The anti-government Smart Growther

Blogging from “The Reinvented City,” in Cambridge, Mass., a conference sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

9:45 a.m. – Andres Duany, founder of Duany Plate-Zyberk and one of the founders of the New Urbanism movement, is proving that Smart Growth and “New Urbanist” are not synonymous with “bog-government liberal.” He’s talking about rebuilding New Orleans:
“The government has made affordable housing impossible, so that only government can deliver it.”
In America, he says, “We did three centuries of housing immigrants without a nickel. Then government busted in.” His point is that building standards, adopted with the best of motives, make it impossible to build the rudimentary housing that can serve as places for people without much money to live in.

And more on the problems in the U.S. planning process:
“We dumbed it down too much.” And we make decisions at the wrong level. Decisions that should have been made at the block level are made citywide – example: Chickens. “Chickens are so in.” Cities outlaw chickens citywide. That’s a decision that should depend on the different situations in different parts of town. But bike paths will be defeated if you make the decisions at the neighborhood level – people will always protest bike paths and greenways, Duany notes. That’s a decision that should be made at the regional level, because those amenities are important to the overall community.

Reinventing the City – Numbing the NIMBYs?

Here at “The Reinvented City” conference in Cambridge, Mass. First up, the always provocative Andres Duany, “a rock star of New Urbanism,” in the words of Anthony Flint of the sponsoring think tank, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. (Other sponsors: Nieman Foundation, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design).

9:15 a.m. – Duany – “For me the century started in 2007-2008. The pivotal events all occurred about 2008.” They were the bursting of real estate bubble, the public recognition of global warming, and the erasure of public confidence in government.

And he’s got a great riff going about the problem of the public process in planning. “There’s something radically wrong with the public process” in planning. “We dumbed it down too much.” And he says, the immediate neighbors are a special interest. Currently the immediate neighbors carry extra weight. But, he notes, “they are not the community as a whole.” They will block things that are in the larger interest – bike paths, schools, power lines for new alternative energy projects, etc.

“Large shopping malls are perfectly located to be future town centers. “

And for those who think New Urbanists and Smart Growth advocates are always pro-government. New Urbanist guru Duany is ow trashing government standards. His firm was trying to design a flood-proof house, which could be flooded and not be damaged. “And then we ran into government.”

Re New Orleans: It’s a Caribbean culture. “The Caribbean culture is not about the accumulation of wealth. It’s about the accumulation of leisure.” You can’t have leisure if you’re in debt. People lived in houses granddaddy owned, so there wasn’t much debt. “All the do-goody people are actually destroying the culture of New Orleans by eliminating leisure. And by raising the housing standards.”

Deluged with democracy

Sorry I’ve been absent these recent weeks. Took a week of vacation, earlier, and a day last week, and the rest of the time I’ve been bailing like crazy to keep the boat afloat. Here’s the situation: Too many candidates, too little time! We on the editorial board try to offer endorsements, and that involves researching the people running and trying to interview as many as we can.

This year, what with Tea Party candidates and anti-health care reform candidates and Democrats running against other Democrats, including some pro-health care reform candidates, we’ve got something like 68 candidates to deal with. Democracy is a grand thing, but you can have too much of a good thing.

So while I’ve been squirreling away interesting blog items I haven’t had the time to post them. Next week should be better, and I might even have time to dish a little about candidates. So don’t give up on The Naked City.

Friday and Saturday of this week I’ll be at a conference on “The Reinvented City,” in Cambridge, Mass., sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. My plan is to blog from there, although last year my Mac seized up with something called a kernel panic (don’t ask) and I was thwarted. Let us hope for better computer vibes this time.

Sneak a peek at uptown plans

Here are some ideas to chew on:
– An “applied innovation corridor” stretching up North Tryon Street from uptown to UNC Charlotte, along the to-be-built light rail line.
– A “culinary corridor” from Johnson & Wales University to Central Piedmont Community College’s new culinary building.
– Create a consortium of the higher education institutions in and near uptown, so they can pool their resources with shared facilities. CPCC, Johnson & Wales, Johnson C. Smith University, Queens University of Charlotte, even UNCC with its new uptown presence could all be players. (Sorry, Davidson College, you’re just too far away.)
– With the growing numbers of college students, why not build a shared student union uptown?

That last idea came from a focus group for high school and college students.
The others came from Daniel Iacofano, one of the consultants for the ongoing Charlotte center city planning (public workshop tonight at 5:30 at the Convention Center.) I caught up with Iacofano this morning to hear where he and the consultants are headed in their thinking on the Charlotte Center City 2020 Plan.

He talked a lot about the economic underpinnings, and he offered some of the many ideas the California-based consulting group MIG (the I is for Iacofano) are tossing around. He’ll talk about some of them tonight at the public workshop.

Cheryl Myers, the Charlotte Center City Partners senior veep of planning and development, said the consultants had gotten 80 ideas from Center City 2020 Plan working groups alone. (Disclosure: Observer publisher Ann Caulkins is a co-chair of the steering committee for the 2020 Plan. She doesn’t know that I’m writing this, or what I’m writing. And I have been supportive of having uptown plans since I’ve been writing opinions for the Observer.)

Iacofano said the I-277 loop is “kind of a noose” around uptown.
I asked, “How do you tame the loop?”
Iacofano: “There’s a menu of interventions.” They could range from capping it – there are places where that could work – to simply enhancing the connectivity under and over it with better lighting, artwork, and so on. Other possibilities would be to put development closer to the highway, or to put things under the freeway overpasses.

Tonight, expect a lot of attention to the issue of creating “seams” rather than “dividers” between uptown and the neighborhoods that surround it.

N.C. adds Charlotte-Raleigh trains

Starting June 5 two more passenger trains will run between Charlotte and Raleigh, the N.C. Department of Transportation announced today. One will leave Charlotte at 12:30 p.m., arriving in Raleigh at 3:43 p.m. The other will leave Raleigh at 11:50 a.m., arriving in Charlotte at 3:02 p.m.

That will make a total of six trains between the two cities. The Carolinian, which leaves Charlotte at 7:30 a.m., continues past Raleigh to Selma, Wilson, Rocky Mount, Richmond, Washington and New York. The Piedmont, which leaves Raleigh at 6:50 a.m., arrives in Charlotte at 10:02 a.m., then heads back to Raleigh, leaving Charlotte at 5:15 p.m., arriving 8:28 p.m.

I spoke today with Patrick Simmons, director of the N.C. DOT’s Rail Division, who mentioned that, among other things, they’ve been interested to see that students living in Raleigh are now commuting to college in the Triad on the daily trains. (The Greensboro stop is very near N.C. A&T State.) I also asked when we’d see a passenger train from Charlotte to the beach and the answer, in a nutshell and delivered much more diplomatically, was not in my lifetime.

No, it isn’t high-speed. But I figure anything that can get some traffic off of I-85 and N.C. 49 is a good thing. See bytrain.org for schedules and train information and information on buying tickets.

Parking, planning and bypasses

Today’s post is a grab bag of interesting items for your perusal.

1. Envisioning development, and making planning more accessible to citizens. The Town of Cary has created a Virtual Interactive Planner. Here’s what Dan Matthys, communications and information planner with the town, had to say about why they did it:
Our development process is actually pretty complex, and it involves processes that have a lot of “it depends” and “maybes,” and it wasn’t clear to our citizens when they had a chance to speak and when they didn’t have a chance, how long the process was or what the different steps are to that process. So the mayor asked us to develop something that would be more intuitive, and we decided we needed something fancier than some sort of PowerPoint decision-making tool.
Read more about it, on this planetizen.com story, “Making Planning More Accessible.”
(Hat tip to Planetizen.com for that one.)

2. Parking space census. The City of San Francisco is probably the first in the country to have actually counted ALL its parking spaces. Here’s a Streetsblog.org piece on the effort. The magic number, it appears, is 442,541 spaces, 280,000 of which are on-street spaces. Its part of a federally funded parking management experiment (“SF’s parking experiment to test Shoup’s traffic theories”) in which the city will experiment with dynamic parking demand management, intended to tell people where the parking spaces are at any given moment so they don’t circle and circle, searching. The experiment is funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant.
Parking is a conundrum for most cities. “How we love/hate our parking lots” was my recent op-ed on the topic.

3. USA Today tells us “More cities ban digital billboards.” Among U.S. cities that have banned the billboards: Durham; Knoxville, Tenn.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Dallas and Fort Worth and Houston, all in Texas.

And Charlotte? It had the chance to ban them several years ago and after a lengthy stakeholder process (see my stakeholder thoughts “Pulling back the stakeholder curtain” here) opted to allow them.

4. The South Tryon Street road diet experiment has begun (“Another road diet, this one for South Tryon”). I know this because it is right in front of The Observer building, and because I have walked to work twice since blogging about it and I can verify that the bollards are up, AND that Hill Street between South Tryon and Church Street is now two-way.

5. Your highway dollars at work. Ground was broken today on the Sanford bypass. Here’s a photo of pols with gold shovels. Sanford is a town of about 27,000 people. The fact that our tax dollars are building it a bypass should raise many, many questions in your mind. The Good Roads State has become the State of Pointless Bypasses.

My theory: No city gets more than one bypass. (Monroe, Shelby et al have failed to control their land use development and have both clogged their bypasses – both of them U.S. 74, as it happens – and in so doing managed to all but gut their downtowns. They aren’t the only towns that have done this, they’re just two I’m familiar with. And both want new, bypass-bypasses.)

High water bills? Whose fault really?

Who’s really overseeing Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities?

Obviously, City Manager Curt Walton is the top boss. And the Charlotte City Council is Walton’s boss.

But if you’ve followed city government very long you’ve noticed the elected officials tend to let CMUD (technically it’s CMU) have its own way. That’s because CMU is an “enterprise fund” – like the airport – and runs off its own revenues. Because council members don’t have to raise taxes for CMU, they haven’t given it much scrutiny. (Yes, I know that fees come out of people’s pockets, too. But trust me, fee increases don’t raise nearly the political wars that tax increases do.)

So who scrutinizes CMU? I took at look at the CMUD Advisory Committee? That’s a seven-member committee (3 members appointed by the city, 3 by the county, 1 by the mayor). They are to “review and make recommendations to City Council” concerning: all water/sewer capital improvement programs, changes in policies for extending water/sewer service as well as proposed changes in how fees are determined, and pretty much anything else.

Why is this important? Many cities have used utilities as a way to strategically manage growth. It’s less expensive, in the long run, not to have to build and maintain water/sewer lines over every square foot of land. But Charlotte’s powerful developers have never wanted any land set aside from development. Shrinking the supply of land would raise the price of their raw material – undeveloped land. What better way to ensure that no land got set aside than to control the CMUD Advisory Committee?

Another reason it’s important: It’s in the best interests of this whole urban region to encourage more water conservation. What sucks up a disproportionate amount of unnecessary water use?Expansive suburban lawns. But suburban subdivision developers have little interest in not offering suburban lawns.

So who’s on this board? It’s required to have a real estate developer, a water and/or sewer contractor, a civil engineer, a financial expert, a representative from the non-Charlotte towns in the county, and a neighborhood leader.

I took a look at the board. It’s revealing.

The chairman is James Merrifield, a developer with Merrifield Partners, formerly with Crosland. Last year he replaced former chairman Charles Teal, an owner of Saussy Burbank, a developer.

The two engineers are Robert Linkner with HDR and Erica Van Tassel with Kimley-Horn. The contractor is Marco Varela of CITI-LLC, a systems design company. Varela was mentioned in an Observer article in several years back (before his 2008 appointment) as selling wastewater treatment equipment to the city.

So far it’s rather predictable. You’d want some civil engineering expertise, for sure, as well as developer expertise. Yet it’s worth noting that engineering firms are generally hired by developers so they’d have little business reason to tick off potential clients by, say, pushing for using your utility department as part of a growth strategy that might involve setting some areas aside from development. Even if that would probably have been a lot more fiscally sound than stretching water-sewer pipes all over Mecklenburg County and asking all the rate-payers to fund those capital and operating costs.

But what about the people who are presumably supposed to add the non-developer points of view – the neighborhood leader, the towns representative?

The “neighborhood leader” turns out to be a Charlotte Chamber executive, Keva Walton. I suppose he lives in a neighborhood, but you wouldn’t exactly expect him to be a voice in opposition to any business-developer interests.

And that towns representative? It’s David Jarrett, vice president at Rhein Medall Interests, a Charlotte-based developer.

The end.

Atlanta hears Charlotte’s footsteps gaining

Seems Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed a bit worried that Charlotte may be gaining on Hotlanta.

Reed apparently told the Hungry Club (a civic discussion group at the Butler Street YMCA) that Atlanta’s in danger of falling behind Charlotte if the city and the State of Georgia don’t make strides on transportation, education, water and the arts. All this is from the Atlanta Journal Constitution’s Jim Galloway and his blog.

Reed also noted that the N.C. Piedmont got some big chunks of federal high-speed rail money, and Atlanta didn’t.

For more fun, read the comments on Galloway’s blog, e.g.: “Not that Atlanta’s a model city, but I’ve been to Charlotte many times and it’s boring as hell. It may be on the rise, but there’s nothing interesting about Charlotte either historically or culturally.”

On schools and cities

What follows is my Twitterstream from a panel discussion today at a luncheon put on by the nonprofit Teach for America. On the panel were Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Superintendent Peter Gorman, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, Teach for America founder and CEO Wendy Kopp and moderator Mike Collins of WFAE’s “Charlotte Talks” morning show.

It should give you a sense of the panel discussion, as well as a sense of what it’s like to read an event being covered by Twitter. (Follow me on Twitter at @marynewsom.) Despite what you may hear, Twitter is not all about what you had for lunch today.

– At Teach for America lunch/panel talk w. Supt Gorman, Mayor Foxx & Wendy Kopp, TFA founder. Wanna know who’s here? Stay tuned.
– Johnny & Deborah Harris, CMS’ chmn Eric Davis, Tom Tate. Also Harvey Gantt, NC Sen Ruth Samuelson. UWay’s Jane McIntyre. [Foundation for the Carolinas’ Michael Marsicano and Laura Meyer, MeckEd’s Kathy Ridge, POST’s Claire Tate were also there, among others. The speakers started and I stopped tallying the crowd.]
– TFA Teacher Emily White [teaches 10th-grade English at Phillip O. Berry high school] tells moving tale of student w. drug mom who’s teaching HER to read. She [White, not the druggie mom] gets standing ovation.
– Gorman: 60% of CMS kids who are below grade level are in 25% of CMS schools.
– Moderator Mike Collins asks the gutsy question – Was it like that before end of court-ordered integration?
– Gorman response to deseg question: “Ah-ah-ah-ah.” When thru stuttering says “I wasn’t here then.” …
– Gorman’s recovery: something abt how it wasn’t all that great for a lotta kids back then either. & “I totally dodged your question, Mike.”
– Foxx gives shoutout to his 9th grade algebra teacher, David Butler (namesake of Butler Hi.) [Then I got a Twitter note from another West Charlotte alum, Decker Ngongang (@ngongang), saying “that was my Geometry teacher yr before he passed, push ups if you were late for class.” No word on whether Decker, or Foxx, ever had to do push ups.]
– Foxx says need for strong schools is one reason he’s asking #cltcc [Twitter lingo for Charlotte City Council] to look at city’s housing locational policy.
– Foxx (Teach4America panel) says achievement “gets in the water in the school” & an important factor in success is when kids mentor others.
– Wendy Kopp, T4A founder: We need longer school day & flexibility for principals.
– Gorman: “staggering” amount of budget reductions will be on the table at sch bd bjt talks this afternoon. #cmsbrd [Twitter lingo for CMS school board]
– Gorman: Yes, there’s resistance to T4A from some teachers and some principals.

Why don’t more women bicycle?

My recent recounting of the 4.2-mile, 80-minute walk to work (“A Morning Walk”) brought a Twitter response from @JamesWillamor: You could make it in 15 to 20 minutes or so on a bicycle.

I tried to explain to him about the problems of riding on Providence Road, and the problems of having to wear office garb at the office and tried a delicate mention (especially difficult with the 140-character nature of Twitter) of the issue of profuse sweat from biking up that long long Morehead Street hill.

He persisted: Plenty of office garb on bicyclists in Europe and Asia. “Humidity,” I replied. He said there’s plenty of humidity in Japan and China.

But maybe there’s more to my reluctance than the logistical problems of trying to bicycle in nice clothes, or in a disinclination to being killed by bicycling on Providence Road. (I have imagined elaborate and circuitous routes through the meandering heart of Myers Park but there’s no way to avoid riding on some parts of Providence and either busy Morehead or busy Stonewall.)

Could my reluctance be, in part, because I’m female?

I got an e-mail today that originated with transportation planner John Cock (correction, no longer with The Lawrence Group, now with Alta Planning), notifying people of a free Webinar (register here) from the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals. The topic: “Writing Women Back Into Bicycling: Changing Transportation Culture to Encourage More Women to Cycle.” The blurb: “Some say that transportation culture will change when more women are cycling. What’s the key to making that change happen?”

Indeed, what would help me reconsider? My quick list:

First, safe bike lanes wide enough so I didn’t feel I’d put my life in danger.

Second, a chain guard to keep the grease from getting onto my office clothes. Because who wants to have to carry good office garb in a backpack? That adds even more weight to a pack where you’ve already had to stash your office shoes. Plus in a pack, your good clothes would wrinkle.

Third, a good place to shower at the office. I can walk and still be presentable if it’s not 80 degrees outside. No way I could bicycle without showering. (Technically, because of where I work, I could shower at the Dowd Y. But that’s not a generic solution for all women.)