The Naked City Blog

OK, I should have left the office by now, but instead I peeked at my ever-welcome Planetizen.com automatic e-mail of interesting growth-related stories. This one — Why the 2-Hour Commute Is A Public Policy Success” — leaped out as being pertinent to the How Far Will They Drive discussion. It’s from a California Planning and Development report, a blogger named Bill Fulton.

You knew it would happen, and it is.

“Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas,” reports Peter Goodman of the New York Times. See Fuel Prices Shift Math for Life in the Far Suburbs”

I’ve written about this before, but a lot of people buy houses without really calculating the cost of their transportation to and from work, shopping, schools, etc. So that house in the far reaches of an urban area may cost a lot less, but when you have to drive 30 or 40 miles to work, your living expenses can be more expensive than you had figured. And guess what? Bigger houses also cost more to heat and to air-condition.

Goodman reports: “In Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis, homes beyond the urban core have been falling in value faster than those within, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com.”

Some planner-pundit types are now hyping the end of the suburbs, based on reports of this sort. Consider this essay in the Washington Post.

I think that’s extreme. But it seems obvious that many more people are going to be discovering the allure of living closer to the city — or even in the city — because of high fuel prices.

Here’s that link I mentioned to a paper presented at a conference last week at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Here’s a remark from a reader who must have an RSS feed or something on The Naked City, because the comment came only minutes after I posted it late last night.

The real news is that the Charlotte Observer and Charlotte.com are continuing their slide into total irrelevancy. Hope you didn’t come back here expecting your job to be around for a long time. 6/24/2008 12:38:00 AM

Well, now, thanks for reading, but I’m pretty well up to speed on conditions at the Observer. (If it’s so irrelevant why read this?) I’m fully aware the Observer isn’t perfect. And the layoffs have hurt everyone, even those of us who keep our jobs, because of the emotional trauma and damage to the newsroom’s staffing levels.

But is there any other source of news about Charlotte and environs that is substantially better, in terms of breadth, depth and scope?

The financial problems the Observer and other newspapers face are caused essentially by a huge dropoff in classified advertising. Welcome to Craigslist world. If you count daily circulation and online, readership is up for the Observer and many other papers.

I just read an academic paper on the topic of newspapers, that provides some facts that run counter to the prevailing word-of-mouth stuff I’ve been reading. If I can dig up the link, I’ll post it here. Later. Got to unpack and run errands.

Rolled into town at dusk, after two days on the highway from The People’s Republic of Cambridge. Was it a good year? One of the best in my life. I’ll miss a lot about Cambridge and the Boston area — but more about that later.

I’ll be back at work at week’s end, though likely digging through stacks of old mail, and then — way to make someone feel glad about being back at work after 10 months! — I get to go to computer classes next week because the Observer has a new pagination-editing system and I’m expected to understand how to use it. Go figure!

So watch this space, but don’t get too worried if my postings are catch-as-catch-can.

Until then, what have I missed?

I’ve been reading charlotte.com, of course, and talking to friends and work colleagues. I know the light rail has been carrying scads of people and the park and ride lots are jammed. I know about those water mains, and that Mayor Pat’s running for the Governor’s Mansion in Raleigh.

But what’s the REAL NEWS? Help me get up to speed, friends.

Family and friends, if you’d like to read occasional dispatches from Cambridge you may visit my personal blog, Heading North, at marynewsom.livejournal.com. I’ll try to update it every few days or at least weekly.

But if you’re seeking punditry, or opinions on topics in the news, you should look elsewhere until my return next July.

Have a great year in The Naked City!

Some of you already know this, but at the end of this week I’ll have to close down The Naked City for a year, while I take part in a fellowship program for midcareer journalists at Harvard, called a Nieman Fellowship.

It’s a wonderful opportunity for me and my family: I can take any courses I want to at Harvard. But I’m not allowed to do any professional work. (Throw me into that briar patch!) That means no Naked City. Sorry, folks. Maybe you can convince Ed Williams to start a blog or something. (And for you conspiracy theorists, I applied for the fellowship last winter, long before I had ever heard of Lizardking or Edd Hauser … )

My last posting will be tomorrow or Friday. Until then, here’s a cool link my buddy Joe Sovacool showed me. This site rates the “Walk Score” of your neighborhood.

Example: “90-100 = Walkers’ Paradise: Most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car.” Or, “0-25 = Driving Only: Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!” My neighborhood rated a 35.

Warning: The site is slow, and earlier today it was having a spasm. Seems to work better on Firefox than IE. It isn’t up-to-date. Told me I was only half a mile from Providence Hardware — which closed in 2003. And I don’t think it measures threatening dogs or places where poison ivy is growing too close to the sidewalk. Still, it’s fun. Check out your own area’s walk score.

The site’s principles are based in part on those of Dan Burden, a consultant who’s been to Charlotte several times to try to infuse the city DOT with info on pedestrian and bicycling needs.

If you want to keep arguing about transit, please do so, on the comment string from my previous post. This is about other topics.

Booming ‘burbs: What’s the country’s fastest-growing suburb? Not Marvin. Not Fort Mill. See this Forbes magazine story for the answer, and for a list ranking suburbs by growth rate. (Want to skip Forbes’ annoying full-screen ad before reading the article? Click on “Skip this welcome screen” in upper right corner.) The chart, ranking growth from 2000 to 2006, tallies Holly Springs at No. 18, and Wake Forest at No. 20. Both are in Wake County. You might say Holly Springs is a suburb of Fuquay–Varina … Huntersville is No. 46, and Cornelius No. 51.

Back off, bulldozers: Salisbury, which takes more pride in its historic buildings than, say, Charlotte, on Tuesday will consider (but not vote on) an ordinance to require the City Council to issue a permit for any downtown demolition. Here’s the Salisbury Post’s article.

Hummer Houses in Hotlanta: Here’s a link to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s article last month about a proposal to limit the size of large houses on small lots. (A Nexis search didn’t find any follow-up articles.)

On the verge of importance? UNC Charlotte’s Ken Lambla, dean of the College of Architecture, offers a thoughtful look at the role of art and architecture in this month’s Charlotte Viewpoint. He starts, “We all know that Charlotte is on the verge of something big; the question that follows is whether we are on the verge of something important? After 24 years of teaching at UNC Charlotte and being involved in architectural and urban practices, I am convinced that we are just about ready to make a shift in substance.”

Anti-sprawl in Greensboro: Read about an “un-sprawl” development in Greensboro, from terrain.org, “A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments.” Here’s a link. It’s about Southside, one of that city’s first significant mixed-use infill projects, and winner of an American Planning Association award in 2003 for Outstanding Planning: Implementation. The photo shows Southside infill housing (in yellow) and renovated housing.

Driving drives down volunteering: Long commutes have a negative effect on community volunteering, a new study finds. The study says four factors influence the rate at which a community’s residents volunteer: (1) residents’ attachment to the community, (2) commuting times, (3) socioeconomic characteristics such as education levels, and (4) the capacity of a community’s nonprofit groups. The study found that volunteer rates in central cities are lower (24%) than in suburbs and rural areas, which rates (29%). Here’s a link to the study. Charlotte ranked No. 9 nationally for volunteering, below Milwaukee and above Tulsa. Minneapolis-St. Paul ranked No. 1.

At long last, I’m freed up from other duties to get back to Naked City topics. I’ve spent this past week researching topics such as impact fees and land transfer taxes. More on that in later posts.

First, to take the wind out of some conspiracy theorists’ sails: I opted to start Potterblog about two weeks before the books came out because I thought it would offer fun online reading that no one else at Charlotte.com was going to do. I didn’t plan it months in advance. I didn’t do it to escape writing about that transit study. I did it because I thought it would be interesting (believe it or not, I have many interests) and give readers something they’d enjoy.

Second, although I do appreciate the devoted (if sometimes mean-spirited) commenters and readers of The Naked City, honesty compels me to reveal that Potterblog was far more popular, measured in page views. (Blog readership — high or low — doesn’t affect my pay, by the way. And no, I don’t measure the value of what I do by page views, otherwise I’d be opining about Brad Pitt and the NFL.)

But back to Naked City-land:

Yes, I goofed in making such a big deal of the UNCC transit study . Edd Hauser wasn’t forthright in explaining its origins to me, and I took him at his word when I shouldn’t have. However, a few mistakes in one apparently sloppily done rush-job research report do nothing to undermine the importance of having a good transit system here. It’s just one study, for crying out loud.

Further, nothing in the somewhat obsessive reporting that’s been devoted to the UNCC study indicates Hauser or anyone else cooked the results. Steve Harrison’s analysis confirmed many of the study’s findings. Of the mistakes, some made CATS look worse than it should have, others made CATS look better. To me that shows hasty and sloppy work, not intentional skewing.

The bottom line remains: Much statistical information you’ll read about transit comes from people either stoutly for it or stoutly against it. They mine data charts for tidbits that support their views and ignore tidbits that don’t support their views. I don’t believe the UNCC study did that. Compared with much of what I see, especially from the anti-transit crowd, it was far more even-handed. (It’s not sheer coincidence that the anti-light-rail John Locke and Reason Foundations hire anti-light-rail UNCC prof David Hartgen or other rail transit critics to do their transportation studies.)

Overall, finding dispassionate analysis is tough. Academic studies, as opposed to advocacy group studies, tend to be more even-handed. But academics often have views that affect what they study and how they approach it. That’s true for many subjects, not just transportation.

Even people who aim for even-handed analysis face difficulties comparing one city’s transportation experience with another’s, because each city is unique. They differ in topography, financing, growth rates, growth patterns, land use rules and local culture.

Should Charlotte be compared with Atlanta, which until recent years didn’t require transit-supportive development around MARTA stops? (Miami was the same.) Or with slow-growing Pittsburgh? Or Portland, which decided to support its transit system by capping the number of parking places downtown? Any comparison is, in its own, way, apples to oranges.

At bottom, the issue facing Mecklenburg County is whether the city needs a mass transit system funded with a half-cent sales tax, or not. Some people think it’s a waste of money. I — and many other people — think it’s fiscally irresponsible NOT to build one.

This will be the last Potterblog post. I’m taking time off the rest of this week and next week The Naked City will return in this spot.

Yes, I finished the book. It was 4 a.m. Sunday. Our daughter finished it at 6 a.m. Saturday, after getting a midnight copy at a Potter party at Borders near SouthPark. It was a memorable event: Little kids, teens, young adults and gray-haired folks all gathered in one spot for one reason. Some of the costumes were quite creative. One young guy had rigged up a centaur costume.

It was a good cross-section of society, in many ways. You had obvious nerds (having been one in high school, I can say that), obvious “popular” teenagers, and lots of regular folks in between of all ages and shapes. My husband came, too, although he hasn’t read any of the books, doesn’t like fantasy fiction and hates costume parties. He lasted until about 11 p.m. and said later said it had reminded him of being in a remote, inland country somewhere in South America where you didn’t understand the language, the people or the culture.

We stood in line next to Voldemort. And then we got the book and as we waited for a ride home, a friend who had been with us in line called from the nearby Teeter to report that the books were on sale there, too, with no line at all.

But the book? OK, spoilers to follow. If you haven’t finished it, stop now.

How would I review the book? As a work of literature, I’d give it maybe 7 on a 10-point scale, with popular but not very well written stuff like “Da Vinci Code” down at about 3. It kept me attentive — of course — but the long exposatory passages, where Harry reads Snape’s memories and where he has his disembodied lecture from Dumbledore, made me question why Rowling wasn’t able to clear all those things up without having to resort to the “egghead explains” technique.

As I noted early in the Potterblog, I was afraid we’d endure one of those cheesy scenes where the dead come back in ghostly, translucent forms to communicate with the living, and I was right to be worried about that.

The very last chapter — the one that Rowling has said she wrote at the very start of writing the series — sounded, in tone, much more like Books 1 and 2 than Books 5 and 6. It was, dare I say it, a shade too cute? All those cutesy little kids saying cutesy things. And I knew right off that someone was going to be named Severus. But to name Draco’s kid Scorpio was a great touch!

On the other hand, was I right, or what, about Snape and Lily? Ditto Lupin’s death, sad to say?

Is it accurate to note that all of Harry’s “protectors” ended up dead? His parents, his godfather, his mentor Dumbledore, the respected Auror Mad-Eye Moody (he was Tonks’ mentor, so maybe that’s why she had to die, too), even Dobby the annoying house elf who kept showing up to help him out of tight spots. Even the majestic owl, Hedwig. So I spent much of the book thinking both Ron AND Hermione would be snuffed. I’m very glad I was wrong.

The doe in the woods was a wonderful touch — and the revelation about whose Patronus it was and why. I liked the introduction of the goblins — they were a cultural group (a race? a species?) that we hadn’t learned much about. I liked it that we FINALLY learned more about Ravenclaw, and saw the Ravenclaw ghost. I LOVED Molly Weasley’s great scene with Bellatrix.

Aberforth was a nicely drawn character. I wish we could have seen more of him earlier in the series, just because he was good company. Ditto Ted Tonks.

Agree? Disagree? Put in your own thoughts below.

Final note: If you want to read more thoughts about Book 7: LeakyLounge.com and HarryPotterspage.com. And try potterforums.com. I couldn’t get the page to load, but you may have more luck.