When I wrote my “Fundamentals of Carrboro” blog post, I shared this Barack Obama-ism to point out how most of the things we want to see happen in Carrboro are under the control of the Town Council, and that while there are state and federal programs and resources that can be leveraged, none of them are any use to us if we don’t take votes at the local government level, and then follow up with more action after key votes.
As Damon Seils’ service as Mayor comes to a close, I believe that he has understood this better than anyone in Town, and that we will look back on his final term and consider our current elected board to be “the Consequential Council.”
I had a conversation with Damon when he was transitioning from Town Councilor to Mayor and he told me something like this: “we spend a lot of time listening to and receiving reports. That’s useful, but our time as a group is valuable, and I want us to use more of that time to make decisions that move the town forward.”
Key Votes of the Consequential Council
The 2021 to 2023 Town Council is a testament to the decision-oriented governing style he envisioned, and the results include:
The vote to approve the final plan and funding to construct the 203 Project, successfully completing a 34-year old quest to build a library in Carrboro
The votes to review key drafts and ultimately adopt the final Carrboro Connects Comprehensive Plan, the town’s first ever holistic policy document for the Town’s future
The vote to adopt a strategy to build affordable housing on Town-owned land
The votes to re-open public engagement on the long-stalled Bolin Creek Greenway alignment and approve the Creekside alignment as the path to take into engineering design and construction
The votes to bring forth the first Unified Development Ordinance (UDO) amendments to eliminate residential parking requirements and adjust Planned Unit Development (PUD) regulations
Any two of these votes would be major decisions in a single council term, but on top of these, the Town Council also managed to process and reach resolution a community discussion about the future of the Fidelity Street cemetery.
Perhaps most importantly, Mayor Seils’ governing approach demonstrated that the Town Council could make decisions with transparent processes in four months or less for multiple policy actions that overlapped, with the Greenway and parking policy actions being the most recent example.
A Referendum Election on Consequential Election and Swift, Timely Governing
As the fall election season began, three candidates emerged that are aligned with Mayor Seils’ decision-oriented governing approach and policy agenda, including one candidate and incumbent Town Councilor who both had significant, direct involvement in the Carrboro Connects plan. All three candidates were clear and unequivocal supports of the Town’s affordable housing strategy, the completion of the greenway, and the use of the Carrboro Connects plan to update our land use rules.
Two other candidates emerged who expressed concerns about stormwater and skepticism of or outright opposition to the votes and policy agenda described above.
Last night’s election was a clarion call for continuing the success of the Consequential Council, with the Carrboro Better Together candidates receiving roughly 80% of the votes in the election. Mayor-Elect Barbara Foushee, who has been a strong supporter of the initiatives described above, ran unopposed and received 97% support from Town residents.
The Opportunity for More Consequential Councils
With these results, Mayor-Elect Barbara Foushee and the incoming 2023 – 2025 Council should be feel a strong wind at their backs to continue the policy agenda that the 2021 – 2023 Council has developed and supported, and even more importantly, to feel confident that they can move forward with the speed that that the current council has proven can work in town.
If our new council is successful, we will be able to remember the 2021 – 2023 Town Council as the FIRST of MANY Consequential Councils. May we be so fortunate.
One More Consequential Opportunity: Taking Administrative Action On BCG That Reflects Broad Consensus
As the current council completes its last few meetings in November, there is one more opportunity to do something small but meaningful that can act as the cherry on top of the big ice cream sundae of their accomplishments.
Now that the Town Council has adopted the Creekside alignment for the Bolin Creek Greenway, there is no reason to wait to update regional plans to reflect this. The DCHC-MPO’s long-range Metropolitan Transportation Plan currently omits the Bolin Creek Greenway due to the gag order on discussing the project that persisted in recent years.
The DCHC-MPO Metropolitan Transportation Plan instead contains one of the alternative alignments that we now know only reached the plan because our engagement processes prior to Carrboro Connects privileged the opinions of wealthy, mostly older white homeowners over everyone else. Getting the BCG into the DCHC-MPO Metropolitan Transportation Plan is crucial because it is the gateway to federal funds that can help us complete the greenway.
The Town Council should instruct Town staff to immediately reach out to DCHC-MPO staff and request that they initiate an Administrative Modification of the MTP to remove the alternative Seawell School Rd alignment and to put the BCG Creekside alignment in the MTP instead.
We have had a 2021 Town Survey, the BCG engagement process, and now an election with pro-greenway and anti-greenway candidates that have all showed 70% to 80% support. There’s no need to have lengthy discussion or additional public engagement to make this change. I hope we can see this as a consent agenda item before December 5th.
Congratulations to Mayor-Elect Foushee, Councilor Posada, Councilor-Elect Fray and Councilor-Elect Merrill. We have high hopes for you and are grateful for your willingness to serve.
Back on May 16th, at long last, the Carrboro Town Council held a discussion about whether to remove parking requirements in Carrboro. As the Town Council finished its discussion, the schedule for next steps included bringing a revised draft of a parking proposal to the Town Council on June 20th. This did not happen; there were no parking policy items on the June 20th agenda.
In an effort to move the community discussion forward at a faster rate, I and another community member with professional urban planning expertise made an attempt at drafting alternative text that would convert parking minimums to parking maximums in Carrboro.
This is a DRAFT and is surely imperfect. However, it does attempt to:
Convert all minimums in the parking table to maximums, for all uses in Carrboro. For all but two uses, we did not change any quantity of parking listed in the table. The two where it was hard to write a maximum without expressing a number have the comment “qualitative adjustment”
Use a 1/2-mile buffer around the Chapel Hill Transit Short Range Plan services that operate five days per week as the “Transit Parking Area” where the change can be activated
Leave space for zoning district-driven triggers for parking maximums. However, we left this section of the code empty, as it appears commercial parking changes may be handled through a different process.
Address the possibility of car-share services such as Zipcar being allocated spaces outside of the standard parking maximums.
My anonymous colleague and I hope these are useful to the Town.
Yesterday evening, I attended the Carrboro Town Council meeting to ask Town Council to amend their list of projects submitted for state funding to DCHCMPO by June 27, 2023 in order to include the Bolin Creek Greenway (BCG) in the list.
The speaker made several statements about the importance of getting facts right, and then engaged in the exact behavior that the Mayor warned about – making wildly misleading statements about the potential project cost of the BCG. The remainder of this blog post unpacks those statements and addresses what the BCG is likely to cost.
The speaker cited an article from Maryland about a greenway that cost $82.5 because it had an underground tunnel under downtown Bethesda (pic below – doesn’t look much like Bolin Creek), which is some of the most valuable real estate on the East Coast and a labor market with much higher construction costs than Carrboro. A tunnel under these buildings for anything will require life safety measures, evacuation points and be very expensive.
Aerial of Downtown Bethesda Maryland, a suburban edge city located north of Washington DC in Montgomery County, Maryland
The speaker then stated that the Bolin Creek Greenway may have a similar cost to the Bethesda project, even though none of the BCG would be in a tunnel or be in an environment like this. The speaker then asserted, without any evidence, that the BCG would cost as least much as the library being built in Downtown Carrboro. Even if we ignore the ridiculous Bethesda comparison, given the price of the library, the speaker is therefore suggesting the BCG will cost (at minimum) over $41 million dollars.
THIS IS NOT A REMOTELY REASONABLE NUMBER. So let’s take a considered look at what BCG Phases 3 and 4 might actually cost.
But first, a disclaimer – this is a simple exercise using online data sources. This is not in any way a substitute for real engineering design and cost estimating work. However, this is an attempt to model how real cost estimates are developed and managed to help the community understand how these methods can support the Town in making informed decisions.
How Infrastructure Professionals Create Cost Estimates
When a city or town engineer, or engineering consultant puts together a cost estimate for a project, the best information comes from having a preliminary design that is specific to where the proposed infrastructure will be on the earth.
Sometimes technical professionals get asked to put together a cost estimate for something without a preliminary design. This is inherently a more uncertain proposition. Responsible analysis of this type involves identifying projects that have a similar physical nature to the proposed project, examining their cost estimates, and using per linear foot costs for facilities like greenways and streets, and then reporting not one number, but a range of potential cost outcomes.
Applying These Two Approaches to the Bolin Creek Greenway
Let’s start with the Bolin Creek Greenway Master Plan from 2009. It has a preliminary conceptual design with significant detail. Its cost estimate is specific to the land along Bolin Creek, described as follows:
“For conceptual planning purposes, budget estimates prepared for this plan assumed a primary trail surface of concrete in creekside/flood prone areas and asphalt for hillslopes and upland areas.”
Let’s take a look at what the 2009 study estimated for Phase 3 of the creekside alignment for the BCG. (page 86 in the Master Plan) This is the Carolina North Forest Section.
This estimate uses detailed cost components and has a total cost of roughly $1.3 million for 1.77 miles of greenway in Phase 3.
Here’s the Phase 4 cost estimate – which extends from the southern end of Phase 3 to roughly Estes Drive.
This estimate also uses detailed cost components and has a total cost of roughly $1.1 million for 1.26 miles of greenway in Phase 4.
But These Costs Are Fourteen Years Old! Can We Still Use Them?
It’s not ideal to work with old numbers. We can consider these numbers if we add some extra contingency for caution and account for inflation. Here’s how.
The note at the bottom of both cost estimates says that land acquisition and several other costs are not included. It’s hard to say exactly how much we would want to raise the overall presumed cost for each of these “does not include” items. However, a conservative approach to adding a contingency budget would add 45% to the base cost. The original BCG budget adds 15%.
Let’s quickly calculate two higher contingency costs. Here’s the math:
The base cost for Phase 3 is $1.12 million before adding contingency. Instead of 15%, if we add 30% and 45% contingency we get:
With 30% Contingency: $1.12m + $336,000 (30% of $1.12m) = $1,456,000 for Phase 3.
With 45% Contingency: $1.12m + $504,000 (45% of $1.12m) = $1,624,000 for Phase 3.
Now let’s do the same for Phase 4. Phase 4’s base cost is about $948,000 before adding contingency. If we add 30% and 45% contingency we get:
With 30% Contingency: $948,000 + $284,400 = $1,232,400 for Phase 4.
With 45% Contingency: $948,000 + $426,600 = $1,374,600 for Phase 4.
Now we sum the costs by contingency level. At 30% contingency, the total 2009 cost for BCG Phases 3 and 4 would be $2,688,400. Let’s round up and call it $2.7 million for 3.03 miles.
At 45% contingency we get $2,988,600. Let’s round up and call it an even $3.0 million in 2009 dollars.
Our 30% contingency estimate of $2.7 million in 2009 gets inflated to $3.8 million in 2023.
Our 45% contingency estimate of $3.0 million in 2009 gets inflated to $4.2 million in 2023.
We get a range of $3.8 million to $4.2 million in 2023 dollars for Phase 3 and Phase 4 of the BCG. If we wanted to work with rounder numbers, we might simply say $3.5 to $4.5 million for roughly 3 miles of trail. This is $1.2 to $1.5 million per mile.
Is $1.2 to $1.5 million per mile reasonable for the BCG in 2023? Let’s do Peer Review.
Instead of only working with this cost estimate, we can look at other greenway project cost estimates in the public domain that (this is really important) have similar phyiscal characteristics to the BCG.
Barwell Road Greenway: $7.4 m over 1.86 miles = $4 million per mile in 2025 dollars
Brier Creek Loop: $12.2m over 3.57 miles = $3.4 million per mile in 2025 dollars
Both of the above include significant boardwalk segments, which are 7 times more expensive than asphalt on earth, the primary surface in those cost estimates. Neither of the cost estimates above for BCG Phases 3 and 4 identify boardwalk construction. Only one bridge of $75,000 is anticipated for BCG. The BCG corridor is in a relatively flat easement using pavement while up to 1/3 of a mile of the two facilities above are built on boardwalk. So these Raleigh cost estimates are probably high. If we converted the boardwalk sections of these two projects above to trail asphalt, Barwell Rd drops to $5.6 million over 1.86 miles for $3 million per mile, and the Brier Creek Loop drops to $10m over 3.57 miles, or $2.8 million per mile in 2025 dollars.
If we assume 3% inflation between 2023 and 2025, then these projects would be $5.3 million ($2.8m per mile) and $9.4 million ($2.6m per mile) in 2023 dollars.
A closer to home cost estimate is the estimate for Phase 2 of the Morgan Creek Greenway in Carrboro. It estimates the 1.2-mile segment had a construction cost of $912,000 million in late 2022. Inflation would raise this slightly to $932,000 in 2023 dollars. This is just under $800,000 dollars per mile. Pretty inexpensive!
Reasonable Estimates Use Ranges: BCG Phases 3 and 4 Could Cost Between $3 millionand$9 million Dollars
If we take the per mile costs of these different sources in 2023 dollars we get a low of $800,000 per mile for Morgan Creek and a high of roughly $2.7 million per mile for two projects in Raleigh. For a 3.03-mile stretch of the BCG, that’s about $2.4 to $8.1 million dollars in total to build Phases 3 and 4 of the BCG.
What If Inflation Spikes Again?
It’s been a very unusual few years in financial markets. Will inflation increase, driving up material prices? Who knows? This is why you put contingencies on numbers. Want to try to add some extra contingency to account for this?
Let’s just bump both numbers up a little and finalize our numbers to say that the total cost to build Phases 3 and 4 of the BCGwill most likely be between $3 million and $9 million.
This is a wide range – because there are many unknowns about the project even though we have a reasonably detailed preliminary design. As design of the BCG advances, factors other than inflation could also be a factor. The cost could fluctuate if different materials were used, or if there were requests to make more connections from additional neighborhoods to the greenway, those additional pieces could add cost. As design advances, more implementation issues will be identified and favorably resolved, the alignment will be confirmed, and the cost will stabilize in a much narrower range than above. This is the nature of all linear transportation projects.
Nice Things Like Greenways Cost Money
I’m sure that as different people read this post, some will find $3 million to $9 million to be a great value for the Town of Carrboro, and others will find it a waste of money. Those are value judgments, not fiscal ones. The Town of Carrboro’s Capital Budget was $68 million over 5 years in the last Capital Improvement Plan, up from $58 million for the prior 5-year period.
If the cost of BCG Phases 3 and 4 do fit within the $3 to $9 million range, this is a cost that is within the regular scale of expenditures of the Town’s 5-Year capital plans, and is not going to significantly impact the amount of debt the town manages. It is also worth noting that there are federal funds that can help pay for the BCG, and this is typically how Carrboro constructs such facilities in town.
Hopefully this analysis is reassuring to those who have a good faith curiosity about how much it costs to build a greenway.
What To Do About Misinformation: Don’t Get Distracted and Keep Moving Forward
The assertions by yesterday’s speaker that the BCG will cost somewhere between $41 and $82 million are fundamentally inaccurate. The suggestion that the BCG poses a significant risk to town debt finances is uninformed at best. It’s disappointing that anti-greenway homeowners have decided to engage a community conversation in this way. But based on how many conversations proceed in our community, we can expect these inaccurate figures to continue to circulate. We need to refer back to primary source and other relevant documents, ignore the noise, and keep moving.
As a resident who enthusiastically wishes to see the BCG built, I will continue to do my best to share accurate information, cite sources, show my work as done above and explain my methods.
My hope is that sometime this fall, the Town will restart the project and we can get a refreshed BCG conceptual design and new, up-to-date, fully vetted capital costs by early 2024.
Thanks to everyone who read to the end!
Closing disclaimer – this is a simple exercise using online data sources. This is not in any way a substitute for real engineering design and cost estimating work. However, this is an attempt to model how real cost estimates are developed and managed to help the community understand how these methods can support the Town in making informed decisions.
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.
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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It’s an exciting time in Carrboro! There are new bike lanes on Main Street. The construction of the 203 Project, featuring a new branch of the Orange County library, is underway. Perhaps most importantly, we have a new Comprehensive Plan that is focused on addressing racial equity and taking action to fight climate change. Better still, the Implementation chapter of the Carrboro Connects Comprehensive Plan (see below) highlights numerous policy actions that can move us towards our goals.
The Fastest, Easiest Climate Win Available: Ending Parking Requirements for Cars
The great news on the climate action front is that there is one policy action that can be taken immediately with virtually zero negative (or even noticeable!) effects: ending parking requirements for cars.
How Does Ending Parking Requirements Fight Climate Change?
There aren’t enough jobs in town for the residents who live here. So many of them have to commute 20 to 40 miles to work, as I discussed in the Fundamentals of Carrboro post.
Eliminating parking requirements, as described in Implementation Strategy 4.1.c on page 48 of the chapter, can make it easier to build mixed-use and commercial buildings in town, and provide more jobs locally.
4.1 c) Update parking requirements to consider adjustments or removal of minimum requirements for affordable housing, accessible dwelling units, and mixed-use development to reduce impervious surfaces and make more efficient use of land. – Carrboro Connects
If we can house more jobs in downtown Carrboro, we have the potential to convert climate-intensive car commutes from Carrboro to RTP, Durham, and Raleigh to walk, e-bike or local bus trips on the Chapel Hill Transit F, J, CM, or CW bus, and reduce emissions of Carrboro residents.
Eliminating parking requirements can also help build more small housing units on the same land, making it easier to live in a community that is prioritizing walking and biking, which have no emissions. Removing parking requirements is also addressed in strategy 4.2 a on page 29 of the Implementation Chapter.
4.2 a) Remove minimum vehicular parking requirements for residential development close to transit.* Lower vehicular parking requirements for all residential uses, including ADUs.
On examination, creating a 1/2-mile buffer around the transit routes in town (a standard distance for a reasonable walk to a bus stop) actually puts MOST of the town in an area that would be eligible for removing parking requirements.
After creating the map, I realize it is also missing the F route, which did not run when this bus route layer was created, so the white boundary should encompass even more of North Carrboro. I’d say we’re talking 75% to 80% of the town is in the end-requirements-near-transit area.
The Easiest Path Is the Best Path: Eliminate All Car Parking Requirements in Carrboro
Given that most of the town falls under the criteria where parking requirements would be eliminated, the best course of action is to make it simple and remove all car parking requirements in Carrboro, period.
It’s also a best practice at this point! In March 2022, Raleigh removed all parking minimums citywide. Dunwoody, GA (population 49,000) did the same in 2019. Graham, North Carolina (population 15,000) has removed parking minimums and applied parking maximums to ALL nonresidential buildings citywide. Albemarle, NC has also eliminated virtually all parking requirements. There’s even a lovely map of all these places and what they’ve done!
What Will Happen When We Eliminate Parking Requirements?
Immediately and for awhile thereafter? ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! Ending Parking Requirements in Carrboro doesn’t affect any properties as they are currently built in town, and doesn’t affect any currently existing parking spaces. It only ends the practice of requiring a certain number of parking spaces for new development. But over time, with the removal of these requirements, we are likely to see more viable building projects downtown and in our commercial areas become financially viable, allowing us to have more jobs with short commutes in town.
Does This Mean Developers Will Only Build Buildings With No Parking? No.
The 201 N Greensboro project is a great example of what will happen downtown without parking requirements. A developer will bring a project forward, and they will have a financial interest in having some amount of parking that meets the project need. Instead of having to match some arbitrary number in the ordinance, which is not tuned to how many people take the bus or bike in town, they will find a number that works for the project, and assumes (appropriately!) that many people will arrive by bus, bike, and walking.
Finally – How Have Parking Requirements Harmed Carrboro?
Parking requirements increase the cost of housing. From Todd Littman at the Victoria Transport Policy Institute:
“Based on typical affordable housing development costs, one parking space per unit typically increases moderate-priced housing costs approximately 12%, and two parking spaces increases lower-priced housing costs by 25%. Since parking costs increase as a percentage of rent for lower priced housing, and low income households tend to own fewer vehicles, parking minimums are unfair and regressive.” – Littman, Parking Impacts On Housing Affordability, May 2022
Parking requirements also inhibit economic development and job growth by limiting the financially viable buildings that can be constructed. Downtown Carrboro is a perfect case study on this point. The Triangle has been undergoing a roaring population and job expansion over two decades, and other than the 300 East Main project, which was entitled in the 2004 – 2007 timeline, and built between 2007 and 2013, we have not had a new given permission to build in our downtown core* until a few months ago, when the town gave 201 N Greensboro a green light – after letting the developer go below the required number of parking spaces, without which, the building was not likely to be financially feasible.
It’s also worth noting that the only other building approved downtown since that time is the 203 Project, which is being built with public money and does not have to meet a financial profit test to be built. Those expensive parking spaces at $48,000 per space would render any private development downtown financially impossible.
So when you ask yourself: “gee, a lot of other communities, even Graham out in Alamance County are seeing quality new development downtown, but Carrboro isn’t, why is that?”
The answer is that our parking requirements have basically told developers who look into a project that the math to pay for parking isn’t going to work out, so the jobs and tax base that would like to settle here goes elsewhere.
There are many other policy changes that need to happen to achieve the goals in the Carrboro Connects comprehensive plan. Eliminating parking requirements is a necessary first step and a good way to start moving towards those goals. I hope that we’ll see this item on a Carrboro Town Council agenda sometime in October.
*I’m considering Shelton Station to be outside the downtown core
On Saturday, August 27th, Carrboro Town staff hosted a tour of what will be Phase 1 of the Carrboro portion of the Morgan Creek Greenway.
Morgan Creek Greenway Overview
The Morgan Creek Greenway is a regional greenway connection across southern Chapel Hill and Carrboro with many years of planning behind it. Our family has ridden on the existing portion of the greenway for years and it is delightful. Here is a “sights and sounds” video I made in 2016. Notice what a safe and low-stress riding environment it is for children. (and people of all ages and cycling abilities)
The map below shows the existing sections of the Morgan Creek Greenway, which connects to Merritt’s Pasture, and the Fan Branch Trail, which connects the Morgan Creek Greenway to Southern Village. The red box near Smith Level Rd indicates where Phase 1 of the Carrboro portion of the greenway will be built.
Existing Morgan Creek Greenway in Purple, Carrboro Phase 1 in Red Box
The Carrboro Portion of the Morgan Creek Greenway
The Town put together a Morgan Creek Greenway Conceptual Master Plan Report(PDF) in 2010 to outline the possibilities of what full implementation could look like. The original master plan alignment is shown below. Again, the red box indicates Phase 1.
Morgan Creek Greenway Master Plan, Phase 1 in Red Box
Current Phase 1 Design Features
The greenway is currently at 30% design. This is a portion of the engineering process when many major things have been figured out, but there is still an opportunity for some adjustments to be made to the path of the greenway.
The current design proposes the following:
A sidewalk from Smith Level Road and public works drive leading from the street down to the greenway
The greenway proceeding on town property outside of the Public Works facility fence along the north side of the creek
Greenway will run to the left of the fence outside of Carrboro Public Works
A sidewalk access into the cul-de-sac at the bottom of Abbey Lane by Canterbury townhomes and another access point further up on Abbey Lane directly across from Friar Lane
A bridge (in maroon, at right below) over the small creek that passes under Public Works Drive
A bridge (in maroon, at left below) crossing Morgan Creek to the south side of the creek and a turnaround where the future Phase 2 section of the greenway will begin
Carrboro Portion of Morgan Creek Greenway: Phase 1
Design Analysis and Recommendations for Improvement in the Next Design Milestone
Overall, there’s a lot to like about this design. A bridge under Smith Level Road to the Chapel Hill section ensures this will be a Level of Traffic Stress 1 facility, suitable for children and senior citizens. This is the gold standard of bicycling safety and comfort in terms of protection from motor vehicles. The two different access points to Abbey Lane ensure that nobody has to significantly backtrack out of the neighborhood to go east or west when the full trail is built out.
The most important opportunity for improvement in this design is to include lighting as part of the trail.
The Frances Shetley bikeway in Carrboro is heavily used and beloved by neighbors, and one of the key reasons is that it has excellent lighting that makes it useful after dark. (see left side of trail picture below) There are even new lighting types that reduce or completely eliminate upward light pollution by ensuring the light emitted only goes down. The International Dark Sky association maintains a list of compliant lights that can make the Morgan Creek Greenway as useful as possible while meeting dark sky goals.
For the 60% and final design of this greenway, the town should ask the engineering team to incorporate dark-sky compliant lighting for the trail into the design.
Shetley Greenway with Lights Near Carrboro Elementary School
Improving Public Process: Notify Everyone
Finally, one place where the Town continues to use an outdated practice is to notify near neighborhoods of a project meeting, but not the broader community. I only learned about this event because we own property within a certain number of feet of the project location. But this is supposed to be a REGIONAL bike-ped project that is part of a multi-town plan in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
There’s no reason this project and commenting on how to improve it should be a privilege of nearby neighbors, and not the whole town, and even our neighbors in Chapel Hill who might use it as well. Numerous studies have shown how notifying homeowners in near neighborhoods around projects ultimately biases processes towards favoring participation among older, wealthier and whiter participants. And frankly, while the crowd of nearly 50 who attended were largely enthusiastic about the trail, and that was great to see – they also largely fit the narrow demographics of this outdated notification method. Given that 33% to 38% of the population of the Census tracts that would be served by the trail are home to non-white residents, we probably could have done better at reaching those residents.
Let’s work to broaden the conversation from here on out, shall we?
On Tuesday, May 10th, the Carrboro Town Council will have its first opportunity to adopt its first-ever comprehensive plan. The fact that our town has reached this point after not having a plan for so long is commendable, and everyone who has helped propel this plan forward, especially in the pandemic, should be proud of their efforts.
That said, the Adoption Draft still contains some places where it equivocates instead of sets direction, and those should be improved ahead of final adoption.
Must-Address Changes In the Adoption Draft
Parking Requirements: Still Getting It Wrong What the Adoption Draft Says: “Investigate lowering parking requirements…”, “reduce negative effects of parking requirements” “update requirements to remove minimum requirements for residential development close to transit.”
What the Plan SHOULD Say (Best): Parking requirements are hereby eliminated in Carrboro with the adoption of this plan.
What the Plan COULD Say (Acceptable): Parking requirements are hereby eliminated in Carrboro within all downtown districts (list here), future growth centers identified in this plan and within ¼-mile of all transit routes. Parking requirements in the remainder of town are hereby reduced to no more than 1 space per dwelling unit, and all applicants are encouraged to propose alternative parking ratios for their projects. These changes are effective upon adoption of this plan.
Why: Removing parking requirements DOES NOT MEAN that projects will not have any parking; it simply means that developers of projects we would like to see in town do not have to curtail their ability to meet our goals in order to meet an arbitrary number. We can see this right now with the 201 N Greensboro Project, where the code requires 50+ spaces for no good reason, and the developer is proposing 43. This is the number that meets Transportation Management Goals best that also works to obtain lender support for the project. If we want economic development, more jobs in town, and the tax base that comes with it, we need to stop making developers beg for this. In fact, letting them figure out what the project truly needs HELPS us because parking is expensive, and developers will be financially incentivized to spend time figuring out how to divert money formerly earmarked for baseless parking requirements into more important items like affordable housing units and green infrastructure.
I can only imagine that these requirements are hanging around in the draft, particularly for commercial uses, because of hypothetical concerns that if new commercial development does not have parking requirements, it will put pressure on existing parking for current businesses. This is only potentially a problem if we continue to do nothing to manage our parking downtown.
The town must grapple with this truth: we have had very limited private investment downtown through one of our region’s most continuous massive boom periods because the parking requirements are effectively eliminating proposals before they start. The changes in East Chapel Hill and many parts of Durham are a testament to how much Carrboro has shunned economic growth in the past decade. Maintaining parking requirements to address this concern is a commitment to stymie development downtown, a commitment to NOT capture a larger share of the regional economy, and it is the town telegraphing that it anticipates that indecision and non-action on pricing parking downtown will persist.
In other words, maintaining parking requirements is waving a big flag that the plan is more committed to keeping the status quo than raising funds through new compact, walkable development to address climate change and racial equity.
The plan should not pass with the current lack of action on parking requirements. If it does, the staff and/or council should say WHY this strategy is preferable to elimination. I get that implementing parking pricing in town has a lot of culture change to process and requires a lot of thought. But this is a no-brainer. Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Durham, and GRAHAM, North Carolina (GRAHAM!) have all removed parking requirements.
Our adoption draft plan is scheduled to “Conduct financial analysis of benefits of reduced parking requirements” in 2024. This is ridiculous. The idea that there’s something left to study that makes them more important in Carrboro than in other jurisdictions is comical. Mayor and Council, pull the trigger and save us all years of meaningless debate. End parking requirements in Carrboro with passage of this plan.
Open Space In New Development: Still Encouraging Sprawl and Inhibiting Climate-Friendly Density What the Adoption Draft Says: “the Town is committed to improving ecosystem quality, recognizing the dual benefits for quality of life and climate change resiliency and its importance to town identity. For example, in 1995, the land use ordinance required that 40% of open space be preserved in all new developments. In 2014, the tree canopy coverage standards were updated to include at least 40% canopy coverage on residential land.”
What the Plan Should Say: “The town recognizes that while well-intentioned, the requirements for 40% open space in new development, especially when coupled with parking requirements, largely have worked to prevent development downtown and along transit corridors and encouraged it along the edges of the town. The ordinance is hereby adjusted to reduce both coverages from 40% to 15%, and that the open space requirement can be met by a combination of open space and green roof facilities.”
Why: We must move beyond the idea that because we can see more green right in front of our eyes, that we have made the most green development choice possible. Indeed, Mebane and Chatham County are booming with large lot development that disturbs much more land than urban development in Chapel Hill or Carrboro would because of standards like these. Urban communities can have density and tons of greenery. Any visit to Savannah, GA proves this on every block.
Get Specific About What “More Lots” Means for ADUs What the Adoption Draft Says: “Reform ADU standards in the Land Use Ordinance to allow for ADUs on more lots.”
What the Plan Should Say: “Reform ADU standards in the Land Use Ordinance to allow for ADUs on more than 50% of single family lots in town.
Why: We don’t want to go through a long process to enable 5-10 ADUs to be built in town. We want to enable dozens or hundreds of them. Set a goal for making ADU viability the NORM rather than the exception, and tune ADU eligibility to exceed 50% of existing single family lots in town.
Make Decisions In This Plan To Avoid Overlong Timelines The Timeframes of when to do things in the plan are either “1 to 5 years” or “6+ years.” How can the staff build a reasonable workplan off of this? How can we hold anyone accountable. To sustain momentum out of the adoption, the town should have a relatively short list of priority actions to be addressed by 6, 12, and 18 months from adoption.
Then there should be a 1.5 to 3 year bucket of actions. Then 3 to 5 years; then 6+.
But more importantly, MORE DECISIONS SHOULD BE MADE NOW.
Under land use, it says for 2022-2023: “Determine priority areas to conduct small area plans such as key corridors identified in the comprehensive plan and possible updates to existing small area plans based on the comprehensive plan. Determination should consider race & equity and climate action criteria.”
Why can’t this be done as part of the plan? We have opportunity sites in the plan. We have engaged the largest group of diverse audiences in the Town’s history. Why can’t we put those priority areas in the plan today? How could we have done all this work and not be able to figure out where these priority areas should be already? Chapel Hill’s 2020 plan identified Future Focus Areas as part of its adoption; surely we can do the same.
The rest of the plan should be screened for other decisions that can simply be made NOW.
It is worth stating that one of the reasons that it is important to get as much policy direction set in this document is that outside of processes like this and the 203 Project where consultant resources were engaged, the town has struggled to advance any significant policy changes in planning ordinances and regulations that move the needle on our problems. We may need a larger planning staff that dedicates more time to changing regulations to fit the plan to create this capacity. We may need the Council to set shorter time limits for project reviews and to put finite bounds on public engagement processes that have previously over-privileged wealthy homeowners at the expense of everyone else. But more than anything, we need the Council to provide leadership and make decisions. That’s the biggest barrier between the Town and its goals in this plan.
Today I’ll be going through the land use chapter of the plan. The framework of a better document is here; it just needs some refinements.
Let’s jump right in. The plan begins by again referencing racial equity and climate change. It states: “The land use element aims to address race and equity goals – both to overcome barriers that have been created in the past and to open doors for new opportunities.”
Corridor Assessments
The plan has a variety of strategies; we’ll talk about those in a minute. But at the big picture level, it focuses on 5 corridors:
Jones Ferry Road Corridor and Downtown
NC 54
Rogers and Homestead
Old NC 86
Estes and N. Greensboro
If you look through them all, and do some measuring in Google Earth, you’ll find that in a town of about 4,200 acres, the plan identifies only 83 acres of opportunity sites that are not the large parcels of undeveloped and lightly developed land at the edge of town where Homestead and Hillsborough Rd meet at Calvander. Those 83 acres represent about 2% of town land. If we’re going to make big strides in addressing equity and climate change, we’re probably going to need more opportunity sites. We also need to start steering our future where we want it to go based on our goals, and not on what’s on the ground today. What’s missing? Here are just a few locations that should be added to the list:
Poplar/Main/Fidelity across from BP, north of the downtown fire station. This is perhaps the best large, in-town site that is likely to turn over economically in the near future. This should be a mixed use location with significant commercial and residential, probably 4-6 stories in height.
All of our storage facilities. These are low-density, low job generating uses that don’t contribute to their surroundings, and belong out of town off of rural roads. There’s one south of South Green on S. Greensboro St and another just south of Gary Rd. These operations will probably be there a long time but we should signal to property owners that those sites could be more.
Also on Jones Ferry is the Kangaroo Express gas station on the corner of Davie and Jones Ferry. That parcel and the parcel to the west should be positioned as an opportunity site. On both this one and the prior bullet, it will be critical to talk to the Alabama Avenue neighborhood about what they would find desirable on those sites.
Laurel Ave – the block with Chapel Hill Tire, the car wash, the daycare, and the gas station is very underutilized for its marquee location by the Carrboro Farmers’ Market. Except for the office building across from Balloons and Tunes, these buildings are relatively old, and none are significant in any way architecturally or historically. When we talk about increasing our commercial tax base, this is an opportunity.
The northwest corner of Greensboro and Weaver Streets. Formerly home to WCOM radio, and bulldozed in recent years and surrounded by fencing, this site’s destiny is continually at risk of becoming a suburban drugstore if we don’t plan for a better block between those two streets, Center street, and Short St
Think Beyond the Corridors and Develop Growth Accommodating Strategies for Every Part of Town
If we focus on accommodating growth only on corridors and only in opportunity sites, we’re not pulling together as a town to accommodate new neighbors, or provide housing choices for children growing up here today. The strategies about ADUs and missing middle housing should be extended to all of our residential neighborhoods to allow for incremental density like that which was commonly allowed in much of Carrboro from the 1960s to the 1980s.
Let’s move on now to the plan metrics and strategies themselves.
We Need Goals for Housing In General, Not Just Affordable Housing
Here are the land use chapter’s draft metrics:
1) Increase the number and preservation of affordable housing units
2) Increase in amount of land available for commercial, business and mixed-use development
3) Increase in commercial and business share of the tax base to reduce residential tax burden
4) Increase in amount of land protected for natural resources
On housing, we can’t just fight the housing crisis with affordable only units. We need a metric that counts increased housing units in total, increased market units, and new and preserved units. Yes, we should have a goal for affordable units. But every new market rate unit that is built also reduces competition between higher-income and lower-income residents for older and more affordable units. So we need a goal for increasing the number of all housing units. The rest of these goals are reasonable.
Goal 1. Promote Design
Strategy 1.1. Good! Nothing to add.
Strategy 1.2.a. We need more specifics/clearer language for “Work with homeowner associations to expand public use of open space including bikeway connections, use of recreational activities and natural habitat.” Will we be using privately owned spaces by HOAs to do this? This seems also to be a strategy the town has limited control over other than asking private property owners to change how the manage their properties. There’s no harm in including it; I just think it is a long shot.
Strategy 1.3. Good, but set a timetable by when it will be done.
Strategy 2.1.Separate the identification of areas along key corridors from small area planning. The identification of growth areas should be done in this comp plan. The small area plans for those key growth areas can come afterwards.
Strategy 2.2.a. The text does too much considering on important actions. We should have been reducing parking requirements everywhere, and especially downtown, ten years ago. Does proactive rezoning mean town-initiated? Say that. Consider priority growth and redevelopment areas in accessible locations almost means nothing and is easy to ignore.
Strategy 2.2.b. If we are proactively rezoning for greater density, are we then going to put an overlay district on top of those locations? Is this just adding complexity? The history of density bonuses in the Triangle market is not promising. Durham, to their credit, kept escalating their bonuses when developers did not jump at lower levels of incentive. If Carrboro is not willing to make changes rapidly, the bonus is not worth doing in the first place. If we do a density bonus, look at how Durham and Raleigh have made changes quickly and are trying to calibrate their bonus to the market frequently.
Strategy 2.3.a. The goal is great, the parentheses may undermine it completely as “appropriate setbacks” are often in the eye of the beholder. Again, we see “consider” modifications to the ordinance. This is not the “Comprehensive Things to Think About Doing Someday” it’s the PLAN. We say we’re going to modify the code to support ADUs. Good! That’s definitive; much better than considering. (Note:these steps on ADUs don’t seem as proactive as those Raleigh, Durham, and Winston-Salem have taken. Look at their ADU approaches and adapt)
Strategy 2.3.b. – Is the development community asking about tiny homes? With so little land left in Carrboro, single family tiny homes are a much more expensive and inefficient way of delivering small units than missing middle housing, or apartment buildings.
Strategy 2.4 Good!
Strategy 2.5. Remove the first three words and it’s excellent. We can do the evaluation. But make it clear that the action is the reducing of density restrictions, not the studying of them.
2.5.a. strike “strategically” and remove “in appropriate locations” and replace with “throughout the town.” We should not be only reducing parking requirements for affordable units. To meet our climate goals, we should be reducing them for all.
2.5.b. Looks pretty good. A lot of zoning “swings for the fences” and tries to get 20-30% affordable units in projects. Carrboro may have more success getting 10% affordable across a wider number of projects. When calibrating the density bonus, look at this. Be prepared to offer 3 market rate bonus units per 1 affordable unit, 4:1, 5:1 bonuses for affordable units. Be prepared to report on your density bonus every six months, and adjust it if you’re not getting any takers.
2.5.c. A long shot, but good.
Strategy 2.6.a. Good. Ask the development community if this is more attractive to them with a number or a percentage of units.
Strategy 3.1.e. The 40% tree canopy requirement is damaging to delivering many building types we need for climate change. At minimum, this should be changed to 40% tree canopy/and or green roof. Ideally, this threshold will be lowered to 20% tree canopy and/or green roof, and will seek to address tree canopy through quality urban design, and not simply covered acreage. The acreage requirement is a blunt instrument when we need more precise ways to get good buildings and get great trees surrounding them.
Goal 4. Good
Strategy a. 15 minute neighborhoods mean greatly expanding density in and near downtown or expanding retail in other parts of the community. The saying “retail follows rooftops” means it will be hard to draw more retail without additional infill housing. We need to acknowledge all this and decide which approaches we are pursuing in/near downtown and in other locations.
Strategy b. Our downtown parking requirements are probably the biggest obstacle to increasing the amount of commercial downtown. All downtown parking requirements should be eliminated, tomorrow. Every other parking requirement in town could immediately be cut in half with almost certainly no consequences. We can’t talk about climate action without doing this. Ending parking requirements don’t take away the opportunity for developers to provide parking anyway – they simply stop forcing them to provide parking they don’t think is needed for their project to work.
Goal 5. Maybe good? What does “Appropriate development opportunities” mean?
Strategy 5.1. Good strategy, but it’s horizontal. (increase the acreage) We also need to increase the vertical capacity on existing and future commercial/mixed use land. Add strategy that addresses the vertical portion.
Strategy 5.2 Outside of this process, we must admit that our status quo is not vibrant public participation. Like many, many other privileged communities, our processes are dominated by wealthy homeowners giving short speeches in meetings. The public meeting format needs to drastically change, or be replaced.
Strategy 7.1 We need to think carefully about whether or not Neighborhood Preservation Districts do anything to support racial equity and climate action if they are deployed in neighborhoods that are NOT predominantly inhabited by minority or low-income residents. Our neighbor next door initiated a Neighborhood Conservation District for Northside, which has helped prevent some but not all displacement in the neighborhood. But look at the Chapel Hill’s NCD page and you will see that most of the NCDs in town are in wealthier white neighborhoods, and their primary function is to prevent additional housing stock of any type from being built.
Compromise Recommended by the School System Staff and Town of Carrboro Staff
Early in the meeting, Todd LoFrese of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City School System took to the podium to describe a compromise that had been worked out between school staff and Town of Carrboro staff regarding the Multi-Use Path. That compromise took the following form:
Reduced the number of Multi-Use Path crossings of the Cross-Country trail from three to one.
Proposed looking at alternative surfaces (such as ADA-compliant rubber instead of concrete) at the remaining crossing.
Explore creating as much separation as possible where the multi-use path and the cross country trail parallel each other.
One citizen brought forward an interesting photo (at right) showing staggered gates on a greenway designed to slow riders approaching a potential conflict point. To address concerns of runners worried about bicycles crossing the cross-country trail at speed, particularly during meets, these may be a potential solution to maximize safety.
Citing not only the financial implications, but also years of participation by many Carrboro residents in the process, and the town’s values in support of providing transportation choices and addressing climate change, the Board of Aldermen asked the town staff to explore how to address some remaining engineering questions about what types of alternative surfaces could be feasible and report back one week later, with an eye towards the Board passing a resolution to move forward affirmatively at their May 17th meeting.
What the Town Residents Will Be Getting From This Project
Lest the big goals of this greenway get lost in all the discussion of process, I want to remind everyone of the big, game-changing amenity the town will get when this project is complete- a safe, low stress way for up to 1,000 children living north of Homestead Rd to walk or bicycle to the three schools south of Homestead Rd.
I went out and shot some video (with audio) on the Morgan Creek Greenway and Fan Branch Trail Greenway in Chapel Hill yesterday. We rode about four miles in all, got pizza and did some grocery shopping, and took in all the great natural enjoyments found along the greenway. We saw squirrels, deer, many kinds of birds, and heard a barred owl calling nearby in the woods in the early evening. In a world where we hear talk of “nature-deficit disorder” among younger generations and childhood obesity, imagine what a joy it would be to get to ride to school on a facility like this every day.
You can hear many of the sounds we heard in the clip below, but you can’t smell the honeysuckle- you’ll need to get out there yourself to enjoy it.
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