The Naked City Blog

I popped in at the City Council’s zoning meeting last Monday night. When you do that, you almost always stumble over some great tidbit.

Monday’s came during a public hearing on a request to rezone about 5 acres off Tuckaseegee Road for an office and a self-storage facility. The planning staff was recommending against the rezoning, because it doesn’t match the plan for the area. One area of contention was that the planners want the developers to save 17 percent of the trees on the site. The developers say that isn’t feasible.

At that point council member Michael “The Lorax” Barnes spoke for the trees. He said he found it unacceptable to disregard the city’s tree-save requirements and suggested the developer consider options for mitigating the damage, such as planting trees elsewhere. It’s a novel idea – who knows if it’s workable? – and I loved hearing a politician offer such a thought.

Then the developers’ lobbyist, Bob Young, spoke up: “I like trees,” he avowed. “We all like trees.”

Well, yes.

It reminded me of when the city, in 1998, was proposing requiring developers to build sidewalks on both sides of subdivision streets, a proposal that drew sharp opposition from the Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition. They just loved sidewalks, of course. But at one council meeting, after pleas for good sidewalks on behalf of children, the elderly and people in wheelchairs, REBIC executive Mark Cramer warned council: “You can have too much of a good thing.”

Like trees, I suppose.

Today’s topic: Bloated houses.

It’s on my mind for a couple of reasons. First, the City Council on Monday night had a public hearing on whether to created a local historic district for the Hermitage Court area of Myers Park. The majority of the property owners on the street support the historic district, which would bring the possibility of up to a year’s wait if someone wanted to demolish a home. So it wouldn’t stop the teardown frenzy, but might slow it some. And Myers Park is being ravaged by teardowns. Consider the “starter castle” (above) on Queens Road West.

But here’s the other reason it’s on my mind. A friend sent me this link to something the alternative weekly Austin Chronicle has put online: Its Bloat-O-Meter. People send in photos and then online voters rate it 1 to 10, a 10 being “McMansion.”

What’s a McMansion? We all have different definitions, I suppose. To me it’s a pretentious new house built in a place where it’s too big for its neighbors, in many cases too big for the lot, and typically with a national-franchise predictability to its architecture (using the term loosely). Just being new and ugly doesn’t make something a McMansion. Being oversized and too show-offy are key ingredients.

I confess to having heightened sensitivity, because I live in a neighborhood where ’50s ranch houses are being torn apart, house by house, and replaced by houses with upwards of 6,000, or even 8,000 square feet. To my knowledge, only one of the families moving into the big new houses has enough kids to truly need that many bedrooms.

The construction has been unrelenting for five years. Builders rip out huge trees. They allow eroding dirt to pollute our creek. Construction trucks block the street, crack the pavement and gouge tracks in our lawns. While our property value has soared, that’s only worth something to us if we sell our house and move. Meanwhile, it means our property taxes have also soared. We used to think we could retire there. No more. The taxes will drive us out.

But enough about me. Take a look at the Austin Bloat-O-Meter. Don’t you think our McMansions can beat their McMansions any day of the week?

Today’s topic: Bloated houses.

It’s on my mind for a couple of reasons. First, the City Council on Monday night had a public hearing on whether to created a local historic district for the Hermitage Court area of Myers Park. The majority of the property owners on the street support the historic district, which would bring the possibility of up to a year’s wait if someone wanted to demolish a home. So it wouldn’t stop the teardown frenzy, but might slow it some. And Myers Park is being ravaged by teardowns. Consider the “starter castle” (above) on Queens Road West.

But here’s the other reason it’s on my mind. A friend sent me this link to something the alternative weekly Austin Chronicle has put online: Its Bloat-O-Meter. People send in photos and then online voters rate it 1 to 10, a 10 being “McMansion.”

What’s a McMansion? We all have different definitions, I suppose. To me it’s a pretentious new house built in a place where it’s too big for its neighbors, in many cases too big for the lot, and typically with a national-franchise predictability to its architecture (using the term loosely). Just being new and ugly doesn’t make something a McMansion. Being oversized and too show-offy are key ingredients.

I confess to having heightened sensitivity, because I live in a neighborhood where ’50s ranch houses are being torn apart, house by house, and replaced by houses with upwards of 6,000, or even 8,000 square feet. To my knowledge, only one of the families moving into the big new houses has enough kids to truly need that many bedrooms.

The construction has been unrelenting for five years. Builders rip out huge trees. They allow eroding dirt to pollute our creek. Construction trucks block the street, crack the pavement and gouge tracks in our lawns. While our property value has soared, that’s only worth something to us if we sell our house and move. Meanwhile, it means our property taxes have also soared. We used to think we could retire there. No more. The taxes will drive us out.

But enough about me. Take a look at the Austin Bloat-O-Meter. Don’t you think our McMansions can beat their McMansions any day of the week?

Not surprising, really, but the two most affluent City Council districts, 6 and 7, have only a tiny proportion of the city’s federally subsidized Section 8 voucher rentals. The vouchers help low-income households pay for rents they otherwise couldn’t afford.

The breakdown of where the vouchers go has been eagerly sought by East Charlotte neighborhood activists, among others, who think their part of town holds a disproportionate share of government-funded affordable housing. The Observer’s Karen Cimino acquired the breakdown – which is public information – from a GIS analyst in the city’s Neighborhood Development department.

Her article Thursday in the Neighbors of University City section ought to generate some interesting talk.

(Cimino tells me her earlier requests to the Charlotte Housing Authority for Section 8 vouchers sorted by Zip code still haven’t produced the data. Guess it takes a City Council member – in this case District 4 rep Michael Barnes, who asked city staff for it – to spur some public agencies to make public information public.)

The breakdown is by City Council district, which makes it a bit tough to analyze in an East Charlotte v. West Charlotte v. South Charlotte kind of way. That’s because District 2, for instance, covers chunks of what would be considered West Charlotte as well as University City (northeast Charlotte); District 5 covers parts of East Charlotte and South Charlotte; and District 1 covers all the way from Dilworth to chunks of East Charlotte.

But the numbers are stark: The affluent, predominantly white District 7 (far south Charlotte) has 34 Section 8 vouchers. District 6 (closer-in south Charlotte) has 193. Even their combined total of 227 is dramatically less than any other single district.

District 3 (generally west and southwest Charlotte) leads with 921. District 2 (generally northwest, north and northeast, and with more than 5,000 more housing units) is next with 917. The predominantly east Charlotte District 5 has 757, with District 1 close behind at 754. (Note that District 5 holds 4,500 fewer housing units than District 1). District 4, which is most of University City, has 588.

Some caveats: Landlords have to voluntarily apply to receive Section 8 vouchers from renters, so those in high-demand, more affluent parts of town have little incentive to enroll in the program.

Federal policy supposedly is to try to spread Section 8 housing around, so as not to overburden one neighborhood. It doesn’t seem particularly effective, from what the numbers show. The city says it wants to do the same. But the marketplace, left to its devices, isn’t accomplishing that.

Why care? Because when too much low-income housing gets too concentrated, property values throughout that area drop, undercutting the the city tax base. And that means higher taxes for all of us.

Experience has shown that a small percentage of affordable housing units sprinkled lightly through affluent areas don’t affect property values. Why doesn’t the city require all housing developments to include a small percentage of affordable units? Other cities do this, and it works well.

It prevents the stark economic segregation we’re now seeing in Charlotte.

I’ve always thought the people who say there’s nothing to do in Charlotte aren’t looking very hard. We have art museums, history museums, frescos all over uptown, gallery crawls, all kinds of live performances, lectures and seminars, great restaurants and a ga-zillion bars. There’s enough stuff to do that if I found $10 million in untraceable drug money and could quit my job I could easily fill my time as a gadabout.

Then our family hosted a 13-year-old French kid for two weeks. She was part of a student exchange program at our daughter’s school, a public magnet school called Smith Language Academy. Our kids had visited Limoges (one of Charlotte’s Sister Cities) two weeks last fall. This month, the French kids came here. Now I understand the tourism problem.

When our kids were in France, they visited Versailles and the Eiffel Tower, several medieval villages, and the famous cave paintings of Lascaux, as well as the medieval center of Limoges. Turns out there are Roman ruins below the school the kids attended there, and they went down to see them one day.

The day after NASCAR awarded its Hall of Fame to Charlotte, Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jeff Schultz wrote: “The NASCAR hall of fame instantly becomes Charlotte’s top tourist attraction. The elevator in the Wachovia building drops into second.”

I’m not a huge NASCAR fan, but I think we’d have taken those French kids to the Hall of Fame in a nanosecond. And the whitewater center, if it had been open.

You know, 13-year-olds are not, as a group, your best art museum aficionados. Carowinds isn’t open yet. The whitewater center isn’t built yet. Because the crowd of 19 had only six boys, the Charlotte parents who were organizing their activities opted against Lowe’s Motor Speedway as an attraction.

So what did they like? The girl who stayed with us liked shopping malls. All the kids seemed to enjoy a Bobcats game. I’m pretty sure the group did ride an elevator in a tall building uptown, but it wasn’t their No. 2 activity. It was more like No. 6.

I still think there’s a lot to do in Charlotte, but it does help to like birds of prey (they visited the raptor center), Charlotte history (not a topic taught extensively in Limoges) and art museums. So from now on, when those tourism experts tout Concord Mills and Carowinds as tourist attractions, I no longer will sniff at the concept.

Tourism wasn’t really the point of the exchange, of course. The French kids learned a lot about Americans and American family life. Everything here is so big, they said. Americans eat more than they do, I was told. The huge trucks on the streets and roads interested the French kids.

And one day we were in a huge hurry, and we bought Wendy’s hamburgers and ate them while driving on the interstate. This, I thought, is the total American family experience!

Overall, the kids seemed to treat the trip as a grand adventure and to have a great time, regardless of tourist attractions.

But as tourists, what did they like best? I’m pretty sure it was the overnight trip to Charleston.

About that NASCAR Hall of Fame: You may be cheering. Or maybe you doubt it will bring in either the people or the money projected and think the city made a stupid deal.

Forget that for the moment. I’m more worried about the building itself. If you care about uptown design, you should be, too. Feel free to add your comments below.

What I see in the renderings released so far make it look like a flying saucer hunkered in a parking lot. (I’ll try to add a link, below).

Yeah, yeah, it has a fancy architect – Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. That’s Pei as in I.M. Pei, ultra-famous architect who designed the glass pyramid at the Louvre and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland.

But if you’re going to build in this city – in any city – you need to understand urban fabric. It’s what makes cities and city streets and sidewalks interesting places. Paris has it, and, I assume, Cleveland. In those places, you need a break here and there from the urban fabric. Charlotte has precious little of it. New projects should help create it, not obliterate any opportunity.

Urban fabric means a lot of very small threads, woven close together. Like any ecosystem, a city needs tiny organisms: coffee shops, apartment buildings, stores, doctor’s offices, rowhouses, Chinese take-out places, pizza delivery joints, bars, cleaners, day-care centers, condos, French bistros and Italian trattorias, banks, insurance offices, antique furniture restoration shops, boutiques, art galleries – all in close proximity. Huge, single-use buildings in huge-single use blocks pretty much obliterate any hope of urban fabric. That’s why you don’t want them clustered together.

Second Ward, where the hall is planned, is a veritable monument to Bad City Planning Circa 1960. It is scarred by too many leviathan-sized projects that destroyed the old street grid: the government center, the Convention Center and its hotel and the Education Center-Marshall Park-First Baptist megablock, among others. Big blocks make boring neighborhoods and worsen traffic congestion.

The city’s planners know this. That’s why, in the Metro School rebuilding, South Davidson Street is being extended to Stonewall Streets.

The area around the Hall of Fame is dead, dead and more dead. Dead as in butt-end of the convention center loading docks. The last thing it needs is another gigantic-footprint building. The city – which will pay to build the building – should demand better.Interestingly, the city uses your tax money and mine to pay the salaries of a staff of urban designers in its planning department. They haven’t been consulted about the NASCAR hall design.

The city engineering department has taken the lead so far. Now, I value engineers. Without them bridges would collapse and skyscrapers tumble. But most engineers don’t know diddly about urban design. Maybe that’s why the city has eagerly planned yet another overstreet sidewalk, to connect the Convention Center to the Hall of Fame-new Convention Center ballroom complex. This despite haranguing for decades from planners that overstreet passages are fatal to a lively street scene.

So, let’s see. If a developer wants to build one, the city nixes it unless it’s B of A or Wachovia in which case the city curls into the fetal position. But when the city wants to build one, it’s OK?

Stay tuned. Whatcha bet the city will want to exempt itself from its own sign ordinance, too?

To see the rendering: http://www.belongshere.com/halloffame.html

Sometimes I think I’ve plopped into an alternate universe. Can it be the Charlotte Department of Transportation giving PowerPoint presentations on the importance of making city streets welcoming to pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as cars?

Ten years ago, if I’d heard that it would have meant I’d fallen, cracked my head on a rock and was hallucinating. Back then CDOT acted as if “transportation” meant only “motor vehicles.” Sidewalks, if built at all – and they weren’t required on many subdivision streets – were a stingy 4 feet wide and hugged the curb, right next to 50 mph traffic. Bicycle lanes? Why bother? Nobody rides bicycles in Charlotte! To “improve” transportation efficiency you just made all intersections wider and – if possible – added lanes wherever you could afford to (which, thankfully, was too expensive to do everywhere).

In a few spots, like where rich and/or politically influential people lived, the city proved it was “neighborhood friendly” by forbidding turns onto those sacred streets or even flat-out closing off streets. (Example: East Kingston at Euclid in Dilworth.)

So Tuesday night, at the “Sweet Streets” presentation – part of an ongoing monthly lecture/program series called Civic by Design at the Levine Museum of the New South – it was almost other-worldly to hear CDOT planner Tracy Newsome and her boss, Norm Steinman, CDOT’s planning and design manager, list changes they’re proposing to the city’s street-design standards. No, this isn’t asphalt quality or storm drain engineering. It’s about how wide or narrow streets need to be, how wide and how far from the street sidewalks should be and the importance of short block lengths and having plenty of street connections. Would you believe me if I said I think Jane Jacobs would approve?

What Newsome (no, we’re not related) and Steinman and their boss, CDOT Deputy Director Danny Pleasant are pushing is pretty much the whole philosophical approach that I and plenty of other people in town have wanted the city to adopt for years. The project’s bureaucratic name is the Urban Street Design Guidelines. They’ve been in the works at least four years – my first notes on the subject say April 2002. One early draft came out in 2003. The city’s Web site has the current draft.

Why haven’t they been adopted yet? One possibility: There’s been plenty of pushback from developers, who don’t like it whenever city rules get tighter and who specifically have complained about shorter block lengths (i.e., more pavement required, and in some cases developers may not be able to get as many lots onto a subdivision site) and about wider, 8-foot planting strips – which Newsome and Steinman say are needed if you want street trees to survive and grow. In response, CDOT has already loosened the proposed block-length requirement.

Another possibility: The city manager’s staff – as always – frets that developers will whine, City Council members will listen to the developers and the staff will acquire even more scar tissue. Well, it has been known to happen.

The CDOT folks Tuesday night said the proposals aren’t being offered for adoption yet, in order to go through yet another mind-numbingly bureaucratic review process (my words, not theirs). I figure that will take months.

That’s stupid. Adopt the street design guidelines. Now. They’re good, they’re badly needed, and they will make our city better.

If you want to pushing this much-needed improvement onto City Council’s agenda, let your council members know. Tell them you support the Urban Street Design Guidelines and want them adopted now. And if you’d like to be notified of the monthly Civic By Design forums, please notify Tom Hanchett at the Levine Museum of the New South.

I figure any column that brings similar responses from avant garde-ista Little Shiva AND civic stalwart Frank Bragg must have hit a nerve. (Feel free to add your own responses, below.)

Last Saturday’s Urban Outlook column was about learning to love Charlotte after living here 28 years. (Ouch, typing that “28” still hurts.) Compared with places like Boston, San Francisco, New Orleans, Asheville, or even Fayetteville, Charlotte’s personality is, well, elusive.

Years ago, I was at a job-recruiting fair trying to meet promising young journalists who might want to work for The Charlotte Observer. One photographer stopped by the booth, and we chatted. She asked, “Does Charlotte have a soul?”

Long pause. Remember, I was being paid to make people think they’d want to work here. Finally, I came up with a convoluted response that I hope didn’t sound too desperate. It went something like this: “Charlotte’s soul is subtle. You have to live there a while before you can figure out what it is. It’s hidden, sort of … ” The photographer never, to my knowledge, applied for a job here.

I wrote, years ago, that Charlotte may have no “soul,” per se – although some people pointed out to me that the city probably does have a soul, just not one I approve of. Whatever.

Anyway, several people I’ve talked to about my Saturday column – one has lived here 30 years – have confessed to ongoing ambivalence about Charlotte, but that they’re starting to suspect that they, too, may be feeling more affection for the place.

Little Shiva, if you haven’t run into her, is a graphic designer and artist who publishes an underground magazine called QZ and who generally makes Charlotte a more interesting place to live in. She wrote:

“Just wanted to tell you that I like your Charlotte Valentine in today’s paper. I’m not quite ready to say the same for myself, but I feel like I might be someday. I’m not as far along as you, having just gotten here in late 1999. I’m still not in love with this place. … In spite of my family roots here and in spite of the fact that I’ve been fairly well accepted, I’m still dreaming of Mr. Right (referring to some dream city).

“But I have to look at how far I’ve come since 1999, all the commitments I’ve made towards Charlotte, personally as well as creatively, and I have to realize that this dopey town has somehow become a part of me. Whether or not I ever leave, or just keep this as home base and travel a whole lot more, Charlotte will be a begrudgingly fond chapter in my life story.”

Frank Bragg, by contrast, is a successful financial adviser and a well-known philanthropist and civic activist – very “establishment,” if you will, and a decidedly different style than Little Shiva. It was Frank and Kathy Bragg, for instance, who recently donated $100,000 to start an endowment fund for the Chamber Music at St. Peter’s concert series.

“Loved your article about your gradual coming to love Charlotte. I feel the same way. Kathy grew up here and we have lived here 43 years … except we have always lived outside the city. First south, at Elm Lane and Providence Road West on a small farm (now totally developed …) and then on Lake Norman for the last 16 years. … But now we live in Fourth Ward in a condo. We bought it in 1999 and lived here only part-time until last August when we sold our lake house. We love the city. It is exciting, stimulating, and beautiful.”

Planners are always coming up with Utopian ideas. Then those ideas get heaved against the plaster walls of the real world and shatter like porcelain teacups. (Feel free to share your war stories on that front, below.)

“Live-work units” – they’re all the rage among planners, and some developers, all over the country, especially (but not exclusively) in New Urbanist-styled neighborhoods. They’re buildings with retail or business space on the first floor and homes on upper floors.

It’s easy to see why they’d be popular: They’re an unfilled niche in the development market, aimed at people who own small businesses and don’t want to have to pay to rent/own both a home and a business site, or who don’t want to have to commute. Planners like them because they’re “mixed use” and, among other praiseworthy attributes, cut down on how many auto trips people have to make.

Plus, they can increase a city’s stock of affordable housing if you figure that not having to shell out for a separate space for your business gives you more money for your home.

Here’s the wall that they hit: Building codes don’t recognize them. If you’re a developer trying to build live-work, you’ll probably have to build the whole building under the commercial building code, even residential floors. That pushes your building costs so high that – guess what! – it isn’t affordable any more, and the units may not be able to compete with other residential development on the market.

I wrote a column in the Observer a few weeks ago about the difficulty developers have when applying the state’s building codes to mixed-used buildings. It spurred a call from Jim Bartl, Mecklenburg County’s director of code enforcement. He knows all about the live-work problem. “We’re getting pummeled by it all across the country,” he said.

Bartl, an architect, is one of North Carolina’s unsung heroes for his successful push to revise North Carolina’s state building code to make renovating older buildings dramatically easier. (That change, first enacted as a pilot project, was made permanent last year. Builders, planners, historic preservationists and downtown revitalizers all over the state should applaud Bartl and state Sen. Dan Clodfelter, D-Mecklenburg, among others.)

Turns out Bartl is working with a national committee to change the International Residential Code and the International Commercial Code – the documents that underpin North Carolina’s state building code – so they recognize live-work units and make it easier to build them without compromising safety and fire standards. The committee will submit its proposal to the International Code Council in March. It could be adopted by spring 2007, and North Carolina’s building code would likely adopt the changes after that.

It wouldn’t get us anywhere near Utopia, of course, but it should make mixed-use and New Urbanist development a bit easier in the state of North Carolina.

Planners are always coming up with Utopian ideas. Then those ideas get heaved against the plaster walls of the real world and shatter like porcelain teacups. (Feel free to share your war stories on that front, below.)

“Live-work units” – they’re all the rage among planners, and some developers, all over the country, especially (but not exclusively) in New Urbanist-styled neighborhoods. They’re buildings with retail or business space on the first floor and homes on upper floors.

It’s easy to see why they’d be popular: They’re an unfilled niche in the development market, aimed at people who own small businesses and don’t want to have to pay to rent/own both a home and a business site, or who don’t want to have to commute. Planners like them because they’re “mixed use” and, among other praiseworthy attributes, cut down on how many auto trips people have to make.

Plus, they can increase a city’s stock of affordable housing if you figure that not having to shell out for a separate space for your business gives you more money for your home.

Here’s the wall that they hit: Building codes don’t recognize them. If you’re a developer trying to build live-work, you’ll probably have to build the whole building under the commercial building code, even residential floors. That pushes your building costs so high that – guess what! – it isn’t affordable any more, and the units may not be able to compete with other residential development on the market.

I wrote a column in the Observer a few weeks ago about the difficulty developers have when applying the state’s building codes to mixed-used buildings. It spurred a call from Jim Bartl, Mecklenburg County’s director of code enforcement. He knows all about the live-work problem. “We’re getting pummeled by it all across the country,” he said.

Bartl, an architect, is one of North Carolina’s unsung heroes for his successful push to revise North Carolina’s state building code to make renovating older buildings dramatically easier. (That change, first enacted as a pilot project, was made permanent last year. Builders, planners, historic preservationists and downtown revitalizers all over the state should applaud Bartl and state Sen. Dan Clodfelter, D-Mecklenburg, among others.)

Turns out Bartl is working with a national committee to change the International Residential Code and the International Commercial Code – the documents that underpin North Carolina’s state building code – so they recognize live-work units and make it easier to build them without compromising safety and fire standards. The committee will submit its proposal to the International Code Council in March. It could be adopted by spring 2007, and North Carolina’s building code would likely adopt the changes after that.

It wouldn’t get us anywhere near Utopia, of course, but it should make mixed-use and New Urbanist development a bit easier in the state of North Carolina.