to pull together on common goals, using commonly shared and trusted information.

The grant is from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, a partnership among HUD, the EPA and the U.S. Department of Transportation. The partnership works to get the three branches of the U.S. government to working together instead of, as sometimes happens, at cross purposes.

(Disclosure: The the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, where I work, is a partner in the grant, and will get $179,000 for research to provide those metrics. The UNCC Metropolitan Studies program, which houses the institute, will get $253,000 for a regional affordable housing market study. The UNCC Urban Design Program in the School of Architecture will get $46,000 to help provide urban design guidance to the plan.)

More than 100 public and private sector partners will work on the process, but the core partners on the grant are: the Catawba Regional Council of Governments, UNC Charlotte, The Lee Institute, Urban Land Institute, Mecklenburg County CONNECT council, City of Charlotte CONNECT council, Charlotte Housing Authority, Regional Workforce Alliance, Charlotte Regional Partnership CONNECT council, Johnson C. Smith University and Winthrop University.

Destroying the ‘Drive ‘Til You Qualify’ myth

RALEIGH – I’m blogging today from the N.C. State Urban Design Forum. Topic du jour: “Creating Value: Designing for Resilient Cities.”

9:55 a.m. HUD official Shelley Poticha just finished speaking. Her remarks have a clear bearing on the patterns of city growth all over the country. She spent several minutes destroying the “Drive ‘Til You Qualify” myth – the real estate sales push to just get farther and farther out from a city until housing costs drop to where you can afford a mortgage.
But the current housing bust, she says, is showing the failure of that myth. There’s a convergence of evidence that a host of problems – job loss, obesity, asthma, racial and economic segregation, loss of wildlife habitat, “our dangerous dependence on foreign oil” – all stem at heart from the “dangerous mismatch between where we live and where we work.”

“All the evidence is now aligning to show this “Drive ‘Til you Qualify” myth … is one of the single most destructive decisions we ever made,” she said.

10:55 a.m. – Something to think about. Speaker Jim Held of UrbanGreen, a real estate adviser and planner, talks about the need to think of cities not as a place but as systems. Systems regenerate and evolve. As with any living natural system, they need diversity and connectivity, among other things. He showed a subsidized housing project in San Francisco’s Potrero Hill neighborhood with several hundred units. “Mono-cropping” has not led to a resilient neighborhood,” he said. Plans now call for re-establishing the street grid of 100 years ago, before modernists in mid-century planned the disconnected street patterns.

AND – He talked about ways to nurture entrepreneurs – are you listing, Tom Flynn of the City of Charlotte? Flynn, of the city’s Neighborhood and Business Services Department, has been tasked with seeing what more the city can do to help small businesses.

Here’s one idea –food entrepreneurs. A nonprofit in San Francisco, La Cocina, aims (next part is from its Web site) “to cul­ti­vate low-income food entre­pre­neurs as they for­mal­ize and grow their busi­nesses by pro­vid­ing afford­able com­mer­cial kitchen space, industry-specific tech­ni­cal assis­tance and access to mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ties.”

With the huge and growing thirst for local foods in Charlotte, surely there’s a way to help start-ups find commercial kitchens and find more markets.

The cost to live in exurbia

RALEIGH – 9:15 a.m. — I’m blogging today from the N.C. State Urban Design Forum. Topic du jour: “Creating Value: Designing for Resilient Cities.”


Excellent quote, to start the day, from NCSU College of Design Dean Marvin Malecha: The design of a community begins with the measure of the first human step.

9:30 a.m. Now Shelley Poticha of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. She’s been active in New Urban and transportation and other community design initiatives for years. (She’s speaking via Skype.) She has offered some fascinating tidbits.

Costs in Raleigh-Durham to living on the exurban edge: She ran some numbers on the combined household costs of housing and transportation in this area. For people living in the core city, she said, combined household/transportation costs are about 34-38 percent of income. But here’s the amazing fact. For people living on the farthest edges of Wake County, combined housing/transportation costs can be as high as 75 percent of household income.


Federal revolution, under the radar?: 9:45 a.m. – Poticha is describing what has been an amazing, under-the-radar transformation at the federal level, where Shaun Donovan at HUD, with help from Ron Sims (former county exec for King County, Wash., i.e. Seattle) and the EPA and US DOT are – get this – trying to work together to remove federal barriers that keep cities and states from smarter urban growth/planning, or what she described as formerly being “a backwater set of issues.”

They’re trying to change some of the dumb stuff that doesn’t require legislation. An example she cited: Used to be that HUD protocols made it impossible to use federal housing money for developing on a brownfield (former industrial) site. They changed that. Now, if you can get the EPA certificate that your site is OK, then you can get HUD money.
Another example: Used to be if your apartment building qualified for Dept. of Energy weatherization money, then you had to fill out a whole other bunch of forms for HUD. Now, no extra HUD forms needed.
(more)