Tree-planting’s great; but look at big picture, too

Davis Cable, former head of the Catawba Lands Conservancy, just gave an intriguing presentation to the Charlotte City Council, about a new initiative to try to plant 50,000 trees across the city, to help the city with its adopted goal of having 50 percent of the city land under a canopy of trees by 2050. The city canopy now is about 46 percent. If the city is built out according to current zoning, the canopy will shrink to 45 percent.

It’s a public-private venture – not a new nonprofit being formed but an initiative called Tree Charlotte, Cable explained. The Foundation for the Carolinas has given $20,000; so has the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The idea: Get the community involved and engaged in planting trees.

It’s probably the best warm-fuzzy idea I’ve heard emerge from this windowless chamber in the government center in ages. Who could be against this idea?

But as I analyze why Charlotte has lost so much of its canopy, one inescapable conclusion is that a huge amount of the loss has to do with new development, mostly in the suburbs. Duh, right? But think about how much of any new retail development is that huge surface parking lot. Yes, the city requires trees sprinkled through it, but it’s not the same as the woods that had to get cleared to build it. If we could drive less, we could save a lot of trees.

And what about subdivisions that spring up with no rezoning needed, because all the undeveloped land in the city got automatically zoned for subdivisions (or more intense development) about 30 years ago? There is no zoning for farms or woods or protected areas. Most subdivisions are virtually clearcut. To be sure, the city has a new tree ordinance that requires new developments to save small amounts of trees on the site. That’s better than nothing. Still …

And all that new commercial development that serves those new subdivisions means new or expanded roads, which mow down trees. (And I do mean roads in this instance, not city streets, which of course should all have street trees.) Streets, parking lots and rooftops mean more stormwater runoff, which requires big pipes and stream “restoration” projects that take out even more trees.

In short, more city-style development – with multi-story buildings close to each other, so you can easily walk to places you need to go, with parking decks instead of surface lots, and a vastly improved transit system – would result in a lot more trees saved on the edge of the city, as many of those  suburban developments wouldn’t be getting built.

Meanwhile, if multiple developers are to be believed – and I think they’re probably not making this up – redeveloping inside more urban-style areas is really, really tough, and made harder by some well-intentioned but bizarrely enforced zoning and inspection standards.

As Cable made his presentation to a receptive City Council, here’s what I was sending out via Twitter: 
Good presentation to #cltcc [Twitter-speak for Charlotte City Council] on Charlotte tree canopy. Push on to plant more trees, says Dave Cable. But much is going unsaid … (cont)
Cont. … Re tree canopy: Shouldn’t city look at its devt rules that allow/encourage major spread into undeveloped (treed) areas? 
Good pix of a Peachtree Hills retrofit plan, adding back trees in clearcut subdivision. Worthy effort. BUT … it’s after-the-fact.
Yes, plant trees. Also save em: Build city streets, not huge ROW-sucking highways. End auto-pilot OK for subdivisions on city fringe.
AND, to encourage more tight, urban-style infill stop requiring suburban-style “buffers” and berms in urban areas.
I applaud the tree-planting effort. It’s a good idea and will help.
But it’s the rules of development that shape how the city grows. If Charlotte wants to be a place that isn’t always trying to catch up to its tree loss by planting thousands of new trees, shouldn’t it take a holistic look at what sort of development the city is allowing, and where?

The feel-good story that isn’t

If you read the recent Charlotte Observer article, “All signs point to Peachtree Hills on the rebound,” you read about much admirable work from the City of Charlotte and nonprofit groups. The city committed almost a half-million dollars to help the foreclosure- and crime-plagued subdivision.

According to reporters Kirstin Valle Pittman and Peter St. Onge, the city improved curbs and sidewalks, helped residents form a strong neighborhood group and helped win a $75,000 grant for a new playground. Charlotte-Mecklenburg police have worked hard, too, and report crime down 70 percent over last year; residential break-ins are down 88 percent. And home values are rising. The average selling price this year is $77,300, up from $68,670 last year.  The nonprofit groups Self-Help and Habitat for Humanity are hard at work. Durham-based Self-Help has bought 33 Peachtree Hills homes, to refurbish and sell to buyers whom the group believes can avoid future foreclosures.  Habitat has built seven new homes and bought five foreclosure houses for resale.

It’s a nice, feel-good story. Except.

Except that it exposes a huge flaw in the process by which development takes place in Charlotte. It makes you wonder: Why city officials in their right minds would vote to approve the building of mile after mile after mile of rock-bottom-cost subdivisions, right next to each, other across a large arc of west, north and east Charlotte? Having so much low-cost housing in close proximity made the whole area vulnerable to foreclosures and the attendant problems when the national blight of subprime lending, mortgage fraud, financial market misdeeds, and then unemployment hammered Charlotte.

A 2007 Charlotte Observer article (“New suburbs in fast decay”) noted that from 1997 to 2007, starter homes (so-called because their low prices attract buyers just starting in home-ownership) accounted for one-half of all single-family homes built in Charlotte between I-85 and the northern city limits. They made up fully a third of all single-family homes in Charlotte built south of I-85. By late 2007 BEFORE the big crash in late 2008 the Observer’s analysis found more than 50 neighborhoods with elevated foreclosure rates of 15 percent to 61 percent. Virtually all were new starter-home subdivisions.

Could it happen today? Have Charlotte’s leaders from pols to planners learned from what happened during that decade from the late ’90s until the crash, when that vast cluster of low-income housing spread  across the city’s northern edge?

I fear that, yes, the same thing could happen today. Part of the reason is the way growth is managed (or not) in Charlotte; part of the reason is just the way land prices work. If the market magically revived (not likely for a while, to be sure), dozens more subdivision-building bottom-feeders could probably erect multiple subdivisions of the cheapest materials, in the worst places, all next to one another. In most cases no rezoning is needed, because most undeveloped property in Charlotte years ago was zoned for single-family subdivisions (R-3, R-4, etc.). An estimated 75 percent of the subdivisions built in Charlotte in those boom years needed no rezoning; elected officials had no chance to say yes or no. All the developers needed was to follow the city’s subdivision ordinance and meet the standards in the zoning ordinance. Auto-pilot insta-growth.

As it happens, the developer of Peachtree Hills, built starting in 2003, did need a rezoning. Triven Properties got a rezoning from R-4 (four houses per acre) to R-6 (CD), almost exactly 10 years ago. The City Council on Sept. 17, 2001, voted unanimous approval for the rezoning.

So, what should change? It’s not an easy question to answer. One reason is that low-cost new development  gravitates toward places where land costs are lower. Putting up more low-end development tends to create more of the same, just as putting up high-end development drives up land values. Should government intervene in this process, and if so, how best to do it?

And the problem isn’t low-cost housing per se. It’s the large-scale clustering of housing all aimed at the same income levelin typical suburban-sprawl layouts that force every resident to own a car and drive everywhere. In any event, elected officials aren’t allowed to – and shouldn’t – decide rezonings based on the price level of the proposed housing. And there IS a huge need in Charlotte for dwelling places that more people can afford. (I do keep wondering, though, why this problem isn’t also being addressed at the wage-level end, instead of only at the housing-cost end. Low wages are the He Who Shall Not Be Named in Charlotte’s whole community housing discussion.)

It seems to me any answer must come from multiple places: revamped subdivision and zoning ordinances, maybe removing the no-rezoning-needed incentive that exists now for sprawl development on greenfield sites and giving more incentive to the infill, mixed-use development that the city prefers but that today must jump though multiple hoops.

I’m not saying I know what the answer ought to be. But this I am sure of: More smart people in this city ought to be trying to find some answers and now, while development is slow and there’s time to explore and, yes, while the sector of the development industry that depends on suburban-sprawl subdivisions is in a weakened condition, which levels the playing field with other development players.

It’s admirable that so many people, with public and private dollars and unmeasurable volunteer time and energy, have tried to help Peachtree Hills and other such subdivisions, such as Windy Ridge, and that their efforts seem to be succeeding. But the true measure of success ought to be figuring out how to avoid building any more neighborhoods that will simply replicate the problems of Peachtree Hills.

Photo: Windy Ridge, another foreclosure-plagued Charlotte subdivision. (Photo: Keihly Moore / Liz Shockey, UNC Charlotte)