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Justin, who commented on the previous post, hopes we (the country) are finally getting it together.

(To fill you in: I’m at a conference on “The Next City” in Cambridge, MA, sponsored by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Nieman Foundation and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.) We’re now listening to economist Chip Case of Wellesley University, creator of the Case-Shiller Index of real estate. More about him later.)

Keith Schneider — a Michigan-based writer and blogger (ModeShift.org) who free-lances for the New York Times and founded the Michigan Land Use Institute — opined that unless the country does get its act together, the whole country will be like Michigan. That is, suffering deeply.

By getting its act together, he means stronger transit and not jettisoning the already-built infrastructure in cities such as Detroit and Cleveland, and building in ways that aren’t as expensive for public infrastructure as the years of low-density sprawl growth has been.

He noted that the problems the whole country is now seeing, such as foreclosures and declining incomes, were first visible in the outer-outer suburbs of Detroit. (And, I should add, in the new starter home subdivisions ringing Charlotte.)

Leonard Pitts, the Miami Herald’s Pulitzer-winning columnist, is in town today. He spoke to a breakfast sponsored by the nonprofit group Mecklenburg Citizens for Public Education, or MeckEd (http://www.mecked.org/ ). This afternoon he’ll visit the staff at The Observer.

In 2007 Pitts wrote a series, “What Works,” in which he highlighted more than a dozen successful efforts around the country to help children and schools. One was from Gaston, N.C. (a town near Roanoke Rapids on northeastern North Carolina, not nearby Gaston County) and featured a KIPP Academy.

“How do you change something many of us long ago learned to take for granted?” he asked the crowd. And, “If we know what works, why not just do it?”

He quoted an ancient Greek saying: “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they will never sit in.”

In other words, get involved where you can, doing what you can.

He’s not the first to note this, but it’s still true: A strong public education system is important for the local economy, for keeping businesses healthy and for the fiscally prudent goal of keeping local people engaged in productive lives and out of jail. It’s not just a feel-good thing, Pitts said, but a common-sense mathematical calculation.

Yet if you read the comments section of this blog or many online sites, anytime the public schools emerge as a topic, and they’re filled with hostility toward Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in particular and public schools in general. Which is, at bottom, incredibly counter-productive for the whole community. Nothing is perfect, but invective doesn’t help anyone improve anything and indeed, tends to have the opposite effect.

Has my kid had some bad teachers at CMS? You bet. Been in class with a few deeply troubled kids? Yep. Do CMS administrators make occasionally silly decisions? Of course. Why should they be different from managers everywhere? (I say that as a former department head, where made my share of dumb decisions.) None of those problems is specific to CMS or even to public schools.

Yet there’s a vein of what seems to approach hatred running through parts of Charlotte, toward its public schools that too often drowns out an equally strong vein of support.

MeckEd hopes to start a community discussion on public education. Here’s a link to their new discussion board, being run with help from the Crossroads Charlotte initiative.

And don’t forget DonorsChoose.org, where you can put your money to good use helping classroom teachers who really need the help.

The News & Observer reports that N.C. transportation officials are optimistic that the Charlotte-Raleigh-Washington route will fare well in snagging some of those $8 billion in stimulus money for high-speed rail, and that it’s one of six corridors feds have said are likely candidates for the first stimulus funds to be distributed later this year. (Associated Press report here.) If that’s the case, then kudos to North Carolina for having worked for years to try to keep alive the idea of high-speed inter-city rail travel, even during years when many taxpayers thought the idea was just a waste of money.

I’m just back from a week spent traveling by rail in and around New York, New Jersey and Washington, DC. Took commuter rail from NYC to Princeton. Took heavy rail (that would be the subway) around Manhattan. Took Amtrak from NYC to DC. It was easy. It was fast. It was environmentally prudent. It was more convenient than flying — downtown to downtown. And the whole time I was on the train I didn’t worry a bit about landing in the Hudson River.

Does inter-city rail cost money? You betcha. But so do our taxpayer-built airports (don’t forget the air traffic control system), as well as the interstate highway system, with which we are all busily polluting our atmosphere (possibly destroying the global environment as we do so, though I think I’ll be dead before we know whether that’s really what we’re doing) and enriching some Middle Eastern potentates I’d just as soon not enrich. Everything’s a trade-off.

UNCC’s planned uptown building (above)

Good news for N.C. architect Phil Freelon. His firm, the Freelon Group, has been named to a team that will design the Smithsonian’s new Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall. David Adjaye, an up-and-coming young architect from London, will be lead designer. The Freelon Group is also designing Charlotte’s now-under-construction Afro-American Cultural Center, to be named for architect and former Mayor Harvey Gantt.

Speaking of Gantt, he was one of the many glitterati (such as we have in Charlotte) at the UNC Charlotte groundbreaking on Monday for the 12-story building at 9th and Brevard streets uptown. Among the folks who spoke or whom I spotted in the crowd: UNC system president Erskine Bowles, UNCC trustees chair Ruth Shaw, Mayor Pat McCrory, City Council members Patsy Kinsey, Anthony Foxx and Andy Dulin, county commissioners’ chair Jennifer Roberts, ex-BofA exec Dennis Rash, former First Union CEO Cliff Cameron, retailers Al and Leon Levine, and a string of city staffers including City Manager Curt Walton.

And if the firepower assembled at that party tent makes any difference, you should put money on the northeast transit corridor — an extension of the existing Blue Line — being renamed the Green Line, after UNCC’s colors. References to the “green line” drew enthusiastic applause.

This just in: U.S. Transportation System is a giant Ponzi scheme.

OK, it’s an April Fool’s joke (sort of) by the clever folks at the Project for Public Spaces. The “Faking Places” newsletter today has these other headlines:

— How football stadiums can be transformed into vital community places.
— Get your kicks on I-95: USDOT announces “Roads with Character” initiative.
And my favorite:
— Ice rink tops list of amenities proposed by residents of Hell.

I wish I could tell you what was discussed at 7:45 a.m. today, when the Charlotte Chamber’s Land Use committee (a committee of real estate, development and related business people) met with Deputy City Manager Ron Kimble. But I was told I wasn’t welcome.

On the agenda, according to an e-mail last week from Natalie English, the Chamber’s senior vice president for business and education advocacy: “Collin Brown [a lawyer] with K&L Gates will present specific examples of the cumulative impacts of the Post Construction Control Ordinance, the Urban Street Design Guidelines policy and the Proposed Amendment to the Tree Ordinance. Please plan to attend to participate in the discussion with Ron Kimble about how we might affect the impact these ordinances have on economic development, affordable housing and development in our community.”

The post-construction controls ordinance is a water-quality protection measure. The urban street design guidelines (policy, but not embedded into ordinances yet) aim to make city streets walkable and would require more streets and more street trees, among other things. The proposed change to the tree ordinance would strengthen tree-save requirements for commercial property developers.

The Chamber, English told me last week — when she was, in a very friendly and polite way telling me I couldn’t come this morning — is concerned that the proposed tree ordinance changes, on top of the post-construction controls ordinance and the street design guidelines, would “drastically impact the ability to grow the economy.”

The Land Use committee chair, Karla Knotts, is also interim executive director of the Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition (REBIC). REBIC and some members of the Land Use committee had asked the Chamber to oppose the proposed tree ordinance changes.

Clearly, putting more requirements on developers will increase the costs of development and construction. That means what gets built would A) Cost more to buyers, OR B) Mean developers wouldn’t offer as much money to buy land to start with. Both results have been known to occur, depending on the location, the market, etc. But regardless, the marginal difference in building cost isn’t the villain in today’s horrific real estate and building slowdown.

Nor would the real estate market here miraculously revive if only developers could offer product a bit more cheaply, with narrow sidewalks and no street trees, its runoff still allowed to pollute local creeks, and just as many trees being cut down as is allowed today.

Here’s the painful reality, painful to everyone in this area, because none of us likes to see businesses hurting: The developers’ potential customers are losing their jobs, health insurance, and even their homes to foreclosure, or they can’t sell their existing homes. Financing agencies, including banks, are struggling to offer credit because the finance system is full of toxic loans. That’s the problem developers are facing. It isn’t the tree ordinance.

At 3 p.m. today a bunch of Charlotte City Council members and assorted others (including yours truly) will possibly risk their lives by walking on one of those cruddy back-of-curb sidewalks along Woodlawn Road, where traffic whizzes by at 50 mph, inches from your body. And then we’ll be invited — try not to gasp in horror — to cross the street. Note: Woodlawn has no lights or crosswalks between Scaleybark and South Boulevard, almost a full mile. So if you need to get to the other side, you just dash.

The purpose: Show the politicians how pedestrian-UN-friendly some of today’s existing development standards are.

Let us all hope no elected officials get squashed like bugs on the street. As we have seen in recent months, filling seats of elected officials (e.g., county sheriff, school board) can be messy and ugly. We would just as soon not be put through that again this year.

Why do the sidewalks tour? CDOT is working on a Pedestrian Plan which it hopes to put to council for a vote later this year. The plan (in its current draft) would recommend studying changes to ordinances in order to require back-of-curb sidewalks be improved if there’s a substantial development on a site, and that infill/teardown development be required to install sidewalks. There’s probably going to be opposition from the developers’ lobby. This is a way to help present the other side of the issue to the council members.

Small note: Technically the sidewalks on Woodlawn are not all back-of-curb. There’s a minuscule planting strip of perhaps 12 inches weedy grass-like foliage.

I’ll be taking photos. If anyone is turned into a grease spot on the pavement, don’t say you weren’t warned.

As I wrote in the Saturday Observer, the Charlotte Chamber isn’t going on an inter-city visit this year, opting to stay home and study what’s here. I gave some suggestions for what they should do and see, such as have a locavore dinner and hear from artists and people with lots of piercings.

But what would you recommend they see? (And for the purposes of this blogposting, let’s all assume those who wish to have already visited whatever topless bars they care to.) If you want to vote on the Chamber’s online poll, here’s a link.

Chatting with Chamber president Bob Morgan, I asked if he, too had observed more people uptown dressing more formally? Just in the past several months, it seems, I’ve seen more guys in suits and ties and fewer in khakis and knit shirts or jeans and sport shirts. Morgan said he’d noticed the same thing. We speculated people afraid of being laid off are dressing up more, and those already laid off are trying to look professional as they look for new work.

Then, he noted something else. In conversations he’s hearing, he said, “It’s no longer about work-life balance. It’s now about ‘work ethic.’ “

Not unexpected, of course. When times get tough, companies want workers who’ll put in long hours, not whine about pay/benefits and not have to deal with those pesky “family” problems such as sick kids or ailing parents.