I came across this article about Pineville, by two planners: Kevin Icard, city planning director, and planner Travis Morgan.
“Pineville is a historic city filled with landmarks, rustic antique shops and bustling downtown district reminiscent of the 1950s,” they write. Well, true that, if you’re talking about downtown Pineville. The town is right to try to protect it. But what they have done — requiring new buildings to have brick facades — won’t protect the cozy turn-of-the-century downtown at all.
Even more significant, compared to the rest of Pineville, its downtown is like a b-b rolling around a six-lane highway. The rest of Pineville is the worst of suburban retail sprawl: strip centers, power centers, a enclosed regional mall, big box stores clear to the horizon — all of it unwalkable, all of it a traffic nightmare at virtually all times of day. Pineville is famed throughout the metro Charlotte region as the worst possible example of unplanned retail development — not that that has stopped other places (Concord Mills in Concord, University City, Albemarle Road, etc.) from trying to steal that designation.
It is famous in local circles, also, for refusing to let Charlotte’s newly opened light rail line into town. The wildly successful transit line now ends at the Pineville city limits.
I will give Pineville kudos for saying no to a Wal-Mart supercenter a few years back, and I will give its planners kudos for trying to save downtown Pineville. But I’m pretty sure that an ordinance requiring every new building to have a brick facade isn’t the way to do it, however.