Tag Archives: comprehensive plan

Ending Parking Requirements for Cars in Carrboro is a Zero-Cost Win for Climate: Let’s Do It Now

Posted on by
2

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

Carr-Connects-11-ImplementationDownload

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

Posted on by
Reply

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

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

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

A Missed Economic Opportunity

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

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

A Missed Design Opportunity

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

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

A Missed Housing Opportunity

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

Median Net Worth By Age

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

So Where’s The Better?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by
1

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

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

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

Those two things are:

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

 

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

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

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

Lack of a Current Comprehensive Plan or Vision Document

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

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

Another:

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

And another:

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

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

An Outdated Unified Development Ordinance (UDO)

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

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

No Sidewalks At Park Slope

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What The Aldermen Should Do

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