A Little Urbanity

RUCO Facts and Figures

2010-09-22T15:00:00.001-05:00

Greensboro's RUCO (Rental Unit Certificate of Occupancy) ordinance was adopted by the city council in 2002. Its purpose was to reduce the number of substandard apartments in the city by requiring all rental units to be inspected in order to receive a certificate of occupancy. The ordinance also requires that a 2% sampling of apartments in the city be inspected annually. Thus RUCO is a proactive rather than a complaint-based system, although tenant or neighbor complaints can still trigger inspections.

The Triad Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition (TREBIC) and the Triad Apartment Association and the Greensboro Landlords Association opposed the ordinance, claim that it doesn't work, and are now lobbying the city council to return to a complaint-based system.

But RUCO does work, and it works very well.

In the first year of RUCO inspections, the number of substandard housing units reported in Greensboro increased dramatically, but this was not because housing was getting worse. It was because RUCO was uncovering hundreds of substandard apartments that lay hidden in the complaint-based system. The figures support the contention of the Greensboro Housing Coalition that many tenants are afraid to report problems because they fear reprisal by their landlords. But as RUCO inspections progressed throughout the city, landlords stepped up maintenance, and the number of substandard units was more than cut in half from its peak:

Even more dramatically, RUCO inspections have reduced the number of housing-related complaints by 80%:

Not surprisingly, when landlords know that the RUCO inspector might show up, they get their properties up to code without waiting for someone to complain.

Landlords also respond to complaints far more quickly under RUCO than they did under the previous ordinance. More than half of violations were not fixed even after a month under the old system. But now almost 60 percent get fixed on the same day they're reported, and nine out of ten are fixed within 30 days. That is because of the ordinance's one-two punch of fines for non-compliance and the threat of lost rental income if one's CO is revoked.

(source: "Ensuring Housing Quality: Proactive Minimum Housing Code Inspections
of Rental Properties in North Carolina Cities" by Carol Cooley Hickey).

If proactive inspections are repealed in Greensboro, experience in Asheville, NC shows that the number of housing complaints will probably rise again to previous levels. Asheville enacted an ordinance similar to Greensboro's RUCO program, and under it the number of housing complaints declined steeply. But under pressure from Asheville's landlords, the ordinance was repealed, and housing complaints quickly jumped back up:

(source: "Ensuring Housing Quality: Proactive Minimum Housing Code Inspections

of Rental Properties in North Carolina Cities" by Carol Cooley Hickey).

Proactive inspections also improve safety. In Asheville, after the repeal of the proactive inspection program, residential fires doubled.

(source: "Ensuring Housing Quality: Proactive Minimum Housing Code Inspections

of Rental Properties in North Carolina Cities" by Carol Cooley Hickey).

One feature of the RUCO ordinance that the apartment industry especially hates is its sample inspections. They argue that it is a waste of money, and inspections should be focused on the "real problem properties" that can be identified from a visual inspection or from tenant complaints. As Marlene Sanford, president of TREBIC put it in a News & Record article, "We've spent $3 million inspecting luxury apartments."

But Marlene was not telling the truth when she said that. The total cost of RUCO over its first eight years is $2,865,682, and in that time it has uncovered thousands of substandard housing units. I doubt that those were luxury apartments, and even if they were, they obviously needed to be inspected.

So far this year, 13 percent of apartments visited during random sampling failed inspection, according to Dan Reynolds of Greensboro's inspections department. Violations occurred in all kinds of apartments in all parts of town. Eighty-one percent of the violations were related to electrical problems or smoke alarms. These problems are not visible from the outside, and even the tenants may not know about them. They would never be discovered if the apartment industry gets its way. The fact that about one in ten apartments in Greensboro have problems that jeopardize the life and safety of the tenants is apparently not a concern to TREBIC.

Landlords also complain that up to a third of violations are "caused by the tenant." But this figure includes dead smoke alarm batteries, which the apartment industry considers to be the tenant's responsibility (though for the life of me I can't figure out why). However, I doubt that saying "it was the tenant's fault" will console anyone for the loss of life or property in the case of a fire.

The hostility toward tenants that I've heard expressed at many RUCO meetings seems odd to me. You would think that tenant damage is something that professionals would have built into their business model, and at any rate it has no bearing on the landlords' responsibility to maintain their rental property. You never hear anyone in the auto rental industry claim that they shouldn't have to submit their cars to safety inspections because those darn renters just keep wrecking them.

Regulatory Capture

Though I haven't gone into detail about the history of the ordinance, it's important to note that the apartment industry has steadily chipped away at it over the years. One way they have done this is to capture its regulatory body, the RUCO board. Here is the language from the ordinance:

The board shall be composed of fifteen (15) members serving three-year terms and representative of the following: One (1) member from each of the five council districts; one (1) council member, one (1) inspections staff member from the city's engineering and inspections department; one (1) staff member from the city's housing and community development department; one (1) member from each of the following organizations or representative successor organizations having similar interests: Triad Apartment Association; Triad Real Estate & Building Industry Coalition; Greensboro Landlords Association; Greensboro Housing Coalition; Greensboro Neighborhood Congress; and two (2) citizens at large. In making appointments to the board, the city council shall make due effort to assure a fair balance between the number of members representative of landlord/owner interests and those representative of tenant/occupant interests. All members shall have one (1) vote except for city staff appointments who shall serve in an advisory capacity and be appointed by the city manager to serve at his discretion.

What that boils down to is that of the RUCO board's 13 voting members, none of them must be actual tenants, and only one of them (from the Greensboro Housing Coalition) necessarily represents tenant interests, since the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress is mostly made up of homeowners. In fact, the Congress's current representative is himself a landlord who was fined under the RUCO ordinance. But three of the members must represent the rental housing industry. According to Jordan Green of YES! Weekly, six of 11 current voting members either own rental properties or work for companies that do so. There are no tenants on the board at all.

The foxes, having taken up comfortable residence in the regulatory hen house, have finished their hors d'oeuvres, and are now hungry for the main course.

Scoring the Proposed Downtown Design Manual

2010-06-20T09:57:00.024-05:00

Greensboro's proposed Downtown Design Manual is open for public comment until June 24th (if you have comments you can send them to michael.kirkman@greensboro-nc.gov). I've been involved with the manual on and off over the course of its development, and I have a few thoughts. Actually, a lot of thoughts.

Short History of the Manual

The manual has taken a circuitous path to get to its present state. The first draft was produced under the guidance of a citizen steering committee composed of design professionals, downtown property owners, downtown advocates, preservationists, and me. I was there as a representative of the neighborhoods bordering downtown, but had to drop out about halfway through the first draft. My input was minimal. City planning staff administered the meetings, and the prestigious design firm Cooper Cary was hired to turn the steering committee's ideas into coherent guidelines. Unfortunately, Cooper Cary couldn't produce a usable draft, so the steering committee wrote its own guidelines.

The initial draft contained both standards and guidelines. The standards were meant to be hard-and-fast rules; the guidelines were recommendations. City staff would review and approve proposals to make sure they met the standards.

When the first version came up for public review, it met strenuous opposition from some downtown property owners, led by Roy Carroll. Carroll is owner of the Carroll Companies, a large development firm with extensive experience in suburban single- and multi-family development. The Carroll Companies' vice-president was a member of the citizen steering committee, and he frequently voiced his opposition to any standards in the manual. Other prominent development firms (Weaver Cooke Construction, Lomax Construction, Milton Kern & Co.), which had extensive experience in downtown development, were represented on the steering committee as well, but they supported the the use of standards.

Mr. Carroll's only notable foray into downtown Greensboro development is the renovation of the former Wachovia Tower on Elm Street as a high-rise condominium complex, for which he received nearly $1 million in government incentives. Now called Center Pointe, most of its units remain unsold after several years on the market, although Mr. Carroll himself reportedly lives in the expansive penthouse suite on the top floor. Mr. Carroll is also active in local politics, contributing money to many local candidates, and recently offered the use of his private jet to elected city officials for a lobbying trip to Washington, DC (they eventually declined under public pressure).

Mr. Carroll's opposition group, claiming to champion free-market economics and individual property rights (despite Mr. Carroll's entanglement with government subsidies for a private project), essentially took over the manual writing, and after some months of intensive work with city staff, produced the current draft. It contains no standards, only guidelines.

The new draft has two important innovations. The first is a points system for scoring projects. A project is awarded one point for each guideline that it meets, and two points for meeting certain "bonus" guidelines that are considered more important. Projects that accumulate 75% of possible points in their category are considered acceptable and are automatically given a green light by city staff.

The second innovation is the addition of the Property Owners Review Team, or PORT. The PORT is composed of eight members. Five of them are required to be downtown property owners who have recently developed projects there; these are the only voting members of the PORT. The other three members-- one representative from Downtown Greensboro, Inc., and two design professionals -- serve in an advisory capacity only.

If a proposed project falls short of the 75% points score, it is referred to the PORT, whose function is to advise the proposers on how to score more points, although their recommendations are non-binding. That is, all proposals are automatically approved, regardless of their score. If the project has to go to City Council for any further approval or funding, PORT and staff comments are provided to Council. The Council, of course, is not bound by the points system and can approve any project it desires.

This part of the new manual is a textbook case of regulatory capture, in which interested parties not only took over the writing of the manual, but also installed themselves as the authoritative interpreters of it. What's more, they have made themselves the gatekeepers of future development: important projects that require City Council approval will have to seek the imprimatur of the established special interests on the PORT.

Using the Guidelines

At the last public meeting on the manual, I asked whether anyone had test-driven the new guidelines to see how well the points system worked. Planning staff said that maybe somebody had scored some downtown projects, but they didn't have the results available.

So I decided to try them out for myself and score some well-known downtown buildings. Many of the guidelines are written somewhat vaguely, so other people might score them differently. At any rate, I've assigned each project a grade using a standard 100-point percent system. According to the manual, a 75% percent grade is adequate for automatic approval, which in my scoring system would be a C. A 100% score would be an A+, 90% an A-, etc. Here are my scores and comments.

Carolina Bank (Pedestrian Mixed Use area). Grade: F (58%). As I've written before, this building falls short on a number of guidelines: it disrupts the pedestrian environment with many curb cuts for its parking and drive-through, and its needlessly high retaining wall is grimly blank, effectively destroying the entire streetscape on the Cedar Street side. Although the building itself is attractive, it is completely suburban in character. It would have been perfect at Friendly Center.

Arbor House (Pedestrian Mixed Use area). Grade: F (58%). This grade even includes two bonus points for "accentuating" its entrance which is nothing more than an industrial steel door. It gets poor marks for its materials choices, which include inexpensive vinyl windows and porch railings, and fiberboard clapboard siding. And it obviously gets no points for "celebrat[ing] nearby historic properties," since it is named for the beautiful and significant historic property that was destroyed in order to build it.

Bryan YMCA (Pedestrian Mixed Use area). Grade F (35%). This building got two bonus points for putting its parking in the rear, but that doesn't take into account the fact that its front entrance is permanently locked, and marked "not an entrance." It's wonderful to have a downtown YMCA, and I'm a member, but this structure is just a disaster as a downtown building. The YMCA, the Arbor House, and the Carolina Bank, all sited contiguously, have effectively suburbanized four important blocks of downtown Greensboro.

Center Pointe (Pedestrian Mixed Use area). Grade: B- (80%). Some of the points-scoring features of this tower were built into it before Mr. Carroll refurbished it, such as its wide sidewalks, street-fronting entrances, and side parking. But he should also get due credit for using high quality materials and tasteful signage and lighting. On the down side, no street trees were planted along its wide, Elm street sidewalks. This is the only gap in North Elm's street canopy for many blocks (and the artist's rendering of the Center Pointe website shows street trees at this location). Nor is the side parking lot screened except for a couple of forlorn crape myrtles.

324 South Elm (Historic Core area). Grade: D+ (68%). This new building (still under construction) reportedly underwent significant design modification under pressure from other downtown developers. However, it lost bonus points by ignoring the roof levels, window patterns, and design cues of nearby buildings. It could easily pick up the necessary points for a C grade, however, by including some landscape screening for a utility box at the sidewalk and by integrating appropriate signage (of which there is none at the moment).

Some Conclusions and Ideas

The actual guidelines in the manual seem workable, and the points system provides a rough measure of the overall appropriateness of projects, although I think it could use some tweaking. Not all guidelines are actually applicable to every project; for example, the guidelines about retaining walls are not relevant to projects without them. Thus it's not possible for most projects, even very good ones, to receive a 100% score. The scoring issue is one that the manual writers seem not to have thought through very carefully.

Perhaps that's because in the actual administration of the manual, the score is nearly meaningless, because it has no real consequences beyond requiring an applicant to have a conversation with the PORT. This feature of the ordinance gives it the power to irritate applicants and slow down development, but not the power to effect real improvements to bad projects. Lose-lose.

But a worse problem with the manual is the makeup of the PORT and its role in the administration of the guidelines. Imagine how it will make Greensboro look to some experienced outside developers. In what other town must they justify their projects to a board whose voting members must be chosen on the basis of a property qualification, but who need not have any professional expertise or demonstrated success? They will think they have arrived in a jerkwater town where everything is run by the local good ole boy network.

However, there is a kernel of a good idea in the PORT. Property owners deserve a significant voice in the process, and they often have knowledge and experience that professional planners lack. But an individual-property-rights-only approach to downtown design is not sufficient for making downtown successful, not only because downtown depends on and uses public infrastructure and services, but also because downtown as a whole is composed of interdependent elements -- buildings, sidewalks, streets -- any one of which can damage or enhance the value of the others. Imagine a South Elm street with drive-through curb cuts every 40 feet, or where every third lot was a parking lot. Downtown Greensboro, and its established businesses, would be effectively gone.

The PORT could be strengthened by including, in addition to the five property owners, a certified preservationist, a certified architect with demonstrated success in downtown design projects, either in Greensboro or elsewhere, and the president of Preservation Greensboro, Inc., all as voting members. A preservationist is absolutely necessary because downtown Greensboro includes a National Register historic district (The Old Greensborough district) and a number of National Register and Landmark structures.

City Staff and the PORT could score projects independently, and their scores could be averaged. Both would submit recommendations, no matter a project's score. If a project did not receive an average of 75% points from the PORT and staff, it would not receive a building permit, but could be resubmitted with modifications suggested by staff and the PORT.

Alternatively, the City Council could appoint a singe design review committee composed of city staff, property owners, design professionals, and preservationists, and that body could score projects and make recommendations for improvement without the need for separate reports.

In either case, the points system would provide flexibility to developers, but the power to actually stop and modify projects would ensure that the whole process amounts to more than pointless kvetching.

What's Good About The LDO

2010-04-04T07:16:00.006-05:00

Here's a column I wrote for today's News & Record:

The quickest way to make someone's eyes glaze over is to say, "Let's talk about land use." But you sure can wake them up by saying, "Hey, the city's rezoning your property!"

John Hammer in the Rhino Times has been using the latter approach in writing about Greensboro's proposed new Land Development Ordinance, which is now under public review. He's got people talking, which is good. But a lot of important information has been left out of the reporting so far.

The ordinance rewrite got rolling after the City Council unanimously adopted the Connections 2025 Comprehensive Plan for Greensboro in 2003. The plan's land-use section says, "New challenges are emerging which necessitate a comprehensive review of land use and development policy. ... Significant revisions to zoning regulations will be required to implement these land use policies."

Responding to this council mandate, then-City Manager Ed Kitchen and the council appointed a Citizens Advisory Team to work with consultants and staff on revising the existing ordinance. The CAT (of which I'm a member) was made up of neighborhood representatives, engineers, builders, real estate professionals and lawyers with expertise in land-use and environmental issues.

The city posted an explanation of the rewrite, along with the CAT's contact information, on the city's Web site throughout the process. Two City Council liaisons served on the CAT: first Tom Phillips, then Goldie Wells. Phillips gave explicit direction from the council at the beginning of our work, and Wells stepped in when Phillips left the council. City staff kept each successive council updated, and drafts were posted on the city's Web site.

After 31/2 years of painstaking work, we produced a draft ordinance that retained the best of the existing ordinance, but also included needed updates and neighborhood protections. City staff held public hearings on the rewrite, both at the very beginning, and after the first draft was released in October. Not many people showed up, and the City Council rightly directed staff to send letters to individual property owners alerting them to changes and to hold more public hearings. Many people came to them expressing disapproval of a few provisions in the proposed ordinance.

The most unpopular provision was the inclusion of twin homes at limited locations in some single-family residential districts. Other people were worried that the new ordinance would make their properties "non-conforming." Political consultant Bill Burckley also criticized the proposed LDO because it is not unified with other Guilford County municipalities the way its predecessor, the Unified Development Ordinance, was.

Since the last public hearing, members of the CAT and city staff have met with neighborhood and industry groups to incorporate this input into a revised draft. The latest proposal removes twin homes from single-family districts and specifies that owners of properties made non-conforming by the ordinance have the right to maintain and rebuild their properties just as they are.

As to the Unified Development Ordinance, the City Council charted Greensboro's path away from that in 2003 when it ratified the Comprehensive Plan. The city of High Point also officially abandoned the UDO concept in 2007.

While the local media have focused on some controversial aspects of the new ordinance, they have not emphasized its real advantages. Here are some that I believe in strongly:

-- The proposed ordinance is friendlier to neighborhoods. One provision requires developers who ask for conditional rezonings to report to the Zoning Commission the efforts they made to contact neighbors, and to describe any changes they incorporated into their plans as a result of neighborhood input. The aim is to improve communication between developers and neighbors before showdowns at the Zoning Commission.

-- Another provision allows infill development in older neighborhoods to conform to prevailing setbacks and lot sizes instead of taking the one-size-fits-all approach of the current law. This will help neighborhoods built before 1960 retain their traditional character.

-- The new ordinance includes new mixed-use zoning categories which encourage commercial development to be more pedestrian-friendly and oriented to neighborhoods than the strip-style development that currently prevails in Greensboro. The pioneering Southside development is an excellent example of a mixed-use development where residents can easily walk to services, stores and restaurants.

-- The new ordinance clarifies and improves many technical provisions that business owners had found difficult to understand and use.

-- The ordinance is simply easier for the average person to read, access and understand. Its final online version will include hyperlinked cross-references to definitions and diagrams that make it very user-friendly. That is a tremendous help to average property owners, who are now often at a disadvantage in zoning disputes because they don't know the law as well as they might.

Think of the proposed new ordinance as a much-needed infrastructure upgrade. Many competitor cities have already adopted up-to-date zoning practices that attract solid economic development. In these hard economic times, Greensboro cannot afford to fall behind them.

Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Bob Dylan in Durham

2009-07-29T11:50:00.004-05:00

We packed two cars full of teenagers yesterday to see Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Bob Dylan perform at the Durham Athletic Park. Even making allowances for the downsides that go with ballpark concerts (bad seating and poor acoustics), I wouldn't recommend paying $70 per ticket for this tour unless you're a big Mellencamp fan.

The opening act was actually the musical highlight of the evening for me, an acoustic jug-band group called The Wiyos. Their playing and vocal harmonies were tight and upbeat, and the overall sound quality was the best of the evening.

Willie Nelson followed with a small, low-tech and low-key ensemble that focused attention on his singing and guitar playing. Unfortunately, he didn't sing much, half-talking his way through his long and venerable repetoire of country and pop classics. When Willie did bother to sing, his voice was rich and strong, but "perfunctory" would be a kind way to describe most of his vocal and instrumental work. The fans loved him, though, and he reciprocated by frequently pointing at and/or blowing kisses to the most enthusiastic of them. A very few were rewarded with one of his trademark red bandanas, which on this afternoon were soaked with sweat. I suppose it's remarkable that a 76-year-old man can still perform on a sun-drenched stage in 95-degree heat, but that didn't make the music any better.

John Mellencamp was up next, and he gave full value. Though I've never been a fan, he completely won me over. His voice sounds as good as it ever did, and he worked hard on stage, punctuating his lyrics with enthusiastic jumps, kicks, and fist-pumps. This from a man who is on the downslope toward 60. He even had me singing on "Hurts So Good," and I just don't do that. One of my teenagers remarked afterward, "I'd like to go to a Mellencamp concert some time."

The highlight of the show should have been the headliner, Bob Dylan. I will give him this: he and his band looked really cool. And as far as I could tell, his band played well. But the volume for the Dylan set was so loud and the sound consequently so muddy that it's hard to be sure.

What little is left of Dylan's ravaged voice and expressive power could occasionally be discerned if you had earplugs and patience. But his phrasing is hurried and apparently bored (especially on his older classics), to the extent that it was hard to make out even the lyrics I knew by heart.

So I did something I've never done: I walked out of the stadium and waited for the rest of my crew in the concourse. I couldn't help but notice that hundreds of others were doing the same, steadily streaming out, looking bored. I would guess that about a third of the audience was gone by the time the show was over.

I wasn't actually expecting a great performance from Dylan. We all know he's far past his prime; part of me just wanted to lay eyes on the great man since I'd never seen him perform live. But whatever was good in his performance was ruined by truly horrible sound engineering.

Update: Horbrastar concurs, and also left early.

Do We Want Downtown Design Guidelines?

2009-06-05T15:14:00.013-05:00

Greensboro is trying to figure out whether it wants to regulate the design of buildings and sidewalks in its downtown business district. After a couple of years of hard work, city staff and volunteers have put a set of design guidelines up for review and approval by the Zoning Board and the City Council. (Disclosure: I was a volunteer for a while, but had to resign because of time constraints.)

Of course the regulations are controversial. John Hammer of the Rhino Times predictably and incoherently railed against them. Developer Roy Carroll reportedly said in the Triad Business Journal that they will cost the downtown $100 million in lost investments. At-large councilmember Mike Barber is quoted as saying, "we cannot let this happen."

I've been checking around with some other cities that have design guidelines to find out whether they actually do discourage investment, but that's a post for another day (I've go some more checking to do).

This post is a photo essay looking into the current state of our downtown pedestrian environment. A lot of people are probably inclined to think our downtown is doing great: we don't need any intervention; let the market continue to work its magic. But I don't think the market is working very well at expanding our downtown.

Actually, I think that the market killed downtown at the end of the last century, along with transportation policies that favored cars over pedestrians in the central business district. Government and philanthropic groups, working along with entrepreneurs, have been key to bringing it back. Modern downtowns are not at all what old-fashioned ones were. They are a public-private partnership -- if you will, an amenity that has to be planned and nourished. Of course there's no necessity for a city to have a vibrant downtown any more; most cities don't have one. But if we want one, we'll have to work at it.

When people say that Greensboro's downtown is doing well, they're really talking about only a section of Elm Street. And Elm is doing great. Anchored at one end by the Southside neighborhood, which was a public-private partnership conceived, planned and implemented by our city government, and by the Center City Park at the other, which was planned and built by Action Greensboro, that stretch of downtown really bustles. Between those poles, restaurants, shops, and clubs thrive.

The Center City Park brings office workers out to buy lunch and enjoy the public spaces.

The City of Greensboro contributes funds to make the sidewalk along the park a pleasant place to walk. The landscaping and interesting paving materials naturally attract people.

People also like walking, shopping, sitting, eating, drinking, and socializing along Elm. Thanks to the city, the sidewalk is wide enough to accommodate both pedestrians and diners, and the human-scaled storefronts allow for a lot of small businesses. Spaces like these make downtowns successful.

Further down South Elm, the low wall separating a parking area from the sidewalk preserves the sense of pedestrian space, as do the sidewalk trees and varied paving materials.

The richness of architectural details on the different storefronts-- most only about 20 feet wide -- provide a lot of visual interest. The man on the right seems to be looking at the architecture across the street. Architecture matters, and Elm Street has an incredibly rich variety of it.

I took these pictures in the early afternoon on a weekday. I took the following ones at the same time on the same day as I wandered back and forth from Elm to some of the surrounding streets.

Here's a photo I took on Davie Street, just a block away. The rotten pedestrian environment here was a team effort: poorly placed streetlights, open private parking lot, no visual border between the sidewalk and a lightly-traveled street that has enough traffic lanes for a superhighway. It's not surprising that no one walks here.

Here's another sidewalk view on Davie. The oddly-placed crosswalk signal is ironically symbolic, don't you think? Nobody likes walking on a narrow sidewalk next to a high wall.

Here's a view of Market Street, next to a Brutalist style office building. Walking here makes you feel like you're skirting the walls of Mordor on the left and the Daytona 500 on the right.

Here's a view on Church Street with a Lincoln Financial warehouse on the right. Cozy!

Along the sidewalk next to the News & Record property, they've put a chain-link fence around the parking lot.

It's pretty obvious that some kinds of buildings, fences, and sidewalks encourage pedestrians, and some don't. People don't like walking along monumental blank walls on barren sidewalks with no visual border between the sidewalk and the street. And if there aren't open storefronts, there usually isn't any reason for them to walk there anyway.

BUT (you might say), we've seen a lot of new buildings downtown like the new YMCA, the Arbor House condominiums, the Carolina Bank building, and Governor's Court -- isn't that a sign that we don't need any design guidelines?

I think just the opposite. All those buildings are downtown, but none of them is actually a downtown building. They are suburban buildings that happen to have been built in the central business district. And to the extent that they're suburban buildings, they have shrunk rather than expanded the footprint of our true downtown.

Here's the main "entrance" to the YMCA on Market Street.

I put scare quotes around "entrance" because if you try to enter the Y that way, you'll find that it's actually "not an entrance."

The Y's facades on either side of Market are blank walls of concrete block. The YMCA folks have tried to help the situation with these large banners, but they don't really help much.

Here's the Y's real entrance: from the parking lot. That's the essence of a suburban building, isn't it? -- no usable openings to the street, and you can access the building only from a large parking lot.

Right across the street from the Y are the newly-built Arbor House condominiums. I was frankly puzzled by the material choices on this building. Its clapboard siding and vinyl windows and balustrades on the balconies seem better suited to the apartment complexes you see along Bridford Parkway or Bryan Boulevard.

But aesthetics aside, you can see that this building has only one visible pedestrian entrance to the sidewalk. It's a little hard to make out, but you can see it recessed beneath a small awning, flanked by two bizarrely tall streetlamps.

Here's a head-on view: not exactly a grand entrance.

I've spent a lot of time staring at this side of the Arbor House, because the treadmills in the YMCA look out directly at it. In all those sweaty hours, I've only seen two pedestrians using the sidewalk (one of them was a jogger), and I've never seen anyone go in or out of the door. The main entry for the residents is the parking garage that is the bottom floor of the building.

Again, it's the essence of a suburban building to be accessible primarily by car. But it's hard to blame the builder. The nearby streetscape is so bleak and blank, who would want to walk there? This is a great example of how one bad design decision (the YMCA) begets others.

The same idea drives the design of the new Carolina Bank building, which is just across the street from the Arbor House and the Y. It's a pretty building: its form and details playfully allude to the domestic architecture of nearby neighborhoods like Fisher Park. It looks like a big colonial-revival foursquare house with a front-facing gable end on the front porch.

But again, Fisher Park is known as "Greensboro's First Suburb," and other design elements confirm the building's suburban essence.

Instead of a porch, it has a drive-though -- a quintessentially suburban use -- supported by doubled Tuscan columns. And to the rear, the bank built up the ground to make a large, flat parking lot rather than working with the natural grade.

The result is this very high retaining wall. You usually see walls built with this kind of low-cost stackable concrete block at suburban shopping centers. The Super Walmart at South Elm-Eugene has a lot of them.

The parking lot could have been built on the natural slope, but the builders decided to favor the the users of the parking lot over the pedestrians on Cedar Street. I spoke to the architect about the wall, and he told me that Carolina Bank would install plantings that would cover it. So far they haven't.

Much of what I said of the Arbor House is also true of Governor's Court condominiums on Church Street. It doesn't have any pedestrian entrance to the sidewalk except for a tiny steel door. Its ground floor is devoted to parking rather than to storefronts that attract pedestrian activity. I heard through the grapevine that the builders were encouraged to put storefronts on the ground level, but the local banking community couldn't figure out how to finance a mixed-use building like that.

Many of the anti-pedestrian features of these buildings would have been prohibited or modified by the proposed downtown design manual.

The overall picture I get from walking around downtown is that its anti-pedestrian character comes from two sources. One of them is the government. The unduly wide streets that encourage fast car traffic in most of the central business district, and the pedestrian-unfriendly sidewalks are a result of poor transportation planning over the past half-century. This can be fixed only by long-term, concerted attention and money from the City Council.

The other source of the problem is the private sector. Much of the new building downtown -- and by new I mean since 1950 or so -- simply doesn't contribute to a pedestrian downtown environment. It's pretty clear that many builders don't know how to -- or don't want to -- build in a way that promotes an active pedestrian environment. Elm Street is very successful in this respect largely because it was built before the age of the automobile.

If we want our downtown to continue to expand successfully beyond Elm Street, we're going to need downtown design guidelines. Lots of cities have them -- Raleigh, Durham, Charlotte, Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Chattanooga TN, Greenville SC -- so it's not like they're something exotic. The Southside neighborhood also has them, and and that development has been extremely successful.

But many builders have said, and are saying, that such guidelines are unworkable, and that projects like the ones I've just mentioned "couldn't be built" if they had to adhere to stricter guidelines.

Maybe. But somehow, buildings are being built in all those other places that do have design guidelines. Why is it that Greensboro builders and bankers should stand out in this respect -- that is, in their supposed inability to build attractive, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use buildings downtown?

Memento Mori

2009-05-03T22:37:00.006-05:00

David Craft and Ann Stringfield of the Friends of Green Hill Cemetery gave a tour of that beautiful and fascinating place this afternoon. I took a few photos (click images to enlarge).

Please think about donating to help maintain Greensboro's oldest cemetery. Many of its monuments and its landscaping are falling into disrepair.

The UNCG Quad

2009-04-10T08:30:00.003-05:00

I found out this week through Ed Cone's blog, Benjamin Brigg's blog, and the News & Record that my university is considering tearing down and replacing several historic dorms on its Quadrangle in order to accomodate its rapidly-growing student population.

The Chancellor held a forum at which two options were presented: either renovate the dorms and add a new dorm elsewhere on campus, or tear the dorms down and builder new, bigger ones on the site. I attended the forum and spoke (see Joe Killian's article), but a number of points were made -- mostly by students -- that I think deserve a little more elaboration and documentation. And so here they are:

1) Renovating these buildings is in keeping with the University's Master Plan:

(p. vii): "The Master Plan Update recognizes that the structure and form of the built environment will have a critical impact on the ability of UNCG to meet the mission laid out by the “Vision 2008” stated above. As such, it strives to prioritize the use of existing campus space, protect and restore the historic resources of the campus and identify building sites for future campus buildings, while recognizing that the campus will need to become more dense and “vertical” where appropriate."
P. 17 "As it faces future growth, the UNCG campus has numerous strengths upon which to build. These include proximity to established residential neighborhoods, downtown Greensboro and other colleges; its significant historic buildings and green space ..."
P. 12 of the Master Plan identifies the Quad and its buildings as "significant character-defining buildings."
P. 13: "Many of the older buildings have historic, architectural or “space-shaping” significance which creates a sense of place and enhances the character of the campus. These include Foust Building, the dormitories at the Quadrangle, the Steam Plant and the buildings along College Avenue. The University should strive to preserve these important buildings, consider them within the context of current building and program needs, and enhance them with future landscape or structural improvements."

2) Renovating the buildings is in keeping with the University's values, especially sustainability, which is explicitly mentioned in the University's new Strategic Plan, and endorsed by the Chancellor. The buildings contain an enormous amount of "embodied energy" -- that is, the energy that went into the manufacture of its parts (bricks, beams, etc), and the making of the building itself. Tearing the building down will entail throwing that energy investment away, and using more energy to demolish and transport the debris to the landfill, and then to manufacture and build new dorms. "The greenest building is the one that already exists," as preservation economist Donovan Rypkema likes to say.

3) The existing buildings, if renovated, would probably perform better in terms of energy efficiency than new ones because of their heavy masonry walls.

4) UNCG trails nearby schools in a national sustainability survey. UNCG gets a C; whereas UNC Chapel Hill gets a B+, as does Duke University. Demolition of the buildings will only put us farther behind, and make it clear that the University's commitment to sustainability is window dressing only.

5) UNCG has the only Historic Preservation graduate program in the state. What message will it send if the University refuses to preserve its own buildings against the recommendation of its own master plan? How will that help attract new students to the Historic Preservation program, or affect the program's national reputation?

6) Renovation is likely to help the local economy more than would demolition and rebuilding. Renovation is more labor-intensive and heavily employs local skilled contractors, workers, and craftsmen, so more of the money flows to local sources. Rebuilding typically draws manufactured materials (brick, concrete block, etc.) from father afield, and typically requires less skilled workers.

7) New buildings seldom include the depth and density of architectural detail found on older ones. While the option to build new mentions that some of the architectural details would be imitated on the new buildings, these are the kinds of things that get cut when budgets get tight. It's doubtful that new buildings would have the architectural texture and value of the existing ones, which were reportedly designed by Harry Barton, one of Greensboro's most famous architects.

8) The proposed new buildings have an expected life of 50 years. The existing buildings already have lasted 80-90 years, and with proper maintenance should have an indefinite lifespan. A good masonry building can be maintained pretty much as long as one wants to keep it -- the old center cities of Europe are packed shoulder-to- shoulder with buildings that are hundreds of years old and are still well-used. Only in the United States is a 90-year-old institutional building considered "old."

9) The old buildings can be adapted to suits the needs and wants of modern undergraduates, and if renovated, will probably become premium, desired housing at the center of campus, much the way the old dorms on "The Lawn" at UVA are.

Certainly the Chancellor and Board of Trustees have an obligation to look after the need of undergraduates and to be good stewards of the University's budget. Demolishing and building new might look like a cost-effective solution in the short term. But over the life of the University, which will be here for many generations, I think preservation and renovation make more sense.

I, Zygote

2009-03-10T11:00:00.002-05:00

Note: I first posted this in May of 2005, but though it was worth re-posting in light of recent developments.

When did I start being me? And when did you start being you?

Timely questions, since the ethics of embryonic stem cell is much in the news. I, and you, were once embryos. The pivotal question, of course, is who or what we were when we were embryos, and what rights (if any) accrued to us then: all the debates about whether it's permissible to create, use, and destroy human embryos for purposes of medical research flow from this.

Let's not consider -- yet -- what benefits might come from such research. No doubt many wonderful medical advances would be gained by expanding the pool of of research subjects and organ donors to include involuntary participants like convicted felons or the mentally debilitated. But respect for the rights of those potential subjects keeps us from extracting almost-certain medical benefits from them, and from censuring the defenders of their rights as anti-technology bio-luddites.

So, back to the question. When did I start being me? Well, some of the things that make me who I am are my inherited traits, which include not only eye color and hair color, but also, apparently, higher-level traits like personality and sexual orientation. Twin studies seem to bear out the idea that personal identity is intimately intertwined with genetics.

Then when did my personal genome come into being? My high school biology tells me that it happened when a sperm cell from my father fertilized an egg from my mother, and they shared genetic material. Thus my personal genetic code had its first, distinct instantiation in a zygote.

At that point, things started happening pretty fast, if I understand this article properly (and I'm not completely sure I do). I think it says that my genes started the process of expression -- that is, putting my genetic information into action, into the building of a mature human being -- right away, even before the zygote implanted itself in my mom's uterine wall some days later.

Was I "being me" at that point? Certainly not as fully as I am "being me" now. But my personal genome -- an unmistakably human genome, and the same one that I have now -- was working furiously to become what I am now, and that continuous, unbroken process has been going on for almost 50 years.

So if I wasn't "me" then, at what point did I become "me"? I certainly became more "me" every day. Some of my genetic traits (such as those controlling my fetal growth pattern) were expressed quite early, some only much later. Important cognitive abilities developed only long after my exit from the womb; apart from my physical appearance, I think there was little in my very early years that would distinguish me from other advanced primates. I can find no distinct point on this continuum of development to which I can point and say that before it I was "not me," and after it I was "me."

Thus it seems that when I was a zygote, I was (1) distinctively human, (2) genetically myself, and (3) actively expressing my distinctive humanity. After all, a golden retriever zygote cannot implant itself and grow in a human uterine wall. I "knew" how to do that because I was being human. Acting human. I was mostly a potential "me," but also, to some (growing) extent, an actual "me." That zygote contained, and was actively in the process of expressing, billions of bits of genetic information that contribute to my identity.

OK, then, what were my rights at this point?

Hmmm. That leads to a bigger question: whence do my rights derive?

One hears commonly that an embryo is "just a lump of tissue," and therefore not deserving of rights. But we know that it's a living, genetically distinct lump that is packed with information gleaned from millions of years of human evolution. In fact, it is precisely the lump's humanity that make it useful for research into human disease. Otherwise we could get those stem cells from some other species' lumps, no?

Some have proposed that zygotes, and their more advanced brethren, embryos, have no claim to the rest of their lives because they lack nerves, brains, consciousness, etc. But we perform painful and death-dealing experiments on all sorts of creatures (e.g., rats, rabbits, primates) that are fully sentient, and perhaps self-aware. Yet we do not perform them on infant humans, whose cognitive development (or lack thereof) would put them on a par with many primate subjects. If sentience is the relevant criterion, I can't see how this makes sense.

Peter Singer, the renowned Princeton philosopher, proposes to resolve this problem by stopping experimentation on all creatures that can suffer: their right to physical integrity, he argues, derives from this capacity. But he also proposes that people should have the option to euthanize handicapped babies or incapacitated adults, because, for him, the right to life derives from the ability to plan and anticipate one's future.

Singer's argument is coherent, but his starting point for the right to life seems to me rather arbitrary. If it's OK to euthanize an infant who turns out to have a serious genetic disorder, why not one whom you just don't want? Or why not a 20-year-old incurable schizophrenic whose future life is almost certain to be extremely painful to himself and others? I've no doubt that mental hospitals could arrange gentle and painless deaths for such unlucky people. Still, I don't assent to such practices, and I doubt most people would.

The ancient Spartans had an even more utilitarian view than Singer's. A person's right to life was, in practice, pretty much determined by his or her usefulness to the state, and the Spartans took care that non-useful people either wouldn't be produced, or would be eliminated in fairly short order. According to Plutarch, Lycurgus, the (perhaps mythical) founder of the Spartan constitution, arranged the Spartans' sex lives so as to optimize their chances of producing strong offspring, and made provision that weak or unhealthy babies should be disposed of outside the city walls. Training for Spartan youths was so rigorous that it tended to kill the weak; Plutarch records that he himself witnessed several Spartan boys being whipped to death during a particularly brutal trial of strength.

Like Singer's, the Spartan view has a certain cogency, but I have a feeling it would be pretty universally denounced by most Americans.

Thus if my claim to the rest of my life doesn't derive from sentience, or from my ability to anticipate the future, or from my utility to the state, then where does it come from?

Two options seem most salient.

The first is that I simply have no such claim, and never did. I didn't have it as a zygote, or as an embryo, and I don't have it now. I may be granted certain rights by the state that I live in, but those are more or less arbitrarily assigned according to the sentiments of my time and place. And if history teaches us anything, it is that moral sentiments are in constant flux, and that moral sympathies can be extended or withdrawn quite whimsically. Thus for millennia slavery was almost universal, with hardly a scintilla of the moral revulsion it arouses today; thus Babylonian potentates killed their political enemies by impaling them anally over the course of several days, but the EU now considers torture and capital punishment to be barbaric; thus infanticide is both widely practiced and widely reviled; thus Soviet sympathizers applauded Stalin when he wiped out millions through collectivized farming; thus millions of Europeans assented to the hunting down of European Jews, then regretted it, and now are reconsidering; thus I myself felt murderous hatred toward Palestinian women dancing in the streets on September 11, though no doubt their children love them dearly.

In this view, the rights of this or that group may be asserted, but they have no real existence; they are social conventions, which are themselves nothing more than collectively-defined preferences. Concepts of "good" and "evil" would also be mere conventions. In this view, though I myself would probably adhere to the conventions of the day, I'd be hard pressed to say why. And as for embryonic stem-cell research -- why not? Maybe someone to whom my sympathies happened to extend would benefit from it. But then why not do research on anesthetized, unwanted babies (who would then of course be painlessly euthanized)? They could be a great source of organs for wanted babies. What criterion -- besides convention or fickle moral sentiment -- could I adduce to object to such a practice? I can't think of one.

But I don't really like this option.

Rather, I adhere to the view that human life has intrinsic value, quite separate from convention or moral feeling, though convention and feeling may (and should) recognize that value. Because of that intrinsic value, I bridle at the merely instrumental use of a human being -- whether as a slave, or as a research subject, or even as the fulfillment of a parent's ambitions.

The creation of a human life as an instrumentality, or the reduction of it to such a state, even if it is only embryonic, is deeply troubling to me. Painful, too -- because to some extent my moral sympathies do extend to such human beings. Not because they suffer, but just because they are.

It is also painful to be confronted with horrifying diseases and disabilities like Parkinson's and Alzheimers along with the admonition, if only you'll let us experiment on these embryos, great good will come of it. No one will suffer! No one will be missed! It sounds wonderful.

But no one would suffer if we made full use of Peter Singer's unwanted babies, either. If we can experiment on them painlessly at 6 days of embryonic development, and do the same at 6 months post partum . . . why shouldn't we?

Six Days After the Snowstorm

2009-03-07T17:48:00.002-05:00

Great Snowstorm of Aught Nine

2009-03-02T08:36:00.006-05:00

Plebe Life

2009-02-26T21:18:00.005-05:00

Son Sam posted these pictures of his room at West Point, and gave me permission to re-post them. I think they give some insight into what life is like there. Disciplined.

Here's Sam in a get-up he patched together out of parts of various uniforms for "Heritage Night." I think he's a makeshift English officer.

Below, his uniforms are laid out on his bed for inspection. Cadets don't sleep in their beds -- it wastes too much time in the morning making them. They sleep on top of the blankets, under their woobies.

Plebes are three to a room in Sam's company, and they switch roommates every semester.

He has a view of the Cadet Chapel from his dorm window.

Sam and his friend John joined us on their only three-day weekend of the semester. They were very happy to get OPPs (off-post passes). We took them to the mall, a movie, dinner, then back to our seedy EconoLodge motel room in Highland Falls to watch TV. They loved it -- one of their big social events of the winter. Woot!

Plebe life is incredibly rigorous, mentally, physically, and emotionally. How they do it, I don't know. But I'm glad they do. Go class of 2012!

Well, That's Comforting (Sort of ...)

2009-01-28T08:57:00.003-05:00

Michele reports that the Greensboro Police Department will now respond to all reports of shots fired. Wonderful, I guess, but it's pretty disheartening to realize that they weren't already doing this.

Good to know that the GDP will be pulling officers away from those spots where crime wasn't happening.

Protest Petition Passed City Council

2009-01-22T14:26:00.003-05:00

The Greensboro City Council unanimously endorsed reinstating the protest petition at last night's meeting -- not the vote count I expected! -- and also voted to tack an addendum to the recommendation before it goes to the state legislature.

As I understood the (somewhat confusing) discussion, Council wants TREBIC and the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress to work out a compromise proposal that will mellow some of the protest petition's harsher requirements. Discussion focused on the fact that owners of only 5% of property contiguous to the lot to be rezoned can trigger the process and force a 75% super majority in order to get the rezoning approved.

Donna Newton of the GNC and Marlene Sanford of TREBIC both pledged that their organizations will work together in good faith, and I expect that to happen. They are both extraordinary women.

I made some comments at the meeting, too, in which I focused on the fact that the building and real estate industries hold majorities on key boards and commissions, specifically the Zoning Commission, the RUCO board, the Board of Adjustment, and the Land Development Ordinance Citizens Advisory Team (of which I was a member).

Marlene Sanford of TREBIC took issue with my figures, disputing in particular the LDO CAT numbers, which I said was weighted 11-4 in favor of real estate interests. Since this is a public board, I don't think I'll be violating anyone's privacy by posting their names and occupations here. So here they are:

Trip Brown
Brown Investment Properties (TREBIC member)

James Cox
Urban-Atlantic Builders

Mike Fox

Attorney

Tuggle Duggins and Meshan PA (TREBIC member company)

Dick Franks

Koury Corporation (TREBIC member)

Gary Hill

McAlpine Company

Jessica Marlies

Environmental law attorney

Bob Powell

North Carolina A&T University

Keith Price

Samet Corporation (TREBIC member)

Todd Rangel

Commercial real estate manager

SunTrust Bank

Gary Rogers

Starmount Company (TREBIC member)

Todd Rotruck

Independent Contractor

Mary Skenes

Yost and Little (TREBIC member)

Gary Wolf

Sparrow Wolf & Dennis, PA (TREBIC member)

David Wharton

UNC Greensboro

Some might quibble with the way I counted. Mike Fox and Gary Wolf are both attorneys, but I counted them as being in the real estate industry because both of their firms are TREBIC members. And though Todd Rotruck was appointed as a representative of the GNC, he's also a contractor in the building industry.

I should add that these are all great people whom I like and respect. Although we had many vigorous discussions over the past 3 and a half years, they were always conducted civilly and professionally.

Ed Cone's blog has more discussion here and here.

Still More About Protest Petitions

2009-01-13T20:13:00.008-05:00

Professor David Owens of the UNC School of Government came to Greensboro to talk about the origin and use of the protest petition, and he drew a crowd of influential Greensboro people.

In attendance at the luncheon sponsored by the League of Women Voters were State Senator Don Vaughan, State Representative Maggie Jeffus, Councilwoman Goldie Wells, the N&R’s editorial page editor Allen Johnson, the Rhino Times’s editor John Hammer, and Zoning Commission members Mary Skenes and Cindy Hayworth, along with about 70 other interested citizens.

I’ve scanned Prof. Owens’ handouts (click the thumbnails below for larger versions), which give a pretty complete picture of the petition process. But his last paragraph tells the story:

A valid protest petition can ... affect the zoning process in an indirect but significant manner. The approval rate for projects subject to a protest petition was reported to be 52%, compared to a 76% approval rate for rezoning petitions overall. This lower approval rate indicates that the depth of opposition reflected by a protest petition frequently convinces a majority of the city council to oppose a rezoning. In addition, an actual or threatened protest petition may encourage the landowner, the neighbors, and the city to negotiate prior to a vote on the rezoning, which can in turn lead to project revisions. So the informal impacts of a protest petition are typically more substantial than its formal impacts [emphasis mine].

I know that TREBIC is scared to death of the protest petition, but it needn’t be. Owens’ research shows that protest petitions are used quite infrequently, and they certainly haven’t hampered growth in Raleigh and Charlotte, where they are used most often. But they have encouraged developers, neighborhoods, and cities to cooperate more.

Isn’t that what everyone wants?

Rep. Jeffus indicated that she would introduce legislation to give the protest petition back to Greensboro whether or not the City Council endorsed it, and I believe Sen. Vaughan is also in favor. But a request from the City Council would help ease the petition through the state legislature.

More on Protest Petitions

2009-01-11T14:08:00.006-05:00

Suddenly the Protest Petition is everywhere. The Greensboro Neighborhood Congress discussed it at its monthly meeting yesterday; N&R editor Allen Johnson (sort of) endorsed it in today's paper; and the League of Women Voters will hear about it on Tuesday (and you're invited, too).

On January 21st, the Greensboro City Council will decide whether to endorse the Protest Petition process, and ask the North Carolina legislature to reinstate it for Greensboro -- the only city in North Carolina that doesn't have it.

Over the past year I've changed my mind on this issue. I used to think -- as the real estate industry does -- that the petition puts too much power in the hands of too few people. How can it be fair for a mere 5% of surrounding property owners to mandate that a proposed rezoning must pass with a three-quarter majority vote?

In fact, it wouldn't be fair,

if the Triad Real Estate and Building Industry Coalition (TREBIC) didn't have a full-time lobbying staff whose job is to influence real estate law at every level, from the writing of the ordinance to the final appeal before the City Council,
if the real estate industry didn't have the cash to hire the smoothest real estate lawyers in town to argue their cases before boards and City Council,
if TREBIC hadn't placed so many of their representatives on the Planning board, Zoning Board, Board of Adjustment, and Citizens Advisory Team that worked to rewrite the city's development ordinance,
if TREBIC didn't hold an annual shindig to schmooze with elected officials,
if the real estate industry wasn't one of the biggest contributors to City Council elections, and
if three members of the Greensobo City Council weren't in the real estate/development industry.

So let me turn that "fairness" question back on TREBIC: how can it be fair for one industry to have such lopsided influence over Greensboro public policy?

The Protest Petition would help restore the balance of power between neighborhoods and the real estate industry. I'm for it.

The Sneering Times

2009-01-08T08:23:00.008-05:00

Does sneering in the NY Times actually need to be chronicled? Probably not, because the Times sneers so regularly and obviously. Still, I can't help myself after reading Maureen Dowd's column pumping Caroline Kennedy for Hillary's soon-to-be-vacant Senate seat.

It starts like this:

Ask not, you know, what your country can, like, do for you. Ask what you, um, can, you know, do for your country.
After a lifetime of shying away from the public spotlight, Caroline Kennedy asked herself what she could do for her country.
Her soft-spoken answer — to follow her father and two uncles and serve in the Senate — got her ripped to shreds in the, you know, press.
I know about “you knows.” I use that verbal crutch myself, a bad habit that develops from shyness and reticence about public speaking.
I always thought that Caroline and her brother, John, had special magic capital in America because of their heartbreaking roles in the Kennedy House of Atreus.

Dowd goes on,

People complain that the 51-year-old Harvard and Columbia Law School grad and author is not a glib, professional pol who knows how to artfully market herself, and is someone who hasn’t spent her life glad-handing, backstabbing and logrolling. I say, thank God.

OK, you're probably saying, there's no sneering here. Dowd is being nice to Caroline! She's making excuses for Caroline's verbal tics, saying her family background gives her political capital. So what if she isn't part of the corrupt political establishment? That's a good thing. She's a Harvard and Columbia girl and an author. Why is the press being so mean to her?

Compare all this to an earlier column that Dowd wrote regarding a different candidate's verbal foibles and family background:

Talking at the debate about how she would “positively affect the impacts” of the climate change for which she’s loath to acknowledge human culpability, she did a dizzying verbal loop-de-loop: “With the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that, as governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change subcabinet to start dealing with the impacts.” That was, miraculously, richer with content than an answer she gave Katie Couric: “You know, there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that we’re dealing with now, with these impacts.”
At another point, she channeled Alicia Silverstone debating in “Clueless,” asserting, “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.” (Mostly the end-all.)
A political jukebox, she drowned out Biden’s specifics, offering lifestyle as substance. “In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been, you know, all our lives,” she said, making the middle class sound like it has its own ZIP code, superior to 90210 because “real” rules.
Sometimes, her sentences have a Yoda-like — “When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not” — splendor. When she was asked by Couric if she’d ever negotiated with the Russians, the governor replied that when Putin “rears his head” he is headed for Alaska. Then she uttered yet another sentence that defies diagramming: “It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there.”
Reared heads reared themselves again at the debate, when she said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “were starting to really kind of rear the head of abuse.”
She dangles gerunds, mangles prepositions, randomly exiles nouns and verbs and also — “also” is her favorite vamping word — uses verbs better left as nouns, as in, “If Americans so bless us and privilege us with the opportunity of serving them,” or how she tried to “progress the agenda.”

That's Dowd on Sarah Palin.

You get the idea: if you're a Harvard and Columbia grad and a member of America's royal family, your weakness in public speaking and your tragic-but-tawdry family background are positive qualifications for office. But if you're from the rural middle class and talk the way most middle-American people do, well, go back to the dirt-floor cabin from whence you came, you garbling ineloquent rube.

Should I point out that a columnist who mocks the grammatical errors of others probably shouldn't split her infinitives ("to artfully market herself")?

One more thing. Dowd's "House of Atreus" reference is inapt. The House of Atreus was riven with internecine hatred, cannibalism, child-killing, husband-killing, mother-killing, and madness. The Kennedys are more like the house of Priam, with all the noble sons cut down in their prime, survived only by their sisters and mother.

New Building on South Elm?

2009-01-06T11:36:00.010-05:00

Benjamin Briggs sent me these renderings of a proposed building in the 300 block of South Elm Street:

At first glance, it doesn't look bad. An earlier proposal was apparently all steel and glass, which wouldn't fit in with South Elm's distinctive architecture.

But I think five stories is too abrupt a transition from the next-door building's three, the window pattern and steel awnings are incongruous with the surrounding buildings, and the recessed and dark entrance on the corner is a wasted opportunity to put something interesting on the sidewalk.

It reminds me of a lot of newer buildings I've seen in downtown Charlotte and Chattanooga -- pretty generic. I think the architects could certainly relate the building more creatively to its context, since Elm Street has plenty of interesting architectural elements to play with.

Or have I missed something here?

Update: Benjamin Briggs has a much more detailed (and architecturally informed) critique.

Update II: News & Record story. Downtown developer Milton Kern says, "[The developers] are good folks. They don’t understand that downtown is not another office park."

Protest Petition Presentation

2009-01-01T22:11:00.004-05:00

Donna Newton sent the following message to the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress:

As most of you know, the Greeensboro Neighborhood Congress voted to support the reinstatement of the right of Protest Petition to the citizens of Greensboro. At this time, Greensboro is the only City in the state that does not have this right. The League of Women Voters also supports the Protest Petition and is sponsoring a presentation by an expert on the subject as described in the flier below.

Please register and join me on January 13 to hear this presentation.

The City Council will hear comments regarding the petition at their meeting on January 21 and then vote on whether to support the protest petition in their legislative agenda. The Congress will be represented at the January 21 meeting to present in favor of reinstituting the Protest Petition. Please join us then as well. We will need a strong showing at that meeting.

Lunch with the League

League of Women Voters of the Piedmont Triad
Tuesday, January 13, 2009, 12:00 noon
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, Haywood Duke Meeting Room
605 N. Greene St. near downtown Greensboro

“The Protest Petition”

Speaker:
Dr. David Owens, Gladys H. Coates Professor,
Public Law and Government
School of Government, UNC-CH

Dr. David Owens, an expert on land use topics, the scope of local government authority, planning legislation and urban growth management, has been a member of the Institute of Government since 1989. Prior to that, he was an attorney and senior planner for the Planning Office. He received a graduate planning degree and law degree from UNC-CH.

About the Protest Petition:

This is a North Carolina general statute (160A-385(a) that gives residents of a neighborhood an opportunity to protest rezoning and land use requests. All major NC cities except Greensboro have the protest petition.

References: Greensboro News & Record editorials, March 2 2008: “The right to protest,” and May 14 1008: “Get on board protest petitions.”

Yes Weekly Jordan Green analysis, February 12 2008: “A rezoning chronicle: “How Greensboro lost the protest petition;” Editorial June 30 2008: “TREBIC vs. Protest Petition.”

The January 13, 2009 program is free. Everyone is invited. Reservations are necessary if you’d like to have lunch at a cost of $8.00 per person. Make reservations by Friday, January 9 and please arrive at noon on the 13th if you plan to have lunch.

Reservations: tkwhitacre@triad.rr.com or call Trudy Whitacre at 336-643-2131.

Don’t miss this vital opportunity for greater understanding of the need for transparency and citizen participation in decision-making!

Unequal Protection

2008-12-19T12:03:00.009-05:00

The News and Record reports this morning that the GPD has stepped up patrols at "shopping centers across the city" in order to make people feel safer during the Christmas shopping season. Here's the N&R's map showing the affected shopping centers:

I'm sure people who shop at those centers appreciate the effort. But there's something missing -- literally -- from the map. That story should read, "across the city (if you don't count anything east of Church St. as part of the city)."

Here are some facts about crimes and arrests over the past month in three of the shopping areas that will receive extra police protection.*

The quaint and charming State Street district, tucked at the edge of Irving Park, Greensboro's wealthiest neighborhood, reported one arrest and no other crime incidents.

Shoppers on State St. near Irving Park.

The spanking-new Jefferson Village area, which recently sprang up in the fast-growth New Garden Road area, reported five arrests and 16 crime incidents, the most serious of which were four shoplifting incidents, one burglary, one larceny, and one forged check.

Shoppers at Michael's at Jefferson Village.

The Lawndale Crossing area reported significantly more crime: nine arrests and 38 crime incidents, including seven incidents of shoplifting, four larcenies, two burglaries, one robbery, and one auto theft.

But Pyramids Village, located at the intersection of E. Cone Boulevard and I-29, which is receiving no increased police presence, reported 19 arrests and 48 crime incidents, including four burglaries, five larcenies, two incidents of fraud, one bank robbery, and one robbery of an individual.

Walmart shoppers at Pyramids Village.

In short, a higher-crime shopping center on the poorer side of Greensboro gets no increased patrols, while lower-crime retailers in wealthier neighborhoods receive the lion's share of scarce police resources.

This makes me mad as hell.

*I collected the information using the GPD's P2C website, setting the crime radius at .5 mi except for State St., which is small; the .5 mi radius would have included Golden Gate shopping center and distorted the data.

The President, The Corps, and the Brigade

2008-12-08T19:27:00.011-05:00

We spent Saturday at one of the few places left where a stadium full of people would enthusiastically cheer President Bush -- at the annual Army-Navy football game with the Corps, the Brigade, and their many families and supporters.

And cheer they did. It was very affecting when the Army cheerleaders surrounded and hugged the President, though I'm sure it made the Secret Service a bit nervous. He obviously returned the cadets' affection.

Robert Gates was there too (far left in the picture above). Before the game started, Air Force One buzzed the stadium while the Corps was doing its march-on, and waggled its wings over the field. That's actually cooler than it sounds -- George C. Scott captures the impression pretty well:

After that about 10 Army and Navy parachutists dropped spectacularly onto the field.

And then Navy jets and Army helicopters also buzzed the field.

So, not your typical football game. For Army fans, the pregame was a lot better than the game.

People who know me know I am anything but a football fan; the main attraction for me was the chance to see my favorite plebe, who is doing just fine. West Point ain't Disneyland, as they say, but he is taking its rigors in stride. And he looks great in gray.

Small Neighborhood, Big Ideas

2008-11-20T23:15:00.009-05:00

One of the country's leading design firms is working in Greensboro this week to help solve a knotty planning problem that has resisted solution for a quarter of a century.

The firm is Duany Plater-Zyberk, whose principals have driven the rise of New Urbanism in America, one of the most important and influential architectural and design movements in the past half-century. The problem is what to do with a 5-acre empty plot near downtown on Chestnut Street known as Dunleith.

A century ago, Dunleith was one of Greensboro's most prestigious properties, an ornate Italiante mansion nestled in magnificently landscaped grounds. Seventy years later, it was an unloved wreck that received the kiss of death from the wrecking ball. About 25 years ago Greensboro's Dascalakis family bought the empty acreage and razed its overgrown gardens, sparing only two huge Magnolia trees.

The Dascalakises proposed to build 140 apartments on the plot, but the neighbors objected very strenuosly, even to the point of lying down in front of bulldozers. It was that event that galvanized them to form a neighborhood association and eventually to have it declared a historic district.

But the 5 acres have lain dormant. The Dascalakises proposed two different development plans in the intervening years, and with much effort got them approved by all the nit-picky city departments, including the prickly Greensboro Historic Preservation Commission. But they declined to build them.

However, everyone knows that someday, somehow the site will be developed. It's just too much acreage, too close to downtown, and in too nice a neighborhood to sit vacant forever. The problem is how to do it and make everybody happy.

A row of single-family bungalows faces Dunleith; farther down Chestnut lies a mix of historic houses divided into apartments, newer two-story apartments, and a few more single-family bungalows. The larger Aycock neighborhood is a similar eclectic mix, populated (as one of my neighbors put it) by "a bunch of neighborhood activists." The activists have tended to favor low-density development of Dunleith, while the Dascalakises have understandably wanted higher density. It's been a stalemate for 25 years.

Enter Andy Scott and Mike Cowhig from the city's department of Housing and Community Development. They got a grant to host a design charrette where all the interested parties get together to share their visions -- and their bottom lines -- and then ask the planners to sketch out solutions. (Pictured below: DPZ planner Tom Lowe talks over options with neighbors.)

The charrette has been going on this week, and so far has taken input from the property owners, the neighborhood, a number of developers, and the city. The planners have produced a few preliminary sketches, and will present their final proposals tomorrow afternoon. Here's the city's website for the charrette.

I'm planning on attending, and will report on the outcome.

St. Jude is My New Patron Saint

2008-05-07T07:16:00.005-05:00

St. Jude is, of course, the patron of desperate and lost causes, which seem to be my specialty when it comes to bond issues. Both the War Memorial Stadium and Parks and Rec bonds that I supported have gone down in flames.

I'll let John, Paul, and George sing my theme song:

Go, Greenway, Go

2008-05-05T07:03:00.006-05:00

I'm going to vote tomorrow for the Greensboro Parks and Recreation bond, which includes $4 $2 million for the Center City Greenway. It's the only bond item the News & Record didn't endorse. A good friend told me last night that he was "looking for a reason" to vote for it, and I told him I'd offer mine.

I live only a block from the Greenway's proposed path, so you could say that I'm for it out of pure self-interest, and that wouldn't be totally wrong. The Greenway would improve my quality of life tremendously by letting me walk and bike in a nice environment to places where I have to drive now because current roads are dangerous for bikers and nasty for walkers.

But what benefits me also benefits thousands who live in Greensboro's "ring" neighborhoods: Fisher Park, Westerwood, Latham Park, Southside, East Market St. These are neighborhoods that have mostly received the short end of the transportation stick for the last half-century. Or I should say, the sharp end of the stick (as in "a sharp stick in the eye"). There are also some neighborhoods not named here because transportation projects that were intended to benefit commuters simply wiped them away. In their place now are low-income housing projects like Cumberland Court that barely function as neighborhoods at all.

A little history: in the mid-20th century, city and transportation planning was all about modernist ideals. Center cities would tower with gleaming skyscrapers, and happy workers would commute briskly to and from the suburbs on efficient superhighways or live in hive-like high-rises. Traditional modes of urban living (called "neighborhoods") and the older buildings that accommodated them were declared "blight" and "slums." Many of them were razed to make way for "urban renewal" and transportation projects, and their hapless denizens were relocated to modern housing projects.

As we all know now, this great civic project was one of the great failures of the 20th century, and the planners made an urban wasteland of many of America's great cities.

Greensboro's Murrow Boulevard is a good example of this. Its six mostly empty lanes ripped though the urban fabric on the east side of downtown Greensboro, leaving almost nothing intact from Lee St. to Summit Avenue.

However, suburbanites were mostly happy with these projects, because they were effective at moving cars to and from the city. When center cities collapsed and crime skyrocketed in the 60's, suburbanites responded by moving further and further from the cities, and transportation dollars followed them.

Only in the past couple of decades have planners embraced the idea of reinvesting in neighborhood-friendly urban transportation infrastructure. In Greensboro, bonds supported the Southside and East Market transportation projects. Both of them have been very successful.

The Greenway is another such project that will continue to re-weave the urban fabric that was so ripped and tattered by mid century misunderstandings of how good cities work, and make Murrow Boulevard (among other streets) work for the city dwellers who live there rather than for commuters who just want to drive through as quickly as possible.

The future of transportation in America and in Greensboro will not be like the past. It seems undeniable now that we will be facing higher gas prices for a long time -- maybe forever. And the new generation of Americans seems more interested in living in cities than their boomer parents and grandparents were. Making the city a nicer place to live will attract more urban dwellers to Greensboro, meaning that less countryside will be devoted to suburban development, and fewer transportation dollars will have to follow commuters out to the exurbs.

So I'm voting for the Parks and Rec bond.

Greensboro Neighborhood Congress Writes Complaint to DOJ about City Council Redistricting

2008-03-14T08:18:00.003-05:00

The Greensboro Neighborhood Congress has serious qualms about the city council redistricting that happened in such a hurry-up, back-room-deal kind of way recently, and has written to the Department of Justice to complain, not only about the way the redistricting happened, but also about the disadvantages of "Plan Q," the adopted district map.

Update: Tony Wilkins says in the comments, "Can you be specific as to what this means: "Plan Q has obvious political benefits for certain elected representatives and less obvious impacts for some business"? If you're going to make this allegation you should be specific."

I can't speak for the letter-writers, and I wasn't present at the meeting where this was discussed. But Plan Q splits many neighborhoods into different districts, and thus dilutes the political clout of those neighborhoods with the Council. Since unified neighborhoods often oppose the plans of real estate developers like Councilman Matheny, maybe this move is seen as an effort to increase the real estate industry's control over rezoning cases.

Here's the whole letter:

March 12, 2008

Don Jacobsen
Voting Section
Civil Rights Division
Room 7254 - NWB
Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
Washington, DC 20530

Re: City of Greensboro, NC Council Districts

Dear Mr. Jacobsen:

We are writing as Co-Chairs of the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress (GNC), at the direction of the GNC membership, to express the GNC’s strong displeasure concerning the City of Greensboro’s recently adopted City Council redistricting plan that is currently under review by you and other United States Department of Justice personnel. The GNC is a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit organization comprised of neighborhood organizations representing neighborhoods located throughout Greensboro. We currently have 43 member neighborhood organizations that include more than 16,000 households. These neighborhoods are located throughout Greensboro’s five City Council districts, making the GNC one of the most socio-economically and racially diverse organizations in Greensboro. The mission of the GNC is to address issues of citywide concern to neighborhoods and to empower neighborhood leaders to address their specific neighborhoods’ own issues of concern. We focus on advocacy for the improvement of the quality of life in Greensboro neighborhoods and on the education of neighborhood leaders.

On February 19, 2008, our City Council voted to adopt what is known as redistricting “Plan Q” over other redistricting plans, including a “Plan B” that had been recommended by City staff. (We believe that you have been asked to review both the adopted “Plan Q” and the alternative “Plan B.”) At a meeting on March 8, the GNC membership in attendance voted unanimously to comment to the United States Department of Justice to protest the procedural deficiencies involved in the adoption of Plan Q, as well as the substantive deficiencies in Plan Q relative to Plan B. We are writing this letter to you in accord with that mandate.

The GNC membership is particularly dismayed with the manner in which Plan Q was adopted. Unlike Plan B and most of the other plans that were made available for public review and comment well ahead of the Council’s February 19 meeting, Plan Q was unleashed on the public for the first time during the Council’s meeting, by its sponsor, Council Member Zack Matheny, who is the District 3 representative. (In fact, The GNC has been informed that some of the Council Members themselves had only 24 hours or less to review Plan Q prior to the Council meeting.) The public had no opportunity to review any maps depicting the impact of Plan Q before (or even during) the Council’s meeting at which Plan Q was adopted. It is hard to imagine a decision more fundamental to our Country’s democratic processes than a redistricting that will deprive some voters of representation by the candidates they voted into office. For our Council to have made such a decision by adopting an alternative that the public was denied access to until after the fact is simply repugnant. We urge you to reject Plan Q for that reason alone.

We also want to make sure that you are aware of the substantive inferiority of Plan Q relative to Plan B. Plan Q results in 26 voting precincts being shifted from one district to another, whereas Plan B would have shifted 3 precincts. This means that, absent your intervention, voters residing in 26 of Greensboro’s precincts (about one third of the total precincts in the City) will find themselves represented on July 1, 2008 by a candidate whom they did not have the opportunity to vote for in the general election on November 6, 2007. To deprive this many voters of the opportunity for representation by a candidate they had the opportunity to vote for (or against) is a serious usurpation of democratic processes. Plan Q also will split 11 neighborhoods whereas Plan B would split only 5, and the current districting splits 6 neighborhoods. Plan B would therefore result in one less split neighborhood than the status quo, compared to Plan Q, which will double the number of split neighborhoods.

Moreover, Plan Q has a more insidious impact. Under the current districting, Districts 1 and 2 are “majority minority” and Districts 3 and 4 are “majority majority,” whereas District 5 is almost balanced with 47.5% minority population. What this means is that our City’s most likely opportunity to have a third district represented by a minority candidate is in District 5. But Plan Q would dilute the minority population in District 5 down to 41.3%, undermining the prospect of a minority candidate being elected in District 5, and making it unlikely that minority representation on our Council will have any prospect of increasing in the foreseeable future. This is a serious impact, and although some of it is inevitable given that the areas recently annexed by the City have a primarily white population in District 5, Plan Q’s magnification of that dilution relative to Plan B constitutes another serious substantive flaw in Plan Q.

Because Plan Q is flawed substantively compared to Plan B in so many respects, it renders the procedural deficiencies attendant to Plan Q’s adoption all the more suspect, and begs the question of whether Plan Q’s conception and 11th hour unveiling was engineered by special interests. Plan Q has obvious political benefits for certain elected representatives and less obvious impacts for some business interests.

For the reasons set out above, the GNC strongly urges the United States Department of Justice to give Plan Q the strictest scrutiny, and to reject it in favor of Plan B.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Sullivan
Co-Chair
Greensboro Neighborhood Congress

Art Davis
Co-Chair
Greensboro Neighborhood Congress

A Short Video History of Summit Avenue

2008-03-11T21:12:00.002-05:00

I've enjoyed working with my neighbors over the past several years on planning for improvements on Summit Avenue, which I live near. Here's a short video summarizing what the my neighborhood has done so far.

I'm hopeful that the Summit improvements will be included in the next transportation funding package.

Glenwood Plan Goes to City Council

2008-01-29T11:48:00.000-05:00

Update: the Glenwood plan was approved by City Council on Feb. 5. Congratulations, Glenwood!

From an e-mail circulated to the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress:

The Greensboro City Council will hold a public hearing regarding formal adoption of the Glenwood Neighborhood Plan during its meeting next Tuesday, February 5. City Council meetings are held beginning at 5:30 pm in the Council Chambers (2nd Floor) in the Melvin Municipal Office Building (City Hall), 300 West Washington Street.

Anyone who lives in, works in, owns property in, attends school or church in, or has other ties to Glenwood is encouraged to attend! If you are unable to attend in person, but would like to watch the meeting as it happens, you can do so on both Cable Channel 13, and on the internet here.

If the City Council adopts the Plan during this meeting, the Plan will become
official City Policy for all matters affecting the Greater Glenwood Neighborhood. The Plan will function as an amendment of the City's "Connections 2025" Comprehensive Plan. This is the final step in developing the Glenwood Neighborhood Plan and the FIRST STEP in implementing the plan!

The Glenwood neighborhood is working really hard to keep it a livable place. It has a very active neighborhood association and lots of distinctive local culture. I hope the new council will reward their efforts.

Bito the Cat, RIP

2008-01-29T04:57:00.001-05:00

Bito the Cat passed away yesterday at Greensboro's North Elm Animal Hospital after a lengthy and courageous battle with cancer. Diagnosed last May, he endured his illness in a heroic manner worthy of his namesake. He died while licking turkey puree off a tongue depressor, surrounded by his family.

An accomplished hunter, Bito was unloved by the small animals and birds in his neighborhood. He is pictured above engaging in his favorite activity, eating squirrel, though not in his preferred dining spot (under his owners' bed).

His gregarious and outgoing personality, combined with a high tolerance for vigorous patting and tail-pulling, made Bito popular with neighborhood children. His habit of draping himself over his owners' heads in the middle of the night, however, will not be missed, though his cheerful and insouciant manner will.

Office Depot Listened to the Neighbors

2008-01-29T04:18:00.000-05:00

A year ago I groused about the way a new Office Depot store had been built, and even made a short video about one of its signs. The main idea was not that neighbors didn't want the store near their homes; it was that the design of the store and the sign weren't appropriate for their setting.

I didn't do anything more about it after that, but a bunch of my neighbors in both the Aycock and Fisher Park neighborhoods did. They kept writing and calling Office Depot, and organized a petition and neighborhood boycott.

Office Depot finally paid attention and removed the offending sign last week. That was a nice thing to do, since Office Depot was not legally obligated to do it. Thanks, Office Depot.

Just a thought: all the efforts of the neighbors, and the wasted expense for Office Depot in putting up then taking down the sign, could probably have been avoided if someone from the company had met with the surrounding neighborhood associations during the planning process.

Brutal Preservation

2007-12-18T10:34:00.000-05:00

Charles Paul Freund writes about the preservation paradoxes swirling around an architecturally-unloved 1970s-era Christian Science church in Washington, DC:

So why has the city's Historic Preservation Review Board unanimously declared the Third Church of Christ, Scientist to be an official D.C. landmark, preventing not only its demolition, but even its unauthorized alteration? Because, it turns out, it is a sterling example of the mid-century school of design known as Brutalism.

... Brutalism's preservers remain vulnerable to the ironists. That's because the church is question is exactly the kind of building that energized the city's grassroots preservation efforts in the first place. Of course, the activist preservationists of decades ago were hardly seeking to save such buildings as this church; many were seeking to prevent them from being built at all (at least in an urban context).

Our fair city has quite a bit of Brutalist architecture, including the Melvin Municipal Office Building, aka City Hall. Sometime in the next generation, people are going to start talking about tearing it down, and we're going to have to decide whether to keep it.

Via Instapundit.

DIY Downtown Design Coming to Greensboro

2007-12-18T08:04:00.000-05:00

At the last meeting for the Downtown Design compatibility manual, the steering committee agreed that we should fire the consulting firm that was supposed to be writing up our new downtown design guidelines.

Everyone in the group was a little surprised to hear from our city staff leader, Mary Sertell, that Cooper Carry, a prestigious Atlanta design firm, had failed to produce acceptable draft guidelines out of the materials we had sent them last summer. Cooper Carry had previously done good work here in producing Action Greensboro's conceptual plan for downtown. The city sent a termination notice on December 13, and Cooper Carry's contract will end on January 17, 2008.

The downtown design committee, which is composed of city staff and volunteers from the development community, Action Greensboro, Downtown Greensboro, Inc., and regular citizens like me, earlier had agreed on a "geographical" approach to downtown design. We mapped out zones in the central city with distinctive features and building types, and turned our findings over to Cooper Carry. They were supposed to develop design guidelines for each zone.

Firing Cooper Carry will save the city, Downtown Greensboro, Inc., and Action Greensboro somewhere in the neighborhood of $90,000 dollars, but the group and city staff are going to have to roll up our sleeves and do a lot more work.

Some prominent downtown developers suggested we look at the successful design manuals of cities like Charlotte and Durham, and adapt the ideas that we think work best. And that's where we're going to start.

Sauce for the Gander

2007-12-16T08:41:00.000-05:00

Mike Clark, the N&R columnist on language, writes today about how "language sticklers" like him tend to drive friends and family nuts with their linguistic policing. Mike also drives me a bit nuts, because I believe that such policing has little to do with a love of language and much to do with a desire to control others.

Besides, the notions of "correctness" that get used in these exercises are quite arbitrary, and are often just a matter of imposing past conventions -- real or imagined -- on present speech. I find that policers of language impose their standards inconsistently, or, worse, are guilty of the same crimes that they accuse others of.*

(*No, it is not incorrect to end a sentence with a preposition, and if you don't like it, it's just something you have to put up with.)

In fact, Clark's column today is full of the kinds of little errors that he likes to find in others.

For example, he writes,

However, at home it seems to go differently.

Passing over the vague reference of "it," which doesn't refer clearly to anything in the preceding context, I'll ask why Clark doesn't know that "however" should be postpositive. According to Strunk's Elements of Style, "In the meaning nevertheless, ["however" is] not to come first in its sentence or clause ... When however comes first, it means in whatever way or to whatever extent."

Clark also writes,

Evidently, there was an infinitesimal catch in my voice. A teeny tone thing that gave me away.

In proper usage, "infinitesimal" means "an infinitely small amount, too small to be measured or reckoned." How could something so small be evident? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Clark's usage, meaning "very small," is only found in "loose or hyperbolic" speech. Tsk.

Furthermore, "tone thing" is redundant. A tone is of necessity a thing; the word "thing" adds no meaning to the phrase. Why not just say "a teeny tone"? Even worse, "A teeny tone thing that gave me away" is not a complete sentence; it's a mere fragment.

Clark continues,

Then I explained that when you write a check, you want to hyphenate numbers with "ty" in the first part ...

Hmmm. "You want"? I think he means, "you ought." "Want" as a modal verb showing obligation or necessity is not listed at all in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Clark goes on,

We know that our desire for correct punctuation, spelling and usage is based on the fact that language is the building block of thought, of communication.

"[T]he building block"? Really? How can you build something with just one block? That's a failed metaphor, and it's factually incorrect to boot. We have many non-linguistic thoughts, for example when we compose, play, or listen to music. And we communicate with gesture, posture, and facial expressions as well as with language.

Later in the column he writes,

They're more than willing to say, "What's the rule for commas and quotation marks?"

If Clark meant to be precise, he would have written, "What are the rules ..." unless he meant to say that there is a single rule for the use of both commas and quotation marks. Or is he talking about some rule concerning the proper relationship between commas and quotation marks? At any rate, he hasn't made himself very clear.

Still further down, he writes,

Catherine, I am happy to report that "alright" is still considered nonstandard, even though it has become increasingly commonplace since it first appeared (in the 19th century).

Clark should have avoided the passive voice in "is still considered" (see Strunk again), but the passive is convenient for him, because it allows him to avoid saying just who, exactly, considers "alright" to be nonstandard. Furthermore, there is no reason put parentheses around "in the 19th century."

And Clark probably doesn't really mean that "alright" has become more commonplace ("devoid of originality or novelty" -- OED); he just means that it has become more common.

Had enough? Me too. I hope you found this post completely irritating. Because there really isn't much wrong with the style, grammar, or punctuation of Clark's column. My point was to show, by example, the pointlessness of being a language policeman.

Some Suggestions On Where to Find That $500,000

2007-12-11T23:21:00.000-05:00

The city council met tonight in an emergency session devoted to Greensboro's recent rash of murders, and instructed city manager Mitch Johnson to find $500,000 in the budget to give to the police department.

In a pinch like this, it's always most tempting to take the money from places where you think you won't rouse much organized opposition, such as in poorer neighborhoods that usually don't have neighborhood associations -- or even very many homeowners. Those places get the bulk of funds from departments like Housing and Community Development.

I think it would be a bad idea to take planning and infrastructure dollars from those neighborhoods, mostly because their already poor civic infrastructure contributes to crime and economic underperformance. Those areas need more money to fight crime, not less.

But we are spending money on some pretty pricey items which -- although they're beautiful -- could take a hit until tax dollars become more plentiful. Here are my picks:

Hagan-Stone Park. It's outside the city limits, where we also maintain a little-used pool. We don't need a city park that's in the county.

Bryan Park golf courses. They're wonderful (I hear), but should a city be paying to maintain championship golf courses when we can't protect our citizens from gang murders? The Gillespie Park course should get us through until crime is under control; the Bryan courses belong in the private sector.

The Botanical Gardens. They're beautiful, expensive, and inessential. Exotic plants or police protection? Hmmmm. I think we can cut back a bit on the plants for a while.

Lingua Latina in Temporibus

2007-12-04T19:43:00.000-05:00

The New York Times says, Hooray for Latin:

As much as opening the concertina enlarges your imagination, squeezing it shut — translating English into Latin — sharpens your prose.

Years of reading and writing Latin have had some effect on the way I write, I'm sure -- though whether for good or ill, I can't say. I also liked this bit:

With a little Roman history and Latin under your belt, you end up seeing more everywhere, not only in literature and language, but in the classical roots of Federal architecture; the spread of Christianity throughout Western Europe and, in turn, America; and in the American system of senatorial government.

I've heard classicists quote Cole Sear on this point: "I see dead people." American culture is suffused with classical culture, but few see it.

Learning Latin and Ancient Greek is hard, but I rarely hear anyone who put in the effort to do it well say that it wasn't worth it. For most, it's a source of satisfaction and a path to interesting insights throughout their lives.

Update: Somebody could use a little classical eduction. Sheesh!

"And They're Getting More Organized All The Time."

2007-12-04T09:44:00.001-05:00

So said one of Greensboro's prominent real estate developers recently, in a conversation about neighborhood groups, and he wasn't happy when he said it.

Free, new media have empowered neighborhood groups tremendously. A decade ago, anyone wanting to oppose a rezoning or a development had to go door to door or make scores of phone calls to get people to meetings. Time and distance greatly constrained what people could accomplish.

But now an increasing number of neighborhood groups are using tools like Yahoo or Google groups, which allow e-mail messages to go out instantly to group members -- and only to group members -- so quickly that neighborhoods are now as agile as their industry opponents. Neighborhoods are also using free blogs to give them a public face and to archive public documents.

I think this new "Army of Davids" power is very apparent in Greensboro, where developers have lost recent rezoning battles (or given up before they started) in response to neighborhood pressure. It looks like they're going to lose a few more.

The Fairview-Rosecrest-Kirkwood neighborhood group has recently conjured itself into existence and is starting a public campaign to oppose a commercial rezoning in their neighborhood. They've been quietly organizing via e-mail for the past couple of weeks.

And Citizens for Haw River State Park recently won an important ally in opposing the Patriot's Landing development, after months of behind-the-scenes organizing facilitated by an e-mail listserv and website.

In both cases, the developers have asked for continuances, hoping to wait out the "Davids" and strike when their fervor is cooled. But now that the citizen groups have their electronic networks in place, it will be easy to rally the troops again when they're needed.

This is very irritating to developers, but in the long run I think it will hold them to a higher standard, which is good for everybody.

Upheld

2007-11-29T08:40:00.000-05:00

The Greensboro Board of Adjustment yesterday upheld a ruling of the Greensboro Historic Preservation Commission about the cutting of a tree in Fisher Park. I wrote about the HPC's vote here, and I should note that I made the motion on the HPC to deny the request to cut the tree. The N&R's Jim Schlosser writes,

The Greensboro Board of Adjustment sided with the Fisher Park Neighborhood Association on Monday by ruling the church must keep a willow oak in a new church parking lot planned along North Elm Street.

I wasn't at the BOA meeting (I was teaching my historical linguistics class), and I believe they made the correct ruling, but I'm going to pick a bone with Jim Schlosser.

The job of the BOA is not to re-hear cases de novo, and the Board does not have to agree with the original ruling in order to uphold it. The Board's job is to determine whether the original ruling of the HPC was made fairly and reasonably.

When the HPC ruled that the tree in question should be preserved, it was not siding with the Fisher Park neighborhood; it was applying what's written in the Historic Preservation Design Guidelines to a specific case. Nor was the BOA siding with anyone in this appeal -- it would be a gross dereliction of their duty for them to do so. The BOA simply found that the HPC had ruled within its authority in a fair hearing.

Portraying a case like this as an amusing feud between a neighborhood and a church, with various boards and commissions taking sides, makes for a lively story.

But it demeans the work of the board and commission volunteers, who take their duties seriously, and it deprives the public of accurate knowledge of how their city government works.

Family Friendly Cities

2007-11-27T22:05:00.000-05:00

Joel Kotkin writes in the WSJ:

The family's enduring supremacy is also apparent in the attitudes of young people, the so-called millennials.

As Morley Winograd and Michael Hais suggest in their upcoming book, "Millennial Mainstream," this new generation is twice as numerous as Generation X, and far more family-oriented. They display markedly less proclivity for teen pregnancy, abortion and juvenile crime. They also tend to have more favorable relations with their parents, with half staying in daily touch and almost all in weekly contact.
The evidence thus suggests that the obsession with luring singles to cities is misplaced. Instead, suggests Paul Levy, president of Philadelphia's Center City district association, the emphasis should be on retaining young people as they grow up, marry, start families and continue to raise them.

Greensboro has always been good at the family-friendly part, and has recently gotten better at atracting and retaining young people. That sounds like a winning combination.

Projects in the works like the proposed downtown greenway and the nearby Haw River State Park, should help even more.

The Ol' Black Friday Bait and Switch

2007-11-23T07:21:00.001-05:00

For the first (and hopefully last) time in my life I got up early this morning to shop on Black Friday.

Office Depot had advertised a basic Lenovo laptop at a very low price. We've been keeping our eyes open for deals, since #1 son will need one next year at college. So I roused myself and him out of bed at 5:40 am, still heavy with sleep and semi-digested turkey. We arrived at Office Depot shortly after 6 am, found the laptop display, took the little paper slip from the plastic sleeve under the Lenovo, and went to the cashier.

"We're out of those," she said.

"Then you need to take the slips off the display," I said. I didn't bother to complain that their big sale items were all gone by 6:09 am. "How many of these did you have," I asked a guy on the way out.

"Maybe two."

I should have kept my vow not to shop at Office Depot any more. Or maybe just followed Laurie's advice.

Update: Joe Tech found something similar at Circuit City.

Maybe Next Year ...

2007-11-22T11:09:00.000-05:00

We're roasting the traditional turkey for Thanksgiving this year. But maybe we'll try something different next year:

Via Althouse.

"The most amazing thing is that this started with 10 signs.”

2007-11-21T22:28:00.000-05:00

Preservation Nation:

It was the last straw for neighbors like Tad Skelton, who had watched eight houses fall for new ones in one of the town’s two national historic districts. Skelton and others planted red plastic signs in their yards, protesting the teardown trend. Today 550 front yards in the town of 27,000 display the “Protect Historic Kirkwood” signs.

Something for the folks in Greensboro's Kirkwood to think about.

Fall Street Scene

2007-11-21T15:11:00.001-05:00

Happy Birthday Hero

2007-11-20T20:12:00.000-05:00

I haven't done much dog blogging lately -- here's a pic of Hero our Belgian Malinois today, on her fourth birthday.

She has a very poor temperament -- skittish and mistrustful toward strangers, growls at guests, doesn't get along with other dogs (except for Trajan), nervous and hyperactive, needs a 3-mile run every day.

We love her to death.

Smart Growth and Traffic Safety

2007-11-20T18:49:00.000-05:00

Todd Litman says that Smart Growth reduces traffic fatalities for drivers, pedestrians, bikers, and transit commuters:

Many families move to sprawled, automobile-dependent suburbs because they want a safe place to raise their children. They are mistaken. A smart growth community is actually a much safer and healthier place to live overall.

Most discussion of Smart Growth benefits focuses on infrastructure savings, environmental protection, increased accessibility and improved livability. One of the most important benefits, increased traffic safety, is often overlooked. In fact, traffic safety is one of the most important benefits of smart growth and smart growth is one of the most effective ways to reduce traffic risk.

Three of the top 10 most sprawled places studied were in North Carolina: Stokes County, Yadkin County, and Davie County, where you are about seven times more likely to die in a car crash than in New York County, New York.

Third Anniversary

2007-11-16T22:54:00.000-05:00

I started this blog three years and 630 posts ago.

Still having fun. Thanks for reading.

Poetry Corner: Jimmy Carter via Sun, Too

2007-11-16T22:21:00.000-05:00

Sun, Too, in the comments at Quantum of Wantum, is Muse-struck, and turns an authentically odious letter by Jimmy Carter into a masterpiece of modern poetry a la William Carlos Williams:

Lamentably, I killed your cat
while trying just to sting it.

It was crouched,
as usual,
under our bird feeders
& I fired from some distance with birdshot.

It may ease your grief somewhat to know
that the cat was buried properly with a prayer
and that I'll be glad to get you another
of your choice.

There's also a little Billy Collins in that "It may ease your grief somewhat to know."

Poets are everywhere!

Chevron CTO Says Peak Oil is Real

2007-11-16T20:41:00.000-05:00

Don Paul, Chevron's CTO says that

The "geological endowment" of conventional oil--that is, the amount of oil in the Earth--once totaled about 3 trillion barrels, he said during a presentation at the Dow Jones Alternative Energy Innovations conference here. We've used about 1.1 trillion. Oil companies with current technologies can't get it all out of the ground, so maybe there is a trillion barrels left for human consumption....Thus, peak oil--the theory that we're about to get into declining numbers on conventional oil--is probably real. However, Paul said, "I don't think it has to be the catastrophe that other people have predicted because there are other ways to make fuel."

Paul is the first big oil industry representative I've heard say this.

One way to mitigate the increasing cost of energy is to build energy-efficient cities and towns that help people get around without depending so much on cars.

Lawndale / Cornwallis Site Plan and Elevations

2007-11-15T18:48:00.000-05:00

I got some photos of the sketch site plan that Tribek Properties submitted to the Greensboro Zoning Commission earlier this week for the Lawndale / Cornwallis intersection (see my previous post on this topic.) Their proposal was to rezone a block, which is currently Residential Single Family (RS-7), to Conditional District -- Planned Unit Development -- Infill. The Zoning Commission's vote was a tie, so the plan ~~was automatically appealed~~ may be appealed to City Council for a hearing and vote on December 18. (Update 11/17: A neighborhood informant tells me that Tribek now has formally appealed the decision.)

This case will give us a good idea of what kind of projects the newly-elected Council will likely approve or turn down.

The central feature of the plan is a large (14,800 sq. ft.) Walgreens that is situated in the center of the parking lot, with a corner-facing entrance as is typical of almost all new Walgreens.

The principal entrance to the parking lot is on Fairfield Avenue, which is now a residential street. A secondary entrance lets out onto Lawndale.

Edging the lot on Rosecrest and Fairfield are a series of 3-story condominiums, each with a front-facing 2-car garage on the ground floor:

The site plan shows no sidewalk on Cornwallis or Lawndale, a full sidewalk on Rosecrest, and a partial sidewalk on Fairfield. No pedestrian access to the Walgreens from the townhouses is shown, and the rear of the townhouses is divided from the Walgreen's by an 8-food masonry wall.

Pockets of green space are preserved between three of the townhouse buildings and on the corner of Rosecrest and Fairfield, where the designers have passed up the opportunity for a a signature corner entrance. (Compare the way the Hobbs building in Southside handled the corner, at left.)

A recent article in the Business Journal called this development "New Urbanist," and developer Bob Isner was quoted as calling it a "hybrid."

It is neither. The whole aim of New Urbanism is the integration of compatible uses with one another while creating a pleasant pedestrian environment and human-scaled public places -- sidewalks, pocket parks, small cafés and shops -- that promote personal interaction.

This project is just a lazy and obtuse mash-up of incompatible suburban buildings types: not only are the uses not integrated with each other -- they are segregated by the physical features the designers have proposed. The Walgreens will be sitting in its pool of asphalt like every other Walgreens you've ever seen. The proposed townhouses are just slightly squished-together Reedy Fork Ranch facades (see left) whose garage entrances will form a blank wall at the sidewalk level. The green spaces can provide no opportunities for interaction; they are just empty space.

This project is "New Urban" only to the extent that Frankenstein's Monster is a human being.

City planning staff think that this development will pose a grave danger to the integrity of the Kirkwood neighborhood, and they're right.

If the Council approves this, Katie bar the door, and older neighborhoods, organize yourselves! Because no one else will be looking out for your interests.

Happy Trails

2007-11-13T17:00:00.000-05:00

Bull City Rising is rooting for the completion of the American Tobacco Trail in Durham.

Hey, maybe we should do something like that here!

Lawndale / Cornwallis Zoning Denied ... For Now

2007-11-12T22:26:00.000-05:00

The Greensboro Zoning Commission denied a request to rezone the block of residential property at Cornwallis and Lawndale that was previously discussed here, here, and here.

City zoning staff had recommended against the rezoning, saying (in part),

Though the proposal includes both residential and non-residential components it is unclear that these uses can be truly integrated either within the site or with the surrounding residential areas, which is a goal of mixed development. The Sketch Plan provided with this request notes a wall separating the drug store and associated townhomes as well as parking areas and a full point of access to the drug store directly adjacent to existing single family residences. Given the heavy concentration of commercial uses already present on Lawndale Drive and Battleground Avenue, and the location of this site at the edge of the larger Mixed Use Commercial area, new higher intensity commercial uses do not appear warranted. Rather residential development that provides transition between the solid commercial and established residential areas appears to be a better fit (emphasis mine).

The developer will almost certainly appeal this decision to the City Council, where it will be heard on Dec. 18.

Staff comments make a lot of sense to me. It's interesting that the developer is proposing a "mixed use" that isn't really mixed -- the drugstore is separated from the residential unit by a huge wall. It reminds me of the "mixed use" designation for the Shops and Friendly, which, as many have noted, is really a couple of strip malls set back-to-back with some condos proposed for a back corner of the site.

A paradox of the area along Lawndale is that there's already a lot of nearby residential property, and a lot of adjacent commercial services, but it's almost impossible for residents to walk to the commercial services. I once watched in terror as a mother with a baby in a stroller tried to cross Lawndale to get to Target. She made it, but just barely.

This developer's proposal seems to be inimical to the very idea behind mixed use development -- that is, an improved urban environment with better pedestrian amenities.

A Green Old Age

2007-11-12T22:02:00.000-05:00

Walter Gallas writes about an unusual reason for a tear-down request in New Orleans:

This week I went to the New Orleans City Council to speak against a proposal to demolish an undamaged 1890’s Queen Anne style house on Henry Clay Street in the Audubon Park neighborhood so that the owners could build a new “green” house....

This urge to demolish is especially shocking given that its goal was supposedly sustainability, as it is a complete contradiction of what the green building movement envisions. It would be more responsible to apply green building principles to the current building–exploring ways to conserve energy, preserving its original materials, and ensuring that the building continues to exist for another 100 years. The resources contained in this house will be wasted and lost forever with its demolition.

Historic Computer Rehab

2007-11-11T17:19:00.000-05:00

The machine on which I do most of my blogging is a nearly eight-year-old Gateway that was a real fire-breather when we bought it.

But its once incredibly huge 40-gig drive is full, and its CD-ROM drive died quite a while back. I was thinking of replacing it.

But the old CPU is still fine for the stuff I do -- word processing, web surfing, e-mail, blogging, and the occasional production on Windows Movie Maker. And the price of a good, new desktop just wasn't in the budget right now.

So I picked up a $25 read-write CD burner at Staples and a new 160 gig internal drive at Best Buy for less than $100. They were really easy to install; my old gateway had two open slots for additional internal drives.

The only tricky part was getting iTunes to find the 20 gigs of music I migrated to the new hard drive, and even that wasn't very hard.

If I had known it was this cheap and easy, I would have done it a couple of years ago.

Wanna Take A Ride In My Charger?

2007-11-10T16:49:00.000-05:00

Benjamin Briggs and Ed Cone are covering the Lawdale-Cornwallis rezoning like syrup on pancakes, so I don't have much to add. Both have good photos of the stately corridor of willow oaks that would be lost.

A Walgreens + condos wouldn't add any value at that intersection, where -- do I need to say it? -- the transportation challenges are already immense.

I hear from city planning staff that big-name consultants have been brought in to try to make sense of the Battleground-Lawndale-Cornwallis nexus as it is now, and they've just thrown their hands up in despair. A drive-through pharmacy would only make things worse.

I kept hearing during the city council campaign that we need to be more business-friendly. But we don't need to be friendly to every business, unless they're going to be friendly to us.

Recruiting businesses is like searching for a spouse, and this Walgreens looks to me like the guy with the toothpick, pompadour, and cheap sunglasses who wants to take Greensboro for a ride in his primer-gray Charger.

A Little More Urbanity, Please

2007-11-08T10:36:00.000-05:00

Chicago architecture critic Blair Kamin has this advice for Greensboro's developers:

But if your building is third rate, then your company’s image will be third-rate. And if your city’s buildings are third-rate, then the image of your city will be third-rate. And if the image of your city is third rate, then how on Earth are you going to attract the most desirable people—“the creative class,” as Richard Florida calls them?

You won’t. You’ll be a provincial backwater. You won’t be fully equipped to move into the 21st Century. It’ll be as though as you were living without cell phones and Blackberries and computers. They’re all essential right? Well, good design is too...

My challenge to you--to the business leaders of Greensboro, to the political leaders and to the citizens--is to recognize that architecture matters and to act on that understand in fresh and creative ways. You’ve made a good start in reviving your downtown, but now it’s time to raise your game to the next level.

Benjamin Briggs has the whole story.

Progressive Developer

2007-11-05T15:42:00.001-05:00

I caught a bit of WUNC's State of Things while on a noontime errand and got to hear Frank Stasio's interview with Raleigh's Smedes York, a real estate developer and former Raleigh mayor. I wish every developer in Greensboro could listen to it. Here's a link directly to the audio [link]; send it to anyone who might be interested.

York talks about his experience in bringing residential and mixed-use developments to downtown Raleigh, starting in the late 1970s after Raleigh adopted its comprehensive plan in 1979. He thinks the plan was instrumental in helping to guide Raleigh's development more rationally than has happened in Charlotte, where, he says, development is mostly driven by business interests.

I was intrigued by his assertion that Raleigh's growth has benefited from the variety of interest groups that participate in land use decisions, including businesses, neighborhoods, and minority groups. York said that this has forced Raleigh to learn how to reach consensus decisions.

Here in Greensboro, I've been very disappointed that our comprehensive plan has received almost no attention from the entire crop of city council hopefuls, because that plan contains real, practical guidelines about how Greensboro can manage its future infill growth while protecting established neighborhoods.

If we try to follow the plan, I think we'll end up with less traffic congestion, a cleaner environment, better neighborhoods, and a better quality of life. If we don't, we wont.

I think some in our development community -- Robbie Perkins comes to mind -- understand that it's possible to grow according to a comprehensive plan and still make money. Others viscerally oppose any sort of regulation and reflexively fight it. In my view, the latter group tends to dominate the development discourse in Greensboro.

Narrow Streets, Bikes, and Sidewalks

2007-11-05T08:55:00.000-05:00

News & Record reader Troyce Hood worries about GDOT's new narrower standard width for residential streets

Did the City Council ever consider leaving the width as is and marking off designated bike lanes? How is this city ever going to be considered bicycle-friendly if it starts making the streets less wide? I have to believe that, as in most cases, it all comes down to dollars and not common sense.

While you're at it, did anyone ask fire and police how they like the idea of slimmer roads in residential neighborhoods? It must be exciting to try to get those big hook-and-ladder/pump trucks down slimmer streets for emergencies.

Perhaps the title of the article should have been, "Greensboro is slimming down streets while adding pounds to its residents."

GDOT gave a couple of presentations to the LDO committee on the new standards, and of course they did due diligence on the fire and police issue -- 26 feet is plenty wide enough for emergency access.

But one of the main reasons for narrowing the standard width was to encourage developers, who previously had been required to pay for 30' wide streets, to use some of that concrete to build sidewalks. Not that they are actually required to build sidewalks on both sides of the street, but "concrete ain't free," as the developers like to say, and I'm for anything that will encourage them to build in good pedestrian connectivity.

Since on-street parking (at least on one side) is usually the norm on residential streets, GDOT didn't see any advantage in keeping the streets wide and striping in bike lanes, and I agree. We're not talking about collector streets or thoroughfares here. As a bike commuter, I like riding the narrow, old streets of Fisher Park and College Hill, and I don't think bike lanes would improve their ridability.

The Willow Oaks development is one of the first to use the new 26' standard, and I think it's very walkable and bike-ridable. Here's a photo I took a while back of that streetscape:

Robert Goulet, RIP

2007-10-31T16:54:00.000-05:00

Robert Goulet died yesterday at age 73 of a rare lung ailment.

When I was very small, my parents played records of hit Broadway shows on our old stereo a lot, so Robert Goulet's voice in Camelot is one of the first I remember. I still think "If Ever I Would Leave You" is one of the most romantic songs ever recorded.

Here he is in a medley of early 60's Broadway songs with Barbara Cook, who I will always remember as Marian the librarian in The Music Man.

Mansions vs. McMansions

2007-10-30T14:55:00.000-05:00

Greensboro's Treasured Places reports that the Irving Park neighborhood is thinking about adopting an NCO -- not a non-commissioned officer, but a Neighborhood Conservation Overlay. They'd be the first neighborhood to do so since the city council passed the ordinance enabling the overlays.

NCOs allow old neighborhoods to craft their own development guidelines, including street setbacks, building forms, and building materials. The goal in Irving Park would be to stop tear-downs and the building of bulky contemporary houses on small lots.

If that's what Irving Park wants, I'm all for it: that neighborhood is stunningly beautiful and worth protecting. You don't have to live there (and few of us can afford to) in order to enjoy a jog or a bike ride through it and appreciate its many architectural and landscaping wonders. It's kind of like an architectural park for the whole city. (Bless those developers in the 1920s for building sidewalks!)

It will be interesting to see how the neighborhood debate plays out. One assumes that Irving Park, being our most prestigious neighborhood, is probably a stronghold of market-based, laissez-faire, anti-regulatory capitalists. Will those folks oppose regulation when it stands to protect their property values?

We'll see. Just remember Wharton's Land Use Axiom #1: Land use makes hypocrites of us all.

The Downside of Democracy

2007-10-30T07:03:00.000-05:00

Fec does some potential voter interviews in Greensboro's District 5.

They call to mind H. L. Mencken's famous definition of democracy:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

Another Vinyl Hater

2007-10-27T15:36:00.000-05:00

Barbara Campagna goes on an anti-vinyl tirade:

“No vinyl” I said. “But vinyl lasts longer and doesn’t need any maintenance,” he responded. Why does this misperception continue in the general public and bleed over into those of us who should know better? As Mike Jackson (Chief Architect of the Illinois SHPO’s office) says, “No Maintenance required” really means “can’t be repaired” - so they end up in the landfill much sooner than say a wood window which can be repaired and repaired and repaired, or recycled. Vinyl can’t be repaired, and it can’t be recycled. So, maybe you don’t need to repaint it every 1o years, but within 20 years you will need to buy new windows yet again, and the heavy imprint on the environment starts all over.
To quote my colleague Patrice’s recent “White Paper on Sustainability”: There is a common perception that windows are a major source of heat loss and gain. Yet retaining historic windows is often more environmentally friendly than replacement with new thermally resistant windows. Government data suggests that windows are responsible for only 10% of air infiltration in the average home. Furthermore, a 1996 study finds that the performance of updated historic windows is in fact comparable to new windows. Window retention also preserves embodied energy, and reduces demand for environmentally costly new windows, typically constructed of vinyl or aluminum… There is the widespread perception that air leakage through windows is responsible for the majority of heat gain or loss in historic buildings. Yet information from the U.S. Department of Energy indicates that windows are responsible for only 10% of air escape in the average American home. Floors, ceiling and walls are responsible for 31% of heat loss and gain, while ducts and fireplaces are each responsible for about 15% of heat loss and gain.

Besides, vinyl windows are just ugly as hell.

Previously.

Joe Wilson Gets Specific

2007-10-25T17:48:00.000-05:00

In answer to my earlier question, candidate Joe Wilson writes in the comments on his blog,

David, one thing that comes to mind is engineered standards. We often see projects of the same relative size and scope differ greatly in their engineering. For example one site may have a pile of rock in the bottom of a retention pond called a “baffle” and the other may require a series of earthen baffles and a skimmer for the same size pond in the same area. This is because different engineers use different methods. Anyway the point I am trying to make is the city should standardize engineering requirements to simplify the TRC Technical Review Committee process.
Once you get a plat map of your site submitted to the city it goes into “TRC” and 13 different heads of departments look it over and return comments and your engineer makes the changes required by the comments,it is then resubmitted for more comments and changes up to 3 times until it is finally approved. Then you have to have 5 people sign off on the thing and finally it gets approved. The current contact person who is Jimmy Person usually takes it to the city clerk for recordation within a week. My last plat map took 101 days to approve and record.

So the addition of one person attached to the executive department is going to speed this up how? let’s say on average they look at 15 new plans a month, So now as it stands developers and their engineers have 13 points of contact, so getting an answer is pretty quick. The new position the “Special Assistant to the City Manager” has to contact as many as 13 people about as many as 15 plans and then report to the engineers to solve the problem. How does one person do the work of 13 people more efficiently than they can do it themselves? I bet he or she will be expensive.

I understand that the job is only supposed to deal with problems that arise but I just illustrated that every plan submitted has re-writes and changes that have to be communicated, I just think it’s a needless addition of more bureaucracy and not too mention that the person in this position will come into contact with every developer in the city one on one as a City representative. in a position of power. Once again they’ve created the possibility a person of influence entering politics with a lot of support from developers. When will we ever learn that perception is reality in the mind of the public. I have lots more to say just not lots of time right now. let me hear from you.

That's plenty specific! I'm going to forward this to city manager Mitch Johnson and see if he'd like to respond.

I'm less concerned that the liaison would enter politics as the cat's paw of developers than that the liaison would become a lackey for development interests working for the city.

But what part of the current process, that's admittedly very complicted, could be or should be eliminated?

What Red Tape? Be Specific, Please

2007-10-25T10:05:00.000-05:00

Red tape and city rules and regulations are convenient dogs to kick at election time (or should I say, goats to scape?).

Candidate Mike Barber got the nod from the N&R partly for his stance against "red tape," and on his blog, candidate Joe Wilson criticises city manager Mitch Johnson for adding a staff member whose job is to help developers through the approval process. Joe thinks the city should simplify city regulations instead.

I want to know exactly what red tape these candidates (and others) want to cut. Because regulations that look like pointless nuisances to developers often look like necessary protections to property owners and neighborhoods. I want the candidates to quote chapter and verse in the city's ordinances.

I wrote in a comment at Joe Wilson's blog,

Joe, when you say you want to make the process simpler, do you have any particular ordinances or codes in mind? Which ones trip people up most? I hear lots of candidates say they want the city to be more “business-friendly,” but I’ve never heard any specifics on which ordinances or procedures they want to change.
I ask this because I’m on the citizens advisory team for rewriting the city’s development ordinance, and if you have any specific ideas, this is the time to get them on the table.

~~As of this writing, Mr. Wilson hadn't yet responded.~~Mr. Wilson responds in the comments.

Wilson confuses me, too, because in another post on his blog, writing from the point of view of a neighbor, he blasts the city for not regulating the cutting of trees. In that post he also criticizes "overzealous" city employees, but don't you think that if a city employee had prevented the tree-cutting that Wilson laments, the developer who wanted to cut them would have complained about meddling city employees?

Unless I hear very specific deregulation proposals from the candidates, I'm going to assume that calls for eliminating "red tape" are at best just political posturing, or at worst, a call to give developers free rein to build what they want, wherever they want it.

Urban Planning By Blog

2007-10-23T22:31:00.000-05:00

Robert Goodspeed:

[Robert Fishman] argues the tradition has not been a story of centralized, rational planning, coordinated through governmental agencies. In his view,the great planning accomplishments of American history were instead the product of a great “urban conversation” where elites and common citizens alike engaged in an “intense and impassioned” discussion of urban and regional strategies. Fueled by the selfish interests of both the actors and the cities themselves, this urban conversation is the true source of the power in directing the development of our cities. Indeed, history shows Americans have invested heavily in common infrastructure in the past, building freeways and transit, urban parks, train stations, ballparks, and convention centers.

We are living through remarkable times, when the very medium of our urban conversation is being transformed. No longer are our major urban newspapers the exclusive forum for the civic minded. Newspaper circulation and readership has declined, niche publications catering to various interests and languages have sprung up. The most potent tool of this revolution - the internet - has exploded in influence and scope over the past decade. At a fundamental level, it has empowered every organization and every individual to communicate directly with any other person on the planet.

As we might expect, this has changed the nature of the urban conversation fundamentally. No longer does it take place through several well-known forums, today it happens on websites, over neighborhood email lists, in blog comments, on message boards, or through email threads among co-workers or friends. While there is much disorienting about this brave new world, it has empowered citizens to seek direct information from the government.

There's a lot of that happening right here in Greensboro -- some of it right here on this blog.

Local Architecture Lacking

2007-10-23T19:24:00.000-05:00

According to Benjamin Briggs,

[B]oth of [Raleigh and Charlotte] are far ahead of Greensboro in understanding the power of architecture and good design. Raleigh has developed an appreciation of architecture in being the home of the NCSU School of Design since 1948. Charlotte was hit over the head with the importance of good design with architect Robert A. M. Stern’s 1986 proclamation that Queen City was “the ugliest collection of third-rate buildings in America.” Through the years, the press in both cities has cultivated a population that has an appreciation of architecture and design. In contrast, the Greensboro News and Record has provided little coverage on design issues, focusing instead on historic preservation (and often on the conflicts therein).

Yup.

It's Not The Water ... It's The Government

2007-10-23T18:43:00.000-05:00

Bull City Rising admires Greensboro's new downtown streetscapes:

Driving through Southside on Saturday morning, the streets and alleyways were full of couples and singletons out walking the dog or enjoying the early part of the day from their porches.

But the renewal doesn't end at the few city blocks of Southside; it extends down Martin Luther King, Jr. Parkway all the way to I-40, with a massive streetscape project having added sidewalks, attractive lighting and what appears to be landscaping along the boulevard... transforming, in the process, what clearly was once a run-down street into a much attractive drive, and from the looks of it helping to draw in renewal and revitalization to some of the houses....

Heading over to N.C. A&T from downtown, I was impressed to see still more streetscape beautification, with landscaped medians, attractive signage, and good lighting. Sure enough, upon approaching the college, attractive, modernized campus-oriented retail appeared along Market right next to the campus....

[H]ow has Greensboro pulled off its redevelopment so well while Durham is just starting? Its tax levels are about the same (though as a larger city, it does have a larger base from which to draw.) Is its local government simply more capable at executing on change, on operating functionally?

Whatever the explanation, there is something in the water in the Triad, and it ain't lead.

It's not the water; it is city government in Greensboro.

The projects that BCR mentions (Southside, East Market St. Corridor) emanated from Greensboro's Housing and Community Development department, whose talented planners -- Andy Scott, Sue Schwartz, Dan Curry, and others -- not only had the imagination to envision these projects, they had the skills to get other city departments (planning, transportation), city political leaders, and voters on board.

And there's more to come from this crew on South Elm Street. Greensboro is very lucky to have these people working for us.

Via Cone.

GSO Housing Web Video

2007-10-23T18:14:00.000-05:00

The Greensboro Housing Coalition has produced a mini-documentary on affordable housing. It gives you a pretty good idea of how minimum housing enforcement works in Greensboro.

The GHC has a lot to be proud of, and Greensboro should be very grateful for their work.

Via Chosen Fast.

Mellowing On Mellow Mushroom

2007-10-21T10:50:00.000-05:00

I got a couple of responses to what I wrote about the Mellow Mushroom coming to South Elm:

Ed Cone wrote that "Greensboro is not Mayberry." Irrefutable!

I've got no problem with downtown Greensboro growing and changing, though you might not get that message from my post. To clarify: my worry is that South Elm's distinctive, local flavor will be lost to architectural and commercial generica.

So I was really happy to get an e-mail from the Mellow Mushroom's owner, Jim Waters. He wrote,

The store in Greensboro will take into consideration (and respect) the character of the neighborhood and hopefully expand on it. It will have a completely different look than the WS store. When the time comes I'll send you a rendering of the Greensboro store and would welcome your comments. I'll be shocked if we bring a chain feel to the area; that is not why we are heading there.

In the meantime, keep us (and the rest of Downtown Greensboro) on our toes!
...

We have a vision for 609 S. Elm that I hope comes together will blow people away. We are looking for a "bohemian cathedral" feel that will take advantage of all the windows on the south side of the building. We'll see what this all means when we get there.

For what it is worth, we do our fair share to support local art and music and often lay low, take our punches on any dissent and then see if the views change once we deliver our product.

Those are heartening words, because South Elm is already an architectural treasure.

Mr. Waters sent some photos of the Mellow Mushroom in Winston-Salem:

To me, The sleek, almost retro- modernism of the WS store looks appropriate for its context. It will be interesting to see what the Greensboro store will look like.

Wish I'd Said That

2007-10-20T16:20:00.000-05:00

Glenn Reynolds writes, "the political rewards for fixing old stuff are far inferior to the political rewards for building new stuff -- even if the old stuff is stuff we need, and the new stuff is showy pork."

So right. His post is about "big" infrastructure like bridges and dams, but the same principle applies to neighborhoods.

Rent-Leveling the Playing Field

2007-10-18T08:45:00.000-05:00

LTE writer Michael Silverman suggests that Greensboro establish a rent-levelling board to handle landlord-tenant disputes:

The board members consisted of three landlords, three tenants and three homeowners all appointed by the city council. The board also maintained an attorney. We met monthly in town hall, and after each meeting the public was invited to bring concerns before the board stemming from either tenant or landlord issues. The board heard all parties and made a legal binding decision either for or against the landlord or tenant involved. For the many apartment complexes within Greensboro, it would be a service to the thousands of residents if such a board were implemented in Greensboro.

I'd never heard of rent-leveling boards before, and my intensive research indicates that they're all in New Jersey.

I think it would be a good thing if renter-landlord problems could be brought into a hearing where tenants and landlords would have to show their faces to deal with disputes. As Greensboro rental law now stands, many landlords are able to maintain substandard property for years on end with few bad consequences for themselves, and landlords have almost no recourse against deadbeat or destructive tenants.

But the rent-leveling boards of New Jersey seem to have been established to handle rent increases in rent-controlled properties, and we don't have rent control here in North Carolina. I imagine that the Devil will be buying a polar fleece anorak from REI before rent control comes here. And I'm pretty sure that the city would need an enabling law from the NC state legislature before it could establish another quasi-judicial board.

Haw River Memories

2007-10-15T20:41:00.000-05:00

When I die, I want my ashes to be scattered in the Haw River.

(Photo by Dave Horne)

In the first years of our marriage, Laurette and I rented an old post-and-beam farmhouse that stood on 1,100 acres in Chatham County. You could only get to it by a mile-long logging track that meandered between low rocky forested hills and along a creek. The place was wooded with beech, poplar, pine, oak, and understory dogwoods whose white blossoms glowed out of the spring twilights. Our teenage children were babies then -- two of them were born while we lived there -- and we had two young dogs who are now long dead.

If you followed the logging track past the farmhouse -- it was called Way Station Farm, and had once been a stage stop on the way to Pittsboro -- the track led down to the banks of the Haw, eventually fading off into the undergrowth. I followed it through the brush a few times to find the stone foundations and ruined chimneys of houses that had once been like the one we lived in.

In the four years we were there, I think we walked down that track almost every day, winter and summer, our shepherds making wide circles around us through the woods, our children usually in backpacks and the baby jogger. When we reached the river, the dogs would have a swim, and the kids would throw sticks for them into the water. Sam caught his first fish there, a small greenish catfish. We threw it back.

In spring and summer the ticks were ferocious, and we spent part of most evenings pulling ticks off the dogs with tweezers and dropping them into a small glass of rubbing alcohol. We checked the kids and ourselves, marking the day of every tick bite on the calendar in case of Lyme Disease or Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.

But there were no mosquitoes, probably because every standing pool rippled with tadpoles that ate the larvae. What few survived the tadpoles were taken by the dragonflies that patrolled our yard, or by the quiet bats at dusk.

One spring the jungle of wisteria that was choking to death a nearby stand of loblolly pines bloomed so intensely that if you stood in the middle of it you could hardly take a breath, the sweetness was so overpowering. The bees and other insects were intent on the nectar, so that you could stand in the swarm without them paying you any attention.

In high summer the fireflies would settle in the trees after their dipping twilight mating flights and just pulse, their yellow glow contrasting with the thick icy white of the Milky Way. Late at night the whippoorwills would wake us up with their loud, repeating cries. In winter, you could often see the barred owl who lived nearby, and through the bare trees there were always a couple of turkey vultures circling in the pale sky.

Wouldn't it be a terrible waste if a place such as this were clearcut for a gated suburb? Don't you think places like this should be preserved for generations to enjoy?

I do. That's why I support Citizens for Haw River State Park.

Good Charlotte

2007-10-14T13:17:00.000-05:00

"Greensboro is by and large a nice, well-run place to live," wrote a local blogger recently, and I was inclined to agree until I rode around looking for houses that Project Homestead had built.

Yesterday's tour gave me a very biased sample, but I saw that Greensboro has a lot of stressed neighborhoods with boarded-up houses like these. I was afraid to get out of my car to take these pictures. [NB: these houses were not built by Project Homestead. Read the link above to find out about the condition of PH houses.]

The city does a lot to provide basic housing in these neighborhoods, and has done some great infrastructure and planning projects like the East Market Street corridor.

But what does the city do to promote the community health of existing neighborhoods that don't need infrastructure repairs as much as help to make sure that lots are not overgrown, trash is picked up, and their streets are reasonably safe? With all the recent publicity about gangs in the city and the need for a comprehensive approach to them, this would seem to be a pressing issue.

What we have here in Greensboro is a single part-time employee who runs the Neighborhood Information Center out of the Glenwood Library. That person, Donna Newton, has been indefatigable in working with neighborhoods and the Greensboro Neighborhood Congress (an all-volunteer organization) to help with basic problems like crime, housing inspections, and getting appropriate city services.

But there's only one of Donna, and she works more than full time at her half-time position. We need much more.

In this respect, Charlotte has our butt kicked. For 12 years, Charlotte has run an annual neighborhood symposium. It provides leadership training for neighborhood organizations. It offers matching grants of up to $25,000 for neighborhood improvement projects, including planning. It works with neighborhood organizations to help enforce basic quality of life ordinances. It has a vision of what a model neighborhood is.

Greensboro needs a central clearinghouse and dedicated staff for neighborhood services, backed up by a firm commitment from all departments to enforce housing, zoning, trash, and transportation ordinances. It also needs a firm commitment from city council to provide the staff to enforce basic ordinances.

I propose selling off the Bryan Park golf course and transferring its annual budget to pay for these needed services. Seriously.

[Special note to RGW: I don't hate golf or golfers! I just think that this course belongs in the private sector.]

Project Homestead: The Inside Story You Haven't Heard

2007-10-13T17:31:00.000-05:00

If you asked an average Joe Greensboro about Project Homestead, I think you’d get a story that goes something like this:

Project Homestead was a nonprofit homebuilder in Greensboro that received millions of dollars in handouts from the city to build low-income housing. But Project Homestead’s late leader, the Rev. Michael King, squandered a lot of that money on cruises, personal expenses, and illicit land deals for his family and cronies. Even worse, Project Homestead’s houses were shoddily built. All this happened because city staff wasn’t paying close enough attention to the non-profit’s activities. After Project Homestead went bankrupt and Rev. King took his own life, the local DA investigated the mess, chose not to prosecute anyone, and then refused to release his report.

Unfortunately, some of that narrative is true, and the more sensational parts of it were well-covered in the N&R. ~~Oddly, the normally muckraking Rhino Times left the story alone.~~ (Correction: according to an e-mail Rhino editor John Hammer sent me, the RT ran many Project Homestead stories. Unfortunately, none of them are available at the RT website, whose archives don't go back past 2005.)

I got curious about how Project Homestead actually worked with the city. How much money did Project Homestead receive from the city, and on what terms? How much was squandered, and how much actually helped low-income people get into decent housing? How much money went to homeowners? What was the quality of the housing, and is anyone looking after it now? I suppose these questions are too boring to get much newspaper coverage, but I think they’re important for evaluating the whole Project Homestead affair.

I asked Andy Scott, head of the city’s housing and community development (HCD) department how much the city spent on Project Homestead, and he was kind enough to put together a report and to meet with me to explain it. Here’s what I found out.

Total funds to Project Homestead from the city between 1990-2003 were $17,600,734. About $16 million of that went directly to property owners in the form of lots donated by the city, second mortgages to homeowners, and loans to Project Homestead in partnership with other developers who specialized in building and managing low- to moderate-income apartments.

None of the mortgages were in the sub-prime category that is currently scaring the pants off the U.S. real estate industry. Project Homestead vetted its mortgagees carefully enough that the default rate on their mortgages is about 2-3%, while the default rate for adjustable rate sub-prime mortgages lately runs between 7 and 14.5%. According to Andy, the loans produce $500,000 to $750,000 a year in income to the city.

You can do the numbers yourself: over the life of those loans, the city will eventually get back its $16 million investment and more.

What about the allegedly shoddy units? When complaints started popping up in the newspaper, HCD worked closely with the city inspections department to address the problems. The city eventually identified 57 out of 625 single- and multi-family Project Homestead units that needed some repairs. Andy described the majority of the problems as either cosmetic or due to normal wear and tear or deferred maintenance.

Five houses had serious problems related to their foundations. The houses’ insurer, Nationwide, refused to repair any of them. (Nationwide wasn't on their side.) The city eventually paid about $200,000 to fix all problems for all 57 units. I guess you can look at that expenditure either as a waste of taxpayer money or as the city protecting its investment in the houses, depending on how demagogic you’re feeling.

Here’s a photo of one of the houses that needed minor repairs:

From the street, it looks like a pretty good house. I picked it at random off the list Andy gave me.

All told, fewer than 10% of Project Homestead units had minor problems, and fewer than 1% had serious problems. I don’t know the industry standard for this kind of thing, but Project Homestead’s complaint rate seems better than what people are saying about houses built by K. Hovnanian Homes, one of the country’s biggest for-profit homebuiliders.

What about that lax staff oversight? If you read the N&R’s coverage carefully, you find that staff raised concerns quite early about the way Project Homestead was doing some things. In particular, Project Homestead didn’t seem to be giving as much “instant equity” to homeowners from the donated lots as other low-income homebuilders were. HCD produced a report and a plan to address the problem, and gave it to city council in early 1997. Council took no action. Staff members who raised red flags to the council include Andy Scott, then-city manager Ed Kitchen, and assistant city manager Ben Brown.

HCD staff have always done regular on-site inspections and audits of the multifamily properties that were built and managed by Project Homestead and its partners. Andy provided me with a stack of recent audit memos that address occupancy rates, renter qualifications, monthly rents, and the physical condition of the buildings and grounds (which are also covered under the city’s minimum housing ordinance). The memos are boring to read, but they paint a clear picture: city staff holds property managers to a very high standard as a condition of receiving city loans.

Here's a photo of the L. Richardson Hospital in East Greensboro -- an historic building which Project Homestead and its partners recycled as an apartment building:

And here's another aparatment building that Project Homestead built:

Over the years, the city also contracted with Project Homestead to provide homeownership counseling, homeowner preparation, and project planning. The city paid to rehab the Project Homestead headquarters on MLK Drive (which the city now owns, I think) and provided some other rehab loan funds. All of these expenditures were audited, and totaled about $730,000.

Unusual grants to Project Homestead were for the Cumberland Shopping Center, a Job Training Center, and the Dudley-Lee Center upfit, all together totaling about $831,000. If I recall correctly, these grants were requested by Rev. King outside of normal channels, were not recommended by staff, but were generally approved by city council, with councilwoman Sandy Carmany often the only dissenting vote.

The primary responsibility for keeping track of Project Homestead’s finances lay with the Project Homestead board of directors, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the board failed miserably in its duty to keep an eye on what Rev. King was doing. However, since the Project Homestead meltdown, the city has begun requiring mandatory, annual training for all non-profit boards that do business with the city – no exceptions allowed. Two board members, one of them an officer, have to participate.

This kind of board failure is actually pretty common, unfortunately. Maybe you remember what happened a while back with the United Way, and more recently with the Smithsonian Institution. When people are in constantly in control of a lot of other people's money, it's hard for them not to take some of it.

You can draw your own moral from this story. My view is that Project Homestead did a tremendous amount of good for the city, building better houses for low-income homeowners than the market would have provided, bringing a lot of economically marginalized people into the financial mainstream, strengthening the fabric of many neighborhoods, and just giving thousands of people decent places to live.

In a worst-case scenario – say Project Homestead squandered $500,000 of city money – we paid a 3% toll to human sin and folly. More than we’d like to pay, for sure, but hardly more than one would expect in this world.

The Social Science of Science

2007-10-09T07:10:00.000-05:00

John Tierney has a fascinating article about opinion "cascades" among hard scientists. He writes about a small group of eminent scientists who dared to buck a powerful consensus on a scientific subject that is deeply entwined with U.S. government public policy:

But the report’s authors were promptly excoriated on Capitol Hill and in the news media for denying a danger that had already been proclaimed ....

The scientists, despite their impressive credentials, were accused of bias because some of them had done research financed by ... industry. And so the informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom ....

[A prominent senator] subsequently asked [one of the scientists] at a hearing to reconcile his skepticism with a survey showing that the ... recommendations were endorsed by 92 percent of [leading experts].

“Senator ... I recognize the disadvantage of being in the minority,” Dr. Ahrens replied. Then he pointed out that most of the [experts] in the survey were relying on secondhand knowledge because they didn’t work in this field themselves.

“This is a matter,” he continued, “of such enormous social [and] economic ... importance that it must be evaluated with our eyes completely open. Thus I would hate to see this issue settled by anything that smacks of a Gallup poll.” Or a cascade.

The scientific issue that Tierney writes about is the effects of dietary fat on mortality (apparently there's no scientific correlation between the two), but the parallels with current debates about global warming are striking.

Not that I'm exactly a global-warming skeptic. Having no knowledge whatsoever about climate science, I'm pretty much stuck with relying on the scientists to be good scientists. And Tierney's article shows very clearly that scientists are as liable to form opinion "cascades" as anyone else.

So I get a little twitchy when I hear people say stuff like "the debate is over" about climate science. In real science, the debate is never over. There's always something new to be learned, and every great scientific paradigm should have its opportunity to be tested and overturned.

Good scientists should welcome that kind of criticism and scrutiny, or else they may someday find themselves playing the Inquisition to some other scientist's Galileo.

Mellow Mushroom Can't Be As Mellow As Two Art Chicks

2007-10-05T07:01:00.000-05:00

[Sigh.]

Jogging down South Elm Street the other day, I was thinking how it still has the ambiance of an old-fashioned, small-town downtown, with some distinctive Greensboro touches. Old guys hanging out in front of Coe Grocery. Kindley's used office furniture. Two Art Chicks.

Enter Mellow Mushroom, exit Two Art Chicks.

The chainification of downtown Greensboro has begun. It will be good for property and business owners, bad for downtown Greensboro's being someplace, instead of anyplace or everyplace.

Two Art Chicks has been an ideal downtown citizen, not only providing gallery space for local artists, but also meeting room for neighborhood redevelopment confabs. (It looks like it might now be a victim of its own public-spiritedness.)

But the hard truth is that most people care a lot more about good pizza than they do about picturesque charm or local art.

[Sigh.]

The End of Walmartia?

2007-10-03T07:20:00.000-05:00

Today's Wall Street Journal has a long article (subscription required) sounding the death-knell of the Wal-Mart Era.

Today ... Wal-Mart's influence over the retail universe is slipping. In fact, the industry's titan is scrambling to keep up with swifter rivals that are redefining the business all around it. It can still disrupt prices, as it did last year by cutting some generic prescriptions to $4. But success is no longer guaranteed.

Rival retailers lured Americans away from Wal-Mart's low-price promise by offering greater convenience, more selection, higher quality, or better service. Amid the country's growing affluence, Wal-Mart has struggled to overhaul its down-market, politically incorrect image while other discounters pitched themselves as more upscale and more palatable alternatives. The Internet has changed shoppers' preferences and eroded the commanding influence Wal-Mart had over its suppliers.

As a result, American shoppers are increasingly looking for qualities that Wal-Mart has trouble providing.

I seem to be late to the party. I started shopping at Wal-Mart only last year, when it built a store at the abandoned Carolina Circle Mall property.

I suppose I should hate Wal-Mart, as even the Journal admits that it helped erode Main Street America, and it doesn't pay its employees very well (but neither does Target, I hear).

But I really like going to the Cone Boulevard Wal-Mart, for a lot of reasons. Price is one of them; we buy packaged staples and dairy there for the prices and buy meat, eggs, and produce from the Farmers' Market for the quality.

But price isn't the only thing. The Cone store is like a party, even if you're there at 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night. And the shoppers there make me feel a little better about my side of town, which is usually in the news only for crime, drugs, and prostitution. The people I see at Wal-Mart look like happy families -- for some reason, group shopping is the norm -- who are enjoying each other and buying stuff they need at low prices. It seems to make them feel good, and their presence shows me that even the "bad" side of town is mostly populated by nice, good people.

I think a lot of these people are inhabitants of John Edwards's "Other America," and this Wal-Mart is their town square. No other retailer or grocer was willing to build a store for them: not Target, not Costco, not Harris-Teeter, not even Food Lion.

So hate Wal-Mart if you like, but stop by the store on Cone sometime and ask the people who work and shop there if they'd like to see their Wal-Mart go away. I think I know what they'll tell you.

Hot Child(ren) In The City

2007-10-02T10:27:00.000-05:00

Lots of informed discussion going on at Asymmetrical Information about carbon footprints, heat islands, kids, city government, and suburbs. Libertarian city-dweller Megan McArdle says,

Dense cities are a tax on having children, but that's not an inherent quality of cities. If we had taller buildings next to spots of green space, you could have more residential space and a convenient play space, and built-in play spaces for your children. If you had school choice, you could solve many of the fears about the urban school system that lead affluent families to flee the city. If the tax system weren't set up so that localities bear the responsibility for caring for the indigent, you wouldn't have affluent families moving out to get away from the tax burden. A dense city is in many places a better place to raise a child than a suburb: you spend a lot fewer years shuttling the kids around, and there are many more options and activities for them than for suburban children. But current political culture makes them child-unfriendly....

City dwellers are far too self-satisfied with their allegedly low-carbon lifestyle, too willing to impose carbon taxes in the belief it won't affect them much. It is especially irritating to hear people who take multiple annual long-haul flights complain about SUV drivers, but the general phenomenon is broader than that. I expect that in the event a carbon tax is enacted, I will see a lot of my costs go up--as they should, to the extent that I am exporting my carbon emissions elsewhere. But nonetheless, I don't think they'll go up as much as those of people in suburban homes, because heating, cooling, and driving to those homes really is simply massively less efficient than doing the same thing in an urban area.

A couple of questions come to mind: will refusing to care for the indigent actually make cities more attractive to the affluent? I doubt that the indigent will go away, so won't withdrawing services mean lower taxes + more street people?

No argument with Ms. McArdle's criticism of self-satisfied city dwellers who sneer at SUV drivers while taking long-haul flights, but don't suburbanites take long flights, too?

In the end, though, she seems to agree with James Kunstler that higher energy prices are going to hurt suburbs more than cities.

Hope You Enjoyed Your Day

2007-09-30T08:32:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was a good day for some people. Mr. Sun spent quality dad time with his boys, took a nap, and made some cute graphics about living in Greensboro. Ed Cone went shopping for consumer goods with his son, and got to make fun of Circuit City afterwards. On Facebook, one of my colleagues updated his status to "having the best day ever!"

Me, I spent the morning alternately feeling like I was going to throw up and shouting obscenities at myself, because we let my daughter run out of gas in our Prius, a block from home.

Did you know that if your Prius runs out of gas, and the big battery gets depleted from driving only on electric power, you have to get a new battery? And the battery costs $4000? And I don't have $4,000? And Sam is going to college next year, and Madeline the year after that?

So I spent the morning getting the car towed to the dealer, hoping against hope that all was well, and shouting the f-word (sometimes vivace, sometimes lento, always fortissimo) at myself all the way home from Rice Toyota.

The afternoon I spent in the 18" spidery crawlspace underneath my kitchen, feeling a lot like Charles Bronson's character in the Great Escape -- you know, the tunneler with claustrophobia.

I had discovered some serious decay caused by our house's previous owner building a deck attached to the rear of the house, which allowed moisture to penetrate and rot the support beams. All this had to be fixed by building a new concrete-block support pier and replacing the rotted beams, in a space accessible only by wiggling 25 feet over and under a century's worth of plumbing, electrical wires, and steel ducts. Lots of those white spider egg sacs this time of year. Thousands of them. They feel kind of tickly on your head and down the back of your neck and under your shirt.

Anyhow, I got the pier built, and took a call (while under the house) from the Toyota technician. All's well with the car (which I still like a lot, so please keep your schadenfreude to yourself, hybridophobes).

And I'm going to enjoy this afternoon by constructing and replacing beams with my new friends the spiders.

Enjoy your nap.

Update (Sunday, 7 pm): I emerge victorious over spiders and rot.

Romans Going Dutch

2007-09-22T23:33:00.000-05:00

I thought only Amsterdam was known for its bicylces. But now, apparently, it's when in Rome, do as the Dutch do:

Although the city’s hills, old cobblestones and dense streets can make biking difficult for some, it’s now easier than ever to enjoy the sights from the perch of a bicycle seat. The number of bicycle lanes and rental shops and the indulgence of Rome’s otherwise aggressive drivers make biking in Rome convenient. Also, the municipal government occasionally bans private motor traffic in central Rome for a day, making the city a biker’s paradise. [Link]

Some Suburbs Ending Even Before The End Of Suburbia

2007-09-22T22:08:00.000-05:00

The documentary The End of Suburbia predicts that high energy prices will soon make our modern suburbs unlivable, or at least transform them into something other than isolated havens for single-family homeowners.

According to the WSJ, it's already happening to some places, but not because of the price of gas.

In 2004, Mark Spector and his wife, Deanna, paid $350,000 for a six-bedroom house in Bridgewater, a new development in Wesley Chapel, Fla., about 25 miles north of Tampa. They moved into their home and looked forward to meeting their neighbors.

Then Florida's once-feverish housing market started to cool. Investors who'd bought a large percentage of the properties in Bridgewater found they couldn't flip them for a quick profit, and brought in tenants, instead. By last year, Mr. Spector estimates, close to half of the residents in the subdivision of 750-plus homes were renters.

The result, Mr. Spector says: overgrown lawns, drug deals in the park and loud parties in the "frat houses" down the street. "You'll see some driveways with a dozen cars parked in the driveway and on the grass," he says.

It's kind of surprising how fast and easily a "good" suburb can come down with the ailments of older, more urbanized neighborhoods, isn't it? And I love the response of the developer to neighbors' complaints:

"We have no evidence that leads us to believe that rentals are the cause of the homeowner concerns."

I've met a few landlords who talk like that. But it's really true that homeowners can cause as many neighborhood problems as renters. Or even more:

Denise Bower, of Community Management, Inc., which manages 122 developments around Portland, Ore., says renters are often more responsive to complaints because they know they run the risk of losing their leases if they don't. "I have more problems with owners, by far," Ms. Bower says. "They get stubborn."

Suburbia isn't really ending yet; suburbs and exurbs still account for the vast majority of growth in the U.S. But suburbia ain't what it used to be. There are now more poor people in the suburbs than in cities. If you're hoping that a suburban location will protect you from typical urban problems like poverty, crime, drugs, and declining property values, it looks like that bet just isn't as good as it used to be.

Focus, People

2007-09-22T09:48:00.000-05:00

Large sections of Greensboro are under the control of roving thugs, and the Greensboro police are unable to provide basic protection to ordinary citizens there. Billy Jones blogs about this, and gets almost no comments.

City Council responds to the gang problem by stealing officers for a gang unit from other patrols. Shortly after that, when neighborhoods in the city's inner-ring neighborhoods report a stormburst of car break-ins, the response from the police department is, "we hope you can catch them in the act and call us, because we don't have staff to increase patrols." Gee, thanks.

At the same time, the city's enforcement of minimum housing laws is so ineffectual that the Greensboro Housing Coalition feels compelled to give a housing award to the landlord with the most housing violations in the city -- more than 30 --, because last year that landlord had 63 violations. Wow. Isn't that like giving a sobriety award to a drunk for cutting down to a six-pack a day?

These things being so, I find it pretty disappointing that Greensboro is currently obsessing over the termination of a police chief that happened almost two years ago, and which has zero chance of a resolution that will please aggrieved parties.

All reports agree that the GPD was dysfunctional before David Wray became chief, remained dysfunctional under him (and appears to have become more so), and probably remains so today.

Does anyone have a practical and concrete plan to ensure that the City of Greensboro can provide basic law enforcement and housing protection to its citizens?

Caveat: "fire Mitch Johnson" or "ban the Simkins PAC" are not practical proposals to solve these problems. A new city manager would face the same police and housing enforcement problems that Mitch inherited, and the Simkins PAC represents a permanent political constituency in Greensboro that will not go away.

Greensboro Cycling Survey

2007-09-19T20:41:00.000-05:00

I got this message from a member of BIG, and I'm passing it along:

BIG (Bicycling in Greensboro) is a group of local cyclists that are trying to improve the cycling environment in Greensboro.

We need your help to identifywhat our priorities should be as we move forward. You can do this by taking a survey that has been put on the Internet for easy access. Go here for the survey; it will only take a few minutes. We really want your input.

If you know anyonethat cycles in our area please forward this to them and encourage them to take the survey as well.

If you are not a member of BIG we would love for you to join us. Membership information can be found here and an application here.

Capitalist Preservationist

2007-09-17T16:20:00.000-05:00

Jim Schlosser reports that John Lomax and three partners plan to renovate Greensboro's first Cadillac dealership:

John Lomax, who has rehabbed many downtown buildings, points to the [building's] expensive wainscoting around the showroom walls, white and black diamond floor tiles, skylights and other upscale touches that survive at 304 E. Market St. These features once told car buyers America's most classy automobile was sold here.

According to the article, Lomax has rehabbed 28 downtown buildings in the last 8 years. Two of his partners, Jay Jung and Daniel Craft, also have done adaptive re-use projects. That's an impressive record; Mr. Lomax and his partners are doing good work, and making money at it, which shows me that a lot of people are finding value in preservation these days.

Claudette Burroughs-White, RIP

2007-09-17T16:07:00.000-05:00

Former District 2 councilwoman Claudette Burroughs-White passed away over the weekend.

She was a fine, kind, and thoughtful person, and she worked hard to represent our district. She always answered calls and responded to her consitutents' needs. Though I knew her only a little, she habitually greeted me with a hug.

I'll miss her.

Heirloom Apple at the Curb Market: Magnum Bonum

2007-09-15T10:28:00.000-05:00

Apples are starting to come in at the Curb Market, and this morning I picked up a bag of a very tasty heirloom apple: Malus (apple) Magnum Bonum (great good).

They're pretty small in size, which I like because my kids usually don't eat all of a big apple. It has a slightly rough, yellow and red skin, and firm white flesh. The taste has a nice balance between tartness and sweetness, with much more flavor intensity than you get in a Red Delicious or Fuji.

The vendor at the market grew them in southern Virginia. Here's what Big Red at Dave's Garden has to say about the Magnum Bonum:

Also known as Bonum, Maggie Bonum, Red Bonum. A long-time Southern favorite and one of the finest early fall apples available. It originated in 1828 in Davidson County, North Carolina when John Kinny planted seeds of the now extinct Hall apple. It was once a very popular commercial variety in Virginia grown for its fine flavor and the hardy and productive nature of the tree. Fruit size is medium or smaller. The yellow skin is mostly covered in light red and darker red streaks with numerous white dots over the surface. The fine-grained, aromatic white flesh is often stained with red near the outer skin. Ripens September to October and keeps fairly well if properly stored.

More information here about heirloom apples of Appalachia.

Architecture In The News!

2007-09-14T07:05:00.000-05:00

Item! Local heartthrob-architect Steve Freyaldenhoven adorns the cover of 99 Blocks, Greensboro's newest publication for downtowners! Architecture-conscious women's knees weaken. Sorry ladies, Steve's taken by the lovely and talented Ginna Freyaldenhoven, also an architect, and is his business partner, too.

Their company, Teague Freyaldenhoven Freyaldenhoven, is designing the renovation of the Southeastern Building, and they're bringing it back to its original appearance. Nice work, Freyaldenhovens!

Item! Local builder turns green! Roy Carroll builds apartments that meet the "green building" standard of the National Association of Home Builders. "This is not a government mandate. It's market-driven," he says. The NAHB says the market for green buildings is "exploding."

Carroll's is the second major project to "go green" in the 'Boro , following the lead of Dennis Quaintance's Proximity Hotel -- the only hotel in the eastern US to be built according to the even more stringent LEED standard.

On the QT -- some folks have been quietly urging the developers of the proposed Murrow Station to build green, too. No response yet. Developing ....

Item! News and Record columnist Rosemary Roberts visits Seattle, likes its architecture, gets a bit confused! She wrote,

Seattle is rapidly becoming a city of acclaimed architecture. The Experience Museum ... was designed by Frank Gehry. If you're not familiar with Gehry's work, think of his signature building, the Opera House in Sydney, Australia.

No, don't think that! The Sydney Opera House was designed by Jørn Utzon! Quick, somebody buy Rosemary a ticket to Bilbao!

Good News for Friendly Avenue Architecture

2007-09-11T20:01:00.000-05:00

From Greensboro's Treasured Places:

On September 10th, the Greensboro Zoning Commission unanimously approved the rezoning of the historic Albright House for office use, paving the way for preservation of the site as the headquarters for the Junior League of Greensboro. Final approval will be requested of City Council ....
The Starmount Company has owned the house for decades, and it has recently developed a plan to donate the house for charitable use. The surrounding wooded land and stream would be dedicated to the city and preserved for use as a passive park memorializing Blanche Sternberger Benjamin.

Although I don't think this part of town really needs another park, it's great news that the Albright house may remain intact and well-used.

How Gen X Likes To Live

2007-09-10T07:02:00.000-05:00

Alert reader Jim Rosenberg sent a link to this story in the NYT Magazine about marketing lifestyles to young condo buyers:

"Gen Xers desire connectivity,” Stouffer says. “In these buildings, you are so close to your neighbors you often know them. You also get to know people in the public spaces in the building like the gym or the courtyard. It makes it easy to get acquainted.”

The story confirms what my informal surveys of my UNCG students tell me: they prefer to live in close-knit neighborhoods that emphasize community over privacy and exclusivity.

“The younger generation wants to play where they work and work where they play and do both in and around the places they live,” says Wendy Mendes, vice president of RTKL, a design firm that has helped develop condo complexes in Los Angeles, Austin, Miami and Dallas. “They desire physical spaces that allow social connections.” For Mendes, the strategy is to move community amenities from the rooftops or basements, where they are often underused, to the ground floor near the entryway. “The front-door area, which used to be a static place, has now become active,” she says. “It has wireless access and sometimes a coffee bar. In one project in Austin, we have the pool, club room, a TV viewing area and a fireplace all at lobby level. If you come to check your mailbox, you are in the social center of the building.”

The only Greensboro condo project that is aimed straight at the Gen Xers is Murrow Station, and that has yet to get off the ground. The big condo projects we've seen so far -- Bellemeade Village (on indefinite hold), Center Pointe (in progress), and Arbor House -- are aimed at a wealthy, middle-aged demographic, using typical suburban lures like granite counters, garden tubs, and pretty sunsets as selling points. Sales have reportedly been slow.

The 'Boro is awash in college students, whose attitude toward the city has been radically changed for the better by the revived downtown social scene and well-planned events like Get Down!Town. Maybe somebody could make good money by building a place where these kids would like to live.

A note to the marketers: pretty much every potential buyer in such a place has a Facebook, Friendster, or Myspace page. You'll attract customers if you set up a Facebook group for your project. Residents will sell units for you just by being networked with their friends who are still in college.

The End of Suburbia

2007-09-09T21:12:00.000-05:00

So I finally got around to watching The End of Suburbia, a documentary whose thesis is that we've already reached or passed our peak oil producing years, and that the coming energy crunch is going to be very hard on everyone, but especially hard on SUV-driving, McMansion-living suburbanites. And it's going to happen in our generation.

I have no way to evaluate the oil-production predictions of the movie's talking heads. If they're right, my retirement portfolio is probably going to be toast. But my house in the center of Greensboro is probably going to be very valuable, so maybe I'll come out OK.

I think the movie's thesis would be more believable if it weren't so obvious that its principals despise suburbs and SUVs, and clearly desire their demise. And the repeated claim that suburbs have "failed to deliver their promise" is patently wrong. People keep moving to suburbs because they like them.

My favorite part of the movie came near the end, when urban designer Peter Calthorpe speculated on ways that suburbs could be retrofitted to accommodate a world of high energy prices. Shopping centers could become mixed-use, live-work villages, and some of the pavement of arterial roads could be reclaimed for sidewalks or businesses and residences.

If Kernersville is any indication, our suburbs may already be densifying, and I wouldn't be at all surprised to see that trend continue. It's entirely reasonable to think that in 50 years, the Triad will be an archipelago of urban villages, with many more people either living at or near their place of work, or telecommuting (as my wife does), and depending on vehicles like this to get around:

Roads, Bike Lanes, Perfect Worlds, And Old Fashioned Politics

2007-09-09T10:24:00.000-05:00

I belatedly noticed this post from Sam H at Piedmont Publius. Sam was responding to a post I wrote about biking in Greensboro, and he expresses his ambivalence toward bike paths. He likes to use them, but ...

What bothers me is the way city planners continually shove bike transportation down our throats as part of their perfect-world vision. If everyone could only ride their bikes everywhere, they believe, we would reduce our use of fossil fuels, the air would be cleaner and global warming would cease to exist. The world would be saved.

I don’t like perfect world visions, because there’s no such thing as a perfect world. The majority of Greensboro citizens either want better bicycle transportation or they don’t, and city planners should react accordingly. It’s a lot more simple than saving the world.

I think Sam is mistaken about the origin of Greensboro's very small number of bike lanes. The scuttlebutt I used to hear from city staff was that GDOT's transportation head, Jim Westmoreland -- himself an avid competitive cyclist -- was opposed to bike lanes, because he believed that they don't actually increase bike safety.

But GDOT held a number of public hearings when it started a review of its pedestrian transportation plans a couple of years ago, and the people who showed up at those meetings told GDOT very strongly that they wanted bike lanes.

At about the same time a bunch of Greensboro bike-lovers formed a lobbying group, BIG (Bicycling In Greensboro), that launched a PR campaign involving group bike rides, public meetings, letters to the editor, and guest op-eds in the local paper.

Their politicking paid off, and GDOI rewarded them with a few bike lanes in places that could easily accommodate them by simply repainting the roads and putting up a few signs. GDOT also published a map showing which existing streets are bike-friendly in our town, and which are not.

GDOT's new thoroughfare guidelines, which will come under public scrutiny in a year or so when the new Land Development Ordinance is up for adoption, make provisions for bike lanes where appropriate. But those guidelines did not come from transit utopians on city staff -- they are the product of tough committee-room skirmishes between bike/pedestrian advocates on the one hand and builders and developers on the other. Everyone involved in the process that I've heard from agrees that the result is a compromise that all parties can live with. Sounds like good city politics to me.

A lot of people presuppose that the older transportation model -- the one with multi lane, one-way streets with no sidewalks, crosswalks, or bike lanes -- is the result of "market forces" or is somehow more in line with libertarian-style individualism.

But every planning book I've read says that those whooshing thoroughfares are the offspring of mid century visionaries who were going to solve urban problems with efficient roads that would whisk happy suburbanites to and from their jobs in the gleaming center city.

Transportation decisions back in that day were much more top-down, and planners had a freer hand to ram their perfect-world visions down the public's throat. The result? High Point Road, Battleground Avenue, and their ilk The visionaries' vision failed, and now we're forced to go back and fix their mistakes. Whence comes the High Point Road corridor plan.

I'm a lot more comfortable with the kind of public input and give-and-take that goes into our newer transportation guidelines. Besides, I like to drive, walk, and ride my bike safely. And I've noticed that the new bike lanes on Spring Garden St. get heavy use, which shows to me that there was pent-up demand for them.

Farmers Appreciation Day at the Market (Video)

2007-09-08T13:02:00.000-05:00

In spite of the drought, the produce is still plentiful at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market on Yanceyville Street. Today's turnout for Farmers Appreciation Day was the biggest I've seen.

Kernersville Steals A March

2007-09-07T13:07:00.000-05:00

The town of Kernersville and a Winston-Salem developer are partnering to build the biggest mixed-use, neo-traditional enclave in the Triad. It's called Carrollton, and if the project and planned expansions to it reach fruition, it could become the biggest such development in North Carolina.

According to Jeff Hatling, Kernersville's Community Development Director, the project germinated from seeds planted in 2001, when Forsyth County adopted its long-range plan, Legacy. The plan proposes the development of nine "activity centers" throughout Forsyth, located at crucial transportation hubs, and earmarked for high-intensity residential and core business activity mixed together. The idea is to allow people to live near where they work, and to have easy access to transit. This kind of development is also called Transit Oriented Development (TOD). Greensboro's Comprehensive Plan proposes several activity centers, too.

At about the same time that Legacy was being worked up, the city of Kernersville went through a "visioning" process in which citizens agreed on what they wanted a future Kernersville to be like. According to Hatling, they decided that they wanted a "unique, high-quality community" with a "sense of place" and a "small town atmosphere." The city decided to pursue these goals by adopting a zoning overlay for several parts of town, that regulates roof forms, building forms, facade materials, architectural detailing, colors, signs, parking, sidewalks, and setbacks.

According to Hatling, the overlay districts were adopted with no opposition from the local development community. The reason, he said, was that local developers think that the overlay ordinance provides a safe environment that protects their investment.

Apparently this strategy is working, because PM Development looked at the activity center proposed for Kernersville, coupled with the town's zoning overlay, and saw not zoning obstacles to be fought, nor planners meddling with the market, but a business opportunity.

According to Paul Williams, an employee of PM, his company started pursuing the project several years ago, and it evolved from a plan for strictly residential housing to something bigger. His boss, Stuart Parks was attracted to the project, Williams said, because of his background in landscape architecture and urban planning. The first phase of the project will include a small, 7-acre commercial area along with housing. More commercial development is planned to be included as the housing is built out over the years.

According to an article in this morning's New & Record, Carrollton will have mixed housing types:

The developers' mandate from city planners is to make mixed housing the village's dominant feature. The village must also have lots of sidewalks, making it walkable; use classic building design elements found in this region; functional front porches; and short distances from building fronts to streets. [Link]

In fact, the town's overlay ordinance controls other architectural features such as roof pitches, window pane size, and trim elements.

On the national scene, there's nothing really out of the ordinary about all this. Cities and towns have been adopting a variety of overlays, fitted to their particular circumstances, in order to preserve or enhance existing neighborhoods, or to attract development.

And, contrary to a simplistic reading of free-market economics, it works. Greensboro's historic districts, which are highly regulated, have attracted millions in investment, and their real estate values have risen markedly faster than those in the city as a whole over the past two decades.

And the Southside development, which is regulated by a TND overlay, has seen fervid development and skyrocketing housing prices. Across North Carolina, other neotraditional developments like Meadowmont and Vermillion have been very successful, not only in terms of selling houses, but also in creating tight-knit communities where people live and work and in making efficient use of land and transportation resources.

But it hasn't happened in Greensboro yet. Starmount Co. had an opportunity to do something like this when it designed Reedy Fork Ranch a few years ago. But in the end, Starmount rejected the TND concept, electing instead to build on a mid-20th-century suburban model.

My prediction: if anything like this ever should come to Greensboro, it won't be done by any of our major old-line developers here in town. It will be done by someone young from out of town, who you've never heard of. He will be ridiculed as a nut by old-timers in the local real estate community, and then he will sell a lot of houses and commercial real estate and make a lot of money.

Me And That Tree

2007-09-03T08:15:00.001-05:00

Jim Schlosser reported in this morning's paper that the Greensboro Historic Preservation Commission denied First Presbyterian Church's request to cut down a tree in order to increase the number of spaces in a parking lot.

[C]ommission member David Wharton said, the panel "simply cannot buy the destruction of that tree."

Jim's story will likely provoke outrage in some quarters about regulatory overreach in the historic districts, but he left out one thing that I think is crucial to understanding why the Commission made its decision: the Historic District Guidelines. According to state law and city ordinance, it's the Commission's job to enforce them, whether we agree with them or not.

Here's the relevant guideline from the section about new parking areas (p. 30):

9. Incorporate existing large trees and shrubs into the landscaping for new parking areas when possible.

My judgement of First Presbyterian's parking plan was that incorporating the Willow Oak in question was certainly possible, even though it would reduce the amount of space for parking. Had the guidelines said "convenient" instead of "possible," I would probably have voted differently. But it would have been capricious and unfair for us to disregard our own guiding document in this or any other case.

First Presbyterian did a great job of working with the neighborhood and the Commission on the rest of the plan [link], which -- except for this one detail -- was outstanding. I hope they'll continue to do so on future projects.

Bedroom Sweet

2007-09-03T00:28:00.000-05:00

I finally finished the bedroom renovation I started in July. It was a long haul. There were plenty of moments when one of those new Hovnanian tract houses looked pretty good to me -- everything plumb and square, and built by someone other than me!

But it came out well in the end, and apart from my time, it didn't cost very much. Maybe it will turn out to be a good investment if the housing market ever recovers. Right now, I'm relaxing on my bed and feeling some cool breezes through my beautifully restored double-hung windows.

Full disclosure: David Hoggard of Double Hung Window Restoration fixed two of my six window sashes; the rest I did myself.

Here's a video summary of the job.

A Question For Joe Killian

2007-08-26T08:22:00.000-05:00

News & Record reporter Joe Killian held today's Sunday front page with a story about Greensboro's gang culture, based on interviews with 40 gang members.

"Gangs give these kids status, a self-identity, and they call that their family ... More than anything, that shows they come from poorly structured, fractured families. That leads them to have a skewed perspective."

I have a question for Joe: of the 40 gangbangers interviewed, how many had a father living at home?

Update: Joe Killian responds in the comments, and links to more on the story that he put in his blog.

I should clarify that my question to Joe was not a criticism of his excellent article. I just wanted to know more, and he has obliged. Thanks, Joe.

Summer Job

2007-08-17T21:58:00.001-05:00

I've spent this week closing in on the completion of my bedroom renovation project. Apologies to my small cadre of DIY cineastes; no time to make videos, since I'm trying to actually finish the project.

The room I'm working in isn't air-conditioned, and temperatures have been in the high 90's every day, but I can't say the heat has bothered me much. I wear my favorite heavy canvas work pants (Carhartts) and a t-shirt, and I drink a lot of iced tea. I'm dirty and dusty and sweaty most of the day, and it feels good.

I've been thinking of this as my summer job, since my academic contract only runs 10 months, and it reminds me of summer jobs I had in college. My dad got me a job with a transportation company in Davenport, Iowa, and I spent two summers loading grain barges on the Mississippi, and two summers fixing tires for a truck fleet.

Both jobs were hot and dirty. The barge terminal I worked at was right next to a flour mill that had blown up spectacularly a few months before I started, from a dust explosion, something that I often thought about as I was awash in grain dust. I met a lot of truck drivers and farmers selling their grain, and did a lot of nasty, hard work that I'm proud of.

And at the truck terminal, the mechanics were always amused at the way I handled a tire hammer for breaking the tire bead, since I was such a skinny kid and the hammer weighed about 9 pounds ("look like ya need a counterweight on yer butt, Davie!"). But they liked me OK, and I liked them too.

I suppose it would be trite to say that I learned the value of a dollar at those jobs. I did learn how hard a lot of people have to work for their dollars. But most of them seemed to like their jobs, and took satisfaction from their work. And this summer, I've been taking satisfaction from mine.

So I've been enjoying pretending to be a working-class guy, wearing the costume and doing some of the same kinds of work. Doing different jobs does change the way you see yourself, and the way others see you, too.

I had to go to the grocery store yesterday, quite dusty from working on plaster, and I ran into a woman whom I've known from my kids' school for over a decade. She was dressed in classic southern style: blond hair pulled back simply, full makeup, summer blouse, expensive pants, good shoes. She was in the checkout line.

She looked straight at me. Not even a glimmer of recognition. I'm quite sure she wasn't snubbing me -- she's not a snob -- she just didn't see me. That is, she didn't see the me that she knew. She just saw a common worker, probably stopping in to pick up a six-pack of Bud.

Interesting experience.

Back From Vacation ... Thanks Be To God

2007-08-14T11:09:00.000-05:00

If you should ever consider taking a beach vacation that involves watching over four teenage girls between the ages of 13 and 16, let me give you some advice.

Don't.

I think the girls had a pretty good time, but it's hard to know because they're not speaking to me much. That's not a result of any conflicts on the trip, though -- it's just the state of play in our lives right now.

Many of the girls' vacation activities seem to have taken place between the hours of 1 and 5 a.m. For example, one night Laurette and I went to bed as the parents and temporary guardians of three redheads and a brunette, and woke up the next day looking after three brunettes and a blond. Good morning, Miss Clairol, how nice of you to join us.

Another vacation high point: one of the girls fainted while waiting in line for the services of an Albanian henna tattoo artist. Called her mother, who advised us to make her eat some meat (she's a vegetarian), which she did, with surprising relish. Even had some bacon the next day. Tattoos acquired: two butterflies, a heart, and an anchor. Ahoy, boys!

I'm sure L & I are a big hit with our guests' parents, what with their girls coming home with dyed hair and tattoos. But, as I said to L, no big deal. It's not as if we got invited to their parties anyway.

Glad to be back home at work. Here's a little song that L found which seems funny to me right now:

What's Your Walk Score?

2007-08-13T07:00:00.000-05:00

Quantum of Wantum found a site that calculates how walkable your address is.

My house got a walk score of 69 out of 100 -- not bad, but not great. If I lived in Southside, my score would have been 88. If I lived in New Irving Park in Greensboro, it would have been 14.

Its algorithm works by calculating how many things like stores, coffee shops, libraries etc. are near your house, but I don't think it knows if there are actual sidewalks between you and them.

One nice feature -- it showed me things near me that I can walk to that I didn't even know about!

Update: since Jason Hardin linked me in this morning's Fast Forward, I've moved this post to the top of the heap. Welcome, N&R readers!

Plaster and Sheetrock

2007-08-04T17:08:00.000-05:00

A few before and after shots as I begin to put our bedroom back together.

I've felt a little like an indentured servant working on this project this week. 95 degree heat, no AC, and still a seemingly endless list of tasks to finish.

So I'm taking a week off at the beach. Back soon.

Bedroom Renovation Day 9 Part Deux (Video)

2007-07-30T21:42:00.000-05:00

Destruction! And hidden treasures discovered behind my old mantel.

Bedroom Renovation Day 9 (Video)

2007-07-29T23:18:00.001-05:00

More window stuff. But get ready. Part II exposes some sights not seen for a century! Coming soon.

Bedroom Renovation Day 8 (Video)

2007-07-28T17:45:00.000-05:00

In which I learn the wonders of epoxy.

99 Blocks Rocks

2007-07-28T08:48:00.000-05:00

99 Blocks, Greensboro's magazine devoted to all things downtown, this week honors my neighbor Laura Wall, who spearheaded the effort to win a Neighborwoods grant for Aycock.

It also has a good story about one of the most popular house styles in Greensboro's historic neighborhoods, the American Foursquare.

99 Blocks is making me feel better. I wish it had a web presence.