Category: zoning ordinance

Time to have that uncomfortable talk. I mean about parking.

A Walmart in east Charlotte offers a gracious plenty of parking. Photo: Google Maps satellite view

It’s a question without easy answers. But that just makes it even more important to confront, and find a guiding strategy. It’s time for Charlotte to talk about parking.

Parking is both blessing and curse for any city built – as Charlotte mostly was – around private automobile use.

There’s a lot to curse. An admittedly incomplete list of problems parking lots cause would include the way they devour valuable land space that could hold housing, stores, workplaces, parks, community gardens, tree canopy, pretty much any use valued by city residents. (See below for a short list of what could go into one parking space.) They send storm water runoff cascading into local surface waters (i.e. creeks), polluting them and causing more frequent flooding onto the floodplains where foolish development was allowed. Remember Hurricane Florence in September? Get used to it, as climate change brings more heavy rainstorms. They add to the urban heat island effect, pushing the rising summer temperatures even higher. And the need to provide parking creates significant headaches for small businesses.

And finally this: With so much parking both “free” and available, we almost always hop into the car instead of asking, could we walk? Bicycle? Take a bus or light rail?

But parking lots can also be a blessing in a city built to make driving the automatic choice for almost all of us. For most residents here, any alternatives to private automobile travel – walking, bicycling, scootering, transit or ride-shares – aren’t available or competitive in terms of time, hassle and cost. And when we drive, we need temporary lodging for our vehicles.

I was reminded of this late last month. Rain was pelting the asphalt as I wheeled into what looked like the last available parking spot at Cotswold shopping center, then sloshed across the asphalt for last-minute Christmas shopping. I was glad to find even that terrible parking place.

But should two weeks in December really determine the size of parking lots year-round? It’s January now, and across
most of Charlotte those huge lots at our shopping centers revert to their 50-other-weeks-a year condition: plenty of open, “free” spaces.

It’s time for Charlotte policy-makers to figure out how to get a handle on parking. How can we encourage smarter use of our land while admitting cars will be with us, even if, we hope, in smaller numbers? Can we acknowledge the social inequities embedded in our autopilot acquiescence to providing all the parking anyone needs for the Saturday before Christmas? Can we ask:

• How much parking should be required? How much should be allowed?

• Why isn’t more parking shared between day- and night-time uses, and how can the city encourage more sharing?

• Why should churches, schools and other institutions get a free pass to expand surface parking lots into nearby neighborhoods almost without limit?

• How in terms of parking regulations, do we treat places differently, since places in the city are different? Ballantyne is not NoDa, and University City is not Myers Park.

• Can the city lead on this issue? Could it assist with financing private, shared parking decks, more space-efficient and environmentally prudent but more expensive to build?

• Couldn’t some parking lot and meter revenue help fund something helpful?

City planners are rewriting ordinances governing development in light rail station areas, called Transit Oriented Development (TOD) zoning. They propose eliminating any required minimum number of parking spots except for restaurants within 200 feet of single-family homes. They believe (with reason) that providing easy, “free” parking close to light rail stops encourages people to drive when they could walk, cycle or take transit.

The problem, of course, is that not offering easy parking doesn’t stop people from driving in from areas where transit isn’t readily available and walking isn’t safe or efficient. Yes, I personally will sometimes drive 15 minutes to get to a light rail station where I can “park for free”* and then ride to South End or NoDa, but I am not a typical Charlottean. Example: For me to leave home and arrive at the Evening Muse in NoDa for an 8 p.m. event would be a one-hour transit trip, and that’s with a bus stop a quick, 5-minute walk from our house. Driving is 15-20 minutes.

Further, developers will tell you that lenders require a certain amount of parking, even if the city doesn’t. Yes, easing the TOD parking requirement may well be a smart thing, but it’s no silver bullet that kills the parking monster.

Just imagine what could go in one 220-square-foot parking space: room for 10 bicycles, space for lunch with 15 friends, 3 office work spaces, or one small studio in Paris. That fun factoid comes courtesy of author Taras Grescoe (@Grescoe on Twitter) and the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy in New York (@ITDP_HQ on Twitter).

So as Charlotte dives into a new comprehensive plan, Charlotte Future 2040, can we please take a harder look at parking? We’re going to need some of that space for other things.

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* Why is “free” in quote marks? Because parking is never really free. The cost is embedded in rents you pay, the cost of goods you buy from merchants who must build those parking lots or pay the cost in their leases.

Planner and author Daniel Shoup studies parking and believes it’s been subsidized in a way that’s inequitable. “Wherever you go – a grocery store, say – a little bit of the money you pay for products is siphoned away to pay for parking,” Shoup says (as quoted in this 2014 article in Vox). “My idea is simple: if somebody doesn’t have a car, they shouldn’t have to pay for parking.”

Shoup estimates the national tally for public subsidies for parking at $127 billion.

Apparently Google’s Satellite View camera did not take the photo of this south Charlotte church lot on a Sunday morning.

‘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.”
 

Regional planning and sticker shock

Will stickers on a map matter? Photo: City of Charlotte

After suggesting in print that people should attend last Thursday’s regional planning workshop, part of the CONNECT Our Future effort, it was only fitting that I, too, go. And a good time was had by all. Except …

We were assigned tables as we went in, and I ended at a table with two other Marys – Mary Hopper, recently stepped down as director of University City partners and a former chair of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, and Mary Clayton, a transportation planner with Parsons Brinckerhoff. Also at the table were three UNC Charlotte urban design grad students, and a handful of other folks.  I am not sure that the table was representative of the population at large, but whatever. It was a good collection of people.

Our table moderator, Nadine Bennett, a planner with Centralina Council of Governments, which is administering the $5 million federal grant that funds CONNECT, asked us all to talk a bit about who we were and what we thought the region’s biggest issues are. Just about everyone said “transportation.” And just about everyone said, “We don’t want to become another Atlanta.”  One of the graduate students was, I am not making this up, from Atlanta, and she was particularly forceful on this point.

Bennett said that she had been the moderator for, I think, 17 different tables during a two-month series of workshops in 14 counties and at every one of those tables, people had said, “We don’t want to become another Atlanta.”
In other words, regardless of the interesting, lively, cultural vibe in Atlanta, its image in this part of the country is of one giant traffic jam and minimal public transportation.  Not sure that’s accurate, but that’s obviously what people envision.

The workshop exercise itself  involved placing stickers on a big map of Mecklenburg County, showing where we think new metropolitan centers (towers), activity centers, transit-oriented centers, etc., should be.  We had a small number of “walkable neighborhoods” that we could stick here and there on the map.  It was never clear why we couldn’t work toward making every neighborhood a walkable neighborhood. And it wasn’t clear why we were restricted to Mecklenburg County, because if anyone understands the reality that a metro area’s issues are not hemmed in by county lines, it would be the regional planners at the Centralina COG.

It was fun placing the stickers. Without a young child in the house my exposure to stickers has dropped and you forget how much fun they are. But as with most regional planning exercises of this sort, whether it was the RealityCheck 2050 workshop last June, or last week’s event or even the drawing up of area plans, I emerge frustrated. From what I see, in this city in this state, what’s in a plan seems to make little difference in shaping what ends up happening.

Do plans matter?

That’s for a lot of reasons. One is that national tax policy as well as the financing availability for developers both play a big role in how developments are structured. It is even tougher than before the downtown to get financing for mixed-use developments.

Another obvious reason that plans don’t get followed is that the plans themselves can be disconnected from the legal requirements for developers. Ordinances address such things as setbacks, allowable land uses, how many buildings can sit on how much land, etc. Those things shape the results. Some cities create land use plans that have the force of law. Others adopt a comprehensive plan and then systematically amend their ordinances to enable what the plan calls for.

Charlotte doesn’t do it that way. It adopts plans, then hopes developers will follow them. Unless the plans are 20 years out of date. In which case the planners may recommend in favor of a development that doesn’t follow the plan. Plus, sometimes plans have vague language which means nobody can tell if a development is following the plan or not. In any case, regardless of what plans say or what planners recommend, it’s elected officials who decide rezonings.

Less obvious: by-right zoning

A less obvious reason that plans may make little difference is that a lot of development takes place with no rezoning needed. Consider the vast, 733-student, gated and fenced apartment complex going up about a half mile from the planner University City light rail stop. No public notice or rezoning took place because the land was already zoned to hold suburban-form apartments.

Multifamily is a good use for a transit station area. But this design is not. Transit station areas are supposed to have walkable streets and connecting streets (walkability is closely related to short, connecting blocks, says Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City.) Transit station areas are not supposed to feature a 733-space parking lot between the light rail station and the residences, nor large wooded buffer areas — a suburban-style design. (An updated zoning ordinance could have prevented this.)

Charlotte’s Sharon Road West light rail stop. No other counties have opted in. Photo: Nancy Pierce

Last Thursday night, I had to leave before all seven tables reported out, but after five tables, all had recommended dramatically improving the area’s public transportation choices.Is that going to happen? A 14-county region means dozens of elected officials, and so far, none of those counties has offered to pay for public transit, because it would mean taxing the voters. If there’s a groundswell in the region for a transit tax, it’s not loud or well-reported on.

To be sure, the Salt Lake City region’s remarkable series of transit construction projects (building 70 miles in seven years) is reported to have emerged from a regional planning process, Envision Utah.

Can CONNECT produce any region wide consensus the way Envision Utah did? I’m hopeful. But not optimistic.

What’s up (or not) with a zoning ordinance re-do?


It’s been almost three months since a consultants’ report concluded the city’s zoning ordinance is seriously in need of updating. (See my PlanCharlotte.org article, “Report: Charlotte ordinance confusing, lacks modern tools” from July.

What’s happening next?  Planning Director Debra Campbell discussed that at an Oct. 7 meeting of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, an appointed advisory board to the city’s Planning Department and City Council. 
Campbell said the planning staff is discussing how to link the zoning ordinance assessment process with their planning process. The planners want to look at whether a revised zoning ordinance would mean revising the way plans are done, which today are the “Euclidian model,” Campbell said. For non-planners, that means based on single-use zoning districts.  (The term “Euclidian zoning” isn’t about Euclidian geometry, but is named for the 1926 Supreme Court case, Village of Euclid, Ohio, v. Ambler Realty Co., which ruled that land use zoning is constitutional. The Euclid zoning ordinance was based on single-use districts, a type of land use generally considered suburban or rural, not suitable for large cities.)

 

“Our plans are very use-based,” Campbell said. “They’re colors on a map.” In other words, local plans tend to map large areas and, with color-coding, delineate land uses should go where. Instead, Campbell said, “I want them to focus on both use and character.” Sometimes, she said, getting too deep into the planning process can seem dry and boring to the general public. “In general people want to be involved with what’s it going to look like, what’s it going to feel like?”
Laura Harmon, the department’s director of development services, said the staff would have a better idea of how to link plans and the zoning ordinance “in the next month or two.”
Said Campbell: “If there’s a fatal flaw that I have, it’s that I like to go slow … I like to bring folks along with me.”

But what about those duplexes?

Before the city Zoning Committee deferred its decision on a controversial rezoning for a Walgreens in the Dilworth neighborhood, the panel – a subcommittee of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission – also postponed another controversial proposal.

City staff have proposed changing the Charlotte zoning ordinance, to allow duplexes on any property zoned for single-family residential. Some neighborhoods have protested, saying they worry that too many duplexes will bring rentals to otherwise stable neighborhoods and that single-family-home neighborhoods should stay that way. Want to read more on that? Click here: “Garage apartments now legal; duplex move stalls.”

The duplex proposal is part of a larger city initiative to increase the amount of affordable housing throughout the city, rather than letting it cluster in a few parts of the city. Read more about that initiative here.

Walgreens and the ‘urban’ zoning that isn’t

I’m sitting at the zoning committee of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission listening to the committee – an advisory body only – discuss whether to recommend a rezoning needed for a controversial, proposed stand-alone Walgreens pharmacy on the edge of the historic Dilworth neighborhood and abutting its historic district. (See “Dilworth wary of proposed Walgreens.”)

There’s a lot of discussion, led generally by planning commissioner Lucia Griffith, an architect, about the proposed drive-through window the Walgreens would build. An aside: The property is in a pedestrian overlay district, a zoning category intended to make a more pedestrian-friendly area. Drive-throughs, with driveways and vehicles going in and out, are generally accepted as not pedestrian-friendly. Yet they are allowed in this pedestrian district. Whatever. (Want to read the rezoning petition? Click here.)

But here’s the larger issue that I don’t hear anyone discussing. The property is now zoned for O-2, for office development, and is in a PED (the overlay) zoning.* That zoning would allow an office building, and if it was larger than 30,000 square feet it could include a small bit of retail, but it would take approximately 40,000* 80,000 square feet of office space to allow as much retail space as the Walgreens wants – 16,000 square feet. So in order to have a stand-alone, one-story Walgreens with a drive-through lane, the developers are asking for – wait for it – a more urban zoning category.

Yes, you read that right. The extremely suburban form of a stand-alone, one-story, drive-through pharmacy needs a zoning category called Mixed-Use-Development District, or MUDD. That whole zoning category was created to allow more urban-style development in the city.
The planners at some point in the negotiations asked the developer to create a more “urban” design, and now they say the developer has complied, because the formerly blank walls will have more articulations and “architectural features.”

I am still waiting for a planning staffer or a planning commissioner to push for a truly urban design, which would have a multi-use building, that meets the sidewalk, with ground-floor retail space with windows and door on the sidewalk, offices and/or residences above.

Whether the Walgreens is or isn’t a good idea for that corner is a whole separate question. Seems to me a Walgreens in a true city building is a whole different question from a cookie-cutter suburban Walgreens in a historic nighborhood and in what is supposedly a pedestrian-friendly district.

The bigger question is why the zoning for an urban-style development allows an extremely suburban style of building.

Seems the Mixed-Use zoning should produce actual mixed use development, not an office-only building plopped next to a drug-story-only building, separated by a driveway and parking lot. That’s what we’ve been getting for decades all over the city, and we call it auto-oriented suburban sprawl.

Two end notes:
1. Walgreens consultant Walter Fields, when I asked him recently why the developers didn’t just propose a multi-use building with retail on the ground floor and offices above – what’s built in real cities all over the world – he said that to do such a larger building would require a lot more parking, which would require a parking deck, which would be too expensive. I’d love to hear other developers’ thoughts about that.

2. Lucia Griffith moves for, and wins, a 30-day delay to let the developers and the neighborhood talk more about how the lighting would affect the neighbors, to rework the drive-through exit, and to ensure that the site plan restricts the retail use on the site to a pharmacy. She asks them also to work on the “urban character,” but isn’t specific about what that means.

* Corrected to account for what O-2 zoning allows if it’s in a pedestrian overlay district. Friday, Oct. 5, 1:15 p.m.)

If you ask the public, they might answer

(Update, 9/19/12 at 1 p.m.: A more complete version of this article, with photos, “Neighbors deliver earful on zoning ordinance,” is now available at PlanCharlotte.org.)

You’d expect a room full of developers, developer consultants and lobbyists invited specifically to  bellyache Tuesday afternoon about Charlotte’s zoning ordinance would have had plenty to say. And they did have comments. But it was the group who followed them, about two dozen neighborhood activists and non-developers at a later public comment session, who all but scorched the paint off the walls.

“My concern is that this whole process will turn the zoning ordinance over to the developers,” said Bea Nance of the College Downs neighborhood in northeast Charlotte.

“We’re no match for the developers with money,” said John Wall of the Hidden Valley and North Tryon Street neighborhood.

“The problem is, there are no teeth in plans. They mean nothing,” said Susan Lindsay of east Charlotte.

“Quite honestly, the staff doesn’t support their own plans,” said Cindy Schwartz of Dilworth. “We never see them oppose anything.”

The two forums were held Tuesday ….
to solicit comments from the public about a zoning ordinance assessment. The city Planning Department has hired Clarion Associates of Chapel Hill and Denver to look at the city’s zoning ordinance and at whether it helps or hurts in implementing city policies and plans, and then offer ideas for reorganizing, restructuring and updating the ordinance. A 4-6 p.m. public comment session was aimed at developers and other regular users of the ordinance. A 7-9 p.m. session was aimed at other members of the public.

As consultant Matt Goebel of Denver repeated several times, the consultants aren’t writing a new zoning ordinance as part of the project. It’s an assessment, not a rewrite, he said.

Nevertheless, participants at both sessions questioned why more public input wasn’t included in the project. At the night meeting, even the consultants’ intent to get city planning staff to edit a draft of the assessment report they’ll write in the next few months raised suspicions and complaints among several people in the audience.

“You’re getting paid out of public dollars,” Susan Lindsay said. “I’d like to see what you have to say without the staff editing it.”

Not all the comments were in agreement with each other. Bea Nance said plenty of residents like having grass and trees and weren’t necessarily interested in more public transit service. ” ‘Suburban’ is not a bad word, people,” she said.

It’s not that the earlier session, with developers, was filled with the bluebirds of happiness. Among the issues raised, in addition to a wish for more public input, were:

From developer David Furman: A suggestion that, especially in more well-developed areas, measuring development intensity by counting units per acre isn’t particularly effective. A better measure, he said, would be to use what planners call Floor Area Ratio, which measures the square footage of the building compared to the size of the site.

From developer and consultant Karla Knotts: It’s difficult to look things up in the ordinance the way it’s presented on the city’s website. Also, she said, “Unless you know you’re in an overlay district there’s no way to know you’re in an overlay district.”

From lobbyist Joe Padilla of the Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition: Some broad-brush restrictions, such as height limits, would be more effective if they were tailored to different parts of the city instead of imposed one-size-fit-all.

Add your own input. Take an online survey: Click here, or visit the city Planning Department department web page for the project by clicking here.