Recently I highlighted the top two things that the next draft of the Carrboro Comprehensive Plan needs to do, which were to get rid of equivocal language (such as “consider” doing something) and to confront tradeoffs. We’ve talked about considering things in Carrboro for a long time. It’s time to do things.

Today I’ll be going through the land use chapter of the plan. The framework of a better document is here; it just needs some refinements.

Let’s jump right in. The plan begins by again referencing racial equity and climate change. It states: “The land use element aims to address race and equity goals – both to overcome barriers that have been created in the past and to open doors for new opportunities.”

Corridor Assessments

The plan has a variety of strategies; we’ll talk about those in a minute. But at the big picture level, it focuses on 5 corridors:

•  Jones Ferry Road Corridor and Downtown
• NC 54
• Rogers and Homestead
• Old NC 86
•  Estes and N. Greensboro

 

If you look through them all, and do some measuring in Google Earth, you’ll find that in a town of about 4,200 acres, the plan identifies only 83 acres of opportunity sites that are not the large parcels of undeveloped and lightly developed land at the edge of town where Homestead and Hillsborough Rd meet at Calvander. Those 83 acres represent about 2% of town land. If we’re going to make big strides in addressing equity and climate change, we’re probably going to need more opportunity sites. We also need to start steering our future where we want it to go based on our goals, and not on what’s on the ground today. What’s missing? Here are just a few locations that should be added to the list:

• Poplar/Main/Fidelity across from BP, north of the downtown fire station. This is perhaps the best large, in-town site that is likely to turn over economically in the near future. This should be a mixed use location with significant commercial and residential, probably 4-6 stories in height.
• All of our storage facilities. These are low-density, low job generating uses that don’t contribute to their surroundings, and belong out of town off of rural roads. There’s one south of South Green on S. Greensboro St and another just south of Gary Rd. These operations will probably be there a long time but we should signal to property owners that those sites could be more.
• Also on Jones Ferry is the Kangaroo Express gas station on the corner of Davie and Jones Ferry. That parcel and the parcel to the west should be positioned as an opportunity site. On both this one and the prior bullet, it will be critical to talk to the Alabama Avenue neighborhood about what they would find desirable on those sites.
• Laurel Ave – the block with Chapel Hill Tire, the car wash, the daycare, and the gas station is very underutilized for its marquee location by the Carrboro Farmers’ Market. Except for the office building across from Balloons and Tunes, these buildings are relatively old, and none are significant in any way architecturally or historically. When we talk about increasing our commercial tax base, this is an opportunity.
• The northwest corner of Greensboro and Weaver Streets. Formerly home to WCOM radio, and bulldozed in recent years and surrounded by fencing, this site’s destiny is continually at risk of becoming a suburban drugstore if we don’t plan for a better block between those two streets, Center street, and Short St

 

Think Beyond the Corridors and Develop Growth Accommodating Strategies for Every Part of Town

If we focus on accommodating growth only on corridors and only in opportunity sites, we’re not pulling together as a town to accommodate new neighbors, or provide housing choices for children growing up here today. The strategies about ADUs and missing middle housing should be extended to all of our residential neighborhoods to allow for incremental density like that which was commonly allowed in much of Carrboro from the 1960s to the 1980s.

Let’s move on now to the plan metrics and strategies themselves.

We Need Goals for Housing In General, Not Just Affordable Housing

Here are the land use chapter’s draft metrics:

1) Increase the number and preservation of affordable housing units

2) Increase in amount of land available for commercial, business and mixed-use development

3) Increase in commercial and business share of the tax base to reduce residential tax burden

4) Increase in amount of land protected for natural resources

On housing, we can’t just fight the housing crisis with affordable only units. We need a metric that counts increased housing units in total, increased market units, and new and preserved units. Yes, we should have a goal for affordable units. But every new market rate unit that is built also reduces competition between higher-income and lower-income residents for older and more affordable units. So we need a goal for increasing the number of all housing units. The rest of these goals are reasonable.

Goal 1. Promote Design

Strategy 1.1. Good! Nothing to add.

Strategy 1.2.a. We need more specifics/clearer language for “Work with homeowner associations to expand public use of open space including bikeway connections, use of recreational activities and natural habitat.” Will we be using privately owned spaces by HOAs to do this? This seems also to be a strategy the town has limited control over other than asking private property owners to change how the manage their properties. There’s no harm in including it; I just think it is a long shot.

Strategy 1.3. Good, but set a timetable by when it will be done.

Strategy 2.1.Separate the identification of areas along key corridors from small area planning. The identification of growth areas should be done in this comp plan. The small area plans for those key growth areas can come afterwards.

Strategy 2.2.a. The text does too much considering on important actions. We should have been reducing parking requirements everywhere, and especially downtown, ten years ago. Does proactive rezoning mean town-initiated? Say that. Consider priority growth and redevelopment areas in accessible locations almost means nothing and is easy to ignore.

Strategy 2.2.b. If we are proactively rezoning for greater density, are we then going to put an overlay district on top of those locations? Is this just adding complexity? The history of density bonuses in the Triangle market is not promising. Durham, to their credit, kept escalating their bonuses when developers did not jump at lower levels of incentive. If Carrboro is not willing to make changes rapidly, the bonus is not worth doing in the first place. If we do a density bonus, look at how Durham and Raleigh have made changes quickly and are trying to calibrate their bonus to the market frequently.

Strategy 2.3.a. The goal is great, the parentheses may undermine it completely as “appropriate setbacks” are often in the eye of the beholder. Again, we see “consider” modifications to the ordinance. This is not the “Comprehensive Things to Think About Doing Someday” it’s the PLAN. We say we’re going to modify the code to support ADUs. Good! That’s definitive; much better than considering. (Note:these steps on ADUs don’t seem as proactive as those Raleigh, Durham, and Winston-Salem have taken. Look at their ADU approaches and adapt)

Strategy 2.3.b. – Is the development community asking about tiny homes? With so little land left in Carrboro, single family tiny homes are a much more expensive and inefficient way of delivering small units than missing middle housing, or apartment buildings.

Strategy 2.4 Good!

Strategy 2.5. Remove the first three words and it’s excellent. We can do the evaluation. But make it clear that the action is the reducing of density restrictions, not the studying of them.

2.5.a. strike “strategically” and remove “in appropriate locations” and replace with “throughout the town.” We should not be only reducing parking requirements for affordable units. To meet our climate goals, we should be reducing them for all.

2.5.b. Looks pretty good. A lot of zoning “swings for the fences” and tries to get 20-30% affordable units in projects. Carrboro may have more success getting 10% affordable across a wider number of projects. When calibrating the density bonus, look at this. Be prepared to offer 3 market rate bonus units per 1 affordable unit, 4:1, 5:1 bonuses for affordable units. Be prepared to report on your density bonus every six months, and adjust it if you’re not getting any takers.

2.5.c. A long shot, but good.

Strategy 2.6.a. Good. Ask the development community if this is more attractive to them with a number or a percentage of units.

Strategy 3.1.e. The 40% tree canopy requirement is damaging to delivering many building types we need for climate change. At minimum, this should be changed to 40% tree canopy/and or green roof. Ideally, this threshold will be lowered to 20% tree canopy and/or green roof, and will seek to address tree canopy through quality urban design, and not simply covered acreage. The acreage requirement is a blunt instrument when we need more precise ways to get good buildings and get great trees surrounding them.

Goal 4. Good

Strategy a. 15 minute neighborhoods mean greatly expanding density in and near downtown or expanding retail in other parts of the community. The saying “retail follows rooftops” means it will be hard to draw more retail without additional infill housing. We need to acknowledge all this and decide which approaches we are pursuing in/near downtown and in other locations.

Strategy b. Our downtown parking requirements are probably the biggest obstacle to increasing the amount of commercial downtown.  All downtown parking requirements should be eliminated, tomorrow. Every other parking requirement in town could immediately be cut in half with almost certainly no consequences. We can’t talk about climate action without doing this. Ending parking requirements don’t take away the opportunity for developers to provide parking anyway – they simply stop forcing them to provide parking they don’t think is needed for their project to work.

Goal 5. Maybe good? What does “Appropriate development opportunities” mean?

Strategy 5.1. Good strategy, but it’s horizontal. (increase the acreage) We also need to increase the vertical capacity on existing and future commercial/mixed use land. Add strategy that addresses the vertical portion.

Strategy 5.2 Outside of this process, we must admit that our status quo is not vibrant public participation. Like many, many other privileged communities, our processes are dominated by wealthy homeowners giving short speeches in meetings. The public meeting format needs to drastically change, or be replaced.

Strategy 7.1 We need to think carefully about whether or not Neighborhood Preservation Districts do anything to support racial equity and climate action if they are deployed in neighborhoods that are NOT predominantly inhabited by minority or low-income residents. Our neighbor next door initiated a Neighborhood Conservation District for Northside, which has helped prevent some but not all displacement in the neighborhood. But look at the Chapel Hill’s NCD page and you will see that most of the NCDs in town are in wealthier white neighborhoods, and their primary function is to prevent additional housing stock of any type from being built.

That’s all I’ve got for now.

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