20 cities to avoid - or not?

CNBC.com has put together an interesting slide show of 20 cities you don't want to live in ... yet.
With each are a few paragraphs about that city's problems and its good points, too. Not surprisingly, Detroit tops the list. Flint, Mich., is on there, too. And Fresno and Stockton, Calif., as well as Jackson, Miss., Little Rock, Ark., and Birmingham, Ala.

But I started looking at the unemployment rates listed with each of the so-called loser cities – and I don't think they're loser cities, but certainly troubled ones in many cases. The Charlotte regional jobless rate tops those of Cleveland, Buffalo, St. Louis, and possibly even Detroit. The blurb just said Detroit is "above 10 percent." As is this region's jobless rate: 10.7 percent in February. Mecklenburg's rate in February was 10.2 percent. Hmmm - unemployment worse than Detroit? That would not be a Charlotte Chamber slogan you'll be seeing anytime soon. Though it does portend sinking pay and desperate workers, which might attract some jobs ...

Seriously, it's a quick and interesting snapshot – based on someone's set of criteria – of some cities. As the article quotes Bert Sperling of BestPlaces.net saying, in many cases young urban pioneers are moving back into the distressed cities such as Detroit, Cleveland and New Orleans, attracted by the housing prices and urban opportunities.

(Naked City is taking another long weekend break. I'll be speaking Thursday in Beaufort, S.C., at 6:30 p.m. at the Technical College of the Lowcountry, 921 Ribault Road. The lecture's free and open to the public so if you're in that neighborhood, come on by. Sponsors are the Beaufort chapter of CNU Carolinas, the City of Beaufort, and Brown Design Studio.)

Why high-speed rail debate's a disaster, how to fix it

Bruce Babbitt, the former Interior Secretary (1993-2001) and Arizona governor 1978-87, thinks the national debate over President Obama's push for high-speed rail "has, to put it mildly, been a total disaster."

In terms of marketing, he told a group of journalists today, Obama goofed in comparing a new national high-speed rail initiative to the intercontinental railroad in the 19th century. That infrastructure initiative, Babbitt noted, is inextricably linked in history books with a huge corruption scandal, the Credit Mobilier. A much better comparison, Babbitt said, would have been the interstate highway system.

Today many people look back on the interstate highway-building project as if it was a unanimous hug-fest. In fact, Babbitt said, many governors opposed it when it was first proposed. They rejected the idea of a federal tax. Major businesses such as the concrete and steel industries didn't like the federalization. Eventually, though, after "protracted discussion," agreement was forged to raise the gas tax and create a trust fund – the product of "a lot of good, solid brokering."

Why not, he proposes, bring something of that process to a high-speed rail venture in the only region that, today, has a sound network of passenger rail – the Northeast? What about a regional compact for a regional gas (or other) tax, for regional high-speed rail? It might be a model for other regions. (Or not, as he pointed out.)

But he was also a bit pessimistic that seven regional governors could get together even on this kind of project. Someone asked why. "I was a governor," he replied.

The conference sponsors are the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, the Nieman Foundation, and Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Larry Summers - Debt ceiling politics 'unconscionable'

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – Turning the issue of raising the debt ceiling into a political tool is "simply unconscionable," economist and ex-Obama adviser Larry Summers said this morning.

Speaking at a forum for journalists at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy , Summers said using the debt ceiling issue for political reasons "is the moral and practical equivalent of inviting children to play in a room full of dynamite."

Summers, ex-president of Harvard, ex-Treasury secretary (1999-2001) and director of National Economic Council for the Obama administration, 2009-11, said the U.S. economy is coming back, noting how rarely you hear people talking about a double-dip recession anymore. Corporate profits are healthy, and so on and so on.

Most of his talk was about what it was like to be inside the Obama team after the 2008 election and early in 2009. Things were so bad that jobs were being lost at a faster rate per month than at any time since those statistics had been kept.

The basic economic theory that you learn in Econ 101, about markets and the way the economy works as an equilibrium (Demand up? Supply goes down. Supply up? Prices down; demand up. Etc.) is "basically right most of the time." But, he said, "two or three times a century a different dynamic takes hold." The self-equilibrating function gives way to an avalanche of de-stability, a self-fulfilling prophecy that leads to a downward spiral. (Less consumer spending? Jobs go away. Fewer jobs? Less consumer spending. Etc.)

Obama decided that confidence could be the cheapest form of stimulus. He decided it was more important to boost confidence than exact "vengeance" (interesting word, especially from a guy like Summers) against the people who caused the problems, e.g. the banking, mortgage and financial industries.

Then began a fight over how best to use stimulus money. Summers described the tension between people wanting projects that could get done quickly and the visionary projects.

" 'Shovel-ready' is the great American lie," he said. Bureaucrats knew that projects always take longer than you want, he said, noting that the "Hoover Dam" opened in 1937. (Hoover lost the presidency in 1932.)

When the stimulus money arrived at state governments, he said, "It can only be described as a urinary Olympics between the governors and the mayors." The governors tended to think the mayors were "a bunch of useless slugs."

Summers essentially defended the decisions the Obama administration made - no surprise. And he said the lack of criminal prosecutions for the financiers who brought our whole economy down is likely because no crimes were committed. "Being stupid is not a crime," he said. "Lending money unwisely is not a crime."

He did make something of an exception for the former Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo, whom he noted was being criminally investigated, and then the investigation was dropped.

Next up to speak is ex-Mayor of Washington, Adrian Fenty. The conference sponsors are the Lincoln Institute, the Nieman Foundation, and Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Atonement: Bringing Gumby back

If you read my Thursday op-ed, "Some good ideas, in need of patrons," you may have noticed the end section, about getting Gumby back.

The whole sordid episode involving New York sculptor Joel Shapiro – whose career in 1987 was just starting a sharp upward trajectory – was embarrassing at the time and helped firmly entrench a national image of Charlotte as a city of rubes and rednecks.

Our city art commission had chosen his proposal for a 22-foot bronze work, a collection of rectangles resembling a human in motion, for the front of the to-be-built (and now demolished) Charlotte Coliseum on Tyvola Road. But one art commission member, Robert Cheek – who later went to prison for cocaine trafficking – didn't like the choice. He helped whip up popular scorn. Either Cheek or deejays John Boy and Billy dubbed the figure "Gumby," after the green clay animated figure.

Ultimately the City Council, which in those days had final say on public art purchases, nixed it 7-4. History note: Voting against the work were Richard Vinroot (later to be mayor), Ann Hammond, Al Rousso, Ron Leeper, Roy Matthews, Gloria Fenning and Minette Trosch. Trosch said she feared repercussions on the public art program if they accepted the art. Voting for it were Cyndee Patterson, Pam Patterson, Charlie Dannelly and Velva Woollen.

Of course, the "Angels in America" spat 10 years later didn't help. Just as people elsewhere were starting to forget how many Charlotte folks were keen to make fun of art, we reminded them that many here were also so homophobic they'd kill funding to the arts because a theater group performed a work that depicted gay men.

Cut to 2011. I see the affection people have for Niki de Saint Phalle's "Firebird" – dubbed Disco Chicken by some – at the Bechtler. You can hardly go by (and since it's between my office and Amelie's coffee shop, I go by it a lot) without seeing someone photographing someone else at the Firebird. The temporary exhibition of large Saint Phalle works in the park across from the museum draws a steady stream of viewers, including children scampering through that huge skull. (Be sure to go inside, where it's mirrored and blue and serene.) The Bechtler, filled with modern art, is drawing great crowds.

I think Charlotte has matured. Finally.

The whole episode was painful for Shapiro. He later told the Observer's Richard Maschal it was "a low point" in his career. Shapiro was at that 1987 council meeting. Our old files have a photo from the meeting, with Shapiro looking on as a speaker holds a clumsy wooden contraption saying it was something he made in fifth grade. The photo caption doesn't say that the speaker was making fun of Shapiro's work, but that would certainly be my guess.

Seeing which way the vote would go, Shapiro left before it was taken and returned to New York. Today his work is in major museums all over the country, including the National Gallery and the N.C. Museum of Art. You can see it at Davidson College. You can see it in Greenville, S.C. But not in Charlotte.

So why don't we try to bring that Shapiro work back to where it should have been all along? Although it would have cost $400,000 in 1987, today his works can sell for seven-figure (corrected) sums. This would take patrons with significant money. Queens Table, where are you?

Would Shapiro consent to this? He might not. But maybe he'd see that this city has grown and changed. Sure, there are plenty of people (including some politicians) who think any sculpture other than soldiers on horseback is weird, or who look at a Picasso and say, "My fifth-grader could do that." But that's true in New York as well as Charlotte. The difference is that there are plenty of people here today with a much wider appreciation of art.

Plus, I think there's a reason the name "Gumby" stuck, even among Shapiro supporters who were angry and embarrassed about the whole thing. Even the tiny wooden model had life and spark, and so much personality it demanded a name. So Gumby it became, and Gumby is how it is remembered in local lore.

Now it's time to bring him home. After all, Disco Chicken needs a buddy.

Photo: 1987 Observer file photo of Joel Shapiro with a model of his proposed sculpture. Photo by Diedra Laird.

Our mayor in Spandex?

Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx, at his regular news briefing Thursday, mentioned that he's been teaching his kids, 6 and 4, to ride bikes and said he went out and bought himself a road bike, the kind with toe clips that he's still learning how to use.

The last few days, he said, "I've gone out at 5:30 in the morning and gone down to the Little Sugar Creek Greenway." He talked about wanting to make the city friendlier to bicycling.

All of which leaves the obvious question, which yours truly was the only journalist in the room willing to ask: "So, are you wearing Spandex?"

Foxx: "I'm not answering that."

Which I think means he must be.

So, dear readers, if anyone wants to volunteer to be a citizen journalist and go down on the greenway at – as my friend Brenda would say, "O-dark-thirty" – and try for a mayoral Spandex sighting, please let me know what you discover.

Devlopers, JCSU want city money for catalyst project

Should the city help Johnson C. Smith University and a private developer with a project on West Trade Street? The council will likely be deciding that question in coming weeks.

Monday night JCSU official Malcolm Graham – a former City Council member whose other hat is to be a state senator – and Mike Griffin of Griffin Brothers showed the council plans for Mosaic Village, which would be student housing subsidized by JCSU, with street-level retail and a parking deck. Griffin said the project has a $4 million financing gap. Coincidentally, that's almost exactly the cost of building the parking deck.

Graham and Griffin didn't ask the council for any specific help, or lay out a specific request. The matter goes to the council's Economic Development committee. Mayor Anthony Foxx noted that the city has a corridor revitalization strategy.

West Trade and Beatties Ford Road have languished as other neighborhoods near uptown began to blossom. But things are afoot. The Wesley Heights neighborhood nearby has had growing numbers of urban pioneers moving in. JCSU's president, Ron Carter, has made a point of trying to better link the school with both its immediate community and the larger Charlotte community. Take a drive up West Trade and you'll see an area ripe for fresh projects – which would raise the tax base and thus, help city and county finances over time. Would this one be the catalyst the area needs? Or money down a sinkhole? Or somewhere in between?

That's what the City Council will have to figure out. Despite the usual crowd of naysayers who object to almost all city spending beyond the bare basics, smart city investments can have a big payoff later. Example: When the city bought the unused rail corridor along South Boulevard. Now it's the Lynx light rail. South End has seen millions of dollars worth of private investment – new building, rehabs, new business. But as always, knowing which investments are "smart" will be tough part.

Road planning from the disco era - the rest of the story

In putting together my op-ed, "Road planning from the disco era," the limitations of space and time required me to leave out some juicy tidbits. You lucky blog readers now may read the rest of the story.

I wrote that the N.C. Turnpike Authority is required by the feds to analyze impacts/effects of the very roads that the authority is, by law, expected to build. The point here is that the legislature, for example with the 1989 Highway Trust Fund, decides to build roads well in advance of any detailed and painstaking analysis of whether the damage they'll do will be worse than their benefits. Today, significant questions have been raised about both Gaston County's Garden Parkway and the Monroe Bypass – the latter having been ordered up by legislature in 1989.

Let's let politicians, not planners, choose the routes. March 17 the General Assembly passed, and the next day the governor signed, a bill that in essence requires the N.C. Turnpike Authority to consider only one route – the most sprawl-inducing one – for the proposed Triangle Expressway Southeast Extension toll road, a link of Raleigh's I-540 outer loop. The bill, sponsored by Wake Sens. Dan Blue, D, and Sen. Richard Stevens, R, appears to box the turnpike authority into such a spot that it might not be able to meet federal law. The feds require analysis of several alternatives.

"We think that they've probably backed themselves into an untenable corner," says David Farren of the Southern Environmental Law Center. He adds, "What's most outrageous is just the idea of going as far out as you possibly can, which means the road is longer, the road is more expensive and it's more sprawl-inducing." The SELC has filed two lawsuits contesting what it says are improprieties and falsifications involving the federal impact study for the Monroe Bypass.

Why spend only $15 million when you can spend $800 million? Another tidbit that didn't make the column: The SELC found a 2007 NCDOT study showing that for $15 million, traffic flows on U.S. 74 in Union County could be improved significantly by changing lights, timing and intersections. The N.C. Turnpike Authority, engaged in studying the $800 million Monroe Bypass which aims to alleviate congestion on U.S. 74, didn't even know that study existed, Farren says.

The state doesn't do land use planning. And Richard Nixon wasn't a crook and Bill Clinton never had sex with that woman. When the state plans highways, it engages in land use planning. Next time the state agrees to spend your tax dollars to build a bypass for a city that hasn't had the sense to say no to congestion-causing highway sprawl development, the state should not pony up dime one until the local government enacts unambiguous land use and zoning ordinances that will prevent said sprawl, including single-family subdivisions, from the new bypass.

The chances of that happening? About like snowballs in hell.

Find the bad bridges in N.C., S.C.

If you get a shiver whenever you drive over the Yadkin River bridge on I-85 between Rowan and Davidson counties, you might find it instructive to spend a few minutes seeing how your county, and your state, compare nationally in a ranking of deficient highway bridges.

The nonprofit Transportation for America coalition has pulled together an online tool that lets you see state and county stats on highway bridges deemed deficient by the federal government. Here's the North Carolina page. The Tar Heel state ranks No. 14 in the percentage of deficient bridges, 13 percent.

Rockingham County, north of Greensboro, is the worst county, with 33.6 percent of its bridges rated deficient. In the Charlotte metro region, Cabarrus is worst - No. 4 in the state - with 25 percent.

South Carolina is right there with us, ranking No. 15, also with 13 percent of its bridges deficient. The three worst states, in order: Pennsylvania (26.5 percent), Oklahoma (22 percent), Iowa (21.7 percent).

It's hard to see how this isn't yet another problem confronting our national and state transportation policies, where (my opinion here) disproportionate money has been spent on building new highways with little regard for the costs of future maintenance.

The group's assessment of the roots of the problem: "Two key problems persist: while Congress has repeatedly declared bridge safety a national priority, existing federal programs don't ensure that aging bridges actually get fixed; and the current level of investment is nowhere near what is needed to keep up with our rapidly growing backlog of aging bridges. Did you know that states can transfer up to half of their federal money dedicated to bridge repair to other projects, no questions asked?"

Here's a link to the page describing what data was used.

And for the record, the NCDOT is working on rebuilding that Yadkin River bridge.

Photo credit: Yadkin River bridge, in 2007 Observer file photo

Highway tales from the crypt

It was like a quick, surprise trip to the mindset of the 1980s. Or maybe like one of those horror movies when something you thought was dead turns out to be twitching in the grave, still alive.

I dropped in on a group of regional elected officials and other civic-leader types who'd gathered Monday afternoon to talk about "next steps" for the worthy-but-unsexy goal of regional transportation planning, with the Centralina Council of Governments moderating a series of conversations by a study group.

It's one of those under-the-radar issues, boring but important if you think a metro region should act like, well, a metro region and not a bunch of unrelated local governments, especially when it's dealing with something as important – and as costly to the taxpayers – as transportation. As I've mentioned previously (some might even say ad nauseam), the Charlotte metro region has possibly the most fragmented transportation planning of any metro area in the country. Gaston County isn't in the same transportation planning group as Charlotte. Cabarrus County isn't either. Ditto York County, S.C., and ditto the whole Lake Norman area.

It was as the group was talking about the need to articulate a vision for the whole region, that the zombie idea arose from the crypt. Gaston County commissioner Joe Carpenter started talking about how it felt like, as Yogi Berra used to say, "deja vu all over again." He recalled the era from 1988 to 1992, when a regional coalition, the Carolinas Transportation Compact, pushed for – if you said mass transit, or farmland preservation you lose – for an outer-outerbelt highway around Charlotte.

Carpenter then unfurled a large map of the route of this mythical highway, long lusted after by suburban land developers.

Because why have only one outerbelt if you can have two? Haven't we all seen how well Charlotte's first outerbelt has relieved congestion, led to smoothly flowing traffic, trimmed the region's carbon footprint, helped create walkable neighborhoods and made transit easier to implement? Imagine the wonders if we could spread our Pineville- and Ballantyne-style development all over the region's farmland?

Then-state Sen. Jerry Blackmon had conceived of the idea of a 13-county outer-outerbelt, 30 to 50 miles from Charlotte, in the mid-1980s. Planning continued throughout the 1980s, out of the public eye although land speculators such as Robert Pittenger, later a state senator, bought land along its route. In 1993 its cost was estimated at $2 billion.

Although the Carolinas Transportation Compact backed it, there was a Carolinas Urban Coalition of nearby cities which opposed it, foreseeing that the sprawl it would engender would empty their struggling downtowns. "I find the idea inconceivable," said then-Charlotte City Council member Lynn Wheeler. "You could take gasoline and pour it on the city of Charlotte and the other cities and light a match. It would have the same effect."

The newly elected Gov. Jim Hunt was not a fan. "The outer-outerloop strikes me as just being a little farfetched," he said in early 1993. "I'd be very concerned about spending money on that." And after that, Observer articles on the outer-outerbelt dwindled. And in the intervening two decades thinking about urban transportation has changed dramatically. Highways have been shown not to relieve congestion, as hoped, but to create it. Willy-nilly suburban growth has been shown to be, in many cases, a net loss for local government revenues rather than the hoped-for boost.

As Carpenter (who's also a big backer of the dubious Garden Parkway through rural southern Gaston County) spoke, I noticed that the meeting's chair, Dennis Rash – a former N.C. transportation board member and a one-time key lieutenant to ex-Bank of America CEO Hugh McColl Jr. – wasn't saying much. I asked him later about the outer-outerbelt idea. Is that what we are to see from a group looking for regional transportation planning? He noted, drily, that the old outer-outerbelt idea had been conceived during a time when the federal government was paying for 90 percent of the cost of highway projects. Those days are gone, probably for good.

And that should be the fate, as well, of yet another outerbelt highway through the Piedmont around Charlotte. Please, no more rising from the crypt for this one.

I'm taking a week off

I'm on furlough the week of March 21-27, and no work is allowed. So I'll be taking it easy - sort of - and back on the blog Monday March 28. Happy spring, everyone.

City pulls plug on proposed loud music measure

City Attorney Mac McCarley tells me the city staff is pulling the plug on a chunk of its proposal to change the city's noise ordinance. A new version will be offered Monday at the 3 p.m. public hearing that, McCarley says, aims for a balance that won't hurt performers and bars that aren't causing problems for neighbors.

The ordinance change has made a lot of musicians, bar owners and nightlife denizens angry, and McCarley said, they've been heard. (Read some of the Observer's coverage here -- Mark Washburn - "New noise rule is music to our ears" ; "Pub owners decry new noise limits" ; "Debate over outdoor music in Charlotte")

The proposed change to the ordinance would have barred "sound amplification equipment out of doors or directed out of doors" for live music or "other forms of entertainment" at a business if the amplifiers are less than 400 feet from residences. It would also bar amplified sound outdoors (note the outdoors, please. It doesn't apply to indoor music) at a business that's audible on residentially zoned property.

When I talked to McCarley about noon Friday, he said he and his staff were still working through exactly what they'd propose to the City Council but that it would be aimed at businesses that cause problems and try to protect those that don't.

How (not) to be a creative city

I was recently walking down the sidewalk beside the Lynx light rail, and I spotted some colorful banners alongside the tracks. They added a festive touch, I thought. Then I read them.

They said: "Create" and "Splurge" and "Thrive" and my favorite, "Groove." I found this interesting. It had the flowery fragrance of promotional marketing. I checked. Yep, the banners are part of a rebranding effort for South End.

Now I am not against promotional marketing. In an advertising-based industry, how could I be?

But somehow, being ordered to "Thrive" reminded me of a time, years ago, when the walls of the Observer building sprouted posters ordering us all to "Work Smarter." As if we would all slap our heads in recognition of our heretofore obvious stupidity and decide to mend our ways.

The promotional effort, courtesy of Charlotte Center City Partners, the nonprofit uptown advocacy group that also serves South End, partnered with a South End design/branding firm. They want to highlight "the brand attributes of the district" which they believe to be shopping (hence, "splurge"), residential ("thrive"), art galleries and creative businesses ("create"), and hospitality and nightlife ("groove").

I called three creative types from around town, plus my college-aged daughter and asked if anyone ever says "groove" any more. "I don't think so," said commercial film producer Peggie Porter. "I hear people say 'groovy' in a sort of ironic way."

"No one I know says groove," said the text my daughter sent from Chapel Hill.

Filmmaker Dorne Pentes, though, said he still sometimes hears people say "groove."

What about the rest of the banners and being ordered to "create"?

"I think that would be the least likely thing to make me feel creative," Porter said. "It sounds like Chamber of Commerce stuff to me," Pentes said.

As one branding/marketing expert told me (no name because this person needs business and can't afford to tick people off), "In the brand world, what things ARE is most important, not what you say they are. That's what we focus on with clients. Get them away from slogans."

Colorful banners? Nice touch. Sloganeering in a supposedly "artsy" part of the city? Not so creative.

A note about spacing: For some reason blogger.com today refuses to put spaces between the paragraphs. I tried deleting the old spaces, putting in new "enter" lines, the works. No luck. Does anyone have any solutions for this?

Why DO conservatives hate trains?

Found while looking up something else: An interesting piece in Slate.com, "Why do conservatives hate trains so much?"

Writer David Weigel dissects the opposition and notes it's more libertarian than conservative (other than a delusional George Will line about trains – "...the real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism." Whoa, George, you might wanna dial back the paranoia a tad.)

Libertarians, Weigel notes, don't have a problem with transportation. What they and some Republicans have a problem with is federal spending on transportation. But then, the article goes on to note, "Amtrak passengers pay more of the cost of their transportation than do drivers on the interstate. About 62 percent of Amtrak's operating expenses, according to the Department of Transportation, comes from fares. According to the Federal Highway Administration, the percentage of highway spending paid for by users—in the form of gas taxes and tolls—is headed below 50 percent."

Weigel goes on to quote other reasons some conservatives don't like rail transit, although little of what he reports as their reasons square with the reality that highways are just as expensive, just as prone to go over budget, just as heavily subsidized.

Ultimately, in my opinion (and Weigel gets at some of this) conservatives don't like rail because liberals do. Some people will do anything in order not to be in the same camp with people whose beliefs they disdain. This is not limited to politics, of course, and seems to be a general part of human nature. Have you ever been around UNC and Duke basketball fans? They make liberal-conservative spats look tame.

Old depot may yet escape bulldozer

Photo courtesy Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission

The historic passenger depot off Freedom Drive, the Thrift P&N station, may yet be saved from demolition. A complicated property deal is in the works, involving the depot's owner, CSX railway, as well as the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Historic Landmarks Commission and the N.C. Department of Transportation.

As I first wrote in November (City may seek landmark demolition) the station dates to the Piedmont and Northern electric suburban rail system developed by power company and tobacco magnate James B. Duke and power company executive William States Lee (who ran the forerunner of Duke Energy). The railway opened in 1912; passenger service ended in 1951. The station, designed by prominent Charlotte architect C.C. Hook (he designed the Duke Mansion and old City Hall), is the last P&N passenger station in Mecklenburg County.

It's a designated landmark, but in North Carolina designated landmarks can be demolished if the owner desires. The old depot was caught up in the city's new, well-intentioned nonresidential building code, adopted last April and aimed at cleaning up dilapidated, blighted buildings. CSX hadn't kept the old depot in good repair, and after an inspection the city ordered repairs or demolition. CSX applied for a permit to demolish. The city-county landmarks commission has power to delay demolitions for a year and did so.

Walter Abernethy, the city's code enforcement manager, told the City Council on Monday that an agreement had been reached to save the depot. He might have been a wee bit prematurely optimistic. Dan Morrill, the consulting director for the landmarks commission, says that CSX has
has agreed to withdraw its demolition application for a year to let NCDOT and the landmarks commission try to put together this scenario:

• NCDOT acquires property nearby, across track. If it succeeds, NCDOT allows the depot to be moved onto that new site.
• CSX would then donate the station to the HLC. The HLC would move the station to the new site and restore it for an interim adaptive reuse. CSX might donate some money for the move and restoration, Morrill said.
• If and when NCDOT acquires the former P&N track for passenger use (it owns about 15 miles of the railway, some near uptown Charlotte but mostly in Gaston County where re-opening freight operations) then NCDOT would buy the station from the HLC for use as a passenger. But currently NCDOT has no plans for passenger rail along the line.

Obviously, the plan hinges on NCDOT acquiring land. But if all the pieces fall into place – still a big if – in a weird sort of irony the demolition threat may well end up having saved the old depot from what was starting to look like "demolition by neglect."

NCDOT chief: No more bypasses of bypasses

Don't expect the state to build your city a bypass to compensate for the existing bypass your local governments have glopped up, State Transportation Secretary Gene Conti said today. "Those days are gone," he said.

OK, he didn't say "glopped up." That's my description. Conti dropped by the Observer editorial board today in between local meetings in town – a business roundtable at UNC Charlotte, and he'll be at the 5 p.m. Charlotte City Council meeting for a discussion about recommendations for the Independence Boulevard project (also see this link, for more information).

He was being questioned about two toll road projects, the so-called Garden Parkway in Gaston County (See "Money-waster road will induce sprawl"), and the proposed Monroe Bypass. Both highways are needed, he said. That's his story and he's sticking to it, obviously. After all, the legislature has ordered them both, and Conti's job is to produce the roads he's charged with.

Neither of those highways, of course, is worth the taxpayer money that will be spent. But the Monroe bypass is at least an attempt, however uncreative, to ease a terribly unpleasant drive along U.S. 74 through Monroe and Union County.

The problem, of course, is that you can hardly go anywhere in North Carolina, or even in the country, and not find a state-taxpayer-built highway envisioned as a "bypass" that has become a traffic nightmare because the local government involved allowed extreme highway glop to be built along it. Even places as comparatively traffic free as Albemarle have clogged bypasses. Shelby wants a bypass of its bypass. They are all what former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory has referred to as "corridors of crap."

So, I asked Conti, should the state's taxpayers reward those towns with another new bypass?

His reply: "Well, no."

"All of us would benefit from a much greater collaboration on those growth issues," he said. He said the DOT is trying to work to bring local governments more into transportation discussions.
"The days of just trying to continually build bypasses of bypasses, those days are gone," he said.

So Shelby, Albemarle, Asheboro, Ramseur and all the other N.C. towns that have allowed corridors of crap along your state highways, be forewarned.

The realist in me, though, requires me to mention this: If the legislature orders a highway to be built, as it did via the Highway Trust Fund of the late 1980s, there's not much a DOT secretary can do about it.

Historic church gets saved on Seigle Ave.

It looks as if the Seigle Avenue Presbyterian Church sanctuary won't be demolished. Neighbors, church members and other interested parties found a local builder-developer who has contracted to buy the old church property. Monday night the Charlotte City Council granted a 90-day delay in the city's demolition order.

As I wrote in my Jan. 28 op-ed, "Once-loved sanctuary faces the end," the church may not be an architectural gem, but it and its congregation played a notable role in ongoing efforts here to create more racially integrated congregations. It was, I wrote, "a small congregation, racially integrated for more than 40 years. For decades that 1950 sanctuary was home to a group of African-American and white Christians puzzling their way through barriers of race, income, gender, class and other inequities – a journey so difficult that many other people and groups in Charlotte have not really begun it."

The congregation split over a variety of issues, with many long-time former members of both races joining Caldwell Memorial Presbyterian Church. The remaining Seigle members moved up the street to another building five years ago and put the old property on the market. But the real estate slowdown, the three buildings' bad condition and the lack of parking made it a difficult sale. The city's new building code for non-residential property, when applied to the church property, resulted in a demolition order. In January the City Council granted a 30-day demolition delay, after the church's real estate agent said he thought he had found a buyer.

Monday night, the buyer himself – Brandon Brown of Green City Development – told the City Council he would close on the property in about a week and asked for 150 days' delay in the demolition order so he could tear down the oldest building and start repairing the sanctuary and fellowship hall. He's also asking to buy 2 city-owned acres behind the church to use for more parking; those negotiations will be more complex and his purchase of the church isn't contingent upon that separate land purchase.

Brown said he'd like to turn the church sanctuary into a restaurant (he didn't use the example of Bonterra in Dilworth, but I will) and the fellowship hall into a coffee shop or office. The City Council gave him a 90-day extension of the demolition. Brown was good with that.

The city's nonresidential building code is well-intentioned but it's having the effect of threatening historic landmark buildings, as I wrote in November's "City May Seek Landmark Demolition." (The Seigle Avenue church building wasn't a landmark.)

Observer file photo below showing the front of the sanctuary was taken in 1993.

'City-Suburban Smackdown' and other news

Cities v. Suburbs: The Carbon Smackdown: The infrastructurist.com in "New Study: Suburbs Can Pollute More Than Cities" reports on a new study that may set some conventional wisdom on its ear: "When blame is assigned for greenhouse gas emissions, big cities typically receive more of it than smaller cities and suburbs. But a new report in a recent issue from of Environment & Urbanization suggests casting a more nuanced net of responsibility. In fact, contrary to popular wisdom, cities can have a per capita rate of greenhouse gas emissions that’s astonishingly lower than rates in their surrounding suburbs."

Schoolyard Fight – Green V. Urban: This article from the Boston Globe, "Green Building," is making the rounds among landscape architects, urban designers and related folks. New Urbanist leader Andres Duany (a graduate of Princeton and Yale) is picking a fight with Harvard's Graduate School of Design. When Duany was in Charlotte earlier this month he told me one reason he was kicking up dust was to energize young New Urbanists. It's a movement, he said, that needs people with the energy to enjoy Sisyphean tasks.

Ex-mill town nurtures its downtown. Kannapolis, a one-time mill town built and dominated for decades by the Cannon family and Cannon Mills, was for years the largest unincorporated town in North Carolina. It finally incorporated in 1984. It's an interesting place, especially if you're keen on N.C. history, because many of the mill houses, built for the textile workers, still exist. So does the Williamsburg-style brick downtown.

Cannon Mills became Pillowtex, which abruptly closed in 2003, sending thousands out of work. The former Cannon Mills Plant No. 1 was demolished to make way for the still unfinished N.C. Research Campus. (I'm leaving out a lot. For more, see the N.C. Research Campus site here.)

Kannapolis is working on a new downtown plan. Here's a link to a draft of the plan. And here's an article from the Independent Tribune.com, by former Observerite Karen Cimino Wilson. A big problem: Since the huge mill closed the downtown stores have suffered. Among the proposals: Transforming Dale Earnhardt Boulevard/Loop Road from a suburban highway to an "urban boulevard." Building a City Market building. Creating better gateways to the downtown area.

K-12 Transportation Costs: Charles Marohn, New Urban Network writes about what he sees as school transportation policies that subsidize inefficient development patterns. In the New Urban Network, he writes: "Door-to-door transportation for K-12 students may seem to be a compassionate policy from a society that values both students and education. That may be the intent, but the transportation mandate ultimately takes money from classrooms to subsidize our inefficient, post-WW II development pattern. In the end, it also devalues traditional, neighborhood schools in favor of the remote, campus-style we now build."

Be forewarned. Marohn makes explicit that he's not considering the considerable issues of race and school integration: "Again, I'm not trying to get into a broader discussion on race. I'm not thinking that big," he cautions.

With Gov. Bev Perdue proposing making counties, not the state, responsible for buying school buses – one gigantic unfunded mandate – and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools for all practical purposes resegregated anyway (I'm not supporting that, but acknowledging reality) it's past time for CMS and the city and county local governments to work together to make it easier for kids who do live within a mile of schools to be able to walk there safely. And for CATS and CMS to figure out better ways to collaborate. And for parents to stop being afraid that putting a 10-year-old on a city bus is a huge risk, when in fact the much bigger risk is putting a kid into a private auto. Remember, car wrecks are the leading cause of death for Americans ages 1-35.

Knoxville + Charlotte = Same league?

While folks in Charlotte are still elated over being selected for the 2012 Democratic National Convention, The Economist magazine has deftly slid a stiletto under the city's civic ribcage:

In its Feb. 10 issue, "Changing leagues: What landing the convention says about North Carolina’s biggest city," the writer quotes Charlotte Center City Partners' Michael Smith: "“We’re changing leagues.”

The magazine goes on to describe the city: "It has a couple of professional sports teams, the NASCAR Hall of Fame, a sleek new light-rail system and a decent but hardly remarkable smattering of museums and theatres. It seems just one of several pleasant, medium-sized cities—such as Knoxville, Richmond and Norfolk—between Washington, DC, and Atlanta."

Keeping in mind that Charlotte's estimated 2006 population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau was 630,478, it's instructive to note that the Census Bureau also reports:

• Richmond's 2010 population at 204,000 and Norfolk's at 242,803.
• Knoxville? Its 2006 population estimate was 182,337.

All those years of spending, building, scrapping and clawing and climbing by the fingernails into the NBA and the NFL, building towering phallic bank and energy company skyscrapers to prove the city's virility, were they for nothing? Can it be possible that to the rest of the world, which now appears not to have been paying the least bit of attention, Charlotte is still considered a "pleasant medium-sized city," maybe about like Knoxville?

Ouch! Ooof! Uggghh! And grrrrr!!! You can hear the teeth grinding up and down Tryon Street.

Urban acupuncture and the American Dream

We now live in the Century of the City, so called because last year the global human population counter rolled over the 50 percent mark – More than half the world's people now live in urban areas.

But in the U.S., the 21st century will also have to be the Century of the Suburb – the re-imagined suburb. That's particularly true in Sun Belt cities such as Charlotte, Raleigh, Atlanta, Orlando, etc., where such a large proportion of land is given over to postwar suburban development. In coming years we'll have to decide how to, as Georgia Tech architect and author Ellen Dunham-Jones puts it, re-inhabit, retrofit and re-green those areas.

The imperatives are economic, environmental and demographic.

1. Carbon and greenhouse gases. If we're to avoid creating even more damaging and destructive changes in the world's climate (increasing droughts, floods, snow or burning heat, depending on where you are) for our kids and grandkids to deal with, then an excellent way to shrink U.S. production of greenhouse gases is to reduce how much people drive.

Even for people who insist on believing that all the world's climate scientists (who compete with one another and back-bite as avidly as any other professionals) have joined to perpetuate a worldwide hoax, there are other excellent reasons to reduce the U.S. driving habits: the cost to households and businesses of higher fuel prices, not to mention driving itself, with transportation taking an average 19 percent of U.S. household income; depending on other countries for our fuel; air pollution; the vast cost of building and maintaining roads and streets to accommodate ever-more driving.

2. Demographics. Population realities are converging to favor urban/multifamily/higher density development. Gen Y (aka the Millennials) have a clear preference, at least at this stage in their lives, for urban environments. Meantime, many aging boomers will be selling their houses and moving into condos or apartments. Many of them will also have to give up driving due to infirmity, illness or eyesight, so they'll be looking for neighborhoods where they can walk to stores and medical offices.

3. The emerging obesity epidemic. Driving more means exercising less. Human beings haven't suddenly lost their ability to have will power. We have structural issues that are making us fat. One of them is that we don't walk much anymore, because we have to drive.

4. Suburbs on the brink. Many of the postwar suburban neighborhoods (and by "suburban" I mean low-density, auto-oriented neighborhoods or towns carved up into single-use zones) are fading. To be sure, many thrive and will continue to, even as the market for single-family houses stagnates through oversupply (see item 2, above). But already, many cities including Charlotte are puzzling over fixes for dead or dying enclosed malls, derelict strip centers and big box stores, and neighborhoods with dwindling property values and rising crime and social problems.

I was privileged to spend Saturday moderating a conference in Raleigh, sponsored by the N.C. State College of Design, looking at the problem of, and opportunities for, inner-ring suburbs – which generally means those built in the late 1940s through the 1960s.

The clear consensus was that cities and metro areas will have to learn how to encourage more development closer to their core, and to build more transit lines. Some tidbits from some of the speakers:

• William Hudnut, former mayor of Indianapolis (he joked about "India-No-Place") gave a definition of "sustainable" that I liked: "Stuff that endures." He said the first-tier suburbs are "the place where blight can either be stopped or spread farther out." He used a term I love: "urban acupuncture," which he attributed to Brazil's Jaime Lerner, a former mayor (Curitiba) and state (Parana) governor. The idea is to be strategic with well-placed interventions that help heal the surrounding area.

"Progress is not always new," he reminded the crowd. Other advice: Eradicate ugliness, and "multiply picnics." Finally, he offered a pertinent quote from Ernest Hemingway that I intend to repeat often: "making strong the broken places."

• Patrick Condon of the University of British Columbia, author of "Seven Rules for Sustainable Communities," showed how, when looked at based on 30-year amortization, streetcars are a cheaper form of mass transit than buses. "The cost of buying buses, this year, is cheaper," he said. But long-term, building and operating streetcars is cheaper for transit systems. He showed slides of old streetcar rails popping out of the pavement (no, he didn't have a photo of the one on North Tryon Street) "wanting so much to be used."

• Ellen Dunham-Jones of Georgia Tech, co-author of "Retrofitting Suburbia," noted that "nobody is plowing down existing neighborhoods" but instead there are opportunities to build infill, especially on what she called "underperforming asphalt." It requires creativity and innovative ways of developing, she said.

Wrap-up speaker Patrick Phillips, CEO of the nonprofit Urban Land Institute, made the point that close-in neighborhoods can have a great appeal due to their proximity to employment centers and to transit options – unlike far-flung “exurbs,” he said, many of which are seeing high rates of foreclosures in the recession. And he used some research from the Center for Neighborhood Technology, looking at Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill, that showed that when transportation costs are figured in, exurban areas that look most "affordable" are, in fact, the least affordable. (See "Penny Wise, Pound Fuelish.")

The wrapup? Marvin Malecha, dean of the NCSU College of Design, took aim at today's use of "the American Dream" to mean a house in the suburbs. Come on, he said, isn't there in fact a different dream that we all have? "The real American Dream," he said, "is that our children will be OK."

"Prudent Growth"? Multifamily McMansions?

A Coconut Grove, Fla., McMansion circa 2003. Are McMansions destined to be apartment houses in the next decade? (Miami Herald photo)
I came away from last week's New Partners for Smart Growth conference with a notebook full of interesting ideas, factoids and thoughts:

• Can we scrap the term Smart Growth? It insults people, which doesn't help anyone make needed political and business changes. But "sustainability" isn't much better. For one thing, the way a community develops is much more complex than buying fluorescent light bulbs, which is what "sustainability" means to a lot of people. "I try to avoid using the word 'sustainability,' " Raleigh Planning Director Mitch Silver, who is president-elect of the American Planning Association, told the crowd Saturday. The term means too many things to too many people, he said.

I vote for not calling it anything, since any good planner/urban designer/policy maker worth her or his salt knows what to do anyway. If a term is absolutely required, what about "Prudent Growth" or "Responsible Growth"?

• Two different planning/development experts predicted that many of the McMansions built in the past decade will end up being broken into multifamily housing. Arthur "Chris" Nelson, who gave an interesting demographics presentation, even offered floor plans for converting a 6,000-square-foot-house – "modest by McMansion standards" – into three apartments. He noted that multifamily's share of the demand for new housing 2010-20 will be 50 percent. Considering population, age and market-demand projections, the U.S. is overbuilt on single-family housing, he said, and underbuilt on multifamily.

Silver, of Raleigh, also pointed to that likely result. "What are we going to do with those 4,000-square-foot mansions out in the suburbs," he asked.

• Silver gave an excellent talk about Raleigh's planning and zoning efforts. He self-deprecatingly noted the city's "Sprawleigh" nickname and described a wide-ranging effort Planning Raleigh 2030, that aimed to get residents to envision what they wanted their city to look like in two decades. (They used different outreach methods for different age groups.) The city's new comprehensive plan was adopted in 2009. Unlike Charlotte, that isn't all the city did. "If you just have a policy plan sitting on a shelf, it has no value," Silver said. "It's important to have the one-two punch" of adopting the plan and then codifying it.

So the city is completely rewriting its zoning code, which will be, in part, a form-based code. That's a code that worries less about what you're doing inside the building (office? store? apartments?) and more about how the building behaves in its surroundings. "Sprawl is fiscally irresponsible and frankly, too expensive to maintain," he said. (I guess he doesn't have to worry about REBIC and influential suburban subdivision developers complaining to his bosses when he says things like that, right out loud and in public.)

• The Atlanta BeltLine project was described as "the most transformative project in Atlanta since the airport was built." (quote is from Atlanta City Council member Joyce Sheperd). It's a $2.8 billion redevelopment project to create public parks, multi-use trails and transit along a mostly abandoned 22-mile railroad corridor that encircles downtown Atlanta and connects 45 neighborhoods. It's a huge partnership, and involves a 6.500-acre tax increment financing district (covering 8 percent of the city's land area). Along with local, state and federal money expected to be spent, a nonprofit Atlanta BeltLine Partnership is raising money from philanthropic and private sources, as well as local, state and federal funds.

Almost half the right-of-way has been leased, optioned or purchased. So far 3.5 miles of permanent trails have been built, as well as 8 miles of interim hiking trails.

Brian Leary, CEO of Atlanta BeltLine Inc., told the conference gathering, "For the last 14 years Atlanta has been looking for its next Olympic moment." He clearly thinks the BeltLine is it.