Category: South End

‘Why are all those new buildings so ugly?’

Apartments on South Boulevard greet the sidewalk with two floors of parking.  Photo: Tom Low, Civic by Design

The topic is an eye-catcher and, thank goodness, keeps catching eyes: Why do so many of the new apartment buildings going up in Charlotte’s fast-redeveloping neighborhoods all look alike? And look, um, not all that attractive?

The latest chapter in this civic conversation came Tuesday, with a two-part punch. Three local architects were guests on “Charlotte Talks,” an interview show on WFAE, Charlotte’s local public radio station. Listen to the show here.

Tuesday evening Tom Low, one of the guests, held a public forum, “Bland Charlotte,” at his monthly Civic By Design discussion group.

Low and others have written and spoken in recent months about their concern that speedy growth and development, especially in the South End area adjacent to the city’s only light rail line, is sub-par in urban design and architecture.

PlanCharlotte.org, the publication I run at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, has run several  articles on the topic:

Ditto, other local media outlets:

Tuesday night, Low showed a series of depressing photos of apartment complexes, mostly but not exclusively in South
End, with parking dominating the streetscape. What people are upset about, by and large, is not that they are multifamily but that they are clad in obviously cheap materials, they offer monotonous and graceless facades, and most important, instead of contributing to a growing urbanity of street and sidewalk activity, such as shops or restaurants, they offer to the public realm only metal grills, with parking lots behind.

As on the radio show, discussion at the forum touched on whether the problem lies with the architects and designers who should have the courage to say no when developers want those abuses of the public realm, or with developers, or with the finance system. While I think we need more extraordinarily talented and courageous designers, and more extraordinarily thoughtful developers, the essential problem to me seems to lie elsewhere. Because most people are not extraordinary.

As I listened, I was reminded of a phrase I used to hear when, in another life, I attended conferences of a national group, Investigative Reporters and Editors. You’d hear of amazing investigations into malfeasance by public officials, universities, businesses, schools or bureaucrats. Often, after describing abuses by one group or another, the investigative reporter would conclude with this: “Of course, sometimes the biggest crime is what’s legal.”

Which leads to my point. Those apartment buildings that people are upset about were built in accordance with city ordinances.

The flaw, once again, lies with Charlotte’s deeply outdated and flawed zoning ordinance. The city planners say they have finally begun working with consultants to rework the ordinance, but that is expected to take four years.

Meanwhile, too much is being built that is perfectly awful — and perfectly legal.

Why slow-growing light rail ridership should not surprise anyone

A bus in uptown Charlotte, where most bus routes begin and end. Photo: Claire Apaliski

Today’s Charlotte Observer brings an article from Steve Harrison noting that ridership on Charlotte’s light rail line, the LYNX Blue Line, has finally rebounded to its pre-recession levels but has not increased dramatically despite rapid growth in apartments along part of its route. See “Lynx light rail ridership back to 2008 levels.”

Some background: Charlotte’s first and only light rail line opened in late 2007, just in time for the massive 2008-09 recession that had Charlotte unemployment lingering in double-digits or near it for months. The northern couple of miles of the 9-mile route, closest to uptown, have seen massive apartment development in the past several years. The southern part of the route? Nada.

But the South End neighborhood – an area of old industrial buildings dating from the 1960s back to the late 1800s – is popping with hundreds of new apartments, and hopping with new microbreweries and trendy restaurants.

Car-free in Charlotte? It isn’t easy by Carolyn Reid, published last June at the PlanCharlotte.org website I run, helps explain why ridership may not be growing as quickly as you’d think.

Even in South End there’s little easy or walkable access to routine shopping needs like grocery and drug stores, no easily accessed, widely connected network of bike routes, nor robust bus service with headways under 10 minutes that spreads cross town. Because of lack of funding, the city’s bus service – while much improved over 1990s levels – still focuses on  delivering workers to uptown rather than building a widely connected network.

South End remains a place with better transit, bike and pedestrian connections than almost any other Charlotte neighborhood. But it’s still not a place where living without a car is going to be easy. Unless you’re trying to go uptown, the light rail can’t deliver you where you want to go.

My prediction: Ridership will zoom when the Blue Line Extension opens in 2017, taking riders to the 27,000-student UNC Charlotte campus about 10 miles northeast of uptown. 

A new look for South Tryon Street

It’s little things like this project that will add up, over time, into a much more pleasant experience for people walking into and out of uptown Charlotte from South End and Morehead Street. Here’s a photo of the newly widened sidewalk on South Tryon Street on the bridge over the I-277 freeway.

It used to be a stark, back-of-curb concrete sidewalk where you had to choose whether to get uncomfortably close to traffic or uncomfortably close to the railing where you could look down and see where your body would splat if you leaned too far. (Technically, the railing would have protected you from falling, but the place still felt dangerous.)

The city of Charlotte oversaw a project to shrink the number of travel lanes, widen the sidewalks from 5 feet to 12 feet and add bike lanes. A few cosmetic improvements include changing the railing and adding pedestrian-scale street lights.

The project cost, including design, was $2 million. The bridge over I-277 is state-owned, so the Charlotte Department of Transportation worked with the state DOT, which had to approve the changes.

Here’s a piece I did in 2010 about the project. You can decide for yourself whether the reality looks like the drawing that envisioned the project then.

A ribbon-cutting will be at 10 a.m. Tuesday (June 19).

Photo: Courtesy of City of Charlotte

But, Mayor Pat, do you back light rail?

Photo of Third Street station courtesy Charlotte Area Transit System
(See update at end, 6:30 p.m.)

Ex-CATS chief Ron Tober sends along a link to a nice little video about the Lynx Blue Line and South End. It praises the way the light rail line brings neighborhoods together, helps people move about the city without cars and builds for the future.

The film (apparently made by Siemens, hence the talking heads from that company) quotes many Charlotte notables, including Charlotte Planning Director Debra Campbell, Duke Energy’s North Carolina president Brett Carter, UNC Charlotte Dean of Arts + Architecture Ken Lambla, UNCC profs David Walters and Jose Gamez, Levine Museum historian Tom Hanchett …

… and former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory.

This is worth pointing out because McCrory, a seven-term mayor who is all but certainly running again for N.C. governor in 2012, has been a strong transit supporter. He has a national reputation for being a strong transit supporter.  That much isn’t really news for politics buffs.  But here’s a new wrinkle. His Republican Party in North Carolina now appears dominated by anti-transit conservatives.

During the recent General Assembly session, state legislators from Mecklenburg County made several stabs at outright killing any more state funding (and thus, any more federal funding) for Charlotte’s light rail system, as well as trying to off the state’s long-planned high-speed passenger rail between Charlotte and Raleigh. Last spring, McCrory said he had made calls to Republican legislative leaders about transit, but wouldn’t say what he talked about.

This all leaves Mayor Pat with a dilemma.  He can continue to tout his accomplishments as a moderate, pro-transit mayor, which will help him with independents and with any Democrats who have cooled on Gov. Bev Perdue. But that would definitely rile the people now in control of the state Republican Party, not to mention many legislators. Or he can play to his right and somehow distance himself from Charlotte’s nationally praised light rail system, one of his most praiseworthy achievements.

I note that on this video, McCrory doesn’t say anything that might be pulled out and used as a pro-transit film clip by enemies on the right, who kicked him around a lot when he was mayor, calling him a RINO (Republican in Name Only), or even a socialist, for supporting mass transit. On the film he says innocuous things,  that cities should look to the future, and this “infrastructure” is a good investment.

(Update and rewrite, 6:25 p.m.) McCrory just phoned me back and was pointed in saying he supports mass transit “where it works.” If the transportation experts and federal funding formulas say it would work in a certain place, McCrory said, then he’s for it. He said he just asks, “What will the numbers look like?”

This is all consistent with his remarks as mayor. But, I asked him, a lot of N.C. Republicans oppose mass transit, so how will he handle that in his campaign? “I’ll handle it exactly the same way I handled it as mayor,” he said. Some Republicans won’t like his answers, he said, and neither will some Democrats.

I’ve been wondering how McCrory, who is a deft politician, will handle this GOP-hates-transit dilemma. He’s on the record now – at least with Naked City Blog – on mass transit. It will be in interesting political show to see how his campaign plays out on this particular issue.

How (not) to be a creative city

I was recently walking down the sidewalk beside the Lynx light rail, and I spotted some colorful banners alongside the tracks. They added a festive touch, I thought. Then I read them.

They said: “Create” and “Splurge” and “Thrive” and my favorite, “Groove.” I found this interesting. It had the flowery fragrance of promotional marketing. I checked. Yep, the banners are part of a rebranding effort for South End.

Now I am not against promotional marketing. In an advertising-based industry, how could I be?

But somehow, being ordered to “Thrive” reminded me of a time, years ago, when the walls of the Observer building sprouted posters ordering us all to “Work Smarter.” As if we would all slap our heads in recognition of our heretofore obvious stupidity and decide to mend our ways.

The promotional effort, courtesy of Charlotte Center City Partners, the nonprofit uptown advocacy group that also serves South End, partnered with a South End design/branding firm. They want to highlight “the brand attributes of the district” which they believe to be shopping (hence, “splurge”), residential (“thrive”), art galleries and creative businesses (“create”), and hospitality and nightlife (“groove”).

I called three creative types from around town, plus my college-aged daughter and asked if anyone ever says “groove” any more. “I don’t think so,” said commercial film producer Peggie Porter. “I hear people say ‘groovy’ in a sort of ironic way.”

“No one I know says groove,” said the text my daughter sent from Chapel Hill.

Filmmaker Dorne Pentes, though, said he still sometimes hears people say “groove.”

What about the rest of the banners and being ordered to “create”?

“I think that would be the least likely thing to make me feel creative,” Porter said. “It sounds like Chamber of Commerce stuff to me,” Pentes said.

As one branding/marketing expert told me (no name because this person needs business and can’t afford to tick people off), “In the brand world, what things ARE is most important, not what you say they are. That’s what we focus on with clients. Get them away from slogans.”

Colorful banners? Nice touch. Sloganeering in a supposedly “artsy” part of the city? Not so creative.

A note about spacing: For some reason blogger.com today refuses to put spaces between the paragraphs. I tried deleting the old spaces, putting in new “enter” lines, the works. No luck. Does anyone have any solutions for this?

The candy bar approach to city planning

Thank you, anonymous commenter from 5:20 p.m. Tuesday. I am not against density or height. I am against height in the wrong place. You can make a case that next door to the Arlington is an appropriate spot for density, and I won’t get in your face about it, although I think the proximity to the Dilworth Historic District makes it problematic, for reasons I’ve mentioned before. Overall, I tend to agree with Charleston Mayor Joe Riley, who says that six five-story buildings are better than one 30-story building.

But here’s the crux of my objections to the South End rezoning: The whole point of a small station area plan is to plan what heights and densities are appropriate on which spots. If the planners who wrote the South End Station Area Plan and the City Council who adopted it in 2005 believed that site was appropriate for buildings twice the height of the rest of the area’s height limit, why not have the plan say that? Why limit the appropriate height there, in the plan, to 120 feet? Those kinds of issues are precisely why your tax money pays for planners and why your elected representatives adopt small area plans.

Why even bother with any plan if it’s routinely disregarded?

It reminds me of taking a kid to the grocery store. You say before you go, “I’m not buying you candy in the check-out line.” If you then buy the kid a Snickers in the check-out line, that kid will cry for candy on every visit to the store for the next 20 years. And you will have undermined any credibility your authority might have had.

One last thing, responding to a commenter on the post about the Piedmont Town Center project: I LOVE Filene’s Basement. Offer one of those up and I’ll be out there with my chainsaw. (Joke, people, joke.)

South End tower wins swift OK

Reporting live, from City Council:
(See previous post, also from council meeting, about a first — a developer urging council to reject his own rezoning petition.)

The City Council launched the vote-on-rezonings part of its meeting at roughly 6:25 p.m. By 6:39 p.m. it had finished its rezoning decisions. They ripped through 18 rezonings, all except one of them approved unanimously with no discussion on any, except for about 30 seconds on the one that was approved 7-2 (for a day care center at The Plaza and Barrington Drive).

That proposal to allow a 250-foot high-rise tower in South End? The one that was in violation of the South End Transit Station Area Plan, which set a 120-foot height maximum? I didn’t have a stopwatch, so I couldn’t tell you whether it was 5 seconds or 10, but there was no discussion, nothing. Unanimous approval, and on to the next agenda item.

Sure, the council’s rezoning meetings can drag. The public hearing part of the meeting tends to bring out developers and neighborhood opponents. It’s 7:34 p.m. and they’re just on No. 6 in a 15-item public hearing agenda. And council member Michael Barnes just pointed out that there have been numerous violations of the Northeast District Plan in recent years. So why didn’t he — or anyone else — think it was worth maybe a little public discussion about why they were violating the South End station area plan, adopted in 2005?

Maybe there were good reasons. Maybe the 120-foot maximum height limit adopted as part of the Transit Station Area Principles isn’t a good idea after all. You, the voting public, have no way to know why the council members decided to treat their own adopted plans as virtually irrelevant.

They’re on auto-pilot. The biggest issue facing the city for decades has been growth and how to deal with it and pay for its impacts. You’d like to think your elected officials are thoughtfully debating the pros and cons of different growth proposals. Guess what. I’m watching them tonight, and it’s pretty hard not to conclude they’ve abdicated that responsibility.