Go, Greenway, Go

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.

Office Depot Listened to the Neighbors

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.

DIY Downtown Design Coming to Greensboro

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.

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

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.

Smart Growth and Traffic Safety

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.

Chevron CTO Says Peak Oil is Real

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

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

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

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 Little More Urbanity, Please

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

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.

Mansions vs. McMansions

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.

Urban Planning By Blog

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.

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

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.

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

[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?

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

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.

Some Suburbs Ending Even Before The End Of Suburbia

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.

The End of Suburbia

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:

Kernersville Steals A March

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.