Category: N.C. State

The retail horror story we face

This country is facing a retail crash that will make the housing crash look small, says McDuffie “Mac” Nichols, who grew up in Charlotte and is a South Meck alum. He’s talking to the N.C. State Urban Design conference in Raleigh.

“The credit crisis on housing is nothing compared to what’s coming up this summer over commercial loans,” he says. A slew of loans for commercial development are all coming due this summer. And the projects are failed. “Every mixed-use category is in distress,” he said.

The underlying problem: The U.S. has built way, way more retail space than we need. In the U.S. we now have 20 square feet of retail space per person, he says. Compare that to Great Britain,with 2.5 square feet per person. That one drew audible gasps and an undercurrent of aghast comment from the crowd.

One-third of all enclosed shopping malls in this country are obsolete, he says. Nichols, who now lives in the Washington area, grew up in Charlotte and graduated from South Meck. (He’s among the consultants the City of Charlotte has hired in recent years to study Eastland Mall.)

The challenge will be what in the world you do with all those dead retail sites – vast surface parking lots with a building in the middle. That will be one huge urban design challenge of the next decade.

Other needs he’s citing for economically resilient cities:
– strong, high-quality public education.
– much better transit networks, which will reduce the cost of development if you don’t have to spend so much for parking. (See my op-ed today on “How we love/hate our parking lots“).

2:25 p.m – More from Mac Nichols (he’s great): He advises designers/consultants to always say “Parking will be an issue,” because A) They’ll be right, and B) Everyone will be forewarned, because parking is going to be an issue everywhere, for a long time. But, he tells the crowd of designers, make parking work for you.

Don’t overbuild just because someone loves an idea, he says.

“Economics is the foundation of design solutions.” You’ve got to understand the underlying economics. Otherwise it’s like designing a landscape without understanding the topography.”

Charlottean gives his recipe for cities

City planning has a lot in common with brewing your beer at home, says McDuffie “Mac” Nichols, who grew up in Charlotte and is a South Meck alum. He’s talking to the N.C. State Urban Design conference. In home-brewing, he says, you can exercise great creativity, but you’re always bound to the unavoidable laws of chemistry.

The same’s true with cities. You have to take into account the unavoidable laws of economics and how cities work.

How to create and maintain a city that’s economically viable over time? It’s not about get rich quick, he says. You need economic diversity. Example to avoid: Detroit. Diversify before things are gone. Cities that depend on “seasonalities” such as beach or ski resorts are vulnerable, too.

Nichols told me at a reception last night he’s one of the consultants who has worked with the City of Charlotte to study the Eastland Mall situation (several years ago, before the city gave up its options to buy). I asked him whether there was any hope for decent retail in downtown Charlotte, where much of the existing retail space has been torn down, and the new spaces aren’t adjacent to each other. (See “Charlotte’s uptown shopping dilemma.”) His reply: “Shook.” They should just let Terry Shook [of Charlotte’s Shook Kelley Design] draw it and then do what he draws, Nichols said.

Another retail tidbit: You need retail (i.e. stores) in any mixed-use project, but you shouldn’t let it dictate the way the project grows and is built.

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.