Category: regional

Threatened revote on bypass didn’t happen

While I was heading out of town last week, the threatened move by Charlotte, planned for Wednesday night, to revisit a vote of support for the Monroe Bypass did not take place.

Robert Cook, secretary to the transportation planning group formerly known as MUMPO (see “MUMPO no more“) reports that, indeed, Charlotte City Council member Michael Barnes told the group that he did not intend to raise the Monroe Bypass issue at the meeting. 

Here’s the background on the issue: “Charlotte council, smarting over airport resolutions, threatens Monroe Bypass.”

And here’s the Sunday article from The Charlotte Observer’s Jim Morrill, “Emotions high over airport authority push.”  He was at the legislative building on Wednesday as city officials and legislators were discussing whether this vote – which was to have been symbolic only, not actually a vote on revoking funding for the project – should happen.

Meanwhile, for those of you following the political soap opera around Charlotte’s airport, the Airport Advisory Committee has been asked to attend the 5 p.m. Charlotte City Council dinner meeting.

The council’s agenda packet includes a complete list of Airport Advisory Committee members, including who appointed them and when, and when their terms end. Want to see?  And here’s a link to download the full council agenda. The Airport Advisory Committee agenda item is on page 5 of the PDF document. And here’s the Observer’s take on the impetus for today’s meeting: Charlotte City Council to grill airport board over power struggle.

Weathering the downturn – or not?

For decades Charlotte was known as the metro region that simply shed recessions like water off a duck’s back. But will the current downturn belie that reputation? That’s the key question being explored today at a conference today that has drawn several dozen experts in regional resilience to Charlotte’s Duke Mansion.

Obviously the answer to that can’t be known just yet. But some interesting information has come out, particularly during a panel discussion I served on this morning. The group that came to Charlotte is the MacArthur Network on Building Resilient Regions, which has studied metro regions for years. They look at how metro regions react to major economic shocks. Are they resistent? Or do they bounce back, i.e., are they resilient? Or re they non-resistent? They studied the Charlotte region’s response to previous economic downturns – finding the region either resistant or resilient. But their study ended before 2007. They haven’t been back, and they wanted to get caught up on the situation here since the banking crisis.

One key stat we talked about: The metro region’s (that is, the MSA’s) percentage for employment in banking and finance is virtually unchanged now from what it was pre-2008. Another: The manufacturing sector in the region has gone from one-third of the employment in 1980 to, by 2005, less than 10 percent.

Another, from panelist John Connaughton, a UNC Charlotte economist: Since the downturn began, the U.S. has regained 40 percent of the jobs lost. North Carolina has regained only 25 percent of its lost jobs. The Charlotte MSA has regained 50 percent of its lost jobs. But, he pointed out, what Charlotte lost, when it lost the Wachovia headquarters when that bank was bought by Wells Fargo, was some high-paying jobs. The real issue, he said, is the loss of blue-collar jobs: manufacturing and construction jobs.

“Charlotte is a very diverse economy,” he said. He predicted the metro region will spring back. “It will be the star that it was,” he said.

The panel also talked, predictably, about the need for education. I mentioned the region’s history in the past centuries of not valuing education, especially for low-income farm- and mill-workers. And this region remains comparatively poor in post-baccalaureate education and research universities. UNCC is on the road to creating a reputation for research, but as Hal Wolman, director of the George Washington Institute of Public Policy conceded, it does not now have a national reputation for research.

If cities are made more resilient to downturns by having strong education, government and health sectors, then Charlotte may be at risk. One out of three may not be enough.

A chaotic map hints at many meanings of ‘urban region’

The recent news that the Charlotte “urbanized area” was No. 1 in rate of population growth 2000-2010 among U.S. urbanized areas of 1 million or more brought some local chest-thumping and in some quarters a bit of head-scratching. After all, last year, the Census Bureau told us the Charlotte metropolitan area was No. 4 in rate of growth over the same period. What gives?

The answer is that it all depends on how you define the urban region.  The Census Bureau’s six-county Metropolitan Statistical Area is a whole other territory from the “urbanized area.” Neither is what many would consider the greater Charlotte metro region. The Charlotte-Gastonia-Concord MSA, for example, includes Anson County but not Lincoln, Iredell, Rowan or Stanly counties. The Census Bureau’s “Charlotte N.C.-S.C. urbanized area,” by contrast, doesn’t even include Gastonia and Concord.

My colleagues at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute include some geographers and map lovers (a.k.a. map geeks) and we decided to take a look at all the different areas that are considered the “Charlotte region.”  Here’s a link to that article. It includes a large, easier-to-read map of multiple “regions,” including the MSA, the urbanized area, the MPOs, and more. The word that comes to mind is “chaos.”

Transportation planning in particular, is a crazy quilt of metropolitan regions, known as Metropolitan Planning Organizations. I’ve written before about that particular nuttiness.

Over at newgeography.com, Wendell Cox calculated the density (population per square mile) of those Census Bureau “urbanized areas.”  It turns out Charlotte’s had the lowest density of all 41 major urban areas.  Next-least dense was – wait for it – Charlotte’s fellow sprawling Sun Belt metro, Atlanta.

So if you figure that urban density is is one way to characterize an area as “urban,” then maybe Charlotte’s “urbanized area” is the fastest-growing but least “urban.”