On Friday, March 24th, the Town of Carrboro released a Scope of Work (Town Scope) for the Bolin Creek Greenway (BCG) Public Input Process that several Carrboro residents, myself included, believe significantly ignores not only the will of the community, but also the direction and guidance of the majority of the Town Council at their February 14th work session.
As quick examples, on February 14th, several Carrboro Town Council members:
stressed the importance of reaching out to renters in this process.
mentioned interest in using a lottery approach like Raleigh or other methods to get statistically valid data from diverse populations
There is no mention of renters in the Town Scope, nor is there mention of the 2021 Town Survey which has statistically significant response rates due to its rigorous sampling approach. For more coverage of what is NOT in the scope, please read this coverage at Triangle Blog Blog. While the Town Scope is disappointing for what it leaves out, several items in the Town Scope will not help the town reach its goals, and are more likely to produce delays.
The Town Scope states as its purpose: “The goal is to engage the community in determining its vision and expectations for consideration of Phases 3 and 4 of the Bolin Creek Greenway.”
That is not what the community nor, in our opinion, the Town Council wants to see out of this process.
The community is not looking to develop a vision, or “determine expectations to consider” something. We are looking for the Town Council to vote to select an alignment for the Bolin Creek Greenway, and to start the process of building it as expeditiously as possible.
Seeing this fundamental misunderstanding of what the public and Council majority is seeking based on the content of the February 14th work session, we do not have any suggested edits for the Town Scope. Instead, we have drafted an entirely new one. We recommend that this new Community Scope should be used as a replacement for the Town’s draft, or at least as a starting point for new edits before a Scope of Work is finalized.
The Town Scope was drafted over six weeks. This alternate Scope of Work (Community Scope) was drafted in approximately 8 hours on March 25th and 26th.
The Community Scope is built on the following principles:
That a clear schedule, and a project management structure that reflects urgency and focus is respectful of the public’s time. Studies that have no defined schedule and do not identify decision points are wasteful of the public’s time, favor the time-privileged, and are by their nature inequitable.
That the opinions of town residents at large, and not the priorities of the most “plugged-in” citizens is what should guide Town Council decision making. The Community Scope is designed to reach out to residents instead of waiting for them to opt in, and aims to have participation match town demographics. Self-selective public participation in Carrboro has proven time and again to attract participation from wealthy residents, older residents, white residents and homeowners out of proportion with their presence in the Town population.
That there is more than enough existing data, analysis and other technical information available about the BCG, greenways, creeks, and other facilities in Chapel Hill and Carrboro to make a decisionabout which alignment to select, and to make a decision to proceed with design.
Many of the items raised in the Town Scope that involve additional analyses, engaging property owners, and other technical activities are unusual for a public involvement exercise. Checking on the current use of the rail corridor isn’t helping us evaluate the three alternatives in the 2009 plan; all that does is re-open the alternatives process to delay a decision by trying to add new choices to the mix.
As for reviewing regulations to see if rules may prohibit old designs from proceeding, this is inappropriate. The whole point of final design of any facility is to complete the design WITHIN various regulatory frameworks, with the National Environmental Policy Act as a tool to help the design of the facility ADAPT as it moves towards construction to be in harmony with local, state and federal regulations. Reviewing regulations and regulatory change without having a design team on hand to attempt to adjust the design of a facility to meet any new regulatory requirements is stacking the deck in favor of project cancellation and against thoughtful mitigation of any impacts that may arise
Below are links that Town Council, staff and community members can use to view the proposed scope and a recommended schedule associated with the scope of work.
This Community Scope can surely be improved – it was written very quickly! That said, we believe it represents an accurate representation of the type of actions that residents are looking for the Town to undertake, and we offer it as a resource for discussion as the Town Council works to refine their scope of work and begin this process.
There are lots of great reasons to complete the Phase 3 and 4 segments of the Bolin Creek Greenway through Carrboro that include a wide variety of environmental benefits. But equally important are the equity benefits that the community will receive from completing the greenway.
Connecting Students to Public Schools
There are three Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools that are close to the proposed Phase 3 and 4 segments of the Bolin Creek Greenway: Seawell Elementary School, Smith Middle School, and Chapel Hill High School.
Really? Where?
The image below shows proximate the northern portion of the greenway would be to the three schools. Connecting the greenway to each of them would be easy to do as part of the Phase 3 and 4 project. The Chapel Hill High School-Homestead Rd path already connects neighborhoods north of Homestead Rd to Chapel Hill High School near the tennis courts.
Talking Equity: The Differences Between Household Income Along the Proposed Greenway and School Demographics at Seawell, Smith, and CHHS
The households living in the Census Block Groups immediately adjacent to the proposed phase 3 and phase 4 segments of the Bolin Creek Greenway have only 3% of residents living in poverty, and have median incomes over $123,000 per year. (well above the median income for Chapel Hill/Carrboro of roughly $77,000 per year) The map below shows the relative income of Census Block groups near Phase 3 and 4, labeled as “Bolin Creek Missing Greenway.”
However, data gathered by US News shows that the percentages of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch (strongly correlated with household poverty) at the three schools are notably higher:
Seawell Elementary: 26% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch
Smith Middle School: 23% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch
Chapel Hill High School: 16% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch
Here are individual median incomes identified for some of the Census Block Groups near the proposed Greenway. In each case, the median household income of the block group is identified in a green box.
South of Estes Drive and East of North Greensboro Street
The Census Block Group immediately south of Estes drive and East of North Greensboro Street has the lowest median household income near the proposed greenway. This area include the Estes Park apartments and the 605 Oak Avenue public housing community.
Immediately East of the University Railroad and West of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd in Chapel Hill
This Census Block Group has a median income of roughly $72,000 per year, which is closer to (but still below) the median income in the area.
North of Estes Drive and Surrounding the Proposed Greenway Alignment
The Census Block that largely surrounds the proposed greenway on both sides has a median income of over $123,000 per year.
The Attendance Zones for These Schools Serve Low-Income Neighborhoods in both Carrboro and Chapel Hill
Here are the Smith Middle School attendance zones laid on top of the income map and the proposed greenway alignment. What becomes pretty obvious is that the SCHOOLS are at the north end of proposed Bolin Creek Greenway and many of the neighborhoods with lower and middle income residents are at the south end.
Completing this portion of the greenway (and connecting the southern end to Umstead Park in Chapel Hill!) would really provide a safe, healthy, environmentally friendly transportation choice for students at all three schools, though particularly middle school and high school students, who are more likely to take a longer trip by foot or bike.
Given that the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools are facing unprecedented challenges in hiring school bus drivers to bring children to school, and that low-income families are less likely to have a car available to drive a child to school if their bus doesn’t show up, completing the Bolin Creek Greenway is more than a way to create emission-free, environmentally-friendly trips between neighborhoods – it’s a way to help make access to education more equitable, resilient and reliable for everyone.
The Carrboro Linear Parks Project has brought significant attention to the need to complete the Bolin Creek Greenway (BCG) in recent months, and it appears that the Town Council may take up a process to re-start the design and engineering of the BCG in 2023.
Given this development, and that one of the founding pillars of the Carrboro Connects plan is Racial Equity, I spent two evenings this week re-watching the last two major public meetings about the BCG from 2016, when the Chapel Hill High School-Homestead Path portion of the BCG was a hot topic in town.
A recent study in greater Boston, where white residents make up 80% of the population, found that over 95% of speakers at public meetings were white. How representative of Carrboro were the speakers at the last two BCG meetings? While I had impressions of those meetings in my mind, as I attended and spoke at both, I wanted to get hard data.
A Target for Representative Input: Carrboro Town Profile Some quick Carrboro stats from the 2020 Decennial Census and 2021 American Community Survey 5-Year estimates for the Carrboro population:
Renting/Owning a Home ▪ 58% of Carrboro residents are renters ▪ 42% are homeowners
Race/Ethnicity ▪ 12.8% of Carrboro residents are Hispanic/Latino ▪ 10.0% of Carrboro residents are Black ▪ 62.2% of Carrboro residents are White ▪ 8.8% of Carrboro residents are Asian ▪ Approximately 6% of Carrboro residents are multi-racial
Income (Earnings in Last 12 Months, 2021) ▪ 6% of Carrboro residents earned less than $25,000 ▪ 37.2% earned $25,000 to $49,999 ▪ 19.2% earned $50,000 to $74,999 ▪ 13.2% earned $75,000 to $99,999 24.2% earned $100,000 or more
Age ▪ 21% of Carrboro residents are age 19 or younger ▪ 24.5% are age 20 to 29 ▪ 16.1% are age 30 to 39 ▪ 11.8% are age 40 to 49 ▪ 11.5% are age 50 to 59 ▪ 8% are age 60 to 69 ▪ 7.1% are 70 and up
Looking at these stats, a representative set of speakers at a Town Council podium would be mostly renters, about 4 out of 10 would be non-white, primarily under age 40, and 60% would earn less than $75,000. What did I find?
Like Boston, Public Commenters in the Last Two Carrboro BCG Meetings Were Almost Entirely Wealthy Older White People
Example 1: BCG Public Comment Stats from May 10th, 2016
▪ All 16 of the speakers were white. I was able to confirm that 14 of the 16 identified as Non-Hispanic or Latino White on their voter registration. ▪ Using Anywho.com and Spokeo.com, I was able to get ages for all but one speaker. The average age of the speakers was 54, the median age was 57, and other than one 17- year-old, the youngest speaker was 41. 10 of the 16 speakers were over age 50. ▪ Using voter address data and the Orange County Land Records system, I learned that 100% of speakers were homeowners, and none were renters. ▪ Using Zillow.com and home value as a proxy for income/wealth, I learned that the median home value in 2022 for speakers is $635,700. Assuming a household could afford a $63,500 down payment, they would then need an annual household income of over $154,000 to buy such a home. ▪ Video documentation of this meeting is available here – Carrboro Granicus 5-10-2016 Town Council Meeting
Example 2: BCG Public Comment Stats from May 17th, 2016
▪ 7 of the 8 speakers were white, one identified as Latino in their voter registration. ▪ The average age of the speakers was again 54, the median age was 52, and the youngest speaker was 42. ▪ Again, 100% of speakers were homeowners, and none were renters. ▪ The median home value in 2022 for these 8 speakers is $662,650. ▪ Video documentation of this meeting is available here – Carrboro Granicus 5-17-2016Town Council Meeting
Three Interesting Tidbits
TIDBIT 1: The most fascinating finding for me in this exercise was that in both meetings, the person who lived in the most expensive house took the most time speaking at the podium!
No, I’m not kidding. In the May 10th meeting, it was a homeowner in a house currently valued at $1.07 million who spoke the longest, and on May 17th, the longest speaker spoke at the podium for 19 painful minutes. They have since moved away, but the house they lived in is presently valued at $1.8 million.
TIDBIT 2: Like in NCAA sports, there is apparently a NIMBY Transfer Portal! The lengthiest anti-greenway speaker at the May 10th meeting apparently got a great NIL deal or something, and moved out to La Quinta, CA, where they promptly joined La Quinta Residents for Responsible Development and recently killed a proposed wave pool resort near their home.
TIDBIT 3: In both meetings, multiple members of a single household spoke. On May 10th, 2016, there were two sets of adults who lived in the same home who spoke, as well as one mother/son pair who spoke. On May 17th, there was another pair of adults living in the same home who spoke. These multi-household-member-with-similar-opinion comments further narrow an already limited demographic pool.
Carrboro Must Stop Holding Public Comment Sessions Like This For a town that says it is making Racial Equity a foundational element of its decisionmaking going forward, it’s hard to think of a reason that this type of engagement process should continue at all.
It took me about 8 hours to document these two meetings and research the characteristics of the participants. While I am sure a labor-intensive effort could turn up meetings prior to the very intentional Carrboro Connects process that had slightly more representative socio-demographic voices from the town speaking at a podium, the truth is what is documented above is much more the status quo norm than any unusual occurrence.
People shouldn’t have to sit in a specific room at a certain time of day, and wait for hours to speak for 1-2 minutes in order for their input to matter. This is unfair to parents who put small children to bed in the early evening, people who work second shift, and those who depend on transit services that shut off for the night before a lengthy meeting may end.
People shouldn’t have to be subjected to an intimidating environment and be heckled when they speak a view not shared by others in the audience. I was yelled at while speaking in both of my comments, which you can see in the videos. Others I know who supported the CHHS path did not attend the second meeting because of the environment in the first meeting. We can’t let that happen the next time we discuss the BCG.
A more equitable public input process going forward might include a time period (one week?) prior to a Town Council decision point for residents to submit their demographics and videos or voice recordings up to 1 minute in length from their mobile phones, and then allow town staff to curate a representative set of remarks that reflects the broader community, and not just a few voices with a lot of free time, and lasts no longer than 10 minutes in a meeting setting.
The staff would also spend time presenting opinion data from larger efforts with higher data validity, like the 2021 Carrboro Community survey and the Carrboro Connects planning process.
Sharing data and insights from events out in the community that were attended by Town staff would also be valuable.
Stopping Doing the Wrong Things Is Still Progress Even If The Right Thing Isn’t Entirely Clear Yet Recently our neighbor Chapel Hill has had some pretty good breakthroughs under the facilitation of Canadian planner Jennifer Keesmat. With that in mind, I’d like to share a slide from former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian that I like.
I am sure that the question of “what does equitable engagement that supports racial equity look like in Carrboro?” will not be easy to answer, and that there will be some trial and error along the way.
But we know public comment as currently practiced in Town Council meetings in Carrboro is broken and built for privilege, just as it is in most other communities that use podium comments to shape decisions. Before we open another public discussion on the BCG, or any other important community issue, let’s find a way to eliminate or minimize the importance of podium comments in Town Council meetings, and jump from item #1 to item #4 in the slide above.
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The Short Take: Carrboro Town Council passed the Carrboro Connects plan over 5 months ago. To date, no significant land use policy changes have come to the Council Table for action from the plan. Meanwhile, sites that could have held more diverse housing options continue to be converted to large homes that only millionaires can afford.
How Neighborhoods Can Support Different Stages of an Individual or a Family’s Life
Our family has lived in Central or West Carrboro for the last 21 years, despite moving several times. One of the things that has made this possible is that as our lives have changed, there have been different types of housing in the neighborhood available to suit our needs. I lived in a small apartment before getting married. DW and I bought a townhouse a few years later. As we became a family of three, we moved to a house.
Age and Size of Housing Stock and Affordability
Living here for twenty years, you can distill the neighborhood down to three kinds of housing choices and price points for each:
New and any size – expensive
Old and large – expensive
Old and small – more affordable
My apartment had one story, 2 small bedrooms, and about 600 square feet. It rented for $600/month in 2002. It was built in 1962, 60 years ago.
The townhouse, about 950 square feet, rented for about $780 in 2006, and was built in 1982. Our house was newer, a little larger, and nearly double the townhouse rent for the mortgage.
Every property in our neighborhood is getting older. But we haven’t built many small units in the neighborhood in a long time. What that means is that if we’re not building more small units today, even if they are new and more expensive now – we have fewer opportunities to have the “old + small = more affordable” units of the future.
A Significant Missed Opportunity on Gary Rd
Earlier this summer, our neighbor Cristobal Palmer published this great piece about how he thought a significant assemblage of land that had gone on the market would be a great place for a neighborhood coffee shop or bodega. His closing statement proved prescient. He said:
“I don’t have the capital or skill set to make my dream happen, but I hope there are folks who share this dream and will be loud about it. If we aren’t loud, developers will do what is fastest or easiest to finance and get approved: more single-family detached homes. Let’s dream bigger.“
Sadly, the most likely (and zoning-encouraged) future unfolded. There is no zoning that allows anything other than large lot single family housing to be easily built here, and the other day I saw this on a walk:
I popped over to Zillow and found Cristobal’s (and my own) fears confirmed.
That’s one household living in 3,150 square feet. Zillow estimates the monthly mortgage payment for the million-dollar house to be roughly $6,600 per month. To meet the standard that your mortgage payment must be no more than 30% of your income, this house is targeted at a household earning $264,000 per year. Only millionaire households will live there.
Go two blocks east up West Poplar Avenue and you’ll find four households living in 3,161 total square feet in a quadplex.
The going rent for 2 bedroom apartments in the area ranges from about $1200 to $1500 per month. At $1500 per month, an individual or couple making $60,000 per year can rent these quadplex homes at a reasonable percentage of their income.
The Quadplex Above: Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing at 80% Area Median Income
The median income for Orange County in the 2016 – 2020 American Community Survey was $74,800. A household earning $60,000 per year is at 80% of the Area Median Income (AMI) and can spend 30% of their income on $1500/month rent. This level of affordability, approximately 80% to 100% of AMI, is the level of income that programs like the Community Home Trust target for buyers in their programs.
What this example shows is that despite all the challenges for housing here, especially for those at 60% AMI and below, which will require public subsidy to address, there is a portion of the below-median income market that may, in the long run, be served by older, smaller units without public subsidies — but only if we build it, and let it get old.
How Long Until the Next Missed Opportunity?
While we wait for policy changes, the real estate market moves along. Someone else will sell a significantly sized parcel, and if the only thing allowable is a large lot single family home that costs $1 million, that’s what we’ll get.
The Carrboro Connects plan can’t wait for years of study to take its next steps. We need two actions from the Council to begin moving as soon as possible. Those actions are:
We need to update our Single Family Zones to be Single Family + Missing Middle Housing Zones. On this one, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Chapel Hill has already done a significant amount of heavy lifting by drafting this model text to enable Missing Middle Housing. The Town Council should direct the Carrboro Planning staff to bring a draft version of this ordinance to the Council in this calendar year. It shouldn’t take that long to adapt this language for our town.
In taking these two actions, the Town will at least open the door to the possibility that the next building on a parcel like the one on Gary Road will house more people in smaller units, and help us prepare for a more affordable housing future.
So how can we get these things moving quickly?
Carrboro’s Pre-Carrboro Connects Public Input Process for Land Use and Zoning Changes Was Deeply Flawed
For many years, Carrboro planning decisions have been subject to the worst kind of public participation processes – those that privilege wealthy, older, whiter, retired homeowners who have the time to spend 3 hours sitting in a room to speak for 3 minutes at a podium on a weeknight. These engagement methods encourage a “pack the room” strategy that allows every person with an opinion to speak at a podium ALWAYS favors those who are retired and done working, those who work daytime hours, and those who are not responsible for caring for young children in the evening.
Two Better Ways to Take Public Input
The Town of Carrboro would do better to combine public engagement approaches from Chapel Hill and Durham to address and accelerate the timeline to vote on policy changes. For some of Chapel Hill’s recent initiatives, the town used its Public Input website to not only capture opinions, but also to get the demographic characteristics of those participating. Carrboro should use these techniques to gather online data from people who cannot attend public meetings, and should report the results in meetings where decisions are under consideration at Town Council.
In Durham, some council decisions allow for no more than five speakers to speak in favor AND no more than five speakers to speak against any policy change. Each speaker is given two minutes. Twenty minutes of verbal public testimony is combined with data from community surveys and larger, more intentionally inclusive initiatives like the Carrboro Connects process. Indeed, the Carrboro Connects plan recently won the prestigious Marvin Collins Planning Award – one of the highest honors a public plan can receive in North Carolina. The Daily Tar Heel reported in September:
Part of the criteria of the Marvin Collins Awards includes looking for transferability and applicability to other communities, as well as originality, Bynum Walter, a co-chair of the APA-NC awards committee, said. Carrboro Connects was particularly effective in its community outreach efforts, she added.
“We had an unprecedented amount of community engagement and development,” Carrboro Mayor Damon Seils said regarding the plan.
The Carrboro Connects team engaged with more than 1,600 individuals. The plan also recognizes over 4,000 touchpoints – instances of engagement within the community.
There’s no reason Carrboro should not offer a public comment opportunity on these policy initiatives, but it should be reasonably limited like Durham’s process, and recognize the breadth and depth of opinions generated by the much larger, more detailed, Carrboro Connects process, and the 2021 Carrboro Community survey.
Still Waiting for Action Five Months After Plan Adoption
In closing, it’s great that the Carrboro Connects plan reached 1,600 people in town with over 4,000 touchpoints. But if the policy recommendations don’t move forward, that public input is slowly and steadily devalued. The Carrboro Connects plan was adopted on June 7th, 2022 and as of this writing on November 11th, 2022, it is not clear when any policy actions from the plan will be considered on a Town Council agenda.
I am well aware that policy actions don’t always happen overnight, and that anything that comes to the Council table could take up to 6 to 8 weeks to reach a vote. But it’s important to get these processes started. I hope that we’ll see at least one policy proposal from the Carrboro Connects plan reach the Town Council agenda in January 2023. The two policy proposals above are great places to start. If you agree, consider sending an email to council@carrboronc.gov and letting them know you want to see eliminating parking requirements and expanding housing choices on a council agenda in the near future.
It’s an exciting time in Carrboro! There are new bike lanes on Main Street. The construction of the 203 Project, featuring a new branch of the Orange County library, is underway. Perhaps most importantly, we have a new Comprehensive Plan that is focused on addressing racial equity and taking action to fight climate change. Better still, the Implementation chapter of the Carrboro Connects Comprehensive Plan (see below) highlights numerous policy actions that can move us towards our goals.
The Fastest, Easiest Climate Win Available: Ending Parking Requirements for Cars
The great news on the climate action front is that there is one policy action that can be taken immediately with virtually zero negative (or even noticeable!) effects: ending parking requirements for cars.
How Does Ending Parking Requirements Fight Climate Change?
There aren’t enough jobs in town for the residents who live here. So many of them have to commute 20 to 40 miles to work, as I discussed in the Fundamentals of Carrboro post.
Eliminating parking requirements, as described in Implementation Strategy 4.1.c on page 48 of the chapter, can make it easier to build mixed-use and commercial buildings in town, and provide more jobs locally.
4.1 c) Update parking requirements to consider adjustments or removal of minimum requirements for affordable housing, accessible dwelling units, and mixed-use development to reduce impervious surfaces and make more efficient use of land. – Carrboro Connects
If we can house more jobs in downtown Carrboro, we have the potential to convert climate-intensive car commutes from Carrboro to RTP, Durham, and Raleigh to walk, e-bike or local bus trips on the Chapel Hill Transit F, J, CM, or CW bus, and reduce emissions of Carrboro residents.
Eliminating parking requirements can also help build more small housing units on the same land, making it easier to live in a community that is prioritizing walking and biking, which have no emissions. Removing parking requirements is also addressed in strategy 4.2 a on page 29 of the Implementation Chapter.
4.2 a) Remove minimum vehicular parking requirements for residential development close to transit.* Lower vehicular parking requirements for all residential uses, including ADUs.
On examination, creating a 1/2-mile buffer around the transit routes in town (a standard distance for a reasonable walk to a bus stop) actually puts MOST of the town in an area that would be eligible for removing parking requirements.
After creating the map, I realize it is also missing the F route, which did not run when this bus route layer was created, so the white boundary should encompass even more of North Carrboro. I’d say we’re talking 75% to 80% of the town is in the end-requirements-near-transit area.
The Easiest Path Is the Best Path: Eliminate All Car Parking Requirements in Carrboro
Given that most of the town falls under the criteria where parking requirements would be eliminated, the best course of action is to make it simple and remove all car parking requirements in Carrboro, period.
It’s also a best practice at this point! In March 2022, Raleigh removed all parking minimums citywide. Dunwoody, GA (population 49,000) did the same in 2019. Graham, North Carolina (population 15,000) has removed parking minimums and applied parking maximums to ALL nonresidential buildings citywide. Albemarle, NC has also eliminated virtually all parking requirements. There’s even a lovely map of all these places and what they’ve done!
What Will Happen When We Eliminate Parking Requirements?
Immediately and for awhile thereafter? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Ending Parking Requirements in Carrboro doesn’t affect any properties as they are currently built in town, and doesn’t affect any currently existing parking spaces. It only ends the practice of requiring a certain number of parking spaces for new development. But over time, with the removal of these requirements, we are likely to see more viable building projects downtown and in our commercial areas become financially viable, allowing us to have more jobs with short commutes in town.
Does This Mean Developers Will Only Build Buildings With No Parking? No.
The 201 N Greensboro project is a great example of what will happen downtown without parking requirements. A developer will bring a project forward, and they will have a financial interest in having some amount of parking that meets the project need. Instead of having to match some arbitrary number in the ordinance, which is not tuned to how many people take the bus or bike in town, they will find a number that works for the project, and assumes (appropriately!) that many people will arrive by bus, bike, and walking.
Finally – How Have Parking Requirements Harmed Carrboro?
Parking requirements increase the cost of housing. From Todd Littman at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute:
“Based on typical affordable housing development costs, one parking space per unit typically increases moderate-priced housing costs approximately 12%, and two parking spaces increases lower-priced housing costs by 25%. Since parking costs increase as a percentage of rent for lower priced housing, and low income households tend to own fewer vehicles, parking minimums are unfair and regressive.” – Littman, Parking Impacts On Housing Affordability, May 2022
Parking requirements also inhibit economic development and job growth by limiting the financially viable buildings that can be constructed. Downtown Carrboro is a perfect case study on this point. The Triangle has been undergoing a roaring population and job expansion over two decades, and other than the 300 East Main project, which was entitled in the 2004 – 2007 timeline, and built between 2007 and 2013, we have not had a new given permission to build in our downtown core* until a few months ago, when the town gave 201 N Greensboro a green light – after letting the developer go below the required number of parking spaces, without which, the building was not likely to be financially feasible.
It’s also worth noting that the only other building approved downtown since that time is the 203 Project, which is being built with public money and does not have to meet a financial profit test to be built. Those expensive parking spaces at $48,000 per space would render any private development downtown financially impossible.
So when you ask yourself: “gee, a lot of other communities, even Graham out in Alamance County are seeing quality new development downtown, but Carrboro isn’t, why is that?”
The answer is that our parking requirements have basically told developers who look into a project that the math to pay for parking isn’t going to work out, so the jobs and tax base that would like to settle here goes elsewhere.
There are many other policy changes that need to happen to achieve the goals in the Carrboro Connects comprehensive plan. Eliminating parking requirements is a necessary first step and a good way to start moving towards those goals. I hope that we’ll see this item on a Carrboro Town Council agenda sometime in October.
*I’m considering Shelton Station to be outside the downtown core
On Saturday, August 27th, Carrboro Town staff hosted a tour of what will be Phase 1 of the Carrboro portion of the Morgan Creek Greenway.
Morgan Creek Greenway Overview
The Morgan Creek Greenway is a regional greenway connection across southern Chapel Hill and Carrboro with many years of planning behind it. Our family has ridden on the existing portion of the greenway for years and it is delightful. Here is a “sights and sounds” video I made in 2016. Notice what a safe and low-stress riding environment it is for children. (and people of all ages and cycling abilities)
The map below shows the existing sections of the Morgan Creek Greenway, which connects to Merritt’s Pasture, and the Fan Branch Trail, which connects the Morgan Creek Greenway to Southern Village. The red box near Smith Level Rd indicates where Phase 1 of the Carrboro portion of the greenway will be built.
Existing Morgan Creek Greenway in Purple, Carrboro Phase 1 in Red Box
The Carrboro Portion of the Morgan Creek Greenway
The Town put together a Morgan Creek Greenway Conceptual Master Plan Report(PDF) in 2010 to outline the possibilities of what full implementation could look like. The original master plan alignment is shown below. Again, the red box indicates Phase 1.
Morgan Creek Greenway Master Plan, Phase 1 in Red Box
Current Phase 1 Design Features
The greenway is currently at 30% design. This is a portion of the engineering process when many major things have been figured out, but there is still an opportunity for some adjustments to be made to the path of the greenway.
The current design proposes the following:
A sidewalk from Smith Level Road and public works drive leading from the street down to the greenway
The greenway proceeding on town property outside of the Public Works facility fence along the north side of the creek
Greenway will run to the left of the fence outside of Carrboro Public Works
A sidewalk access into the cul-de-sac at the bottom of Abbey Lane by Canterbury townhomes and another access point further up on Abbey Lane directly across from Friar Lane
A bridge (in maroon, at right below) over the small creek that passes under Public Works Drive
A bridge (in maroon, at left below) crossing Morgan Creek to the south side of the creek and a turnaround where the future Phase 2 section of the greenway will begin
Carrboro Portion of Morgan Creek Greenway: Phase 1
Design Analysis and Recommendations for Improvement in the Next Design Milestone
Overall, there’s a lot to like about this design. A bridge under Smith Level Road to the Chapel Hill section ensures this will be a Level of Traffic Stress 1 facility, suitable for children and senior citizens. This is the gold standard of bicycling safety and comfort in terms of protection from motor vehicles. The two different access points to Abbey Lane ensure that nobody has to significantly backtrack out of the neighborhood to go east or west when the full trail is built out.
The most important opportunity for improvement in this design is to include lighting as part of the trail.
The Frances Shetley bikeway in Carrboro is heavily used and beloved by neighbors, and one of the key reasons is that it has excellent lighting that makes it useful after dark. (see left side of trail picture below) There are even new lighting types that reduce or completely eliminate upward light pollution by ensuring the light emitted only goes down. The International Dark Sky association maintains a list of compliant lights that can make the Morgan Creek Greenway as useful as possible while meeting dark sky goals.
For the 60% and final design of this greenway, the town should ask the engineering team to incorporate dark-sky compliant lighting for the trail into the design.
Shetley Greenway with Lights Near Carrboro Elementary School
Improving Public Process: Notify Everyone
Finally, one place where the Town continues to use an outdated practice is to notify near neighborhoods of a project meeting, but not the broader community. I only learned about this event because we own property within a certain number of feet of the project location. But this is supposed to be a REGIONAL bike-ped project that is part of a multi-town plan in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
There’s no reason this project and commenting on how to improve it should be a privilege of nearby neighbors, and not the whole town, and even our neighbors in Chapel Hill who might use it as well. Numerous studies have shown how notifying homeowners in near neighborhoods around projects ultimately biases processes towards favoring participation among older, wealthier and whiter participants. And frankly, while the crowd of nearly 50 who attended were largely enthusiastic about the trail, and that was great to see – they also largely fit the narrow demographics of this outdated notification method. Given that 33% to 38% of the population of the Census tracts that would be served by the trail are home to non-white residents, we probably could have done better at reaching those residents.
Let’s work to broaden the conversation from here on out, shall we?
Carrboro has a relatively new (and yet deeply experienced) Mayor, a new town manager, and the most progressive town council in recent memory.
This new leadership team has settled into place and Carrboro recently adopted its first ever Comprehensive Plan for the town, declaring that its two overarching principles are making Carrboro a place that advances Racial Justice and takes Climate Action.
Now that the Carrboro Connects plan is adopted, will it move us in the directions described above? Are the strategies proposed to move ahead feasible for a town with budget and staff capacity the size of Carrboro, and will they be designed to leverage our assets, or be more dependent on the goodwill of other partners to be executed?
To answer these questions, we’ve got to start with an accounting of Carrboro’s place in the world, and our challenges and opportunities. Below I present what I see as the lay of the land, what I will refer to going forward as The Fundamentals of Carrboro. Let’s begin.
Fundamental #1: Carrboro is part of the Triangle economy, and except for UNC, it is far from all of the region’s other major job centers.
Traditionally, the Triangle regional economy has centered on employment opportunities in Wake, Durham, and Orange counties. Carrboro sits very close to one of the densest job clusters in the region with UNC and UNC Hospital. Downtown Chapel Hill and Downtown Carrboro could also be considered part of this cluster. But most of the rest of Carrboro is adjacent to low-density suburban Chapel Hill neighborhoods or the Orange County rural buffer. The rural buffer has few to zero job opportunities now and will not likely add them in the future. East Chapel Hill may hold more jobs in the future, but development cycles in Chapel Hill are long and slow. Except for those Carrboro-ers that work at or adjacent to UNC, most Carrboro residents are traveling 10-20 miles each way to work in Durham or RTP, or 30-40 miles to work in Raleigh. Increasing suburban growth across the region and no high capacity transit planned for Carrboro in the next 30 years means that driving to these far-flung jobs will only get more challenging for Carrboro residents.
Unless we figure out how to grow a larger base of jobs here in town, Carrboro residents will have an increasingly difficult time accessing a wide variety of jobs in other communities in the region. If like me, you are a parent who finds Carrboro a good place to raise a child, this situation increases the likelihood that the kids we love to raise here will move away to find work.
Fundamental #2: Our tax base is 86% residential and only 14% commercial.
We have a very high dependence on residential property tax to pay for town operations. If we can’t grow the commercial tax base, the funding for all of Carrboro’s lofty goals will be paid for most heavily through residential property taxes, which…raise the cost of housing.
Fundamental #3: Carrboro is part of, and heavily influenced by, the Chapel Hill real estate market. Both towns have made choices to grow slower than the region, with significant consequences.
Over the past decade, all the other communities surrounding Chapel Hill and Carrboro have grown by at least 20%, while Chapel Hill and Carrboro have grown at less than half the rate of the others. (Durham, while not listed, is also over 20%).
Wikipedia
Growing this slowly is A POLICY CHOICE that has been repeatedly made by both the Chapel Hill and Carrboro town councils.
The scarcity of new housing in both communities for a growing population has a predictable result, nearly half of our renters are cost-burdened:
Carolina Chamber State of the Community Report
This means that since Carrboro is adjacent to another slow-growing town, Chapel Hill’s scarcity of housing also drives up our prices and rents, and the difficulty of building in either of the two towns sends jobs elsewhere.
What does growing slower and becoming more expensive have to do with Racial Justice? Due to a host of systemic discriminatory phenomena, from redlining to urban renewal to hiring discrimination to real estate appraisals, we have a significant wealth gap in the United States between white and non-white households.
Median Net Worth By Race (Federal Reserve, 2019)
This means that when lower-income residents struggle to afford to live in Carrboro, they are much more likely to be black and brown residents. Our current development patterns have us on a glide path to being an increasingly older, wealthier, and whiter town. This outcome is far from the values Carrboro professes to hold.
What does growing slower have to do with Climate Action?
The Cool Climate Network at UC-Berkeley modeled a bunch of policy actions to see how much they would reduce GHG emissions. The data above is for the City of Sacramento. Look at how much urban infill outperforms. The biggest source of GHGs in the US is transportation, and urban infill can convert driving trips to walking, turning the most polluting trips into zero-emissions exercise. That’s why it makes such an impact.
Fundamental #4: Carrboro does not have the capacity to build affordable housing at scale.
Building new affordable housing units is expensive, and while Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill have the financial and staff capacity to do Low Income Housing Tax Credit projects like Willard Street Apartments in Durham or Greenfield Commons in Chapel Hill, Carrboro presently lacks both the resources and staff to produce and fund new affordable housing at this level.
This doesn’t mean Carrboro shouldn’t pursue affordable housing initiatives; we most certainly should. What it means is that we should be thinking about how to increase Carrboro’s capacity to meet our goals just as we define those goals in our Comprehensive Plan.
This capacity expansion will demand financial resources and technical skill, likely through the hiring of new town employees.
Fundamental #5: We are the people we’ve been waiting for.
If you’ve followed state government or federal government policy recently, it’s fair to say that if our plans rely on outside partners to contribute significant amounts of funding to achieve our goals, then we could be waiting for a long time. To paraphrase Barack Obama, Carrboro’s plans should embrace the idea that “we are the people we’ve been waiting for.”
Our elected leaders should certainly try to build partnerships with other levels of government to advance community goals. The soon-to-break-ground 203 Project, featuring a new library in Carrboro, is a great example of the town and Orange County working together. However, excellent outcomes like this are more often the exception than the rule, and while we should embrace those opportunities when they arise, we should not count on them to achieve our goals.
Fundamental #6: Carrboro has assets to pursue its goals, but the town is not taking full advantage of those assets to reach its goals more quickly – YET.
Carrboro has some powerful things going for it. While far from many jobs in the Triangle region, it is very close to a big job center in UNC, including many well-paying jobs. The University and UNC hospital also aren’t going anywhere, which means that even in recessions, that job base will likely remain present and strong.
Carrboro and Chapel Hill share the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School System, which is one of the highest-regarded and best funded in the state of North Carolina. As a former college admissions counselor, I can tell you that its high schools are well-regarded both in-state and nationally.
We have a downtown that has a strong local business flavor. Our town commons hosts a nationally recognized Farmers Market.
Our fare-free bus system, Chapel Hill Transit, carries a very high number of passengers for a community of this size, and has helped LOWER most traffic counts in town compared to the early 2000s, despite growing population in both communities.
These are just some of the things that make our community a good place to live, and makes the land beneath our buildings quite valuable. But not all buildings are created equal, and on a per-acre basis, our more densely developed buildings provide significantly more tax revenue per acre to pursue our community goals. In 2013, the Chamber hired a consulting firm, Urban 3, to report on the tax productivity per acre in Orange County. The most productive building in Carrboro at that time was the Hampton Inn.
Tax value per acre (Carolina Chamber / Urban 3/ Joe Minicozzi)
Putting it all together – Carrboro can meet a lot of goals by using our valuable land differently, and more intensely. We can build more housing, and make room for new neighbors, while helping current ones stay in town. We can provide space for new job opportunities, so our residents can shorten their commutes, and their emissions. Doing both will also bring in new tax revenue to help pay for the big goals the town wishes to pursue.
Equally important is that how the town grows is mostly controlled by choices made by the Carrboro Town Council.
The 2022 – 2023 Town Council session presents an ideal time to begin making a transition to a greener and more inclusive future. This coming year on the blog will be dedicated to putting forth strategies to make this happen.
On Tuesday, May 10th, the Carrboro Town Council will have its first opportunity to adopt its first-ever comprehensive plan. The fact that our town has reached this point after not having a plan for so long is commendable, and everyone who has helped propel this plan forward, especially in the pandemic, should be proud of their efforts.
That said, the Adoption Draft still contains some places where it equivocates instead of sets direction, and those should be improved ahead of final adoption.
Must-Address Changes In the Adoption Draft
Parking Requirements: Still Getting It Wrong What the Adoption Draft Says: “Investigate lowering parking requirements…”, “reduce negative effects of parking requirements” “update requirements to remove minimum requirements for residential development close to transit.”
What the Plan SHOULD Say (Best): Parking requirements are hereby eliminated in Carrboro with the adoption of this plan.
What the Plan COULD Say (Acceptable): Parking requirements are hereby eliminated in Carrboro within all downtown districts (list here), future growth centers identified in this plan and within ¼-mile of all transit routes. Parking requirements in the remainder of town are hereby reduced to no more than 1 space per dwelling unit, and all applicants are encouraged to propose alternative parking ratios for their projects. These changes are effective upon adoption of this plan.
Why: Removing parking requirements DOES NOT MEAN that projects will not have any parking; it simply means that developers of projects we would like to see in town do not have to curtail their ability to meet our goals in order to meet an arbitrary number. We can see this right now with the 201 N Greensboro Project, where the code requires 50+ spaces for no good reason, and the developer is proposing 43. This is the number that meets Transportation Management Goals best that also works to obtain lender support for the project. If we want economic development, more jobs in town, and the tax base that comes with it, we need to stop making developers beg for this. In fact, letting them figure out what the project truly needs HELPS us because parking is expensive, and developers will be financially incentivized to spend time figuring out how to divert money formerly earmarked for baseless parking requirements into more important items like affordable housing units and green infrastructure.
I can only imagine that these requirements are hanging around in the draft, particularly for commercial uses, because of hypothetical concerns that if new commercial development does not have parking requirements, it will put pressure on existing parking for current businesses. This is only potentially a problem if we continue to do nothing to manage our parking downtown.
The town must grapple with this truth: we have had very limited private investment downtown through one of our region’s most continuous massive boom periods because the parking requirements are effectively eliminating proposals before they start. The changes in East Chapel Hill and many parts of Durham are a testament to how much Carrboro has shunned economic growth in the past decade. Maintaining parking requirements to address this concern is a commitment to stymie development downtown, a commitment to NOT capture a larger share of the regional economy, and it is the town telegraphing that it anticipates that indecision and non-action on pricing parking downtown will persist.
In other words, maintaining parking requirements is waving a big flag that the plan is more committed to keeping the status quo than raising funds through new compact, walkable development to address climate change and racial equity.
The plan should not pass with the current lack of action on parking requirements. If it does, the staff and/or council should say WHY this strategy is preferable to elimination. I get that implementing parking pricing in town has a lot of culture change to process and requires a lot of thought. But this is a no-brainer. Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Durham, and GRAHAM, North Carolina (GRAHAM!) have all removed parking requirements.
Our adoption draft plan is scheduled to “Conduct financial analysis of benefits of reduced parking requirements” in 2024. This is ridiculous. The idea that there’s something left to study that makes them more important in Carrboro than in other jurisdictions is comical. Mayor and Council, pull the trigger and save us all years of meaningless debate. End parking requirements in Carrboro with passage of this plan.
Open Space In New Development: Still Encouraging Sprawl and Inhibiting Climate-Friendly Density What the Adoption Draft Says: “the Town is committed to improving ecosystem quality, recognizing the dual benefits for quality of life and climate change resiliency and its importance to town identity. For example, in 1995, the land use ordinance required that 40% of open space be preserved in all new developments. In 2014, the tree canopy coverage standards were updated to include at least 40% canopy coverage on residential land.”
What the Plan Should Say: “The town recognizes that while well-intentioned, the requirements for 40% open space in new development, especially when coupled with parking requirements, largely have worked to prevent development downtown and along transit corridors and encouraged it along the edges of the town. The ordinance is hereby adjusted to reduce both coverages from 40% to 15%, and that the open space requirement can be met by a combination of open space and green roof facilities.”
Why: We must move beyond the idea that because we can see more green right in front of our eyes, that we have made the most green development choice possible. Indeed, Mebane and Chatham County are booming with large lot development that disturbs much more land than urban development in Chapel Hill or Carrboro would because of standards like these. Urban communities can have density and tons of greenery. Any visit to Savannah, GA proves this on every block.
Get Specific About What “More Lots” Means for ADUs What the Adoption Draft Says: “Reform ADU standards in the Land Use Ordinance to allow for ADUs on more lots.”
What the Plan Should Say: “Reform ADU standards in the Land Use Ordinance to allow for ADUs on more than 50% of single family lots in town.
Why: We don’t want to go through a long process to enable 5-10 ADUs to be built in town. We want to enable dozens or hundreds of them. Set a goal for making ADU viability the NORM rather than the exception, and tune ADU eligibility to exceed 50% of existing single family lots in town.
Make Decisions In This Plan To Avoid Overlong Timelines The Timeframes of when to do things in the plan are either “1 to 5 years” or “6+ years.” How can the staff build a reasonable workplan off of this? How can we hold anyone accountable. To sustain momentum out of the adoption, the town should have a relatively short list of priority actions to be addressed by 6, 12, and 18 months from adoption.
Then there should be a 1.5 to 3 year bucket of actions. Then 3 to 5 years; then 6+.
But more importantly, MORE DECISIONS SHOULD BE MADE NOW.
Under land use, it says for 2022-2023: “Determine priority areas to conduct small area plans such as key corridors identified in the comprehensive plan and possible updates to existing small area plans based on the comprehensive plan. Determination should consider race & equity and climate action criteria.”
Why can’t this be done as part of the plan? We have opportunity sites in the plan. We have engaged the largest group of diverse audiences in the Town’s history. Why can’t we put those priority areas in the plan today? How could we have done all this work and not be able to figure out where these priority areas should be already? Chapel Hill’s 2020 plan identified Future Focus Areas as part of its adoption; surely we can do the same.
The rest of the plan should be screened for other decisions that can simply be made NOW.
It is worth stating that one of the reasons that it is important to get as much policy direction set in this document is that outside of processes like this and the 203 Project where consultant resources were engaged, the town has struggled to advance any significant policy changes in planning ordinances and regulations that move the needle on our problems. We may need a larger planning staff that dedicates more time to changing regulations to fit the plan to create this capacity. We may need the Council to set shorter time limits for project reviews and to put finite bounds on public engagement processes that have previously over-privileged wealthy homeowners at the expense of everyone else. But more than anything, we need the Council to provide leadership and make decisions. That’s the biggest barrier between the Town and its goals in this plan.
This blog post is an overview of a community conversation going on in Carrboro, NC, about the town’s plan to build affordable housing on town-owned land.
The Big Picture: Our Housing Challenge
But first: how expensive is it to live in Carrboro? We need to put things in perspective. Before we grapple with this question, watch this 90 second video from the Raleigh News and Observer yesterday with the volume on. Take a listen to Monique Edwards, who is narrating the scene at a showing for a house that is being sold for $260,000 in Raleigh.
Now that we’ve set the scene, here are the median listing prices for homes in our area from realtor.com as of February 23, 2022:
Let it sink in- the median home for sale in Carrboro is priced 85% higher than the one in this video.
Carrboro’s Strategy to Build Affordable Housing on Town-Owned Land
Here’s what’s happening: on February 8th, 2022, the Carrboro Town Council approved a strategy to create affordable housing on Town-owned land. This approval represents the culmination of several years of work, including:
Town Council adopting Affordable Housing Goals and Strategies (June 2014)
Updating those strategy documents (March 2015)
Affirming via the Town Attorney that Carrboro has the authority to provide affordable housing in general, and on town-on land specifically (February 2018)
The most recent step has been for the Town to review land it owns to see which sites are most suitable for building affordable housing. Building affordable homes on publicly owned land is a common strategy for municipalities in North Carolina, which lacks the legislative support for tools like rent control and inclusionary zoning that are available in other states.
The Town reviewed 47 parcels, and narrowed the list down to three sites with the most potential after excluding other sites in the list of 47 that were any of the following categories:
1) Within a conservation easement 2) Inside a Long-Term Interest Areas (WASMPBA) 3) No water or sewer nearby 4) Within 100 year floodplain 5) Within dedicated right-of-way 6) Parcel completely developed 7) Inside Rural Buffer zoning
After the Chapelboro story, email lists around town began receiving invitations to a meeting scheduled by neighbors of the Pathway Drive site on Saturday, February 19th. As someone with a long interest and professional background in these topics, I attended the meeting. About 50 to 75 people gathered in a cul-de-sac near the proposed Pathway Drive site to share their thoughts and concerns about the proposal with each other, and Councilmember Randee Haven O’Donnell took questions.
While I’m not going to spend time detailing lots of comments, I think it is fair to say that the majority of those in attendance were first and foremost trying to learn what is going on. Beyond that, I think it is also fair to say that there were a few individuals who think that affordable housing at the Pathway site represents a significant opportunity for the community, and several more who have concerns.
But while this story may be new to Carrboro, it has all the ingredients of a disheartening local government controversy that we see time and again in communities that vote in very high percentages for Democratic candidates in national elections.
A Local Story In a National Moment
I was going to write a few paragraphs about this, but then I remembered that the New York Times did a fabulous video on this recently. Start at the 4 minute mark, and go to 7:15. This is a better primer than anything I could write.
This topic has also been addressed in Richard Reeves’ book Dream Hoarders, where he takes a look at how anti-development activism locks lower income children out of better school systems, and limits social mobility:
“…homes near good elementary schools are more expensive: about two and a half times as much as those near the poorer-performing schools, according to an analysis by Jonathan Rothwell. But the gap is much wider in metropolitan areas with more restrictive zoning. ‘A change in permitted zoning from the most restrictive to the least restrictive would close at least 50% of the observed gap between the most unequal metropolitan area and the least, in terms of neighborhood inequality,” Rothwell finds. Loosening zoning regulations would reduce the housing cost gap and by extension narrow educational inequalities.”
So…how similar is this conversation we’re having in Carrboro to the national trend?
I don’t need to review how Carrboro votes in national election. And I think everyone is aware we have one of the top-rated school systems in North Carolina, and that McDougle Elementary and Middle schools are well regarded. But let’s look at Census data. We have two sites up for discussion since the third one is already being built upon.
Here is a map of the Crest Street and Pathway Drive sites, overlaid on median income by census tract from the American Community Survey (ACS):
The Pathway site is in one of the highest income neighborhoods in Carrboro, with a median income over $130,000, which is approaching double the Orange County median household income of around $71,000.
And also percent white by census tract from the ACS tables on race and ethnicity:
The Pathway site is in a census tract that is 81% white, whereas Carrboro as a whole is 62% white. (2020 Census)
On my way home that evening, I counted seven Black Lives Matter yard signs on the way back to North Greensboro Street. It was also hard to miss this larger banner one block from where the meeting was held.So yes, while every college town development tussle has its own nuances, this is a conversation that could very easily end in dispiriting outcomes like Boulder residents opposing affordable housing to protect firefly habitats and limit “pet density.”
Can We Have A Better Conversation In Carrboro?
I sure hope so. With that in mind, I’ve got some suggestions for everybody.
Suggestions for the Town
For the town staff:
1. The clearest take-away from the meeting I attended near the Pathway site is that the process that got from 47 sites to 3 sites is a mystery to everyone. I don’t think the Town intended it to be that way, but I spent some time looking around the town website and digging through 2018 meeting minutes and I couldn’t find what I think a lot of people would like to see – a spreadsheet that lists all of the sites, which criteria they met and failed to meet, and so forth. I think it’s imperative to share that data with the community.
2. Future discussion of these projects needs to have some basic educational content about what is and what isn’t possible with affordable housing in North Carolina and Carrboro. Rent control? Illegal. Requiring affordable units in new development? Not allowed under standard zoning in NC. Can we negotiate with a for-profit developer? Yes, but density bonuses are tricky and when Durham offered 3 bonus market rate units for every 1 affordable unit supplied a few years back, not one developer took them up on it. These are some of the reasons why non-profit developers building on public-owned land are often how affordable housing gets delivered these days.
I’m a professional urban planner and these things are not common knowledge even in our circles. The public shouldn’t be expected to navigate the what-ifs without more background on why other things may not be possible. Please help the community understand why certain things are and are not on the table.
3. Share more information about how our Stormwater Utility (and the money it collects) are designed to help with addressing flooding issues. It’s clear there are legitimate flooding concerns already being dealt with by neighbors, and talking about how the town can address those on a parallel path to any new home construction will be valuable.
Suggestions for Those With Good Faith Concerns About the Pathway Project
4. Most importantly – go look at some multifamily home communities nearby. There are many that are quite beautiful and sought-after places to live. Take pictures of things you don’t like to share with town staff, but crucially, also take pictures of things you DO LIKE so that if something does get built, it is as informed by your goals as much as possible.
There are lots of ways to put 24 to 36 units on a small number of acres, and a sloping landline can sometimes help. Stacked townhomes with a one-floor condo on top of a two-story townhouse (or vice versa) create a three-story building type that makes it easier to build cost-efficiently while preserving more trees.
We have some interesting examples around here – the best may be Village West off of Estes Drive:
The two cohousing communities of Arcadia and Pacifica also offer some interesting, compact building techniques. I like how little land the parking at Pacifica takes up. That said, both of those communities were designed with solar access in mind, so they have very few trees amid the homes, with significant trees at the edge of their buildings. I wonder if some mix of the parking approach at Pacifica and the building type from Village West could meet the town’s goals while leaving more land undisturbed, which seems to be a goal of several neighbors.
5. Accept that while this may have felt like surprising news, the Town did not get to this point casually or without careful consideration. I hope the Town does share their list of 47 town-owned sites and the attributes of those that didn’t make the cut. But be prepared to find out that even after the data is released, that the Pathway site is still probably the best site that the town controls to build the most affordable housing at one time.
Suggestions for the Media
In this conversation, there will be misinformation brought up, and it can’t be put on an equal plane with real technical expertise. I’ve seen reporting in one local outlet that sounds too frequently like this: “The professional stormwater engineer certified that the design can detain all the runoff from a 125-year storm using its cistern and best management practices, but a person with a strongly held opinion said that it will flood just like all the other stuff in the neighborhood [that was built before modern stormwater rules] does.”
6. Don’t do this. If you believe that reporting on an assertion that isn’t supported by technical expertise is crucial to a story, use a truth sandwich when sharing it.
Suggestions for Affordable Housing Advocates
In every local government controversy, our elected officials are besieged with emails about what people are mad about, afraid of, and against, and they rarely get emails about what people are excited about, hopeful for, or supportive of.
7. If you think building affordable housing is important, don’t just watch this process, write in and tell the town council. You can write to council@townofcarrboro.org.
Suggestion For The Town Council: Help Us Pass This Character Test
Sometimes it’s easy to tell what the right thing to do is, and hard to follow through on it. Our town’s draft comprehensive plan is built on pillars of Racial Equity and Climate Action. How do those fare if we miss this opportunity? Well, if lower-income families who were going to live at the Pathway Drive site wind up living somewhere else, it’s probably most likely somewhere with lower housing costs outside of Chapel Hill/Carrboro, and Orange County. The medical staff who check people in at my doctor’s office in Carrboro drive in from Roxboro and Siler City, respectively. The emissions of commute trips that long are a climate issue. I’m sure they’d live closer if they could afford it. From a racial equity point of view, researchers have documented how much the zipcode you grow up in can influence your life trajectory. So many of us live here because we believe this is true in Carrboro for our children. Being generous with that opportunity in 27510 is one of the best contributions we can make to racial equity.
In closing, at the community meeting last Saturday, I was heartened to hear Council member Randee Haven O’Donnell say that we absolutely must avoid pitting affordable housing and environmental goals against each other, and that this project is an opportunity to build a new model for how a community can come together to build affordable housing, and share all that we love about Carrboro with others.
May it be so. I believe this Town Council can lead us there.
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.
