Category: sustainable development

Is sustainability for Commies?

Here’s something I keep wondering: If you drew a Venn diagram with one circle being people who say they believe free markets need little intervention and that government has no business telling people what to do with their property, and another circle being people who think there’s a liberal conspiracy to force apartment buildings and stores into suburban residential neighborhoods now restricted to single-family houses on large lots, how big would be the part of the Venn diagram where the two sets overlap?

My guess: Huge.

Somehow some people have gotten the idea that land in a city (and suburbs) would, if left to the natural laws of economics, shape itself into quarter-acre and half-acre lots with one house sitting in the middle. They don’t seem to get it: Valuable land, without zoning restrictions, would attract higher income-producing uses. Apartment buildings. Stores. Office towers. It’s government intervention that is keeping all those high-priced neighborhoods near Charlotte’s SouthPark mall as single-family homes. Large-lot subdivisions are often built in times and places where that’s considered the highest and best use (to use real estate speak) of the dirt. But as cities evolve, a lot of those neighborhoods hold land that becomes more valuable for other uses. Examples: Myers Park, Dilworth, Elizabeth, Barclay Downs. Keeping those valuable areas zoned for single-family residential may or may not be wise public policy – that’s a debate for another day – but it’s clearly not letting the free market have its way. So why have some parts of the tin-foil cap crowd decided that efforts to build more high-density neighborhoods, i.e. “sustainable development,” is a global socialist plot using a U.N. policy called Agenda 21 to co-opt municipal governments all over America?

Think about it: Wouldn’t big-government socialists be the ones wanting regulations to override private ownership, via single-family-housing zoning?

It’s part of a larger mystery.

Why did preserving the environment come to be seen as “liberal” instead of just, well, smart? Seems to me the liberal-conservative battles ought to be fought over the best methods with which to ensure resources aren’t depleted and water and air remain clean. After all, those things are important necessities for human life, not to mention long-term local and national economic health. Some would argue government regulations are the best method. Others would argue that regulations don’t work, or aren’t enforced, or that a private market approach works better, as in cap-and-trade programs. But why would anyone argue that to be a true conservative you shouldn’t care about the environment?
 
After all, the environmental movement has had plenty of Republican champions, including President Richard Nixon. Former N.C. Govs. Jim Martin and Jim Holshouser and Charlotte’s long-time U.S. Rep. Alex McMillan are all Republicans who understood the importance of conserving land and using government to try to ensure clean air and water.

Indeed, after Republican City Council member Edwin Peacock III, who chaired the council’s Environment Committee, lost his seat in November, I called longtime Charlotte environmental activist Rick Roti to get his sense of Peacock’s role. “He has been, especially for a Republican, a more balanced leader,” Roti said. Understand, Roti doesn’t just blindly compliment politicians. He has served on multiple stakeholder committees, chaired the Charlotte Tree Advisory Commission and is now president of the nonprofit Charlotte Public Tree Fund. He has seen the sausage being made, from up close, and probably has psychic scars to prove it.
So what I’m about to say probably betrays my own inadvertent stereotyping. Out of routine, I asked Roti what party he was in. “Republican,” he said. “People are often surprised when I tell them that.” Uh, yep.
He favors Republican financial policies, he said. “When it comes to the environment, they’re [the Republican party] not where where they need to be.”

What does this have to do with sustainable development and Agenda 21? Only this: One of the key goals underpinning advocacy of sustainable development is to improve and protect the environment by helping people live in ways that use less energy: Less driving, more walking and bicycling and transit. Living closer together, to save building energy and make transit easier (see the part about less driving). Of course, one hugely important reason to do this, in addition to saving a lot of money and energy, is to try to combat human-caused global climate change. But for some reason, that, too, has become a red-blue litmus test. If you believe the world’s climate scientists, you must be a liberal elitist.

Again, it seems to me the liberals and conservatives ought to be arguing over what’s the best way to fight climate change, not about whether it exists.

Here’s a final thought about the relationship between sustainable development, and policies, and politics. It’s in an op-ed in the Boston Globe, “A frugal answer to zoning pitfalls, needlessly slashed,”  in which Paul McMorrow, an associate editor at CommonWealth magazine, writes about the congressional move to de-fund an Obama initiative, the Sustainable Communities program. Lodged in Housing and Urban Development, the program was trying to get multiple federal agencies – EPA, HUD and the Department of Transportation – to work more efficiently together and to promote policies to curb sprawling development. (Clarification, 1/6/12: I consulted with officials in the HUD Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities, which coordinates federal policy with DOT and the EPA. They say the office remains very much alive, as is the Partnership for Sustainable Communities, the collaboration among the three agencies. What lost funding is the grants program, which in 2011 awarded a $5 million regional planning grant to the Charlotte region, among $96 million in regional planning and community challenge grants around the country.)

 
McMorrow notes that sprawl is fiscally wasteful for governments: “If we’re going to build new homes and businesses anyway, we should at least construct them in a way that’s not deliberately wasteful,” he writes. “This wastefulness applies to the open space that sprawl consumes, as well as the enormous cost of developing and maintaining the infrastructure serving new suburbs and exurbs.”

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.

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)

“Green” developers council?

Got an e-mail from developer David Smoots in response to the recent Citistates Report.

He proposes that developers, city officials and residents collaborate to find alternatives to sprawl.

He writes:

Our community must be prepared for a paradigm shift. It will require the collaboration of developers (I am one), city officials and citizenry to consider alternatives to the sprawling kind of development we’ve had in Charlotte for so long. In one recent national study, “Measuring the Market for Green Residential Development,” homebuyers admit we have to face the issue of environmental responsibility head-on. Nearly 38% strongly agree, and 41.2% somewhat agree, that “in order to protect the environment we will need big changes in the way we live.”

While New Urbanism has caught on over the past two decades, Charlotte should now prepare for the next step. One idea: Motivate the Urban Land Institute to implement a strategy among local members and push for the creation of a Sustainable Stewardship Council.

This council would work with citizenry, government and private entities on environmentally friendly development issues within our community. An involved SSC Council could help promote water strategies, energy strategies, transportation, health strategies, recycling and reuse of materials in rezoning, and permit-related activities. The upshot? Local real estate developers would become better community leaders.

Several things are notable about his suggestion. First, it sounds like a good idea. I mean, it couldn’t possibly hurt and it might help educate developers. Second, it’s further proof that at least some developers think (know?) that building “green” is a market niche that they can exploit. More and more customers are looking for “green.”

Is there a role for city and state regulations? Should city standards and zoning rules be changed to make them more environmentally sound? Note, this might not mean ADDING regulations so much as changing the ones we already have.