The Fundamentals of Carrboro

Posted on August 19, 2022 by patrick

Carrboro Town Hall

Carrboro has a relatively new (and yet deeply experienced) Mayor, a new town manager, and the most progressive town council in recent memory.

This new leadership team has settled into place and Carrboro recently adopted its first ever Comprehensive Plan for the town, declaring that its two overarching principles are making Carrboro a place that advances Racial Justice and takes Climate Action.

Now that the Carrboro Connects plan is adopted, will it move us in the directions described above? Are the strategies proposed to move ahead feasible for a town with budget and staff capacity the size of Carrboro, and will they be designed to leverage our assets, or be more dependent on the goodwill of other partners to be executed?

To answer these questions, we’ve got to start with an accounting of Carrboro’s place in the world, and our challenges and opportunities. Below I present what I see as the lay of the land, what I will refer to going forward as The Fundamentals of Carrboro. Let’s begin.

Fundamental #1: Carrboro is part of the Triangle economy, and except for UNC, it is far from all of the region’s other major job centers.

Traditionally, the Triangle regional economy has centered on employment opportunities in Wake, Durham, and Orange counties. Carrboro sits very close to one of the densest job clusters in the region with UNC and UNC Hospital. Downtown Chapel Hill and Downtown Carrboro could also be considered part of this cluster. But most of the rest of Carrboro is adjacent to low-density suburban Chapel Hill neighborhoods or the Orange County rural buffer. The rural buffer has few to zero job opportunities now and will not likely add them in the future. East Chapel Hill may hold more jobs in the future, but development cycles in Chapel Hill are long and slow. Except for those Carrboro-ers that work at or adjacent to UNC, most Carrboro residents are traveling 10-20 miles each way to work in Durham or RTP, or 30-40 miles to work in Raleigh. Increasing suburban growth across the region and no high capacity transit planned for Carrboro in the next 30 years means that driving to these far-flung jobs will only get more challenging for Carrboro residents.

Unless we figure out how to grow a larger base of jobs here in town, Carrboro residents will have an increasingly difficult time accessing a wide variety of jobs in other communities in the region. If like me, you are a parent who finds Carrboro a good place to raise a child, this situation increases the likelihood that the kids we love to raise here will move away to find work.

Fundamental #2: Our tax base is 86% residential and only 14% commercial.

We have a very high dependence on residential property tax to pay for town operations. If we can’t grow the commercial tax base, the funding for all of Carrboro’s lofty goals will be paid for most heavily through residential property taxes, which…raise the cost of housing.

Fundamental #3: Carrboro is part of, and heavily influenced by, the Chapel Hill real estate market. Both towns have made choices to grow slower than the region, with significant consequences.

Over the past decade, all the other communities surrounding Chapel Hill and Carrboro have grown by at least 20%, while Chapel Hill and Carrboro have grown at less than half the rate of the others. (Durham, while not listed, is also over 20%).

Growing this slowly is A POLICY CHOICE that has been repeatedly made by both the Chapel Hill and Carrboro town councils.

The scarcity of new housing in both communities for a growing population has a predictable result, nearly half of our renters are cost-burdened:

Carolina Chamber State of the Community Report

This means that since Carrboro is adjacent to another slow-growing town, Chapel Hill’s scarcity of housing also drives up our prices and rents, and the difficulty of building in either of the two towns sends jobs elsewhere.

What does growing slower and becoming more expensive have to do with Racial Justice? Due to a host of systemic discriminatory phenomena, from redlining to urban renewal to hiring discrimination to real estate appraisals, we have a significant wealth gap in the United States between white and non-white households.

Median Net Worth By Race (Federal Reserve, 2019)

This means that when lower-income residents struggle to afford to live in Carrboro, they are much more likely to be black and brown residents. Our current development patterns have us on a glide path to being an increasingly older, wealthier, and whiter town. This outcome is far from the values Carrboro professes to hold.

What does growing slower have to do with Climate Action?

The Cool Climate Network at UC-Berkeley modeled a bunch of policy actions to see how much they would reduce GHG emissions. The data above is for the City of Sacramento. Look at how much urban infill outperforms. The biggest source of GHGs in the US is transportation, and urban infill can convert driving trips to walking, turning the most polluting trips into zero-emissions exercise. That’s why it makes such an impact.

Fundamental #4: Carrboro does not have the capacity to build affordable housing at scale.

Building new affordable housing units is expensive, and while Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill have the financial and staff capacity to do Low Income Housing Tax Credit projects like Willard Street Apartments in Durham or Greenfield Commons in Chapel Hill, Carrboro presently lacks both the resources and staff to produce and fund new affordable housing at this level.

This doesn’t mean Carrboro shouldn’t pursue affordable housing initiatives; we most certainly should. What it means is that we should be thinking about how to increase Carrboro’s capacity to meet our goals just as we define those goals in our Comprehensive Plan.

This capacity expansion will demand financial resources and technical skill, likely through the hiring of new town employees.

Fundamental #5: We are the people we’ve been waiting for.

If you’ve followed state government or federal government policy recently, it’s fair to say that if our plans rely on outside partners to contribute significant amounts of funding to achieve our goals, then we could be waiting for a long time. To paraphrase Barack Obama, Carrboro’s plans should embrace the idea that “we are the people we’ve been waiting for.”

Our elected leaders should certainly try to build partnerships with other levels of government to advance community goals. The soon-to-break-ground 203 Project, featuring a new library in Carrboro, is a great example of the town and Orange County working together. However, excellent outcomes like this are more often the exception than the rule, and while we should embrace those opportunities when they arise, we should not count on them to achieve our goals.

Fundamental #6: Carrboro has assets to pursue its goals, but the town is not taking full advantage of those assets to reach its goals more quickly – YET.

Carrboro has some powerful things going for it. While far from many jobs in the Triangle region, it is very close to a big job center in UNC, including many well-paying jobs. The University and UNC hospital also aren’t going anywhere, which means that even in recessions, that job base will likely remain present and strong.

Carrboro and Chapel Hill share the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School System, which is one of the highest-regarded and best funded in the state of North Carolina. As a former college admissions counselor, I can tell you that its high schools are well-regarded both in-state and nationally.

We have a downtown that has a strong local business flavor. Our town commons hosts a nationally recognized Farmers Market.

Our fare-free bus system, Chapel Hill Transit, carries a very high number of passengers for a community of this size, and has helped LOWER most traffic counts in town compared to the early 2000s, despite growing population in both communities.

These are just some of the things that make our community a good place to live, and makes the land beneath our buildings quite valuable. But not all buildings are created equal, and on a per-acre basis, our more densely developed buildings provide significantly more tax revenue per acre to pursue our community goals. In 2013, the Chamber hired a consulting firm, Urban 3, to report on the tax productivity per acre in Orange County. The most productive building in Carrboro at that time was the Hampton Inn.

Tax value per acre (Carolina Chamber / Urban 3/ Joe Minicozzi)

Putting it all together – Carrboro can meet a lot of goals by using our valuable land differently, and more intensely. We can build more housing, and make room for new neighbors, while helping current ones stay in town. We can provide space for new job opportunities, so our residents can shorten their commutes, and their emissions. Doing both will also bring in new tax revenue to help pay for the big goals the town wishes to pursue.

Equally important is that how the town grows is mostly controlled by choices made by the Carrboro Town Council.

The 2022 – 2023 Town Council session presents an ideal time to begin making a transition to a greener and more inclusive future. This coming year on the blog will be dedicated to putting forth strategies to make this happen.

Displacement Without Development: Filtering Up on North Greensboro Street

Posted on February 24, 2015 by patrick

Last week I described the real estate market phenomenon known as “filtering,” and discussed a recent example in Carrboro where Abbey Court filtered from a lower rental submarket to a higher rental submarket and became Collins Crossing.

Displacement Without Development

Today I’m going to discuss another local example of where lower-rent units are disappearing and higher-rent units are taking their place. As you continue reading, keep in mind what is ultimately the most important part of this post – that new development is completely absent from the neighborhood real estate market, and yet rents are rising. When rents in existing buildings are rising, the socioeconomic status of the people living there is going to change. (as we saw last week)

Since properties filtering up and down is driven by the decisions of many individual landlords, a lot of filtering happens one property at a time, and thus can be hard to spot. However, Carrboro has one smaller-property hotspot for filtering up these days: North Greensboro Street, just north and south of Estes Drive Extension.

Let me show you what I mean, and also show you the best free software tool available to track filtering visually: Google Street View. If you look at the date of any Google Street View photo and see a clock to the left of it, that means there should be older views available as well. For neighborhoods currently seeing changes and investment, this is a great way of doing before and after comparisons. With that in mind, let’s explore North Greensboro Street in Carrboro in the pictures below.

Filtering On North Greensboro Street

Here’s 1103 North Greensboro St in 2007:

1103 N Greensboro St – 2007

and “The Wilson” in 2012 (same property)

“The Wilson” – 2012

From a website attempting to sell The Wilson for $2.3 million for its 16 units- the smallest unit is a 2BD/1 BA renting for $905/month for 700 square feet:

The Wilson Apartments are located 1.5 miles from the UNC campus and the commercial hub of Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. The property has been completely renovated with condo quality finishes that include stainless steel appliances, updated baths, hardwood floors and a new metal roof.

Also from their website, here are the improvements the owners of The Wilson made to move to a higher-end rental submarket

Removed baseboard heat & window a/c’s and installed central heat and air in all 16 units – new heat pumps
Removed old shingles, replaced old plywood and installed a new energy efficient standing seam metal roof
Removed all the original single pane windows and installed new Pella low-e vinyl windows
Completely renovated every kitchen; new cabinets, counters, sinks, and appliances – stainless refrigerators with ice makers, ranges, built-in microwaves
All new bathrooms including, tubs, showers, vanities, cabinets, lighting, mirrors and accessories
Installed all new plumbing lines and fixtures inside every unit, sub-meters were installed on some of the units, but are not being utilized at this time
Installed new main sewer line from buildings to the street
Removed the laundry room and installed new, energy efficient stackable washers and dryers in every unit
Painted the exterior brick and re-painted all the interiors
Refinished the existing hardwood floors and “feathered in” new hardwoods in the living and bedroom areas – tile floors installed in the baths
New interior and exterior doors with new hardware
Completely demoed and re-wired all units and the common areas – replaced lighting fixtures with new
Made alterations to floor plans which include, but are not limited to; adding bedrooms (converted 6 units from 2 BD’s to 3 BD’s), removing dividing walls
between kitchens and living areas, creating arched doorways, vaulting the 3rd floor ceilings and capturing common area space (previously un-used) to make
some units larger
Upgraded the landscaping in the courtyard with new plantings and accents,removed overgrowth at the front of the property and planted new trees and shrubs, removed debris and thinned out the woods in the rear of the property to create and view and path to Wilson Park
Added three new porches with standing seam metal roof, all new wood handrails with cedar trim accents and arched pergola in courtyard
Tore down, graded and re-built the retaining wall on the left side of the property
Graded and added gravel in the rear of the property to create more parking spots
Built new property fence along the street and dumpster containment area

Remember that year you spent in grad school at the aging Todd St apartments?

Todd St Apartments, Mid-Renovation – 2007

It’s now known as “The Flats.”

“The Flats” Condominiums – 2012

Here’s a picture of the kitchen and laundry area in one of The Flats units that recently sold for $193,000 according to Zillow. Notice the stainless steel appliances, double-stack modern front-loading laundry equipment, and new counters. This building was built in 1962, but the inside screams 2010 or newer.

The Flats Kitchen/Laundry Investment

One of the more recent conversions is 605 North Greensboro. Here I have put the before and after shots side by side- one from Google Street View, and another photo I took last year.

605 N Greensboro Filters Up in Carrboro

Like many other buildings on the street, 605 N Greensboro now has a name- “Sagebrush,” to signal its upmarket transition.

What Filtering Means for Carrboro and Affordable Housing

In a world where not enough housing gets built to meet market demand, the demand for luxury and high-end-of-the-market housing in a growing metropolitan area will turn middle market units into upper market units via renovation. This is exactly what is happening on North Greensboro Street.

If new housing is built, and it is luxury housing, it will entice some residents seeking a luxury housing experience out of their current units, freeing up those units for renters with a little less income to take their place. This helps put downward pressure on prices through the basic law of supply and demand.

The flip side of this point is that if Carrboro produces a limited amount of new housing units, then the town has adopted a de facto policy to encourage filtering up in various submarkets of the existing housing stock. The landlords on North Greensboro Street have figured this out, and they are making rational capital investments in their rental businesses.

As the Board of Aldermen continue to discuss affordable housing strategies, it is important that they and town staff be aware of filtering occurring in town at large properties (like Abbey Ct/Collins Crossing) and smaller ones (like North Greensboro St), and they think about how to channel the reasonable and natural impulse of landlords to filter their properties up and down to support the town’s broader housing goals.

Filtering: A Word We Need to Understand as We Discuss Affordable Housing

Posted on February 17, 2015 by patrick

Protest of Abbey Court Sale to ASM (photo courtesy of www.chapelboro.com)

When new development occurs in Carrboro, many people ask “how many of the new residential units are going to be affordable?” While this is a good question to ask, the new units in any project are inevitably a small portion of the overall housing stock in the town.

The more important question is “how many of the EXISTING units are becoming more or less affordable?”

New Development = Small Portion of the Housing Supply

The 2012 American Community Survey reported that Carrboro had 9,347 housing units. A recently approved project on North Greensboro Street, Shelton Station, will add 96 units to the town’s supply of housing, which is barely over 1% of units. The debate over a single project’s affordability can make it seem like the prices of the other 99% are affordable, or at least have prices that are holding steady. This is not the case.

Landlords Respond to Rent Conditions and Trends

I’ll let Chris Bradford, the eloquent blogger behind Austin Contrarian, explain this part:

When property values rise, low-quality housing “filters up” to the high-quality housing sub-market. The reason is that rising rents encourage landlords to invest more in the property. When property values fall, high-quality housing “filters down” to the low-quality housing sub-market. The reason is that falling rents encourage landlords to invest less in property. The key in either case is that old housing costs more to maintain than new housing.

He continues:

Every landlord with an old property confronts the same decision: Should I spend the money to keep the property in top shape, or should I let it go?

Keeping the property in top shape allows the landlord to charge more rent. But it also costs the landlord more in maintenance and periodic renovation, especially for old apartments. What the landlord decides to do depends on the current market, his estimate of future demand, and about a million other things. But we know one thing for sure: A landlord is less likely to maintain an apartment in tip-top shape when the rent for tip-top apartments is falling. Declining rents mean a declining return on the maintenance investment. That spells less investment .

Without constant maintenance, apartments deteriorate from “tip top” to “slightly dilapidated.” Renters, sensible people that they are, are not willing to pay as much for bad quality. Rents fall, and the apartments “filter down” into the pool of affordable housing.

Filtering Moves Units From One Housing Submarket to Another

In another one of Bradford’s posts on filtering, he goes on:

People understand that a tight housing market leads landlords to raise rents. What they often don’t seem to understand is that a tight housing market also causes some landlords to invest more money in their properties in order move them into a more expensive submarket. That’s how a shortage of units in the $1,200/month submarket (for example) can hurt someone shopping in the $800/month submarket.

This is a key point about “filtering up.” If there’s a demand for higher-end units in a market that is not being met, middle-market landlords who realize this are likely to invest in their properties and re-position them as higher-end units. This often comes in the form of fresh paint, premium kitchen appliances and countertops, and other modest-cost improvements such as better light fixtures and new carpets. Once these conversions take place, the landlords will then start charging higher-end market rent for their unit, and simultaneously shorten the supply of mid-market apartments by one unit.

Bradford touches briefly on “filtering down,” and makes a good point:

Filtering down happens too, of course. It’s just that no one sends a press release to the Austin Business Journal when they decide to cut back on maintenance and allow their property to slip in to a cheaper submarket.

What’s The Most Prominent Example of Filtering In Carrboro?

One particular property in town has had a place in the spotlight as it has gone through filtering changes in the last few years: Collins Crossing, formerly known as Abbey Court. While the story cannot be completely told using news clips, the following quotes suggest that Abbey Court was “filtering down” through neglect from the middle of the past decade to the time of its sale to Aspen Square Management, and the new management firm has been renovating units, repositioning the property as a student-centric location, and “filtering up” to a higher-rent submarket ever since. Units that once rented in the mid-$500 range a few years ago now rent for more than $900 after the renovations.

June 2012: Abbey Court Sold [emphasis added]

While Blau acknowledges that renovations to the condominium complex are desperately needed to bring things up to code – citing buildings that are unsafe and stairways that are falling apart – because a large percentage of the residents who live in the condominium complex are immigrants, she is concerned that renovations could price them out of the complex.

January 2013: Abbey Court child falls through staircase [emphasis added]

A 10-year-old boy tumbled through a deteriorated stairway at the complex on Nov. 24, three days after Collins Crossing owners notified condo owners of their plan to impose assessment fees.

Carrboro officials gave owners 90 days to make repairs. In the meantime, condo owners have to find the cash within three weeks. It’s unclear what penalty tenants will face if they don’t pay, although Carrboro Mayor Mark Chilton says management could impose a lien on the condos. Some residents fear foreclosure.

March 2014: Glowing reviews about Collins Crossing Landscaping on Yelp: [emphasis added]

I moved in right before school started last fall. The landscaping is great and the renovated apartments are awesome. I have so much room/closet space, other then having a tiny sink, the bathroom is perfect. The staff is always more then accommodating, they are some of the nicest women ever. The prices are going up but still quite affordable and the best part is that you can have separate leases. I would definitely recommend this place.

Current (Jan 2015) Collins Crossing Website:

The UNC is our fully renovated 2 bedroom 2 bathroom apartment. It is an ideal floor plan for roommates within biking distance to UNC. It also features a full sized stackable washer and dryer.Starting at $979.

Housing Markets Are Dynamic, And Don’t Require New Development to Experience Price Changes in Submarkets

Carrboro has not seen significant new residential construction over the last several years, and Abbey Court/Collins Crossing is a good case study of how real estate market conditions, independent of the presence or absence of new development- drive how properties can become less affordable.

While the change from Abbey Court to Collins Crossing received significant coverage in the media, in part due to the size of the complex, this is not the only part of town that is filtering up.

Next Tuesday’s post will cover another key location where filtering is presently going on in Carrboro. Have a guess about which part of town it is? Leave it in the comments, and check back on February 24th to see if you got it right.

Getting Terms Right: At Its Core, The Word “Urban” Is About Life On Foot

Posted on February 10, 2015 by patrick

Editor’s note: I originally published this post on February 18, 2013, but there’s been a lot of discussion about density, urbanity, and quality of life in local media recently, and I thought it was worth re-publishing this.

Original post below:

On this blog, I’ll be discussing a variety of topics regarding questions of town-building for Carrboro, North Carolina and other places. But one I’ll probably come back to again and again is the word “urban.” Knowing that, I want to be as clear as possible about what I mean when I use this term.

In growth debates, this tends to mean a lot of things to a lot of people. More than a few people hear “urban” and immediately think “Manhattan” or “New York.” Interestingly enough, I think that when people say New York, they actually do mean “Manhattan,” and not Brooklyn, Queens, or any of the other boroughs. They are thinking of super-tall buildings first and foremost, and Manhattan has the highest concentration of skyscrapers in one place in the USA.

Others think more broadly of large cities with very large populations, places that generally have over one million inhabitants in a single municipality. This definition can encompass neighborhoods and communities of very different physical character. It may include skyscraper districts, mid-rise districts, and low-density neighborhoods often found 3 to 10 miles from an American city center.

However, I think the definition of urban can be made very simple, and most accurate, by tying it to one function: walking. Here is the simplest definition I can offer:

If you live, work or visit somewhere that numerous people regularly walk from one place to another for a variety of reasons other than recreation or exercise, then you are living in, working in, or visiting an urban place.

Christopher Columbus Park, Boston – a Place for Walking

This is really the key to figuring out if a place is urban or not. Fundamentally, I believe that once we have stopped talking about agricultural landscapes and communities where farming is a principal activity, we are better off organizing our communities around urban principles instead of not doing so. This blog will be about explaining why I think this is true, and how we can build cities and towns full of beautiful urban neighborhoods.

With that in mind, what are some of the primary reasons why we should build urban places?

1. Health of Individuals. Getting around on foot rather than in a car provides significant health benefits. Most doctors will tell you that walking is close to “the perfect exercise” – low impact, able to be participated in for most of one’s life, and requiring little special equipment or money to participate. A community that makes it safe, easy and pleasant for people to walk for non-recreational purposes is one that is investing in the long-term health of its population.

2. Health of Shared Common Resources. Initiatives that convert auto trips to transit trips and particularly bicycle and walking trips lower a community’s per-trip air pollution and per-trip carbon footprint. Developing in a more compact growth pattern, by putting more uses and residents within walking distance of each other- reduces development pressure on farmland and on land around water resources.

3. Reduced Lifecycle Costs for Infrastructure. If we build 150 homes on 450 acres (1 home per 3-acre lot) then attaching those homes to a local sewer system such as OWASA will require a network of publicly maintained pipes that provides drainage across 70 percent of one square mile. Building those same homes at 15 dwelling units to the acre means that any expanded sewer network will need to cover 1.6 percent of one square mile. Joe Minicozzi of Asheville has probably done a better job than anyone documenting this issue.

4. A Healthy, Innovative Local Business Ecosystem A compact, reasonably dense neighborhood can support its own district of small businesses. Finer grain block sizes in city streets inherently lead you away from big-box retail owned by large corporations and international investors, and towards smaller format stores with a greater likelihood of a local owner running the business. Greater population densities create opportunity for greater variety in dining choices and for agglomeration benefits in many industries.

5. Vibrant Public Spaces By building compactly and in an urban pattern, one of the best outcomes is the ability to create special places that people cherish because they function as social centers as well as perhaps cultural or artistic centers. Locally, the Weaver Street Market Lawn is the best example of such a place.

A Latin Dance Band gets the crowd moving on the Weaver Street Market Lawn at the 2012 Carrboro Music Festival.

Whether you’re a local elected official, a developer, or a citizen, if we’re going to build better urban places, it’s always good to ask – “is this proposed change going to help or hinder Life On Foot in the neighborhood and the town?”

Carrboro’s Summer of Bike-Ped Infrastructure, Part 2

Posted on August 14, 2013 by patrick

Earlier in the month I covered some improvements to the local pedestrian grid on Davie Rd and at the intersection of James St and Hillsborough Rd. However, the most high-profile change to the Carrboro street grid this summer is undoubtedly the Main St Road Diet.

Definition: Road Diet

First, what’s a “Road Diet?” Simply put, it’s the reconfiguration of a roadway to remove excess space for cars, and the reassigning of that space for the use of cyclists and/or pedestrians, and in some cases, transit vehicles. Carrboro’s road diet on Main St involved taking a 4-lane road section with no bike lanes down to a 2-lane road with a center turn lane, and bicycle lanes in both directions.

Sample Cross-Sections

Recently I’ve been working as a beta tester for some programmers developing a terrific tool called StreetMix that allows non-engineers to propose street cross-sections for their communities. Here’s the basic before vs after comparison in graphic format. Where you see “Bus Lane” please simply interpret that to be a drive lane in this case. I was just trying to pick different vehicles in the StreetMix program and missed the label.

And here’s what the AFTER configuration is:

Benefits of the West Main Street Road Diet

There are several immediate benefits that this project creates for the community:

Shortens the maximum number of moving vehicle lanes that a pedestrian must traverse to cross Main St. Instead of 44 feet of cars, the pedestrian only needs to cover 33 feet where they need to be on their maximum guard for their safety. This is of particular benefit to children, senior citizens, those with mobility impairments who walk slower than average, and parents pushing strollers.
Fulfills a recommendation of the Carrboro Safe Routes to School action plan and provides safety benefits in a school zone.
Completes a major gap in the bicycle infrastructure network.

I want to place major emphasis on the final point in the list above. For many years, Carrboro has been working slowly and steadily to expand its bike lane and greenway network, with most major street segments in town represented.

The map below shows how effectively Carrboro has been at placing bike lanes on its streets. Green lines represent greenways and off-road bicycle facilities. Orange lines represent wide outside shoulders. Purple lines represent on-street bike lanes. Notice the big gap in the purple network starting at the intersection of West Main and Hillsborough Rd, which then extends south from there past Poplar, Fidelity, and Weaver St, all the way to Jones Ferry Rd.

The road diet turns that grey section to purple and completes several linkages among SIX other roads with existing bike lanes!

Pre-Road-Diet: West Main St Bike Network Gap. Map produced by Town of Chapel Hill

The reason is this is so important is that some of the best research on the propensity of Americans to bicycle for transportation, even in super-bike-friendly cities like Portland, Oregon, indicates that the largest proportion of the populace falls into what Portland refers to as “Interested But Concerned” potential bike riders. These folks would LIKE to bicycle more, but have concerns about personal safety, and generally prefer to bicycle in a space that is clearly identified as being for cyclists first and motorists second. A bike lane meets that criteria for many people, and this road diet fills in a major gap in a network of facilities that address a perceived safety issue for many potential riders.

While I would still like to see us figure out ways to build even more separated bike-only facilities both on and off streets, this is a most welcome improvement to the Carrboro cycling infrastructure.

Congratulations to the town and NCDOT for working together to make this happen! Look below for some photos of the implemented Road Diet.

Pre-Road Diet

Post-Road Diet

Performance Parking Pricing Is Better For Businesses Than Enforcing Free, Time-Limited Parking

Posted on June 3, 2013 by patrick

Coming Soon to Carrboro?

A few weeks back, the Carrboro Aldermen held a discussion about parking, mostly pertaining to downtown. After some debate, the sense of the Board majority (though not all Board members) was that it is better to encourage aggressive private towing — instead of having anyone pay for public parking at any time.

This is unfortunate, since there is a much better parking management alternative that:

Gives visitors to downtown more choice in how long they shop
Costs taxpayers less to enforce than enforcing free 2-hour parking
Prevents all-day Park & Ride Parking to UNC in town lots
Makes it possible to find a lot with many open spaces online or by smartphone
Makes it more likely that visitors to downtown find a space easily
Reduces cruising for parking which leads to increased congestion and emissions downtown
Generates potential revenue for improvements that expand non-auto access to downtown
Helps generate revenue for businesses with parking when their business is closed

The alternative I am referring to is called Performance Parking Pricing.

Performance Parking Pricing – How It Works

Performance Parking Pricing starts with the following three principles:

The ideal utilization of any group of parking spaces is 80-85% full and 15-20% empty, because this leaves enough spaces to help anyone entering a parking lot, parking deck, or on-street row of spaces to quickly find a space and START SPENDING MONEY at local businesses instead of cruising around looking for a space.
You set the price per hour to the lowest price you can charge, INCLUDING FREE — and still have 15-20% of spaces open.
If a block of parking spaces is consistently more than 80-85% full in a given time period, you RAISE the hourly price for that time period. If the block of spaces are consistently less than 80-85% full, you LOWER the hourly price for that time period.

Technology has advanced to make monitoring the number of free spaces in real time quite inexpensive, and text-enabled mobile phones, smartphones, and on-street kiosks make it easy to use.

Benefits of Performance Parking Pricing: For Shoppers

There are many benefits that Performance Parking Pricing has over trying to enforce 2-hour limits on free parking spaces. Imagine you’ve come to downtown Carrboro to do some shopping and have parked in a public lot. You shop for about 1.5 hours, and then run into a friend you haven’t seen in a while. They ask you to get lunch at one of downtown’s sit-down restaurants. “Sorry, I can’t- I’m going to get towed in 30 minutes unless I move my car.” With a smartphone or single text message, you could extend your parking downtown by one hour and not have to walk back to your car to do so. You get to enjoy lunch with your friend. And a restaurant gets another customer.

Benefits of Performance Parking Pricing: Customer Turnover for Businesses

With the coming pricing of Chapel Hill Transit Park & Ride lots, town officials are correct to be concerned that downtown public parking lots will be used by commuters to the UNC campus. Maximum parking time limits during class hours on weekdays can significantly deter park/ride activity, but fewer parking attendants can be deployed since the pricing encourages people to watch their time, and smart sensors can alert parking staff to violators so that tickets can be issued quickly.

Benefits of Performance Parking Pricing: Costs to Taxpayers

Enforcement costs money. A decision to enforce parking rules without adding revenue either adds cost to town budgets, or redirects employees who have other duties at present. I’m grateful that crime is much less common in Carrboro than other communities. But do we want to take police away from more important duties to enforce two-hour time limits? If not, the town will likely need to hire new staff. Mayor Chilton was quoted in a recent WCHL story saying:

“if you mess up so bad that you get a parking ticket in the Town of Carrboro, there is nothing that I can do to help you.”

This suggests that current parking enforcement in Carrboro is somewhere between non-existent and very lax. I personally do not think I have seen a single parking ticket on a windshield in the twelve years I have lived here. Inconsistency in enforcement of any rule tends to lead to non-compliance, which means when enforcement begins, more people will be surprised to get ticketed or towed, which means more people will have bad experiences and unmet expectations about visiting downtown. Vigorous enforcement will be needed to break habits and that will not be free to the town budget.

Implementing a parking system like this, of course, also has costs- but pricing brings REVENUE to recoup the cost of the system, and after that point has been passed, the system can generate revenue for the town to improve access to downtown by means other than the private automobile.

Benefits of Performance Parking Pricing: Much Better Than Encouraging Towing

There are lots of reasons to prefer parking pricing over towing. Here are just a few:

Outsourcing enforcement to the private sector. The Town can use its regulations to promote turnover in public lots by towing vehicles, but any revenue generated by motorists who violate town rules winds up going to tow companies and not the Town. With the Town managing pricing, violation fines can be put to public purposes, such as running buses later in the evening on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, making it easier to get downtown without a car in the first place.
Towing is generally much more expensive than a parking ticket to a shopper who violates the rules. Chapel Hill has recent experience with some of the towing firms that are likely to “serve” downtown Carrboro that may be instructive, with tow fees reaching up to $250! We don’t want people to monopolize public parking downtown and prevent it from turning over for new customers, and enforcement should send them a signal that they should behave differently. But a parking ticket is a much better mechanism than towing, and can get the point across without gouging. There’s a big difference between a $20 ticket and your car is where you left it and a $250 tow fee and you have no idea where your vehicle is, and now you have to pay a cab to take you to a remote lot. Who’s more likely to return to downtown Carrboro to shop: the guy who drove home as planned and mailed in a $20 check to Town Hall, or the guy who had to find his car in the woods at 1 a.m. and fork over $200 cash, after the cab that drove him out to somewhere on NC 54 between here and Graham already left?

Benefits of Performance Parking Pricing: Give Local Businesses a Revenue Opportunity

The Daniel Building on West Weaver Street has a series of businesses that are almost all closed at night, and they have several parking spaces. Their sign discourages people from parking there who are not visiting those businesses. That’s their right and this is important during the day for Modern Fossil and others in the building, but generally not at night. If we had a town-wide parking system, the owners of The Daniel Building spaces could add some or all of their spaces to the Performance Parking Pricing pool, and generate revenue from their idle spaces at night, while also expanding the parking supply for late-evening downtown visitors patronizing Open Eye, Steel String, and Tyler’s.

Benefits of Performance Parking Pricing: Real-Time Parking Information

One of the most frustrating recurring parking problems I face in Carrboro is trying to park somewhere near Carrburritos at dinner time. You drive over there, and find that the four spots at Carrburritos are full. So you drive into the Rosemary Lot across the street from BowBarr, and you see a space! Just as you’re about to pull in, you realize it’s the one wheelchair accessible space in the lot and you turn around and drive out. As you exit, you pass someone with a hopeful look driving in, who not only saw a space, but sees you leaving, which means they think you vacated the space! Their hopes are similarly dashed moments later, and your hunt for parking continues, as your car continues to emit emissions and add congestion to the street grid.

Among some of the other benefits listed here, a Performance Parking Pricing system would by definition keep track of which lots in the system had spaces available, in REAL TIME. Many cities have data like this these days using systems like the ParkMe web and smartphone app.

Imagine driving to downtown Carrboro with a map like this that someone in the passenger seat could use as you drove there:

You’d never hunt for parking again because you’d know exactly where to go.

Benefits of Performance Parking Pricing: THERE WILL STILL BE FREE PARKING DOWNTOWN A GOOD DEAL OF THE TIME

Before completely moving on from the map above, notice the price for less than 1.5 hours in Santa Monica: FREE. There are plenty of days and times every week in downtown Carrboro where current lots are not 80% full even at zero cost and (let’s be honest here) pretty much zero enforcement. While adding pricing to high-demand locations at peak times will help fill under-used lots, under a Performance Parking Pricing strategy, lots that remain below 80% occupied at $0/hour stay priced at $0/hour. Until they go above 80% occupied, when it becomes difficult to guarantee an empty space to the next visitor, they would remain FREE.

Performance Parking Pricing vs More Enforcement of Time-Limited Free Parking: Summary

I recognize that for many people and business owners, the idea of paying for parking in a place where it has always been free represents a big shift in thinking about downtown Carrboro. But simply stating “we’re not ready to charge for parking” and saying we’re going to ramp up enforcement on two-hour parking limits doesn’t seem to do the two things that I think would bring merchants the most steady stream of customers, which are:

making the process of finding parking EASIER for customers at high-demand times
establishing a public policy that supports turnover of spaces for commerce

Returning to my Carrburritos example, I’m there enough to know that most people eating there are not staying longer than 1 to 1.5 hours. Even under strict enforcement of a 2-hour limit, all the challenges at the Rosemary Lot I described will almost certainly persist. The 2008 parking study also found that only about 20% of those parking downtown were staying longer than three hours. How many spaces can we really enforce to turnover if most people leave in under two hours anyhow? What if the real gain in spaces for businesses occurs by converting 60 minute downtown visits to 30-minute ones? Making the first 30 minutes free and the time after that paid? The first 60 minutes free? If either of these are true, then enforcing a two-hour limit will be a big waste of time.

What if the optimum time for people to stay downtown from a commerce point of view is a little over two hours? Now the scenario where someone comes downtown to visit one store and then decides to stay longer and get a meal can still get cut short by needing to go move their car, and a local restaurant just lost a customer. Maybe that’s why Santa Monica has their pricing set the way they do? Who knows. Maybe we should ask Town staff to talk to Santa Monica staff.

What I fear an enforcement-only approach means is that a commitment to free parking at all costs is just a guess at what will generate greater parking availability for businesses, and that it will be a costly one in terms of town funds, with no guarantee of actually making more parking available for customers. Beyond the financial aspect, it also looks like a commitment to continued extra cruising in and out of the Rosemary Lot when Carrburritos is slammed, and the same at the Century Center Lot on Thursday evenings when Weaver Street Market has an event. For a community that prides itself on accolades from the Sierra Club and similar organizations, it’s a commitment to extra greenhouse gas emissions that come from that extra cruising for parking. It’s a commitment to more traffic and congestion than necessary, and more time for people who WANT to spend money at downtown businesses to wait until they get to make a transaction while they hunt for spaces. Oh, and if they decide they want to stay longer and shop or dine for more than 120 minutes- sorry, they can’t make that choice legally without walking back to a lot and moving their car.

If simply “more enforcement” of two-hour limits is the answer of an alternative policy to pricing, then the Town should at least be clear about how much the Town budget and taxes might increase to pay for this additional enforcement, or detail which other activities by existing town staff in specific departments will be curtailed to redirect their energies towards parking enforcement.

Finally, there should be a clear metric to measure “success” in a greater-enforcement-but-still-free-public-parking environment downtown that doesn’t involve the number of cars ticketed or towed. If the goal is to have a greater number of spaces available at all times for customers patronizing downtown Carrboro businesses, then that’s what we should count. If anyone can think of a cheap, accurate, statistically viable way to do this without sensors, let me know.

At Its Core, the Word “Urban” Is About Life on Foot

Posted on February 18, 2013 by patrick

However, I think the definition of urban can be made very simple, and most accurate, by tying it to one function: walking. Here is the simplest definition I can offer:

If you live, work or visit somewhere that numerous people regularly walk from one place to another for a variety of reasons other than recreation or exercise, then you are living in, working in, or visiting an urban place.

Christopher Columbus Park, Boston – a Place for Walking

With that in mind, what are some of the primary reasons why we should build urban places?

A Latin Dance Band gets the crowd moving on the Weaver Street Market Lawn at the 2012 Carrboro Music Festival.

Here We Go – Hello Carrboro!

Posted on February 3, 2013 by patrick

Well, here goes nothing. I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a city and town planning blog for a few years, and I think it’s time to give it a shot. Here are some of the ideas that I’ll be working with on this site, in no particular order.

All things being equal, I believe it is better to build communities in an urban pattern than a suburban pattern, for numerous reasons. But most importantly, an urban pattern makes it possible to live a significant portion of one’s life on foot, while a suburban pattern generally makes this difficult, if not impossible. A community where you can participate by walking (or using a wheelchair) is inherently inclusive physically, and this generates numerous benefits socially. I’ll talk about these benefits as time goes by.

Being urban has nothing to do with the size of a community in terms of population or building height, though they are often correlated. You can have urban towns of under 500 people, and suburban cities of hundreds of thousands of residents.

I believe that the benefits of a community built in an urban pattern inevitably demonstrate network effects; the more continuous urban fabric in your community, the more variety you will find in local restaurants, the better your transit system will function, the stronger and deeper your labor markets become, and the more opportunities there are for people of all ages, backgrounds, and income levels to enjoy shared community benefits.

I hope to kickstart discussions of some ideas that I think don’t get enough attention, as well as respond to emerging local issues in Carrboro. As I do, I’d love to hear what you think as well. My first regular piece comes out Tuesday at 7:00 am, and focuses on Informal Markets and their history in cities and towns around the world. I hope you come back and check it out.

Thanks for reading!

CityBeautiful21

Urban Planning for the 21st Century

Category Archives: Definitions

The Fundamentals of Carrboro

Displacement Without Development: Filtering Up on North Greensboro Street

Filtering: A Word We Need to Understand as We Discuss Affordable Housing

Getting Terms Right: At Its Core, The Word “Urban” Is About Life On Foot

If you live, work or visit somewhere that numerous people regularly walk from one place to another for a variety of reasons other than recreation or exercise, then you are living in, working in, or visiting an urban place.

Carrboro’s Summer of Bike-Ped Infrastructure, Part 2

Performance Parking Pricing Is Better For Businesses Than Enforcing Free, Time-Limited Parking

At Its Core, the Word “Urban” Is About Life on Foot

If you live, work or visit somewhere that numerous people regularly walk from one place to another for a variety of reasons other than recreation or exercise, then you are living in, working in, or visiting an urban place.

Here We Go – Hello Carrboro!