Lloyd Farm Is Only “Doing The Wrong Thing Better” And Should Be Voted Down

Posted on October 22, 2018 by patrick

One of Canada’s leading urban planners, Brent Toderian, shares this slide with communities he consults in to spur discussion:

As the Carrboro Board of Aldermen contemplate the Lloyd Farm proposal Tuesday evening (10/23), they should know that they are clearly dealing with a case of Doing The Wrong Thing “Better.”

Despite years of discussion, the principal flaws of the Lloyd Farm proposal remain the same.

A Missed Economic Opportunity

We need to maximize our tax value per acre on parcels in Carrboro to better balance our commercial and residential tax base, and that means building up in a denser format. An urban grid with rectangular or square blocks makes redevelopment much easier in the long run.

Instead, Lloyd Farm gives us the limited value proposition of the Timberlyne Shopping Center and its strip mall-plus-outparcel format. Joe Minicozzi from Urban Three found that suburban Timberlyne produces a tax value of about $950,000 per acre while the taller, urban format Hampton Inn in downtown Carrboro produces over $33 million per acre.

A Missed Design Opportunity

The two most damaging design features of this proposal are the curvilinear road running through the site, and the poorly placed stormwater ponds that will make creating urban blocks on the site financially challenging or impossible for future redevelopers.

One needs only to view Durham’s Patterson Place in Google Maps to see how a suburban site can be laid out in a grid-like fashion to be infilled later. Twenty years after it was first developed, the Durham Planning department is doing exactly that, and a five-story Duke Medical office building and a Springhill Suites hotel are the first signs of a new, more vertical, higher tax-base per acre urban future at Patterson Place.

A Missed Housing Opportunity

Carrboro will not address its housing cost challenges without building significantly more new units, many of which could be built on such a large site. It’s also disappointing to see only senior housing being proposed. While there are housing needs for senior citizens in Carrboro, it is worth noting that older Americans are generally wealthier than everyone else.

Furthermore, the Town’s economic analysis indicates that the vast majority of the jobs expected to locate at Lloyd Farm will earn less than $15/hour, and are professions that are generally held by younger people. This proposal could have contained a significant number of micro-units in the 400 to 600 square foot size range so that people who worked at Lloyd Farm could live there, too, and walk to work- helping us be more inclusive in our housing while also reducing traffic.

So Where’s The Better?

The developer has made some changes to the original proposal. Getting buildings on the north side of the grocery store parking field may help that part of the site transform one day, and the addition of more floors of office space is better than those remaining one story buildings.

But while there is also a public gathering space/amphitheater designated, it does not have a real connection to the uses that would help activate it- the restaurants and retail. Instead, it is closest to the parking lot of an office building, and separated from those potentially synergistic uses by the beating heart of this proposal- the massive parking field for the grocery store.

Years of discussions have not changed the fact that the developer is basically following the punch list of a chain grocery store for their preferred suburban layout, where they work from the assumption that everyone always drives to the store, and that there’s no need to push back against that norm to do something better. This is the wrong thing to do in the 21^st century.

Carrboro cares about equity, works hard to make transportation choices possible, worries about how to grow the commercial tax base, and proclaims a desire to make a difference in a world where the IPCC just told us we have about 12 years to turn the tide on climate change.

Carrboro can do so much better, and it should. The Aldermen should reject this proposal and immediately get to work on a comprehensive plan to help guide developers toward those better outcomes. If you agree, shoot an email to boa@townofcarrboro.org and let the Aldermen know.

Carrboro Needs a Comprehensive Plan, and The Aldermen Should Put Money in the Next Budget To Create One

Posted on January 22, 2017 by patrick

Carrboro needs a new Comprehensive Plan, and an entirely new Unified Development Ordinance. The Carrboro Board of Aldermen should take the first step towards these goals by putting money in the town’s Fiscal Year 2018 budget to create such a plan.

Last year, my most widely read posts on CityBeautiful21 were about one subject- the proposed Lloyd Farm development, a crappy 20th century strip mall concept that greatly underused the site and missed the mark in many ways. I’m not going to rehash the problems with the proposal, but anyone who wants a rundown can read my final piece before the vote here.

Instead, I’m going to discuss the two things that Carrboro lacks that likely would have prevented the Town from taking FIVE YEARS to reject a bad idea.

Those two things are:

A lack of a Current Comprehensive Plan or Vision document with appropriate geographic specificity
An outdated and piecemeal-amended Unified Development Ordinance that draws its core values from the ideas of the late 1970s, that does not reflect the challenges and opportunities present in Carrboro today.

Quick Review: What’s A Comprehensive Plan? What’s a Unified Development Ordinance?

Simply put, a Comprehensive Plan is an overall policy document for a city or town that describes the type of community the city or town seeks to become in the future. A Comprehensive Plan usually has many subsections with goals for each including items such as Land Use, Transportation, Economic Development, Parks and Recreation, Social Equity, Environmental Quality, and so forth. Truly excellent plans try to address the places where goals for each of these topics may conflict and accurately frame the tradeoffs inherent in those conflicts.

A Unified Development Ordinance is the nitty-gritty, detailed set of rules and regulations that govern how buildings, streets, sidewalks, telephone poles, plantings, trash bins and just about any other physical element of the community you can think of gets laid out on the ground when it is built.

Lack of a Current Comprehensive Plan or Vision Document

It is worth nothing that while the town does not have a Comprehensive Plan, Carrboro does have a Vision document, called “Carrboro Vision 2020.” It was adopted quite a while back, in 2000, and it is a vision for the whole town. Some of the policies are quite good. Here are a few:

2.22 Where development is deemed acceptable, there should be well defined dense
development with areas of well preserved open space.

Another:

2.41 The town should support the evolution of a downtown district that embodies
Carrboro’s character. The downtown district should have medium-rise buildings
appropriately sited with adequate public access, and it should provide shopping
opportunities that meet our citizens’ everyday needs. The downtown should
remain a center for the community where people work, gather, shop, socialize and
recreate. The Century Center should serve as a focal point for the downtown.

And another:

4.41 As a general policy, established roads should be widened to accommodate bike
lanes and sidewalks, but not to provide additional lanes for automobiles.

It is terrific that Carrboro has a policy document like this, and the 300 East Main development in downtown is evidence that this policy is being applied in at least part of downtown. But while it is great that we have such straightforward, intentional statements for downtown, it is clear that “well defined dense development” is nearly the opposite of what we got at Lloyd Farm.

An Outdated Unified Development Ordinance (UDO)

Generally speaking, if you want to build something that positively adds to the town’s urbanity, amplifying the “life-on-foot” feel that makes downtown Carrboro such a great place, you need to jump through all sorts of hoops, extra public hearings and special use permits to get it built. When you want to build something that turns inward, away from the street, and doesn’t contribute much to the public realm in Carrboro, you can usually get a building permit pretty quickly under our 1970s suburban ordinances. Under these conditions, you’re counting on the quality of the vision of the developer to give you something other than a terrible outcome.

While once in a blue moon we get a solid outcome like Shelton Station, we usually get an urban failure like the Park Slope development. What’s wrong with Park Slope? Several things, but the worst thing about it is that the Town did code not require Park Slope to build a piece of sidewalk on South Greensboro St along the front of the Park Slope property.

No Sidewalks At Park Slope (right side, with little red signs on white posts) on S Greensboro St

What’s particularly sad about this outcome is that residents have been advocating for several years to get a sidewalk on South Greensboro Street. If the Town had required a sidewalk here, and the new South Green development had been required to build more sidewalk to connect to it, the Town would be much closer to having a sidewalk from downtown to the base of the South Greensboro, and the private sector would have been a partner in helping to make that connection.

Instead, the town is having to compete with Durham, Chapel Hill, and Hillsborough for limited Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) funds at the DCHC-MPO to build a sidewalk for $400,000. Carrboro should be getting developers to participate in building our sidewalks on major arterials, so that we can request CMAQ funds for things that are greatly needed but unlikely to be funded by developers, like future phases of the Morgan Creek and Bolin Creek Greenways.

So why exactly didn’t the code require sidewalks here? It’s not entirely clear to me, but the reason may be in Article XIV (the Streets and Sidewalks section) of Carrboro’s current UDO.

In subdivision developments that abut a public street, sidewalks shall be con-
structed adjacent to such street if a sidewalk in that location is required by the officially adopted town sidewalk master plan. Whenever possible, such sidewalk shall be constructed within the public right-of-way.

I put a few words in bold above. Carrboro does have an adopted Bike Plan on their website, but I did some Googling and Carrboro does not seem to have an officially adopted sidewalk master plan. That seems to be a big hole weakening the connection between what we want to happen and our requirements to deliver our desired future.

There’s also some text in other parts of Article XIV that states:

The permit-issuing authority may reduce the sidewalk requirement for subcollector streets
meeting the alternative street standard from both sides to one side of the road if:
a. The development contains a parallel system that is integrally designed and provides pedestrian access to the interior of the site;

This is great for the people who live in Park Slope, but not good for anyone who doesn’t live there but needs to walk by Park Slope. It’s also very consistent with the idea that paths are for walking within developments, and presumes you will never need to walk out of the development because you will drive to anywhere else- a very 1970s view of the world.

Our Regulations Aren’t Working For Us (Or For The Developers)

With five years to get to “No” on Lloyd Farm, and missing the chance to have developers build sidewalks on a street where we ARE approving development and are applying for public funds to build sidewalks, it’s clear that our directions to the development community aren’t clear enough about our desires and our ordinances aren’t organized to require the pieces of town infrastructure we need.

If Carrboro doesn’t change its approach to development proposals, what happened with Lloyd Farm will happen again, and what happened with Park Slope will happen again.

Our ordinance is full of band-aids with amendments in 1998 or 2003 still trying to address thoughts from the 1970s and the 1980s in 2017. The world has changed, our towns opportunities and challenges have changed, and so should our development regulations to be more specific about the future our town needs and desires. It’s time to throw the old stuff out and start fresh. Want to see what a modern UDO looks like? Check out Raleigh’s – complete with pictures to make it easy to understand for residents.

From the point of view of the development community, I’m sure they would like to propose projects that generate less fractious debate and have a better chance of being well-received by residents. A clearer code could be a win-win where Carrboro residents see more changes in town that complement their vision for the future, and developers can approach projects with more certainty about outcomes.

What The Aldermen Should Do

On January 24th at 7:30 pm, there is a public hearing on budget priorities for the upcoming year. I’m requesting that the Aldermen put in funding to hire a consultant to support the Town Planning staff in developing a new Comprehensive Plan for Carrboro and a completely brand-new UDO. Please join me in making this request. You can attend in person, or tell the Aldermen “We Need a Comprehensive Plan!” by emailing boa@townofcarrboro.org.

Roundabout Being Considered for Estes Dr and Greensboro St Intersection

Posted on October 17, 2016 by patrick

Did you know that NCDOT is considering removing the traffic signal at the intersection of Estes Drive and North Greensboro St in Carrboro?

There will be a drop-in meeting Monday, November 14th at from 4 to 7 pm in the Carrboro Town Hall Board Room.

Study Area for Potential Roundabout

Roundabouts have significant safety benefits as their design reduces 32 potential conflict points for cars to only 8, and 24 conflicts down to 8 as well for pedestrians- when compared to a standard 4-way intersection.

This intersection also provides a link to the Frances Shetley Greenway, so hopefully there will be an excellent bicycle interface between the two facilities. Make sure to stop by Town Hall on Nov 14th!

Lloyd Farm: What Happens When You Let a Grocery Store Chain Do Urban Design

Posted on June 27, 2016 by patrick

After several years of hearing suggestions for improvements from adjacent neighborhoods, elected officials, advisory boards and citizens from all over Carrboro, the folks at Argus Development have submitted plans for what they have always wanted to build here – a grocery-anchored strip mall. I first wrote about this project in 2014, nearly 18 months ago, and have talked to many Carrboro residents about it since. Very, very little about the proposal has changed and its chief flaws dating back to 2014 remain mostly unaddressed.

If I was a member of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen, I would vote to deny this rezoning application.

The most recent site plan attached to Tuesday’s packet is below. If you look at the link above to my prior post, you’ll see little has changed in 18 months. I’m going to list several shortcomings ahead of the image below.

The overall design of the site is simply too suburban, which makes it hard to redevelop into something better in the future. Some of the suburban features damaging this site layout in particular are the gently curving road from the top of the site the area down by the two stores surrounded by stormwater detention ponds. This roadway geometry and lack of buildings along the side of the road will encourage speeding through the site by cars.
Tax base efficiency for the town. This design incorporates several of the low-value per acre approaches documented in the 2014 presentation by Urban 3 to the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce (click to see slides-they’re EXCELLENT!). In a town with a rural buffer, we need to do our best to maximize our tax value per acre on parcels inside the buffer to produce a better balance between commercial and residential tax base in Carrboro, and that means building up in a denser format. The site design for this plan incorporates the limited value proposition of the Timberlyne Shopping Center and the “Older Outparcel Format” on slide 18 with parking completely surrounding a building, providing a much lower value per acre (in this case, about $950,000/acre) than more urban building types such as the Hampton Inn in downtown Carrboro. (Over $33 million per acre!). Go to the final slide and look at the comparison of mall or strip development per acre with mixed-use at 3 and six stories. The Lloyd Property should be in the categories on the right hand side of the chart; instead, it is mostly in the strip mall category, with limited tax base per acre developed and a design that locks that in for probably 30 or more years.
The massive parking field in front of the Harris Teeter grocery store. I don’t think I have had a single conversation about this project that doesn’t involve someone lamenting the massive parking lot fronting the grocery store, and how much better it would be to have something more akin to Southern Village instead. This suggestion has been made repeatedly to the applicant, and they have done nothing to engage with this community request in their design. The most likely reason is that their client, Harris Teeter, has probably sent some middle management person to the site who looked around and said “yup, this looks suburban, it must have the suburban standard site layout,” which comes with a checklist that says, more or less- “if we can’t have all the parking right in front of the store in a massive parking field, the store will not make money. Our customers are simply too stupid to figure out how to use our stores otherwise.” Harris Teeter’s own store at North Hills in Raleigh shows this isn’t true, but since the corporate grocery office has labeled this “suburban” rather than “urban” they are shoving the standard design down our throats. Let me say that again another way- one of the most significant undeveloped parcels in Carrboro is being designed primarily around the needs of a checklist in a major grocery store corporate office, not the town’s needs and goals.
The two water detention ponds with the two outparcel sites featuring a triple drive-through (worst kind of drive through!) bank and another retail site are a pretty irreversible suburban set of uses that work to prevent a future urban street grid from being installed while also only supporting low-intensity uses.
No public gathering spaces. There are two locations titled “Plaza Lawn” on this drawing. Neither of them are likely to be used by many people and become the beloved community space that the Weaver Street lawn is. One Plaza Lawn (bottom left) is going to be nearly empty, all the time. With no adjacent uses other than parking, and a walking path to Old Fayetteville- the side of the site featuring the least pedestrian traffic, there’s no reason to be here. The Plaza Lawn in the curve near the top center of the site will have high-speed traffic on one side, and a retail/restaurant space on the left side. Perhaps there may be some spillover here if this is a restaurant, but if it is a retail store, this will just be another grassy berm that goes unused. Looking at these two sites plus the big green swath of land between the road and the detention pond north of the senior housing, there was plenty of space in this site to create a village green surrounded by active uses, but the parking for the grocery store was too important. Are you one of the folks who was really interested in a gathering spot, or are you interested in learning more about the failures of American “plazas,” and why the Lloyd Farm “Plaza Lawns” fail in the same way? Check out this neat piece by Neil Takemoto on the difference between Americanized “plazas’ and Italian “Piazzas.”
Age-restricted housing. My most recent post on Lloyd Farm covered the issues with Senior Housing instead of housing for all ages. Click here to read why going from apartments to age-restricted housing presents a dilemma when it comes to equity issues in housing.
None of the buildings have any relationships with the streets. They have relationships with the parking lots. This means that it will be harder to tear these buildings down and replace them with more dense development in the future, effectively restricting the future economic capacity of one of our limited commercial zones.
Virtually all of the commercial buildings are one story. Orangepolitics ran a great piece recently on how we don’t have space to receive small and growing companies, and we can’t get ANY of these buildings to have a second story with some space for the next business that breaks out of an incubator to move to?

Lloyd Farm Plan April 2016

In closing, I’m going to share a few comments from the advisory boards that I thought were particularly good:

Add multistory mixed use development with ground floor commercial with residential
and/or office use above, and increased clustering of buildings relative to the current site
plan. Consider the model of Southern Village. The current site plan has too many
buildings too far apart with too much separated parking. Building up and clustering
would reduce impervious surface and therefore more effectively address stormwater
runoff and flooding issues. – Environmental Advisory Board

And…

The Board recognizes the need for senior housing in Carrboro, but is disappointed with
the lack of affordable or workforce housing. We would like to see some of the senior
residences made available at workforce rates. A payment-in-lieu should be required as a
condition of the rezoning.- Planning Board

And…

The Board strongly suggests that the final plan reverse the positions of the grocery store
and the buildings facing it. The intent is to reinforce a residential buffer. It would also
serve to decrease the distance between the grocery store and the senior housing.
The rezoning should include conditions regarding architectural standards, including
uniformity of materials and setback of taller buildings in proximity to residential areas,
which mirror the Downtown Districts. The conditions suggested by the Applicants should
also be included, however condition #1 should be amended to reflect the change in
positions of the grocery store and the facing retail buildings.

It seems pretty clear that the rezoning is the last chance to get any improvements to the design or reconsideration of strategies, and I hope the Board signals that this proposal should not proceed unless these issues are addressed. Given we’ve been at this for 18 months formally and longer informally, I’m not terribly optimistic that we’re going to get much better by giving them a green light.

In closing, I want to acknowledge that I think that development processes that don’t make it clear what the community wants and expects make it harder for developers to come to reasonable win-win outcomes for the community. I understand that the proposed investment at this site is a big deal, but I also think a superior project would offer better upside for the town and the developer if they could get past the inflexible approach to the parking on the grocery store and the other conventional mid-to-late twentieth century design approaches they are taking to the site layout and organization. Honestly, I feel like the investors and the Town are leaving profit and taxbase on the table to cater to the checklist at the Harris Teeter corporate office.

Given that we already have a Harris Teeter with a dangerous, pedestrian-hostile parking lot in Carrboro, and that these folks don’t seem to have incorporated much of what the community is asking for, I think that denying this rezoning is reasonable, and that the town should then turn to establishing a process that the TOWN leads to establish what type of development is appropriate for this site. We can (and should) do better.

Carrboro Advisory Boards Should Push For Gathering Space at Lloyd Farm

Posted on June 2, 2016 by patrick

Tonight, at 7:30 pm in Town Hall, the various Carrboro Town Advisory Boards will meet to review the Lloyd Farm rezoning proposal before it goes to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen later in June. This site represents a significant opportunity to do something compelling or make a lasting mistake for Carrboro.

All in all, Lloyd Farm is a mildly better than average suburban strip mall concept with a bunch of single story buildings surrounding a large parking field fronting a Harris Teeter. The “better than average” points come for significantly more attention to bike/ped mobility through the site than is usually present in proposals like this. That said, here are the key problems with it:

The layout is driven first and foremost by traffic engineering concerns; the two drive-thru parcels are particularly awful.
The green “Plaza Lawns” are located in places that almost guarantee they will never be used as public spaces.
No multi-story buildings on a large site that could accommodate them and surface parking
Too small a residential component for a town struggling with increasing housing affordability challenges

I’m not sure the last two are going to be addressed at this point in the game, so I’m going to focus on ONE MEANINGFUL CHANGE that could significantly improve this project.

Re-Configure the Lawns and Parking to Create a Gathering Space, So That There is An Urban Core to a Suburban Site

The image above is the most recent site plan with a few minor changes:

It removes the 7,810 square foot building in the curve of the road, and places parking there instead. (Blue circle)
It moves the square footage of those buildings into two buildings that front a place reminiscent of the the Weaver Street Market Lawn among several buildings. Just as people can walk into the center of Southpoint Mall’s primary walkway between Barnes & Noble and the Apple Store, you could do the same between these two buildings. Harris Teeter would still have a massive parking field out front, albeit in a slightly different shape than they are used to. If they can build a two-story Harris Teeter at North Hills, they should be able to handle this.
The public space allows for more urban cafe-style dining fronting a space for people rather than a space for cars. This could be accomplished with greenspace, hardscaped space like a brick plaza, or both. Ideally I think the developer could steal brick and planting design cues from the UNC campus, and then allow for dining along both sides of the space. The Piazza at Schmidt’s development in Philadelphia strikes this balance well, see below:
This closes the movement of trucks from behind Harris Teeter to the road with the bus pull-out closer to the apartments. Trucks will then need to make a 90-degree turn in front of Harris Teeter and then head north to the road to go left towards Old Fayetteville Rd, or somehow move south of the public space and adjacent retail and exit that way.
Finally, this move does take some retail away from the terminus of the greenway coming from Carol St. I understand how if I was coming from Carol Street, I would find this a bit of an aesthetic loss. However, I think that transition by walking and biking can be made reasonably well if there is also a greenway east of the bioretention area (PURPLE dotted line) that leads to the crossing near the proposed bus pullout. This consolidates crossings from the two directions that pedestrians and cyclists may arrive near a potential bus stop, and give them the smallest amount of parking lot/road combination to cross to reach the stores and the public space.

This Site Needs More Housing, For ALL Ages

It’s also worth noting that there’s just not enough housing being built on such a large site. Carrboro is not going to be able to address its rising housing cost challenges without building new units. Although there are 200+ new units here, this site can accommodate many more, and more stories of height over podium parking. Additionally, it’s disappointing to see only senior housing being proposed. While there are clearly needs for housing for senior citizens in Carrboro, since the Board of Aldermen proposed to look at every decision through the prism of equity at their annual retreat, it is worth noting that generally speaking, older Americans are generally wealthier than everyone else. The chart below shows the median net worth by age in the USA. The data is from the Census Bureau in 2015 via an article at the financial planning website fool.com. Given this distribution, it is hard for me to see how we can talk about equity in a complex that doesn’t allow people under 55 to live there.

One Chance to Get This Right

In closing, I strongly recommend that the advisory boards to be energetic in encouraging the Lloyd Farm development team to use this opportunity to provide a special place on the edge of Carrboro. Not only do I think this concept of a gathering space would garner them more support for approval, I think they’d actually get higher rents! I suspect that the primary pushback will be about their anchor tenant (Harris Teeter) and expectations regarding parking. If they are getting roughly the number of spaces they expect in view of the front door of the store (as my proposal above provides) I think they should be willing to compromise.

Restoring Sidewalk Space for People By Gardening: Local Business Edition

Posted on May 3, 2016 by patrick

Today I was out walking with DC along West Weaver Street, and I started noticing all the curb cuts for various driveways. Really, a curb cut is a big red flag for people walking that implicitly says “stop relaxing and look out, you could be endangered at a moment’s notice by a car here!”

But then I walked by Carrboro Family Vision, and noticed what a great job they had done to unplug this dynamic. Look at how they’ve succeeded through the magic of Google Streetview’s older photos.

Carrboro Family Vision Building – 2012

Carrboro Family Vision Building – Upgrade in Progress September 2014

Carrboro Family Vision – April 2016

This was my view on a recent beautiful sunny Saturday. Instead of parking spaces, we have planters, flowers, a friendly notice of services available, and a garden path to their door and bike rack. (not visible in photo but it’s right around the corner) The curb cut still remains at left, but this space has been reassigned from cars to people very effectively.

When businesses need examples of how to be more pedestrian friendly at the curb, this is a great outcome to hold up. Great job Carrboro Family Vision!

Dream Up Downtown Walk in Chapel Hill / Carrboro Tomorrow

Posted on March 30, 2016 by patrick

Are you free tomorrow evening, March 31st? If so, and you want to walk and talk city life, I will be joining Molly DeMarco to lead a walking tour and discussion of Public Spaces in Downtown Chapel Hill and Carrboro as part of the Chapel Hill Downtown Partnership’s “Dream Up Downtown” event series.The walk will begin at Peace and Justice Plaza (179 E Franklin St, Chapel Hill-in front of the downtown post office) at 6:30 pm. and proceed west, finishing in downtown Carrboro around 8:00 pm.

The walk will focus on the theme of Our Public Spaces! We’ll visit several public spaces as we wander through the two downtowns, and talk about what’s working well and what could use improvement. This event is meant to be a Jane’s Walk named after the influential writer and urbanist Jane Jacobs; it is as much a conversation as a tour. So please bring your own insights, questions, and vision for the future to share.

Come join us, all are welcome!

The Difference Between Space for Parking and Space for People

Posted on February 11, 2016 by patrick

This is a quick look at how much more space cars take up than people, visualized. While the context here is a street, think of it as a parking lot for a moment. Then, as you think about how to enhance what we love about downtown Carrboro, think about whether we need to focus on providing more parking downtown, or improving other ways to get there. See you tonight at the Carrboro Parking kickoff!

Key Take-away From Summer Streets: It’s Time For Autumn Streets

Posted on July 22, 2015 by patrick

Sunday, July 19th, from 8:00 am to 2:00 pm, Carrboro held its second “Summer Streets” (Herald Sun article) event, in which the block of Weaver St between Main St and North Greensboro St was opened to people and closed to cars. For the umpteenth time in the decade and a half I’ve lived here, the Town closed this portion of Weaver Street with no visible negative impacts to traffic or downtown in general.

As usual, people came out and enjoyed a calm public space, kids drew with chalk, and everyone generally had a grand time relaxing, even with 100-degree heat index temperatures. People did yoga, hung out in folding chairs just talking, and one of our Aldermen even held “office hours” for the second time during such an event.

What does opening a street to people do for a town? Stuff like this:

Kurt Stolka and his 3-year-old son walked around Weaver Street after playing a game of soccer in the street.

He said when there is traffic on Weaver Street, “I just can’t feel calm letting my kids play. You have to constantly keep an eye on them.”

But the Summer Streets program helps parents like him relax, he said.

Carrboro Summer Streets: Safe, Happy Kids Dancing on Yellow Lines

Kurt is absolutely correct. I took the picture to the right at the 2012 Carrboro Music Festival. I was able to take this photo because I did not have to hold DC’s hand in a vise grip in downtown Carrboro to provide protection from the greatest danger to children, cars. Why is this so important? Sure, I can take DC to Wilson Park, Carrboro Elementary School, McDougle School, or MLK Park and take advantage of any of the stuff there in the same way, but none of those places have the amenities of downtown in terms of food, commerce, and culture.

Back in May, WCHL reported that the Town was only going to hold three Summer Streets events, and to end them at 2:00 pm each time. This was due to concerns from “…local business owners inside Carr Mill Mall who don’t love the idea. They worry the street closures will keep shoppers away from the mall.”

Given the people-attracting quality a street closure can provide, I was baffled by these concerns. Fortunately, the latest Herald-Sun article reports:

“…[Carrboro Economic Development Director Annette] Stone said that after last month’s event, she sent out an email to business owners. She said she didn’t receive any negative responses and several businesses expressed support for the program.

Seeing as there appears to be broad agreement that there’s not problem here, let’s not take any more half-measures in managing what could be one of our community’s marquee public spaces- let’s set up an “Autumn Streets” program that starts the first Sunday in September and runs EVERY SUNDAY until the Sunday before Thanksgiving, from 8:00 am to 9:00 or 10:00 pm.

That would be twelve glorious autumn days to come downtown and relax, and twelve other great opportunities to try ways to program the block to engage residents. There are plenty of tourism co-promotion opportunities between UNC football games, 2nd Friday Art Walks, etc to take advantage of as well to engage visitors.

If you think this is a good idea, please email the Carrboro Board of Aldermen and let them know “I support weekly Autumn Streets!”

ArtsCenter-Kidzu Building: A Compelling Idea That Needs Some Work Before Going Forward

Posted on January 20, 2015 by patrick

The Short Take: The Town of Carrboro has been approached by two cherished local non-profits (Kidzu and The ArtsCenter) with a proposal to build a new “Carrboro Arts and Innovation Center” (CAIC) involving town funds from a not-presently-existent revenue stream. The proposal has several issues that should discourage the Town from moving forward until these challenges can be resolved or greatly improved upon. These issues are exacerbated by a lack of public policy guidance documents, most notably a Town Comprehensive Plan, that would guide such proposals to be more in sync with community priorities from the outset.

I urge the Carrboro Board of Aldermen to NOT move forward with this proposal at this time, and to step back and ask themselves:

Broadly: What can the Town do to better prepare itself for major proposals such as The CAIC and the Lloyd Farm project? Why is the Town so unprepared to deal with ideas like this?
More Narrowly: What pieces of the ArtsCenter proposal are at an inappropriate level of detail (too much? too little?) to effectively evaluate whether the Town should:
- Support such a project?
- Support such a project AND participate in it financially?

The Long Take: There are multiple issues to consider with this proposal and I will try to take them on one at a time.

Background on my Point of View

For those who don’t know me who are reading this, I’ve lived in Carrboro for about 15 years, and my interest in the arts is one of the reasons I live here. I’ve been a performing musician since high school, and have played locally at the Festival for the Eno, Blue Horn Lounge, Cafe Driade, the Carrboro Music Festival, Open Eye Cafe, Johnny’s, The Station, and yes, The ArtsCenter. Our family has patronized concerts, theater events, public meetings and art shows there. With a small child in our family, we have also recently been members of Kidzu. I am a supporter of both of these organizations and what they do in the community, both in spirit and as a patron of their activities. I hope that those who have spent time assembling the CAIC proposal will read the remainder of this post while keeping in mind that I am someone who wants to see both The ArtsCenter and Kidzu succeed.

What’s Good – Carrboro, The Arts, and Institutions for Young Families

The exciting part of the proposal is the promise of an expanded ArtsCenter in a town where the populace loves the arts from a participant point of view as much as a concertgoer/theatergoer/galleryhopper point of view. A great space for the arts is in keeping with Carrboro’s strengths and brand as a community. There’s no doubt that the idea is compelling. Additionally, Carrboro’s percentage of population under age 10 is almost 16%, so a place like Kidzu also makes sense to be in the community.

However, as we move from the general to the specific, these positives get overwhelmed by details (and in some cases, the lack thereof) that detract from other things residents cherish about Carrboro, most notably its nature as one of the truly walkable communities in North Carolina and the Southeast.

What’s Problematic:

The Architectural Style

To start with the challenges of the proposal, I’m going to focus on what I’ve learned from the media coverage as I have not been able to attend any public forums. Below are some images that I believe came from the Chapel Hill News. They show a modernist/postmodernist building that is heavy on glass and steel. The building has uneven projections from multiple sides, which certainly probably raise the cost of the building over continuous walls in the same space. I assume that the building would not actually have all the text labels on the outside and that those labels are to help explain interior functions.

ArtsCenter Visualization 1

ArtsCenter Visualization 2

First, if the town wants to take on debt to build a building for non-profit organizations, we should have a plan for how the building could be used if those nonprofits fail and cannot use the space as proposed. I flag this because the track record of re-using modernist buildings is not that good.

Carrboro’s Town Hall, a former school, has found adaptive re-use, as has Carr Mill. Meanwhile, the BCBSNC property sits empty because it ignored many timeless building practices for trendy abstract art statement-making.

If the Town is going to build a building, it should build in a style that has a record of attracting new uses when the original ones fail or leave, and we should try to build it without expensive, hard-to-maintain materials and profiles.

The Building’s Orientation to Its Surroundings

I’ve been to DPAC for a show and I walk by there all the time. It’s a beautiful facility on the inside, and it sounds great. That said, I don’t know that its interaction with the rest of the city is all that great in Durham. To be fair, I’m not sure the site of DPAC presented many opportunities for synergy when it was built, but this site has the opportunity to embrace one of Carrboro’s most busy intersections for pedestrian activity. Unfortunately, the design seems to “hide” the CAIC behind two trees and there is no relationship with Main Street, the most important or “A” street on which the property fronts. Instead, the primary orientation for people walking to and from the entrance is towards the “B” street of lower importance, Roberson Street. Additionally, nearly the full length of the ArtsCenter’s interface with the block is for drop-off/pick-up for cars.

The present design honors the car first and the pedestrian second. This needs to change, and any project at this location needs to do more to honor Main St and contribute to it as a place.

The Multiple Roles of the Architect

Mr. Szostak is on the board of the ArtsCenter. What happens when the ArtsCenter is pushing for a design element that raises the cost to the Town, and the Town wants to reduce it? Wouldn’t it be awkward for an architect to fulfill the Town’s (his client’s) wish while upsetting his Board colleagues? It doesn’t seem fair to ask the architect of a Town building to negotiate that tension. Also, shouldn’t the Town, if it’s undertaking a signature building project, seek proposals that would include competitive bids for the design work? There’s no doubt Mr. Szostak is a talented architect. I suspect he’s done many good things for the ArtsCenter board as well. If this proposal goes forward, the Town should consider how to prevent conflict between the non-profits and itself via the roles of the architect.

Architecture, Decorum, and Placemaking

Former Mayor Mark Chilton once said that Carrboro’s architecture has “a certain humility” to it. I think he was onto something, but I would say it a little differently, perhaps that our architecture has a “common dignity” to it. I think that any new ArtsCenter building would best serve its purpose by contributing to the common dignity of the street scape rather than making a big statement unrelated to the rest of downtown.

Calls for New Revenue Streams

To the extent that any of this proposal relies on new revenue streams, it is hard to ignore that the NCGA has recently taken away the privilege license tax from municipalities and is looking to redistribute some of their sales tax revenue to rural areas. This is a legislature that also put new limits on sales tax for counties last year. A realist proposal would not include a component of asking the NCGA for new revenue sources for a municipality.

Collateral from Non-Profits

The proposal suggests that the Town would only move forward if the ArtsCenter or Kidzu could offer some collateral. Realistically, what assets do these organizations have, and what is the value of these assets?

Continued Failure on Parking Policy From the Town

It is extremely painful to see that one of the four key points this agreement suggests that the Town would not move forward without the appropriate parking infrastructure. Forgetting all the other points I have made, this is more than enough to oppose the entire proposal until we get off of the idea that because we have a new use of any type in our walkable, transit-served downtown we need more (implied: free) PARKING. During the Carrboro music festival this year, theoretically our biggest visitor event which will DWARF the busiest night at any new ArtsCenter, the deck was not full. Why on earth would we put public money toward any structured parking (which eats up truly finite economically productive land in the downtown) without pricing the parking we already have? (which would also bring revenue). Or without stepping up enforcement? (which would bring revenue and reduce predatory towing)

I’ve already hashed out most of the reasons for being smarter about parking in this post. Please take a look.

How We’re Getting Input On This

I’m also disappointed that what we’re doing to decide how to proceed with this project is to hold a public hearing. First, let me say that holding a hearing is vastly better than not holding one. Still, what’s happening is that everyone is debating the merits of this proposal against itself, and not as part of a broader vision for downtown and the community. It’s the same type of short-term, single-faceted thinking that led the Town to recently consider turning the bike lanes on Fidelty Street into car parking. It’s almost as if because one idea emerges, we forget everything else we’ve agreed to as goals for the community.

The recent Lloyd Farm meetings with the community highlight some of the same problems. In frustration, one neighbor said to the developer “we’re not supposed to be designing the project for you!” This line brought lots of laughs, but it held a lot of truth. But I also had sympathy for the developers. Our zones and our code don’t tell them what we want; many of the ideas in our zoning and codes are decades old and are not made for this moment in our community’s life, but we keep governing off of them.

Of course, with both the CAIC and Lloyd Farm, the missing document that is supposed to manage all these tensions is a comprehensive plan. Carrboro needs one.

Closing

As I finish this piece, there are a lot of pieces of the CAIC proposal that need work. I hope The ArtsCenter and Kidzu will step up to the challenge and address those issues in a refined proposal to be considered somewhere down the road. I also hope the Town will take a hard look at whether our current policy tools are adequate to deal with Carrboro’s growth in the next twenty years.

CityBeautiful21

Urban Planning for the 21st Century

Category Archives: Street Design