Do We Want Downtown Design Guidelines?

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

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

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

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

Great Snowstorm of Aught Nine

Plebe Life

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 ...)

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

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

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.

Where's Slumdog Millionaire?

So, Slumdog Millionaire wins at the Golden Globes, and is one of the top-grossing films in the country. But no theater in Greensboro has shown it.

C'mon people. Greensboro isn't that much of a jerkwater town ... is it?

More on Protest Petitions

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.