Category: urban design

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)

Transit’s threat to NoDa

How to route the to-be-built northeast light rail line? CATS officials are pondering that question. Read about it in this story from Sunday’s Observer, from The City section. If you want a public voice, there’s a hearing Tuesday 6-8 p.m. in the fellowship hall at Sugaw (not Sugar) Creek Presbyterian Church, at North Tryon Street and Sugar Creek Road.

I was hoping CATS would route the northeast corridor up North Tryon Street instead of the railroad corridor that parallels North Davidson Street. Apparently that’s not to be, at least between uptown and NoDa. CATS is still considering whether to put a section of the line along North Tryon between Sugar Creek Road and Eastway Drive. North of Eastway, the route follows North Tryon Street.

I’m very worried about the NoDa business district being beset by the same forces that are hitting South End and threatening the Dilworth historic district and its bungalows. Except the NoDa retail area is closer to the rail line than much of Dilworth, and NoDa’s business district has a better preserved “Main Street”-type feel to it than anything that was in Dilworth. That’s all at huge risk, because the Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) zoning that applies to transit station areas allows high-rise buildings of up to 120 feet — or higher if your developer asks for an exemption.

The way land values work, if zoning allows high rise buildings on your land and there’s a strong economic market, eventually you’re likely to have high rises there. Say so long to the Center of the Earth Gallery building, the Evening Muse building, the Neighborhood Theatre building, and say hello to more brutalist modern towers like the reviled, pink Arlington.

Even more threatening to NoDa is that it lacks even the protection Dilworth has as a historic district. NoDa isn’t a local historic district, which requires new development to blend in with the old. Being a historic district hasn’t prevented the bulldozing of some bungalows or the ballooning of others into wannabe McMansions twice the size of the original house. But it’s much better than no protection at all.

If NoDa’s main street were to avoid TOD zoning because the rail stop was put up on North Tryon, then you wouldn’t have those sky high, I-can-build-a-tower land values wreaking quite as much havoc on NoDa’s business district. The super-intense development would instead be a half mile north on North Tryon Street, which heaven knows could use TOD’s better urban design rules as well as stronger economic sizzle. Some South End-style development there would be a very good thing.

In the middle of NoDa, those transit-oriented high-rise buildings would merely kill the special place that has grown up naturally along North Davidson and 36th streets.

One solution would be for the city to craft a more historic-preservation option for TOD, capping heights at three or four stories. Sadly, given the grip developers have on the development-loving city officials, that’s about as likely to happen as I am to be picked as the vice presidential candidate for John McCain or Barack Obama.