Community Forums on Housing

From the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro:

The Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro invites the public to participate in two open community forums featuring a new comprehensive report on the state of housing in greater Greensboro.

Participants will have the opportunity to provide comment and to recommend priorities for the community. The report is commissioned by the Community Foundation and prepared by The Center to Create Housing Opportunities.

The two forums have distinct agendas, please plan to attend both. However, if your schedule does not allow, you are welcome to attend only one. There is no charge, but please register so that we may plan accordingly.

See you at the Forums!

Forum I:
The State of Housing in Greensboro

Wednesday, October 19th

7:30 a.m. Breakfast
8:00 a.m. Present Draft Report

Feedback in small groups
Whole group organizes and names priorities
10:30 a.m. Adjourn

Forum II: Direction and Focus

Thursday, Ocober 27th

7:30 a.m. Breakfast
8:00 a.m. Group Process: What strategies will be used to advance housing in Greensboro?
10:30 a.m. Adjourn

Location
Empire Room at Elm Street Center
203 South Elm St.
Greensboro, NC

Contact for Registration:
Hope Brock
E-mail: hbrock@cfgg.org
Fax: 336.378.0725
Phone: 336.379.9100

Holder on Housing and Crime

Ben Holder says, "I have been saying for years that the quality of housing has a direct connection to the crime rate," with observations about the state of code enforcement in Greensboro, especially as regards County Commissioner Skip Alston's Saint James apartment complex.

He's also got a copy of the inspection request for that property.

Greensboro's Pedestrian, Bicycle, and Greenway Master Plan Workshops

GDOT has a master plan that addresses concerns about sidewalks and bike traffic in Greensboro, which it's presenting in series of public workshops. GDOT is asking for public input.

Wednesday, October 12 from 5:30-7:30pm at Trotter Recreation Center ( 3906 Betula Street, 27407)

Thursday, October 13 from 5:30-7:30pm at the Barber Park Indoor Pavilion (1500 Dan’s Road, 27401)

Wednesday, October 19 from 5:30-7:30pm at Summerfield Elementary multi-purpose room (7515 Trainer Drive, Summerfield)

Thursday, October 20 from 5:30-7:30pm at Lawndale Baptist Church fellowship hall (3505 Lawndale Dr, 27408)

GDOT has been very busy building sidewalks lately, but there are plenty of spots where they're still lacking, such as on Fisher Avenue (pictured above).

Zoning Enforcement Update II: 351 Summit Avenue

I posted here and here about an illegal junkyard that has grown like a nasty, cancerous mole near my neighborhood. Here's what it looks like today, October 10, 2005:

Taking Anna's advice, on August 29th I wrote to the city's zoning enforcement chief, Bill Ruska, with my opinion that there was no way under the zoning ordinance that this junkyard could be made legal, since the ordinance specifies that no junked vehicles may be visible from any street, and even a 30-foot fence wouldn't hide them from the Fisher Avenue bridge (as the photo below shows).

I told him that I might post his response.

Bill wrote me back on September 8:

David, we are finally approaching a resolution of this matter. Mr. Gerald Petty who leases the property from Hugh Sarvis has a business license to operate an auto towing and storage service on this lot. Such a use is allowed in a GB zoning district subject to certain development standards. One of these standards is that no more than 20 vehicles may be stored on the premises at any one time. Also, the automotive storage area must be surrounded by a minimum 6-foot high opaque fence.

With the recent installation of the new opaque fencing, we feel that the intent of the development standard has been achieved. Ron Fields has been working with the Pettys to get the inoperable motor vehicles removed from the property. Ten inoperable vehicles have been identified as ones which must be removed from the property and the Pettys understand that the total number of vehicles must be reduced to 20. Ron will re-inspect the property no later than the end of October to insure that compliance with the ordinance has been achieved.

I was a little surprised at this answer, because earlier e-mails from a zoning enforcement officer indicated that the property was being used for the storage of junked vehicles -- but now the city considers it to be a "towing and storage service." The zoning standard for this kind of business does not require that the vehicles be totally screened, only that they be surrounded by a fence.

That is, the requirements for screening had been lowered by fiat.

However, as you can see from the photo, there are still plenty of inoperable (that is, "junked") vehicles on the property. Will they be removed by the end of October? Call me a cynical pessimist, but I very much doubt it.

Nor will anything much happen after that, I expect. A junkyard it was, a junkyard it remains, and a junkyard it probably will be for some time to come, whatever the city calls it.

Bill Ruska told me in a subsequent conversation that the city has only two zoning enforcement officers in the whole city to handle this kind of thing. That means there will be no aggressive enforcement of the ordinance in this case. One case he mentioned took ten years to resolve.

This is only one of countless such cases where frustrated property owners are unable to get relief from violators through city ordinance enforcement. Part of the problem is that the ordinances are often weak, and part of the problem is that enforcement of them is feebly supported by elected officials.

The result?

People who can afford it tend to leave older neighborhoods for places where they are protected by homeowners' associations and restrictive covenants, which are often more powerful and effective than the city at maintaining property standards.

People who can't afford to leave have their once-decent neighborhoods eroded by predatory landowners, weak enforcement, and the draining away of social capital.

That is, "For he that hath, to him shall be given: and he that hath not, from him shall be taken even that which he hath."

Nihil sub sole novum.

We'll Find a House For You

Cobb, who participated in ConvergeSouth, had some nice things to say about my neighborhood:

I want to live in a neighborhood like Aycock. There are several like it in South Pasadena. It's the big house with the big trees and the big porch and the wide street with not much traffic. It's the warm glow of lights on in the evening in wide open windows. It's the free traffic of children and food from house to house and neighbor to neighbor. In all of us lurks the dream of the beloved community.

But he's not sure he really wants to live in a place like this. As a conservative, he observes,

In the big city, I can be conservative easily. That's because the alternative is so large and ungainly. But in the small town one needs to be liberal, because the narrow becomes stifling. The size of the diversity is smaller and therefore embedded with more meaning. A diversity of black and white means little in Los Angeles County. A diversity of black and white is a big deal in the town where the Woolworth Sit In took place.

He finishes with, "I've got a lot more thinking to do." I wish I'd had a chance to talk to him at the conference.

Read the whole thing. (Via Cone.)

Race, Wealth, Education, Housing

Matt Williams writes persuasively on the front page of the News & Record today that family wealth is a stronger predictor of Greensboro students' school performance than race.

It's a great story -- a better one than a recent NY Times story about income, race, and EOG tests in Wake County, NC that I referred to here and here. Matt did excellent independent research.

The fact that minorities have been scoring dramatically better over the past decade in Guilford County may mainly be due to the fact that African-Americans and Hispanics have been moving steadily into the middle and upper classes.

But the low-income neighborhoods they've been leaving behind remain sloughs of badly-educated kids. That's one reason I'm very interested in neighborhoods like Willow Oaks, where the planners have deliberately built low-income units amid middle- and upper-middle class houses.

The idea is to spread "cultural capital" or "social capital" into neighborhoods where it has been lacking or slowly draining away.

Will it work? I don't know. Is it worth a try? Absolutely.

ConvergeSouth Impressions

Sam and I had a great weekend at ConvergeSouth. Thanks to the organizers (Sue, Ed, Jay, Ben) who made everything run smoothly, and the many participants who were lively, interesting, funny, kind, and provocative.

My personal highlights:

Learning about the subtly-textured moral, emotional, and political world of military bloggers in Iraq. The News & Record's Allison Perkins and military wife Christy Seals were humane and insightful, and were true to their experiences and emotions about war blogging: patriotism, pride, love for the soldiers, fear for their soldiers' well-being, doubt about U.S. policy. The Shu was informative about where to find military blogs.

Roch Smith, Jr. led a great session on blogs and local alternative media, and even talked about his own alt-media creation, Greensboro101.com (after we prodded him a little).

I got to participate as a panelist at a session moderated by John Robinson on "Blogging and Journalism." I talked too much about myself. If I had to do it over, I'd have shut up more and tried to make John talk about the ways blogging and journalism entwine and occasionally collide here in Greensboro.

And Sam was asked by the organizers to help out with a "how-to-blog" session for beginners -- Sam loved it, and of course his dad was pretty proud, too.

The blogger BBQ was a blast. Sam took photos, and Tom Lassiter has a 360-view (Quicktime required) of Hoggard's place just before everyone started showing up. I got a quick Swahili lesson from Ndesanjo Macha and met more bloggers than you can shake a stick at.

If you're interested in the Greensboro blogging community, watch Tom Lassiter's Quicktime video about it.

ConvergeSouth!

Matt Gross, David Hoggard, Ben Hwang, Sam Wharton, and I converged this afternoon at Sam's Club to shop for the ConvergeSouth BBQ-for-bloggers party on Friday night.

Sue Polinsky and Ed Cone have been working like dogs to make this conference happen. There is going to be a lot of local and national blogging talent here; I'm really looking forward to it!

I was already signed up to attend, but got a last minute invitation yesterday from News & Record Editor John Robinson to fill in on the Blogging and Journalism panel.

I've been to Classics conventions, Linguistics conventions, and Humanities conventions -- this will be my first Blogger convention.

Should I wear a suit?

Council Agrees

I flipped on the Channel 13 re-run of Tuesday's City Council meeting after my 7-10 p.m. class this evening and listened to councilmembers' comments about our trip to Greenville, SC.

All I can say is, oh my.

I heard Councilman Robbie Perkins saying it is time downtown Greensboro considered instituting design standards, and recommended that we emulate the meticulous attention to detail in streetscaping that we saw in Greenville. He especially liked their "pocket parks" and crypto-parking schemes, and spoke in favor of issuing bonds to finance "public-private partnerships" without referenda. Perkins said it was important for elected officials to be willing to take some criticism in order to push these efforts forward.

Councilwoman Yvonne Johnson seconded all of what Perkins said, adding that she particularly enjoyed Greenville's commitment to public art and innovative retail.

Councilwoman Bellamy-Small said she would like to ensure that housing downtown would be available to people with a range of incomes, and praised the many water features in downtown Greenville.

Mayor Holliday, the fourth and final Greenville day-tripper on the council, said he thought everyone who visited Greenville felt very positive and had a "can-do" attitude about Greensboro's future.

So I guess all the answers to the questions in my earlier post about Greenville would be lots of "yeses" and a few "maybes."

And that ain't bad. Not bad at all.

Now, to bed. I have an 8 a.m. meeting in less than 6 hours. Ugh.

No, Really Infra-Size Me!

My earlier infra-sizing post was about shrinking houses.

But now that I've read this . . . ugh.

I'm going for a jog with the dog.

The Road to Greenville

Action Greensboro loaded a couple of buses full of city & county political leaders, high-ranking city staff members, business movers & shakers, press people, philanthropists, and a couple of ne'er-do-wells (me and Hoggard), and hauled us all down to Greenville, SC last week for a look at that town's successful downtown revitalization.

First things first: thank you to the gracious people at Action Greensboro for an enlightening and entertaining trip, and to the many people in Greenville who educated and entertained us.

Here follows an account of what I saw.

Greenville is a small town of about 54,000 that has a big-town downtown. Downtown Greenville has 80 restaurants, a luxurious downtown hotel, a sports arena, a concert hall, a beautiful downtown park, and a booming downtown residential real estate market.

The question on everybody's mind was, how did they do it? We got the answers in increments.

DOWNTOWN BUS TOUR
When we reached Greenville, we were treated to a short, guided bus tour of the downtown area, with commentary on my bus supplied by Greenville's young and articulate director of economic development, Nancy Whitworth. She emphasized 3 things that have been key to Greenville's success:

(1) Greenville's Mayor Knox White takes a keen interest in the details of urban planning. She noted, for example, the mayor's enthusiasm for "sidewalk lawns" -- the little strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street -- because they make pedestrians feel safe and comfortable while waking on busy streets. She said that the city council, too, is "open to new ideas about urban planning and design."
(2) Greenville has adopted design standards for downtown development and has preservation standards for the historic districts adjacent to downtown. Whitworth attributed the attractive appearance of new condominiums and businesses to these standards, and noted that all new construction -- "even if you want to change a sign" -- must be approved by the Design and Preservation Commission, which is similar to Greensboro's Historic Preservation Commission.
(3) Greenville has entered into many "public-private partnerships" (about which more below) to spur development. One of these is a new baseball stadium downtown, which is currently under construction, and which apparently was the object of considerable controversy (imagine that!).

WORDS FROM THE MAYOR
After the tour, we heard a presentation from Mayor Knox White himself in Greenville's 70s-modern icky council chamber. (The original Romanesque revival city hall was torn down).

Mayor White said that Greenville's downtown renaissance began in 1971 when the city hired a San Francisco landscape designer to plan a streetscape for Main Street, and that efforts have been ongoing since then. The mature trees planted in the early 70s give Main St. much of its current appeal.

The mayor said that the biggest turning point in the downtown's success was the outstanding restoration of the 1920s-era Poinsett Hotel. "Don't doubt the power of historic preservation as an economic development tool, or as a political tool," he said. "We really got everybody on board when they saw how beautiful the Poinsett was, especially the older folks."

HISTORIC WALKING TOUR
I took the walking tour led by Robert Benedict, who is both a real estate developer and the chair of Greenville's Design and Preservation Commission. After a lunch at the charmingly restored Mary's Restaurant,

he showed us some of the more successful historic rehab projects in Greenville, including a downtown park,

the Poinsett Hotel,

and a restored mill that serves as restaurant and office space.

(Note the new condominiums to the left, with their parking garage behind the building facade.)

Greenville has a good stock of historic downtown buildings, some of which are being put to good use, but some of which are also vacant and uncared-for. On the whole, I think Greensboro's inventory of reasonably well-maintained historic buildings is as good or better -- though we do lack the Poinsett.

PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS
After the walking tour, we got a briefing on the public subsidies that helped make all this happen in Greenville.
"Public-private partnerships" was the watchword and mantra of how Greenville government has pushed downtown growth forward. The city has used a number of innovative ways to boost investment.
For example, in order to entice developers to build this building,

the city offered to build and maintain a parking garage beneath it for its tenants and for the public. The city owns the land; the developer owns the "air rights" -- whatever they build on top of the garage.
Greenville seems to have built such crypto-parking decks (I call them that because they always hide the parking behind a residential or retail facade) for a number of projects; for other undertakings, such as their downtown baseball stadium, the city donated the land or offered other incentives to private investors.
Greenville government has taken financial risks and incurred debt to an extent that widened the eyes of Greensboro Interim City Manager Mitch Johnson and his retired boss Ed Kitchen, who, at one point in the presentation, exchanged looks of amazed incredulity.
URBAN PLANNING
But Greenville has not done this without an overall urban plan that is well understood by city elected leaders and staff.
"Build anchors" was the advice given several times. And so Greenville did. They have invested in major attractions like the Peace Center concert hall, the Poinsett Hotel, the Bi-Lo Center, and the West End Market, all in walking distance from one another. They have connected them with high-quality pedestrian corridors that display fine brickwork, landscaping, pleasant little corners to sit and rest, and a generous scattering of public art.
Most impressive to me, the city has been fearless in pushing major anchors like their baseball stadium and the West End Market into truly blighted areas where private developers had feared to tread, hoping to draw them out of their comfort zone. It's working.
"Distribute parking" was the other main piece of advice from Greenville's leaders. The city deliberately did not place big parking decks right next to their anchors in order to generate pedestrian traffic -- and business -- for restaurants and downtown retail.
GETTING TO GREENVILLE
Can Greensboro get to Greenville in terms of downtown development? That will depend on the answers to these questions:
Will Greensboro find the economic and political value in historic preservation that Greenville has found? Will there arise in Greensboro a new class of developer-preservationists a la Robert Benedict who will bring to preservation an entrepreneurial spirit that will spur both civic pride and investment?
Will Greensboro's elected officials develop a heretofore unaccustomed, top-to-bottom interest in urban planning, and a resolve to devise a cohesive and detailed development plan for downtown, with well-placed anchors and first-quality pedestrian amenities? Will they stick to this plan over a period of a decade or more and dedicate themselves to persuading the public of its value? Will they commit public resources to it?
Will Greensboro enter into "public-private partnerships" in order to facilitate the construction of major anchors downtown? Will elected officials have the political will to get out in front of the private sector and place those anchors in areas that really need them, like South Elm St.?
I'll let you answer the questions.

Infra-Size Me!

The size of new American homes has apparently leveled off after rapid growth in the 90's, with the average house coming in at about 2,400 square feet.

The NY Times reports that, when asked the question, "For the same amount of money, which of the following would you choose: a bigger house with fewer amenities, or a smaller house with high quality products and amenities?" 63% of respondents in 2004 said they'd take the smaller house.

That's a huge shift from 2001, when 51% said they'd take the bigger house.

Lots of reasons for the shift are offered: rising heating & cooling costs, the high cost of furnishing a very large house, a growing perception that very big houses are evidence of greed and/or lack of taste (they're sometimes derisively called "plywood palazzos"), and a realization that unused space is just . . . space.

The idea of the "not so big house" has always appealed to me; I guess I'm fascinated with technologies and ways of doing things that are minimalist and efficient-- it's not a political stance so much as it is an aesthetic temperament in my case.

One other interesting bit from the article: apparently some of the new, smaller houses are reaching back to modernist sensibilities, using lots of glass and integrating them into their settings. Hah! Can't wait to hear a new house described as "modernist revival."

Read the whole article, and don't forget to watch the audio slide show.