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.
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.
Professor David Owens of the UNC School of Government came to
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.
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).
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.
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.
Benjamin Briggs sent me these renderings of a proposed building in the 300 block of South Elm Street:
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!
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.
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:
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.
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, 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'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.
