Urban snob?

One of my smartest and most respected readers really let me have it after reading my review of Reedy Fork Ranch. Here's what he said:

You're increasingly coming across as an urban snob of superior virtue and culture making fun of those who don't share your appreciation of "better" architecture and the way you think neighborhoods ought to be organized.

Hard-working middle-class people are looking for affordable housing in a nice neighborhood with good public schools. "Snout houses," like the ones we've always had and have now, are there so people can put their cars in garages, which happen to be extremely functional pieces of architecture. Sidewalks on one side of the street are plenty good enough for them, and they somehow find a way to relate to their neighbors . . .

. . . If I were young and just starting out in Greensboro, Reedy Fork Ranch would be the place for me, and I suspect [my] kids would have had a perfectly fine upbringing exploring all the cul-de-sacs.

Ouch. That "snob" part is not pleasant to hear, but it's probably true.

But hey, one of the reasons I started this blog was to have a lively discussion about development and urbanism (both new and old) here in Greensboro, and so far this reader is the only commenter to come down on the side of suburbia. Let's have a debate.

So over the next week or so, I'll try to put out a few posts, not only about why I like certain types of housing, streetscapes, and neighborhoods, but why I think they're actually better.

Housing and neighborhood design shouldn't be about snobbery. They should be about happiness for as many people as possible.

The Young Professionals have arrived!

And I'm happy to report that they're extremely nice.

I took the dogs for a long walk downtown this afternoon (avoiding housework), and wandered down South Elm, past the various demolition and construction projects, and into South Side.

A young couple was peering into one of the nearly-completed townhouses on MLK Boulevard, and I couldn't stop myself from striking up a conversation. They've recently moved here from Washington, D.C., and bought a South Side townhouse because they wanted to keep the "urban vibe" they enjoyed in DC. They love South Side, downtown Greensboro, and the new baseball stadium (though they like the "historic feel" of the old one, too).

They were very hip. He wore one of those stocking caps all the young men are wearing (people around here call them toboggans), rectangular, black-rimmed glasses, and an item of unthreatening pierced-eyebrow jewelry. She was wearing what looked like a high-end Gore-Tex shell.

In the background was the sound of saws, hammers, and a backhoe breaking ground for the last phase of construction; red clay and sawdust were everywhere. Quite a few other people like them were passing by as we talked, heading toward Natty Greene's or the Green Bean or Simple Kneads.

I joked with them that they were the reason for all of Action Greensboro's work and millions of dollars spent downtown; they were the cause of civil strife and a plebiscite over the baseball stadium; they were Greensboro's economic holy grail. And here they were!

They seemed to know that already, but they laughed just the same.

It looks like all our downtown boosterism is actually working. A lot of people should be patting themselves on the back. Jim Melvin is one of them.

What I did on my summer vacation

A lot more urbanity

may be coming to downtown Greensboro.

Great!

Out with the old . . .

. . . and in with the new parking lot. At least, I've heard that the wreckage of the historic structure shown here is to be a parking lot.



I have a sinking feeling that the Dixie building, pictured below, will be next. It's right across the street from First Horizon Park, on the corner of Bellemeade and Eugene Streets. It's been one of my favorite buildings for years.



One hopes -- against hope? -- that someone with a little heart, imagination, and capital, will do what Dawn Cheney is doing just a few blocks away with the Vick apartment building on Fisher Ave. That is, restore it to its original -- beyond its original -- glory.



Thank you, Dawn!

Buildings are going down on Spring Street

I had word today about three historic, residential buildings near the new First Horizon Park that are slated for demolition. One of them apparently went down this afternoon.

The two others are an Art-Deco apartment building and a Queen Anne style house. The information I had -- which is strictly second hand -- is that these historic structures are being destroyed for . . . parking.

For the new ballpark.

I was actually starting to feel good about that ballpark. Now I'm not.

I'll try to get photos of the surviving buildings up soon, if I can get there before the wrecking ball.

Happy meetings

Just about every minute that I wasn't in class today, I was in meetings with planners, developers, and preservationists. Heaven!

I'm not being ironic. I really do like these meetings.

This morning Aycock neighborhood president Betsey Baun and I met with city staff to interview one of the firms that's bidding to do the Summit Avenue corridor study. All of the finalists seemed highly qualified, and that makes me hope for real improvements in the Summit corridor sometime soon.

Mid-day, Betsey and I met with owners of a substantial chunk of property in Aycock who are planning a major development there. Greensboro architect Jerry Leimenstoll is their lead designer. Jerry has a sterling reputation among local preservationists, and although everything is still in the preliminary stages, prospects are good for a very exciting urban infill project just around the block from my house. Timeline for completion: 24-36 months.

Late in the afternoon, at the Greensboro Historic Preservation Commission meeting, we gave John Stratton the final go-ahead on his excellent infill project in Fisher Park. He seemed happy to have successfully navigated the treacherous waters of historic district development.

Elsewhere, and at the same time, some of my other neighbors were meeting with the developers of the North State Chevrolet property adjacent to the new First Horizon Park to help plan whatever will be built there. (My wife is hoping for a Trader Joe's there.) I'm sure you'll be hearing a lot about it soon.

Still other neighbors will be meeting next week with still more developers regarding still another project involving my neighborhood. Could be big.

Finally, I had a chance meeting on South Elm Street with Ed Cone and Luna. They showed me around Ed's spacious and sunny office in the Old Greensborough building. I'm envious. But Ed usually says nice things about me, so I'm not holding it against him.

Reedy Fork Ranch

Over the weekend I visited Reedy Fork Ranch, the large new housing development northeast of Greensboro, just off US 29. I've heard a lot of radio advertisements for it and seen a few billboards, too, the theme of which is "room to roam." The radio ads feature pastoral nature sounds, and the billboards show grasslands surrounded by woods. Nice.

But when I got there, what I found seemed to be an unremarkable housing development built on a formula that developers have been using and re-using for three or four decades.

The road pattern is mostly "dendritic," meaning that, from the main access road ("Reedy Fork Parkway"), residential streets branch off, finally leading nowhere, ending in loops or cul-de-sacs. The pattern is typical of automobile-oriented commuter neighborhoods, since it makes it easy to drive in and out of the development, but not to walk around the neighborhood to visit actual neighbors.

Reedy Fork Ranch has walking trails, but not sidewalks on both sides of the street. When I drove through, kids were playing in the street. I noted the missing sidewalks to the realtor in one of the model houses, and he said, "they don't do that any more," though he allowed that he liked sidewalks himself, and has an urban sidewalk route that he walks every day in Burlington. The nice thing about sidewalks is that they allow you to choose where to go; walking trails force those choices on you.



The orientation toward automobiles is apparent in the design of the houses, too. Almost all have very prominent front-facing garages, and on the smaller houses this feature absolutely dominates. It's not for nothing that these are called "snout houses;" their entrances really do look like big pig snouts.



Pedestrian access to the front door is invariably from the driveway, and those entries are miniscule compared to the garage. For the families who live here, the garage entrance usually is the main entry to the house. This design minimizes the opportunities for casual contact with neighbors.



The developers left a lot of old trees standing on the edges of the residential areas, but chose to clear-cut huge tracts in between, planting new trees on the larger lots. This gives the areas I saw a rather barren look. Landscaping on the lots is pretty thin, and I don't think this development would meet the standards of a new tree ordinance that the city of Greensboro is working on (more on that topic soon). The lots are quite small, which I think is a good thing, since it minimizes the environmental impact of fertilizers and herbicides on the watershed.



The houses aren't pretty from the outside. Vinyl siding is the rule, though upgrades of brick or stone for the facades are available. Side and rear views of the houses show that the builders' main concern is to provide inexpensive square footage; the houses are boxy and display no sense of proportion or style.



The insides of the houses, however, are quite nice. The upper-end models I looked at had 9-foot ceilings downstairs, crown moldings, and some hardwood floors. The bathrooms and closets seemed luxurious to me (but I live in a 100-year-old house where the three closets are only a foot deep, and the original bathroom was in the back yard). Many nice upgrades like granite counters, tile floors, and added interior trim work are available for those who want to pay for them.

The only problem I found on the models I toured was with the aluminum windows. I opened one with difficulty, and then couldn't get it to close and lock properly.

Reedy Fork Ranch is very close to Guilford County's Bryan Park, which has two championship golf courses and a huge soccer complex. I'm sure the residents will enjoy these amenities. Apparently a large shopping center is planned nearby, "like Friendly Center," the realtor told me.

Here is Bryan Park's clubhouse:



The development also features a 500 acre central park, a historic millpond, two community centers, and other natural areas.

Over all, Reedy Fork Ranch reminds me a lot of Adams Farm, another very popular and successful planned subdivision in western Greensboro. Prices start at under $90 per square foot, and base prices for various house models range from around $100,000 to $220,000. It seems like a good place for people who see their neighborhoods as a place to retreat from work, commerce, civic life, and even from other neighbors.

John Constantine vs. Father Merrin

I saw Keanu Reeves' new movie Constantine this weekend with my son; it's a mildly interesting and very violent action film wrapped up in some gooey, quasi-Catholic cosmology. It's also mixed up with a lot of manichean dualism entailing dull conversations about "the Balance" between Good and Evil. Bleah. The scriptwriters were clearly affected by the 20th century's most influential theologian, George Lucas.

Reeves plays John Constantine, a cynical psychic who is trying to earn his way into heaven by "deporting" renegade demons back to Hell; he gets mixed up with detective Angela Dodson (Rachel Weisz), who is trying to figure out her twin sister's mysterious suicide. Together they end up battling all the forces of Evil in a rather uncompelling way, although a few cameos by Satan and the archangel Gabriel brighten things up at the end.

I'm often amazed at how little trouble Hollywood takes to get even simple details of scholarship right. At a crucial point in this movie, Constantine's quirky, occult-scholar pal has to consult the infernal version of the Bible, which has extra stuff in it. I'm almost sure I heard him refer to "the seventeenth act of Corinthians." Act? Don't these guys know that the Bible is divided up into chapters? Probably not.

On top of that, the content of what he reads therein is obviously supposed to sound like the book of Revelation, not like any of the loving chastisements that St. Paul wrote to those rowdy Corinthians.

Oh, well.

Constantine compares very unfavorably with my favorite demon-oriented movie, The Exorcist, which I rented last week. After thirty-two years, it's still very scary. Maybe that's because The Exorcist takes evil seriously. I also like the fact that William Friedkin, who directed it, along with William Peter Blatty, who wrote the novel, were very careful to get their Catholic theology right.

Toward the end, Father Karras, the young priest who's having a crisis of faith, asks his elder partner, "Why did the demon possess this little girl? It makes no sense." Father Merrin, the experienced exorcist, replies, "I think the point is to make us despair — to see ourselves as animal and ugly, to reject the possibility that God could love us."

Skip Constantine. Rent The Exorcist.

Remember summer?

Don't get mad; get it right

Sam Hieb thinks Greensboro bloggers aren't outraged enough about the mess that happened at St. James II, and suggests that Greensboro shouldn't fund any other such projects.

I agree that we should be outraged about the waste of money that could have actually helped poor people. I don't agree that Greensboro should stop doing projects like these. Instead, it should stop doing them the way it has been doing them, that is, without sufficient oversight.

If you look at Greensboro's recent history with low-income housing, here's what you see: independent leaders like Michael King, Skip Alston, and Christian Wellness repeatedly asking the City Council for funds or other help, with the Council repeatedly granting those requests.

At the same time, HCD staff repeatedly ask for increased financial accountability, and are resisted. (I think this is the source of Alston's "racism" comment.)

You can read the same story played out time and again here, here, here, here and here.

The answer is not to curtail low-income housing in Greensboro -- the answer is to provide city staff with the resources to make sure that the city's investment is adminstered responsibly.

Stop feeding Skip

So many Greensboro bloggers have commented on county commissioner Skip Alston's accusation that Greensboro HCD staff are racist, that I couldn't possibly link to all of them. Well, I could, but I'm too lazy. You can find a lot of them over at Greensboro101.com.

I think we should all just let the matter drop. Skip will never apologize. He's a race-controversy careerist, and all our electronic outrage merely increases his standing among those citizens who will reflexively say "amen!" whenever Skip looks like he's sticking it to The Man.

Skip is the yin to Billy Yow's yang in the Tao of Greensboro's Pointless Race Politics. Let's please ignore them both when they do this stuff. It only encourages them.