Friday, February 3, 2012

The Proposed PAC, Pedestrians, and Parking

I'm glad the new city council is proposing a new performing arts center. Greensboro deserves better than it's got.

The initial debate has mostly been where to put it -- downtown or at the Coliseum complex? -- but so far the conversation hasn't delved deeply into the reasons for siting it at one of those places. The main issues mentioned so far are costs, efficiency, and the availability of downtown sites.

Actually, one blogger has raised another very important issue, namely the community benefits we must get out of the center beyond its value as a performance venue. But Billy's proposal is a non-starter. For good reasons and bad, there will be no PAC on Phillips Avenue.

I think these are the options:

  • If we put the PAC at the Coliseum, the best-case scenario is that we'll have a good performance venue that's easy to drive to, park at, and drive home from. Good, but not great. It won't put Greensboro on anybody's map of cool places to visit, and I think we need more added value than that.
  • If we just plunk the PAC in some vacant corner of downtown and surround it with a parking lot, we'll get basically the same thing as at the Coliseum, but probably at a much higher cost. If people can just drive to the PAC's lot, go in, go out, and go home, there isn't much net gain for downtown. In my view, that's not worth the extra expenditure.
  • But if we site the PAC carefully downtown, give it a distinctive architectural and pedestrian presence, and distribute the parking so that people must walk by shops and restaurants in order to get there, then we have something worth spending some money on.

Distributed parking was key to the renaissance of downtown Greenville, SC, as the Action Greensboro folks learned years ago on their field trip to that town. They were told to "build anchors" like our proposed PAC, and also heard this:
"Distribute parking" was the other main piece of advice from Greenville's leaders. The city deliberately did not place big parking decks right next to their anchors in order to generate pedestrian traffic -- and business -- for restaurants and downtown retail.
Greensboro residents seem to have a hard time getting their head around that principle, but it's absolutely essential to downtown vitality.

Downtown Chattanooga provides a great example of the principle at work. The Tennessee Aquarium downtown has been a driving generator of business and a bustling pedestrian culture. One reason for that success is that there's no dedicated parking on site, but an abundance of commercial lots nearby. As their website says, "there are several paid parking lots near the aquarium ... and a free shuttle runs daily in downtown Chattanooga."

At this point there seems to be no one on the committee studying the proposed PAC who will evaluate this essential piece of the puzzle.

5 comments:

Billy Jones said...

David,
For starters-- thank you. But...

You wrote: "But if we site the PAC carefully downtown, give it a distinctive architectural and pedestrian presence, and distribute the parking so that people must walk by shops and restaurants in order to get there, then we have something worth spending some money on."

You're right, but I think you fail to realize that a PAC could be built on Phillips Ave for less than 1/2 the cost of a downtown site. No one pitching downtown wants to talk about the necessary water, sewer and utility upgrades that, as best I can tell, no one has figured into the price. Downtown Greensboro's water and sewer system is over 100 years old and antiquated. Even the City continually runs programming on the city owned TV channel alerting us to this problem. The cost of utility upgrades will run $2-10 Million Dollars a mile to the treatment plants.

By saving 1/2 of the cost of building the PAC downtown we can afford to improve the Phillips Ave location, which, by the way, is much more attractive than anything in downtown Greensboro. A PAC built on Phillips Ave could easily be the focal point of the project-- downtown it will be overshadowed by many taller and very ugly buildings.

Why not locate it on Phillips Ave, "give it a distinctive architectural and pedestrian presence, and distribute the parking so that people must walk by shops and restaurants in order to get there, then we have something worth spending some money on"?

Apples to apples...

David Wharton said...

Billy, many people are simply afraid to go to that part of town. That's one reason that site won't be chosen.

But even leaving that aside, the whole point of building "anchors" is to connect them with a web of good pedestrian amenities and make it convenient for people to walk from place to place.

Anything beyond the radius of a 5-minute walk is just too far. And an anchor sitting there alone isn't going to do anything to spur development on Phillips Ave. (Note that the Coliseum is just sitting there in a development desert on High Point Road.) Greensboro has already scattered its anchors around town too much.

But I understand and sympathize with your good intentions. Thanks for commenting.

Billy Jones said...

David wrote: "Billy, many people are simply afraid to go to that part of town. That's one reason that site won't be chosen."

I agree, many people care scared to come to my neighborhood but my neighborhood is what it is because the City of Greensboro made it what it is. Patio Place Apartments is the major source of the area's problems and Patio Place Apartments are owned by the City of Greensboro. Therefore it is the City's responsibility to solve the problem and nothing would force the City to solve the problem any more than being pushed to put a city gem on the property beside the City's problem property.

The rest of Greensboro owes my neighborhood for having dumped on us for over 100 years. It's time every neighborhood shared in the riches we all help pay for.

David continues, "Anything beyond the radius of a 5-minute walk is just too far. And an anchor sitting there alone isn't going to do anything to spur development on Phillips Ave. (Note that the Coliseum is just sitting there in a development desert on High Point Road.) Greensboro has already scattered its anchors around town too much."

I am advocating anything but an anchor alone. Look at the green circle, with a radius of only 0.3 of a mile. By spending 1/2 as much to build the PAC, we are left with money to encourage new businesses to the area.

And finally, if Greensboro's better-off population is so snobbish, classist and racist as to refuse to patronize an East Greensboro Performing Arts Center then none of Greensboro deserves to have a performing arts center no matter where they ultimately decide to locate it.

And you know on that I am right.

Billy Jones said...

Yeah, I'm probably getting on everyone's nerves but upon reading, "At this point there seems to be no one on the committee studying the proposed PAC who will evaluate this essential piece of the puzzle."

I recently read an article on the private parking lot industry here in the USA. Until recently it has been primarily a cash business, rarely pays the income taxes due because it's too hard for the IRS to track, is so profitable that parking lot owners refer to their lots as "parking banks" and they resist any efforts to move towards arrangements that might change the way parking is done. Then, when property values soar these parking bank owners sell the lots to downtown developers for mega bucks.

And that is probably why distributed parking hasn't been mentioned thus far.

Roch101 said...

"At this point there seems to be no one on the committee studying the proposed PAC who will evaluate this essential piece of the puzzle."

Do we know who are on the committees?