It’s the oldest trick in the Thug Developer’s Manual for Public Manipulation. If you want to build a development that violates nearly every smart growth promise the mayor and the 11 members of the Charlotte City council ran on, you can’t merely strong-arm the council and pay them off in the next election. The hacked off neighbors must be dealt with first.
So you initially propose a 95,000 square-foot shopping center where you intend to build, say, a 60,000 square-foot one. Then you announce to the public that you’re willing to downsize the development if that’s what pissed-off neighbors want. That way, you can later throw your hands up before the council and whine about how hard you’ve attempted to compromise with the unreasonable neighbors and how much it’s costing you.
The goal is to distract attention from the fact that your proposed development explicitly violates the plans City Council adopted for the site with laborious input from the very neighbors you are now attempting to screw over.
This appears to be exactly what Crescent Resources, Duke Energy’s development arm, is trying to do with the 10.8-acre development it wants to build at Alexander and Pineville-Matthews roads.
Ah, another boring neighborhood rezoning battle, you’re thinking. But what’s going on here is much more than that. This is a rare opportunity to watch a good, old-fashioned Charlotte power brokering, a chance to observe how council members squirm when they’re forced to choose between what they promised voters and the desires of the good old boy network that provides the funds that keep them in office. As usual, what eventually happens in this zoning case will depend not on smart growth principles, but upon how much publicity the fracas attracts.
Your average Charlotte developer wouldn’t have picked this fight. Given the piece of land in question, there are only a handful of local developers with the kind of political clout to pull this off — the sort for whom there is a special, unwritten set of zoning and planning rules — and Crescent is one of them. That’s why no other developer has touched the proposed site since the Mecklenburg County Commission deep-sixed a similar proposal by Cambridge Properties Inc. to build a shopping center there 10 years ago.
Now, as most readers know, I’ve never been a big fan of “smart growth” as dictated by government bureaucrats. But since the voters of this city have overwhelmingly supported smart growth politicians like those that currently sit on the council, I feel it’s my duty to point out to them when the fix appears to be in.
Perhaps because the city council had little to do with planning the development along it, Alexander Road, the proposed site of the development, is a perfect example of the smart growth the city claims it’s striving for. Alexander is one of the city’s prettiest drives. It has lush open spaces interspersed with subdivisions set back from the road and mature trees carefully preserved by previous developers. If you follow smart growth or transit planning at all, it’s clear by the city’s own standards that a shopping center doesn’t belong here. In an early recommendation against Crescent’s plans by the planning commission rezoning staff, they write, “The residential character of the subject property is important for protection of the character of its surroundings.”
The proposed Crescent development would have retail, offices and restaurants, just like the Arboretum, which is only 1.5 miles away. Even if you hit both lights on Pineville-Matthews Road between the Crescent site and the Arboretum shopping center, the drive between the two still takes less than three minutes. In fact, if you park on the corner of Alexander and Pineville-Matthews roads and stand on the hood of your SUV, as I did last week, you can see the Arboretum clearly enough to make out the colors of the larger buildings.
In keeping with the city’s smart growth principles, condos and apartments have been crammed around the Arboretum at the intersection of Pineville-Matthews and Providence Roads. That’s the point of smart growth — to place high-density dwellings, retail and transit centers together to consolidate growth in one spot, shorten drives and preserve green open spaces like those on Alexander Road.
I’ve watched how city politics works for long enough to know that Crescent Resources wouldn’t have come this far with its proposal had it not gotten a preliminary nod from some of the supposed smart-growth advocates on council. The fact that the mayor works for Duke Energy – or at least receives a salary from Duke Energy — shouldn’t hurt either.
Crescent claims it won’t pursue the project if a majority of residents oppose it. Given Crescent’s past escapades with other types of development, I’ll believe that when I see it. I suspect what the folks at Crescent really mean is, “We’ll see how public animosity towards this project affects our friends on city council. Then we’ll decide what we can get away with.”
It’s time to watch ’em squirm.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2003.
