Category: transit-oriented development

Transit chief: P3s help but won’t solve transit funding woes

Sharon Road West station on Charlotte’s light rail line. Photo: Nancy Pierce

The idea of using public-private partnerships to help fund transportation systems, including mass transit, is one of today’s hottest topics in transportation policy circles. But the head of Atlanta’s MARTA cautions that P3s, as they’re known, aren’t a silver bullet for transit systems.

Keith Parker, who headed Charlotte’s transit system 2007-2009 and since 2012 has been MARTA CEO, was in town Tuesday, as a rail conference was kicking off. Parker spoke at a small event organized by the Transit Funding Working Group, a Metropolitan Transit Commission committee that’s been pondering how CATS can move forward despite huge gaps between the 2030 plan and available money to built it out.

The working group has studied P3s, and a P3 conference was held here in March. In transportation, public-private partnerships are being used for bridges, tunnels, toll roads and High-Occupancy-Toll lanes such as the new HOT lane planned for Interstate 77 north of Charlotte. A private company, Cintra, has contracted with the N.C. Department of Transportation to build the lane and use the toll revenue to operate it. In Vancouver, a P3 built one of the region’s rail lines.

P3s are touted as a way to get around a growing national problem of too many transportation needs and too little tax revenue to pay for them. With cars’ gas mileage increasing, a decrease in driving among young people, and a national gas tax that’s not been raised since 1993 and isn’t indexed for inflation, trend lines for transportation funding are heading down.

In Atlanta, Parker has won praise for helping improve MARTA’s relationships with the Georgia legislature and for bringing efficiencies to MARTA operations. And next week may see the first expansion of the system since it was launched 42 years ago in Fulton and DeKalb counties. A referendum is set for Nov. 4 in Clayton County, Ga., asking voters there whether to approve a 1-cent sales tax to expand MARTA into their county.

Parker, who described how MARTA is partnering with developers for transit-oriented developments on MARTA-owned land, cautioned the audience about the limitations of P3s, especially for transit programs. “They don’t solve your revenue issues,” he pointed out. And continuing revenues are needed, as well as capital expenses for building the transit lines and stations.

He quoted a popular misconception: “If you just go to the private sector they’ll build all your trains for you.”  That thinking? “It’s just a myth,” he said.

The Atlanta system is funded with a 1-cent sales tax in two counties. It receives no funding from the state of Georgia.  Mecklenburg County’s system is funded with a half-cent sales tax in only one county.

For more on the recent transit funding challenges facing Charlotte, see “Mayor: Transit sales tax funding may be at risk” from PlanCharlotte.org.

D.C. planner: Affordability is cities’ next big challenge

“Rock star planner” may be an oxymoron, but if there are rock star planners, Harriet Tregoning is one. Tregoning has been chief city planner in Washington, D.C., since 2007— a time of rapid growth and change in the District of Columbia. She’s stepping down to run the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

A looming problem in many U.S. cities is affordability, she said in an interview with Next City, but looking only at real estate prices masks the problem.  “I think the challenge for American cities for the next decade or more is indeed affordability, but it’s not just about housing,” she said. (Read the whole interview here.)

She noted that for the 8 million jobs lost in the recession, the average wage was $24 an hour. While that number of jobs has been created in recent years, their average wage was $11 an hour.

“Middle-wage jobs are declining,” she said. “Or if they’re growing, they’re growing at a much slower rate than the other categories (high-wage, and low-wage hospitality and retail jobs). So affordability needs to be broadened to talk about job creation, middle-income job creation. What are we going to do with our infrastructure to enable us to produce more employment?”

Two topics in the interview have specific resonance for Charlotte. Tregoning talked about the retrofitting of some
suburban areas. “We have more urbanizing suburban development here in the Washington area than in any place in the country,” she said. “When Tysons Corner decided to do this, when Fairfax County decided to do this, it tipped the balance for a lot of other places.”

And she talked about the challenge for the city (which has a height limit) in accommodating new growth. Should the city, which has many areas of one- and two-story buildings, scrap or at least raise the height limit in order to allow towers in some areas in order to keep the growth from spreading into less-dense neighborhoods. Tregoning said:

“Our relatively torrid rate of [population] growth — more than 2 percent a year, 1,100 people a month — is causing the dialog to change. … Plenty of other places around the world accommodate much larger populations in the same kind of geography without having tall buildings. I think the dialog in our city will be, how do we want to accommodate such growth? What kind of neighborhood change are we willing to tolerate? And how will that dictate where in the city growth will go?

“ … The starting point will be asking every neighborhood, ‘Here’s the growth coming to the city, here’s what we project over the next 30 years. This is what your share of that growth looks like. How would you most like to accommodate that growth in your neighborhood?’ I think the easy answer is, ‘I know, let’s grow in that neighborhood over there! They need some growth, but our neighborhood, we’re good.’ The question is going to be, how to have a dialog where people really have to consider real choices about how that growth will be accommodated?”

Charlotte has yet to seriously confront that same issue: Where do you allow intense growth and how do you balance it alongside a wish to keep older, less-dense areas from being wiped clean of the past? The conundrum is most likely to arise as transit-oriented zoning comes to historic, low-density neighborhoods like NoDa and Optimist Park along the route of the Blue Line Extension. The city’s TOD zoning allows heights of as much as 10 or 12 stories. Even a beloved area like NoDa, which has no historic district protection, may well see most of its historic fabric scraped away in favor of 10-story buildings. Think that can’t happen? Just look at uptown Charlotte, which lost virtually all its old buildings and is now mostly new office and condo towers scattered among parking decks and surface parking lots that replaced its historic fabric.

You call that an auto mall?

An auto dealership in an urban environment in Manhattan

I was in New York over the weekend for a meeting, and Saturday morning I went out for a quick walk beforehand. I was staying on West 55th Street so I decided to walk west toward the river.

By the time I got down to 11th Avenue I realized I had been walking past a large auto dealership. Sure enough, a look at signage told me this Mercedes dealership was taking up a substantial part of the block.

New York-style dealerships

Nearby was another new-looking, large building selling Audis. Across 11th Avenue was a building with the names for numerous makes of car – Ford, Volvo, Mazda, Jaguar, etc. I had stumbled on an urban auto mall! (It was the Manhattan Automobile Company.)

It seems developers – at least those who are not in Charlotte – are perfectly capable of designing auto dealerships, even facilities housing several dealerships – that sit right on a sidewalk along a city street, and do not require vast surface parking lots designed with the elegance of a Walmart superstore.

Back home in Charlotte, of course, the City Council just unanimously OK’d a rezoning to allow a vast expanse of auto mall asphalt within the quarter-mile walk zone of a to-be-built light rail station. (See “Don’t derail transit areas with an auto mall,” and “University City auto mall rezoning complete.”)

This was after the appointed planning commission recommended it, and after the city planning department recommended it. Those decisions remain a bafflement to me. None of it matches the city’s stated goals for its transit station areas. While in New York, I mentioned this transit-station-area rezoning vote to a former city planning director from another state who now teaches planning at a large state university. His jaw dropped. He was incredulous.

The said thing is, as these photos show, there are creative ways to have both auto dealerships and a pedestrian environment. I’m left to conclude that our local folks may just be too provincial to know better.

Mercedes-Benz Manhattan.

Can light rail reshape this auto-oriented corridor?

I have auto-related uses on the mind this week, because at a 4:30 meeting today the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission is going to recommend yay or nay on a proposed auto mall (a collection of car lots from different dealerships) in the University City area. You can download the agenda for that meeting here.

(Update, 5:20 p.m.  The planning commission’s zoning committee unanimously recommended that the site be rezoned for an auto mall. Two commissioners who had earlier expressed opposition to the rezoning, Tom Low and Deb Ryan, weren’t at the meeting. The City Council makes the final decision.)

The city planning staff has switched from recommending against the rezoning to recommend for it, if some design and site plan issues are resolved. Interestingly, their issues earlier were not because it’s for a large chunk of auto-oriented uses within a quarter mile of a planned light rail station area, where the overall city policy calls for transit-oriented (i.e. walkable, compact, mixed-use) development. Instead the staff focused on design issues. (See the commentary on PlanCharlotte.org, “Don’t derail transit areas with an auto mall.”)

Yesterday, I  had occasion to drive on North Tryon Street, from the UNC Charlotte Center City campus to the main campus on University City  Boulevard.  I decided to count the auto-oriented businesses on North Tryon Street up to the corner of U-City Boulevard.  I started at Atando Avenue (where the idea occurred to me), so the count starts there.  Want to guess? The answer is ….

Looking ONLY at the right side of the street heading north (so I didn’t count Parks Chevrolet, Young Ford, etc.) I counted 32 used car lots, car rental businesses, auto parts stores, tire stores (new and used), repair shops, etc. If you want to count the Auto Bell car wash, make it 33.

Interesting side note: The auto junkyard was among the nicer-looking businesses along this stretch, due to its screening, landscaping, etc. The used tire stores were the junkiest.

My point here is that the new light rail line will plow through territory that is already heavily aimed toward automobile uses. And most of that territory carries zoning that already allows very nontransit-friendly uses. (See this, about a gated apartment complex at U-City Boulevard and North Tryon – no rezoning needed. Multifamily is fine at a transit station area, but large surface parking lots and a gated development are not.) Until the land use zoning in the area changes – and especially the standards for form and design – it will be difficult for the city to transform the area into a walkable, mixed-use and mixed-income neighborhood.

Urban wildlife: friend or foe? Plus, TOD sans T?

This week colleague John Chesser is vacationing so I’m doing the daily news feed for our two online publications, PlanCharlotte.org and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s homepage. It’s a fun part of the job – although somewhat relentless, like owning a dairy farm with cows that have to be milked every day, regardless.

Barred owl, urban wildlife. Photo: Liz Odum

But when you do the news feed you find dozens of interesting articles. John kept finding them and sending links around for us, in-house. So we created a special feed from him on the PlanCharlotte.org homepage, called Chesser’s Choices:

Today, though, you get my picks at interesting articles: 
Valuing Urban Wildlife: Critical Partners in the Urban System or Scary, Disgusting Nuisances? A Columbia University scientist discusses the differing attitudes the public has toward nature in the city. Cute mammals elicit one reaction. Yucky insects? Not so much. As one of the article’s headlines  puts it: “Who would want to make a corridor for bees?” 
Dead malls turned into data center? This article from TheAtlanticCities.com tells how a dying downtown shopping mall in downtown Buffalo (one described as a “superblock eyesore”) and one that appears to be not completely dead but “mostly dead” is bringing in rent by offering vacant retail spaces for a data storage center. (I would not recommend this for Charlotte’s completely dead Eastland Mall.) 

Some wildlife (cicada) elicits “yuck.” Photo: Crystal Cockman
Do people who live in transit-oriented development drive less? Yes, but not for the reasons you think.  People living in TOD neighborhoods do, in fact, drive less. The mass transit is not the reason. A study “Does TOD Need the T?”  from Daniel G. Chatman of the University of California-Berkeley looked concludes that even without mass transit, people in TOD neighborhoods drive less. An article in the MinnPost reported: 
What he concluded from all this was that it wasn’t so much the availability of transit that made people use cars less, but density itself. Higher density means “lower on- and off-street parking availability, better bus service and more jobs, stores and people within walking distance.” 
OK, putting on my pundit hat for a minute: A question for Charlotte, where traffic congestion continues to be a huge public concern, might be: Why not start requiring more in-town development to follow TOD principles? Today, the city’s conventional, suburban-form development standards permeate its zoning ordinance. Developers who want to build TOD must pay, in time and money, for a rezoning. Otherwise, in many cases the standards that apply reflect planning values circa 1970. The city planning department has been engaged in an almost-year-long process to see whether its 20-year-old zoning ordinance needs an update.  I could have saved the city some money. Yes, it needs an update!

No TOD for you!

Have you noticed that huge lot being cleared and graded on Woodlawn Road between Old Pineville Road and Interstate 77, about a half-mile from the light rail stop? Curious whether that part of the city is finally going to see some true-to-the-plan development designed with transit in mind, I asked city planner Kent Main what was up

Main led the Woodlawn Transit Station Area Plan process that resulted in this document, adopted in October 2008. The plan calls for “Transit-Oriented Development-Employment” for much of the area in the so-called Transit Station. It says: “New development within the Transit Station Area should have uses, intensity, site and facade design, and transportation elements that are consistent with the Transit Station Area Principles outlined in the Introduction to South Corridor Station Area Plans.” Here’s a link to that document.
The station area principles document says: “Transit Station Areas are higher density areas within a 1/2 mile walk of an existing or planned rapid transit station. They typically provide a mixture of pedestrian-oriented housing, employment and retail services designed to promote travel to and from them on transit.”
On page 11 it goes into even more detail. Among other things, it says, development in the station areas should “disallow automobile-dependent uses, such as automobile sales lots, car washes and drive-thru windows.” Further, it says, transit-oriented development in these areas should:
  • – Orient buildings to front on public streets or open spaces.
  • – Minimize setbacks and locate parking to the rear.
  • – Provide windows and doors at street level and minimize walking distance to entrances.

Buildings designed and situated in those ways make an area easier and more attractive to navigate on foot. That helps make it possible for people to live near a station, walk to nearby shopping, take light rail to work or to get uptown. In other words, in the long run people who live in those areas don’t need to drive as much – saving them money and helping ease the upward trajectory of the city’s traffic congestion.
So what is being built at that cleared lot? I was hoping for a good example of new, transit-oriented design, given the adopted plans and existing conditions on that part of Woodlawn. Nearby are: a Bojangles with drive-through window, some vintage ’70s office park developments, deteriorating old chain restaurant buildings, a few motels, a handful of comparatively thriving restaurants including Azteca and Carolina Prime and three or four gas station/convenience stores. It’s predictable highway-oriented commercial development circa 1980.
Kent Main told me the property is going to be … wait for it … a gas station/convenience store.
The site was never rezoned to TOD zoning but remains zoned B-2 General Business, which allows gas stations/convenience stores. Thus the new gas station not only isn’t transit-oriented development but it didn’t even have to go through a rezoning. Main didn’t say this, but Charlotte’s B-2 zoning is not only not transit-oriented, but it’s suburbanized city planning standards from the disco era, nothing that most of today’s planners would be recommending for such a location. 

In an email, Main explained: “We did not rezone these station areas, relying on the carrot of higher density if and when TOD does become a viable opportunity.”
He noted,  “The Woodlawn Transit Station Area Plan does indeed show the site as appropriate for Transit Oriented Development. In practice, given the heavy traffic on Woodlawn, the proximity of the I-77 ramps, and remoteness from the actual transit station, that is a hard sell there.”
I realize it isn’t always a good idea for the city to pro-actively rezone land in its transit station areas, and that if developers aren’t interested in (or able to get financing for) developing land, simply rezoning it may not solve that problem. I also realize sometimes you have to decide whether some development is better than no development, that those decisions may not be easy. But yet another gas station/convenience store inside a transit station area? That isn’t at all what the plans envision.

New look at old problem: Paying for transportation

RED WING, Minn. – Planning consultant Scott Polikov from Fort Worth, Texas, has an idea that needs a bigger audience. It’s about how you find money to build transit systems. That’s a problem Charlotte is facing, along with dozens of other U.S. cities. Based on his thinking it’s something Charlotte has possibly mismanaged, along with many other places.

The key understanding is that building a transit system (or any transportation system, whether it’s highways or canals) creates huge profits for real estate interests. Example: A transit authority will announce it’s building a line, and where the stations will be. Then it will go out and buy right of way, often through eminent domain, along that planned route, paying now-higher land prices, since the building of the line will make that land worth more.

“In Europe, the landowner pays for the right to have the station,” he said.

Why shouldn’t the government (that is, all of us, since we are the government) capture some of the value that it’s creating (that we’re creating) by building that infrastructure?

Indeed, in the pre-crash era there were developers who were seriously thinking about putting up millions to build Charlotte’s proposed commuter rail transit lines, because they knew it would make their development significantly more valuable. The same was true for the Triangle Transit proposed transit line.

Sometime, credit for real estate development will re-emerge. When that happens, why shouldn’t the Charlotte Area Transit System, for instance, auction off the development rights at the transit stations? And then use that money as a revenue stream? (Yeah, yeah there are a lot of legal issues involved, not to mention political ones.)

Consider how development has occurred along the Lynx light rail line through South End. The line was fixed. In an understandable effort to lure transit-oriented development at the station areas, the city has doggedly gone in and pro-actively up-zoned land to the TOD zoning – thereby giving away huge land value to the property owners. It also gave away any real power the city planners might have had to force better urban design onto that TOD development. If you’re already allowed by right to do your TOD, why should you listen to the city’s request that you do something different – for instance, including some affordable housing units?

(I’m at a yearly conference among people affiliated with the Citistates Associates, a loose coalition of planners, economists, think-tankers, current and former elected officials, Chamber of Commerce execs, etc., who share an interest in metro region growth issues.)

Politics vs. planning

I’ve had this bit in my notebook for a week, and finally have time to write about it:

Mayor Pat McCrory was right – but wrong – at last week’s City Council meeting (March 9) when he badgered a planner about why planners removed a street connection from the Arrowood Transit Station Area plan.

He was right to question it and to say city planners should give their best professional planning judgment, not bow to political pressure. (At least, that’s what I think he was trying to point out. And I must note that many elected officials get similarly huffy when planners act oblivious to political reality. But I digress…)

But McCrory shouldn’t have hectored planner Alberto Gonzalez, who was presenting the plan.
In fact, Gonzalez ended up fainting or passing out – apparently because he hadn’t eaten for some time – which made the scene even more dramatic.

The staff had originally proposed a street connection from Sharon Lakes Road to Hill Road. But neighbors in Starmount didn’t like that idea. (See my Feb. 28 column, “Aiming at where the future will be,” about connectivity.)

So, Gonzalez told the council, “We went back and took a closer look.” And they deleted that street connection. Their thinking, he said, was that such connections are made when property is developed or redeveloped, and since the property in question was relatively newly developed, it wasn’t realistic to think it would be redeveloped again any time in the near future.

McCrory wouldn’t let him off the hook. He said, in essence, “Your job is to give us the planning perspective, not make judgments about what will or won’t fly politically.” So, he continued, was your recommendation during the public hearing incorrect? The poor planner was going to have to say, “Yes, we were wrong,” or “Yes, we caved politically.” I can’t remember at what point he blacked out. It might have been right about then.

Warren Cooksey hopped into the discussion to note that the plan should probably have the connections that planners think are needed, because a redevelopment might occur even if it is, today, deemed unlikely, and you’d want that street connection to be in the plan.

The upshot: The City Council adopted the plan with only Cooksey voting against. The mayor doesn’t have a vote on those matters. Here’s a link that will let you look at the Draft Plan and the revisions. The original street connection proposed is on Page 13 of the Draft Plan.

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.