The Naked City Blog

Stay tuned to this space, and tomorrow or the next day I’ll explain why, contrary to what most drivers think, it really isn’t rude when — seeing a merge coming up — you drive all the way to the front of the empty lane instead of hanging in the long, long line in the other lane.

Not that I would do this, mind you. I don’t want to get shot by some road raging nut. I’ll explain more later. Today column-writing for Saturday Viewpoint page comes first. In the meantime, some interesting reading to keep you busy:

The end of suburbia? Joel Kotkin says (in the L.A. Times) “not yet.” Link.

Kotkin’s responding, in part, to an article in the March Atlantic magazine, that created a lot of buzz, from Christopher Leinberger, positing that McMansion suburbs will become the next slums. Link.

Now, here’s a critique of Kotkin’s piece, by Bill Fulton of the California Planning & Development Report. Link.

This month’s Atlantic has an interesting and provocative piece on crime in Memphis, with a mention of Charlotte, pegging the rise in crime in suburban areas to the rise in Section 8 housing vouchers and the demolition of old-line housing projects. Link.

Interesting developments in Sacramento, chronicled by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ tells how the six-county Sacramento region agreed on a plan for growth — including that some areas simply wouldn’t allow development — and is making it happen. Link.

Here’s Witold Rybczynski on the legacy of Buckminster Fuller. Link.

Also, a piece from former Maryland governor Parris Glendenning saying Americans are tired of feeling like victims. Link.

And finally, here’s something you’re unlikely to see out of Charlotte-Mecklenburg: “The county board of supervisors in Loudoun County, Va., has voted to ban itself from accepting any campaign contributions from developers or builders.” Link.

Three cheers for Jim Bartl.

Ever heard of him? If you’re a builder you probably have. Bartl is code enforcement director for the county’s Land Use and Environmental Services Agency. He’s been working for years, slowly and deliberately, to get the county’s and more significantly, the state’s building codes — which dictate the county’s — to be more flexible and to recognize changes in the way developers and planners want to build projects.

It’s because of Bartl that North Carolina adopted a rehab code for older buildings, so owners of older buildings no longer have the devil-or-the-deep-blue-sea choice of either spending a fortune to bring old buildings up to modern codes, or to tear down and build new.

Now, the codes are changing for live-work units. A live-work is a place where you can live AND have a business. A century or more ago, this was common and perfectly legal to build. You could open a business and live above it. The jargon is “vertically integrated.” It’s an urban form dating at least to the ancient Roman empire. But those buildings have been hard to build legally in places such as North Carolina, where codes were written as though everyone would build only new, suburban-style, single-use-zoning developments. Even when zoning allowed them, as in Cornelius, the building codes made it difficult to build economically and created odd rules about which floor you had to live on, and work on.

Bartl knows that traditional neighborhood development, or transit-oriented development, or whatever you want to call it, needs codes that allow such live-work spaces.

“Until now,” writes Bartl in a memo, “there was no provision for any use other than residential in the IRC [International Residential Code]. Since live-work units mix in a commercial use (the “work area”), they were driven out of the IRC, into the International Building Code (IBC). This incurred an increase in code-related construction requirements (use separation, construction type, egress, fire prevention) far in excess of any low risk hazard present in the work function. The added requirements drove the construction costs up, and inevitably drove the units out of the affordable housing range.”

Finally, last year, he reports, the International Code Council Final Action Hearings approved a live-work code change to both the IBC and IRC. The change will be incorporated in the 2009 IRC and IBC, and likely will be available in North Carolina in a few years. Until the, he states, the county department will accept residential project live-work proposals, using the ICC-approved live-work code.

Note: If you’re planning to build something based on this blog posting, please contact Bartl or his department for the fine-print rules that I have probably oversimplified here.

Scrolling the e-mail inbox, I found this invitation for free gelato on Tuesday, as well as an hour of imagining what could be ….

The Civic By Design forum — a monthly discussion group about urban matters — on Tuesday evening is offering free gelato, purchased from Dolce, with its July forum: ” The Pantheon Project: What If Charlotte … “

Consider the Pantheon in Rome, a 2,000-year-old building that remains an architectural marvel, and a transcendent place to experience:



When: The event will be Tuesday (July 8), 5:30-6:30 p.m. at the Levine Museum of the New South, 200 E. Seventh Street (Free parking at Seventh Street Station parking deck).
What: Imagine some of the world’s best urban places were suddenly placed in today’s uninspiring locations all around Charlotte. Local planner Blair Israel came up with a great location, and Tom Low’s recent visit to Rome inspired an idea. What if the Pantheon — including its surrounding piazza with fountain, teeming neighborhood of stores, gelato bars, churches, businesses, homes, etc. — were to rise out of the pavement at Kings Drive and Morehead Street, where the Little Sugar Creek Greenway is being developed.

How would you transform that spot into a civic destination so compelling that people would flock there from all over and it would become a gathering spot for centuries?

Bonus: RSVP by today to brenda@dpz.com and you’ll get gelato at the event. (Or maybe even if you don’t RSVP).

For a map and 360-degree view of the site, go to this link.

People’s pocketbooks and wallets drive behavior. Remember the idea New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed, modeled on a program in London? If you drive your car into the most congested areas of Manhattan, you have to pay a daily fee. The revenue would go toward improving public transit services.

The idea collapsed this spring in the New York state legislature. Now, reports the New York Times, $4-a-gallon gas is accomplishing some of the same goals anyway. One big difference, of course, is that high gas prices are reducing traffic everywhere, not just in the most congested areas. And there’s no extra revenue for public transit.

Meanwhile in London, where congestion-pricing godfather Ken Livingstone lost his re-election for mayor, new mayor Boris Johnson, a Conservative, is looking again at the the most recent congestion-pricing zone extension in the western part of the city and says he doesn’t want any more extensions.

“I am not going to be having any more congestion charges,” he was quoted as saying in The Guardian. “What I am determined to make happen is a modal shift towards bicycling and walking, not just in inner London but also in outer London.”

The program overall has been popular with Londoners, who saw congestion diminish and liked what they saw. The betting — from one of Livingstone’s deputy mayors whom I met in Cambridge — is that it’s so popular that even the conservative Johnson won’t scrap the whole program. And note that, unlike so many of the more conservative pols in the U.S., even Tory Johnson wants more people walking and bicycling.

The Christian Science Monitor looks at the effects of foreclosures across the country, mentioning our Queen City insects along the way:

“From Atlanta’s urban core to leafy neighborhoods filled with chirping crickets in Charlotte, N.C., some 2.2 million homes are expected to go through foreclosure – and stand empty – by the time the mortgage meltdown ends, according to Global Insight, an economic research firm.”

Housing expert Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution compares the foreclosure crisis to a lot of mini-Katrinas slamming cities all over the country.

The article focuses on Atlanta, and then lists a variety of mechanisms being used in cities to help homeowners. No further mention of Charlotte, or its crickets.

First, however, whoever made the comment on the previous thread about New York City buses was making a perfectly legitimate point, until he/she added at the end: “Idiot.” Make your points, stow the insults. Now the whole comment is gone. I’m cracking down on incivility. Too many readers have told me: “I’d like to comment, but I’m afraid of the attacks from the mean readers.”

Last week I took a walk from the Observer building at 600 South Tryon up to The Square to see what’s new. I noted the site of the historic Jack Wood store is STILL undeveloped. Two very nice historic Tryon storefronts, plus a small-scale collection of historic buildings known as Film Row on Church Street, were torn down in 1998. Because of some clumsy computer stuff I can’t link here to a couple of columns I wrote at the time, but the words “civic vandalism” were used.

Notice, that was 10 YEARS AGO! What’s there now? A surface parking lot, and a fancy-schmancy sign. In other words, developers haven’t yet succeeded in putting together a buildable project there. For a full decade Tryon Street has been deprived of some graceful storefronts it could badly need.

Reminds me, again, how lame Charlotte’s development laws are at protecting older buildings. Those buildings should never have been demolished until building permits were in place for what was to replace them, or at a minimum until a developer got the replacement project rezoned.

Other cities’ politicians have spines, or even a moderate interest, in protecting historic buildings. Charlotte’s elected officials don’t seem to care. Nor have city planners proposed much of anything to strengthen the situation, unless that happened in the past 10 months. If they did, someone please let me know.

Another huge change: I took the bus to work today. It was so full people were standing. A nice young man even got up to offer me his seat! This is a huge turnaround from even a year ago. I know $4-a-gallon gas hurts many people’s budgets and is a drag on the economy, but it’s also a good way to get people to change transportation habits — and that’s a real important tool in the fight against global climate change. After a year using Boston’s excellent public transportation system I know I’ll be using CATS a lot more.

Luckily for my kitchen I didn’t have food or coffee in my mouth when I read the complaint below from an attorney for the N.C. Outdoor Advertising Association (a.k.a. the billboard lobby), about North Carolina’s Department of Transportation.

First, the backstory. The billboard industry wants to be able to legally cut more trees in front of billboards, so that you, the motoring public, can better view those ads. (You might say it’s as if your friendly local newspaper wanted permission to kill more housecats if they have the nerve to jump into your lap and obscure your views of the Queen City TV ads. In other words, if a billboard’s in a bad place, remove it or charge less for it.) Current state rules say billboard owners can clear trees and shrubs from 250 feet in front of signs. The industry wants to raise that to 375 feet. So far, the bill hasn’t passed the N.C. House.

Further, there’s a spat between the billboard lobby and NCDOT. Note that word “legally” above. Upon occasion, trees are illegally cut in front of billboards. The NCDOT releases an “illegal cutting inventory,” that lists the names of billlboard owners and businesses where the trees were cut. The billboard lobby wants the list to include only the mile markers, no names.

The names on that list, billboard industry lawyer Betty Waller of Cary wrote, may prejudice the public against the billboard owners, by implying they’re engaged in criminal conduct.

“Unfortunately, NCDOT has demonstrated an unyielding preference for vegetation, and has been unwilling to adopt a vegetation policy equally accommodating to commerce,” she wrote.

I don’t say this often, so pay attention: Hooray for the DOT, for its “unyielding preference for vegetation,” in this instance.

Read the full story here. Or turn to page 2B of today’s Observer.

And I’ll leave you with some verse by the inimitable Ogden Nash:

“I think that I shall never see
a billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all.”

As it happens, Bill Fulton, to whose article I linked yesterday, was in North Carolina last month at a policy wonk gathering in Greensboro, sponsored by the Institute for Emerging Issues at N.C. State, where the topic was dealing with strains on the state’s infrastructure due to growth.

In a piece he wrote afterward about North Carolina, “Is More Growth Bad For The ‘Good Growth’ State?” Fulton says, “The wonks are gingerly beginning to address the question of whether growth should be managed.”

Fulton also spoke at the conference, as an out-of-state expert, saying North Carolina and other parts of the Southeast have the nation’s most wasteful and costly patterns of development.

In his article, he writes, “As a Californian, I was struck by how similar the situation in North Carolina today is to what we in California experienced during the postwar boom.”

The biggest problem in North Carolina now, he suggests, is the growing divide between urban North Carolina and rural North Carolina.

Fulton is publisher of the California Planning & Development Report, whose web site says it’s the only independent publication in the nation covering planning and development issues in a single state.

Things learned while looking up other things:

You’d think the state legislatures of North and South Carolina had covered just about every state symbol possible. We have the N.C. state mammal (grey squirrel), the N.C. state reptile (Eastern box turtle), the N.C. state vegetable (sweet potato, although you can insert political joke here about various not-very-energetic elected officials). South Carolina has a comparable list, including the S.C. state snack food (boiled peanuts). Want to know more? Click here.

But we lack a state soil. Turns out a number of other states have adopted state soils. Examples: Illinois — Drummer silty clay loam. Massachusetts — Paxton soil series. Kentucky — Crider soil series. Florida — Myakka fine sand.

North Carolina has a variety of regionally distinct soils. I don’t know the scientific names for them, but the flat sandy expanses of Eastern North Carolina are not the same as the thick red clay of the Piedmont. And smack between them lies the Sandhills, which is of course white sandy soil.

But let me propose, if not a state soil, then an official Charlotte soil: Bull tallow.

Ever heard of it? Welcome to my world, or at least, my garden. It’s a thick, yellow-gray clay with, near as I can tell, no plant-supporting properties whatsoever. Red clay soil is heavy, but put some compost and humus in it and it will grow all kinds of wonderful things. Not so bull tallow.

A bit of online research I did seemed to point to bull tallow being a folk name for kaolin, a clay used for pottery and ceramics. Hmmm. But here’s why I nominate bull tallow: You really shouldn’t build on it, because it expands and contracts dramatically when wet or dry, making the land unstable. So, um, why again have so many houses around Charlotte, and in Union County as well, been built on it? (I’ve even heard it called the Foxcroft bull tallow.) Guess some developers just wanted to make a little money, and the specter of perpetually cracking home foundations for decades to come wasn’t really their concern.

Which, of course, makes it quintessentially “Charlotte.”