Threats to historic buildings – from the government

The owner of the landmark P&N Railway Depot (above) wants to demolish it rather than meet city’s code demands.

You may have read the op-ed I did in November (“City may seek landmark demolition”), pointing to an unintended consequence of the city’s new non-residential building code – several demolition orders going out to designated historic landmarks that weren’t in good repair.

Or maybe you caught the WFAE report last week on the Davis General Merchandise store, a century old historic landmark which has been ordered to make repairs, and whose aging outbuildings were ordered demolished if repairs weren’t made.

Yes, this is yet another example of your city government and city elected officials being oblivious to the value of old buildings and historic buildings – and not just landmarks – when they adopt city policy. They’re not necessarily hostile, just oblivious to the issue. Witness the happy ease with which planners and council members adopted zoning standards for transit-station areas that allow buildings so tall they’ll alter the property value landscape, making smaller older buildings in places such as NoDa worth so little compared to the land they’re on that owners won’t even blink before razing them for towers.

As today’s Observer editorial (“Historic landmarks? City turns blind eye”) points out, City Council members say they didn’t even discuss, when talking about the proposed ordinance last spring, what its effect might be on historic buildings. That’s telling.

Walter Abernethy, the city’s code enforcement director, says the issue did come up during stakeholder meetings before the ordinance was proposed. But the ordinance has little in it to protect landmark buildings.

Ted Alexander, with Preservation North Carolina, points out that PNC has covenants on the Davis store to protect it – though whether that could prevent demolition is, for now, an open question. (I’ve asked Ted but haven’t heard back yet.) And it’s important to remember that the city hasn’t ordered demolition of the store and isn’t pushing for it. It just wants repairs, which owner Silas Davis would have to pay for. Davis, when I talked to him Friday, was irate about the whole situation and said he didn’t have the money for the repairs.

But as the editorial points out, it’s the historic old Thrift depot that faces the more immediate threat. Its owner, CSX railway, would prefer not to spend what it would require to bring the building up to code. It’s asking for a demolition permit. Because it’s a landmark, the county historic landmarks commission can delay the demo for up to a year, but can’t prevent demolition.

A few N.C. municipalities have gotten special legislation to let them absolutely forbid demolition in some selected cases. New Bern, for instance, can forbid demolition in its historic districts, although there are some procedural hoops everyone has to jump through.

Is the city’s oblivion toward historic landmarks due in part to the governmental organization that has the landmarks commission lodged as part of the county government? Possibly. But notice that the Historic District Commission (not the same as the landmarks commission but with some similarities), is part of the city’s planning department.

Parking lots as polluters

We know driving creates pollution: ozone, other toxic tailpipe emissions such as particulates, contaminated water that runs off streets, the heat island effect of the asphalted street and highway network, etc. etc. But until now, few people had studied the polluting effect of parking lots.

But Eric Jaffe, in The Infrastructurist, writes about new work from researchers at University of California at Berkeley that looks at energy and emissions related to America’s vast parking infrastructure. The researchers write,

“The environmental effects of parking are not just from encouraging the use of the automobile over public transit or walking and biking (thus favoring the often more energy-intensive and polluting mode), but also from the material and process requirements in direct, indirect, and supply chain activities related to building and maintaining the infrastructure.”

There’s no national inventory of how many parking spaces, lots, decks are out there – one academic who’s studied parking compares it to the “dark matter” in the universe – but the researchers point to such things as the heat island effect, where pavement raises summer temperatures which requires more energy for air-conditioning, etc. They calculated that when parking spots are taken into account, an average car’s per-mile carbon emissions go up as much as 10 percent.

And as long as we’re trashing parking places (which even die-hard environmentalists probably wish they could find as they circle, circle, circle the lot on the Saturday before Christmas) check out “Six Reasons Free Parking Is the Dumbest Thing You Didn’t Know You Were Subsidizing,” by Christopher Mims in grist.org. The point is not that we shouldn’t have parking, but that we should all be a lot more aware of the costs of building and providing it. Maybe we’d be more conservative in how we spend that money – if we realized we were spending it.

And for a parking-related footnote, here’s a way Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools might bring in a bit more revenue so CMS won’t have to cut a whopping $100 million from the budget and lay off 1,500 people including hundreds of teachers:

Charge high school students more money to park their cars. If CMS provides buses to the schools (which it does, except to magnet high schools) then families that opt to let kids drive can pay for the privilege. Wake County Schools charge $170 and they’re raising the fee. CMS charges $25. Ahem.

Each parking space adds $2,500 to the cost of a high school, a CMS architect told me a few years ago. Yes, staffers need parking spaces, and some students probably do, too. But a lot of that money could be better spent.

Parking lots as polluters

We know driving creates pollution: ozone, other toxic tailpipe emissions such as particulates, contaminated water that runs off streets, the heat island effect of the asphalted street and highway network, etc. etc. But until now, few people had studied the polluting effect of parking lots.

But Eric Jaffe, in The Infrastructurist, writes about new work from researchers at University of California at Berkeley that looks at energy and emissions related to America’s vast parking infrastructure. The researchers write,

“The environmental effects of parking are not just from encouraging the use of the automobile over public transit or walking and biking (thus favoring the often more energy-intensive and polluting mode), but also from the material and process requirements in direct, indirect, and supply chain activities related to building and maintaining the infrastructure.”

There’s no national inventory of how many parking spaces, lots, decks are out there – one academic who’s studied parking compares it to the “dark matter” in the universe – but the researchers point to such things as the heat island effect, where pavement raises summer temperatures which requires more energy for air-conditioning, etc. They calculated that when parking spots are taken into account, an average car’s per-mile carbon emissions go up as much as 10 percent.

And as long as we’re trashing parking places (which even die-hard environmentalists probably wish they could find as they circle, circle, circle the lot on the Saturday before Christmas) check out “Six Reasons Free Parking Is the Dumbest Thing You Didn’t Know You Were Subsidizing,” by Christopher Mims in grist.org. The point is not that we shouldn’t have parking, but that we should all be a lot more aware of the costs of building and providing it. Maybe we’d be more conservative in how we spend that money – if we realized we were spending it.

And for a parking-related footnote, here’s a way Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools might bring in a bit more revenue so CMS won’t have to cut a whopping $100 million from the budget and lay off 1,500 people including hundreds of teachers:

Charge high school students more money to park their cars. If CMS provides buses to the schools (which it does, except to magnet high schools) then families that opt to let kids drive can pay for the privilege. Wake County Schools charge $170 and they’re raising the fee. CMS charges $25. Ahem.

Each parking space adds $2,500 to the cost of a high school, a CMS architect told me a few years ago. Yes, staffers need parking spaces, and some students probably do, too. But a lot of that money could be better spent.

More stick than carrot in Chapel Hill

I missed this when it happened, but last June, Chapel Hill adopted an ordinance requiring new development to include a small percentage of “affordable” units. Here’s what was reported in the Triangle Land Use Newsletter from the law firm K&L Gates:

“On June 21, 2010, the Town of Chapel Hill replaced its affordable housing “expectation” [which applied only for rezonings] with an ordinance requiring that nearly all development that includes a residential component set aside a part of the development for affordable housing. The new ordinance takes effect on March 1, 2011.

“The new ordinance is a type of ‘inclusionary zoning’ ordinance, and applies to any new development, renovation, reconstruction, or change in use that results in five or more new dwelling units. The ordinance requires developers to set aside 10 to 15% of the new homes for affordable housing. In return, developers will be offered a bonus to allowed density or floor area for providing the required units and a waiver of some development fees.”

The newsletter notes that a recent N.C. Court of Appeals ruling on Union County’s adequate public facilities ordinance leaves the issue of a mandatory inclusionary zoning ordinance “unsettled.”

Why bother with inclusionary zoning? Advocates, such as Charlotte’s Mixed-Income Housing Coalition, say it helps spread affordable housing throughout the community, instead of having it all clustered in some parts of town. Or, more to the point, it means the few affluent neighborhoods that don’t have any affordable housing would get a few units.

Opponents say it just raises the cost of all the other housing units. But Davidson officials report that it seems to have worked well there. (Back when developers were building housing, that is.)

HOT proposal for Indy Blvd should spark some heat


Forget putting light rail transit down the middle of Independence Boulevard, and instead put bus rapid transit on high-occupancy-vehicle lanes already planned. Send a streetcar down Monroe Road. And convince the state to move its Regional Farmers Market to some of the vacant properties on Independence.

Yep, I think the recommendations this morning from a panel from the nonprofit Urban Land Institute will prompt some talk.

“My eyes lit up at the options,” was the reaction from Carolyn Flowers, chief of the Charlotte Area Transit System. Even before the panel presentation had wound down, she was emailing to see if a presentation could be made to the Metropolitan Transit Commission, CATS’ governing body, next month.

Her eyes lit up because the transit recommendation for Independence would, in essence, mean the state builds that Indy Boulevard transit line, and all cash-strapped CATS would have to find is money to buy buses and other equipment and to pay drivers. The ULI panel recommendation would even mean cost savings for the N.C. Department of Transportation for its long-planned Independence Boulevard widening project.

That’s because the current plans to widen Indy Boulevard – a project for which there is at present no money in the state’s five-year plan, but which is likely to get funded at some point later – call for a 52-foot center section to be reserved for a future CATS transit project – maybe light rail (LRT), maybe bus rapid transit (BRT); the MTC still has to decide. If you eliminate that 52-foot section but still build the planned HOT/HOV lanes, you could run BRT or express buses in the HOT lanes (and remember T=toll=revenue stream), and still need a narrower overall corridor, i.e. less money needed to buy right-of-way.

NCDOT secretary Gene Conti was part of the panel, so I’m assuming he’d have scotched recommendations that were thoroughly unworkable from NCDOT’s point of view.

But …..

East Charlotte residents have spent years pushing for light rail transit, not bus, along Independence. They know LRT in general attracts more development than bus transit, because the rail means the route won’t get switched, unlike a less permanent bus route. How will this new idea go over with them? Will the suggested addition of a streetcar along Monroe Road be enough of an inducement?

Several ULI panel members, from cities such as Houston, Denver and New York, all sang variations on this theme: Putting light rail along a limited-access, high-speed and high-volume highway like Independence won’t attract much development. That’s been a lesson from Denver’s light rail, which runs next to a freeway, they said. “Nodes [neighborhood centers] on high-speed corridors do not work,” said Carlton Brown, an economic development expert with Full Spectrum, a development firm in New York and Jackson, Miss.

So, they say, plan to put rail along the smaller commercial corridors where it does have a chance to attract transit-oriented redevelopment: Central Avenue and Monroe Road. Of course, no one had concrete proposals for how to find revenue to build even the Central Avenue streetcar, much less adding another. Their suggestions: Get creative. Build in phases. Find a benefactor, like Bill Gates helping the Seattle-to-Tacoma line. That led to a quip from an elected official in the audience – whom I’ll not name, and so this person owes me one – about the “Leon and Sandra Levine Line.” After all, the Family Dollar headquarters is right on Monroe …

I was sitting next to East Charlotte activist Susan Lindsay. Her immediate reaction was that she wanted to know more before coming to a conclusion about whether to support or oppose the suggestions. But since the MTC lacks money for any transit of any form down Independence – or for any streetcars, any West Charlotte transit, or even enough money to extend the one light rail line past UNC Charlotte – a proposal that might allow rapid transit there in our lifetimes could just win some support.

Note: The ULI panel’s recommendations are simply that – ideas from a group of experts from around the country. They don’t supersede any existing plans or change any priorities.

Photo: Streetcar in Portland, Ore.

HOT proposal for Indy Blvd should spark some heat


Forget putting light rail transit down the middle of Independence Boulevard, and instead put bus rapid transit on high-occupancy-vehicle lanes already planned. Send a streetcar down Monroe Road. And convince the state to move its Regional Farmers Market to some of the vacant properties on Independence.

Yep, I think the recommendations this morning from a panel from the nonprofit Urban Land Institute will prompt some talk.

“My eyes lit up at the options,” was the reaction from Carolyn Flowers, chief of the Charlotte Area Transit System. Even before the panel presentation had wound down, she was emailing to see if a presentation could be made to the Metropolitan Transit Commission, CATS’ governing body, next month.

Her eyes lit up because the transit recommendation for Independence would, in essence, mean the state builds that Indy Boulevard transit line, and all cash-strapped CATS would have to find is money to buy buses and other equipment and to pay drivers. The ULI panel recommendation would even mean cost savings for the N.C. Department of Transportation for its long-planned Independence Boulevard widening project.

That’s because the current plans to widen Indy Boulevard – a project for which there is at present no money in the state’s five-year plan, but which is likely to get funded at some point later – call for a 52-foot center section to be reserved for a future CATS transit project – maybe light rail (LRT), maybe bus rapid transit (BRT); the MTC still has to decide. If you eliminate that 52-foot section but still build the planned HOT/HOV lanes, you could run BRT or express buses in the HOT lanes (and remember T=toll=revenue stream), and still need a narrower overall corridor, i.e. less money needed to buy right-of-way.

NCDOT secretary Gene Conti was part of the panel, so I’m assuming he’d have scotched recommendations that were thoroughly unworkable from NCDOT’s point of view.

But …..

East Charlotte residents have spent years pushing for light rail transit, not bus, along Independence. They know LRT in general attracts more development than bus transit, because the rail means the route won’t get switched, unlike a less permanent bus route. How will this new idea go over with them? Will the suggested addition of a streetcar along Monroe Road be enough of an inducement?

Several ULI panel members, from cities such as Houston, Denver and New York, all sang variations on this theme: Putting light rail along a limited-access, high-speed and high-volume highway like Independence won’t attract much development. That’s been a lesson from Denver’s light rail, which runs next to a freeway, they said. “Nodes [neighborhood centers] on high-speed corridors do not work,” said Carlton Brown, an economic development expert with Full Spectrum, a development firm in New York and Jackson, Miss.

So, they say, plan to put rail along the smaller commercial corridors where it does have a chance to attract transit-oriented redevelopment: Central Avenue and Monroe Road. Of course, no one had concrete proposals for how to find revenue to build even the Central Avenue streetcar, much less adding another. Their suggestions: Get creative. Build in phases. Find a benefactor, like Bill Gates helping the Seattle-to-Tacoma line. That led to a quip from an elected official in the audience – whom I’ll not name, and so this person owes me one – about the “Leon and Sandra Levine Line.” After all, the Family Dollar headquarters is right on Monroe …

I was sitting next to East Charlotte activist Susan Lindsay. Her immediate reaction was that she wanted to know more before coming to a conclusion about whether to support or oppose the suggestions. But since the MTC lacks money for any transit of any form down Independence – or for any streetcars, any West Charlotte transit, or even enough money to extend the one light rail line past UNC Charlotte – a proposal that might allow rapid transit there in our lifetimes could just win some support.

Note: The ULI panel’s recommendations are simply that – ideas from a group of experts from around the country. They don’t supersede any existing plans or change any priorities.

Photo: Streetcar in Portland, Ore.

Seeking solutions to suburban problems

As cities and counties across North Carolina and the nation scour budgets for ways to trim spending and – at least one hopes – make more economically prudent decisions for the future, they should look hard at what last 50 years of spread-out, low-density, auto-focused development has cost them. And how to change those costly ways.

After all, it costs a municipality (and rate-payers) more to spread sewer lines across subdivisions with 2- or 3-houses per acre than across blocks with 20 or 30 dwellings per acre. It costs more to serve cul-de-sac neighborhoods with adequate fire and emergency services, because in order to meet acceptable arrive-by times in areas with disconnected streets, you need more stations and personnel. (Here’s what I wrote in February 2009 about that point – “Sprawl’s dipping into your pocketbook,” and a Charlotte city study that illustrates that point.)

Large expanses of highway right-of-way mean large expanses of property off the tax rolls. Big surface parking lots are not the best way to get high-value property onto the tax rolls. And so on.

But we’ve built our suburban style, single-use neighborhoods with streets that don’t connect and shopping centers you have to drive to. What do we do now?

That’s the topic of an upcoming conference at N.C. State University in Raleigh on Feb. 12: “Sustainable Suburbs: Re-Imagining the Inner Ring.” (Disclosure: I’ll be moderating the conference.)

Here’s my quick two-cents on the overall topic:

Cent No. 1: “Inner-ring suburbs” means different things to different people. Does it mean the first municipalities beyond the city limits of a major city, such as Mint Hill, Matthews, Pineville, etc., regardless of when they were formed and how they were built? Or does it mean neighborhoods built on a suburban template, even those within the limits of the major city, such as Charlotte’s Merry Oaks, Chantilly, Sherwood Forest, even Myers Park? I hope we can define the terms before we end up talking at cross-purposes.

Cent No. 2: Many planners, designers and even transportation officials understand the need for connected, walkable streets, higher-density buildings, mixed uses and access to transit – things lacking in many neighborhoods built after World War II. . But in many instances that form of development still isn’t happening (and wasn’t, when the financial crisis put a stop to almost all development in these parts.) So it would seem that the major stumbling blocks aren’t in planners’ minds, but in other areas: policies and laws, financing practices, existing ordinances, politics, and even in Americans’ cultural expectations. Can those stumbling blocks be overcome?

Conference registration closes Feb. 7. Among the speakers will be:

• William Hudnut III, ex-congressman, ex-16-term mayor of Indianapolis, author, Urban Land Institute fellow emeritus, clergyman and all-around knowledgeable fellow. Among his books: “Halfway to Everywhere: A portrait of America’s first tier suburbs.”

• Ellen Dunham-Jones, co-author of the award-winning “Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.” She’ll talk about the problem of dead malls, vacant commercial strips, aging office parks and apartment complexes. Her book offers several dozen examples of suburban retrofit projects.

• Patrick Phillips, CEO of the nonprofit Urban Land Institute, who’ll talk about what the financial crisis may mean for the prospect of building a more sustainable suburbia.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll almost certainly be interested also in this early February Charlotte conference. The New Partners for Smart Growth conference, “Building Safe, Healthy and Livable Communities,” will draw planners, designers, transportation and public health professionals, and others to the Westin Feb. 3-5. The website says scholarships are available, but deadline to apply is Jan. 14. It’s sponsored by the Local Government Commission, a Sacramento-based nonprofit (and not the N.C. governmental agency).

Seeking solutions to suburban problems

As cities and counties across North Carolina and the nation scour budgets for ways to trim spending and – at least one hopes – make more economically prudent decisions for the future, they should look hard at what last 50 years of spread-out, low-density, auto-focused development has cost them. And how to change those costly ways.

After all, it costs a municipality (and rate-payers) more to spread sewer lines across subdivisions with 2- or 3-houses per acre than across blocks with 20 or 30 dwellings per acre. It costs more to serve cul-de-sac neighborhoods with adequate fire and emergency services, because in order to meet acceptable arrive-by times in areas with disconnected streets, you need more stations and personnel. (Here’s what I wrote in February 2009 about that point – “Sprawl’s dipping into your pocketbook,” and a Charlotte city study that illustrates that point.)

Large expanses of highway right-of-way mean large expanses of property off the tax rolls. Big surface parking lots are not the best way to get high-value property onto the tax rolls. And so on.

But we’ve built our suburban style, single-use neighborhoods with streets that don’t connect and shopping centers you have to drive to. What do we do now?

That’s the topic of an upcoming conference at N.C. State University in Raleigh on Feb. 12: “Sustainable Suburbs: Re-Imagining the Inner Ring.” (Disclosure: I’ll be moderating the conference.)

Here’s my quick two-cents on the overall topic:

Cent No. 1: “Inner-ring suburbs” means different things to different people. Does it mean the first municipalities beyond the city limits of a major city, such as Mint Hill, Matthews, Pineville, etc., regardless of when they were formed and how they were built? Or does it mean neighborhoods built on a suburban template, even those within the limits of the major city, such as Charlotte’s Merry Oaks, Chantilly, Sherwood Forest, even Myers Park? I hope we can define the terms before we end up talking at cross-purposes.

Cent No. 2: Many planners, designers and even transportation officials understand the need for connected, walkable streets, higher-density buildings, mixed uses and access to transit – things lacking in many neighborhoods built after World War II. . But in many instances that form of development still isn’t happening (and wasn’t, when the financial crisis put a stop to almost all development in these parts.) So it would seem that the major stumbling blocks aren’t in planners’ minds, but in other areas: policies and laws, financing practices, existing ordinances, politics, and even in Americans’ cultural expectations. Can those stumbling blocks be overcome?

Conference registration closes Feb. 7. Among the speakers will be:

• William Hudnut III, ex-congressman, ex-16-term mayor of Indianapolis, author, Urban Land Institute fellow emeritus, clergyman and all-around knowledgeable fellow. Among his books: “Halfway to Everywhere: A portrait of America’s first tier suburbs.”

• Ellen Dunham-Jones, co-author of the award-winning “Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs.” She’ll talk about the problem of dead malls, vacant commercial strips, aging office parks and apartment complexes. Her book offers several dozen examples of suburban retrofit projects.

• Patrick Phillips, CEO of the nonprofit Urban Land Institute, who’ll talk about what the financial crisis may mean for the prospect of building a more sustainable suburbia.

If you’ve read this far, you’ll almost certainly be interested also in this early February Charlotte conference. The New Partners for Smart Growth conference, “Building Safe, Healthy and Livable Communities,” will draw planners, designers, transportation and public health professionals, and others to the Westin Feb. 3-5. The website says scholarships are available, but deadline to apply is Jan. 14. It’s sponsored by the Local Government Commission, a Sacramento-based nonprofit (and not the N.C. governmental agency).

Sound off to NCDOT about biking, walking,

If you have thoughts – and I bet you do – about what the North Carolina Department of Transportation could do better to help bicyclists and pedestrians, here’s a chance to give them your opinions.

Take a Bike-Ped survey for NCDOT. It’s quick, and who knows, they may actually use it. Even if they don’t, it might feel better to get stuff off your chest. Survey link sent courtesy of Dick Winters, the Safe Routes to Schools coordinator for Mecklenburg County Public Health.

Consolidation – promises kept?

Talk’s on the upswing again, and not just in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, about trying to run local government more efficiently by consolidating. And at his media briefing today, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx gave yet another big plug to the idea, saying, “It’s hard to shape community priorities when you have resources siloed.”

A timely new piece on the website of UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute takes a look at what happened in 18 other city-county consolidations. The big headline? No real efficiencies were proved.

I asked Foxx today if he’d read the report, and what he thought about its findings. He said that while he believed there would be cost savings if Charlotte and Mecklenburg County governments merged, “I don’t think that is the only driver.” He thinks local government should be structured differently.

The UNCC report is by the authors of a new book, “City-County Consolidation: Promises Made, Promises Kept?”: Suzanne Leland, associate professor of political science at UNCC, and Kurt Thurmaier, director of the Division of Public Administration at Northern Illinois University.

Here’s what they conclude:

• Consolidation can improve economic development
“… Consolidated governments have performed more effectively in economic development than their comparison counties. … This is one promise the majority of consolidated governments delivered on.”

• Consolidation does not necessarily lead to more efficient government

“Our study yields little systematic evidence that consolidated governments operate more efficiently than their comparison communities. While about half of the cases in our sample seem to have lower rates of expenditure growth … the other half of the sample does not produce the same data.”

• Pro-Merger Campaigns delivered on most of their promises

In most cases (not all) they write, “the evidence is quite strong that the particular promises made to voters were kept, with very few exceptions.”