If you’re a parent of a child under age 18 in Carrboro like me, I have some weird news to share: Carrboro has a plan to make our kids move away. Nobody thinks of it that way, and I don’t think anybody really intended to make this the plan for our town, but make no mistake – this plan has existed for some time, and it is WORKING.
First: We Need to Have Empathy for Our Children as Young Adults
Think of your favorite pictures of your children. No matter their age, you likely have some pictures of them under age 10 that absolutely make you melt. The joy on their face the first time they ate an ice cream cone. A loving hug with a grandparent. Our kids will always be our babies, and it’s both fine and loving to think of them that way.
But now use your imagination a bit and try to picture them at ages 19, 20, 23, 26 and 28. What is their life like? What are their hopes and dreams? Do they have a job doing something that speaks to them? Where do they live? Do they live close enough that you see them as much as you’d like to?
That last question is going to be partly answered by this election. But let’s unpack the plan to make our kids move away first, and then talk about voting.
Carrboro Runs On A “Send The Kids Packing” Operating System
Maybe your phone is an Apple device with iOS. Or perhaps it’s an Android OS phone. Carrboro’s operating system for building homes and businesses is called the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO). When you see the word UDO, think “BuildingOS.”
Here’s how it works: the Research Triangle Region of North Carolina, where we live, has been one of the fastest growing metropolitan areas in the country for a long time. This creates a ton of demand for housing as new people move in and those already here have children who grow up and move out on their own.
Most of the UDOs communities in the Triangle, from big cities like Raleigh to small towns like Hillsborough and Clayton – have allowed a lot of housing to provide homes for newcomers, and importantly for parents – new households formed by those who grow up here. But not Carrboro.
2: Of the housing that has been built in Carrboro, 84% of it has been for the wealthy
In the last four years, the Town has allowed only two residential buildings that are NOT single family homes to be built. One is the CASA affordable housing building, which has 23 apartment homes in the Town Limits (most of the project is just over the town line in Chapel Hill); the other is a single duplex somewhere in town. 84% of all homes built were single family homes. From a building permits perspective, 98.5% of building permits were for single family homes.
With such limited buildings, housing prices in Carrboro rose by over $200,000 for a single family home in JUST THREE YEARS. Notice by how much less prices rose elsewhere in Wake and Durham counties, which built more housing. Even the non-Chapel Hill/Carrboro portions of Orange County had much smaller price increases.
And in the period where barely any apartments or duplex homes were built, look what happened to rents from 2019 to 2023. Up $327 per month:
When housing gets so expensive so quickly, who moves in and who does not?
In the past decade, while only 25% to 35% of growth came from retirement age residents in Wake, Durham, and Alamance counties, nearly two-thirds of all population growth in Orange County came from retirees.
This means that if our children want to try to live near us as young adults after high school or college, it’s going to be economically VERY DIFFICULT for them to do so. Look at the comparative resources of different age groups in our society:
The Carrboro UDO “BuildingOS” is Working Effectively to Move Young People Away
In addition to not building much housing, Carrboro has created very few job opportunities for young people in town, and the chickens are coming home to roost. Even while Orange County’s population has grown by nearly 15,000 residents in the past decade, we’ve lost 33% of our young workers under age 29 in that same time period.
So Our Town’s BuildingOS Stinks – Is There Anything We Can Do?
YES! The great news at this moment in Town history is that for the FIRST TIME ever, the Town has a comprehensive plan called Carrboro Connects that is designed to repair and replace our broken BuildingOS or UDO with new, improved and updated regulations that will make it possible for more people and jobs to call Carrboro “home,” INCLUDING OUR CHILDEN, if that is what they want to do.
How Will the Carrboro Connects Plan Help Our Kids Stay Local?
First, the Carrboro Connects plan aims to remove barriers to building housing in general, and promote a greater variety of smaller homes such as apartments, duplexes, triplexes, and other buildings that are most likely to be affordable to our children when they are in their 20s.
Second, the plan recommends things like removing parking requirements, which could make it easier for us to create new job opportunities downtown and in the parking lots at Carrboro Plaza and the Shoppes at Jones Ferry shopping center. Got a kid who’s interested in STEM? Wouldn’t it be great if there were STEM job opportunities in wet lab buildings in Carrboro, and not just in Durham and RTP?
These positive outcomes will become our more likely future when the Carrboro Town Council makes enough changes to the Carrboro UDO so that it promotes the goals of the plan, and not the trendlines in the charts above. We probably need to make at least 50 to 100 changes to the UDO to get the outcome we need. The current council has adopted the Carrboro Connects plan, gotten started, and made the first two UDO changes last week.
Okay, This Sounds Great! But It’s Election Season – Are There Candidates Running Who Support Implementing the Carrboro Connects Plan?
YES! Four candidates out of the six running for public office support the Carrboro Connects plan instead of sticking with the send-our-kids-packing status quo. Those candidates are:
For Mayor: Barbara Foushee
For Town Council:
Catherine Fray
Jason Merrill
Eliazar Posada
Each of them either directly participated in the development of the Carrboro Connects plan, voted to approve it, or supports its completion.
Each of these candidates understand that we have this fundamental choice in front of us:
Our status quo accepts changing the PEOPLE who live in town to be older, wealthier and whiter – to avoid adding new buildings in town.
The Carrboro Connects Plan accepts adding buildings in town, making them more numerous and varied – to avoid changing the PEOPLE who live and work in those buildings, allowing more people who already love Carrboro to stay here, and making it easier for our kids to stick around.
Barbara Foushee, Catherine Fray, Jason Merrill and Eliazar Posada have swept every endorsement of consequence because they understand this is our principle challenge as a community. I give them my unequivocal, most enthusiastic endorsement! See the other endorsements they have received below.
Meet the Carrboro Better Together slate!
Please support these excellent candidates by voting for them early ahead of Election Day! Information on early voting in Orange County can be found below. Remember – this year, for the first time, a photo ID is required to vote!
Now that we’re several weeks into election season, we’re getting a clearer picture of the priorities of each of the Carrboro Town Council candidates.
What’s also clear is that while there are five candidates running, there are functionally two groups of candidates aligned around two different sets of priorities.
The first group includes incumbent Town Councilor Elizar Posada, former Planning Board chair Catherine Fray, and the former owner of Back Alley Bikes, Jason Merrill. Merrill also previously served on the Transportation Board when he lived in Chapel Hill. They have named their slate “Carrboro Better Together.”
The second group includes legal firm Client Relationship Executive and Triangle Red Cross Board Member April Mills and former UNC-Chapel Hill Systems Analyst and Meals on Wheels volunteer Stephanie Wade. While they have not named their slate (to my knowledge) they are campaigning together with joint advertising and canvassing. For this article, I will refer to them as “The Newcomers” since this appears to be their first time running or seeking to join a Town Board.
All of the candidates running are personally and professionally accomplished, and demonstrate a high level of engagement in the campaign.
How to Evaluate Candidates In a Campaign
The longer I follow politics at any level, the less interested I am in someone’s experience, and the more interested I am in how a candidate defines and understands various issues and ultimately, how they will vote on key issues before the community.
Fortunately, all the campaigns have provided a lot of information in this regard through published platforms, social media, and questions answered in public forums. We’ll get to that shortly. But first, what are the priorities of Carrboro residents?
The 2021 Carrboro Community Survey: What People All Over Town Want
Carrboro surveys its residents every few years using a telephone and mail survey, with scientific demographic sampling and follow-up designed to ensure that those responding to the survey are representative of the town, which is:
“Based on the sum of their top two choices, the transportation services that residents thought were most important were: 1) ease of walking in Carrboro, 2) availability of greenways/multi-use paths, and 3) ease of driving in Carrboro.”
“The most important aspect of housing to Carrboro residents was the availability of housing options by price.”
and, in the body of the full report:
“Today, community leaders have limited resources which need to be targeted to activities that are of the most benefit to their citizens. Two of the most important criteria for decision making are (1) to target resources toward services of the highest importance to citizens; and (2) to target resources toward those services where citizens are the least satisfied.”
Only 26% of Carrboro residents are satisfied with the price points of housing in Town. The survey recommends this be the #1 issue that the Town seeks to address.
The Candidates On Two Timely Topics In Town: Affordable Housing and the Bolin Creek Greenway
On housing, as on many issues, Catherine Fray brings their planning board experience to offer precise policy actions they would support: (from frayforcarrboro.com/platform/)
And at the NEXT/IFC/CEF/EMPOWERment candidate forum, a question was asked if candidates would support the 34 affordable housing units proposed for town-owned land on Pathway Drive. The forum was recorded (links go to YouTube comments of the candidates) and here is the summary portion of Fray’s detailed answer:
Let’s unpack this a bit. To recap, Fray, Posada, and Merrill support building affordable housing on the Pathway Site. All three of them are focused on the broad affordability challenge in the community, and how it makes it hard for people across the income spectrum to remain in Carrboro.
Mills would not commit to nor outright oppose affordable housing on the site, and says that the [storm]”water and how it impacts others is just as important.” There is no development plan for the Pathway Site yet; it is early in a screening process to see what the site can accommodate in terms of housing while also meeting environmental rules. It’s entirely possible that a site plan can be created that adds no net new stormwater to the neighborhoods beyond the site. Building taller and more densely on some of the land may leave more of the land available for drainage. But Mills also raises the prospect of aesthetic criteria, putting a taller building on less land strategy that could help on stormwater in conflict with her “match the neighborhood” criterion. While not saying an outright “no,” Mills is making it clear that her priority is the perceived concerns of the neighbors (stormwater, aesthetics) and that housing for low-income residents is important, but perhaps a lower priority. (as another indicator, see Mills’ door hanger below, which mentions stormwater but not affordability)
Stephanie Wade did not attend the forum above, but has made it clear through instagram that she opposes affordable housing on Pathway Drive, and perhaps any housing anywhere else in town.
There are several policy implications of this post. Wade stated:
“One of the things I am very passionate about is tackling the affordable housing problems in Carrboro that come from being an area that has high demand.”
Then:
“Adding homes, apartments and other dwellings isn’t the answer.”
Interestingly, Wade later edited the post and the italicized sentence was removed. Here’s the current post:
Even if one ignores the deleted “no adding homes” comment, Wade’s remaining prescriptions face potentially insurmountable challenges for legal, functional and financial reasons. Those reasons are:
Rent control is illegal in NC, and there is no legislative lever that the Town Council can pull on existing housing to prevent any landlord, corporate or local, from raising the rent by a certain amount.
Apartment construction is THE primary method that created MOST of the affordable housing built in the area, particularly in the last ten years. That includes non-profit development projects like Greenfield Commons in Chapel Hill and Perry Place on the Chapel Hill/Carrboro town line. It also includes Shelton Station, built by for-profit developer Belmont Sayre, which includes 20 affordable and 74 market rate apartments. Another for-profit developer built The Landing at Winmore, where Wade had just visited prior to posting. It’s going to be hard to build affordable housing for individuals below the Area Median Income (AMI) without building apartments.
3. Our Transit funds are fully committed for some time. Chapel Hill Transit, GoTriangle and Orange Public Transportation have all made investments in recent years. The planned Hillsborough Train Station has funding reserved in our county transit plan. Between these investments and construction funds reserved for the crucial North-South Bus Rapid Transit project in Chapel Hill, nearly every transit dollar in the county is already committed for the next several years, perhaps as far out as 2030. When Wade says that we must add more transit before adding any more housing, she is inherently implying either:
a)the Town should support a multi-year-long development moratorium on all housing until new bus service arrives, which could be as late as 2030 b)the Town should raise taxes to pay for more public transportation
As a final piece of information to assess how Mills and Wade prioritize affordable housing, I’ve taken a picture of their door hanger literature below. Neither mentions affordable housing in their priorities, despite it being the #1 issue in the Town Survey. Public transportation is also not mentioned on either door hanger.
The Candidates ON TRANSPORTATION & THE BOLIN CREEK GREENWAY
The NEXT/IFC/CEF/EMPOWERment Forum asked if the Town Council should complete the Bolin Creek greenway sections 3 and 4. Here are key excerpts of the answers of the candidates who attended. We’ll start with The Newcomers this time.
While Stephanie Wade did not attend this forum, she recently made the statement below on social media that mirrors Mills’ statement about greenways not being allowed in already-cleared-of-trees OWASA easements.
It’s possible that Mills and Wade have been given misinformation here, as MOST of the greenways in both Chapel Hill and Carrboro have been built in OWASA easements, which Ryan Byars has documented (with photos!) here.
Here’s what the Carrboro Better Together slate had to say on the issue.
The Crystallization of the Election in One Comment
While Merrill was only speaking about the greenway in the comment above, he touched upon the primary axis around which every other issue in the campaign revolves – should public policy decisions should be viewed primarily through the eyes of wealthy homeowners who live near proposed public investments, or should we take a broader view while also parsing those concerns?
Here’s a map showing the median income of the town, the proposed Bolin Creek Greenway Phases 3 and 4, and the proposed Pathway Drive affordable housing site. It’s impossible to miss how the greenway would connect lower-income parts of the community to the south to Chapel Hill High School, Smith Middle School, and Seawell Elementary at the north end of the greenway alignment.
On these two key issues, the Carrboro Better Together slate and the Newcomers slate have clearly different priorities.
The Carrboro Better Together candidates will support the completion of public investments in the Bolin Creek Greenway along the creekside alignment and affordable housing on town-owned land on Pathway Drive. Both will connect residents across the income spectrum to schools, parks, and each other.
The Newcomer candidates, while being less definitive on both projects, are more likely to oppose both the construction of affordable housing on Pathway Drive, and to oppose the creekside alignment while supporting other alignment plans that are promoted by anti-greenway groups such as the Friends of Bolin Creek. The Newcomers’ objection to both is couched in terms of stormwater and environmental management, even though there are plenty of local examples of technical best practies on both of these fronts. (Shelton Station apartments detains stormwater underground to prevent flooding; the Bolin Creek Greenway in Chapel Hill used multiple techniques that have stabilized the creekbed and prevented erosion.)
Does Where We Stand Ultimately Depend Upon Where We Sit?
As we consider these five candidates, it is also worth knowing that the Newcomer candidates both live in census tracts on the north side of town that both have median incomes over $100,000 per year, while the Carrboro Better Together candidates all live in the Census Tract that had a median income of $36,059 in the map above.
So it’s not surprising that the Carrboro Better Together candidates might hear more about housing cost challenges from their neighbors, and that the Newcomers might hear more from their neighbors about stormwater, since their financial basic needs are more likely to be met.
When any of these five candidates say “this is what I’m hearing,” we should taken them at their word.
What is most interesting about these two sets of platforms is that while it’s clear that the Newcomers’ platform is likely to block substantial priorities of the Carrboro Better Together slate, the reverse is not necessarily true. While the Newcomers are talking about stormwater as a problem, Catherine Fray from the Carrboro Better Together slate is as well, and has been identifying actionable strategies the Town can take to work on the stormwater issue, including using the stormwater utility that the Town established in 2017. Watch them break the issue down here in their closing statement from the forum:
The Town Survey, The Comprehensive Plan, The Candidates and The Future
In 2023, we have a very good idea of what is important to Carrboro residents at a large scale thanks to the 2021 Town Survey, and also the Carrboro Connects Comprehensive Plan process, which involved over 1,600 residents in Town and won an award for inclusive engagement.
The Carrboro Connects plan declares its two foundational pillars to be Racial Equity and Climate Action. Addressing these issues in 2023 largely requires TAKING actions and building things to change the course of an inequitable and climate-change-accelerating status quo.
The Carrboro Better Together slate largely supports the direction set by Carrboro Connects plan, and would TAKE action to build low-to-zero-carbon transportation choices like the Bolin Creek Greenway, and TAKE racial equity steps forward like developing affordable housing on Town-owned land, including Pathway Drive.
The Newcomers are less precise in their policy preferences, and express skepticism or outright opposition to the completing the Bolin Creek Greenway or building affordable housing on Pathway Drive. On these issues, the primary policy approach of the Newcomers would be the PREVENTION of actions, particularly construction (of greenways or homes) in the wealthiest part of Carrboro, and perhaps other parts of town as well.
Carrboro’s future will hinge on which of these two directions the electorate chooses in November.
On Tuesday, May 16th, the Town Council will discuss the potential of removing parking requirements in town for the first time.
The Short Story: All of the information the Town Council needs to make a decision about parking requirements is already in the public domain, and there is no additional research that can be undertaken to further illuminate the policy question. To take an affirmative, meaningful step towards the goals of Climate Action and Racial Equity that uphold the Carrboro Connects plan, THE TOWN COUNCIL SHOULD VOTE ON MAY 16TH TO CONVERT ALL MINIMUM PARKING REQUIREMENTS TO MAXIMUM PARKING ALLOWANCES IN THE FOLLOWING LOCATIONS:
Downtown Carrboro zoning districts
All non-residential parcels within ½ of mile of All-Day (J, CW, CM) and Express (JFX, 405) bus routes
AND ELIMINATE ALL MINIMUM PARKING REQUIREMENTS IN THE REMAINDER OF THE TOWN, WHILE REFRAINING FROM ADDING PARKING MAXIMUMS ON RESIDENTIAL-ONLY PARCELS.
Any alternative policy that requires developer negotiation with staff or council to meet a parking number is a version of the failed status quo and should be considered dead on arrival at the Council table.
Before we get into the details, I want to make two key points. The first:
THE ELIMINATION OF MINIMUM PARKING REQUIREMENTS DOES NOT REQUIRE THAT NEW DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS HAVE ZERO PARKING SPACES.
201 N Greensboro street recently got a permit that did not use the town’s minimum parking requirements – they simply proposed a number that made more in line with the actual use they anticipate. The removal of parking requirements allows developers to bring in proposals with a number of parking spaces they think makes sense while meeting other project goals like street trees, affordable housing, and high quality design. It saves time and helps get us good projects faster.
The second key point:
THE PRIMARY GOAL OF ELIMINATING PARKING REQUIREMENTS IS TO MAKE GOOD DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS (INCLUDING THOSE WITH AFFORDABLE HOUSING COMPONENTS) CEASE TO BE FINANCIALLY INFEASIBLE DUE TO AN ARBITRARY NUMBER OF PARKING SPACES IN THE TOWN CODE THAT DRIVES UP CONSTRUCTION COSTS. REMOVING MINIMUM PARKING REQUIREMENTS STILL ALLOWS ANY DEVELOPER TO PROPOSE AS MUCH PARKING AS THEY WOULD LIKE.
The Details:
The Town Staff materials on the policy have several shortcomings we need to unpack to have a healthy community conversation about this. If you read the Staff Materials, you might have the following take-aways:
That we know nothing about how Carrboro residents travel today that could help us think about whether eliminating parking minimums has risks to the town.
That altering policy on parking requirements requires a certain level of transit service or it can’t be done.
That removing parking requirements raises the risk of a flood of automobiles into Carrboro city streets for on-street parking that will be so substantial that it will block fire trucks and first responders to reach emergencies, and these are potential outcomes even along semi-rural Rogers Rd.
That parking requirements have nothing to do with climate change, which is not mentioned in the document.
That it is not possible for Town Council will take an action any sooner than fall 2023.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly – it presumes that the status quo is less risky and more equitable than the potential policy change. Unrealistic risks that have not happened in other communities that have reformed parking are imagined in the staff memo, and the force that parking requirements apply to make mixed-use and mixed income housing projects financially infeasible – is only obliquely referenced.
The remainder of this blog post addresses each of these shortcomings in the staff materials.
ANALYSIS USING CARRBORO TRANSPORTATION COMMUTING BEHAVIOR DATA
If we care about slowing climate change, we must work to actively reduce the auto-dependency of our communities. However, the staff memo does the opposite, assumes a fully auto-dependent population, and assumes that for each new development, that every developer will underestimate the needs of their building, and that they will not provide enough spaces and produce spillover effects on town streets. But does every Carrboro resident drive everywhere? No. We have lots of data on this.
Nearly Half of Carrboro Commuters Carpool, Take the Bus, Bike, Walk or Telecommute
Here are the 5-Year Average Estimates for Carrboro commuting modes from the American Community Survey, the best publicly available data, for the years 2017-2021:
Drove Alone
Carpool
Transit
Bike / Walk / Telecommute
Total
55.3%
7.9%
10.9%
25.8%
100.0%
Method of commuting to work, Carrboro American Community Survey, 2017-2021
Prior to the pandemic, Carrboro was already one of the towns with the highest percentage of residents who DON’T drive alone to work in the Southeast. The work-from-home revolution has significantly contributed to the expansion of the Bike/Walk/Telecommute number above, and transit use in Carrboro remains at a level equal to or above that of suburbs of major US cities with mature rail systems.
What does this mean for parking use? It means being a two-worker, one car household in Carrboro is much easier than in other communities. It means that when I go downtown on good weather days, I’m much more likely to bike than drive. Our household of three has gone from being a two-car family to a one-car family for the past 18 months, and living in Carrboro makes it possible because we have transportation choices. As we permit new buildings, the new residents will have the same opportunities.
Carrboro literally welcomes new residents and helps them to drive less!
We don’t just see this in commuting data, though. We also see it in traffic counts.
TRAFFIC COUNTS HAVE FALLEN SIGNIFICANTLY IN CARRBORO OVER THE PAST TWENTY YEARS
The only place in town you see counts rising is on NC 54, because that is predominantly pass-through traffic in our growing region. Within town, our residents are driving less and biking, walking, and working from home more.
The final point I want to make here is that between 2000 and 2020, Carrboro also grew from 16,782 residents to 21,295! The town added almost 5,000 new residents and CAR TRAFFIC FELL ALL OVER TOWN.
WHY IS THIS DATA RELEVANT?
What we see in our commute data tells us that if we pick 20 Carrboro residents at random, 12 of them will drive to work alone, two of them will carpool, another two will ride the bus, and four will bike, walk or work from home.
But our ordinance in the staff memo (Attachment B, sections 1.100 through 1.300 of the Part I table) basically assigns one parking space per bedroom, or two parking spaces per unit. This is functionally requiring 20 parking spaces for the 20 random individuals above. We’re requiring too much, and making housing more expensive by requiring the unneeded parking.
THE LEVEL OF TRANSIT SERVICE IS LARGELY IRRELEVANT TO REMOVING PARKING REQUIREMENTS
If finding the “right” level of transit service to safely eliminate parking requirements was critical, we would see parking crises in towns with less bus service than Carrboro that have taken this action. However, towns in NC that have eliminated parking minimums include:
Graham (83% Drive Alone in 2017-2021 ACS)
Mebane (85% Drove Alone)
Albemarle (82% Drove Alone)
Mooresville (84% Drove Alone)
Gastonia (84% Drove Alone)
All of these places have significantly less transit service than Carrboro, and Graham and Mebane grow much faster than Carrboro does due to our restrictive zoning. Even during the bus operator shortage, the J bus still operates 15-minute service on Main Street and 20-minute frequency on the CW in the morning. The CM and JFX supplement with rush hour frequencies of 15 to 25 minutes, and GoTriangle 405 connects us to Durham every 30 minutes. These are excellent transit frequencies at peak times in any southeastern US city. Only the F bus, which only runs four daily roundtrips at this point, has a qualitatively different and noticeably low level of service. It is reasonable therefore to exclude the F but otherwise support parking policy reforms around the remaining All-Day (J,CM, CW) and Express (JFX,405) services.
If the towns above aren’t having parking nightmares with less transit and 30% more drive-alone commuters, why are we contemplating such outcomes in Carrboro? Surely if the votes to reform parking in these five other communities had created significant problems, we’d be able to find news of it. That doesn’t seem to be the case. From a qualitative point of view, if you haven’t been to downtown Graham recently, it’s jumping. Old buildings are full of new businesses and it’s an increasingly lively and pleasant place, and the elimination of parking requirements has been a key ingredient in activating old buildings with new businesses.
If these small towns with fewer transportation choices and greater auto-dependency can make these parking change without crisis, Carrboro, with its significantly larger transit, bike, and telecommuting mode shares, can likely do so without any noticeable impact on our streets, given our reduced traffic counts in recent years.
CLIMATE ACTION IS A PILLAR OF THE CARRBORO CONNECTS PLAN
It’s frustrating to see a document from the Town related to Carrboro Connects that is silent on climate change.
Councilor Slade has made repeated valiant efforts to bring climate action to the Council Table, and I believe that the Council is earnestly interested in taking action. Transportation is the largest source of GHG emissions in Orange County, and therefore is the biggest lever to push to move the needle locally to reduce GHG emissions. Requiring too much parking is fundamentally encouraging further auto use when we need to reduce it. Eliminating parking requirements doesn’t even discourage auto use, it merely stops over-promoting it. Developers can still choose to provide parking at a level that is out of touch with climate imperatives. Parking maximums, however, with their limits on ultimate parking supply, affirmatively discourage auto use, which is why I recommend it as the preferred policy at the beginning of this post.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Orange County by Sector
THE USE OF THE RACIAL EQUITY POCKET QUESTIONS IS INCOMPLETE
As a regular reader of Town Council packets, I observe that the Racial Equity Pocket Questions are primarily posed to consider the racial equity benefits and impacts of a proposed policy change, but not the racial equity dimensions of the status quo policy situation.
This is a problem as it assumes that the current state of affairs is inherently more equitable, even though the Carrboro Connects plan identifies many inequities in town that demand action more than additional study. The Racial Equity Pocket Questions are one of the best new practices in local governance, but they need to examine the status quo as vigorously as any proposed policy change for the best outcomes.
SOME OF THE ANALYSIS IS AT ODDS WITH CURRENT LOCAL TRENDS AND BEST PRACTICESIN TRANSPORTATION PLANNING
While several of the answers in the Racial Equity Pocket Questions in the staff memo are well-considered, there is also a good deal of unrealistic speculation that is at odds with most transportation planning best practices and what we know about relative life safety risks in our community. For example, the memo states:
“Unintended consequences include the congestion of small streets that are unequipped for street parking (as residents who live or move into the area still have cars). Congested streets could make it difficult for emergency services to access residences, could make the streets more dangerous for walkers and cyclists…”
First – development in Carrboro is so slow and so difficult due to our development ordinances, that it is not going to be possible to develop quickly enough in most of the town for this to become a problem. Removing parking minimums is usually a necessary, but not sufficient step to unlocking new economic development opportunities, mixed-use buildings that drive tax revenue for equity goals, and new affordable housing concepts. Unfortunately, the town’s development ordinances have many other hurdles embedded in them that will also need to be overcome. But this situation also means it will be impossible for a parking problem to overtake the town with any speed, especially in residential neighborhoods.
Second, this paragraph is embedded with the assumption that ever more car use is inevitable, even as noted above, car traffic on many Carrboro streets has fallen by 50% over 20 years!
Regarding congestion, the Town of Chapel Hill just added parking protected bike lanes to Franklin Street, and car speeds are slower and people walking and on bike report feeling much safer even though motorists might consider the street more congested. Many Vision Zero strategies that municipalities are using to reduce traffic deaths and life-altering injuries intentionally deploy congestion as a tool to slow automobile speeds.
From an overall life safety perspective, many more residents in Carrboro are injured each year by traffic violence than by fires in homes or businesses. Making streets fast for first responders mostly makes them fast for all other drivers, which puts everyone in town at greater risk every day, even if it gets a fire truck to a house a few seconds earlier on a much less frequent basis.
A second excerpt states: “Spatial analysis…—indicates most of the parcels in Carrboro’s two qualified census tracts (QCTs) as well as historically Black neighborhoods near Rogers Road and Alabama Avenue would be impacted by changes identified in this project.”
Again, this statement seems to be embedded with the notion that removing parking requirements will lead developers simply not to provide parking, leading to congest the sides of streets like Rogers Rd with parking on the shoulder of the street. Whether they are private developers or mission-driven ones such as a church, both have self-interested incentives not to do this. Private developers have profit at risk, and want to meet consumer preferences. In places that have a semi-rural built environment, such as Rogers Rd, the expectation will very much be for off-street parking, and developers will likely cater to that expectation to sell or rent their homes. Similarly, if a church or other mission-driven organization like Habitat for Humanity proposes a development, they will likely propose parking locations that work for their stakeholders, not those that straddle the road right-of-way. This is a significant amount of discussion for a risk that is unlikely to materialize.
WHAT’S THE MOST PRO-CLIMATE ACTION AND PRO-RACIAL EQUITY POSITION POSSIBLE?
On climate, sustaining minimum parking requirements is 100% in conflict with all climate goals, and is Anti-Climate Action. This consensus spans all kinds of publications, from Bloomberg to Mother Jones, and international transit advocacy organizations:
Maintaining minimum parking requirements is the bad-for-the-climate status quo that Carrboro must move on from on Tuesday night.
As mentioned at the top of the post, eliminating parking requirements still allows a developer to propose as many parking spaces as they would like for a project, even if that number of spaces encourages auto dependency. So eliminating parking requirements is progress from a bad status quo but is still only climate-neutral.
With required parking maximums that cannot be exceeded, the Town is explicitly directing developers to take positive Climate Action to bring forth concepts that double down on Carrboro’s strong mode share performance for biking, walking and transit, and to de-emphasize car use as much as feasible while still bringing new jobs and economic development to Carrboro.
Relative alignment of Parking Requirement approaches with Climate Change Mitigation Action
Regarding racial equity, BIPOC homeowners, particularly black residents, have been negatively impacted by systemic racism that discouraged bank lending and wealth-building through homeownership in minority communities over many decades. While adopting maximum parking requirements is a stronger climate policy than simply eliminating minimum parking requirements, applying maximum parking requirements only to commercial properties in Downtown Carrboro and within ½-mile of all-day and express bus services allows commercial landowners to lead on parking supply innovation while ensuring that BIPOC homeowners (and all homeowners) have the freedom to build as much or as little parking on their land as suits their needs. Taking the climate neutral approach of Eliminating Parking Requirements on residential-only land in Town is therefore positive movement on climate while also being a pro-Racial Equity position that does not add regulatory burdens to homeowners, including BIPOC homeowners.
IN CLOSING: CARRBORO CONNECTS CAN BE A COMPREHENSIVE PLAN OR A COMPREHENSIVE WISH
Most of the data in this blog post is old. We know a lot. A plan is something you do and we have enough information to give us the wisdom to act.
Adding density to land in town on transit routes in small units offers one of our best chances to expand the stock of small multifamily homes that will have some legally binding affordable units, and others that will be attainable to 1 and 2 person households near the median income. But our parking requirements are probably the #1 barrier to making this happen.
So the land use reform vs affordability debate is on the table again Tuesday night, as it has been at every Town Council meeting since the Carrboro Connects plan was adopted on June 7th, 2022. The median home price has risen about 5% (~$21,000) since plan adoption. Waiting has consequences.
Carrboro Connects plan is a great document informed by the most inclusive planning process the town has ever done. But without policy action, it’s a comprehensive wish, not a plan.
There are lots of great reasons to complete the Phase 3 and 4 segments of the Bolin Creek Greenway through Carrboro that include a wide variety of environmental benefits. But equally important are the equity benefits that the community will receive from completing the greenway.
Connecting Students to Public Schools
There are three Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools that are close to the proposed Phase 3 and 4 segments of the Bolin Creek Greenway: Seawell Elementary School, Smith Middle School, and Chapel Hill High School.
Really? Where?
The image below shows proximate the northern portion of the greenway would be to the three schools. Connecting the greenway to each of them would be easy to do as part of the Phase 3 and 4 project. The Chapel Hill High School-Homestead Rd path already connects neighborhoods north of Homestead Rd to Chapel Hill High School near the tennis courts.
Talking Equity: The Differences Between Household Income Along the Proposed Greenway and School Demographics at Seawell, Smith, and CHHS
The households living in the Census Block Groups immediately adjacent to the proposed phase 3 and phase 4 segments of the Bolin Creek Greenway have only 3% of residents living in poverty, and have median incomes over $123,000 per year. (well above the median income for Chapel Hill/Carrboro of roughly $77,000 per year) The map below shows the relative income of Census Block groups near Phase 3 and 4, labeled as “Bolin Creek Missing Greenway.”
However, data gathered by US News shows that the percentages of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunch (strongly correlated with household poverty) at the three schools are notably higher:
Seawell Elementary: 26% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch
Smith Middle School: 23% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch
Chapel Hill High School: 16% of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch
Here are individual median incomes identified for some of the Census Block Groups near the proposed Greenway. In each case, the median household income of the block group is identified in a green box.
South of Estes Drive and East of North Greensboro Street
The Census Block Group immediately south of Estes drive and East of North Greensboro Street has the lowest median household income near the proposed greenway. This area include the Estes Park apartments and the 605 Oak Avenue public housing community.
Immediately East of the University Railroad and West of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd in Chapel Hill
This Census Block Group has a median income of roughly $72,000 per year, which is closer to (but still below) the median income in the area.
North of Estes Drive and Surrounding the Proposed Greenway Alignment
The Census Block that largely surrounds the proposed greenway on both sides has a median income of over $123,000 per year.
The Attendance Zones for These Schools Serve Low-Income Neighborhoods in both Carrboro and Chapel Hill
Here are the Smith Middle School attendance zones laid on top of the income map and the proposed greenway alignment. What becomes pretty obvious is that the SCHOOLS are at the north end of proposed Bolin Creek Greenway and many of the neighborhoods with lower and middle income residents are at the south end.
Completing this portion of the greenway (and connecting the southern end to Umstead Park in Chapel Hill!) would really provide a safe, healthy, environmentally friendly transportation choice for students at all three schools, though particularly middle school and high school students, who are more likely to take a longer trip by foot or bike.
Given that the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools are facing unprecedented challenges in hiring school bus drivers to bring children to school, and that low-income families are less likely to have a car available to drive a child to school if their bus doesn’t show up, completing the Bolin Creek Greenway is more than a way to create emission-free, environmentally-friendly trips between neighborhoods – it’s a way to help make access to education more equitable, resilient and reliable for everyone.
The Carrboro Linear Parks Project has brought significant attention to the need to complete the Bolin Creek Greenway (BCG) in recent months, and it appears that the Town Council may take up a process to re-start the design and engineering of the BCG in 2023.
Given this development, and that one of the founding pillars of the Carrboro Connects plan is Racial Equity, I spent two evenings this week re-watching the last two major public meetings about the BCG from 2016, when the Chapel Hill High School-Homestead Path portion of the BCG was a hot topic in town.
A recent study in greater Boston, where white residents make up 80% of the population, found that over 95% of speakers at public meetings were white. How representative of Carrboro were the speakers at the last two BCG meetings? While I had impressions of those meetings in my mind, as I attended and spoke at both, I wanted to get hard data.
A Target for Representative Input: Carrboro Town Profile Some quick Carrboro stats from the 2020 Decennial Census and 2021 American Community Survey 5-Year estimates for the Carrboro population:
Renting/Owning a Home ▪ 58% of Carrboro residents are renters ▪ 42% are homeowners
Race/Ethnicity ▪ 12.8% of Carrboro residents are Hispanic/Latino ▪ 10.0% of Carrboro residents are Black ▪ 62.2% of Carrboro residents are White ▪ 8.8% of Carrboro residents are Asian ▪ Approximately 6% of Carrboro residents are multi-racial
Income (Earnings in Last 12 Months, 2021) ▪ 6% of Carrboro residents earned less than $25,000 ▪ 37.2% earned $25,000 to $49,999 ▪ 19.2% earned $50,000 to $74,999 ▪ 13.2% earned $75,000 to $99,999 24.2% earned $100,000 or more
Age ▪ 21% of Carrboro residents are age 19 or younger ▪ 24.5% are age 20 to 29 ▪ 16.1% are age 30 to 39 ▪ 11.8% are age 40 to 49 ▪ 11.5% are age 50 to 59 ▪ 8% are age 60 to 69 ▪ 7.1% are 70 and up
Looking at these stats, a representative set of speakers at a Town Council podium would be mostly renters, about 4 out of 10 would be non-white, primarily under age 40, and 60% would earn less than $75,000. What did I find?
Like Boston, Public Commenters in the Last Two Carrboro BCG Meetings Were Almost Entirely Wealthy Older White People
Example 1: BCG Public Comment Stats from May 10th, 2016
▪ All 16 of the speakers were white. I was able to confirm that 14 of the 16 identified as Non-Hispanic or Latino White on their voter registration. ▪ Using Anywho.com and Spokeo.com, I was able to get ages for all but one speaker. The average age of the speakers was 54, the median age was 57, and other than one 17- year-old, the youngest speaker was 41. 10 of the 16 speakers were over age 50. ▪ Using voter address data and the Orange County Land Records system, I learned that 100% of speakers were homeowners, and none were renters. ▪ Using Zillow.com and home value as a proxy for income/wealth, I learned that the median home value in 2022 for speakers is $635,700. Assuming a household could afford a $63,500 down payment, they would then need an annual household income of over $154,000 to buy such a home. ▪ Video documentation of this meeting is available here – Carrboro Granicus 5-10-2016 Town Council Meeting
Example 2: BCG Public Comment Stats from May 17th, 2016
▪ 7 of the 8 speakers were white, one identified as Latino in their voter registration. ▪ The average age of the speakers was again 54, the median age was 52, and the youngest speaker was 42. ▪ Again, 100% of speakers were homeowners, and none were renters. ▪ The median home value in 2022 for these 8 speakers is $662,650. ▪ Video documentation of this meeting is available here – Carrboro Granicus 5-17-2016Town Council Meeting
Three Interesting Tidbits
TIDBIT 1: The most fascinating finding for me in this exercise was that in both meetings, the person who lived in the most expensive house took the most time speaking at the podium!
No, I’m not kidding. In the May 10th meeting, it was a homeowner in a house currently valued at $1.07 million who spoke the longest, and on May 17th, the longest speaker spoke at the podium for 19 painful minutes. They have since moved away, but the house they lived in is presently valued at $1.8 million.
TIDBIT 2: Like in NCAA sports, there is apparently a NIMBY Transfer Portal! The lengthiest anti-greenway speaker at the May 10th meeting apparently got a great NIL deal or something, and moved out to La Quinta, CA, where they promptly joined La Quinta Residents for Responsible Development and recently killed a proposed wave pool resort near their home.
TIDBIT 3: In both meetings, multiple members of a single household spoke. On May 10th, 2016, there were two sets of adults who lived in the same home who spoke, as well as one mother/son pair who spoke. On May 17th, there was another pair of adults living in the same home who spoke. These multi-household-member-with-similar-opinion comments further narrow an already limited demographic pool.
Carrboro Must Stop Holding Public Comment Sessions Like This For a town that says it is making Racial Equity a foundational element of its decisionmaking going forward, it’s hard to think of a reason that this type of engagement process should continue at all.
It took me about 8 hours to document these two meetings and research the characteristics of the participants. While I am sure a labor-intensive effort could turn up meetings prior to the very intentional Carrboro Connects process that had slightly more representative socio-demographic voices from the town speaking at a podium, the truth is what is documented above is much more the status quo norm than any unusual occurrence.
People shouldn’t have to sit in a specific room at a certain time of day, and wait for hours to speak for 1-2 minutes in order for their input to matter. This is unfair to parents who put small children to bed in the early evening, people who work second shift, and those who depend on transit services that shut off for the night before a lengthy meeting may end.
People shouldn’t have to be subjected to an intimidating environment and be heckled when they speak a view not shared by others in the audience. I was yelled at while speaking in both of my comments, which you can see in the videos. Others I know who supported the CHHS path did not attend the second meeting because of the environment in the first meeting. We can’t let that happen the next time we discuss the BCG.
A more equitable public input process going forward might include a time period (one week?) prior to a Town Council decision point for residents to submit their demographics and videos or voice recordings up to 1 minute in length from their mobile phones, and then allow town staff to curate a representative set of remarks that reflects the broader community, and not just a few voices with a lot of free time, and lasts no longer than 10 minutes in a meeting setting.
The staff would also spend time presenting opinion data from larger efforts with higher data validity, like the 2021 Carrboro Community survey and the Carrboro Connects planning process.
Sharing data and insights from events out in the community that were attended by Town staff would also be valuable.
Stopping Doing the Wrong Things Is Still Progress Even If The Right Thing Isn’t Entirely Clear Yet Recently our neighbor Chapel Hill has had some pretty good breakthroughs under the facilitation of Canadian planner Jennifer Keesmat. With that in mind, I’d like to share a slide from former Vancouver chief planner Brent Toderian that I like.
I am sure that the question of “what does equitable engagement that supports racial equity look like in Carrboro?” will not be easy to answer, and that there will be some trial and error along the way.
But we know public comment as currently practiced in Town Council meetings in Carrboro is broken and built for privilege, just as it is in most other communities that use podium comments to shape decisions. Before we open another public discussion on the BCG, or any other important community issue, let’s find a way to eliminate or minimize the importance of podium comments in Town Council meetings, and jump from item #1 to item #4 in the slide above.
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