Eeek! Sprawlanta oozes this way!

Yikes! Should Charlotte be worried that Atlanta's sprawl will ooze over it like a slime mold in the damp woods? Or more to the point, ooze over it the way Charlotte sprawled over Derita, Newell, Thrift, Sharon and other once rural hamlets?

Here's a clever video about "Sprawlanta" which notes that if you add together all the miles driven in the Atlanta region daily, you could drive to the sun and back. And note the great visuals of some very courageous pedestrians trying to cross sprawl thoroughfares. As the video counts the number of pedestrian deaths in the region, it notes that iconic Atlanta author Margaret Mitchell died when she was struck while crossing the street.

The last section does seem a bit like a commercial for the Glenwood Park development, however lovely and worthwhile that development does look to be. Note developer Charles Brewer's remarks at the end, pointing out he just wants government to get out of the way so he can develop in a way he believes people want. If you're thinking this is of interest only to big-government commie pinko types, you might want to rethink that piece of it.

Commuter rail in Triangle? Study finds riders

The N.C. Railroad Co. commissioned a study that found up to 8,238 riders per weekday by 2022 projected for a possible commuter rail line between Durham and the Johnston County town of Wilson's Mills. It looked at the whole Greensboro to Goldsboro stretch and concluded a 50-mile section in the Triangle had the highest possibility for ridership - up to 2 million riders per year.

Here's the Raleigh N&O article. And here's WRAL TV's version.

Note the projected cost to construct the line $5 million to $7 million a mile. That's eye-popping to be sure. But according to N.C. Department of Transportation Secretary Gene Conti, building a mile of interstate highway is $30 million to $50 million a mile. Makes the rail look awfully cost-effective, doesn't it?

As the N&O article says,
If the forecast is accurate, the Triangle would have a busier rail line than the commuter trains that now serve such cities as San Diego and San Jose.
"Look at other high-growth areas around the country," said Scott Saylor, the N.C. Railroad president. "There aren't many that don't have commuter rail."

All together now: We know of a big one! We're living in it.

Fear and loathing at City Hall, redux

I've had some VERY interesting reactions to my Saturday op-ed, reflecting on the Warren Turner non-censure vote. I told of a couple of instances long ago in which male colleagues had been inappropriate, either to me or others. I never reported them, I wrote, in part because that was an era when people really didn't talk about "sexual harassment" as something you should complain about.

I also wrote, "Not reporting things is not unusual. Why didn't I report Mr. Trashmouth Reporter? Why didn't I speak up, years later, when a male politician casually and briefly dropped a hand on my thigh at a dinner? I guess I didn't want to make a scene. I told a friend. She revealed that the same fellow had, in the guise of a hug, groped her. (For the record, it was not Warren Turner.)"

As you'd expect, I got some e-mails and phone calls in response. Most of the ones from women recounted experiences they'd had in which male co-workers, bosses or colleagues made their workplace uncomfortable.

Two off-the-record accounts came from women whom I've always thought of as taking no guff – the kind you'd think would have told the men to knock it off or they'd be missing key body parts. They told of thoroughly inappropriate remarks or even fending off men whose names you'd recognize. Neither ever reported it, or directly confronted the men. Why not? They just didn't want to make a scene, they said.

The e-mails were interesting as well. Several from men expressed skepticism that the harassment truly occurred or was really anything more than clumsy attempts at flirtation. Here's what one man wrote:
"Women in the workplace are exposing themselves more and more. ... skirts with high, high slits; leg crossings exposing panties and/or the upper thigh. At the water cooler or in the elevator, an attractive man might get a really hard unmistakable breast buried in his ... triceps. Or a woman will bend over facing him, showing how loose her bra fits and a whole lot of her anatomy. I can understand how some men interpret that conduct as an invitation ... . Sexual harassment is a two-way street. Women should hold their exposure and their pressing of breasts on men for their husbands at home, etc., not at work." (Never mind that neither I nor the women I knew whom I wrote about had dressed in those ways.)

The women's e-mails were more sobering. Here's one: "I've been in the same job for 21 yrs and always "1 rung below" in the pecking order of the same guy all these years. I've put up with exactly what you talked about – for 20 yrs. Nothing has changed for women really today. The same guy has been in trouble numerous times. Nothing ever happens to him. Most who did dare to come forward & complain, found themselves laid off or transferred to a lesser paying job. Why come forward if you'll not be validated or supported by management but rather only made to look like a fool? Certainly, it was never worth it to me."

Another: "Thank you so much for writing the article regarding sexual harassment. I am a retired teacher who was harassed by a principal along with several other teachers. My reaction was interesting when it first happened. You wonder, was it something I said; was he only kidding; maybe I was overreacting. When it happened again, I began to feel very uncomfortable and threatened. I then made it a point of avoiding his presence whenever possible. Eventually I along with a group of other teachers went before the school board attorney to express our feelings. I was wise enough to take my own attorney along and get in writing that I would not receive any repercussions due to my action. There was never any action taken against the principle but he eventually did lose his job for another infraction not related to the harassment. ... I have two daughters in the work force now and they tell me that they have never had a boss who did not harass them in some way. "

And this, with an interesting suggestion at the end: "You told the situation just like it really is. I know from sad experience. I worked for many years at one of our hospitals as an RN. I was groped by one of the doctors, and then later when I complained to the RN in charge, I was told "this is Dr. M, and we don't want to upset him, do we?" Several years later, that same doctor made inappropriate remarks when we were on an elevator. I was so dumbfounded that I just looked harshly at him, and got off the elevator at the next stop. I did tell a superior, and she said basically the same thing that the first one had said, that is, leave it alone. I was supporting my family, and needed my job. You can be assured that I stayed far away from that doctor. ... Perhaps we need a place where women (and/or men) can go to report inappropriate happenings. It would be ideal if there could be some sort of a committee which could listen, and then weigh the situation to see what could be done about it."

So fellas, here's a lesson for you. You may not be making smarmy remarks about body parts or your sexual prowess to your female co-workers, but some men do. You may not be groping your female colleagues, but some other men are. Most men behave themselves. A few don't. When the women try to report these things, please try to believe them. A small percentage may be making things up, but it's more likely that they are telling the truth. Even if it's about your fraternity brother – or your fellow City Council member.

The sad secret behind Charlotte plans

Just got back from a City Council committee meeting where that darn Michael Barnes – the District 4 representative who is running for district attorney – kept asking some impertinent questions.

The topic at hand was a draft of the Catawba Area Plan, which the planners are working on to address an area in the west of part of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, up next to the Catawba River and north of I-85. Part of the plan's aim, it says, is to encourage "developments that are compatible with the surrounding natural environment" and to "integrate environmentally sensitive design elements" by incorporating natural features, minimizing paved surfaces, "preserving and creating open space and greenways" and using green design to try to reduce storm water runoff. Excellent goals, to be sure.

Barnes asked the planner, Alberto Gonzalez, to describe what the city's doing to encourage developers to save more trees and for open space protection. Gonzalez replied that they'd encourage cluster development, where a developer puts houses closer together than usual in order to leave a bigger chunk of undeveloped land in a subdivision.

Barnes: Are we doing anything to increase the tree save on the interior of a development?
Gonzalez: The plan encourages developers to save more trees. ... "There's only so much we can go in terms of requirements."

After some more back and forth about the proposed revisions to the city's tree ordinance (the revisions are for commercial, not residential development) and the tree canopy study the council heard about last week (see report here, starting on page 72, see my recent posting here, and see editorial here) Barnes pointed out, " 'encouraging' clearly doesn't work."

What he was getting at what this simple reality that many people don't understand. Charlotte's plans and policies talk a lot about the need to be environmentally sensitive, or pedestrian-friendly, or any of a number of other laudable goals. They have absolutely no teeth.

What has the teeth are the ordinances – the subdivision ordinance, the tree ordinance, the zoning ordinance, and so on. Until those ordinances require what the planners say they are "encouraging" then we don't get much of it.

Yes, the planners "encourage" developers to do things during the rezoning process. But remember, approximately 75 percent of residential development here doesn't go through any rezoning. And remember, too, that every rezoning, even those that are in direct conflict with any area plan, automatically "update" the plan. Sweet, eh?

Even the Catawba Area Plan PowerPoint presentation itself noted that in the "summary of citizen concerns" was this: "Need strong tools (regulations) to implement environmental recommendations." (To see the PowerPoint presentation of the Catawba Area Plan that was given at the meeting, follow this link. To read the draft plan, follow this one.)

"I suggest we should start demanding more, so this city looks the way we want it to in 20 years," Barnes said.

Spoken like a guy running for countywide office ... But that said, he certainly hit on a good point.

Charlotte meets EPA ozone rules. Sort of.

Visible air pollution shows in 2002 photo of Charlotte skyline

(Update 6:30 p.m. Thursday: I've edited and tinkered in several spots below, after a conversation with Steinman)

On my calendar for May 4, just above where I had scrawled "Primary," was the note, "conformity deadline." "Conformity" is bureaucrat-ese for whether the Charlotte region's long-range transportation plans meet federal requirements for clamping down on ozone.

If the plans don't pass muster, we lose a huge chunk of federal transportation money.

The plans don't have to actually reduce on ozone, mind you. They just have to follow the right formulas and use computer modeling to show that ozone will go down.

I called Norm Steinman of the Charlotte Department of Transportation. (Dare I call him the conformity czar? He protests the term, which I just made up, but he's in charge of the city of Charlotte's measuring of the regional conformity models.)

Charlotte has passed, Steinman told me. The city was notified just a few days before. The letter, he said, was in the mail.

Almost 60 percent of the Charlotte region's ozone comes from vehicle exhaust, including off-road vehicles. If you're skeptical that it really will go down so much, given the projected population growth, join the crowd. It's true, cars are getting cleaner and emissions are sinking. But in a growing city, the increasing number of vehicles on the road and the increasing number of miles they're driving will partly counterbalance cleaner cars, especially as EPA standards keep getting tougher, as more and more evidence shows how bad for use zone and air pollution are.

But with the city's high unemployment rate, fewer people are driving to jobs, Steinman said. It isn't good for our economy but at least it helped with that conformity requirement. An even more important factor was that last summer was unusually cool and damp, with far fewer high-ozone days than usual.

Next up: 2016. That's when Charlotte has to show that it can meet some even stricter ozone rules.

Charlotte's huge tree loss

A report to be given to the City Council on Monday shows that the city has lost half its tree cover since 1985. Read the report here - it starts on page 70 of the pdf.

The county as a whole has lost 33 percent of the tree cover it had in 1985, the report found.
The study is an Urban Ecosystem Analysis, performed with satellite imagery, GIS technology and American Forests' software. A major grant from The Women’s Impact Fund made it possible, with help from digital imagery provided by Mecklenburg County, and additional funding from the City of Charlotte and the Blumenthal Foundation.

The report notes: "Charlotte Mecklenburg’s tree cover has declined for the last 23 years and new policies and practices will need to emerge to reverse this trend. Based upon this latest data,
tree canopy in Mecklenburg County has reached the point where further decline will cause the County to fall below levels recommended by American Forests. Charlotte Mecklenburg is now at a crossroads that will set the course for environmental quality for decades to come."

The city and the county must begin counting trees as part of the essential urban infrastructure. Today they don't.

Yes, any time a city grows into greenfield areas it will lose large tracts of previously undeveloped woods. The problem isn't that the city has grown, but that it hasn't grown smartly – meaning that while plenty of land was targeted for development, no land was set aside for non-development. Other cities have done this routinely, through strategic use of water/sewer service and roads/no-roads policies. Many require parkland to be set aside (or a fee in lieu) with each development. This helps make up for the inevitable tree loss when greenfields get developed.

Not here.

BofA-sponsored report raps sprawl

A new article in Harvard Business Review "Back to the City" predicts a major cultural and demographic shift away from suburbia and back toward central cities.
It cites United Air Lines' plan to move its operational center to downtown Chicago from the suburb of Elk Grove, and Walgreens buying New York drugstore chain Duane Reade, "signaling a deliberate decision to improve its capabilities in urban settings."

Interestingly, it says:

"A recent report sponsored by Bank of America, the Greenbelt Alliance and the Low Income Housing Fund examines the inefficiencies of the current “geographical mismatch between workers and jobs.” Focusing on California, it says that sprawl “reduc[es] the quality of life,” “increase[s] the attractiveness of neighboring states,” and yields “higher direct business costs and taxes to offset the side-effects of sprawl”— which include transportation, health care, and environmental costs."

"To put it simply," the HBR article says, "the suburbs have lost their sheen: Both young workers and retiring Boomers are actively seeking to live in densely packed, mixed-use communities that don’t require cars—that is, cities or revitalized outskirts in which residences, shops, schools, parks, and other amenities exist close together. "

A cities-vs.-states smackdown

Blogging from "The Reinvented City," in Cambridge, Mass., a conference sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Ex-Miami Mayor Manny Diaz and Ex-Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, (both recent president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors) and both spending the semester at Harvard's Institute of Politics, had finished their talks about how each had made changes and improvements to their respective cities. (Note, I've corrected an earlier version of this which didn't show Nickels also headed the mayors' group. Mary, 3:30 p.m. 4-25-10)

For instance, Miami 21 is a new form-based code for the city of Miami that throws out the old Euclidean zoning traditions (planners will know what that's about) in favor of an approach focused not on separating all uses but on the relationship between streets and buildings, pedestrians and streets, all the buildings in a neighborhood, etc.

And Nickels – who spearheaded the U.S. Conference of Mayors' Climate Protection Agreement campaign – talked about his efforts to push U.S.. cities to tackle climate change, since the federal government stalled on Kyoto, etc. As he talked about his lengthy, and probably successful effort to get rid of a highway along the Seattle waterfront and replace it with a tunnel. As he recounted a lengthy process fraught with legislative and gubernatorial political maneuvering, he said, "If you want to get us [him and Diaz] going, get us to talk about our relationship with states."

So I did.

What, I asked, might be some mechanisms that could improve those relationships?

"Abolish the states!" Nickels barked.

He and Diaz pretty much went off on a tear about their anger and frustration with state legislatures. Legislators, Diaz said, don't know or care about cities. "If he's a state elected official he should stay the hell away from what's going to affect mayors," he said. The federal government hardly gives cities any money - they funnel it to states. And states don't give it equitably to cities. "We get peanuts," Diaz said.

States should realize the importance of investing in their cities, Nickels said, since cities are where the vast majority of any state's jobs are. (Bev Perdue, are you listening?)

I buttonholed them after their talk, and they were even more outspoken. Rural legislators get elected by basically dumping on metro areas, Nickels said. He told of one well-respected legislator in Washington who was defeated when his opponent linked him to the Seattle skyline.
I asked if they knew of any state-city relationships that were working. They couldn't list one.

"You create the new American economy in cities," Diaz said. He and Nickels – and, I imagine, multiple other mayors – are enormously frustrated that state elected officials don't recognize that the nation's economy, and by extension the states' economies, are created in the nation's cities. The Miami economy, Diaz noted, is the 11th largest economy in the nation and bigger than most state economies.

They both believe changes are needed at the federal level, so more federal money – for transportation, economic development, energy block grants, etc. – goes directly to cities and urban areas and doesn't need to be divvied up by state governments.

How Detroit is reinventing itself

Rick Tetzeli of Time Inc. runs the company's multi-platform, multi-publication effort to cover the transformation of Detroit. They have bought a house in Detroit and reporters are covering the city's transformation for Time mag, Fortune, even Sports Illustrated, as well as blogging, et al. He just talked to "The Reinvented City" conference I'm attending in Cambridge, Mass.

Here's his quick rundown of how Detroit is having to and is reinventing itself:
-The city is shrinking. The population is down from 2 million to 800,000. Within the confines of the city of Detroit you could put the footprint of Manhattan, Boston AND San Francisco.
-The school system is such a disaster that they're considering "all different kinds of things." Example: public boarding schools.
-They're considering light rail between the city and the suburbs, to help connect both geographically and socially.
-Urban farming is, er, taking root.
- "A huge psychic change – nobody expects the car industry to save them anymore."

Housing: Will we escape a second dip?

Blogging from "The Reinvented City," in Cambridge, Mass., a conference sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Wellesley economist Chip Case, who studies housing bubbles (and who founded the Case-Shiller real estate report) says this downtown is odd because typically a housing oversupply means production slows, and the supply gets soaked up as new households form. But new household formation is lagging – it's going away almost as fast as production is going away. Rental vacancies are up to 11%. This is odd. If people are getting kicked out of their houses (foreclosures, etc.) you'd think they'd be turning to rental housing. But they aren't. (I'll get to the why in a minute but it partly involves immigration.)

So the lack of household formation is disrupting the traditional pattern of how a downturn turns around. His verdict: "Jobs have to start coming back."

There are positive omens: New housing starts are up. The existing inventory is down – a year ago the estimate was the housing inventory was an 11.5-month supply and now it's 6.7 months. Sales of existing housing (which he thinks is a better gauge) are up to 5.35 million, up from 4 million of recent years/months. But 27 percent of those sales are auction sales (i.e. foreclosed houses).

His conclusion: There's a greater than 50 percent chance we'll get out of this recession without a second dip (the so-called W-shaped recession, as in the 1980s). But not as high as an 80 percent chance.

And immigration? I asked what was the cause for the lack of household formation. His reply: He thought it was people doubling up, as in college graduates without jobs moving back in with parents, families moving in together, etc. That's some of it, he says, but a demographer he talked with recently told him that immigration is turning around.

And that doesn't mean that there's just less of an increase. People are going home, he said. "And that's bad for us – despite what the talk show guys say." The reason is that the shrinking number of households is keeping the recovery from, well, recovering.

The anti-government Smart Growther

Blogging from "The Reinvented City," in Cambridge, Mass., a conference sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

9:45 a.m. - Andres Duany, founder of Duany Plate-Zyberk and one of the founders of the New Urbanism movement, is proving that Smart Growth and "New Urbanist" are not synonymous with "bog-government liberal." He's talking about rebuilding New Orleans:
"The government has made affordable housing impossible, so that only government can deliver it."
In America, he says, "We did three centuries of housing immigrants without a nickel. Then government busted in." His point is that building standards, adopted with the best of motives, make it impossible to build the rudimentary housing that can serve as places for people without much money to live in.

And more on the problems in the U.S. planning process:
"We dumbed it down too much." And we make decisions at the wrong level. Decisions that should have been made at the block level are made citywide - example: Chickens. "Chickens are so in." Cities outlaw chickens citywide. That's a decision that should depend on the different situations in different parts of town. But bike paths will be defeated if you make the decisions at the neighborhood level - people will always protest bike paths and greenways, Duany notes. That's a decision that should be made at the regional level, because those amenities are important to the overall community.

Reinventing the City - Numbing the NIMBYs?

Here at "The Reinvented City" conference in Cambridge, Mass. First up, the always provocative Andres Duany, "a rock star of New Urbanism," in the words of Anthony Flint of the sponsoring think tank, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. (Other sponsors: Nieman Foundation, and Harvard's Graduate School of Design).

9:15 a.m. - Duany - "For me the century started in 2007-2008. The pivotal events all occurred about 2008." They were the bursting of real estate bubble, the public recognition of global warming, and the erasure of public confidence in government.

And he's got a great riff going about the problem of the public process in planning. "There's something radically wrong with the public process" in planning. "We dumbed it down too much." And he says, the immediate neighbors are a special interest. Currently the immediate neighbors carry extra weight. But, he notes, "they are not the community as a whole." They will block things that are in the larger interest - bike paths, schools, power lines for new alternative energy projects, etc.

"Large shopping malls are perfectly located to be future town centers. "

And for those who think New Urbanists and Smart Growth advocates are always pro-government. New Urbanist guru Duany is ow trashing government standards. His firm was trying to design a flood-proof house, which could be flooded and not be damaged. "And then we ran into government."

Re New Orleans: It's a Caribbean culture. "The Caribbean culture is not about the accumulation of wealth. It's about the accumulation of leisure." You can't have leisure if you're in debt. People lived in houses granddaddy owned, so there wasn't much debt. "All the do-goody people are actually destroying the culture of New Orleans by eliminating leisure. And by raising the housing standards."

Deluged with democracy

Sorry I've been absent these recent weeks. Took a week of vacation, earlier, and a day last week, and the rest of the time I've been bailing like crazy to keep the boat afloat. Here's the situation: Too many candidates, too little time! We on the editorial board try to offer endorsements, and that involves researching the people running and trying to interview as many as we can.

This year, what with Tea Party candidates and anti-health care reform candidates and Democrats running against other Democrats, including some pro-health care reform candidates, we've got something like 68 candidates to deal with. Democracy is a grand thing, but you can have too much of a good thing.

So while I've been squirreling away interesting blog items I haven't had the time to post them. Next week should be better, and I might even have time to dish a little about candidates. So don't give up on The Naked City.

Friday and Saturday of this week I'll be at a conference on "The Reinvented City," in Cambridge, Mass., sponsored by the Nieman Foundation, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. My plan is to blog from there, although last year my Mac seized up with something called a kernel panic (don't ask) and I was thwarted. Let us hope for better computer vibes this time.

Sneak a peek at uptown plans

Here are some ideas to chew on:
- An "applied innovation corridor" stretching up North Tryon Street from uptown to UNC Charlotte, along the to-be-built light rail line.
- A "culinary corridor" from Johnson & Wales University to Central Piedmont Community College's new culinary building.
- Create a consortium of the higher education institutions in and near uptown, so they can pool their resources with shared facilities. CPCC, Johnson & Wales, Johnson C. Smith University, Queens University of Charlotte, even UNCC with its new uptown presence could all be players. (Sorry, Davidson College, you're just too far away.)
- With the growing numbers of college students, why not build a shared student union uptown?

That last idea came from a focus group for high school and college students.
The others came from Daniel Iacofano, one of the consultants for the ongoing Charlotte center city planning (public workshop tonight at 5:30 at the Convention Center.) I caught up with Iacofano this morning to hear where he and the consultants are headed in their thinking on the Charlotte Center City 2020 Plan.

He talked a lot about the economic underpinnings, and he offered some of the many ideas the California-based consulting group MIG (the I is for Iacofano) are tossing around. He'll talk about some of them tonight at the public workshop.

Cheryl Myers, the Charlotte Center City Partners senior veep of planning and development, said the consultants had gotten 80 ideas from Center City 2020 Plan working groups alone. (Disclosure: Observer publisher Ann Caulkins is a co-chair of the steering committee for the 2020 Plan. She doesn't know that I'm writing this, or what I'm writing. And I have been supportive of having uptown plans since I've been writing opinions for the Observer.)

Iacofano said the I-277 loop is "kind of a noose" around uptown.
I asked, "How do you tame the loop?"
Iacofano: "There's a menu of interventions." They could range from capping it - there are places where that could work - to simply enhancing the connectivity under and over it with better lighting, artwork, and so on. Other possibilities would be to put development closer to the highway, or to put things under the freeway overpasses.

Tonight, expect a lot of attention to the issue of creating "seams" rather than "dividers" between uptown and the neighborhoods that surround it.

N.C. adds Charlotte-Raleigh trains

Starting June 5 two more passenger trains will run between Charlotte and Raleigh, the N.C. Department of Transportation announced today. One will leave Charlotte at 12:30 p.m., arriving in Raleigh at 3:43 p.m. The other will leave Raleigh at 11:50 a.m., arriving in Charlotte at 3:02 p.m.

That will make a total of six trains between the two cities. The Carolinian, which leaves Charlotte at 7:30 a.m., continues past Raleigh to Selma, Wilson, Rocky Mount, Richmond, Washington and New York. The Piedmont, which leaves Raleigh at 6:50 a.m., arrives in Charlotte at 10:02 a.m., then heads back to Raleigh, leaving Charlotte at 5:15 p.m., arriving 8:28 p.m.

I spoke today with Patrick Simmons, director of the N.C. DOT's Rail Division, who mentioned that, among other things, they've been interested to see that students living in Raleigh are now commuting to college in the Triad on the daily trains. (The Greensboro stop is very near N.C. A&T State.) I also asked when we'd see a passenger train from Charlotte to the beach and the answer, in a nutshell and delivered much more diplomatically, was not in my lifetime.

No, it isn't high-speed. But I figure anything that can get some traffic off of I-85 and N.C. 49 is a good thing. See bytrain.org for schedules and train information and information on buying tickets.

Parking, planning and bypasses

Today's post is a grab bag of interesting items for your perusal.

1. Envisioning development, and making planning more accessible to citizens. The Town of Cary has created a Virtual Interactive Planner. Here's what Dan Matthys, communications and information planner with the town, had to say about why they did it:
Our development process is actually pretty complex, and it involves processes that have a lot of "it depends" and "maybes," and it wasn’t clear to our citizens when they had a chance to speak and when they didn’t have a chance, how long the process was or what the different steps are to that process. So the mayor asked us to develop something that would be more intuitive, and we decided we needed something fancier than some sort of PowerPoint decision-making tool.
Read more about it, on this planetizen.com story, "Making Planning More Accessible."
(Hat tip to Planetizen.com for that one.)

2. Parking space census. The City of San Francisco is probably the first in the country to have actually counted ALL its parking spaces. Here's a Streetsblog.org piece on the effort. The magic number, it appears, is 442,541 spaces, 280,000 of which are on-street spaces. Its part of a federally funded parking management experiment ("SF's parking experiment to test Shoup's traffic theories") in which the city will experiment with dynamic parking demand management, intended to tell people where the parking spaces are at any given moment so they don't circle and circle, searching. The experiment is funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant.
Parking is a conundrum for most cities. "How we love/hate our parking lots" was my recent op-ed on the topic.

3. USA Today tells us "More cities ban digital billboards." Among U.S. cities that have banned the billboards: Durham; Knoxville, Tenn.; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Dallas and Fort Worth and Houston, all in Texas.

And Charlotte? It had the chance to ban them several years ago and after a lengthy stakeholder process (see my stakeholder thoughts "Pulling back the stakeholder curtain" here) opted to allow them.

4. The South Tryon Street road diet experiment has begun ("Another road diet, this one for South Tryon"). I know this because it is right in front of The Observer building, and because I have walked to work twice since blogging about it and I can verify that the bollards are up, AND that Hill Street between South Tryon and Church Street is now two-way.

5. Your highway dollars at work. Ground was broken today on the Sanford bypass. Here's a photo of pols with gold shovels. Sanford is a town of about 27,000 people. The fact that our tax dollars are building it a bypass should raise many, many questions in your mind. The Good Roads State has become the State of Pointless Bypasses.

My theory: No city gets more than one bypass. (Monroe, Shelby et al have failed to control their land use development and have both clogged their bypasses - both of them U.S. 74, as it happens - and in so doing managed to all but gut their downtowns. They aren't the only towns that have done this, they're just two I'm familiar with. And both want new, bypass-bypasses.)

High water bills? Whose fault really?

Who's really overseeing Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities?

Obviously, City Manager Curt Walton is the top boss. And the Charlotte City Council is Walton's boss.

But if you've followed city government very long you've noticed the elected officials tend to let CMUD (technically it's CMU) have its own way. That's because CMU is an "enterprise fund" - like the airport - and runs off its own revenues. Because council members don't have to raise taxes for CMU, they haven't given it much scrutiny. (Yes, I know that fees come out of people's pockets, too. But trust me, fee increases don't raise nearly the political wars that tax increases do.)

So who scrutinizes CMU? I took at look at the CMUD Advisory Committee? That's a seven-member committee (3 members appointed by the city, 3 by the county, 1 by the mayor). They are to "review and make recommendations to City Council" concerning: all water/sewer capital improvement programs, changes in policies for extending water/sewer service as well as proposed changes in how fees are determined, and pretty much anything else.

Why is this important? Many cities have used utilities as a way to strategically manage growth. It's less expensive, in the long run, not to have to build and maintain water/sewer lines over every square foot of land. But Charlotte's powerful developers have never wanted any land set aside from development. Shrinking the supply of land would raise the price of their raw material - undeveloped land. What better way to ensure that no land got set aside than to control the CMUD Advisory Committee?

Another reason it's important: It's in the best interests of this whole urban region to encourage more water conservation. What sucks up a disproportionate amount of unnecessary water use?Expansive suburban lawns. But suburban subdivision developers have little interest in not offering suburban lawns.

So who's on this board? It's required to have a real estate developer, a water and/or sewer contractor, a civil engineer, a financial expert, a representative from the non-Charlotte towns in the county, and a neighborhood leader.

I took a look at the board. It's revealing.

The chairman is James Merrifield, a developer with Merrifield Partners, formerly with Crosland. Last year he replaced former chairman Charles Teal, an owner of Saussy Burbank, a developer.

The two engineers are Robert Linkner with HDR and Erica Van Tassel with Kimley-Horn. The contractor is Marco Varela of CITI-LLC, a systems design company. Varela was mentioned in an Observer article in several years back (before his 2008 appointment) as selling wastewater treatment equipment to the city.

So far it's rather predictable. You'd want some civil engineering expertise, for sure, as well as developer expertise. Yet it's worth noting that engineering firms are generally hired by developers so they'd have little business reason to tick off potential clients by, say, pushing for using your utility department as part of a growth strategy that might involve setting some areas aside from development. Even if that would probably have been a lot more fiscally sound than stretching water-sewer pipes all over Mecklenburg County and asking all the rate-payers to fund those capital and operating costs.

But what about the people who are presumably supposed to add the non-developer points of view - the neighborhood leader, the towns representative?

The "neighborhood leader" turns out to be a Charlotte Chamber executive, Keva Walton. I suppose he lives in a neighborhood, but you wouldn't exactly expect him to be a voice in opposition to any business-developer interests.

And that towns representative? It's David Jarrett, vice president at Rhein Medall Interests, a Charlotte-based developer.

The end.

Atlanta hears Charlotte's footsteps gaining

Seems Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed a bit worried that Charlotte may be gaining on Hotlanta.

Reed apparently told the Hungry Club (a civic discussion group at the Butler Street YMCA) that Atlanta's in danger of falling behind Charlotte if the city and the State of Georgia don’t make strides on transportation, education, water and the arts. All this is from the Atlanta Journal Constitution's Jim Galloway and his blog.

Reed also noted that the N.C. Piedmont got some big chunks of federal high-speed rail money, and Atlanta didn't.

For more fun, read the comments on Galloway's blog, e.g.: "Not that Atlanta’s a model city, but I’ve been to Charlotte many times and it’s boring as hell. It may be on the rise, but there’s nothing interesting about Charlotte either historically or culturally."

On schools and cities

What follows is my Twitterstream from a panel discussion today at a luncheon put on by the nonprofit Teach for America. On the panel were Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Superintendent Peter Gorman, Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, Teach for America founder and CEO Wendy Kopp and moderator Mike Collins of WFAE's "Charlotte Talks" morning show.

It should give you a sense of the panel discussion, as well as a sense of what it's like to read an event being covered by Twitter. (Follow me on Twitter at @marynewsom.) Despite what you may hear, Twitter is not all about what you had for lunch today.

- At Teach for America lunch/panel talk w. Supt Gorman, Mayor Foxx & Wendy Kopp, TFA founder. Wanna know who's here? Stay tuned.
- Johnny & Deborah Harris, CMS' chmn Eric Davis, Tom Tate. Also Harvey Gantt, NC Sen Ruth Samuelson. UWay's Jane McIntyre. [Foundation for the Carolinas' Michael Marsicano and Laura Meyer, MeckEd's Kathy Ridge, POST's Claire Tate were also there, among others. The speakers started and I stopped tallying the crowd.]
- TFA Teacher Emily White [teaches 10th-grade English at Phillip O. Berry high school] tells moving tale of student w. drug mom who's teaching HER to read. She [White, not the druggie mom] gets standing ovation.
- Gorman: 60% of CMS kids who are below grade level are in 25% of CMS schools.
- Moderator Mike Collins asks the gutsy question - Was it like that before end of court-ordered integration?
- Gorman response to deseg question: "Ah-ah-ah-ah." When thru stuttering says "I wasn't here then." ...
- Gorman's recovery: something abt how it wasn't all that great for a lotta kids back then either. & "I totally dodged your question, Mike."
- Foxx gives shoutout to his 9th grade algebra teacher, David Butler (namesake of Butler Hi.) [Then I got a Twitter note from another West Charlotte alum, Decker Ngongang (@ngongang), saying "that was my Geometry teacher yr before he passed, push ups if you were late for class." No word on whether Decker, or Foxx, ever had to do push ups.]
- Foxx says need for strong schools is one reason he's asking #cltcc [Twitter lingo for Charlotte City Council] to look at city's housing locational policy.
- Foxx (Teach4America panel) says achievement "gets in the water in the school" & an important factor in success is when kids mentor others.
- Wendy Kopp, T4A founder: We need longer school day & flexibility for principals.
- Gorman: "staggering" amount of budget reductions will be on the table at sch bd bjt talks this afternoon. #cmsbrd [Twitter lingo for CMS school board]
- Gorman: Yes, there's resistance to T4A from some teachers and some principals.

Why don't more women bicycle?

My recent recounting of the 4.2-mile, 80-minute walk to work ("A Morning Walk") brought a Twitter response from @JamesWillamor: You could make it in 15 to 20 minutes or so on a bicycle.

I tried to explain to him about the problems of riding on Providence Road, and the problems of having to wear office garb at the office and tried a delicate mention (especially difficult with the 140-character nature of Twitter) of the issue of profuse sweat from biking up that long long Morehead Street hill.

He persisted: Plenty of office garb on bicyclists in Europe and Asia. "Humidity," I replied. He said there's plenty of humidity in Japan and China.


But maybe there's more to my reluctance than the logistical problems of trying to bicycle in nice clothes, or in a disinclination to being killed by bicycling on Providence Road. (I have imagined elaborate and circuitous routes through the meandering heart of Myers Park but there's no way to avoid riding on some parts of Providence and either busy Morehead or busy Stonewall.)

Could my reluctance be, in part, because I'm female?


I got an e-mail today that originated with transportation planner John Cock (correction, no longer with The Lawrence Group, now with Alta Planning), notifying people of a free Webinar (register here) from the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals. The topic: "Writing Women Back Into Bicycling: Changing Transportation Culture to Encourage More Women to Cycle." The blurb: "Some say that transportation culture will change when more women are cycling. What's the key to making that change happen?"

Indeed, what would help me reconsider? My quick list:

First, safe bike lanes wide enough so I didn't feel I'd put my life in danger.

Second, a chain guard to keep the grease from getting onto my office clothes. Because who wants to have to carry good office garb in a backpack? That adds even more weight to a pack where you've already had to stash your office shoes. Plus in a pack, your good clothes would wrinkle.

Third, a good place to shower at the office. I can walk and still be presentable if it's not 80 degrees outside. No way I could bicycle without showering. (Technically, because of where I work, I could shower at the Dowd Y. But that's not a generic solution for all women.)

Lipstick on a 'snout house'?

You've heard of snout houses, I assume? Those are houses where the garage projects so far forward it overpowers the rest of the architecture. Developers like them because you can put a garage (a selling point) on a much smaller lot. Architects hate them, and planners tend to look askance at whole neighborhoods where it's easy to tell that the cars are happy but hard to tell whether any people live there. They're much more common in the lower end of the price spectrum for single-family housing, but you'll sometimes see very high-end snouts. I know of one that some neighbors have dubbed the "Taj Garage."

I've read articles about how in some neighborhoods, the garage-with-open-door has become a sort of front porch, where neighbors gather to drink beer, play cards, etc.

But what do you do when you have to keep the garage door shut? Private enterprise (European-style) to the rescue. Now you can buy a garage door photo tarp. The company, from Munich, Germany, is style-your-garage.com. The garage door tarp pictured atop this blog would set you back 289 Euros (about $393).

For a chuckle of the day, check out their wares and imagine them decorating garages all over town.

A morning walk

I walked to work today.

Big deal, you say? Maybe so. But it didn't seem like such a big deal. It's 4.2 miles and took me 80 minutes. While walking I called a couple of friends to chat and told them what I was doing (to explain away the panting on the uphill parts). Both acted as if I was bonkers, and both offered to come get me if I needed help.

I didn't. I'm in decent walking shape – walk an hour a day most weekend days, and 30 minutes or so most weekdays – but this was, I admit, a bit daunting. I had to plan it out, choosing a day where I didn't need my car for work, with a good weather forecast, and then think seriously what to wear so I'd be comfortable yet not have to change clothes at work. I put my office shoes in my backpack.

I figure the walk only took about 30 minutes more than my usual morning routine. I typically walk 30 minutes anyway. The drive to work and walk from the parking lot take about 20. So it wasn't hugely time-consuming.

You see more when you walk, of course. I saw daffodils and crocuses and some fruit trees (cherry? plum?) blooming. I saw two places that were complete barriers to anyone wheelchair bound. They should be fixed.

One was the sidewalk in front of the shops at Morehead and McDowell. A utility pole narrows the sidewalk to about 18 inches. Anyone in a wheelchair coming from the south would be completely blocked and have to go in the street. The other was closer to the Y. Repair work at a corner (was it Myrtle?) blocked the sidewalk. I could walk around it, up a grassy hill where a path was being worn away into the grass. No one in a wheelchair could have done that.

I didn't get run over, though I had to make eye contact with motorists a lot and a couple of times realized that state law giving me the right of way in crosswalks was irrelevant, when drivers were complete unaware I existed because they never even looked. It felt like wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak.

I walked mostly along Morehead Street, Queens Road and Providence Road. It was rush hour so traffic was heavy. Almost every vehicle I saw carried only a driver and no passengers. Maybe 5 to 10 percent had a second person, typically a child. All this on a beautiful spring-like morning with a shining sun and temperatures climbing from the 40s into the 50s as I walked. I started to wonder why more people weren't walking. Yes, I admit it, the last 15 minutes were not so fun. I wasn't puffing but I was tired. My shirt got damp, especially under the backpack. But a few minutes at my desk revived me nicely.

And here's my reward. It's from a new book I've finished, called "Carjacked": "Just an hour of walking at a moderate pace burns 207 calories off the average woman and 244 calories off the average man."

No moral to this story, just sharing the experience, in hopes others might decide to give it a try someday, if they can.

The retail horror story we face

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."

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.

Federal revolution, under the radar?: 9:45 a.m. – Poticha is describing what has been an amazing, under-the-radar transformation at the federal level, where Shaun Donovan at HUD, with help from Ron Sims (former county exec for King County, Wash., i.e. Seattle) and the EPA and US DOT are – get this – trying to work together to remove federal barriers that keep cities and states from smarter urban growth/planning, or what she described as formerly being "a backwater set of issues."

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)

Extremely cool Charlotte urban video goes viral

Of course those you who you regularly attend the monthly Civic By Design meetings (second Tuesdays at the Levine Museum, 5:30 p.m.) already saw this months ago, but for those who haven't, there's an extremely cool video of Charlotte's urban history that's in the process of going viral online The last 3 minutes of it were featured on Huffington Post.

I've heard from a number of folks around the country asking about it. Rob Carter of Brooklyn was an artist in residence at the McColl Center for Visual Art in 2007, and made the video using Charlotte's history as its theme. Be sure to listen, not just watch. The sounds are important to the experience. For instance, Charlotteans will recognize the buzzing noise, as the crown is being kicked offscreen, as that of a hornets nest. Other viewers may not know that General Cornwallis, whose troops occupied the hamlet of Charlotte for a few months during fall 1780, referred to his hostile reception as a "hornets nest of rebellion."

Watching the NFL stadium fly in and land is fun, too. The stadium's design and suburban-office-park-esque setting in what should be urban territory downtown led some local urban designers (those not on the team's payroll, at least) to complain that it looked like a flying saucer had landed.

Happy viewing.

Here is a clip from the longer video linked above:



Metropolis by Rob Carter - Last 3 minutes from Rob Carter on Vimeo.

REBIC's long list of 'No's'

Several months back I had coffee with the affable Andy Munn, policy director for the Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition, aka REBIC, the most influential local real estate and development lobbying group. I got the idea that the group, which in the past has had (my words here, not his) a "Just Say No" reputation among local government staffers and environmental and planning activists, might be trying to change its image a bit.

Fast forward to Monday night's City Council meeting ("Foxx: Be flexible with developers"), where REBIC members were out in force. Mayor Anthony Foxx had put onto the agenda a staff presentation about a cluster of new measures that REBIC doesn't like:
- the proposed (not yet adopted) stronger tree ordinance.
- the Urban Street Design Guidelines policy (not yet adopted into ordinances and thus, not required of developers, either)
- the post-construction controls ordinance (the only one developers currently must actually follow). Many big guns were in attendance: Bill Daleure of Crosland Inc., Ned Curran of the Bissell Companies, as well as Charlotte Chamber honcho Bob Morgan.

As the Observer editorial board opined this morning ("Don't let 'flexible' morph into 'gutting' ") just building cheap isn't always smart. When you add in the future costs to taxpayers to retrofit and expand your street network/restore polluted streams/mitigate flooding -- i.e. millions of dollars -- it makes the estimated increment of $1,900 to $2,900 to the cost of new housing (spread over a 30-year mortgage) seem a bit less of a problem.

That said, a city that didn't look seriously at the combined effects of its regulations on the costs of building would be irresponsible. The point is to look at the big picture and make intelligent choices, as best you can. Further, I hear developers of all types, not just the REBIC types, complain about bureaucratic nightmares dealing with multiple government agencies on complicated plans and technical issues. So complaints about lack of flexibility and/or inconsistencies resonate with me.

But here's a problem: Even when REBIC has legitimate points it's virtually impossible to sort them out from the cloud of anti-everything rhetoric it's been floating for something like 30 years.

I recall a famous scene when then-REBIC executive director Mark Cramer spoke at a City Council debate in 1998 over whether to require developers to build more sidewalks in new subdivisions. Of course REBIC opposed it, because it would force developers to spend more money on subdivisions. (Though I must say I doubt they had to shrink their profit margins.) Cramer, after listening to pleas for good sidewalks on behalf of children, the elderly and people in wheelchairs, noted that sidewalks are good things. But, he added: "You can have too much of a good thing.''

I think REBIC and its close relative, the Chamber's land use committee, would have more credibility in many of its complaints if it hadn’t, over the years, fought virtually every environmental and growth-management measure proposed by local governments, dating to before the term Smart Growth was even invented.

It's a long list. It includes: the city bicycle plan, the floodplain ordinance, the stream buffer ordinance, watershed ordinances, the aforementioned sidewalk requirements, a county farmland preservation measure, a pilot project in Huntersville to preserve rural land and efforts a few decades ago to channel the overdevelopment in South Charlotte into other areas by limiting where new sewer lines are built. (That last is a classic planning technique being used all over the country – but not in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. Developer John Crosland Jr. simply got state government to give him permits for private sewer plants and kept on building subdivisions.)

Quite an impressive list of opposition, I'd say. And to be fair I will note that anyone is free to lobby any elected official on anything. When environmental regulations and planning initiatives are gutted or stalled for years, and when city staff is ordered to "compromise with developers" over already-compromised proposals – a tradition staffers hired from other metro areas have told me privately they're shocked to hear here – it's elected officials who do that, not REBIC.

Ballantyne 'affordable housing'? It was there at the start

It turns out that affordable housing – a better term is "below market-rate housing" – was required to be built in Ballantyne as part of its rezoning request, which county commissioners approved in November 1991. This was more than just a verbal agreement from developer Johnny Harris. It was part of the legally enforceable zoning agreement. And the housing was built. (This relates to Tommy Tomlinson's column today, "Is public housing Ballantyne's IOU?", in which he notes that we taxpayers spent millions to create the highways that allowed Ballantyne to prosper.)

Planning consultant Walter Fields, who for many years was land development manager for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg planning staff, worked with the Harris family over a period of years, starting in the 1980s, about their development plans for what used to be called "The South Farm," a beautiful tract that was part of late Gov. Cameron Morrison's vast property holdings.

"There was definitely something in there [the rezoning agreement] and they definitely did it," he told me. He recalled it was small-lot, single family housing. And he pointed out one problem with those sorts of "affordable housing" provisions: Unless other mechanisms are in place the housing is below-market rate when it's first sold, but after than it sells for whatever anyone can sell it for. Which is why, let me note, there's still a need for below-market rate housing in the area.

Today, Ballantyne is awash with apartments, which Fields points out are another form of "affordable housing." He was approached, he says, by a lot of people for help in fighting the now-dropped proposal for subsidized apartments at Providence Road West and Johnston Road. "I turned them all down," he says. As a consultant he often advocates for multifamily.

And, he recalls, during negotiations with the city-county planning department over Ballantyne the planners were continually pushing the importance of a mix of housing types at Ballantyne.

But the project was controversial, not least because that was in the era when Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools was really trying to integrate its schools, because it was legally required to, part of a court order in effect. (Today, schools in the Ballantyne area are far less integrated than in much of the rest of the county; Hawk Ridge Elementary is 10 percent black; Community House Middle and Ardrey Kell High are 12 percent black.) Some school board members weren't happy about the prospect of a vast sea of white kids that they'd be required to bus long distances – or, conversely, having to bus another sea of nonwhite kids long distances. Of course, that problem got solved by the dissolving of the court order to integrate ...

This is from an article in October 1991, by the Observer's Liz Chandler:
"Louise Woods [who later served on the school board], representing a citizens group, urged commissioners to make Harris detail how many low- and moderate-income homes he will build.
"We request that the Ballantyne proposal include a section of affordable moderate- and low-income housing," Woods said in a letter signed by seven others.
Woods also said school and county officials should scrutinize Harris' plans to ensure Ballantyne is an integrated community. Neighboring subdivisions are predominantly white. The group is concerned about what they see is a trend resulting in long bus rides for black students brought in to achieve integration."

Suburb slums? (Shhhh, don't tell Ballantyne)

I caught an intriguing "Urban Vs. Suburban" discussion on WFAE's Charlotte Talks this morning, interviewing Christopher Leinberger, author of the March 2008 article in The Atlantic magazine, "The Next Slum?"

His article opened with an anecdote from the Windy Ridge subdivision in northwest Charlotte. (A Charlotte Observer article later, in January 2009, reported that half the homes in Windy Ridge had been through foreclosure. And six months after, in July 2009, another Observer article said it's one of the neighborhoods hit so badly by foreclosures that Habitat for Humanity is buying the houses, now costing less than what Habitat would spend building a new one, and will rehab them and sell them to Habitat-worthy families.)

Also on the show was Jen Pilla Taylor, who wrote a piece for the January edition of Charlotte magazine, "Tale of Two Cities" in which she writes about the growing divide between urban and suburban parts of Charlotte.

"Much of the time, the two worlds are largely indifferent toward one another," she wrote. "Much of the suburban set is apathetic about the city, with many suburbanites rarely if ever visiting uptown unless they work there. Urban dwellers see the 'burbs as too far away, too rural, too cookie-cutter. But tensions bubble up in public spats fought primarily by activists and elected officials."

But Leinberger, a planning professor at the University of Michigan as well as a real estate developer, talked about the market forces and trends that, he has predicted, will bludgeon property values for suburban and ex-urban houses – due to oversupply and to a growing preference for "walkable" neighborhoods. He said on WFAE that the federal bailout of suburban housing has been much larger than the bank or auto industry bailouts. Interesting way to look at it. (This may buttress his point: A November 2008 Observer story reported, "Because it has such a high concentration of foreclosures and subprime mortgages, Charlotte is in line to get $5.4 million [in federal money] to help stabilize its neighborhoods.)

More recently, MSN Real Estate took on the same topic, "Is your suburb the next slum?" a sort of "Leinberger Lite" that quoted Leinberger and some of the same data.

All the articles make clear that not all suburban neighborhoods are the same and that many are thriving and will continue to. Nor do they present every urban neighborhood as nirvana.

But the data show that the more walkable areas with neighborhood centers of stores and workplaces are more likely to do better in the future real estate market than those made up only of auto-oriented single-family housing.

I guess we won't know whose predictions are coming to pass until the local real estate market revives.

Your face on the side of a CATS bus?

Carolyn Flowers, CEO of the Charlotte Area Transit System, tells me today that she expects the issue of advertising on CATS vehicles to come up at the Wednesday meeting of the Metropolitan Transit Commission. Here's a link to the agenda.

Former CATS CEO Ron Tober nixed the advertising early on in his tenure. He told me he thought it was important, in launching a new transit service, for it to look professional and clean. And certainly, the Lynx Blue Line has been very successful. I am not sure how much of that is due to the lack of advertising placards and how much to other factors, though I suspect the latter.

That said, they should look into the advertising. With the half-cent transit sales tax revenues dropping to 2005 levels, I think they could trade off some pristine appearances in exchange for some cash. Flowers said the most recent estimate, at least a year old and done by the City of Charlotte, said ads could bring in from $590,000 to $2.6 million a year. (Transit sales tax revenues this year are projected at $57 million, with 2010-11 projections at $59.4 million.)

(Note: Flowers' father died today in California. She's traveling to the West Coast and expects to be gone several days.)

'Road hater'? Read the facts, please

To all the folks bent out of shape because I suggested that NC DOT might have fared better if it had pushed for stimulus money for the commuter rail line in Mecklenburg instead of to repair the Yadkin River bridge, please read what I wrote, both Thursday and Wednesday.

I never said the Yadkin bridge shouldn't be fixed. Indeed, I called it "sorely needed." I never said commuter rail was more important. I wrote that it might be possible the state would have gotten money for commuter rail had they pushed it instead of the bridge project - a strategic decision in the realm of competing for stimulus money.

In yesterday's piece I called the bridge project "sorely needed" and also said: "In any case, now that the state has learned the bridge repair project gets only $10 million in stimulus money, it's moving to start the repairs in a few months."

On Wednesday, I wrote: "The state does have $180 million money set aside for Phase 1 of the Yadkin bridge project. It can start work as early as June, he [Conti] said. That money will pay to replace and widen to eight lanes the I-85 bridge, the U.S. 29-70 bridge and reconstruct the N.C. 150 interchange. So I-85 will go from eight lanes to four, as it does now, then widen to eight again over the bridge."

That means, as I wrote, THE BRIDGE WORK IS STARTING. THE STATE HAS MONEY. Indeed, stimulus money is supposed to go to projects that won't get done otherwise. Is it possible that was another strike against the Yadkin bridge project?

It's one thing to be mad about a rickety bridge. I completely agree. But how about reading the facts BEFORE you start with the insults?

I've been contemplating shutting down comments completely, because so many people are such jerks that it seems to just bring out the hostility all around. Thoughts?

In hindsight, maybe bridge idea not so hot

Even hindsight isn't always 20-20 of course, but if you look at the breakdown of which transportation projects across the U.S. won pieces of that $1.5 billion in federal stimulus money, it's pretty clear the feds were favoring transit, rail and pedestrian projects. The top-ranked highway-only project was 10th on the list.

So did N.C. officials miscalculate by putting their big weight on repairing highway bridges over the Yadkin River, instead of making a big push for Mecklenburg County's languishing-for-lack-of-federal-money commuter rail line? Charlotte and CATs submitted the request, of course, but in order to be team players with N.C. DOT and the governor they weren't pulling out the big guns to lobby for it.

New York City's project to improve dowdy Penn Station (the "Moynihan Station, Phase 1") got $83 million. The "Tuscon Modern Streetcar" project won $63 million. A commuter rail project in Massachusetts ("the Fitchburg commuter rail extension and Wachusett station") won $55.5 million. The DC area got $58 million for bus enhancements, and Philadelphia got $54 million for pedestrian and bicycle improvements. A lot of the money went for freight rail improvements, too.

"Selected projects must foster job creation, show strong economic benefits, and promote communities that are safer, cleaner and more livable," the press release said. Later, it said the 22 so-called "livability projects" were "aimed at giving Americans more choices about how they travel and improving access to economic and housing opportunities in their communities."

I think North Carolina's Yadkin River bridge project, although a sorely needed repair job, failed to score on the "cleaner and more livable" factors. And I think it's quite possible the shovel-ready but fed-funding-lacking North Corridor commuter rail line to Davidson would have hit high marks for "cleaner and more livable," because of its obvious connection to more environmentally sound development, and for taking a load of traffic off I-77. It's an example of regional cooperation, too, with four municipalities (Charlotte, Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson) involved.

Conti demurred when I asked him to second-guess the request on Thursday. "It would have been just as hard to get any significant funding for the North Corridor," he said. I wonder.

In any case, now that the state has learned the bridge repair project gets only $10 million in stimulus money, it's moving to start the repairs in a few months.

NC wins "honorable mention" grant for Yadkin bridge

Might the N.C. DOT have made a bad call in applying for $300 million in stimulus money to rebuild the Yadkin River bridge on I-85, instead of using the opportunity to try to snag more mass transit money? DOT Secretary Gene Conti doesn't think so.

The grants - made public Wednesday - were part of the $1.5 billion in so-called TIGER Grant funding, for transportation projects, all part of the federal stimulus bill. North Carolina got $10 million for the Yadkin bridge project.

Here's a complete breakdown from the U.S. DOT.

I just hung up from a phone interview with Conti, who said in total, 10 projects from North Carolina were submitted, including a request from Charlotte and the Metropolitan Transit Commission to fund the proposed-but-got-no-money commuter rail line between downtown and Davidson. Conti said N.C. projects were worth $845 million. Across the country, he said, $57 billion worth of projects were requested.

Looking at the projects that got the big bucks – and it's worth remembering that when you're talking transportation projects, $1.5 billion really isn't very much to spread around the country – transit and multimodal and rail projects seem to have done better than highway projects. The organization Reconnecting America did a breakdown: highway projects received 23 percent of funding, while transit projects 26 percent, multimodal projects received 25 percent, rail projects won 19 percent and ports 7 percent.

Note that a $45 million streetcar project in New Orleans won – $45 million. A $58 million downtown streetcar project in Dallas, Texas, got $23 million. Tucson, Ariz., got $63 million for a $150 million, 4-mile streetcar line.

You'll see some language on the US DOT document, if you read it, about North Carolina being eligible for "optional innovative financing enhancements to support a direct loan for up to one-third of the project costs." I asked Conti what that meant. "That's a good question," he said ruefully. It means, he said, that N.C. could cash in the $10 million now for a $100 million loan. But without a revenue stream to repay the loan (such as a toll road might have) it's best to just take the cash, he said.

The state does have $180 million money set aside for Phase 1 of the Yadkin bridge project. It can start work as early as June, he said. That money will pay to replace and widen to eight lanes the I-85 bridge, the U.S. 29-70 bridge and reconstruct the N.C. 150 interchange. So I-85 will go from eight lanes to four, as it does now, then widen to eight again over the bridge.

A farmer praises the Thread Trail

The Observer News Enterprise in Newton (outside Hickory, in Catawba County) has an interesting interview with a farmer who's a fan of the planned Carolina Thread Trail.

Stanly Stewart, who's been a grain farmer for 35 years, says some farmers worry that a trail near or on their land would bring litter and vagrants.

But Stewart says, public trails aren't the big threat to farmers: "The major threat to farming is unbridled development,” he said. He's right. Suburban sprawl and even rural sprawl are eating away at this region's last farmland – ironic in an era when so many people are rediscovering the importance of locally grown foods and meat.

He has experience that proves his point. Stewart’s family owns land around Murray’s Mill, the article reports. It says, "They decided to build trails around the land for people to enjoy the property. Since the area was opened to the public, the amount of trash has greatly decreased. Stewart attributes the decrease to the public’s renewed interest in the land around the trails.
“When you light up an area, the dark goes away,” he said."

The Thread Trail is a plan for a connecting network of trails throughout the Charlotte region. Each community gets to plan where the trails would go. No land would be taken by eminent domain. In Charlotte, a small portion runs alongside Little Sugar Creek, through Freedom Park. Someday, if all goes well, you could walk from uptown Charlotte to South Carolina, or to Crowders and Kings Mountain.

Parking gives way to sidewalks (update)

Here's a city that's not afraid to try new things. San Francisco is taking away some parking spaces in order to have wider sidewalks. Here's a link to the full article, courtesy SF.streetsblog.org

Gee. In Charlotte we're still trying to get the city to allow MORE onstreet parking – as a way to slow traffic and avoid having to build surface lots or decks. They were on the right track but after 9/11 someone deep in the bowels of the CMGC decided Osama was planning to park a bomb-laden truck outside all the local banks, so a lot of the parking vanished. Interestingly, no such protection was afforded to the daily newspaper office (or the weekly ones for that matter) or multiple other businesses uptown.

Update, 5:35 p.m., from Charlotte Department of Transportation's Jim Kimbler: It turns out Charlotte is doing a small version of what SF is, along Fifth Street between North Tryon and Church streets. Kimbler told me via e-mail that the city is helping the retail property owner at the Ivey's building, Stefan Latorre, who plans to open the interior restaurant space onto Fifth. It would mean wider sidewalks and removing the on-street parking on that block.

"Both the widened sidewalks and the removal of parking are consistent with the Center City Transportation Street Enhancement Standards," Kimbler wrote. "We believe this will help activate this street with outdoor dining and more comfortable sidewalk space."

(And no, Mayor Gavin Newsom is no relation. But at least he spells his name right.)

City leaps to fix hazard

This updates my report Monday on the ugly post in the uptown sidewalk, mentioned in yesterday's blog posting about some pedestrian hazards I encountered uptown.

I just got e-mail from Tamara Blue, customer service manager of Charlotte Department of Transportation: "I wanted to let you know the post is being cut down as I type this. We very much appreciate you letting us know about this trip hazard. Unfortunately, we can’t be everywhere at all times and knowing citizens like you will let us know when there is a problem is a tremendous help."

Kudos to the city for solving a small but dangerous pedestrian hazard. Now if only they can figure out how to inspire folks to shovel their sidewalks after it snows, and to rake off the leaf piles ...

Walking uptown? Good luck

Without question downtown Charlotte is the most pedestrian-friendly neighborhood in town. But there are still some, ahem, issues. I spotted a few during a Sunday afternoon walk through downtown.

For instance, although the city code says property owners are supposed to keep the sidewalks in front of their property free of obstruction, on Sunday afternoon some spots that were in the shade were still filled with slushy ice, such as the spot in front of the restaurant Press on West Trade Street. No, it isn't fair that some people get the sun to do the work for them. Life isn't fair. Clear your sidewalks, please.

Unfortunately, the city doesn't do what many Northern cities do - you get a certain number of hours to clear your sidewalks of snow and then you're cited (in theory, at least). In recent snowy weekends I've noticed that hardly anyone seems to feel it's important to shovel the sidewalk in front of their home - not just uptown either. The result is dangerous ice and slush, and pedestrians having yet more difficulties getting around.

Charlotte has no staff or policies about enforcing the few ordinances it does have, such as keeping sidewalks clear of obstructions. A large pile of leaves was composting in the sidewalk in front of the County Services Center annex building on North College Street. (And since 2001 I've been watching some leaves actually turn into compostable soil on a sidewalk on Runnymede between Alexander Graham Middle School and Sharon Road. In addition, I noticed in fall 2008 that a section of sidewalk on Sharon Road, on the back end of a very exclusive and expensive property, was ankle deep in leaves - as though the property owner had no idea it was his/her responsibility to keep it clear.)

And finally, here's something you don't want to stumble over on a dark night uptown. Come on, guys, just get a hacksaw out and cut that one all the way to the pavement. It's on Fourth Street, just a few feet uphill from College.

Envisioning streetcar stops

What should the stops look like for the city's proposed streetcar project? You can weigh in next Thursday, Feb. 18, 6-8 p.m., at the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center in Room 267.

A press release from the city and from the Charlotte Area Transportation System (CATS) quotes John Mryzgod, civil engineer with the city: “It is important we understand what the public would like to see because it gives us the tools to not only design a streetcar stop, but to design a stop that ties in with the fabric of the community.”

(Background: The CATS plan for transit for 2030 includes a streetcar. The city of Charlotte doesn't want to wait that long so it is going to try to build the streetcar without CATS funding. So far, it is working on planning and engineering but doesn't have construction money. It is, though, applying for a federal grant to build a 1.5-mile segment of the proposed 10-mile project.)

I will add my two-cents' worth here, instead of at the hearing:

• Why does a streetcar line need "stops" that must be "designed"? On other streetcar systems I've seen – most recently Toronto, but including Rome and New Orleans – you just got onto the streetcar in the street, as you would a bus. Obviously, thought must go into things such as where it stops, how to sell the tickets (or maybe just use machines that take money, as buses do?) and which stops will be busy enough so benches and shelter might be offered. Other than that, don't spend money on anything more than an easily spotted sign and the same amenities you'd offer at a bus stop.

The stations on the Lynx Line were way, way over-designed, IMHO, and more reminiscent of subway (aka "heavy rail") stops or commuter rail stations. Maybe CATS figured that in a city of transit newbies we'd need something prettier and more noticeable than just a spot to buy tickets and some shelter while we wait.

• That said, shade, shelter from the rain and a spot to sit would be welcome at the busier streetcar stops. So, too, would be system maps plus route and schedule information about the streetcar. The maps should show what major attractions are at each stop – the arena, the county courthouse, police station, Central Piedmont Community College, Presbyterian Hospital, Johnson C. Smith University, etc.

• And I will take this opportunity to lodge a gripe about something that's bugged me for years about CATS bus stops, although to be fair I'll note bus stops are much improved in recent years. But why not a shelter with a roof that shades you from the sun? Bus shelter roofs should be opaque, not tinted plastic. This is the South, for crying out loud. It gets mighty hot here. Shade is vital.

To learn more about the Charlotte Streetcar Project, please visit http://www.charlottefuture.com/ or try this link.