‘The Ruse of the Creative Class’

Is Richard Florida, author (“The Rise of the Creative Class”), professor and guru of the Creative Class philosophy, just another Harold Hill selling bohemian coffee shops and brew pubs, instead of band instruments to gullible townspeople?

An article in the American Prospect, “The Ruse of the Creative Class,” by Washington Post writer Alec MacGillis inches up to that conclusion – without completely landing it. But MacGillis point to the huge number of cities such as Elmira, N.Y., and Cleveland, that embraced Florida’s theories – some of them paying rather a lot of money to his consulting firm – but haven’t yet found creative class nirvana.

MacGillis writes, “… by some measures, yuppie idylls like San Francisco and Boston have lagged behind unhip, low-tax bastions like Houston and Charlotte, North Carolina.”

Ouch! Unhip? Us? (And I know plenty of people are yelping, “low-tax”??!!!)

The lengthy article is nuanced and points out many complexities, and quotes Florida at length answering his critics. I recommend reading it – before you come to any knee-jerk decision on whether you do or don’t agree with it, or with Florida.

That said, my take on Florida’s theories goes roughly like this: He pinpoints something that has been important in some cities, but there’s no silver bullet that will solve what ails many cities. If a city attracts more artists and creative types, it generally prospers. But simply declaring one’s city to be “creative” doesn’t make it so, nor does paying a consultant to come tell you you should be creative. (Charlotte tried that a while back. I don’t think we’re any more or less creative than we would have been. We’re bigger now, so we have higher numbers of “creatives” but I’m pretty sure that was a result of growth, not any study for which anyone got paid.) Cities are organic and develop in organic ways that are hard to manage and predict.

What are our great places?

Skaters at The Green, where the ice rink is open through Saturday.

Contest alert: If there’s a spot you think is a Great Place in America, you can vote from now until Feb. 25 at the American Planning Association’s “Great Places in America” contest. Click on this link. I note that the Main Street in Greenville, S.C., is among the 2009 Great Streets.

I think we should go for it. Pick a few great spots in Charlotte, or maybe in nearby towns, and start voting.

– What about The Green uptown? It is a wonderful public space. (5:05 p.m.: A reader notes it’s privately owned, not true “public” space.)
– What about East Kingston Avenue in Dilworth? It is a beautiful public street.
– What about the NoDa neighborhood, or Plaza-Midwood?
– Downtown Shelby, downtown Salisbury, downtown Concord.

Have at it.

Shrinking cities, ‘shovel-ready’ and more

That great Web site, Planetizen.com, and writers Nate Berg and Tim Halbur offer their take on the biggest planning issues of 2009. Top o the list, you’ll not be surprised to see, is the Great Recession.

Next is “Shrinking Cities,” followed by “The ‘Shovel-Ready’ Conundrum,” and “High-Speed Rail.”
Except for the high-speed rail, this region experienced all those travails.

The Planetizen recession article has a link with this woeful headline: “Architect Tops List of Hardest-Hit Jobs.” Carpenters came in at No. 2. I think the devastation in the architure profession may be one of the great underreported stories of 2009.

The section on Shrinking Cities ends with a link to an LA Times report that a large commercial farm is buying abandoned land in Detroit with hopes of establishing a large-scale commercial enterprise. Here’s another link, to a Fortune magazine piece on the same topic. It may sound crazy, but if so, a lot of respected planners are crazy. The Fortune piece notes: “After studying the city’s options at the request of civic leaders, the American Institute of Architects came to this conclusion in a recent report: ‘Detroit is particularly well-suited to become a pioneer in urban agriculture at a commercial scale.’ ”

The high-speed rail section includes this paragraph, quoting the always quotable author and dystopian James Howard Kunstler: “James Howard Kunstler, who famously said that America has ‘a railroad system that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of,’ commented that high-speed rail is overspec’d and unnecessary. In 2009, Kunstler wrote that ‘Californians (and the U.S. public in general) would benefit tremendously from normal rail service on a par with the standards of 1927, when speeds of 100 miles-per-hour were common and the trains ran absolutely on time (and frequently, too) without computers (imagine that!)’

There are a wealth of links. Happy reading.

About those butt bins

A quick update from Moira Quinn at Charlotte Center City Partners, re the new cigarette urns uptown:

“The urns are all in Uptown. They were installed on Wednesday, December 30. The TOTAL cost for all 24 was $3,000 (about $125 each). They will save a lot of man-hours to keep city crews from picking up the cigarette butts from the sidewalks. We pride ourselves on having clean sidewalks, so we would have expected our uptown crews to sweep them up. Hopefully, there will be fewer to sweep and those crews can spend their time doing other work.”

This refers to my posting yesterday about the new cigarette urns.

Foxx makes his moves

Sorry about the lengthy hiatus, faithful readers. Vacation happens, thank goodness. Meantime I’ve been stashing away tidbits for you.

Foxx makes committee announcements: I don’t think the Big O had an article on this, but in mid-December Mayor Anthony Foxx announced the City Council committee assignments. This sounds like City Hall inside-baseball, but City Hall watchers know they matter. Committees can speed up issues, stall them or sometimes make them disappear. Here’s where having a Democratic instead of a Republican mayor changes the landscape. Notice the committees with the most influence over policies and ordinances that affect growth, development, transportation, etc.:
– Foxx has split Economic Development and Planning (aka ED&P and formerly chaired by Republican John Lassiter). The new ED committee is chaired by Democrat Susan Burgess. Transportation (formerly chaired by Foxx) is now Transportation and Planning, chaired by new Democratic council member and former Char-Meck Planning Commission chair David Howard.
– Environment continues to be chaired by Republican Edwin Peacock III, but the committee now has a Democratic voting majority: Peacock, Dulin and Democrats Burgess, Howard and vice chair Nancy Carter. (Republican Warren Cooksey leaves the committee.)


No Butts Uptown? Coming to uptown (unless they’re already there – it was too cold today to go check): New cigarette disposal urns on waste receptacles on uptown sidewalks, courtesy of the City of Charlotte’s Solid Waste Services. See photo at right. This, of course, is sparked in part by the new ban on smoking in bars and restaurants, effective Jan. 2. The city notes that it picks up thousands of cigarette butts daily from sidewalks and streets, and those butts are not biodegradable. When they wash into storm drains and then into the creeks they release toxic chemicals into the water, such as arsenic, acetone, lead, toluene, butane, cadmium, etc. So stow your butts, smokers.

Enviro-artist to stick around: Environmental artist Daniel McCormick, whom I wrote about here (and check the cool video link there) – who created the art at Freedom Park – has had his residency at the McColl Center for Visual Art extended through January. He and other collaborators are working on a proposal to keep him here for six months to design a “master plan” for three years of artists/sites along the Carolina Thread Trail.

Wilmore wins magazine kudos: Southern Living magazine declared Wilmore and South End among the South’s Best Comeback Neighborhoods. I was on vacation but the City Council voted down the rezoning for the Wilmore church on Dec. 21. (And I am here to report, courtesy of chef and hostess extraordinaire Susan Patterson of the local Knight Foundation office, that the devil’s food cake featured on the cover of the December issue was as delicious as it looked.)

Study: ‘Gated’ doesn’t equal ‘safer’

Chief Rodney Monroe had some other interesting things to say, in addition to spilling the beans about the Ritz-Carlton-EpiCentre noise issue.

After giving a short presentation Monday to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, planning commissioner Nina Lipton asked the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police chief whether he had any data on safety in gated versus nongated communities.

“We looked at that,” Monroe said. The police and planning departments matched up communities as closely as they could, looking at income levels, multi-family, single-family and other factors. In terms of crime rates, Monroe said, “We saw no difference.”

What matters in terms of neighborhood safety, he said, is who’s living there: Are residents looking out for their neighbors? Are they taking responsibility? If it’s a rental community, is there professional management? Are renters being screened for criminal records?

Lipton noted that planners often hear “safety” as a reason to avoid following the city’s connectivity standards. Monroe essentially shot down that rationale for gated communities. Just making a development gated doesn’t make it safer, he said. “Sometimes it creates an opportunity for me to charge you more.”

I asked Planning Director Debra Campbell after the meeting for a copy or a link to the study. She said the department was still looking at the methodology to make sure, as she put it, that they were really looking at “apples to apples” comparisons. She said the topic had been a hot one last winter and spring but with the development market so slow the department hadn’t seen any reason to rush to give the information to the City Council. (If I were on the council I might ask them for it again.)

Indeed, I wrote a column about that very topic on Feb. 28, after City Council twice winked at its adopted policies on connectivity, despite planning staff opposition. That column isn’t available online for a link. (Update: CharlotteObserver.com’s fabulous Dave Enna found it. Here’s link.) But it described a a Feb. 16 rezoning for a gated apartment complex near Arrowood Road. The other was a Nov. 17, 2008, rezoning for 300 apartments on Woodlawn Road that didn’t want the city-desired connecting street. (That development isn’t happening; the Charlotte Housing Authority hopes to put a development there.) Not surprisingly, neighbors near both of those proposed developments didn’t want more traffic on their streets. Neighbors aren’t always right, you know. As I wrote in February, “Facing a double-whammy of developers and neighbors against connectivity, council members’ spines tend to take on a jelly-like consistency.”

When cultures collide … uptown

If you’re paying big bucks for a room at the Ritz, do you really want to hear loud bands playing at a huge collection of bars right across the street? Apparently, according to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Rodney Monroe, the answer is no.

Monroe was giving the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission a presentation Monday and mentioned the police were getting noise complaints from patrons of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, which just opened Oct. 1.

Above the eighth-floor in the hotel, he said, you can really hear the sounds of bands on the rooftop patios. “It’ll rattle your windows,” he said. “When you pay a thousand dollars a night you don’t want your windows rattled.”

(Note of responsible journalism here: I checked the Ritz-Carlton web site and a weeknight room can be had for roughly $300-$370, less on weekends. I didn’t see any $1,000 possibilities. But then, I couldn’t find a room rate for the Presidential Suite, which looks rather lavish.)

Monroe was answering a question from a planning commissioner about how or whether zoning and plans affected crime rates. He pointed out that both the EpiCentre and the Ritz were developments everyone had wanted. “Be careful what you ask for, you just may get it!”

Governors 1 – Mayors 0

Did the Obama administration and the Congress favor states over cities in the stimulus package? This article in the Atlantic magazine finds evidence that happened. It notes that Veep Joe Biden, in a In a September speech on the stimulus, lamented that “Congress, in its wisdom, decided that the governors should have a bigger input.”

Wi-Fi on city buses?

Keith Parker, late of CATS and now leading the transit system in San Antonio, talks in this Houston Chronicle story about the experiment offering free Wi-Fi in city buses. It’s a pilot project, to see if the service gets used by enough riders to make it worth installing permanently.

Charlotte snags ‘Smart Growth’ award

Although Charlotte’s policy to design streets to better accommodate pedestrians and bicycles remains under assault by the local developers’ lobby – who claim the extra pavement required for sidewalks and more streets isn’t good for the environment – note that the Environmental Protection Agency has given the city an award for those very same Urban Street Design Guidelines.

The EPA announced today that Charlotte is one of four winners of its Smart Growth Awards.
Click on this link to the EPA web site, which should be updated after 3 p.m. Here’s what the press release says:

• Policies and Regulations: City of Charlotte for Urban Street Design Guidelines. As the central city in a rapidly growing metropolitan area, Charlotte, N.C., is under intense development pressures. Rather than continue the automobile-dominated development patterns of the last 50 years, Charlotte adopted Urban Street Design Guidelines to make walking, bicycling, and transit more appealing and to make the city more attractive and sustainable.

Other winners:

Overall Excellence: Lancaster County (Pa.) Planning Commission for Envision Lancaster County. “Lancaster County, in south-central Pennsylvania, is known for its historic towns and villages, and its fertile farmland. To maintain the county’s character, its diverse economy, and its natural resources for future generations, the Lancaster County Planning Commission established a countywide comprehensive growth management plan, which protects valuable farmland and historic landscapes by directing development to established towns and cities in the county.”

• Built Projects: Chicago Housing Authority, FitzGerald Associates Architects and Holsten Real Estate Development Corporation for Parkside of Old Town. “Parkside of Old Town sits on eight city blocks that were once home to a public housing complex notorious for criminal activity. The redevelopment has transformed the neighborhood by reconnecting it to downtown Chicago and tying together mixed-income housing, parks, and new shops and restaurants.”

• Smart Growth and Green Building: City of Tempe, Ariz. for the Tempe Transportation Center. “The Tempe Transportation Center is a model for sustainable design, a vibrant, mixed-use regional transportation hub that incorporates innovative and green building elements tailored to the Southwest desert environment. The Tempe Transportation Center is a true multi-modal facility that integrates a light rail stop, the main city bus station, and paths for bicyclists and pedestrians.”

More federal streetcar bucks?

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, in New Orleans, announces $280 million in federal streetcar and bus money to be made available. Streetsblog.org has the story.

It isn’t new money, but unallocated funding for “New Starts” programs and buses.
Here’s what Streetsblog’s Elana Schor writes:

The money is set to be divided into two parts. The first would award $130 million to streetcars and “urban circulators,” with a focus on proposals that promote mixed-use development in local neighborhoods. No project can win more than $25 million from that pot, however, which would provide about 12 percent of the funding New Orleans needs for its ambitious streetcar expansion plan.

The second $150 million group of bus grants would go to proposals that “provide access to jobs, health care, and education, and/or contribute to the redevelopment of neighborhoods into pedestrian-friendly vibrant environments,” the U.S. DOT said in its announcement.

Obviously, there’s no way to know today whether Charlotte’s fledgling streetcar project might be eligible for any of that streetcar pot of money. Or what $25 million would pay for.