This country is facing a retail crash that will make the housing crash look small, says McDuffie "Mac" Nichols, who grew up in Charlotte and is a South Meck alum. He's talking to the N.C. State Urban Design conference in Raleigh.
"The credit crisis on housing is nothing compared to what's coming up this summer over commercial loans," he says. A slew of loans for commercial development are all coming due this summer. And the projects are failed. "Every mixed-use category is in distress," he said.
The underlying problem: The U.S. has built way, way more retail space than we need. In the U.S. we now have 20 square feet of retail space per person, he says. Compare that to Great Britain,with 2.5 square feet per person. That one drew audible gasps and an undercurrent of aghast comment from the crowd.
One-third of all enclosed shopping malls in this country are obsolete, he says. Nichols, who now lives in the Washington area, grew up in Charlotte and graduated from South Meck. (He's among the consultants the City of Charlotte has hired in recent years to study Eastland Mall.)
The challenge will be what in the world you do with all those dead retail sites - vast surface parking lots with a building in the middle. That will be one huge urban design challenge of the next decade.
Other needs he's citing for economically resilient cities:
- strong, high-quality public education.
- much better transit networks, which will reduce the cost of development if you don't have to spend so much for parking. (See my op-ed today on "How we love/hate our parking lots").
2:25 p.m - More from Mac Nichols (he's great): He advises designers/consultants to always say "Parking will be an issue," because A) They'll be right, and B) Everyone will be forewarned, because parking is going to be an issue everywhere, for a long time. But, he tells the crowd of designers, make parking work for you.
Don't overbuild just because someone loves an idea, he says.
"Economics is the foundation of design solutions." You've got to understand the underlying economics. Otherwise it's like designing a landscape without understanding the topography."
Saturday, March 06, 2010
The retail horror story we face
Charlottean gives his recipe for cities
City planning has a lot in common with brewing your beer at home, says McDuffie "Mac" Nichols, who grew up in Charlotte and is a South Meck alum. He's talking to the N.C. State Urban Design conference. In home-brewing, he says, you can exercise great creativity, but you're always bound to the unavoidable laws of chemistry.
The same's true with cities. You have to take into account the unavoidable laws of economics and how cities work.
How to create and maintain a city that's economically viable over time? It's not about get rich quick, he says. You need economic diversity. Example to avoid: Detroit. Diversify before things are gone. Cities that depend on "seasonalities" such as beach or ski resorts are vulnerable, too.
Nichols told me at a reception last night he's one of the consultants who has worked with the City of Charlotte to study the Eastland Mall situation (several years ago, before the city gave up its options to buy). I asked him whether there was any hope for decent retail in downtown Charlotte, where much of the existing retail space has been torn down, and the new spaces aren't adjacent to each other. (See "Charlotte's uptown shopping dilemma.") His reply: "Shook." They should just let Terry Shook [of Charlotte's Shook Kelley Design] draw it and then do what he draws, Nichols said.
Another retail tidbit: You need retail (i.e. stores) in any mixed-use project, but you shouldn't let it dictate the way the project grows and is built.
Destroying the 'Drive 'Til You Qualify' myth
RALEIGH – I’m blogging today from the N.C. State Urban Design Forum. Topic du jour: “Creating Value: Designing for Resilient Cities.”
9:55 a.m. HUD official Shelley Poticha just finished speaking. Her remarks have a clear bearing on the patterns of city growth all over the country. She spent several minutes destroying the "Drive 'Til You Qualify" myth – the real estate sales push to just get farther and farther out from a city until housing costs drop to where you can afford a mortgage.
But the current housing bust, she says, is showing the failure of that myth. There's a convergence of evidence that a host of problems – job loss, obesity, asthma, racial and economic segregation, loss of wildlife habitat, "our dangerous dependence on foreign oil" – all stem at heart from the "dangerous mismatch between where we live and where we work."
"All the evidence is now aligning to show this "Drive 'Til you Qualify" myth ... is one of the single most destructive decisions we ever made," she said.
10:55 a.m. – Something to think about. Speaker Jim Held of UrbanGreen, a real estate adviser and planner, talks about the need to think of cities not as a place but as systems. Systems regenerate and evolve. As with any living natural system, they need diversity and connectivity, among other things. He showed a subsidized housing project in San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood with several hundred units. "Mono-cropping" has not led to a resilient neighborhood," he said. Plans now call for re-establishing the street grid of 100 years ago, before modernists in mid-century planned the disconnected street patterns.
AND - He talked about ways to nurture entrepreneurs - are you listing, Tom Flynn of the City of Charlotte? Flynn, of the city's Neighborhood and Business Services Department, has been tasked with seeing what more the city can do to help small businesses.
Here's one idea –food entrepreneurs. A nonprofit in San Francisco, La Cocina, aims (next part is from its Web site) "to cultivate low-income food entrepreneurs as they formalize and grow their businesses by providing affordable commercial kitchen space, industry-specific technical assistance and access to market opportunities."
With the huge and growing thirst for local foods in Charlotte, surely there's a way to help start-ups find commercial kitchens and find more markets.
The cost to live in exurbia
RALEIGH – 9:15 a.m. -- I’m blogging today from the N.C. State Urban Design Forum. Topic du jour: “Creating Value: Designing for Resilient Cities.”
Excellent quote, to start the day, from NCSU College of Design Dean Marvin Malecha: The design of a community begins with the measure of the first human step.
9:30 a.m. Now Shelley Poticha of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. She's been active in New Urban and transportation and other community design initiatives for years. (She's speaking via Skype.) She has offered some fascinating tidbits.
Costs in Raleigh-Durham to living on the exurban edge: She ran some numbers on the combined household costs of housing and transportation in this area. For people living in the core city, she said, combined household/transportation costs are about 34-38 percent of income. But here's the amazing fact. For people living on the farthest edges of Wake County, combined housing/transportation costs can be as high as 75 percent of household income.
They're trying to change some of the dumb stuff that doesn't require legislation. An example she cited: Used to be that HUD protocols made it impossible to use federal housing money for developing on a brownfield (former industrial) site. They changed that. Now, if you can get the EPA certificate that your site is OK, then you can get HUD money.
Another example: Used to be if your apartment building qualified for Dept. of Energy weatherization money, then you had to fill out a whole other bunch of forms for HUD. Now, no extra HUD forms needed.
(more)
Monday, October 06, 2008
"Green" developers council?
He proposes that developers, city officials and residents collaborate to find alternatives to sprawl.
He writes:
Our community must be prepared for a paradigm shift. It will require the collaboration of developers (I am one), city officials and citizenry to consider alternatives to the sprawling kind of development we’ve had in Charlotte for so long. In one recent national study, “Measuring the Market for Green Residential Development,” homebuyers admit we have to face the issue of environmental responsibility head-on. Nearly 38% strongly agree, and 41.2% somewhat agree, that “in order to protect the environment we will need big changes in the way we live.”Several things are notable about his suggestion. First, it sounds like a good idea. I mean, it couldn't possibly hurt and it might help educate developers. Second, it's further proof that at least some developers think (know?) that building "green" is a market niche that they can exploit. More and more customers are looking for "green."
While New Urbanism has caught on over the past two decades, Charlotte should now prepare for the next step. One idea: Motivate the Urban Land Institute to implement a strategy among local members and push for the creation of a Sustainable Stewardship Council.
This council would work with citizenry, government and private entities on environmentally friendly development issues within our community. An involved SSC Council could help promote water strategies, energy strategies, transportation, health strategies, recycling and reuse of materials in rezoning, and permit-related activities. The upshot? Local real estate developers would become better community leaders.
Is there a role for city and state regulations? Should city standards and zoning rules be changed to make them more environmentally sound? Note, this might not mean ADDING regulations so much as changing the ones we already have.
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