Citiwire.net

For Release Friday, June 14, 2013
Citiwire.net

You’d think I would have known better. After all, I’ve been writing about growth since before they called it Smart Growth, and I’m still writing about it now that it’s “resiliency,” or “sustainable growth” or whatever the next term is. I can’t count how many times I’ve explained that when you decide where you want urban growth to go, you must also decide where you don’t want it to go.

That’s why last week’s regional planning exercise was an eye-opener. I learned – or rather, learned again – some key lessons:

• Real life doesn’t always work the way you think it should.
• The general public doesn’t think nearly as much about these issues as we like to assume they do.

The exercise was RealityCheck2050, part of a multi-year, regional planning project called CONNECT Our Future that’s looking at the 14-county, two-state Charlotte region. RealityCheck, organized by the Charlotte chapter of the Urban Land Institute, hosted 400 people – among them some 30 elected officials.

We started by listening to speakers, including Ed McMahon of the Urban Land Institute (a Citistates associate), whose inspiring talk included this line – one I’ve heard so often I groaned: “Trying to cure congestion by building more lanes is like trying to cure obesity by lengthening your belt.”

Yet many in the audience laughed. People Tweeted it to their followers. Lesson No. 1: Sometimes city planner types forget other people are not immersed in this subject.

Then we began a game-like exercise at tables fitted out with Legos and a giant regional map. We were told that by 2050 the region of 2.4 million is expected to grow by 1.8 million and add 863,000 jobs. Each table had to stack hundreds of red and yellow Legos where we thought jobs and housing should go. We could mark out new transit lines with orange yarn, new highways with purple, and green spaces with green yarn.

The planning game used red and yellow Legos for new homes and jobs. But we forgot about green space until late in the game. Photo: Mary Newsom
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For Release Thursday, March 28, 2013
Citiwire.net

In January, Charlotte had 1.8 million people. Today it has 2.3 million people. And no, there was no airlift of half a million residents from the Rust Belt. How can a city gain a half-million people almost overnight? How can a metro area vault from No. 33 in population rankings to No. 23?

The answer lies in the way the U.S. government defines Metropolitan Statistical Areas. The two-state Charlotte MSA gained five counties and lost one, and in the recalibrating – effective in February – it grew by half a million people.

Does this even matter to anyone beyond Charlotte’s ever-zealous booster crowd? Consider two other things that happened this week.

The first: A New York Times article March 24, “The Mayor’s Geek Squad: A Group of Number Crunchers Analyzes Troves of Big Data to Try to Solve the City’s Problems,” highlighted how New York’s Office of Policy and Strategic Planning is using data from city departments to track such things as where restaurant scofflaws are letting grease clog sewer pipes, where stores are selling bootleg cigarettes and where fires are more likely to occur.
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For Release Thursday, December 6, 2012
Citiwire.net

It’s a common story around the Sun Belt: Rural hamlet near larger town blinks and finds it’s now a booming suburb in the orbit of a much larger, sprawling city. Years of attracting people looking for a small town and a private getaway have built a fabric of large lawns and scattered houses, and more lawns and more houses. Where does it go from here?

When I moved to Charlotte more than 30 years ago, Matthews was the suburb. It lay directly in the path of the major growth trajectory – southeast. The drive to central Charlotte was a reasonable 25-30 minutes. The cute, but miniature, downtown Matthews and a few surrounding blocks of turn-of-the-century houses gave a historic feel and sense of small-town identity to a place that, in fact, was accumulating mostly standard subdivisions and strip shopping centers.

Today, if you drive into the center of Matthews you come to the town’s historic main intersection. Look to the left up Trade Street and you’ll see a two-block long, walkable old downtown of small-scale storefront buildings and just beyond it, shops built along a new street leading to a new Town Hall, all built atop the carcass of a faded, 1978 strip center. A few blocks farther on, a mixed-use group of apartments and stores is going up atop a new street grid.
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For Release Friday, August 10, 2012
Citiwire.net

It was a hot night in a hot city the day after the hottest month ever recorded in the United States. By 7 the temperature had slid from the 90s to the high 80s, as I pulled up in front of a 1960s split-level on a half-acre lot in a vast subdivision of 2,450 single-family homes.

I was 7 miles from the heart of downtown — in Manhattan terms that’s roughly as far as Wall Street to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But this was not Manhattan. It was Charlotte.

Regardless of thermometers, this N.C. banking center has been hot for years now, as people streaming in from across the country and the globe made it one of the nation’s fastest-growing metros. They’re drawn by the image of a prospering city with jobs and reasonably priced homes, a place of shade trees and lawns. Next month the city arrives on the world stage as host of the Democratic National Convention.

Like its Sun Belt sisters — Atlanta, Orlando, Dallas for instance — Charlotte boomed in the postwar era, although a more accurate term might be “post-central-air-conditioning era.” And like almost everywhere in America since the 1950s, growth has looked much like the neighborhood I was visiting: houses only (zoning bans other uses), on large lots, built and purchased by people who assumed all residents would own cars and drive to work, shopping or just about anywhere.

And that’s the weak underbelly of the Sun Belt boomtowns. Can cities mostly made up of this kind of neighborhood — strung together by corridors of big-box stores, fast-food joints and strip centers, all built on an assumption of cheap fuel, clean air and a stable planetary climate — stay competitive as the world focuses on conserving energy and shrinking carbon emissions?
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For Release Saturday, November 19, 2011
Citiwire.net

It’s as obvious as the air we breathe, as basic as the fluid geography of a watershed, as clear as the connection between a new highway and the strip shopping centers and subdivisions that cluster nearby.

But then again, the air flowing over city limits and state lines is invisible. And most people don’t stop to think that what goes down the kitchen sink or runs off a muddy construction site eventually flows into rivers or lakes and sometimes into other people’s drinking water supply. Even the idea that road building shapes how we live, work and shop is a foreign concept to most people.

In other words despite city limits, voting districts and state lines on maps, in the real world of air and water, of urban transportation and economies, city regions function in ways our American political systems may not recognize. Although environments, economies and living patterns create very real urban regions, those geographic areas don’t exist in the basic structure of the government of the United STATES. Under the Constitution, states have powers; cities don’t.
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