The Naked City Blog – Page 16 – Mary Newsom's archived writings on Charlotte, cities and urbanism

NCDOT moves ahead with new uptown train station. But …

After years of planning, the N.C. Department of Transportation and the City of Charlotte are officially seeking developers for the proposed new passenger rail station in uptown Charlotte. They’re issuing a Request for Qualifications (RFQ), with proposals due Sept. 21.

If you’re an interested developer, click here for more information.

“This RFQ is the next step in selecting a master developer for the project,” says the NCDOT press release issued Thursday morning. What’s being called the Charlotte Gateway Station is envisioned as a central hub for Amtrak, Charlotte Area Transit System bus and streetcar service, the long-proposed-but-still-unfunded Red Line commuter rail project to north Mecklenburg County, Greyhound Bus service and the county greenway system.

Unfortunately for the Red Line and possibly for the streetcar, Mayor Anthony Foxx said in an interview Wednesday that, when it comes to any transit services beyond the Blue Line, “We’re stuck.” (More from that Q-and-A format interview will be posted at PlanCharlotte.org as soon as I can type up the transcript.)
The streetcar has funding only for about a mile and a half between Presbyterian Hospital and The Square at Trade and Tryon. An expansion proposal using city funds only, that would take it to the Gateway Station site on West Trade Street near Johnson & Wales University, was killed by the City Council in June.

The N.C. General Assembly has, for two years in a row, tried to kill funding for the planned-but-not-yet-built Blue Line Extension. Both times the BLE was saved in closed-door bargaining.

But this year the legislators decided to make any rail transit projects compete head-to-head with funding for highway projects, a prospect that most transit supporters believe will all but doom any further rail transit in the state.

But to end on a more cheerful note, replacing the dreary Amtrak station a couple of miles north of uptown on North Tryon Street will be a relief to many rail passengers who use the state’s three daily trains to Raleigh and back.

Atlanta’s future? Tied up in knots

With Tuesday’s defeat of a proposed 1-cent sales tax for regional transportation needs, including both transit and highway improvements, the outlook for the huge metro region’s future looks grim.

This gloomy analysis from Streetsblog describes a state Department of Transportation mired in debt, one that ranks 49th nationally in per capita transportation spending.

The defeat of what was called T-SPLOST (might that name have been a factor in the loss? It sounds like something splatting on a hard floor), also means the ambitious greenway-around-the-city called the Beltline has no major funding source.

My analysis-from-a-distance: The package had too much packed into it, was too large a sum ($7 billion) for these financially hurting times, and by trying to please both city-dwelling transit-lovers and suburban- and exurban-dwelling motorists it was vulnerable to pleasing neither. Note, also, that this vote was not only in Atlanta, but in all the state’s metro regions. Other measures, crafted by elected officials in other regions, passed in three of seven regions: Augusta, Columbus and a central-south Georgia region. Note, also, that voters inside the restrictive-annexation-law-strangled city of Atlanta passed the measure. Was messy politics involved? You betcha.
This idea for regional transportation funding has been in the works for years. Here’s a 2008 Neal Peirce column that describes some of the groups that pushed for it. Note, 2008 was a good two years before the anti-tax, anti-government, anti-transit Tea Party overtook the Republican Party. Add that political influence to the generally bad economic climate in the Atlanta area, and you have a problem. The Sierra Club and NAACP opposition did not help.

What happens next?

My guess is that the region’s civic leaders won’t give up and will, after a long and restful vacation, try to figure out how to pay for important needs. After all, here’s what Sam Williams, president of the Metropolitan Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, said in 2008: “Failure to invest [in transportation] would spell economic disaster for Georgia.”

But for now, it must be terribly disheartening for those people who have tried for so many years to find a solution to the problems Atlanta faces with transportation.

Tree-planting’s great; but look at big picture, too

Davis Cable, former head of the Catawba Lands Conservancy, just gave an intriguing presentation to the Charlotte City Council, about a new initiative to try to plant 50,000 trees across the city, to help the city with its adopted goal of having 50 percent of the city land under a canopy of trees by 2050. The city canopy now is about 46 percent. If the city is built out according to current zoning, the canopy will shrink to 45 percent.

It’s a public-private venture – not a new nonprofit being formed but an initiative called Tree Charlotte, Cable explained. The Foundation for the Carolinas has given $20,000; so has the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The idea: Get the community involved and engaged in planting trees.

It’s probably the best warm-fuzzy idea I’ve heard emerge from this windowless chamber in the government center in ages. Who could be against this idea?

But as I analyze why Charlotte has lost so much of its canopy, one inescapable conclusion is that a huge amount of the loss has to do with new development, mostly in the suburbs. Duh, right? But think about how much of any new retail development is that huge surface parking lot. Yes, the city requires trees sprinkled through it, but it’s not the same as the woods that had to get cleared to build it. If we could drive less, we could save a lot of trees.

And what about subdivisions that spring up with no rezoning needed, because all the undeveloped land in the city got automatically zoned for subdivisions (or more intense development) about 30 years ago? There is no zoning for farms or woods or protected areas. Most subdivisions are virtually clearcut. To be sure, the city has a new tree ordinance that requires new developments to save small amounts of trees on the site. That’s better than nothing. Still …

And all that new commercial development that serves those new subdivisions means new or expanded roads, which mow down trees. (And I do mean roads in this instance, not city streets, which of course should all have street trees.) Streets, parking lots and rooftops mean more stormwater runoff, which requires big pipes and stream “restoration” projects that take out even more trees.

In short, more city-style development – with multi-story buildings close to each other, so you can easily walk to places you need to go, with parking decks instead of surface lots, and a vastly improved transit system – would result in a lot more trees saved on the edge of the city, as many of those suburban developments wouldn’t be getting built.

Meanwhile, if multiple developers are to be believed – and I think they’re probably not making this up – redeveloping inside more urban-style areas is really, really tough, and made harder by some well-intentioned but bizarrely enforced zoning and inspection standards.

As Cable made his presentation to a receptive City Council, here’s what I was sending out via Twitter:

Good presentation to #cltcc [Twitter-speak for Charlotte City Council] on Charlotte tree canopy. Push on to plant more trees, says Dave Cable. But much is going unsaid … (cont)

Cont. … Re tree canopy: Shouldn’t city look at its devt rules that allow/encourage major spread into undeveloped (treed) areas?

Good pix of a Peachtree Hills retrofit plan, adding back trees in clearcut subdivision. Worthy effort. BUT … it’s after-the-fact.

Yes, plant trees. Also save em: Build city streets, not huge ROW-sucking highways. End auto-pilot OK for subdivisions on city fringe.

AND, to encourage more tight, urban-style infill stop requiring suburban-style “buffers” and berms in urban areas.

I applaud the tree-planting effort. It’s a good idea and will help.

But it’s the rules of development that shape how the city grows. If Charlotte wants to be a place that isn’t always trying to catch up to its tree loss by planting thousands of new trees, shouldn’t it take a holistic look at what sort of development the city is allowing, and where?

Revitalizing outside the spotlight

Expanded and renovated house on Roslyn Avenue in Biddleville-Smallwood

Slowly, incrementally, and without trumpet fanfares, neighborhoods off West Trade Street and Beatties Ford Road are changing. Older houses are being renovated or, in some cases demolished, replaced with newly built bungalow-style houses that mimic the neighborhood pattern.

It’s happening almost within the shadows of the uptown towers – but I had little idea of the transformation until I got a short tour last Tuesday from neighborhood residents Tom Polito and Michael Doney. I surmise many other people in Charlotte are just as unaware.

Polito has lived since 2008 in a bungalow-style house built that year on Frazier Avenue, a street tucked between Interstate 77 and Johnson C. Smith University. Most of the houses on his block are new.

New construction, Rozzelles Ferry Road

Polito introduced me to Michael Doney of 5 Points Realty, who’s been behind many of the upfits and new construction. Doney, originally from southwest Pennsylvania, lived for a time in Wesley Heights, another near-uptown neighborhood that has seen an influx of more affluent residents in the past 10 years. He now lives in Biddleville-Smallwood. Doney works with builders on renovations or to build and sell spec houses. He talked about the details: wood windows instead of vinyl, the way the porches are designed, the wide skirts on the steps out front of houses (see photo, right). He said he enjoys renovating older houses: “There’s such cool old stuff.”

We drove down Rozzelles Ferry Road, then up through a 1940s-1950s-era neighborhood that looked like Chantilly’s separated-at-birth twin (Smallwood, said Doney) and into an area originally known as Roslyn Heights, which was built early in the 20th century. Now the whole area is generally referred to as Biddleville-Smallwood.

The duplex on Roslyn, before renovation

The home on Roslyn, shown at the top of this posting, is a renovation and expansion of a duplex, built in 1941, that previously sat on the lot. In looking through property tax listings to find out the ages of houses in the area, I noticed the county tax records still had the photo of the building in its earlier incarnation. It’s shown at right. (Yes, the property valuation is pegged to the larger building, not the smaller duplex in the photo.)

“This has all happened since 2005-2006,” Doney said. “It’s quietly happening. People don’t know about it.”

Some things to keep in mind: Doney is a real estate guy. And Polito is thinking about selling. So they have a reason to be publicly complimentary of the area. But I saw what I saw. This area is truly being transformed. Young urban pioneers are moving in, people who, like Polito, like the look of an old-fashioned neighborhood but either can’t afford Elizabeth and Dilworth or who want houses that look old but have modern amenities.

Here’s an even more important thing to remember: This part of the city tells a story of a racial history more complex than you might realize. Although Johnson C. Smith University has been around since 1867 as a historically black school, some of its nearby neighborhoods were originally home to white residents. Others were originally home to black residents. Others were mixed. Tom Hanchett’s Sorting Out the New South City:Race Class and Urban Development in Charlotte 1875-1975 says Biddleville began as a village of housing for African Americans.

But Western Heights, the area where Polito’s new house is, started out in the 1890s as a mixed-race neighborhood. Wesley Heights and Seversville, on the other side of West Trade Street, were white neighborhoods, as was Roslyn Heights and later, Smallwood. Both were separated from the black neighborhood of Biddleville by only a narrow section of West Trade Street. (Doney pointed to how it was the back yards of the built-for-whites homes that backed up to Biddleville.) It wasn’t until the urban-renewal-block-busting, scared-of-integration era of the 1960s and 1970s that those areas became virtually all black.

Now, they’re transitioning again. Is there potential for tension across both racial and economic lines? Without a doubt. But if the residents and institutions in the area are able to work through the evolutions, and save what’s important to save, and with sensitivity to history, old-timers and newcomers, it will be worth those trumpets and fanfares.

Major bike trail among city’s ‘zombie’ projects

The proposal to keep building Charlotte’s long-planned streetcar route is now officially a zombie. It’s among the living dead, or maybe in the “not dead – yet” category. But so is a $35 million proposal in which the city would have helped the county build out its greenway system, including a bike trail to run from UNC Charlotte to Pineville.

I wrote a piece for PlanCharlotte.org – the website I direct at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute – which was also picked up by The Charlotte Observer last Saturday. The PlanCharlotte piece is here: “Finding a lesson in city’s budget, streetcar impasse.“

Far less publicity has gone to the other community proposals that also were not adopted and, given electoral politics, are likely to stay in cold storage until after the 2013 City Council elections. Here’s a link to a lot of details from the proposed Capital Improvement Program. The cross-county multi-use trail is one proposal whose demise (for now) has drawn sharp disappointment in some quarters. (Want to see a map? Here’s a link to City Manager Curt Walton’s PowerPoint, with the trail on page 15.) It’s also reproduced below.

Two students I know both said the trail and other projects were the sort that would attract young, educated people to Charlotte, or keep them here. That’s not scientific research, just anecdotal evidence to ponder.

Streetcar update: Killed, but not dead yet

Charlotte City Council just voted 6-4 for a budget that doesn’t include a $119 million expansion of the city’s streetcar project. (See my earlier post here.)

Then Mayor Anthony Foxx vetoed that vote. What happens next? The council reconsiders the veto at its next meeting – 6:30 p.m. today. It takes 7 votes to override a veto. Council member James Mitchell is not here but he has been a streetcar supporter. Unless something changes (always possible) the streetcar is not dead yet.

Must go now; Patrick Cannon is finally saying something. He’s been quiet so far.