Imagine if nearly all future development in Mecklenburg County, with few exceptions, looked like Birkdale and Phillips Place — glorified strip malls along transit corridors with residential and/or office space thrown in, topped off by parking decks and a patch of green called “open space.”
This, in effect, is what’s in store if the Planning Commission’s new General Development Policies (GDPs) are fully adopted. It’s part of a radical plan to force the majority of future high density development into the roughly 30 square miles — out of 527 in the county — within a half-mile of transit stations. The problem, though, isn’t what’s planned for the transit corridors, but what isn’t planned for most of the rest of the county.
The Planning Commission’s policy proposals don’t directly forbid development in the rest of Charlotte and the county’s unincorporated areas. They just make rezoning land for new development nearly impossible with rules and stipulations that even the greenest developer couldn’t meet.
Under the new policies, any new single-family development outside the transit corridors would have to meet standards for transportation adequacy, infrastructure and land-use accessibility before the rezoning that made it possible could be approved.
Problem is, to establish whether a site is “transportation adequate” under a points system, near equal weight will be given to whether the site has roadways for drivers, bike lanes, sidewalks and bus and rail transit service. This assumes people use bikes, sidewalks and buses to get around as often as they do cars — a fantasy, at least in the US, where the vast majority of cities have transit ridership of one to four percent.
To be approved, all proposed developments must be within a quarter-mile of public schools, a park or a certain amount of retail. To earn a high ranking on a secondary point system, new developments also must be within a half-mile of places of worship, employment concentrations, hospitals, medical and dental facilities, post offices or libraries. Because of the limited number of post offices and libraries in the county, only roughly 10 percent of the county holds the potential for development under the last two categories. The rest assume that everyone uses the house of worship that’s closest, regardless of their religion, that their insurance plans permit them to use whatever medical facility is most convenient to where they live, and that they actually work in the nearest high-employment location.
Under the GDPs, rezoning and development would also depend on the connectivity of the street network around it. If the streets don’t configure into a fairly precise, pre-dictated pattern, the land would become nearly impossible to develop. Since Charlotte’s street connectivity is notoriously bad and there’s no source of funds currently planned to reconfigure the roads, many, and I’d go so far as to say most, new rezonings would never happen.
For political veterans like me, what’s going on here seems fairly obvious. This is far more than a move to make sure that high-density development lines the transit corridors. This has all the appearance of a power grab by Charlotte City staff. The GDPs have appeared on the scene at about the same time that the staff began making a bid for virtual control of the Planning Commission, which was originally created as a joint venture overseen by both the city and the county.
If the GDPs pass in their current form and the city gains control of the Planning Commission, a handful of powerful city bureaucrats will have near-total control over land use in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. The potential for corruption here is endless. By manipulating where street systems are built or expanded, where bike lanes are created, or by merely altering the routes buses follow, city staff under City Manager Pam Syfert, and the council members who curry favor with them, can virtually dictate which of their developer friends get to build what, when and where.
For now, the planning staff is insisting that the GDPs are merely policy guidelines. But if you read all the way to page 24 of the GDP document, it’s plain that the GDPs are only the first step. “Changes to ordinances will be pursued, subsequent to the adoption of this document, to help ensure that development is built to the intent of these guidelines,” the document reads.
The GDPs worry Anne Marie Howard, head of the Charlotte Realtor Association. Our transit system is dependent on sales tax revenue, she says, yet Charlotte is already losing millions in potential sales tax revenue because retail is moving out of Charlotte. The numbers, which can be found on the Charlotte Chamber’s web site, are alarming. In 2002 alone, Mecklenburg saw a $1 billion decline in retail sales, while retail sales increased in surrounding counties as new retail chose to locate right over the county line. Making retail tougher to develop here will only increase that trend — yet another problem the GDPs don’t address.
It would take another year to address all the logic holes in these policies. City Council should start by putting the current draft where it belongs — in the trash.
Contact Tara Servatius at tara.servatius@cln.com
This article appears in Sep 10-16, 2003.
