Category: urban design

Charlotte fantasies, past and future

UNC Charlotte design student presents plans imagining a transit-oriented neighborhood, North Park. Photo: Mary Newsom

It was 250 years ago this week, Dec. 3, 1768, that the City of Charlotte was officially born with an act by the royal governor of the colony of North Carolina. (Read that charter here.) Monday, the city celebrated in a ceremony uptown with a sound stage and music so extremely amplified that you couldn’t talk to anyone, with birthday cake and food trucks.
Jim Williams as Thomas Polk
It wasn’t a fancy, planned-for-two-years kind of celebration – no fireworks, parades with visiting dignitaries, planes flying banners overhead. But of course, officialdom in Charlotte for as long as I’ve lived here has been more interested in pushing future growth and prosperity than in examining and learning from the past.
That 1768 charter designated five white men to be “city directors,” and one of them, Thomas Polk, was loitering near the sound stage Monday, waiting for the noon speechifying. Polk, or really, local history enthusiast Jim Williams, was resplendent in a black tricorne hat, buff-colored waistcoat, and knee breeches and frock coat of the color that 200 years later would be known as Carolina Blue. Polk – the real one – was a shrewd fellow of Scots-Irish ancestry who before eventually moving on to Tennessee played a key role in the city’s first – but by no means last – spec development.

Polk and a few others, on their own dime, built a log courthouse where two trading paths intersected, in hopes of giving the young town a competitive edge to be designated the Mecklenburg County seat. Which would, of course, make their own property more valuable.
It worked.
And for a city on the make, what could be a more fitting foundational story?
WE MOVE FROM 1768 TO … SOMETIME IN THE FUTURE

After the noontime birthday festivities that celebrated the past, I headed off to hear, instead, about an imagined future –
one that would transform an unattractive, car- and truck-filled intersection into a neighborhood of shops, sidewalks, fruit trees and, of course, a brewery.

First-year Master of Urban Design students at UNC Charlotte’s College of Arts + Architecture were presenting their fall semester project: Envisioning a transit-oriented neighborhood near the Old Concord Road light rail stop. It’s just northeast of the Eastway Drive-North Tryon Street intersection, one of the city’s many areas built solely for the benefit of car and truck drivers.
The assignment from Professor Deb Ryan was to draw a plan for the area generally within a 10-minute walk from the station. After she assigned it, Ryan said, she learned that Mecklenburg County had bought a large chunk of the area – the almost-defunct old North Park Mall site, with its vast potholed asphalt parking lot and derelict empty spaces – and planned to turn it into community services offices.

Although such student plans are essentially just theoretical exercises of the imagination, the students opted to incorporate some of the county’s plans into their own – in hopes the county staff might see some ideas and cooperate in helping transform the whole area.
Cardboard model of the envisioned North Park neighborhood. Photo: Mary Newsom

The students offered a vision – and a nifty cardboard model arrayed on the floor – of a walkable neighborhood with plenty of trees, housing and offices set out along streets lined with stores. They envisioned an elementary school, a research campus outpost of UNC Charlotte, which is 4 miles to the north, and a generous helping of affordable housing.

“What we tried to do is push the idea of health and walkability,” Ryan told a small audience of community members and professional urban designers.
The area today has few attributes of walkability. Although it has some begrudging sidewalks, things are built far enough apart that walking isn’t attractive. The stores and restaurants are splayed out along busy thoroughfares with parking lots in front and between them. Many of the smaller streets don’t connect to anything. It’s hard to cross the busy streets. More walkable areas, by contrast, have nearby places you’d want to walk to, interesting shops and businesses set along the sidewalk, lots of connections, and plenty of residents close by so enough people are out and about to make the area feel safer.
As one student said,  “We had to kind of merge reality with fantasy.”
So they proposed, among other things:
  • 12 new connections for streets that, today, dead end.
  • Both a main street running through the area, and a perpendicular market street that would cross Eastway Drive.
  • A brewery in an old warehouse.
  • Flats, town homes, and single family houses
  • Mixed-use buildings with parking decks hidden on the inside, a form known as a “Texas doughnut.”
  • Reconfiguring the Eastway-Tryon intersection to slow the cars bulleting from Eastway onto Tryon.

Possibly the most controversial proposal (or it would be, if this was truly being proposed rather than an in-class exercise) was to reduce by almost half the existing “park” land nearby. 
Those quotes are because the “park” – Eastway Park – is disconnected from everything around it. Its 90 acres are reached via a long driveway (lacking a sidewalk) off the busy Eastway Drive thoroughfare, with no crosswalk or pedestrian light to allow pedestrians to get there. The driveway leads to a grassy area with two soccer fields, a big surface parking lot and a disc golf course.

Although the park is directly next to the railroad, and only a short distance from the Old Concord road light rail station, you can’t walk between the station and the park, thanks to some fenced-off freight rail lines running directly beside the park.

In other words, Eastway Park is a design fail. In my few visits there, admittedly a highly random sample, it’s only lightly used unless there’s a ball game going on. The county park department plans to build a new recreation center there – although that won’t do anything to improve the park’s unwalkable, isolated site.
Hence the students’ idea to take some of the unused park land and built affordable housing there, to improve the “eyes on the park” for safety, and to give lower-income residents a way to easily access a rec center and park. They propose the same for the Hidden Valley Park in the nearby Hidden Valley neighborhood.
Farther down the fantasy end of the spectrum, although intriguing, was this idea: a series of “productive greenspaces” where trees and other food-producing plantings line streets and small parks. You could walk down a sidewalk and pick an apple. Or a peach, or maybe pawpaws.
Will any of it get built? There’s no way to know, because it’s currently just a gleam in the eyes of a group of graduate students. But as Thomas Polk might have advised back in 1768, when he was building a courthouse on spec with visions of town growth: Why not dream big?

Another Independence Boulevard – lost opportunity or potential future?

Bologna’s Independence Boulevard on a Monday morning in October. Photo: Mary Newsom

On a recent trip to Italy, we stopped for a night in the northern city of Bologna, home to some famous pasta sauces, the world’s first university and a basilica where, legend has it, a German priest was so disgusted by the church’s opulence he went back to Germany and – his name being Martin Luther
– started the Reformation.

It’s also home to an Independence boulevard.  I didn’t capitalize “Boulevard” because the official name of the street is Via dell’ Indipendenza. In any case, it’s a powerful reminder that a busy city thoroughfare need not be ugly.

Photo: Mary Newsom
Under the arcade

I took these photos about 9 a.m. on a Monday, and I took them during breaks in traffic, so they don’t accurately convey the traffic, although it’s safe to say it’s far less than Charlotte’s Independence Boulevard, which carries more than 100,000 vehicles a day in places.

Our Indy Boulevard began life in the 1950s as a four-lane U.S. highway (U.S. 74) that sundered a white, working class neighborhood as well as the city’s first municipal park and its rose garden. Today, Independence Boulevard in Charlotte is either a freeway-style highway lined with sound walls or, where the freeway hasn’t been built yet, a seemingly endless strip of bleak, now-bedraggled highway commercial development that had its heyday in the 1970s and ’80s.

But in Bologna, first settled about 1,000 BC, via dell’ Indipendenza looks different. We arrived on a Sunday evening and the street was jammed with people, and no cars. The street and several others are pedestrianized from 8 a.m. Saturday to 10 p.m. Sunday.

The street itself, like many of the old streets in the city center, is lined with an arcade, which protects pedestrians in bad weather. Under the arcades, many with vaulted ceilings, the sidewalks are terrazzo tile, or something similar. No chewing-gum-stained concrete or crumbling asphalt.

Is there any hope for our Independence Boulevard? I confess to being a pessimist about that. Streets, I’ve observed, set a development pattern that’s difficult to change unless the government decides to buy up all the land, tear everything down, and start over with new development. They have tried that before here, and urban renewal was a brutal disaster.

Charlotte’s Independence Boulevard, 2014. Photo: Nancy Pierce

‘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.

When planners insist, Walmart gets urban


Multistory Walmart in Washington, in a mixed-use building.

Ed McMahon, senior resident fellow at the Urban Land Institute in Washington — and a keynote speaker here in June for the RealityCheck regional planning exercise — sends along a photo of the new, urban-styled Walmart that opened Wednesday in Washington, on Seventh Street NW. “It shows what Wal-Mart can do, if you push them,” he writes.
In a later email, he said, “Wal-Mart* wants to be in hot urban markets like DC because cities are the only place left in America with more spending power than stores.” Because Walmart’s intention to build in Washington was controversial, he wrote, “The City Planning office pushed hard for good urban design.”

The huge retail chain has proposed six stores in D.C., McMahon writes. Two opened Wednesday. The other is on Georgia Avenue. A rendering is below. While the Seventh Street store has housing above the retail, the second one is single-use. but at least it’s sitting on the sidewalk like a respectable city building, and has parking underground rather than splayed out on an asphalt parking lot.

Now, just to get you thinking, just below is the new(ish) Walmart that opened near UNC Charlotte on North Tryon
Street north of University City Boulevard. The tract had been zoned for a conventional suburban-style shopping center since before the city even had plans for its light rail transit line or passed the transit tax in 1998. 
Bing maps photo
Despite knowing by 1998 that light rail would eventually be heading up North Tryon Street, the land was never rezoned for transit-oriented style development. Nor was other land along North Tryon Street.
Just a thought: The entrance to Walmart off North Tryon Street is roughly 1,500 feet (.28 mile) from the planned light rail station at McCullough Drive. It’s generally accepted by planners that the most important areas for transit-oriented development are those within a half-mile of transit stations; a quarter-mile walk is generally considered as far as most people will willingly walk. (Although I question that convention wisdom.)
Today, any piece of property if it already holds the city’s old-style commercial zoning, even if it is right smack-dab at a transit station, could sprout another Walmart-style building. And that does not mean DC-Walmart-style.
I just thought you’d like to know.
—
* Copy-editors and punctuation enthusiasts may wonder why I switch from Walmart to Wal-Mart and back? Two reasons. First, the stores are Walmart. The corporate entity is Wal-Mart Stores Inc.  Second, I was directly quoting McMahon’s email, and he called it “Wal-Mart.”
 

Waxhaw: Once a small town, now it wonders what’s next

Historic downtown Waxhaw. Photo: Nancy Pierce

WAXHAW – The question came from the back row of the small audience, during a presentation from planning consultants about the future for N.C. 16 as it bisects the fast-growing Union County town.

“If we do all this, will we still be considered a small town?”

Consultant Monica Holmes of Lawrence Group paused briefly before answering: “A very important part of this discussion is, ‘What does Waxhaw want to be?’ ”

Good question. Waxhaw – a railroad hamlet chartered in 1889 and named for the Indians who before the Europeans arrived gave their name to the region called “the Waxhaws” – is growing like kudzu. In 2000 it was the 42nd largest municipality in the Charlotte region, and by 2010 it was No. 25. Growth since then has already likely notched it up to No. 17 or 18.  And now it is studying how it could shape the growth along its main highway, growth that is all but promised to arrive in the next 20 years.

Read my article on Waxhaw looks to future for N.C. 16.

Legislature 2013: Most ‘pro-business session in N.C. history’?

‘Snout houses’ in Indiana. Photo: John Delano, Wikipedia.com

Ran across an interesting post from the blog of the local Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition, reporting the doings at a Friday forum the lobbying group held for legislators from Mecklenburg, Union and Iredell counties. Sponsors were REBIC and the N.C. Home Builders Association.

The session “gave home builders many reasons to be optimistic that 2013 would be one of the most pro-business sessions in North Carolina history,” reports the blog.  Read it in full here.

All the legislators on the panel agreed they’d support legislation similar to Senate Bill 731, which passed the Senate in 2011 but didn’t make it through the House before the session died. That bill, sponsored by Sen. Dan Clodfelter, D-Mecklenburg, and Sen. Fletcher Hartsell, R-Cabarrus, would have limited munipalities’ ability to regulate architectural details such as windows, doors and garage doors for single-family residential developments with five or fewer units an acre.

Planners informally called it the “snout-house bill,” because one of the most contentious items in some zoning ordinances, including Davidson’s, is a provision forbidding garages to project far in front of the rest of the house, dwarfing the front door and windows. Planners call those “snout houses,” and say they create a street view that emphasizes cars over people.  Home builders counter that on small lots it’s more economical to build garages that way, and that cities shouldn’t get so deep into architectural details.

Download the text here.
Read its history in the 2011-12 General Assembly here.

Back to the Friday forum:
A bill requiring a sunset provision for “all state administrative rules” won plaudits as well. Primary sponsors include Rep. Ruth Samuelson, R-Mecklenburg, and Rob Bryan, R-Mecklenburg.

A greener home for cars

I stumbled onto what’s below after Wagner Murray Architects posted a notification and link on the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute’s Facebook page. (If you haven’t “liked” us, now’s your chance: Click here or,  on Facebook, search for Facebook.com/unccui.)  The link led to the Charlotte architecture firm’s newly redesigned blog, and what especially caught my eye was the entry proposing a vertical green wall.

Update, Saturday Jan. 5: I ran into architect David Wagner this morning at the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market. (And yes, Nise was there with her fabulous lettuce, the last day until the spring crop. Mostly these winter days you’ll find local meats, sweet potatoes, kale, turnips and carrots.) He confirmed that he’s the author of the Wagner Murray blog, so I’ve edited what’s below to reflect that.

Here’s an illustration, below, courtesy of the Wagner Murray blog:

The idea architect David Wagner proposes is to convert an existing parking deck in uptown Charlotte into a green wall (constructed with living plants) topped with a photovoltaic installation. Here’s a link to the item.

It’s reminiscent of ideas others have proposed here and there to try to enliven, visually, some of the many dead spots built in our downtown during the design-bleak years of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s.

Here’s a link to an essay, from Charlotte writer Tracey Crowe, in the PlanCharlotte.org website I run, in which she proposes using green walls to spruce up (pun intended) some bleak areas: “Turn uptown’s street canyons green.”

And PlanCharlotte’s Keihly Moore has suggested similar ideas, among others, to soften those dull walls: “The great walls of Charlotte.”


How many of you recognize the spot where the proposed green wall is illustrated?

 It’s this uptown parking deck on College Street at East Third Street:

It’s always seemed to me a wasted opportunity for some whimsy. If the green wall thing doesn’t work out, I’d like to see a game where you can drop a large ball at the top and watch it spiral all the way down to the ground floor.  

Urban design takes stage Thursday

Thursday I’ll be live-blogging from the UNC Charlotte urban design symposium – a first for the School of Architecture’s Master of Urban Design program. Lead-off speaker at 8 a.m. will be Mitchell Silver, Raleigh planning director and national president of the American Planning Association.

Then comes a panel of mostly local experts: Charlotte City Council member David Howard, who in private life is a vice president at the nonprofit housing group Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership;  Charlotte architect and planner Terry Shook of Shook Kelley (click here to read his recent remarks on Gastonia, New York and Jane Jacobs); Charlotte developer Clay Grubb; UNCC’s Deborah Ryan, an assistant professor in the school of architecture, and Nathan Taft, director of acquisitions for the Jonathan Rose Companies.

The final keynote at 10:45 a.m. will be from Tom Murphy, former mayor of Pittsburgh.
Attendees must register through the Urban Land Institute chapter in Charlotte: http://charlotte.uli.org.

 

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.