Charlotte's own Big Dig -- without a dig

(At right: Digital rendering of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway atop the Big Dig in Boston.)

All is takes, you see, is for a developer to be interested, and suddenly the city decides it's interested, too. At least, that's how it might look to a cynic. (Moi? Mais, non!)

It's been more than 10 years since the idea was first proposed to cap I-277 and put a park there. It's been eight years since it was included in the Center City 2010 plan.

Next week, the city's transportation department will take a serious look at the possibilities. It's part of a four-day design workshop to look at I-277 and its interchanges from Mint Street to Kenilworth. The freeway cap is sure to come up, I'm told.

Here's a tidbit that might be more than coincidental: Developer Afshin Ghazi of the EpiCentre has bought a spot of land uptown at Tryon and Morehead, overlooking the I-277 gulch. He's a smart guy and he knows that in other cities, freeways have been capped and developable land created. Columbus, Ohio, put a retail development above a freeway. In Boston the Copley Place shopping mall sits over the Mass Pike. And Boston's famous Big Dig (above) is really a freeway that's topped with a park. Of course, in Charlotte we wouldn't have to do that expensive digging part.

The caps themselves aren't all that expensive -- at least, not in the relative terms of massive freeway construction budgets. But putting development on a cap would boost city revenues. It will be interesting to see whether the original idea for a park survives.

Also, I hear that the consultants who'll do the workshop, HNTB, have been hired in Kansas City to help explore a freeway cap there.

Read my Saturday column in the Observer -- here's a link to the Opinion page for CharlotteObserver.com -- and I'll tell you more about what's happening.

Two Dilworth houses saved

Ted Alexander of Preservation North Carolina phoned Thursday to report that two historic houses in Dilworth had been sold to an owner who'll preserve them.

Ted left a voice mail and he's now out of the country, so I don't have publication-worthy confirmation on the buyer's name. He said the closing was Wednesday. The houses, at 329 E. Worthington Ave. and 1818 Euclid Ave., had been up for sale by an investor.

As I wrote in a column last year, the zoning was 22 units an acre, and it was likely the two lots could have been packaged, the houses demolished, and apartments or condos built.

The houses were modest, both dating to the early 20th century and, as PNC President Myrick Howard put it, help tell the story of Dilworth, a neighborhood designed with homes for the wealthy, the middle class and workers. "If all the worker parts are lost," he said, "the story's lost."

As I reported last year, other cities such as Raleigh, protect their historic districts better, by not allowing large-sized additions to small houses if they're out of keeping with the scale of the neighborhood. Charlotte, you'll not be surprised to learn, does not. The fabric of Dilworth, a local historic district, is being changed by steroid-sized expansions. At least these two modest houses will survive to convey to future generations what the neighborhood used to be like: a place for people of high, middle and lower incomes.

PNC stepped in and bought the houses. They resold them with protective convenants in place to preserve them.

Lane-merging: The scientific way

At last, vindication.

While researching totally other topics, I found this piece in Sunday's New York Times magazine addressing at length the question of whether it's OK to zoom to the front of the vacant lane when a merge looms, and the other lanes are full of drivers patiently waiting their turn.

Remember the piece I did last month, "A contrarian look at lane-merging"? It hit a nerve, with most people firmly on the side of those who wait patiently in line. You'll note I didn't say I do this. I don't want people shooting me the finger, or maybe bullets. I just said it would be more efficient if people just did alternate merging.

The scientists who study that sort of thing -- and amazingly, there are many -- appear to conclude that if the world were full of perfectly behaved drivers, it would be more efficient if everyone used all the lanes possible, but left enough space in front so the mergers could merge without anyone having to stop.

This will happen, of course, about the time that all our kids do their homework with no nagging, bluebirds sing in the meadows all day and everyone learns the proper use of it's versus its.

'City of trees' fires arborist

Nope, not Charlotte. Atlanta. The New York Times tells us Atlanta's "defender of trees" got the ax. Many people speculate it's because he's more vigorous about citing developers for tree-cutting infractions than the other people in his office.

This got my attention: "Builders must pay hundreds of dollars for every tree they uproot, even with the city’s permission. ... The penalty for violators is far heftier: One developer was recently fined $24,000 for illegal tree clearance, and Tyler Perry, the movie actor and director, was penalized $177,000 for unauthorized deforestation on his property."

Atlanta's fired arborist said he had issued 70 citations for illegal tree removal this year, while the five other arborists in his division issued a total of 29 citations. This does not sound like Charlotte, does it?

I called Laura Brewer, Charlotte's senior urban forestry specialist. Charlotte's tree ordinance doesn't make builders pay if they uproot trees except for city-owned trees in city right-of-way. Even then, unless it's a big tree they're usually allowed to plant a replacement tree as compensation. That's one reason for the slow loss in the city's tree canopy.

As far as private development, Charlotte's ordinance protects only a few of the trees on private development. On single-family developments a 10 percent tree save is required, although a developer can plant new trees instead of saving existing ones. On commercial development, only the trees in the setback must be saved, if they're 8 inches or larger in diameter.

I asked Brewer if the city had fined any tree ordinance violators in the past year. "I don't believe we have." The city would rather have trees than fines, she said: "Usually, what we've done in the past is require mitigation."

She said a new ordinance is being proposed that would require commercial developers to save 15 percent of the trees on site, rather than those in the setback.

A study in 2003 by American Forests found the total acreage of trees in Charlotte fell almost in half between 1984 and 2003, from 63,000 to 33,000.

Who's moving on up?

My buddy Joe (and earlier, Tom Hanchett) shared a fascinating, though lengthy article in The New Republic by Alan Ehrenhalt about urban "inversion" -- not the kind where hot polluted air settles over a city -- but a demographic shift.

His point is that Chicago and other cities are seeing more middle- and upper-income people moving to the center, and low-income families and immigrants moving out to the far suburbs. He attributes it to several factors: de-industrializaton, less crime, young people eager for urban life, and traffic.

It includes several mentions of Charlotte, which is experiencing the kind of inversion he writes about. Here's one:

In downtown Charlotte, a luxury condominium is scheduled for construction this year that will allow residents to drive their cars into a garage elevator, ride up to the floor they live on, and park right next to their front door. I have a hard time figuring out whether that is a triumph for urbanism or a defeat.

In Atlanta, he says, "the middle-class return to the city is occurring with more suddenness than perhaps anywhere in the United States," and most people say it's due to traffic and gas prices.

'Extreme': Higher taxes? Who pays?

Plenty of folks reading the previous post worried that the King family might not have money for the higher taxes they'll pay. Some suggested the day care they run isn't licensed. It is, and has a four-star rating.

Newsroom colleague and great writer Elizabeth Leland, apparently a Naked City reader, e-mailed me with a note pointing to Mark Washburn's article Saturday about the size of the house and the family's upcoming bills.

A pertinent excerpt is below, or you can read the story online. Mark's story doesn't address the questions of "green" building, though some who left comments
say the show makes a point of using energy-efficient techniques. Does anyone have any information?

What is not generally known is that producers often set aside money to ensure families can afford their gift homes. Community fundraisers, such as this week's concert at SouthPark, help underwrite the accounts.

"Most family mortgages are paid off," says Didiayer Snyder, one of the designers on the Charlotte build. Also, money is put in escrow for things such as power bills and other expenses, including scholarships.

In the case of the Kings, they are planning to finish degrees at UNC Charlotte and the show might make that part of the package, but it probably won't be known until the show airs in October.

"We do not build McMansions," says Diane Korman, senior producer with Lock and Key Productions in Hollywood, which creates the shows for ABC. "Houses need to be affordable for the residents."

... Korman said this week that the Charlotte project has been designed to fit in with the Windsor Park neighborhood, which is mostly one- and two-story brick homes. Lavish palaces are not the goal of the program, she said.

"Extreme Makeover": Is house too big?

Jerry Fleeman of Gastonia e-mails with this (sarcastic) query:

"Given the many past columns and blogs surely you will write on the evils of the McMansion built by the TV show "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" in the Windsor Park neighborhood of Charlotte.

A 1,900 square-foot single-story house was transformed into a 5,100 square-foot multi-story mansion. Surely this house now adversely impacts the neighborhood. Some quotes from the Observer story: "At 5,100 square feet, it barely fits on their Sudbury Road lot. "
And, "Its tall roof soars over the Windsor Park neighborhood, where modest one-story brick homes are the standard."

Whaddaya think?

I've been wondering how much thought went into making the house as energy efficient as possible. Does anyone know? I've not been following it closely. Is there daylighting? Passive solar? Any solar panels? Geothermal heating? Recycled materials?

I hope some provision is being made to help this family with what are likely to be much higher utility bills (unless the house is "green") and higher property taxes.

Finding the Naked City, Part 2

I'm taking a vacation day today and possibly tomorrow, so no new Naked City news for now. (Try saying that 5 times, fast.)

To the readers asking how to set up an RSS feed: When I use Firefox as a browser there's an orange box in the window where the URL shows. Click on it and you're asked how you want the feed to work.

Naked City is listed under the "blogs/columnists" link that shows only if you scroll your cursor over the "Opinion" tab at the top. The blogs/columnists link showing when you open the new home page give you only "News" blogs/columns because the "News" tab automatically opens. For Sports, Editorial Page, Entertainment or other columnists you have to click on the appropriate tab.

Meantime, what's the reaction to the Observer's newly designed Web site? It's now charlotteobserver.com instead of charlotte.com. The charlotte.com URL will keep working for a while but it will disappear at some point, so be sure to fix your bookmarks.

Cheers.

Finding the Naked City

I've been trolling through our new charlotteobserver.com Web site, which looks a lot better, IMHO. But is it just me, or is it harder to find The Naked City? Granted, this smacks a bit of Al Franken's old schtick ("How does that affect me, Al Franken?")

You'll now find blogs from those of use working in the Editorial department (Jack Betts, Kevin Siers, Ed Williams, Daily Views) under "Opinion" at the top of the page -- but you'll no longer find our blogs listed on the Opinion main page. (Columns, yes. Blogs, no. Who knows why? I'll ask around as soon as our excellent online folks recover from their exhausting roll-out-the-new-site week.)

Nor will you find us on the main homepage unless we've posted in the last few hours.

If you're an occasional Naked City reader or a newcomer who found it skimming through the online newspaper, let me recommend bookmarking the site or setting up an RSS feed. Otherwise drilling down to find this blog might take longer than you care to spend.

And here's a kicker some of you anonymous commenters will surely want to know: We're moving to a new blogs platform sometime soon and registration will be required for anyone commenting. I'm told this will allow commenters to keep the same moniker and to look back on all their comments. Love it or hate it, I have no control over it. Just wanted to warn folks.

Until then, it's easier to have a conversation if you'll post using a name so we don't have to refer to "Anonymous 2:57 p.m" and so on.

Now, feel free to go back to commenting on the Overstreet Mall and uptown retail. As to the use of "vibrant" -- I agree it's overused and under-defined, and you'll note I didn't use it. "Vibrant urban village" is a phrase that has grown especially cliched among planners and developers.

The end of uptown hamster tunnels?

Some folks are aghast that Charlotte Center City Partners President Michael Smith would cast aspersions on the Overstreet Mall system uptown of sidewalks and hidden shops. In an Observer article published Thursday, Smith said the overstreet system “is dilutive to creating a vibrant center city.”

One of those aghast is Bill Little, who owned the BB&T Center -- home to many interior retail spaces -- until selling to an REIT a couple of years back. He consistently defends it. Here's a portion of a letter he wrote to the Observer:

"Mr. [Michael] Smith fails to see the big picture. Overstreet Mall is more than a series of pedestrian bridges connecting coffee shops and newsstands. Think of it, rather, as effectively bringing millions of square feet of office space under one roof. I know of no other U.S. city east of the Mississippi where more office space -- not to mention hotels, parking, retail, performing arts centers, and residential buildings -- can be accessed under cover."

I'm on Michael Smith's side. People who say they want more stores downtown aren't going to get them until at least three things happen.

First, better designed retail space has to be available -- the kind where you can walk past the store windows, see inside and go right in. You know, like old storefront buildings (example: inside the Latta Arcade) and like stores in shopping malls. Those mall folks understand window shopping. Architects who design office towers and grudgingly throw in required ground-floor retail space do not.

Second, uptown needs a retail cluster. People like to shop where other shops are. Again, the shopping center developers understand this. Uptown not only doesn't have this cluster, there's little hope it will get one. The retail spaces built in recent years (required by the uptown zoning) are too scattered. The older retail spaces that might have served to link them together have almost all been demolished for the new towers. The only solution would be building a sort of outdoor-air shopping mall uptown. That's expensive.

Finally -- you knew I'd get here -- Overstreet Mall should transition to business support tenants: Printing companies, shoe repairs, cleaners, etc. I'd say it has to go, but the city in its infinite wisdom granted what amounts to perpetual rights-of-way over the streets. So the tunnels will be with us for years to come.

Why do you think shopping malls locate at interstate interchanges? Traffic. Uptown, the traffic is feet. In Charlotte too many feet are diverted into the overstreet system. Or conversely, too many feet are people on the sidewalks with no clue the overstreet system exists or how to get there. In either case, potential retailers suffer.

Yes, I confess I use the overstreet system when it's pouring rain or I need to get into one of the buildings. I understand some symphony-goers were shocked and appalled that they were expected to -- gasp! -- set foot on the sidewalks and walk when the overstreet passage between the Blumenthal and its deck was taken down. But it's perfectly possible to have an excellent shopping district without those tunnels.

If you want strong retail uptown, not the half-hearted retail we now have, eventually Overstreet will have to change.

Mayoral talk over lunch?

Spotted having lunch today at Mimosa: City Council member Anthony Foxx (right), a Democrat, and former City Council member Patrick Mumford (left), a Republican.

Maybe they lunch together often and it's no big deal. Who knows? But I stopped to greet them and when I asked what they were talking about (hey, I'm a journalist and it's my job to be nosy) they just smiled and didn't answer.


The common denominator for Foxx and Mumford -- other than their council experience -- is that both have been the subject of speculation about mayoral ambitions. Charlotte's current mayor is running for governor. The next mayoral election isn't until 2009. If Pat McCrory moves to the Governor's Mansion in Raleigh, who succeeds him?

I'm not an expert at this moment in how a mayor gets chosen if one leaves office, but I'm pretty sure that if a Republican leaves, a Republican must be appointed. If recent council history is a guide, council members would rather appoint someone who doesn't plan to run for the office. That's how Greg Phipps got appointed to the council in 2005 after Malcolm Graham was elected to the state Senate.

Mumford left the council in 2007, saying he wanted time with his family. Might he be a candidate to be appointed mayor if McCrory wins the governorship?

Foxx, of course, is considered likely to run for mayor regardless of whether is opponent is McCrory, or any other Republican.

Mumford, by the way, had a pizza and Foxx had a bowl of chili. Bon appetit!

How does your neighborhood rate?

Interesting story in today's newspaper about the city's semi-annual statistical study of neighborhoods. It's called the 2008 Neighborhood Quality of Life report. If you want to see the map I think you have to see the on-paper version (at 50 cents still cheaper than a cuppa coffee), as I can't find an online link. But here's a link to the report itself. Warning: It's a slow-loading PDF file. Here's a link to the page on the City of Charlotte's Web site about the report.

I haven't read the report yet -- it's 246 pages -- so don't kick me around for "endorsing" it; I'm simply sharing it for those who might be interested. I hope to find time this week for some reporting, with luck for my Saturday column.

One quick thought: I find its terminology unclear. The report says that in 2006 it changed its classifications from Stable, Threatened, and Fragile (also unclear -- which is better, "threatened" or "fragile"?) to Stable, Transitioning, and Challenged. But Transitioning is applied to neighborhoods in "an improving or declining position." So if the number of "transitioning" neighborhoods has increased, is that good news for the city or bad news? Who can tell? And is this because the city wants only happyface news about its neighborhoods? Or because these kinds of reports are done by geographers and academics, not writers or editors? Who can tell?

Anyway, happy reading. Check back with you later.

Save 8th Street uptown

Yes, I'm a dweeb. I'm sitting here watching the City Council meeting on TV. Just watched Mayor Pat McCrory veto a proposal for the city to buy a small convenience store in the Belmont neighborhood.

Lotta council discussion, and much of it reasonably intelligent, even when the members disagreed with each other. McCrory's veto was the right thing to do. I wrote a column on this issue last year. I can't link to it tonight, but will try to add a link tomorrow. Headline: The Belmont neighborhood -- thanks to strategic city investments and other good efforts -- is on the upswing. The private marketplace is slowly regenerating it, and those old retail buildings will help add character and a home for small business entrepreneurs. If there's a crime problem (and with some of the old stores, there is) the solution is policing, not the buildings. The city's money is needed in other, more desperate neighborhoods.

But here's what inspired me to crank out this posting. They're talking about a plan for the First Ward section of uptown, and for a park. It's a complicated land-swap deal, and will involve a park, underground parking, a UNC Charlotte building and other good things.

BUT, and it's a big but, council member Nancy Carter is spot on with her resistance to the proposal to close Eighth Street for the park. Uptown's traffic can be so congested that the last thing it needs is to close off even more of its grid. And as its development continues it is going to get even more congested. The city can't keep chipping away at connectivity uptown. Plenty of excellent parks have a small-scale street running through them, and this one could be one of them.

The Central Avenue challenge

Wonderful discussion about retrofitting suburbia. If you haven't read the comments, I recommend them.

Retrofitting can be expensive for taxpayers, when a city has to build sidewalks, add storm drains and so on. The city's changes in recent years -- requiring sidewalks, better street designs, etc. -- help with new construction only. Even the city's admirable, if slow-moving, sidewalk-building gets at only part of the problem.

Most of the potential retrofitting happens as part of the natural economic evolution of a city: A business closes, another business buys the building and renovates it, or tears it down and build again. Or a business expands its building.

The city's passivity is hurting those small-scale opportunities all over town. Here are two examples, both a couple of years old, are the Bank of America branch at Kings Drive and Charlottetowne Avenue (a.k.a. the old Independence Boulevard), and the Bojangles at Third Street and Charlottetowne. Plenty of other examples abound all over the city, especially along the so-called International corridor of Central Avenue, between Eastway Drive and Eastland Mall.

That branch bank and the Bojangles are welcome businesses. I just spent a year in Massachusetts, suffering withdrawal from good fried chicken and biscuits, so believe me, I value Bojangles. The bank replaced one that was demolished for the Little Sugar Creek Greenway and was needed in the neighborhood.

BUT ... The two buildings -- not the businesses within, but the buildings and lot designs -- are awful for the location. They're suburban in design -- one-story buildings with deep setbacks from the street and huge parking lots out front. They're unsuitable for an in-town location, especially an area where other developers are trying to build more urban patterns. Those two small buildings should have helped with the urban retrofit of Midtown area, yet they didn't. Why not?

The city's old-fashioned zoning codes are to blame. Although I often praise the city's planners for devising a variety of urban codes in the past 10 or 15 years (MUDD, PED, TOD, etc.) those standards apply only to property that holds that zoning. If your property has the older, suburban-style business zoning (B-1 or B-2) you can build suburbia with no trouble from the city. You're virtually required to, in fact, because of the required setbacks and buffers. You have an economic incentive as well, because going through a rezoning costs money. Keeping your old zoning doesn't.

Plenty of other examples abound along Central Avenue. Small owners, small buildings, and old zoning codes add up to lost opportunities for small retrofitting steps over time.

If you're one of the hundreds of people deeply wishing to see a Central Avenue revitalization, you should push the city to change its B-1 zoning standards. I'm getting tired of visionary plans that don't address this issue. Central Avenue still looks like bedraggled suburbia because the underlying rules that govern building designs haven't changed under the old zoning that exists along Central Avenue. To change the way things look, change the rules that govern how things look.

(UPDATE as of 7:30 p.m.: Got an e-mail this afternoon that said the city had adopted a PED overlay for Central Avenue. If that's the case it would do exactly what I'm hoping for -- require more urban-style development. But I can't find it listed on the planning department's web page. Doesn't mean it didn't happen, but means I can't, tonight, confirm or deny it.)

And before you go off about how the city shouldn't set design standards, let me just open your eyes to the reality that B-1 zoning, which requires deep setbacks, is less favorable to property owners than a zoning that would allow them to build closer to the property line and cover more of the land with buildings and less with setbacks and buffers. If you're required to keep 35 feet of property vacant in front, you can't build as much income-producing square-footage as if you're required to keep only 15 feet of property vacant in front. I'm not proposing ADDING a lot of design controls, only altering the ones that already exist.

Any hope for '60s suburbia?

Excellent question at the end of the previous comment string, from "Tom" from Nashville.

"Suggestion for your next blog topic: Is it possible to "retrofit" a suburb, particularly the middle-ring suburbs that are struggling, to be more connected and urban? Can a '60s-style neighborhood be made to behave like a '30s-style neighborhood?"

You won't be surprised to hear I have thoughts. But this afternoon I have other tasks. So I'll toss out the question and let others take it on. Maybe Dan Burden of Walkable Communities Inc., can weigh in, or someone from the Congress for the New Urbanism, or some developer/designer who's done a retrofit project and can talk about how it went.

See you later.

Walkable rating - We're not last!

Walkscore.com, a cool site I plugged a year ago, looked at 2,508 neighborhoods in 40 cities. Charlotte didn't do too well. That's a euphemism. Charlotte was in the basement: No. 38 out of 40. (Cherry, Fourth Ward and Downtown Charlotte were rated our most walkable neighborhoods.)

The site measures walkability with a walkability checklist which assesses stuff such as whether a neighborhood has a discernible center, mixed-use development, sidewalks, traffic that doesn't go too fast, narrow streets (calmer traffic), parks and public spaces, etc. The software used for measuring is based on Google maps, U.S. Census data, Zillow neighborhood boundaries and Yellow Page information, and it assigns values to locations such as schools, workplaces, supermarkets, parks and public spaces based on how near they are to an address. (Based on some comments I saw elsewhere, the software has some glitches.)

USA Today had a piece on the list, noting the bottom three: Charlotte, Nashville and Jacksonville, and the Huffington Post had a short blurb on the Bottom 10 as well.

Why is Charlotte so un-walkable? It's hard to find just one villain; there are several. The part of the city built before World War II (as in Cherry, Fourth Ward, and downtown) is much more pedestrian-friendly. After WWII, traffic engineers and planners embraced some theories, based on the ideals of Modernist architects such as Le Corbusier, that have proven to be ill-suited for urban life. The federal government was in thrall to the automakers and began subsidizing auto travel with vast new highways while shrinking subsidies and passing laws that hurt rail transportation.

Single-use zoning was considered modern and progressive -- yet another reason not to let yourself be blinded by an idea just because it's labeled "progressive." The traffic engineering profession promoted neighborhood layouts that didn't have connecting streets.

In addition, elected leaders in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County rarely did anything that developers didn't like, such as require sidewalks to be built or require subdivisions with lots of connecting streets, or require subdivisions to connect to the subdivision next door. Neighborhood activists fought street connections -- witness the silly closure of East Kingston in Dilworth. After all, if you live on a street that doesn't connect you understandably prefer the lack of traffic to what you'd have with through streets. Private comfort for a few trumped street networks that would have benefited the greater community.

The city's transportation department in recent years has pushed admirably for more pedestrian amenities, and it's making progress, although the rate is slow. Retrofitting the mistakes of 50 years will take money and time -- lots of it.

The candy bar approach to city planning

Thank you, anonymous commenter from 5:20 p.m. Tuesday. I am not against density or height. I am against height in the wrong place. You can make a case that next door to the Arlington is an appropriate spot for density, and I won't get in your face about it, although I think the proximity to the Dilworth Historic District makes it problematic, for reasons I've mentioned before. Overall, I tend to agree with Charleston Mayor Joe Riley, who says that six five-story buildings are better than one 30-story building.

But here's the crux of my objections to the South End rezoning: The whole point of a small station area plan is to plan what heights and densities are appropriate on which spots. If the planners who wrote the South End Station Area Plan and the City Council who adopted it in 2005 believed that site was appropriate for buildings twice the height of the rest of the area's height limit, why not have the plan say that? Why limit the appropriate height there, in the plan, to 120 feet? Those kinds of issues are precisely why your tax money pays for planners and why your elected representatives adopt small area plans.

Why even bother with any plan if it's routinely disregarded?

It reminds me of taking a kid to the grocery store. You say before you go, "I'm not buying you candy in the check-out line." If you then buy the kid a Snickers in the check-out line, that kid will cry for candy on every visit to the store for the next 20 years. And you will have undermined any credibility your authority might have had.

One last thing, responding to a commenter on the post about the Piedmont Town Center project: I LOVE Filene's Basement. Offer one of those up and I'll be out there with my chainsaw. (Joke, people, joke.)

South End tower wins swift OK

Reporting live, from City Council:
(See previous post, also from council meeting, about a first -- a developer urging council to reject his own rezoning petition.)

The City Council launched the vote-on-rezonings part of its meeting at roughly 6:25 p.m. By 6:39 p.m. it had finished its rezoning decisions. They ripped through 18 rezonings, all except one of them approved unanimously with no discussion on any, except for about 30 seconds on the one that was approved 7-2 (for a day care center at The Plaza and Barrington Drive).

That proposal to allow a 250-foot high-rise tower in South End? The one that was in violation of the South End Transit Station Area Plan, which set a 120-foot height maximum? I didn't have a stopwatch, so I couldn't tell you whether it was 5 seconds or 10, but there was no discussion, nothing. Unanimous approval, and on to the next agenda item.

Sure, the council's rezoning meetings can drag. The public hearing part of the meeting tends to bring out developers and neighborhood opponents. It's 7:34 p.m. and they're just on No. 6 in a 15-item public hearing agenda. And council member Michael Barnes just pointed out that there have been numerous violations of the Northeast District Plan in recent years. So why didn't he -- or anyone else -- think it was worth maybe a little public discussion about why they were violating the South End station area plan, adopted in 2005?

Maybe there were good reasons. Maybe the 120-foot maximum height limit adopted as part of the Transit Station Area Principles isn't a good idea after all. You, the voting public, have no way to know why the council members decided to treat their own adopted plans as virtually irrelevant.

They're on auto-pilot. The biggest issue facing the city for decades has been growth and how to deal with it and pay for its impacts. You'd like to think your elected officials are thoughtfully debating the pros and cons of different growth proposals. Guess what. I'm watching them tonight, and it's pretty hard not to conclude they've abdicated that responsibility.

Developer wants own project nixed

Reporting live from City Council:

This has got to be a first. Bailey Patrick, the dean of local developers' lobbyists, just got up and urged the City Council to vote against his own rezoning petition.

It's a rezoning proposal from Crescent Resources, a subsidiary of Duke Energy, which wanted to change its plans, approved in 2005, for the Piedmont Town Center development near SouthPark. They wanted to change approvals for retail and office space into residential space.

The planning staff opposed it. Neighbors opposed it and signed a protest petition against it which means it would need a super-majority vote from the City Council.

The proposal would have wiped out a stand of immense old trees. During the 2004 rezoning -- after some publicity from yours truly -- the developer agreed to leave a large wooded buffer, giving the trees a reprieve. I visited those trees -- immense white oaks along a small stream. The new development would have cut them all down to form a retention pond along the creek.

The real crime here is that it would have been perfectly legal. If you think the city's tree ordinance protects trees, may I suggest you probably also believe that the U.S. found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11.

It appears Crescent decided to cut its losses. Council member Andy Dulin, generally a good friend to developers, made a motion to deny the petition even before the public hearing opened. Which would have been illegal. "I gotta have a public hearing," Mayor Pat McCrory reminded him.

At which point Bailey Patrick got up and urged the council to reject the rezoning. His client, Crescent, would have withdrawn it, he said, but because the protest petition wasn't withdrawn it couldn't legally do that.

Surely it was a first. I happened to be sitting next to 23-year Keith MacVean -- who has, as the joke goes, gone to the dark side and now works for developers (one of his new clients made that joke so I figure it's OK) -- who couldn't remember it happening before.

He also confirmed that the rejection by council means the developer can't come back with another proposal for two years -- unless it seeks a more intense zoning, such as UMUD.

At 9:27 p.m., after hearing a negative recommendation from the zoning committee of the planning commission, which met quickly after the regular council meeting, the council did as Patrick asked -- they voted down the rezoning.

When property rights hurt markets

This may be like throwing gasoline onto a fire, but here goes. Because I'm busy today writing a column for Saturday's Observer -- which I hope you'll read at www.charlotte.com/opinion -- I'll toss out some red meat to the libertarians and free-marketeers among you. Check this book review from Slate.com about "Gridlock Economy," by Michael Heller, an academic who studies property theory. The subtitle: "How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives."

Heller argues, says reviewer Tim Wu, that creating too many property rights can actually wreck markets. Wu then critiques both the book and Weller's thesis, but concludes that even though it has some flaws it's one of those concepts that helps you see the world in a different way. The idea is that too many property owners means there are too many stakeholders and that can impede the functioning of the marketplace. As Wu puts it, "The basic idea that too many stakeholders can kill a project is well-known to anyone who has ever worked on a committee or spent 15 minutes in Washington, D.C."

Read before you rant. And please recognize that just because I link to an article I find interesting, it doesn't mean I necessarily agree with everything in it. It usually means I'm working on my full-time job as an editorial writer and oped columnist and don't have time for lots of blogging. Full disclosure: I haven't read the book and until today had never heard of Michael A. Heller.

Waning faith in the free market

In the category of things found while looking up other things, here's an interesting front-page piece in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times, "Americans may be losing faith in free markets."

The writer, Peter G. Gosselin, quotes several experts, including Kevin Hassett, at the American Enterprise Institute.

William Galston of the Brookings Institution in Washington says, "We're at a hinge point. The strong presumption in favor of markets, which has dominated public policy since the late 1970s, has been thrown very much into question."

Even the American Enterprise Institute's Hassett concurs in the existence of the backlash. "There may be a backlash against markets at the moment," he says, though he goes on to say he doesn't see any alternative view of how things should work.

They cite the convergence of issues: a housing meltdown that resulted from an unregulated corner of the mortgage market (high-risk loans), the price of gasoline (generally blamed on the laws of supply and demand and oil market speculation), disappearing U.S. jobs and worries about retirement investing based on the assumption the stock market will always rise.

"We're [he means Americans] not ready to throw out markets altogether," says economist Robert E. Litan of the Brookings Institution and the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, Mo., "but we want government to do something about the excess.

Optimistic about Charlotte pessimism

(Note: Reworked as of 1:58 p.m. to more clearly reflect Peres' remarks.)

This has to be a quick post, as I'm buried in other matters today.

I caught up with Mark Peres yesterday. Peres is the founder/editor/publisher of Charlotte Viewpoint, a nonprofit online magazine that aims to offer intellectual discourse about Charlotte, especially center city.

"I'm optimistic about the current pessimism," Peres said. (Or words to that effect. I wasn't taking notes.) Um, why? Because, said Peres, maybe the current pessimistic scenarios -- including but not limited to Wachovia's problems, although like most of us he doesn't wish more harm to befall one of the city's two Big Banks -- might tamp down on speculation and "get us back to more sound management principles."

Interesting point. But is there really any pessimism around here? Charlotte's relentless optimism, or some might say boosterism, is as deeply rooted and unquenchable as kudzu.

So feel free to start commenting on optimism/pessimism/boosterism or even kudzu. (I remember reading about one farmer who kept his cattle alive during a horrible drought when he learned they'd eat kudzu.)

Finally, feel free to keep jawing to one another about NoDa, as the comments are fun. But warning: I'm deleting comments that insult others or use words I decide are outside the bounds of polite discourse.

Why razing NoDa really isn't a good idea

Plenty of you disagreed with my previous analysis of the threat to NoDa from the transit-oriented development. Many people said, in essence, it's dump, tear it town. I predict you'll get your wish within the next 10 to 15 years.

Those of you enthralled with all-new development that wipes away anything that was there before seem to think it's about nostalgia. It isn't. It's about entrepreneurs and small businesses, the very basic elements that build a local economy.

New buildings have expensive rents. Old buildings have cheaper rent. Old buildings breed entrepreneurs. It's not the architecture, it's the price of the space.

As urbanist writer Jane Jacobs put it, "Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. ... If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. ... New ideas must use old buildings."

In addition, companies that lend money to developers to finance new developments typically require that the space be leased to "proven" retailers, in other words, chains. That's why you don't see small, local businesses going into new buildings. Starbucks is welcome. Smelly Cat Coffeehouse isn't.

Transit's threat to NoDa

How to route the to-be-built northeast light rail line? CATS officials are pondering that question. Read about it in this story from Sunday's Observer, from The City section. If you want a public voice, there's a hearing Tuesday 6-8 p.m. in the fellowship hall at Sugaw (not Sugar) Creek Presbyterian Church, at North Tryon Street and Sugar Creek Road.

I was hoping CATS would route the northeast corridor up North Tryon Street instead of the railroad corridor that parallels North Davidson Street. Apparently that's not to be, at least between uptown and NoDa. CATS is still considering whether to put a section of the line along North Tryon between Sugar Creek Road and Eastway Drive. North of Eastway, the route follows North Tryon Street.

I'm very worried about the NoDa business district being beset by the same forces that are hitting South End and threatening the Dilworth historic district and its bungalows. Except the NoDa retail area is closer to the rail line than much of Dilworth, and NoDa's business district has a better preserved "Main Street"-type feel to it than anything that was in Dilworth. That's all at huge risk, because the Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) zoning that applies to transit station areas allows high-rise buildings of up to 120 feet -- or higher if your developer asks for an exemption.

The way land values work, if zoning allows high rise buildings on your land and there's a strong economic market, eventually you're likely to have high rises there. Say so long to the Center of the Earth Gallery building, the Evening Muse building, the Neighborhood Theatre building, and say hello to more brutalist modern towers like the reviled, pink Arlington.

Even more threatening to NoDa is that it lacks even the protection Dilworth has as a historic district. NoDa isn't a local historic district, which requires new development to blend in with the old. Being a historic district hasn't prevented the bulldozing of some bungalows or the ballooning of others into wannabe McMansions twice the size of the original house. But it's much better than no protection at all.

If NoDa's main street were to avoid TOD zoning because the rail stop was put up on North Tryon, then you wouldn't have those sky high, I-can-build-a-tower land values wreaking quite as much havoc on NoDa's business district. The super-intense development would instead be a half mile north on North Tryon Street, which heaven knows could use TOD's better urban design rules as well as stronger economic sizzle. Some South End-style development there would be a very good thing.

In the middle of NoDa, those transit-oriented high-rise buildings would merely kill the special place that has grown up naturally along North Davidson and 36th streets.

One solution would be for the city to craft a more historic-preservation option for TOD, capping heights at three or four stories. Sadly, given the grip developers have on the development-loving city officials, that's about as likely to happen as I am to be picked as the vice presidential candidate for John McCain or Barack Obama.

A contrarian look at lane-merging

OK, here's the piece I promised, about lane merging. Note: I don't do this, because the social opprobrium would be overwhelming.

The situation I'm talking about isn't merging onto freeways. (On freeways, one should whenever possible change lanes or slow down to allow the merging vehicle onto the highway. ) I'm talking about when there's an unexpected obstruction in one lane of a multi-lane road or street, such as a stalled car, a moving van or construction.

Just for a minute, think of this situation as a traffic engineer might, viewing the pavement in each lane as "vehicle storage space." If something up ahead is causing traffic to stop or slow dramatically, why should all the vehicles line up in one lane only? That just backs the tie-up even farther down the street. If both lanes were used, with each vehicle fairly and equitably alternating merging, once the obstruction was reached, it would cut in half the length of the clog on the street.

In reality, though, as so many previous comments have shown, people don't act the way engineers view the world. We use our driving as a status quest. People want to be the cutters-off, not the cuttee. They think people who try to cut in front are greedy and ill-mannered. Sometimes, especially when the only vehicle zooming to the head of the formerly empty lane is a gas- and space-hogging Hummer, they are probably right.

Second, this is nothing I thought up in Boston. I noticed it some years back here in Charlotte. In Boston, in such a situation what they do is honk their horns. This is both useless and nuts. I mean, do they think the stalled car will, Lazarus-like, revive itself, or the moving van will decide to go away and come back at midnight, if only it hears some beeping horns?

Do cut in line while merging. Please!

Stay tuned to this space, and tomorrow or the next day I'll explain why, contrary to what most drivers think, it really isn't rude when -- seeing a merge coming up -- you drive all the way to the front of the empty lane instead of hanging in the long, long line in the other lane.

Not that I would do this, mind you. I don't want to get shot by some road raging nut. I'll explain more later. Today column-writing for Saturday Viewpoint page comes first. In the meantime, some interesting reading to keep you busy:

The end of suburbia? Joel Kotkin says (in the L.A. Times) "not yet." Link.

Kotkin's responding, in part, to an article in the March Atlantic magazine, that created a lot of buzz, from Christopher Leinberger, positing that McMansion suburbs will become the next slums. Link.

Now, here's a critique of Kotkin's piece, by Bill Fulton of the California Planning & Development Report. Link.

This month's Atlantic has an interesting and provocative piece on crime in Memphis, with a mention of Charlotte, pegging the rise in crime in suburban areas to the rise in Section 8 housing vouchers and the demolition of old-line housing projects. Link.

Interesting developments in Sacramento, chronicled by the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ tells how the six-county Sacramento region agreed on a plan for growth -- including that some areas simply wouldn't allow development -- and is making it happen. Link.

Here's Witold Rybczynski on the legacy of Buckminster Fuller. Link.

Also, a piece from former Maryland governor Parris Glendenning saying Americans are tired of feeling like victims. Link.

And finally, here's something you're unlikely to see out of Charlotte-Mecklenburg: "The county board of supervisors in Loudoun County, Va., has voted to ban itself from accepting any campaign contributions from developers or builders." Link.

Mean drivers? Charlotte tops Boston

As many of you know, I've just spent 10 months in Cambridge, Mass., generally considered part of the Boston metro area, since Harvard Square is closer to Boston's Fenway Park than SouthPark is to downtown Charlotte. "Boston drivers" have a fearsome reputation nationwide for inappropriate, even insane behavior as well as ripe invective and insults.

I did some driving in Boston, and a lot of driving in Cambridge. My conclusion: Boston drivers are nicer than those in Charlotte. Now I'm back in the city where, if you need to change lanes, no one will let you in.

In Boston, those supposedly demented and reckless drivers routinely let other cars merge in front of them. In Charlotte they act as if you're trying to steal their birthright.

Years ago we vacationed in Boston and New England in a rented car and, because my husband had injured his arm, I did all the driving for two weeks. Yes, those New England rotaries are hair-raising. Yes, the lanes are poorly marked, and people treat lane markings as mere suggestions, anyway. But when you need to change lanes they let you. I remember getting back to Charlotte, zipping down Providence Road, turning on my signal and starting to merge into another lane. The SUV on my left flank sped up to ensure that I couldn't. So did the SUV behind it. I knew I was back home again.

For the past year every time I needed to turn left, the Cambridge traffic would stop to allow it. No surly looks. No speeding up out of spite. This morning I sat behind a garbage truck on Providence Road, near Christ Church, hoping to change lanes, left-turn blinker a-blinking, as the left-lane cars streamed past. And streamed. And streamed. One car hung back, looking as if it was letting me in. I began to edge over and the driver sped up, just to ensure that I didn't get ahead of it. Welcome home.

Building codes: Back to the future

Three cheers for Jim Bartl.

Ever heard of him? If you're a builder you probably have. Bartl is code enforcement director for the county's Land Use and Environmental Services Agency. He's been working for years, slowly and deliberately, to get the county's and more significantly, the state's building codes -- which dictate the county's -- to be more flexible and to recognize changes in the way developers and planners want to build projects.

It's because of Bartl that North Carolina adopted a rehab code for older buildings, so owners of older buildings no longer have the devil-or-the-deep-blue-sea choice of either spending a fortune to bring old buildings up to modern codes, or to tear down and build new.

Now, the codes are changing for live-work units. A live-work is a place where you can live AND have a business. A century or more ago, this was common and perfectly legal to build. You could open a business and live above it. The jargon is "vertically integrated." It's an urban form dating at least to the ancient Roman empire. But those buildings have been hard to build legally in places such as North Carolina, where codes were written as though everyone would build only new, suburban-style, single-use-zoning developments. Even when zoning allowed them, as in Cornelius, the building codes made it difficult to build economically and created odd rules about which floor you had to live on, and work on.

Bartl knows that traditional neighborhood development, or transit-oriented development, or whatever you want to call it, needs codes that allow such live-work spaces.

"Until now," writes Bartl in a memo, "there was no provision for any use other than residential in the IRC [International Residential Code]. Since live-work units mix in a commercial use (the “work area”), they were driven out of the IRC, into the International Building Code (IBC). This incurred an increase in code-related construction requirements (use separation, construction type, egress, fire prevention) far in excess of any low risk hazard present in the work function. The added requirements drove the construction costs up, and inevitably drove the units out of the affordable housing range."

Finally, last year, he reports, the International Code Council Final Action Hearings approved a live-work code change to both the IBC and IRC. The change will be incorporated in the 2009 IRC and IBC, and likely will be available in North Carolina in a few years. Until the, he states, the county department will accept residential project live-work proposals, using the ICC-approved live-work code.

Note: If you're planning to build something based on this blog posting, please contact Bartl or his department for the fine-print rules that I have probably oversimplified here.

The Pantheon Project: What If Charlotte...?

Scrolling the e-mail inbox, I found this invitation for free gelato on Tuesday, as well as an hour of imagining what could be ....

The Civic By Design forum -- a monthly discussion group about urban matters -- on Tuesday evening is offering free gelato, purchased from Dolce, with its July forum: " The Pantheon Project: What If Charlotte ... "

Consider the Pantheon in Rome, a 2,000-year-old building that remains an architectural marvel, and a transcendent place to experience:



When: The event will be Tuesday (July 8), 5:30-6:30 p.m. at the Levine Museum of the New South, 200 E. Seventh Street (Free parking at Seventh Street Station parking deck).
What: Imagine some of the world's best urban places were suddenly placed in today's uninspiring locations all around Charlotte. Local planner Blair Israel came up with a great location, and Tom Low's recent visit to Rome inspired an idea. What if the Pantheon -- including its surrounding piazza with fountain, teeming neighborhood of stores, gelato bars, churches, businesses, homes, etc. -- were to rise out of the pavement at Kings Drive and Morehead Street, where the Little Sugar Creek Greenway is being developed.

How would you transform that spot into a civic destination so compelling that people would flock there from all over and it would become a gathering spot for centuries?

Bonus: RSVP by today to brenda@dpz.com and you'll get gelato at the event. (Or maybe even if you don't RSVP).

For a map and 360-degree view of the site, go to this link.

Money's in driver's seat in NYC

People's pocketbooks and wallets drive behavior. Remember the idea New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed, modeled on a program in London? If you drive your car into the most congested areas of Manhattan, you have to pay a daily fee. The revenue would go toward improving public transit services.

The idea collapsed this spring in the New York state legislature. Now, reports the New York Times, $4-a-gallon gas is accomplishing some of the same goals anyway. One big difference, of course, is that high gas prices are reducing traffic everywhere, not just in the most congested areas. And there's no extra revenue for public transit.

Meanwhile in London, where congestion-pricing godfather Ken Livingstone lost his re-election for mayor, new mayor Boris Johnson, a Conservative, is looking again at the the most recent congestion-pricing zone extension in the western part of the city and says he doesn't want any more extensions.

"I am not going to be having any more congestion charges," he was quoted as saying in The Guardian. "What I am determined to make happen is a modal shift towards bicycling and walking, not just in inner London but also in outer London."

The program overall has been popular with Londoners, who saw congestion diminish and liked what they saw. The betting -- from one of Livingstone's deputy mayors whom I met in Cambridge -- is that it's so popular that even the conservative Johnson won't scrap the whole program. And note that, unlike so many of the more conservative pols in the U.S., even Tory Johnson wants more people walking and bicycling.

Charlotte's crickets get worldwide attention

The Christian Science Monitor looks at the effects of foreclosures across the country, mentioning our Queen City insects along the way:

"From Atlanta's urban core to leafy neighborhoods filled with chirping crickets in Charlotte, N.C., some 2.2 million homes are expected to go through foreclosure – and stand empty – by the time the mortgage meltdown ends, according to Global Insight, an economic research firm."

Housing expert Bruce Katz of the Brookings Institution compares the foreclosure crisis to a lot of mini-Katrinas slamming cities all over the country.

The article focuses on Atlanta, and then lists a variety of mechanisms being used in cities to help homeowners. No further mention of Charlotte, or its crickets.

What's new? Take a walk, and take a ride

First, however, whoever made the comment on the previous thread about New York City buses was making a perfectly legitimate point, until he/she added at the end: "Idiot." Make your points, stow the insults. Now the whole comment is gone. I'm cracking down on incivility. Too many readers have told me: "I'd like to comment, but I'm afraid of the attacks from the mean readers."

Last week I took a walk from the Observer building at 600 South Tryon up to The Square to see what's new. I noted the site of the historic Jack Wood store is STILL undeveloped. Two very nice historic Tryon storefronts, plus a small-scale collection of historic buildings known as Film Row on Church Street, were torn down in 1998. Because of some clumsy computer stuff I can't link here to a couple of columns I wrote at the time, but the words "civic vandalism" were used.

Notice, that was 10 YEARS AGO! What's there now? A surface parking lot, and a fancy-schmancy sign. In other words, developers haven't yet succeeded in putting together a buildable project there. For a full decade Tryon Street has been deprived of some graceful storefronts it could badly need.

Reminds me, again, how lame Charlotte's development laws are at protecting older buildings. Those buildings should never have been demolished until building permits were in place for what was to replace them, or at a minimum until a developer got the replacement project rezoned.

Other cities' politicians have spines, or even a moderate interest, in protecting historic buildings. Charlotte's elected officials don't seem to care. Nor have city planners proposed much of anything to strengthen the situation, unless that happened in the past 10 months. If they did, someone please let me know.

Another huge change: I took the bus to work today. It was so full people were standing. A nice young man even got up to offer me his seat! This is a huge turnaround from even a year ago. I know $4-a-gallon gas hurts many people's budgets and is a drag on the economy, but it's also a good way to get people to change transportation habits -- and that's a real important tool in the fight against global climate change. After a year using Boston's excellent public transportation system I know I'll be using CATS a lot more.

NCDOT's excessive affections

Luckily for my kitchen I didn't have food or coffee in my mouth when I read the complaint below from an attorney for the N.C. Outdoor Advertising Association (a.k.a. the billboard lobby), about North Carolina's Department of Transportation.

First, the backstory. The billboard industry wants to be able to legally cut more trees in front of billboards, so that you, the motoring public, can better view those ads. (You might say it's as if your friendly local newspaper wanted permission to kill more housecats if they have the nerve to jump into your lap and obscure your views of the Queen City TV ads. In other words, if a billboard's in a bad place, remove it or charge less for it.) Current state rules say billboard owners can clear trees and shrubs from 250 feet in front of signs. The industry wants to raise that to 375 feet. So far, the bill hasn't passed the N.C. House.

Further, there's a spat between the billboard lobby and NCDOT. Note that word "legally" above. Upon occasion, trees are illegally cut in front of billboards. The NCDOT releases an "illegal cutting inventory," that lists the names of billlboard owners and businesses where the trees were cut. The billboard lobby wants the list to include only the mile markers, no names.

The names on that list, billboard industry lawyer Betty Waller of Cary wrote, may prejudice the public against the billboard owners, by implying they're engaged in criminal conduct.

"Unfortunately, NCDOT has demonstrated an unyielding preference for vegetation, and has been unwilling to adopt a vegetation policy equally accommodating to commerce,” she wrote.

I don't say this often, so pay attention: Hooray for the DOT, for its "unyielding preference for vegetation," in this instance.

Read the full story here. Or turn to page 2B of today's Observer.

And I'll leave you with some verse by the inimitable Ogden Nash:

"I think that I shall never see
a billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall
I’ll never see a tree at all."

Is Cali-fornication headed our way?

As it happens, Bill Fulton, to whose article I linked yesterday, was in North Carolina last month at a policy wonk gathering in Greensboro, sponsored by the Institute for Emerging Issues at N.C. State, where the topic was dealing with strains on the state's infrastructure due to growth.

In a piece he wrote afterward about North Carolina, "Is More Growth Bad For The 'Good Growth' State?" Fulton says, "The wonks are gingerly beginning to address the question of whether growth should be managed."

Fulton also spoke at the conference, as an out-of-state expert, saying North Carolina and other parts of the Southeast have the nation's most wasteful and costly patterns of development.

In his article, he writes, "As a Californian, I was struck by how similar the situation in North Carolina today is to what we in California experienced during the postwar boom."

The biggest problem in North Carolina now, he suggests, is the growing divide between urban North Carolina and rural North Carolina.

Fulton is publisher of the California Planning & Development Report, whose web site says it's the only independent publication in the nation covering planning and development issues in a single state.

A different kind of bull - - - - - - for Charlotte

Things learned while looking up other things:

You'd think the state legislatures of North and South Carolina had covered just about every state symbol possible. We have the N.C. state mammal (grey squirrel), the N.C. state reptile (Eastern box turtle), the N.C. state vegetable (sweet potato, although you can insert political joke here about various not-very-energetic elected officials). South Carolina has a comparable list, including the S.C. state snack food (boiled peanuts). Want to know more? Click here.

But we lack a state soil. Turns out a number of other states have adopted state soils. Examples: Illinois — Drummer silty clay loam. Massachusetts -- Paxton soil series. Kentucky -- Crider soil series. Florida -- Myakka fine sand.

North Carolina has a variety of regionally distinct soils. I don't know the scientific names for them, but the flat sandy expanses of Eastern North Carolina are not the same as the thick red clay of the Piedmont. And smack between them lies the Sandhills, which is of course white sandy soil.

But let me propose, if not a state soil, then an official Charlotte soil: Bull tallow.

Ever heard of it? Welcome to my world, or at least, my garden. It’s a thick, yellow-gray clay with, near as I can tell, no plant-supporting properties whatsoever. Red clay soil is heavy, but put some compost and humus in it and it will grow all kinds of wonderful things. Not so bull tallow.

A bit of online research I did seemed to point to bull tallow being a folk name for kaolin, a clay used for pottery and ceramics. Hmmm. But here's why I nominate bull tallow: You really shouldn't build on it, because it expands and contracts dramatically when wet or dry, making the land unstable. So, um, why again have so many houses around Charlotte, and in Union County as well, been built on it? (I've even heard it called the Foxcroft bull tallow.) Guess some developers just wanted to make a little money, and the specter of perpetually cracking home foundations for decades to come wasn't really their concern.

Which, of course, makes it quintessentially “Charlotte.”

About that two-hour commute ...

OK, I should have left the office by now, but instead I peeked at my ever-welcome Planetizen.com automatic e-mail of interesting growth-related stories. This one -- Why the 2-Hour Commute Is A Public Policy Success" -- leaped out as being pertinent to the How Far Will They Drive discussion. It's from a California Planning and Development report, a blogger named Bill Fulton.

You mean, driving costs THIS much?

You knew it would happen, and it is.

"Suddenly, the economics of American suburban life are under assault as skyrocketing energy prices inflate the costs of reaching, heating and cooling homes on the distant edges of metropolitan areas," reports Peter Goodman of the New York Times. See Fuel Prices Shift Math for Life in the Far Suburbs"

I've written about this before, but a lot of people buy houses without really calculating the cost of their transportation to and from work, shopping, schools, etc. So that house in the far reaches of an urban area may cost a lot less, but when you have to drive 30 or 40 miles to work, your living expenses can be more expensive than you had figured. And guess what? Bigger houses also cost more to heat and to air-condition.

Goodman reports: "In Atlanta, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Minneapolis, homes beyond the urban core have been falling in value faster than those within, according to an analysis by Moody’s Economy.com."

Some planner-pundit types are now hyping the end of the suburbs, based on reports of this sort. Consider this essay in the Washington Post.

I think that's extreme. But it seems obvious that many more people are going to be discovering the allure of living closer to the city -- or even in the city -- because of high fuel prices.

Newspapers and their future

Here's that link I mentioned to a paper presented at a conference last week at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

To add some facts to the comments: Newspaper circulation has been declining yearly for several decades. What's causing the financial trauma isn't circulation, though of course rising circulation is better than declining. Some of the circulation declines at many papers, such as the Observer, come from their choosing to eliminate delivery by truck and carrier to distant places, including Raleigh. But subscription revenue is a small percentage of newspaper revenue. That's why papers conclude it's more cost-effective not to deliver to far-away places.

The overwhelming bulk of revenue is from advertising. In the past, at most papers around the country up to 30 percent of that revenue, or more, has been from classified ads. That's why the migration of classified ad revenue to online has been such a blow.

Last year, U.S. newspapers averaged a 17 percent profit margin. The Observer remains quite profitable. Last year, nationally, only about 11 percent of newspapers' ad revenue came from online ads. Online readership is growing, and online ad revenue is growing.

No, I meant tell me something I DON'T know

Here's a remark from a reader who must have an RSS feed or something on The Naked City, because the comment came only minutes after I posted it late last night.

The real news is that the Charlotte Observer and Charlotte.com are continuing their slide into total irrelevancy. Hope you didn't come back here expecting your job to be around for a long time. 6/24/2008 12:38:00 AM

Well, now, thanks for reading, but I'm pretty well up to speed on conditions at the Observer. (If it's so irrelevant why read this?) I'm fully aware the Observer isn't perfect. And the layoffs have hurt everyone, even those of us who keep our jobs, because of the emotional trauma and damage to the newsroom's staffing levels.

But is there any other source of news about Charlotte and environs that is substantially better, in terms of breadth, depth and scope?

The financial problems the Observer and other newspapers face are caused essentially by a huge dropoff in classified advertising. Welcome to Craigslist world. If you count daily circulation and online, readership is up for the Observer and many other papers.

I just read an academic paper on the topic of newspapers, that provides some facts that run counter to the prevailing word-of-mouth stuff I've been reading. If I can dig up the link, I'll post it here. Later. Got to unpack and run errands.

Back in the Naked City

Rolled into town at dusk, after two days on the highway from The People's Republic of Cambridge. Was it a good year? One of the best in my life. I'll miss a lot about Cambridge and the Boston area -- but more about that later.

I'll be back at work at week's end, though likely digging through stacks of old mail, and then -- way to make someone feel glad about being back at work after 10 months! -- I get to go to computer classes next week because the Observer has a new pagination-editing system and I'm expected to understand how to use it. Go figure!

So watch this space, but don't get too worried if my postings are catch-as-catch-can.

Until then, what have I missed?

I've been reading charlotte.com, of course, and talking to friends and work colleagues. I know the light rail has been carrying scads of people and the park and ride lots are jammed. I know about those water mains, and that Mayor Pat's running for the Governor's Mansion in Raleigh.

But what's the REAL NEWS? Help me get up to speed, friends.

Heading North

Family and friends, if you'd like to read occasional dispatches from Cambridge you may visit my personal blog, Heading North, at marynewsom.livejournal.com. I'll try to update it every few days or at least weekly.

But if you're seeking punditry, or opinions on topics in the news, you should look elsewhere until my return next July.

Have a great year in The Naked City!

What's your own 'Walk Score'?

Some of you already know this, but at the end of this week I'll have to close down The Naked City for a year, while I take part in a fellowship program for midcareer journalists at Harvard, called a Nieman Fellowship.

It's a wonderful opportunity for me and my family: I can take any courses I want to at Harvard. But I'm not allowed to do any professional work. (Throw me into that briar patch!) That means no Naked City. Sorry, folks. Maybe you can convince Ed Williams to start a blog or something. (And for you conspiracy theorists, I applied for the fellowship last winter, long before I had ever heard of Lizardking or Edd Hauser ... )

My last posting will be tomorrow or Friday. Until then, here's a cool link my buddy Joe Sovacool showed me. This site rates the "Walk Score" of your neighborhood.

Example: "90-100 = Walkers' Paradise: Most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car." Or, "0-25 = Driving Only: Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!" My neighborhood rated a 35.

Warning: The site is slow, and earlier today it was having a spasm. Seems to work better on Firefox than IE. It isn't up-to-date. Told me I was only half a mile from Providence Hardware -- which closed in 2003. And I don't think it measures threatening dogs or places where poison ivy is growing too close to the sidewalk. Still, it's fun. Check out your own area's walk score.

The site's principles are based in part on those of Dan Burden, a consultant who's been to Charlotte several times to try to infuse the city DOT with info on pedestrian and bicycling needs.

Which 'burbs boomed?

If you want to keep arguing about transit, please do so, on the comment string from my previous post. This is about other topics.

Booming 'burbs: What's the country's fastest-growing suburb? Not Marvin. Not Fort Mill. See this Forbes magazine story for the answer, and for a list ranking suburbs by growth rate. (Want to skip Forbes' annoying full-screen ad before reading the article? Click on "Skip this welcome screen" in upper right corner.) The chart, ranking growth from 2000 to 2006, tallies Holly Springs at No. 18, and Wake Forest at No. 20. Both are in Wake County. You might say Holly Springs is a suburb of Fuquay-Varina ... Huntersville is No. 46, and Cornelius No. 51.

Back off, bulldozers: Salisbury, which takes more pride in its historic buildings than, say, Charlotte, on Tuesday will consider (but not vote on) an ordinance to require the City Council to issue a permit for any downtown demolition. Here's the Salisbury Post's article.

Hummer Houses in Hotlanta: Here's a link to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's article last month about a proposal to limit the size of large houses on small lots. (A Nexis search didn't find any follow-up articles.)

On the verge of importance? UNC Charlotte's Ken Lambla, dean of the College of Architecture, offers a thoughtful look at the role of art and architecture in this month's Charlotte Viewpoint. He starts, "We all know that Charlotte is on the verge of something big; the question that follows is whether we are on the verge of something important? After 24 years of teaching at UNC Charlotte and being involved in architectural and urban practices, I am convinced that we are just about ready to make a shift in substance."

Anti-sprawl in Greensboro: Read about an "un-sprawl" development in Greensboro, from terrain.org, "A Journal of the Built & Natural Environments." Here's a link. It's about Southside, one of that city's first significant mixed-use infill projects, and winner of an American Planning Association award in 2003 for Outstanding Planning: Implementation. The photo shows Southside infill housing (in yellow) and renovated housing.

Driving drives down volunteering: Long commutes have a negative effect on community volunteering, a new study finds. The study says four factors influence the rate at which a community's residents volunteer: (1) residents’ attachment to the community, (2) commuting times, (3) socioeconomic characteristics such as education levels, and (4) the capacity of a community’s nonprofit groups. The study found that volunteer rates in central cities are lower (24%) than in suburbs and rural areas, which rates (29%). Here's a link to the study. Charlotte ranked No. 9 nationally for volunteering, below Milwaukee and above Tulsa. Minneapolis-St. Paul ranked No. 1.

Naked City's back on track

At long last, I'm freed up from other duties to get back to Naked City topics. I've spent this past week researching topics such as impact fees and land transfer taxes. More on that in later posts.

First, to take the wind out of some conspiracy theorists' sails: I opted to start Potterblog about two weeks before the books came out because I thought it would offer fun online reading that no one else at Charlotte.com was going to do. I didn't plan it months in advance. I didn't do it to escape writing about that transit study. I did it because I thought it would be interesting (believe it or not, I have many interests) and give readers something they'd enjoy.

Second, although I do appreciate the devoted (if sometimes mean-spirited) commenters and readers of The Naked City, honesty compels me to reveal that Potterblog was far more popular, measured in page views. (Blog readership -- high or low -- doesn't affect my pay, by the way. And no, I don't measure the value of what I do by page views, otherwise I'd be opining about Brad Pitt and the NFL.)

But back to Naked City-land:

Yes, I goofed in making such a big deal of the UNCC transit study . Edd Hauser wasn't forthright in explaining its origins to me, and I took him at his word when I shouldn't have. However, a few mistakes in one apparently sloppily done rush-job research report do nothing to undermine the importance of having a good transit system here. It's just one study, for crying out loud.

Further, nothing in the somewhat obsessive reporting that's been devoted to the UNCC study indicates Hauser or anyone else cooked the results. Steve Harrison's analysis confirmed many of the study's findings. Of the mistakes, some made CATS look worse than it should have, others made CATS look better. To me that shows hasty and sloppy work, not intentional skewing.

The bottom line remains: Much statistical information you'll read about transit comes from people either stoutly for it or stoutly against it. They mine data charts for tidbits that support their views and ignore tidbits that don't support their views. I don't believe the UNCC study did that. Compared with much of what I see, especially from the anti-transit crowd, it was far more even-handed. (It's not sheer coincidence that the anti-light-rail John Locke and Reason Foundations hire anti-light-rail UNCC prof David Hartgen or other rail transit critics to do their transportation studies.)

Overall, finding dispassionate analysis is tough. Academic studies, as opposed to advocacy group studies, tend to be more even-handed. But academics often have views that affect what they study and how they approach it. That's true for many subjects, not just transportation.

Even people who aim for even-handed analysis face difficulties comparing one city's transportation experience with another's, because each city is unique. They differ in topography, financing, growth rates, growth patterns, land use rules and local culture.

Should Charlotte be compared with Atlanta, which until recent years didn't require transit-supportive development around MARTA stops? (Miami was the same.) Or with slow-growing Pittsburgh? Or Portland, which decided to support its transit system by capping the number of parking places downtown? Any comparison is, in its own, way, apples to oranges.

At bottom, the issue facing Mecklenburg County is whether the city needs a mass transit system funded with a half-cent sales tax, or not. Some people think it's a waste of money. I -- and many other people -- think it's fiscally irresponsible NOT to build one.