Weaver Street Market GM Responds to Panzanella Closing Post

Posted on November 1, 2013 by patrick

A few days after my recent post on the decision to close Panzanella restaurant in Carrboro, I received the following reply from Weaver Street Market General Manager Ruffin Slater. I have reproduced it below in full, without any editing, with his permission.

Dear Patrick,

Thanks for your email. I appreciate you sharing how much Panzanella has meant to you and your disappointment over the decision to close. The Weaver Street board creates the policies that govern the co-op’s direction and outcomes, but the final decision was my responsibility so I want to tell you more about the rationale and process.

Since the recession in late 2008, fewer community members have been eating at Panzanella. When Panzanella’s lease came up in 2010, we decided to renew for three additional years with the anticipation that the number of diners would rebound. In spite of our efforts, Panzanella has 25% fewer diners today than we did in 2008. In the meantime, expenses have gone up, including rent, utilities, salaries and health insurance. The combination of declining customers and rising expenses means that Panzanella has been incurring significant losses.

With Panzanella’s lease coming up at the end of this year, we needed to decide between two difficult options: closing, which would disappoint loyal customers and displace staff; or making a multi-year lease commitment, which would risk incurring continuing losses. In making this decision, I tried to weigh the interests of owners and employees as well as Weaver Street’s long-term goals.

I very much appreciate that there are many loyal customers like you for whom Panzanella means a great deal. As Panzanella is part of Weaver Street Market, we look at the restaurant with a holistic approach: is the business model sustainable and does it benefit the co-op as a whole to continue? When Weaver Street opened Panzanella it was one of the few restaurants featuring local food. Now there are many choices. While this is great for our town, it means that Panzanella doesn’t play the unique role that it once did.

Since we renewed our lease three years ago, Panzanella has been trying to attract more diners. Over this period, sales in each of our Weaver Street stores have gone up each year, while sales in the restaurant have continued to decline. The upswing in store sales after a difficult recession tells us that the stores fill a need with our owners and customers. In contrast, the decline in Panzanella sales tells us that the restaurant fills less of a need than it once did.

In an effort to keep Panzanella open, we could have slashed expenses. Panzanella has higher costs than most restaurants because it uses higher priced ingredients and offers benefits such as paid time off and health insurance. However, this approach would have compromised our food offering and created a second class of employee within our co-op. We could have tried a different concept or changed locations, but this would have required an even bigger investment and even more risk.

In an effort to keep Panzanella open, we could have continued to subsidize the losses with revenues from our stores. This kind of cross-subsidy makes sense if it helps to accomplish the co-op’s broader mission. However, subsidizing Panzanella precludes other potential uses for those resources. We receive a lot of feedback about ways Weaver Street should improve, such as making the food in our grocery stores more affordable or filling positions in the co-op that have gone unfilled since the recession. At some point, it doesn’t make sense to continue to postpone progress on these goals in order to keep Panzanella open

After weighing all the factors I made the difficult decision that the responsible choice was to close Panzanella. In order to develop a positive transition path for Panzanella employees, it was necessary to make a definitive decision about closing and to develop a clear timeline. This allows us to concentrate time and energy in placing staff in other positions within Weaver Street or making a smooth transition to a new job. We have started that process and I’m hopeful that it will have a positive outcome.

Thanks for taking the time to express your feelings about Panzanella. Panzanella has made a great contribution to building community and to growing the interest in local food. It has been a wonderful restaurant and it sad for it to close.

Sincerely, Ruffin

Ruffin Slater, General Manager
Weaver Street Market
437 Dimmocks Mill Road Suite 10
Hillsborough NC 27278
P. 919.241.1767
ruffin@weaverstreetmarket.coop

On Panzanella Closing and The Responsibility of Community-Owned Businesses

Posted on October 24, 2013 by patrick

Panzanella Restaurant (photo by Flickr user Dread Pirate Jeff)

Late this afternoon, via social media linked to a News and Observer article, came the gut punch news that beloved local restaurant Panzanella is closing. On a personal level, this is just very, very sad. Since DW and I got married over a decade ago, we have celebrated all sorts of major life events, and perhaps most of them– graduations, birthdays, wedding anniversaries, rare visits from cherished friends, you name it – at Panzanella. With such good food, valuable relationships with local farmers, brewers, and other food producers, not to mention what has always been consistently a warm and friendly staff– this is a big surprise that nobody saw coming.

The restaurant business is a very challenging one, with many promising places going under less than a year after opening. But this is no ordinary restaurant- it is part of the Weaver Street Market Co-op, billed as “Carrboro’s Community-Owned Italian Eatery” on the website www.panzanella.coop. With this ownership structure, one would think that instead of making a unilateral decision to close, presumably by the Board of the Weaver Street Market Co-Op, there would have been some consulting with the broad pool of owners (I’ve been a member for 12 years, and at least 8,000-10,000 others have joined since I did) about their perceived value of keeping Panzanella open, and what financial or other resources were needed to keep the restaurant open in its current location, or to explore what other choices beyond “close the doors and lay people off” existed.

There are a whole host of questions that come to mind that might have led to a different result, including:

The news article talks about an increase in costs and a drop in sales. Did Carr Mill Mall raise the rent? If not, what costs are driving the closure? Are the same cost challenges facing the co-op’s grocery operations?
Did WSM consider relocating Panzanella within Carrboro? There are supposedly spaces for dining at the new PTA Thrift store in either the current or second phase. Would that have been a place the restaurant could have relocated to?
What about shrinking Panzanella’s relatively large dining room? If half of the dining area could be turned back over to Carr Mill Mall and rented to a retail store, would a smaller version of the restaurant with the same kitchen be able to survive?
There’s a mention that the restaurant made more sense when the bakery and offices shared space with the restaurant. But the bakery and office functions are now mostly (I presume, someone correct me if I’m wrong) at the food house in Hillsborough. That’s either new rent or a new mortgage compared to the “everybody-crowded-into-the-back-of-Panzanella” scenario. Why is the restaurant suddenly characterized as a drain on the bottom line but the relatively new food house is not?
If the cooking/back of house space is underutilized at Panzanella, was going bigger-say, STARTING a real full-service bakery– ever considered? I think most WSM members, when pressed, will admit that despite the best efforts to get stuff from the ovens at the food house to Carrboro and Chapel Hill, the freshness of the baked goods has definitely declined a small but perceptible amount since the baking function left the Carrboro store. Bread and Butter in Chapel Hill is nice but it’s hard to imagine it’s meeting that need alone when Durham has Scratch, Loaf, Ninth Street Bakery and Daisy Cakes all within close proximity to each other.
The Carrboro store just finished its big remodel. Part of this outcome was supposed to be a 60-80% reduction in utility bills. Were none of the savings from this ongoing operational cost improvement enough to transition Panzanella to a more sustainable business model?
Are we owners going to get a big dividend this year? After this, the answer better be “NO.” If Panzanella closed down and consumer-owners received a big dividend, and the retention of that dividend might have kept Panzanella open, then that would be a huge mistake. Frankly, most of the long-term member base is used to non-existent to miniscule dividends per dollar spent at WSM cash registers.
Was this discussed at the September 9th Annual Meeting in any way? I can’t imagine it was; it would have been big news then, too. Why not?
The 2013 Annual report for WSM shows a 2.6% net profit for both 2012 and 2013 after a very lean year in 2011. Sales growth is steady (see page 3), averaging about 8% over the last three years, and the report appropriately boasts about saving more profits and reducing debt and increasing equity for the co-op. Finances for Panzanella are not broken out so it’s hard to understand how much any dynamics of operating Panzanella did or did not contribute to threatening these positive trends for Weaver Street Market.
The cafe at WSM is about to be renovated/expanded. Could a smaller version of Panzanella be incorporated into the expanded cafe?
The Draft (?) Vision 2022 document posted by Geoff Gilson online dated May 17, 2012 lists 10 strategies to help WSM reach their 2022 goals. (I feel compelled to say that I have no idea if this is an official document but it would be a very strange thing for anyone to take the time to fake) Strategy Number 3 is “Engage owners more fully.” Sub-topics under this heading include “Communicate about the co-op and the larger industry,” “survey owners regularly” and “create store advisory groups.” These are all good ideas- why weren’t any of them pursued in making this big decision? If the restaurant was struggling, why not empanel a Panzanella advisory group from owners to help problem-solve?

Decisions and Values

I recognize that at a certain level, this was a decision about dollars and cents informed by values, and that businesses come and go or change how they do things all the time. When Facebook changes their layout for the umpteenth time or undoes some other privacy setting, we all know:

They didn’t ask our opinion and they aren’t going to
They believe that their stockholders will benefit financially from this decision in some way

But the whole point of a co-operative business model is to cultivate a better version of capitalism than a single-bottom-line approach. Weaver Street Market has been trying to walk that talk for 25 years, with what I would describe as better than average success. I appreciate that, and have spent money in their store on products I know I could pay a little bit less for elsewhere, even within walking distance- because I have trusted that the local community impact of the dollar I spend at WSM is better than paying less in cold numbers somewhere else.

The flip side of this deal is that consumer-owners and worker-owners have the right to expect more from WSM, especially when they use the phrase “Community-Owned” in their materials, over and over again. The core of WSM’s brand is that there is a “Values Conversation” between the owners and management, that it is a two-way conversation, and that it is ongoing.

With that in mind, I hereby put the list of questions above on the table for Weaver Street Market. I also hope that if Weaver Street Market rises to the occasion and grapples publicly with these questions before the end of the year, that they do so starting from a posture of MAYBE THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE TO CLOSING THE RESTAURANT, and if so, we should tell the owners what that is, even if it means sacrificing or delaying bring other priorities to fruition. In doing so, WSM may find that those of us disappointed in this news may well reach the same conclusion that they made without us, or we may all find a third way forward that is neither a closing nor the apparently challenging status quo.

So Weaver Street Market leadership- care to comment?

Town of Cary Pursues New Downtown Library with Wake County’s Help

Posted on June 19, 2013 by patrick

Downtown Cary by Flickr User Paul J Buda

While this blog’s primary focus is Carrboro, I think it is important to stand up and clap for what looks like a good decision in the making a few miles to our east in Cary. Specifically, the town is working cooperatively with Wake County to put the next iteration of their library in their downtown, and multiple town council members seem to understand the benefits of integrating the library with a broader set of community activities.

Councilman Don Frantz suggested that commercial development wrapped around the parking deck could defray the cost of the public facility.

Bingo! This is one of the most important points that downtown library supporters in Carrboro have been trying to make: a standalone library on county-owned land is a public facility that is only operated using public revenues. A library occupying the floor of a mixed-use building with public and private uses will have some private investment to help with its construction and ongoing operations costs and may even help catalyze further development of a downtown project that is close to “ready to go,” but not quite there yet.

One of the refrains that was repeated earlier this spring in the county staff’s deeply flawed arguments for 1128 Hillsborough Rd as a library site was that there would be opportunities to co-locate the library with a park so that children could play there, and lest anyone believe Cary’s inclinations should validate that idea, they describe the park as follows: “Cary leaders are thinking less of a recreational park than a carefully designed common ground filled with ‘hidden treasures’ and framed by what would be the largest buildings in downtown.” I think it’s hard to overstate the differences between the type of park Cary is planning downtown and what MLK park on Hillsborough Rd is intended to be.

The article goes on to note that the library would be located adjacent to a hotel. It’s hard not to notice that the library siting decision is clearly linked to economic development in the minds of the town staff and elected officials, and they see opportunity in placing the library downtown.

Cary gets it. Carrboro gets it. Wake County gets it. Orange County? Stay tuned…

Five Great Reasons to Bulldoze the BCBSNC Building In Chapel Hill

Posted on June 1, 2013 by patrick

BCBSNC Headquarters – A Building Its Own Architect Doesn’t Know What Do To With (photo from newsobserver.com)

Today Blue Cross Blue Shield of NC announced they are consolidating their operations in Durham and vacating their dated, modernist solar-cooker-on-cinder-blocks digs in Chapel Hill, because the building is inflexible, expensive to operate, and bad for workers:

Blue Cross officials said the insurer’s distinctive Chapel Hill headquarters – a rhomboid, glass structure designed by the architect A.G. Odell Jr.’s firm – had become more costly to operate than its other buildings and didn’t fit the way employees work today.

The article adds:

Blue Cross expects the move to Durham will ultimately save it more than $2.5 million annually in utilities and operating costs.

“It will be a walkable, flexible environment, and create a community of literally all of our employees,” Borman said.

As for the Chapel Hill headquarters, Blue Cross plans to work with town officials to determine the property’s future, Borman said.

McMurray [the building’s designer] worries what will become of his building.

“It’s sad that they’re leaving it,” he said. “I don’t know what you do with it.”

I visited this building this past year on a day with temperatures in the 60s to low 70s. The air conditioning was cranked up like it was in the high 80s or 90s outside, which I assume is part of the reason why their utility costs are so high- whoever occupies the building must combat massive solar gain through the roof. Even the guy who built the building can’t think of a reason to keep using it.

The site layout is as flawed as the building, with curvilinear roads in a mid-century suburban layout that wastes space with both pavement and grass. But as much as anyone hates the announcement that a major employer is leaving, the silver lining is an opportunity to redevelop over 30 acres, or more than 1.5 million square feet of land. If this dysfunctional building was torn down, what could fit there instead?

For inspiration, here are five other examples of quality urban development that could fit in that area or less:

1. Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic (photo by Flickr user Iurbi)

This picture perfect town is mostly enclosed by a bend in the river that winds through it. The area within the river bend is about 80% of the size of the BCSBNC site.

Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic

2. Vernazza, Italy (photo by Flickr user damianocerrone)

Hemmed in by the see and a hill, Vernazza only takes up about 40% of the BCBSNC site, and that includes some of the harbor.

Vernazza, Italy

3. Downtown Shelburne Falls, MA (photo by Flickr user neonlike)

Picturesque small town in Massachusetts with a waterfall, an abandoned bridge covered with flowers, and a trolley museum – in about 25% of the BCBSNC site.

Shelburne Falls, MA

4. The entire pedestrian-only section of Church St and the 8 surrounding blocks in Burlington, VT. (photo by Flickr user devils4ever)

About 91% of the size of the BCBSNC site.

Church St, Burlington, VT

5. The Downtown Core of Black Mountain, NC (photo by Flickr user Bass Player Keith Hall)

East of Asheville, the downtown of Black Mountain is about 50% the size of the BCBSNC site.

Downtown Black Mountain, NC

6. And One Bonus Location: East Franklin St (photo by Flickr user Zannie Gunn)

The space bound by Columbia St, Franklin, Rosemary, and Henderson takes up about 25% of the BCBSNC site.

East Franklin St

Any of these building patterns are more resilient for changing times than the modernist design of the BCBSNC building, which was always more about making abstract aesthetic statements than being useful to the people using the building or embracing the neighboring parcels in a constructive way. When was the last time you heard someone say Franklin St “doesn’t support the way people work or live today?”

Build a street grid on this site and populate it with many smaller buildings, public spaces, and much less parking, and Chapel Hill can have a tremendous new urban neighborhood built to last. This is an exciting opportunity. What could you imagine here?

Please Take a Carrboro Survey

Posted on May 2, 2013 by patrick

The folks who work on economic development for Carrboro are looking to hear what people love about Carrboro in their own words. Please take the survey at www.letstalkcarrboro.com and let them know what moves you about our town!

Carrboro Should Require Developer to Unbundle Parking, and Then Approve Shelton Station

Posted on March 21, 2013 by patrick

Shelton Station

Over a year ago, I wrote a piece in our wonderful community newspaper emeritus, the Carrboro Citizen, supporting the Shelton Station project which will come before the Board of Aldermen Thursday night.

Some key benefits of the project include:

The presence of another 125 to 170 residents so close to downtown will boost local business activity, in addition to generating construction jobs in the short term.
Shelton Station and the residents of its 96 apartments will create a considerably smaller carbon footprint than if those same units were built on the edge of town. Why? Carrboro – and particularly downtown – is built to encourage the most environmentally friendly travel behavior in the state.
If Carrboro does not want to become a town where only the wealthy can afford to live, then the town must approve more housing. That housing should be developed on Carrboro’s terms, in accordance with Carrboro’s values and priorities. As Shelton Station developer Ken Reiter has proposed pursuing green features in the building design, providing covered bicycle parking and renting 10 percent of the units to be affordable to workers at 60 percent of the median income, there is evidence that Reiter has thought carefully about ways to reflect Carrboro values in Shelton Station’s design.

All of the fundamental dynamics that led me to write that op-ed remain in place today, and I would encourage everyone to read it again here.

But prior to saying “Yes,” I hope that the Aldermen can ask the applicant to take one specific action that will introduce more transparency in their rental pricing, encourage more environmentally friendly travel onsite by residents, and direct parking towards turnover spaces that support local business instead of long-term vehicle storage: require the UNBUNDLING of Shelton Station’s parking.

What Is Parking Unbundling?

Unbundling of parking means that a household at Shelton Station, instead of renting an apartment and automatically getting assigned a certain number of parking spaces for their use, rents an apartment at one price, and a number of parking spaces of their choosing at a separate price. For example, imagine a scenario where all parking spaces for residents at Shelton Station rented for $40/month. This means that if the building owner would charge a $740/month rent with 1-bedroom apartment rent and parking rent bundled, then the Unbundled pricing approach would rent the same apartment for $700 and then, IF the renter wanted to park their car onsite, they would pay another $40/month specifically for the opportunity to do so.

Now, you may be thinking, “what’s the point? Most people renting apartments own a car and will desire to park it on site, so why go through this extra step to charge them the exact same price?”

This is a good and relevant question. And the answer is that if you live in a place with very high levels of access, and price residential parking, the evidence indicates that two-car households will “shed cars” and become one-car households, and while less common, some one-car households will also shed cars and become ZERO-car households, particularly if car-sharing is available.

Let’s continue our example: we’ve established that the monthly rental per space is $40 at our hypothetical building. Now a couple decides to move in, and receives the pricing schema for their two-bedroom apartment and two parking spaces. They start paying $1130/month to the landlord, but after only 1 month there, they realize that one of them commutes to work by transit, the other drives to work, and at night or on weekends, they walk everywhere or drive together in one car. They further realize that they are basically paying $500/year for one of their two cars to gather dust. They decide to sell it, which puts some money in their pocket, which they use to get a carshare membership to give them more flexibility. Their monthly rent drops from $1130 to $1090 the next month, and they are now a one-car household. The purple circle in the figure below shows the outcome of this move.

Unbundled Parking Example, With 2BR, 2-car household shedding one car upon move-in

What Are the Benefits of Unbundling Parking?

First, Shelton Station has expressed an interest in bringing Car-Sharing to Carrboro at their site, and unbundling parking helps make car-sharing more successful, which should benefit the developer by lowering the amount of monthly subsidy that may be needed to get car-sharing started onsite. Having a successful pilot experience with carsharing in Carrboro would be a great outcome for both Shelton Station residents and the town. Transportation Planning consultants Nelson/Nygaard conducted a study of buildings with both carsharing and parking unbundling and found the following:

Unbundling parking can help create demand for carsharing, while carsharing can help compensate for having to pay for parking in residents’ minds. In contrast, free and abundant parking reduces the demand for carsharing. As the findings show, households with both unbundled parking and carsharing available in the building have significantly lower vehicle ownership rates compared to households in buildings with neither (0.76 vehicles per household and 1.03 vehicles per household, respectively). Households in buildings with both unbundled parking and carsharing are also more likely to be carshare members than those with neither. Statistically significant differences were also found between carshare members and non-carshare members.

The average vehicle ownership for households with carshare memberships is 0.47 vehicles per household compared to 1.22 vehicles per non-carshare member household. Carshare members are also more likely to take non-auto modes to work and use transit; 83% of survey respondents with carshare memberships use non-auto modes to commute to work compared to 70% of persons without carshare memberships, and 43% of carshare members take transit compared to 23% for respondents without carshare memberships.

Second, it allows people to be rewarded for doing the right thing. There are two-driver, one-car households throughout Carrboro, and every apartment complex they rent from puts the price of two parking spaces in their rent, even though they would not use that amount of resources. An unbundled parking situation at Shelton Station would attract households like this who would jump at the chance to get a slightly lower rent than they would otherwise for only having one car instead of two. The $40 extra per month in their pocket is likely to be re-circulated at businesses they could walk to from the building.

If a development with unbundled parking is successful at getting residents to shed cars, then that allows room in their lot for them to have more spaces available for business patrons onsite, or perhaps even to develop their site further in the future if additional land for development exists.

One other key to success is that the developer should be free to rent parking spaces to non-residents if the unbundling creates spare parking capacity for them. How would this work for Shelton Station? A quick visit to Carr Mill Mall’s shopping center will find the “No Park and Ride/No Park and Bike/No Park and Walk” signs. It is likely that some people would pay by the day, week, or month to park and ride the F bus to campus. This is not as compelling a use as a parking space turning over several times during daylight hours for a business, but a mostly daylight park-and-rider is still going to occupy much less time in a parking space than a resident who never uses their car because everything is a short walk away.

Giving the developer an opening to earn revenue because they have adopted a progressive parking policy is also another way to help them support their fledgling carshare initiative, which I expect neighbors of Shelton Station would also be able to take advantage of as a neighborhood amenity.

In Closing: Purchase of 201 S Greensboro Lot and Future Steps on Downtown Parking

There’s a lot to like about the Shelton Station project. There may be some arguing about whether or not the developer and the staff have agreed to the “right” number of parking spaces. This is largely a red herring because parking generation standards are usually a pseudoscience at best unless you are working with detailed, local datasets. The town ordinance rightly gives parking reductions for certain uses in downtown areas, and has reduced the proposed parking for the Shelton Station site from somewhere around 220 to something closer to 170 spaces. I still think this is too much parking, but I think getting the policy implementation of carsharing and unbundling on the same site is too big an opportunity for us to miss if it can be achieved, and is more important than shrinking the 170 spaces at Shelton Station further at this time.

Roberson St Lot by Flickr User Rubyji

News this week broke that the town purchased the parking lot it has been leasing across from Glass Half Full, just south of Open Eye Cafe, gaining control of 90-odd parking spaces. I was encouraged to hear that members of the board think this could be even a future location for a library as well as other uses and public parking.

Still, it is critical that everyone understand that there is no strategy based on providing more and more free parking in downtown Carrboro in perpetuity that does not end in the town destroying the pedestrian-first atmosphere of downtown, create nightmare traffic jams that choke downtown business and put an upper lid on our prosperity, or lead to aggressive towing that nobody wants to deal with. This does not even address the fiscal cost of buying and maintaining the parking spaces.

Eventually, we’re going to need market-priced parking in downtown to sustain vibrancy, and it will ideally be managed via some system where individual spaces that are not reserved for any one establishment can rent themselves to a broader pool of users via a smartphone app or streetside kiosk. We’re not there yet, but we will be there sooner than many people think.

Unbundling parking removes the least productive type of parking (long-term residential storage) from downtown and helps support local business by providing more turnover spaces for their customers. It will help keep parking pricing for everyone else at bay further off, and will allow us to introduce a new tool in the access-to-downtown toolbox.

Let’s look into getting an unbundled parking condition on this project, and then move it forward for approval Thursday night.

A Little More Time and A Little More Communication Could Get Us an Awesome Urban Library that Works for Everyone in Southern Orange County

Posted on March 19, 2013 by patrick

Hollywood Library and Bookmark Apartments, Portland

A Library Project to Emulate:
Hollywood Library, Rain City Cafe and 47-unit Bookmark Apartments, Portland (photo courtesy Wikipedia)

This is going to be a long post, so to make it easier to use, you can either read it all the way through, or use this bullet-point summary with hyperlinks to each portion:

Orange County is leading a process to site a library in Southern Orange County within the Town of Carrboro. The Carrboro Board of Aldermen sent three sites for review to the county staff in November 2012, and indicated their interest in a few others as well. (Jump to Background)
The Orange County staff has a clear preference for one of the sites named by the Aldermen, but supports that preference with several unsubstantiated claims or in at least one case, information that is directly contradicted by publicly available data. (Jump to County Staff Response)
The County staff’s preferred site represents a location choice in conflict with values that Carrboro has repeatedly said are high priorities for the town. (Jump to Values)
The County selection criteria themselves are biased towards choosing a suburban location for the library over a more urban location. (Jump to Criteria)
Pursuing the development of an urban library in Carrboro provides an opportunity to address several community priorities at once, including local economic development, education, workforce housing, sustainable mobility, and social justice goals. (Jump to Opportunity)
The County Commissioners should reject the staff recommendation to proceed with these two sites, direct the County staff to explain fully what their values and perceived constraints are for a library, including the reasons WHY the staff believes anything is infeasible, too expensive, or undesirable, and engage further with the town of Carrboro on a mixed-use library/economic development combined initiative. (Jump to BOCC Actions)
The Carrboro Board of Aldermen should clearly state to the Orange County Board of Commissioners that any site forwarded by the Town for study by the County, should in fact, be studied, AND that mixed-use, multi-purpose, multi-story buildings and developments should be on the table as PRIMARY options for the library, with single-use library-only sites as fallback choices. The Town should help address County concerns about a lengthy review process by studying successful mixed-use libraries in other cities. (Jump to BOA Actions)

Background

Orange County and the Town of Carrboro are working on a process to locate a southern branch of the county library system in the Carrboro area. On November 20, 2012, the Carrboro Board of Aldermen reviewed and discussed (link goes to Agenda, see item D4) several potential sites and forwarded them all on for consideration to the county staff.

As WCHL reported, the Aldermen expressed additional interest in potentially siting the library even closer to the core of downtown than the three primary sites proposed, with Mayor Mark Chilton suggesting that Town Manager David Andrews look into creating a RFP for proposals on how to incorporate the library into a mixed-use development downtown, and specifically mentioned the 300 East Main St development.

While not reported in the WCHL story, Alderman Jacquie Gist also made the thoughtful suggestion of a multi-story building incorporating a library at 201 S Greensboro St (the previously proposed and now stalled Roberson Square project).

The evaluation document from the November board meeting was to a certain degree, incomplete- with several items were left unaddressed and labeled “THIS CRITERIA WILL BE EVALUATED BY ORANGE COUNTY STAFF.”

This was surprising to me as some of the items left to County staff include criteria such as “Visual appeal,” when Carrboro has an Appearance Commission, and “Alignment with planning tools” when Carrboro has its own Planning department.

County Staff Response

Friday, March 15th, at about 8:00 am, the County Deputy Clerk posted the agenda for the Tuesday March 19^th Board of Commissioners Meeting, which surprisingly contained the county staff evaluation of only two of the three sites forwarded by the Aldermen to the county.

View the staff item on the library by clicking this link, downloading the March 19, 2013 Agenda, and viewing item 7-B.

The county staff dismissed the 301 W Main St site (Carrboro Town Hall) out of hand with the commentary below:

“Staff recommends the elimination 301 West Main Street site (i.e. the Town Hall) from consideration due to significant constraints, most notably the condition of the building, limitation on usable space for the library, limitations on future expansion, and potential parking conflicts.”

No further information was included about what types of parking conflicts the county staff foresees, which types of expansion would be constrained by the site, or what the specific space limits on the property were. The county staff analysis did not acknowledge or assess 300 East Main St, 201 S. Greensboro St, nor mention the RFP proposal discussed by Mayor Chilton.

Here are a few more items from the county staff evaluation:
It’s still a mystery to me why Orange County Staff is responsible for assessing what is visually appealing in Carrboro when Carrboro has an Appearance Commission, but as you can see, the county staff seems to consider single-family housing more appealing than multi-family and businesses. Also, county staff believes that this portion of our neighborhood has a “cluttered look and feel.” I’m not sure what that means, but putting aside that confusion for a moment, if we always invested in the “better-looking” neighborhoods in the community, wouldn’t we eventually wind up with serious disparities in public investment and facilities between the richer and poorer parts of our communities?

Here’s the staff analysis for “Able to provide comprehensive library services to all county residents:”

No reasons for explaining why there is a differentiation between these two sites. Just one word for each site.

County staff did not address either accessibility for pedestrians or accessibility for public transportation, but they did chime in on “Accessibility for Vehicles:”

This is ironic given that one of the reasons the 401 Fidelity site was contemplated was that it could take advantage of the foot, bicycle, and vehicle traffic from the Farmers’ Market on Saturday mornings. Here that context and synergy is listed as a detriment rather than an advantage to the site. Of course, the current main County library building, in which many county employees work, is one block away from Churton Street, a road with much more significant volume-to-capacity ratio problems (PDF), so that has not deterred the county from siting libraries in the recent past.

Perhaps the most puzzling piece of the staff response in the document, however, is the assessment of Centrality of either site to Southern Orange County, in which the staff asserts that the 1128 Hillsborough Rd site is more easily accessible to more people of southern Orange County than the 401 Fidelity St site.

Southern Orange County

A quick series of tests using Google Maps’ Driving Directions shows this makes no sense. First, let’s review the 2010 Census Population for the two Southern Orange County Townships, Bingham and Chapel Hill. See the map to the right for orientation:

Bingham Township: 6,527 (7%)
Chapel Hill Township: 87,971 (93%)
Chapel Hill / Carrboro City Town Limits: 73,979 (78%) – (within Chapel Hill Township)

It’s safe to say that if you’re trying to assess whether a site is more centrally located for residents in Southern Orange County, you should mostly be checking access to a site from places throughout Chapel Hill and Carrboro. For the following places, it’s a shorter drive to 401 Fidelity St:

Southern Village Town Green (100 Market St, Chapel Hill)
Downtown Chapel Hill (Franklin @ Columbia Streets)
Downtown Carrboro (300 e main st)
East Franklin at Estes Drive
100 Meadowmont Ln
Fiesta Grill, NC 54 West of Carrboro

It is the same distance in miles but a minute or two longer timewise to 401 Fidelity from north of Estes Drive, but at the level of all of Southern Orange County, these sites either have the same level of drive access or there’s a slight edge to the 401 Fidelity site, probably mostly due to its proximity to denser neighborhoods and NC 54. Transit and pedestrian access is a different story, but I’ll talk about that later.

In summary, the staff clearly prefers the 1128 Hillsborough Road site, even though several of the staff’s alleged advantages for that location are confusing, counter-intuitive based on the site’s context, or not supported by data. I’m not terribly excited by either of these sites, and the 1128 Hillsborough Rd is a bad choice. The key point is that much better analysis can and should be done to inform this decision.

Conflicts with Carrboro Values

Carrboro is a community with a strong commitment to building walkable neighborhoods, and has invested its own money to accelerate sidewalk construction in town. The town is also working with NCDOT to REDUCE the number of lanes on Main Street to make it more friendly to cyclists and pedestrians, and easier to cross on foot. However, when considering the sites forwarded by the Aldermen to the County and those alternative sites mentioned at the November 20th meeting, the County prefers the least walkable site according to Walkscore.com. Here are the walkscores for the five sites mentioned in the Background section of this post.

300 E. Main St: 92/100 – Walker’s Paradise: Daily Errands Do Not Require a Car

201 S. Greensboro St: 92/100 – Walker’s Paradise: Daily Errands Do Not Require a Car
301 W Main St: 82/100 – Very Walkable: Most Errands Can Be Accomplished on Foot
401 Fidelity St: 63/100 – Somewhat Walkable: Some Amenities Are Within Walking Distance
1128 Hillsborough Rd: 31/100 – Car-Dependent: Few Amenities Are Within Walking Distance

Carrboro is also a community with a history of commitment to social justice, and seeking to advance equality within the community. The median household income of the Census Tract that the County staff prefers is almost $136,000/year! The median household income of the Census Tract holding 401 Fidelity St is just over $34,000/year. The median household income of the Census Tract holding the two sites above with 92 walkscores is around $43,000/year.

Bias Against Urban Outcomes

Several of the criteria used by the County are fundamentally biased towards sites in suburban or rural locations, and against urban ones. It is possible to create criteria that answer similar questions about how effective library services could be provided without being biased against one development pattern or another, but that has not been done here.

Criteria 4 – “Meets minimum acreage.” This requirement is pointless and should be thrown out. You don’t need minimum acres to fulfill a library’s mission. You need minimum amounts of Gross Square Footage (GSF) for the library facility itself. You may or may not need additional new parking, but the criteria should not assume it. There was a terrific report in 2003 titled “GOOD SCHOOLS,GOOD NEIGHBORHOODS: The Impacts of State and Local School Board Policies on the Design and Location of Schools in North Carolina” (PDF) that lays out the case for why less expansive schools are a critical piece of getting more children to walk to school. The same principles hold true for libraries. Turn to page 6 for the executive summary and their key recommendations, which include:

Build smaller schools on smaller sites
Select school sites that maximize bicycle and pedestrian access
Collaborate with local planners and municipal elected officials in selecting the location for new schools
Promote the renovation of old schools that serve as anchors to their community.

It is interesting to note that in regards to the last bullet that the site that the County Staff dismissed out of hand, Carrboro Town Hall- is an old school.

Criteria 5 – Space for building and on-site parking. The Hillsborough branch of the Orange County library has shared parking; there is no need to assume that parking should be provided onsite specifically for library use.

Criteria 7- Space for expansion. This criteria is not well explained, but the answers seem to predicated all outcomes on assumed horizontal expansion, not vertical, and expanded access via extra car trips, not any other modes

Criteria 8 – Setbacks and road widening are fundamentally criteria based around speeding up cars to the detriment of everything else. This criteria should also be thrown out. I haven’t spoken to anybody in Carrboro in years who wants a road widening anywhere in town.

While road widenings are common anywhere that a significant number of left turns may occur along a rural road with few intersections, this is much less common for in-town settings where larger street grids are present, and given that Carrboro is working with NCDOT to complete a road diet to reduce the number of car lanes on West Main St, I’m sure that most Carrboro residents do NOT consider road expansion/widening for car traffic to be an “amenity.”

Criteria 11 – Access for transit. The County staff did not provide any comments on transit service. The town comments report the locations of bus stops but do not identify significantly varying levels of transit service. The CW bus which serves the stop nearest to the 401 Fidelity St location only has outbound service towards Jones Ferry Rd after 12:15 pm on weekdays. The J route, several blocks away at the corner of Davie and Jones Ferry, offers service every 15 minutes for most of the day, but access is along a road with poor pedestrian facilities, though improvements are planned. If the 301 W Main (Town Hall) site had been studied, it would have had the best transit service access of any site with nearby service from both the J and CW routes. The F bus service, serving the Hillsborough site, is decent but the stop closest to 1128 Hillsborough makes it a longer bus ride from much more of the Chapel Hill Transit network than 401 Fidelity or any downtown Carrboro site would be.

Not capturing the frequency of transit service and its level of network access, as opposed to merely its presence, allows sites with lower levels of attractiveness for transit users to rate just as well as the highest-traffic stops in any system, which again, makes this metric as currently deployed biased against urban locations.

Opportunity Presented By An Urban Library

1. There are several great benefits to building an urban library in Carrboro, but let’s start with perhaps the least obvious benefit- building an urban library in Carrboro will make it EASIER FOR RURAL RESIDENTS TO PARK at or near the new library.

Prior to the rebuild of the Chapel Hill library, finding a space there in the afternoons was often next to impossible and required circling the lot and waiting for other patrons to leave. That site has poor access for transit, cyclists, and pedestrians and because that access is poor, people who live nearby who might otherwise walk- DRIVE to the library instead.

If we put a library in downtown Carrboro, a whole slew of potential users who are already biking, walking, and busing to downtown for other purposes will add the library to their trips that they complete by non-auto modes. This means that parking spaces that are reserved for library patrons either in a surface lot or parking deck are more likely to be used by people living far away from the library, and not people close by who have additional mobility choices. If we build a library in a location that has poor access and encourages more people to drive, now rural residents and people from further away driving to the library will be competing for parking with everybody they were competing with downtown, plus Carrboro residents who chose to drive because the location is hard to walk, bike, or take transit to.

A downtown library also builds resiliency into the parking system- if the library spaces for some reason fill up, there are several public downtown parking lots that may offer additional capacity.

2. The next reason that an urban library is a great opportunity is that it provides a chance to leverage public investment to incentivize private development. There are a few projects in downtown Carrboro that would expand the commercial tax base and add jobs in service, entertainment, or office categories- if they could get enough of their space pre-leased to proceed. Having the library at University Mall clearly created beneficial spillover effects for businesses such as the Red Hen, Chick-Fil-A, Southern Season, and the U-Mall Farmers’ market. Putting a library at 300 East Main might accelerate one of their next phases of development, or help put the Roberson Square property back in play, as Jacquie Gist suggested on November 20th.

The County recently raised a 1/4-cent sales tax for economic development, and while there may be more highway-oriented development goals for county areas near Mebane, for example, in Carrboro the economic development opportunities are likely to reinforce the walkable, urban characteristics that Carrboro has that many other towns lack. The County Commissioners should look at an urban library site in Carrboro as an opportunity to fulfill an expansion of tax base goal while also delivering on providing library services.

3. An urban library in Carrboro will have positive social justice and environmental effects. If you have not seen the Rich Blocks Poor Blocks website, you should go check it out now. Enter Carrboro, and set it to show Incomes. Putting the library in an urban location will provide better access, on foot, the most equitable transportation mode- to some of the lowest-income Census Tracts in Orange County. The fact that an urban location will be more walkable, bike-accessible, and transit-accessible will also reduce the carbon footprint and emissions of people of all incomes traveling to the library compared to a suburban location.

What the Orange County Commissioners Should Do

Given the state of the analysis provided for these sites, the Board of County Commissioners (BOCC) should reject the staff recommendation to spend $10,000 to $15,000 studying these two sites to hasten a final decision. Instead, the BOCC should add the Town Hall site back onto the list of potential sites along with 401 Fidelity St and 1128 Hillsborough Rd, and add 300 East Main and 201 S Greensboro St to be screened as well. The BOCC should then engage the Town of Carrboro about how to develop criteria that do not automatically exclude urban outcomes, and consider if the RFP approach mentioned by Mayor Chilton regarding a joint library/economic development venture might generate any interest with developers that are likely to work in Carrboro.

Finally, the BOCC should ask the staff to clarify why their analysis came out like this. Does the current library staff think working next to a cemetery is undesirable? If that’s an issue, they should state that. It would be good to know if the staff really likes 1128 Hillsborough as a site or simply really dislikes the other sites. If County staff think any site is too expensive, too complicated to develop, or to constrained, they should explain why in clear language, i.e.: “the parking for the library and two other uses would conflict at peak times for evening book checkout based on our current patronage at the Hillsborough branch.”

What the Carrboro Board of Aldermen Should Do

Lest the County miss the message, the Aldermen should communicate clearly to the BOCC the importance of a library in Carrboro being an urban rather than a suburban project. Carrboro Town Staff could move the ball forward by helping to proactively address county concerns about a complicated review process. The best way to get started might be to research mixed-use libraries in other cities, and see what zoning designations in Carrboro could accommodate a facility like the Hollywood Library in Portland, OR; Villard Avenue Library in Milwaukee, WI; or the Montgomery County flagship library in Rockville, MD.

What Concerned Citizens Should Do

If the picture at the top of this post looks interesting to you, or if you think that downtown Carrboro is much better place for a library than somewhere north of Estes Drive, please email the Orange County Board of Commissioners and email the Carrboro Board of Aldermen and tell them as much. If possible, come to the BOCC meeting tonight, March 19th at 7:00 PM at 2501 Homestead Rd, and share your ideas in person. I intend to be there to share mine.

This library is not planned to open until 2016-2017. While we should not delay in moving the library project forward, there is certainly time to be more thoughtful about an outcome that succeeds on multiple objectives above and beyond checking the box of “there’s a library in Carrboro.” Hopefully the Town and County can collaborate to figure out how create an outstanding project for Southern Orange County and Carrboro.

Time to Use Car-Sharing and Parking Unbundling to Bring More Stuff People Like and Less Pavement, Traffic and Pollution to Downtown Carrboro

Posted on March 7, 2013 by patrick

Car Parked on Sidewalk, Beijing. Courtesy Flickr User roberutsu

Car Parked on Sidewalk, Beijing. Photo by Flickr User roberutsu

When it comes to creating vibrant urban neighborhoods in the US, with a few exceptions, there is always a tension between providing space for people and space for cars.

The recent proliferation of car sharing services such as ZipCar and WeCar in the US, and even locally on the UNC campus – holds promise to address this tension, but we have yet to employ car-sharing to address both community mobility and economic development goals in Carrboro.

The proposed project at Shelton Station is an ideal place for the Town of Carrboro to support and encourage parking innovations including car sharing and parking unbundling, and the time to start is now. Before getting into why we should do this, let’s review what our options are for downtown land.

Development Choices for Urban Land Downtown

Land supply in urban locations is fixed, and we can use it for a few things:

Residences
Businesses
Circulation for People
Circulation for Motor Vehicles
Storage for Motor Vehicles

What do each of the above add to downtown’s vibrancy? Well, people like to be around other people, and a base of residents provides not only a core set of customers for downtown businesses, but also a natural layer of surveillance in terms of security by people who are there each day and notice when something strange is going on. Their homes generate property taxes for the community based on their value. Put another way, when you want to increase the size of a local living economy, it helps to have more locals.

Businesses provide attractions and commerce, as well as paying both proprerty taxes and sales taxes to the town. They provide jobs for locals and those who come to our community to work.

Sidewalks provide space for people to move around among homes, businesses, recreation, and transportation choices, and allow people to access the neighborhood on foot.

Streets provide the same access for bicycles, buses, and cars that the sidewalks provide to pedestrians.

And auto storage? It provides the lowest per-square foot values of any use on the town’s most valuable land. It prevents business expansion even when it goes unused. It prevents more residential construction that could add more residents, consumer purchasing power, and tax base. It attracts the most carbon-intensive and polluting types of tripmaking to the area. When individual businesses all try to provide their own parking separately, and when the Town requires this to be done, it creates duplication of a resource that is often idle or unused.

Successful Man / Unsuccessful Man by Andy Singer

To be fair, auto storage also provides the occasional opportunity for a food truck to set up shop, and of course also provides motorists a place to store their vehicle temporarily while shopping, or dining.

But at the end of the day, if you have a limited number of “A Streets” and critical corners in your urban grid, every expansion of parking in downtown Carrboro is a foregone opportunity to add more of the top three items in the list above, which add the most value.

Despite the impression of some who seem to believe that the cartoon to the right is true and only motorists come downtown with wallets and pocketbooks, there are plenty of people who get to downtown Carrboro ready to spend money without using a car, and this is one of Carrboro’s strategic advantages compared to other towns of our size and even much larger communities. We ignore this advantage at our economic peril.

Nothing Robs More Value From Downtown Than Residential Automobile Storage

When we think about the value added by residential, business, and people spaces, and the foregone opportunity to have more of these uses when parking is created, there are still great differences in how much value parking can take off the table for downtown.

At the top end of the value continuum for parking is the market-priced parking space. Parking with a price encourages the user to rent the parking space for as long as they need it to conduct their business in a local shop or have lunch with friends, and VERY IMPORTANTLY, then turn the space over to someone else for a new transaction opportunity for a local business.

Over the long term, led by the research of Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, optimal market-priced parking has generally come to be considered as charging whichever price per hour, between zero and X dollars, that keeps a group of parking spaces 85% occupied and 15% empty. The price of parking changes throughout the day as needed to reach this goal.

The next-best situation is having some level of constant parking pricing that promotes turnover of spaces. This is less desirable than market pricing because at times the constant price will be too low to prevent all parking from being filled, and at other times it will be too high and discourage use of the spaces.

The most common situation, which is close to the worst, is having free parking that is reserved to specific stores or uses. This creates extra traffic when people drive across the street to park for free somewhere else because a merchant fears losing the opportunity for turnover, and employs the threat of towing rather than pricing to move people along.

The worst situation is a space that sits occupied for hours on end and does not turn over, which is generally what you get with residential parking.

Shelton Station

Downtown Carrboro And Shelton Station

So how do we align the incentives at Shelton Station to get the type of parking usage that avoids the problems American Tobacco residents are about to experience?

We ask the developer to set up their lease practices to encourage that behavior.

First, just as Southern Village developer D.R. Bryan included a Weaver Street Market membership with every apartment to help that store succeed, we should ask the developer of Shelton Station to pay for the membership fee of every resident in a car-sharing program. This puts the variable cost of car-sharing use, generally at $8-$10/hour, directly on the driver.

Second, we should encourage the developer to sign an agreement with a car-share vendor that has a guaranteed dollar value per month to the vendor, because these allow the car-share sponsor (in this case the developer) to keep revenues from car usage above and beyond that dollar amount. There are two benefits to this:

It helps the developer recoup the cost of its investment in the memberships
Since it creates a revenue stream for the developer, it encourages them to promote car-share to residents in internal marketing, etc.

Next, we should help the developer un-bundle parking rental from apartment rental. This means that instead of having a $740 apartment rent, a tenant is charged $700 for the apartment and $40 for one parking space or $80 for two parking spaces. Bicycle parking should be both covered, and free, and there should be enough bicycle parking for every apartment unit to have a bicycle parked there at all times.

In taking these steps, the Town will make it easier for the developer to offer no more parking than necessary to residents, which will limit the use of parking for its most value-destroying purpose, residential parking.

Better still, proactively managing the parking supply like this may even allow for a greater amount of commercial development on the site by converting dormant, residential-parking-storage spaces into ones available for customers coming and going from the site.

We want to help current and future residents of Carrboro have increasingly sustainable travel choices. If we are successful, and attract many new residents to downtown living and bolster our primary job center and commercial core with more workers and customers, we will have done something good. If they are mostly walking or biking to those opportunities, we will have done something even better. But if they are walking and biking to these opportunities AND not leaving a car sitting for days at a time in a space that could be used by a potential business customer for a downtown merchant, we’ve knocked it out of the park.

If you want to learn more about Car Sharing, this video from Streetfilms is also worth your time.

The Wrong Place for a Suburban Drugstore

Posted on February 24, 2013 by patrick

This is going to be a longer post. But I think it’s worth reading as I’m going to cover a whole bunch of issues that the proposed CVS at the corner of North Greensboro and West Weaver streets raises.

The Project Proposal

Before the Carrboro Board of Aldermen for their consideration on Tuesday night is a proposal to build a free-standing CVS drugstore at the corner of N Greensboro and Weaver Streets (public Hearing B1 on the Agenda). The project’s principal flaw is not its corporate ownership, nor its architectural features or design- but its site plan that takes a corner lot facing two of our most important streets in a limited urban street grid, and places most of that land into a suburban parking format, thereby significantly destroying the value-creation properties of that land in the long term.

The rest of this post explores this flaw in detail.

UPDATE 11:45 pm on 2/25/2013: Per a request via Twitter, I have marked up the site plan for the proposed CVS to help illustrate points discussed in the rest of this post. Click to embiggen.

CVS Siteplan Markup

Notes on the site plan markup:

Red indicates where Carrboro “A Streets” are fronted with parking rather than urban buildings that embrace the pedestrian and the sidewalk.
Orange indicates where Carrboro “B Streets” are fronted with parking rather than urban buildings
Purple indicates where a Carrboro B Street, in this case, Center St, is fronted by a “pocket park” that may or may not be supportive of defensible space principles for urban public spaces

Original post continues below.

Carrboro Has Only Five Critical “A” Streets

When you look at a map of Carrboro, and focus on downtown, one of the things you’ll notice is that we have a pretty limited street network to work with. Other communities like Asheville and Durham have large downtown street grids, many blocks deep in multiple directions, but Carrboro does not.

In urban retail districts, some retail analysts talk about “A” streets and “B” streets, with the “A” streets being home to most of the retail and key walkable urban facilities, while the “B” streets have fewer consumer-oriented businesses, more business-to-business workplaces, more residential development, and less activity overall. This is not to say that “B” streets are lesser places than “A” streets, but to clarify the different roles that streets play in an urban neighborhood.

Carrboro’s “A” Streets are:

Main St
Weaver St
Greensboro St
Jones Ferry Rd
Rosemary St

Carrboro “A” Streets – Downtown

There are some other streets that have the potential to one day fulfill “A” street functions that are clearly not such streets today, but I think it’s hard to argue with this list.

Building a thriving local economy in Carrboro for the long term will require careful stewardship of a high-quality ***URBAN*** public realm along these streets, and of how they relate and connect to other streets and public spaces around them.

The CVS project greets several street frontages with parking rather than buildings. This is a suburban practice, and this site is not a suburban location. The animated GIF below by David Sucher gets it right. Please watch it change a few times. We should not be fronting West Weaver Street with parking spaces, nor North Greensboro Street.

Urbanism Starts with the Location of the Parking Lot by David Sucher, Author of City Comforts

CVS knows how to do this. I’ve seen them do it in other cities, in old buildings and new buildings. The examples below I believe are in ~~Boston~~ Brookline, MA and the DC area, respectively.

CVS Goes Urban – Old Building

CVS Goes Urban – New Building

This Corner is Too Important to Get Wrong, and this Project is Too Small

In 2010, the town of Chapel Hill asked former Raleigh Urban Design Center guru Dan Douglas and his firm, Kling Stubbins- to take a look at their downtown and help them identify strategic redevelopment opportunities going forward. Like Carrboro, Chapel Hill’s downtown is mostly an East-West affair that is only two streets deep.

One of the most interesting findings of the Kling Stubbins report is that corner properties on Franklin Street command the highest property values per square foot. This is the local real estate market telling the community these corners were the most important locations in downtown Chapel Hill, or at least the best ones on which to locate a business.

If we look at corners in Carrboro, it stands to reason that corners where two or more “A” Streets meet will be rather important. Those corners are:

E. Main / Rosemary
E. Main / N Greensboro,
E Weaver / E Main / Roberson
W Main / Jones Ferry Rd
W. Weaver / N Greensboro

And that’s all. If these intersections are likely to produce our highest-value corners in our urban core, we should build a significant amount of stuff on them. We should not leave them mostly as parking. As a community, we should be aiming to create more public and private value on these corners. Any project on the properties proposed for development here should be much, much bigger in terms of total gross square footage built.

I will add that I expect there to be some other voices in the discussion saying this project should not be approved because it is “too big.” I preemptively reject the notion that it is possible to take the average of my “too small” comments next to those and suggest that the amount of square footage is somehow “just right.”

It is quite possible to conceive of a mix of uses for this corner dominated by office and housing, with a modest amount of retail – that would add significant square footage to downtown (beyond what CVS is proposing) while not adding as many trips to this corner as a 24-hour drugstore. Any residents living in this location will have a tremendous ability to substitute car trips with walking, bicycle and transit trips, and office-generated trips would be very susceptible to being diverted to the same three environmentally friendly modes.

The sketch plans created for these parcels from the 2001 “Crossroads Conversation” conducted by The Village Project show some concepts that are more representative of the types of buildings that belong on such an important corner in our town. The CVS proposal is not in the character of the type of project intensity that belongs on one of our biggest redevelopment opportunities on one of our top 5 intersections.

Crossroads Charette Design 1

Crossroads Charette Design 2

This Corner is Right In the Middle of Our Urban Grid and Walkable Core

Over the course of the past week on this blog, I’ve discussed what it means to be “urban” and my #InformalUrbanIndicators series of blog posts focused on several phenomena present in Carrboro’s downtown that indicate that our town, unlike so many others of its size, has a living, breathing, vibrant urban heart.

In documenting several of those #InformalUrbanIndicators, I made maps showing the parts of town covered by individual indicators if you created polygons from the most outlying instances of each indicator. Below, in one map, you will find a combined overlay of my maps for Graffiti, Holiday Lighting Displays, Food Trucks, Outdoor Dining, and Yarn Bombing.

View Combined Coverages in a larger map

If any of these indicators alone is a signal to where people are most likely to walk, then any place where they overlap is surely an even more likely place people will walk. As you can see, the proposed CVS project (using the blue marker) is in one of the most walking-friendly places in downtown. This is inherently a bad place for a auto-oriented development project, with lots of parking fronting A Street sidewalks, not to mention other streets as well.

Why Too Much Parking Is a Really Big Deal

As David Sucher’s graphic above shows that urbanism begins with the placement of the parking lot, such a large amount of parking on this site has actively negative effects that go beyond the lost development opportunity that locking this land up as parking represents.

While I’ll elaborate more on this in another post, there is a finite limit to the amount of economic development that downtown Carrboro can support as long as it is predicated on being served by FREE parking. Eventually, the town will reach a point where bringing people in to park for free will over-congest the streets during key shopping times and the hassle of getting downtown in your car to park for free will become a deterrent to economic growth. We are not quite bumping into that limit yet, but we will reach it sooner rather than later.

I personally question the necessity or wisdom of adding this much parking to any key site in downtown, when the town already has a significant amount of parking that could be managed more effectively, and a significant set of assets in transit, bicycle, and walking infrastructure that also provide access to downtown.

That said, if we are going to add this much parking, it should be in a deck, and it should be tied to a much larger building program that allows for shared parking across several uses.

So What Now?

Surely we as a community could have done more over the past ten years to plan for this site so that we would not get proposals like this. Alas, we did not, and we now have a proposal for a use and a site plan that attempts to suburbanize one of our critical urban crossroads in Carrboro. That being the case, I encourage the Board of Aldermen to vote against approving this project on Tuesday evening.

But voting to deny the construction of this project is only the first step that needs to be taken. If you visit the county website and use the ARIES real estate search tool, you will find that the land value for the corner in question is over $520,000 and the building value is only $130,334, on 0.33 acres. This land valuation greatly exceeding the building value suggests that if CVS is turned down, it is only a matter of time before another proposal for this corner appears.

It’s important for the community to start planning for what we DO want to happen in locations like this one.

Informal Urbanism Indicator #6: Food Trucks

Posted on February 22, 2013 by patrick

Food Truck Mini-Rodeo at Johnny’s

Perhaps the most high-profile Informal Urban Indicator that can be spotted around Carrboro, Durham, and many other cities is the Food Truck. Whether committed to a regular spot or broadcasting its movements on Twitter, the repeated presence of one or more food trucks in a certain place is usually hinting at one thing: “this part of town could absorb more dining and perhaps more retail options.” If the place where the repeat appearances occur is single-use and does not include food service as part of its by-right zoning, the food trucks provide a hint on where mixed-use is warranted, and in some cases, desperately needed. (there’s a reason why whenever RTP hosts a food truck rodeo at their HQ, lines for lunch are 30 minutes long or longer)

Food trucks are particularly interesting as urban indicators because of their ability to relocate in response to demand for their food, albeit within constraints imposed by town operating rules. To my knowledge, Carrboro’s rules are rather simple and require that the food truck has a permit to operate in Carrboro, that it can park in any lots specified on a map maintained by the town, and pay $75 to be a vendor.

Below are some additional photographs I have taken of the Carrboro food truck scene over the last few years. At the end of the post, you can see a map of where food trucks are commonly found in town, and the coverage area bound by those locations.

Fitch Lumber Taco Truck	Crepe Truck at Fifth Season Parking Lot
Ice Cream Truck at Seagrove Pottery	Evening Benefit Food Truck Rodeo at Farmers’ Market

Below is a map of regular food truck locations in Carrboro. Zoom out slightly for a full view. View Carrboro Food Truck Locations in a larger map #informalurbanindicators

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