Category: UMUD

One N.C. city aims to protect older buildings with a height limit. (Hint: Not Charlotte)

Tall new buildings surround Romare Bearden Park in uptown Charlotte. Photo: Nancy Pierce

As discussion in Charlotte continues on how to protect the unique character of some older neighborhoods from intense development pressure, [Can Plaza Midwood save the places that matter?] one N.C. city is using a tool that’s been available all along. That city is Raleigh. [With height caps, Raleigh hopes to protect historic buildings]

It’s not a tool beloved by people who make money from building tall buildings. By limiting the heights of buildings, the city is, at heart, limiting the profitability of any development on that dirt. Note that overall, Raleigh wants to encourage tall buildings downtown, and density.  But with a cluster of 19 old, iconic buildings along its main downtown street, Raleigh wants to add a level of protection.

Most of the buildings that will get the height limits are on the National Register of Historic Places and Raleigh historic landmarks.  Under state and federal law, neither of those designations can prevent a building from demolition.

Charlotte also has height restrictions in some of its zoning categories, especially the transit-oriented and mixed-use development districts. But those height limits are so tall that they don’t, effectively, deter demolitions of older buildings, and there is an “optional” zoning that lets the city OK pretty much anything if the developer can make a good case for it.) Of course, the single-use-only districts have de facto height limits as well.  (My graduate student, Jacob Schmidt, recently analyzed the proportion of mixed-use vs .single-use zoning inside Charlotte city limits. More than 90 percent of the land area is zoned for single-uses.)

But if you own a property in uptown Charlotte zoned UMUD (uptown mixed use district) you can build as tall a building as the FAA will allow. That’s right — the only limits on height are based on whether airplanes might run into the towers. The
development-encouraging UMUD zoning was developed during the 1980s, when businesses were fleeing to the suburbs and the city wanted to encourage development uptown. At the time, it was a much-needed tool. UMUD zoning, coupled with several uptown bank leaders’ determination to keep uptown healthy, prevented uptown from dying completely for a couple of decades. So while Raleigh, Greensboro, Winston-Salem and other N.C. downtowns are finally reviving nicely, with their older buildings intact, in Charlotte the side effect was to demolish virtually all the older buildings, including designated landmarks. With some welcome exceptions, our uptown is mostly shiny and new. 

I have heard at least one planner say that at one point the idea of uptown height limits was mentioned in a planning department meeting. But it was quietly buried.

It will be interesting to see, over time, how or whether Raleigh’s use of the height-limit tool makes a difference in its downtown development. 

Challenges for 2020 Uptown

Let’s get down to it. The Center City 2020 Vision Plan launches this month. There will be a public workshop Oct. 21, 5:30 p.m. at the Charlotte Convention Center.

The nonprofit Charlotte Center City Partners, the city and the county held a media event on Sept. 30, including a tour of neighborhoods in and around uptown that will be part of this study. The Observer’s April Bethea wrote an article, and on Sunday the editorial board opined, with “New uptown plan to look beyond ‘uptown.’ “

CCCP, in particular, deserves credit for pushing this idea. Some of my sources tell me it’s CCCP – not the city or county – providing the energy behind the 2020 Plan. CCCP President Michael Smith and his senior vice president of planning and development, Cheryl Myers, have a good grasp of the many issues involved.

So here’s my two-cents worth on what I hope the 2020 Plan looks at:

• What’s wrong with the sidewalk experience uptown? How can it be improved? What needs to change (UMUD standards, for instance) to ensure that we don’t keep replicating the errors?
By “sidewalk experience” I don’t mean just cracked pavers or crosswalks or utility poles blocking sidewalks on lesser streets. I mean whether it’s interesting to walk down the sidewalk. Can you look into store windows? (We know the sad answer to that one, alas.)

Walk down East Trade Street from College to the Transportation Center and you’ll see what I mean. Surely we can do better than EpiCentre loading docks and Ritz-Carlton driveways for what should be one of uptown’s premier streets.

Or walk along the “new” Brevard Street between the backside of the Convention Center and the backside of the NASCAR Hall of Fame complex. You’ll see that from an urban design standpoint, “backside” is a most polite term. Can I say that the new buildings have created a sidewalk experience that sucks? How did that happen, with the city government’s deep involvement in those projects? We do, in fact, employ urban designers. Were they listened to? Whatever happened to requiring street-level retail? This is not a block anyone should be proud of creating.

• Grapple with the pre-existing and outdated zoning categories. They’re what bring us new, suburban-style branch banks right across the street from the urban Metropolitan development in Midtown. They bring us the new, suburban-style Bojangles at Third and Charlottetowne Avenue, and the new, suburban-style Family Dollar at Five Points next to Johnson C. Smith University. It’s fine to allow old, nonconforming buildings. But for heaven’s sake, if new buildings are going up, can’t you ensure that they’re not the same old suburbia-in-the-wrong-place?
Two years ago, the city’s planners were drowning in rezonings and didn’t have time for this. Guess what? Now they do. And they aren’t looking at this?
This is where Planning Director Debra Campbell could play an important leadership role.

• Related to the previous: How can the city help create true “centers” for neighborhoods – neighborhood centers where you can easily walk to stores, restaurants and offices? It’s hard to explain this concept to people whose only frame of reference is shopping centers and subdivisions, but in older cities different neighborhoods have small “downtown”-like clusters of stores and other businesses. In Boston, the Brighton, Jamaica Plain and North End neighborhoods are good examples. Almost all that’s left of what Charlotte used to have are the Plaza-Central and NoDa commercial areas, both compact and walkable.
The city is committed to a “centers and corridors” strategy. But so far it’s concentrating on “corridors.”
Some of the newer, mixed-use projects (e.g. the Metropolitan) are too much reminiscent of shopping centers rather than neighborhood centers. Part of it is weak project design, part of it is how developers have to put projects together to get financing (including locally owned retail makes it well nigh impossible for developers to get financing), and part of it, I fear, is that the idea of incremental, small-scale buildings owned by different owners has gone the way of the Edsel. Can we bring it back?

• Engage Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in this conversation. I mean, really engage. Few things can hurt a neighborhood on the brink faster than being assigned to a low-performing school – or revive one quicker than being reassigned to a popular, high-performing school. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools needs to be a full participant in this plan. Yes, school assignment can be nasty and politically radioactive. That’s why they call it leadership.

• Why 2020? I want a plan that looks well beyond 10 years. This should be the 2050 Vision Plan. We’ve had more than enough short-term thinking. The quest for short-term profits at the expense of long-term financial stability is one of the things that drove the global economy into this horrible economic slump. Charlotte’s center city planning should rise above that.

(A note of disclosure: Observer publisher Ann Caulkins is a co-chair of the CCCP planning effort. She hasn’t told me to write this, or told me what to write. As of this moment she doesn’t even know I’m writing this, much less know what I’m saying.)