East side speaks out

What do east Charlotte residents like about where they live? What would they improve?

Those topics generated some deeply felt remarks by a small group of East-siders at a Monday night discussion sponsored by AIA Charlotte (the American Institute of Architects' Charlotte Chapter. The impetus for this is a project by AIA Charlotte that aims to study the Central Avenue corridor and come up with a vision for improving it, looking at issues of (their words) "safety, connectivity, transportation alternatives, walkability, open space, image and economic vitality."

So they've been talking with residents. Monday night's session was one stab at that. About two dozen residents attended, although it looked to me as if hardly any were from the Latino community (you can't always tell from a glance, obviously) or the immigrant community (which takes in Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European as well as Latino).

Some of the comments:

-- Residents like the diversity of the area and think that newcomers who move to the area do, too.

-- They feel as though they get an unjustified bad reputation, especially about crime. "I have such good neighbors," said one woman, a widow who's lived in the neighborhood for 52 years.

-- Roberta Farman, who lives in Medford Acres and who just resigned from the city-county planning commission, talked with affection about the great old trees and rural look of her neighborhood. "You're 4 miles from downtown and could almost be in the country," she said.

-- "Someone needs to mention food," said Tom Tate, school board member who lives in Plaza-Midwood. "Anything you want, you can find it."

-- Schools are an issue, although Tate said some schools in the area are like East Charlotte overall, in that they're better than the perception. But people who move in with young kids will either move away or put their kids in private or magnet schools because of the reputations of Eastway Middle School and Garinger High School.

-- Gentrification, as in rising property values and more upscale development, is generally welcomed. It's coming out Central Avenue, they predicted.

-- That said, Louise Barden whispered to me about two houses for sale, both on half-acre lots, on Progress Lane -- a street lined with huge, Myers Park-worthy old oak trees. They'd be eye-popping steals in other neighborhoods. One with four bedrooms and 1,700 square feet and a tax value of $104,000 is to be auctioned this weekend. Another, with a pool and 1,900 square feet, but only two bedrooms, is listed at $195,000.

-- There's much concern about big boxes, dilapidated buildings and generally shoddy development left over from a few decades ago. " '60s strip centers," one man said. "Their life cycle was 20- 30 years at most." Residents want better guidelines for new development, so they're not left with 2007's version of those flimsy '60s strip centers.

Life, as they say, is complicated. It's precisely because those dilapidated old buildings are available, cheap, that they've attracted the rich mix of ethnic restaurants from all over the world. Start-up businesses tend to need cheap, old buildings.

On the other hand, as some of the residents noted, the grungy look of some of those falling-down 60s strip centers is likely to be a turn-off to the more upscale residents that gentrification is expected to produce.

The Naked City solution -- I've written this before and I expect I'll write it again -- is for the city to revamp the standards for its older zoning categories, such as B-1. The old standards allow and in some cases even require suburbia -- buffers, large setbacks, too much parking. Changing those standards for B-1 would mean when new places are built on old zoning they'd have a more urban look. Examples of new buildings on old zoning: Eckerds in Myers Park and Dilworth, the Bojangles at Third and Indy Blvd, and Burger King on Fourth Street in Midtown. Compare the Bo and the BK to the much nicer-looking buildings along Third street just off Indy.

Like the good planner he is, Kent Main of the planning department attended the East Charlotte meeting. I asked him if there were any plans afoot to change the old zoning standards. It's on their long-term list, he said, but they're deluged with other things (rezonings, TODs, etc.) so it's back-burnered.