Unified Development Ordinance

[nicholas]

^what does any of that have to do with the UDO? Don't we have a politics thread?

[Hushpuppy321]

27 minutes ago, nicholas said:

^what does any of that have to do with the UDO? Don't we have a politics thread?

There are some proponents of eliminating Single Family Zoning like was done in Minneapolis.  I don’t think Charlotte is going to do that but in the UDO Draft they’re pushing hard on expanding ADU’s (Accessory Dwelling Units) allowed in the City.

[Madison Parkitect]

Charlotte doesn't need to eliminate single family zoning at this point, but expanding ADUs would go a long way in keeping housing affordable here.

[Nathan2]

19 minutes ago, Madison Parkitect said:

Charlotte doesn't need to eliminate single family zoning at this point, but expanding ADUs would go a long way in keeping housing affordable here.

If charlotte ever wants any resemblance of naturally occurring affordable housing it needs to eliminate single family zoning. This is something that the Charlotte Planning department has been actively looking into. 

[kermit]

4 hours ago, Madison Parkitect said:

Charlotte doesn't need to eliminate single family zoning at this point, but expanding ADUs would go a long way in keeping housing affordable here.

Honest question, are there any good reasons to keep it? (Other than NIMBY BS?)

I think there is an economic case to support an increase in property values when SF zoning is removed — SF parcels can suddenly generate more revenue if you can add another unit. If that is true then I am puzzled that the change has not already been made.

Edited July 23, 2020 by kermit

[Madison Parkitect]

2 hours ago, kermit said:

Honest question, are there any good reasons to keep it? (Other than NIMBY BS?)

I think there is an economic case to support an increase in property values when SF zoning is removed — SF parcels can suddenly generate more revenue. If true then its weird that the change hasn’t been made already.

My reasons for keeping it are mainly aesthetic ones. I'd prefer to keep a lot of the tree canopy and larger lots that come with SF zoning, while also allowing for increased ADU or duplex/triplex use. I think getting rid of SF zoning is a pretty drastic step that is needed in some cities, but I don't think Charlotte is one. We have a TON of empty land and non-SF zoned land that can be developed before we need to get rid of SF zoning.

Now, you want to add some smaller lots in SF zoning so land can be subdivided? I'm cool with that. In Seattle there were 3,000 sf lots and you could get pretty creative with those.

[B Randy]

2 hours ago, Madison Parkitect said:

My reasons for keeping it are mainly aesthetic ones. I'd prefer to keep a lot of the tree canopy and larger lots that come with SF zoning, while also allowing for increased ADU or duplex/triplex use. I think getting rid of SF zoning is a pretty drastic step that is needed in some cities, but I don't think Charlotte is one. We have a TON of empty land and non-SF zoned land that can be developed before we need to get rid of SF zoning.

Now, you want to add some smaller lots in SF zoning so land can be subdivided? I'm cool with that. In Seattle there were 3,000 sf lots and you could get pretty creative with those.

It feels like we're starting to throw the kitchen sink at planning and development in Charlotte.  I'd prefer a medium burn to address all of the new initiatives being discussed.  Don't want some of these valid new (to us) ideas to get compromised b/c we're trying to do too much all at once...

[Nathan2]

3 hours ago, Madison Parkitect said:

My reasons for keeping it are mainly aesthetic ones. I'd prefer to keep a lot of the tree canopy and larger lots that come with SF zoning, while also allowing for increased ADU or duplex/triplex use. I think getting rid of SF zoning is a pretty drastic step that is needed in some cities, but I don't think Charlotte is one. We have a TON of empty land and non-SF zoned land that can be developed before we need to get rid of SF zoning.

Now, you want to add some smaller lots in SF zoning so land can be subdivided? I'm cool with that. In Seattle there were 3,000 sf lots and you could get pretty creative with those.

Stop with the "aesthetic" excuse. You can add density to current single family neighborhoods without taking away the "character" and keeping existing tree's. Drive through any old neighborhood in charlotte and there is plenty of duplexes, triplexes, quads and even 10-12 unit apartments that blend in so well among single family homes its often hard to tell the difference at first glance.  By only allowing single family homes to exist you and most of charlotte that get the chance to become home owners price out anyone who doesn't make a six figure salary and wants a remote chance at being part of the city. Continuing to clear greenfield lots isn't sustainable for the city or the home owner who is having to commute 45 mins to work. Not to mention that most of Charlotte's tree canopy is being destroyed by sprawling single family developments and any remaining empty land is a loss of open and recreational space that the city desperately needs. 

[Norm2]

3 hours ago, Madison Parkitect said:

My reasons for keeping it are mainly aesthetic ones. I'd prefer to keep a lot of the tree canopy and larger lots that come with SF zoning, while also allowing for increased ADU or duplex/triplex use. I think getting rid of SF zoning is a pretty drastic step that is needed in some cities, but I don't think Charlotte is one. We have a TON of empty land and non-SF zoned land that can be developed before we need to get rid of SF zoning.

Now, you want to add some smaller lots in SF zoning so land can be subdivided? I'm cool with that. In Seattle there were 3,000 sf lots and you could get pretty creative with those.

Lots for single family homes are shrinking while the tree canopy is obliterated to build these new single family homes. Even Myers Park when built was cleared of all trees to construct the new homes.

2 minutes ago, Nathan2 said:

Stop with the "aesthetic" excuse. You can add density to current single family neighborhoods without taking away the "character" and keeping existing tree's. Drive through any old neighborhood in charlotte and there is plenty of duplexes, triplexes, quads and even 10-12 unit apartments that blend in so well among single family homes its often hard to tell the difference at first glance.  By only allowing single family homes to exist you and most of charlotte that get the chance to become home owners price out anyone who doesn't make a six figure salary and wants a remote chance at being part of the city. Continuing to clear greenfield lots isn't sustainable for the city or the home owner who is having to commute 45 mins to work. Not to mention that most of Charlotte's tree canopy is being destroyed by sprawling single family developments and any remaining empty land is a loss of open and recreational space that the city desperately needs. 

You explained this much better than I did lol

[kermit]

4 hours ago, Randolph Dragon said:

It feels like we're starting to throw the kitchen sink at planning and development in Charlotte.  I'd prefer a medium burn to address all of the new initiatives being discussed.  Don't want some of these valid new (to us) ideas to get compromised b/c we're trying to do too much all at once...

Ironically the Urban Institute published a piece today saying Taiwo is ready to step on the accelerator of change: 

Quote

And in his third year on the job, Jaiyeoba — who has added the title of assistant city manager as well — says he’s ready to push for bigger changes in Charlotte. He’s already discussed the idea of eliminating single-family zoning to encourage greater density and increase the supply of housing. In recent weeks, he’s also said Charlotte should explore charging impact fees to developers to fund more improvements (a potential “third rail” that would require legislative approval, as well as the need to change government policies that have long enabled and encouraged segregation).

“I think it’s time we stop looking at what other people are doing before making moves,” said Jaiyeoba. “We need to start setting trends.

https://ui.uncc.edu/story/city-planning-productivity

I would offer that soft peddling change related to affordable housing and carbon outputs ain’t gonna fly with many people under 40. They want to see some progress now!

Edited July 24, 2020 by kermit

[B Randy]

1 hour ago, kermit said:

Ironically the Urban Institute published a piece today saying Taiwo is ready to step on the accelerator of change: 

“And in his third year on the job, Jaiyeoba — who has added the title of assistant city manager as well — says he’s ready to push for bigger changes in Charlotte. He’s already discussed the idea of eliminating single-family zoning to encourage greater density and increase the supply of housing. In recent weeks, he’s also said Charlotte should explore charging impact fees to developers to fund more improvements (a potential “third rail” that would require legislative approval, as well as the need to change government policies that have long enabled and encouraged segregation).

“I think it’s time we stop looking at what other people are doing before making moves,” said Jaiyeoba. “We need to start setting trends. “

https://ui.uncc.edu/story/city-planning-productivity

I would offer that soft peddling change related to affordable housing and carbon outputs ain’t gonna fly with many people under 40. They want to see some progress now!

Well...I said "medium" burn intentionally!  Tai is great for Charlotte.  No argument there.

I just hope that while we're proposing multiple huge shifts in urbanization for Charlotte - we're doing the dirty work on the front end to engage the development community and creating the processes, staff and design infrastructure on the back end - to make sure these big moves are set up to succeed and have lasting impact.

[KJHburg]

Most neighborhoods in Charlotte have deed restrictions on not allowing multifamily homes so the impact is not going to be as big as you think.  The suburbs and new neighborhoods that many of you dislike already have mix of uses of housing types for example Davis Lake in university area started in the late 1980s has 700 single family homes, 100 townhomes and approx. 200 unit apartment complex.  Berewick in SW Charlotte is even more diverse in housing types and larger.  Many more attached multifamily for sale units and several apartment complexes rental as apart of the community.  Communities like Antiquity in Cornelius have SF homes and townhomes are mixed together for sale and rental apartments and senior apartments all in one compact community.  

Sure there are just SF neighborhoods being built in the suburbs but these days most have a mixture of housing types and many include rental properties.  

[kermit]

1 hour ago, KJHburg said:

The suburbs and new neighborhoods that many of you dislike already have mix of uses of housing types for example Davis Lake...

This got me thinking, so I wanted to unpack this a little so I might understand my own perspective a bit better:

why do many UP posters dislike subdivisions? (e.g. Davis Lake)

• Their isolation (generally a collection of cul de sacs) limits walkability (there are no destinations in walking distance). 
• they generate disproportionate traffic since they do not add to the street grid
• Their isolation and lack of walkability makes them impossible to serve with transit
• Isolation results in these houses being more expensive to provide city services to (water, sewer, trash, police, fire, school transportation, etc.) than denser dwellings (yet they do not pay a proportionately higher tax rate)
• Since these neighborhoods force residents to drive for every trip, and their houses consume more energy for heating and cooling residents produce much higher carbon outputs
• All of this combines to make residents of these neighborhoods feel like they are detached from the issues impacting the remainder of their community (the city) (e.g. suburban reluctance to support transit since they often think ‘everyone has a car’) 

So from my point of view, these neighborhoods are a) hastening climate change; b) increasing road congestion and parking needs throughout the city, this makes improving walkability and transit more difficult for everyone else in the city; c) will be impossible to retrofit for a lower carbon future. In short, they are going to be a massive economic drag on the city and all of humanity)

One argument in support of these neighborhoods is that they make ‘affordable’ housing available, but I would suggest that is simply misdirection. This housing is cheap because of subsidies (municipal services, and heaviliy subsidized driving costs) and because many of the true costs associated with these places are ignored now and we will need to pay them in the future (e.g. expanding the road network, dealing with carbon, limited mobility for residents as they grow older).

I have no problem with the people who want to live in this environment, but I do have a problem with them receiving subsidies to live this way (one of those subsidies is the promise of plentiful parking wherever they go). So IMO, impact fees, carbon taxes, increased gas tax, eliminating subsidized parking, a higher low-density area property tax rate and more are all necessary to make these places sustainable.

So yea, I think subdivisions are a looming fiscal and environmental disaster. Their long term costs far outweigh their short term benefits (IMO).  I don’t think my dislike for these places is irrational, am I wrong to feel this way?

Edited July 24, 2020 by kermit

[Madison Parkitect]

42 minutes ago, kermit said:

So yea, I think subdivisions are a looming fiscal and environmental disaster. Their long term costs far outweigh their short term benefits (IMO).  I don’t think my dislike for these places is irrational, am I wrong to feel this way?

Not wrong to feel that way at all. Just because people like them doesn't mean they're not a blight on our community.

[KJHburg]

Dilworth was suburb and so was Myers Park which was a greenfield development on former farm land.  NoDa was a mill village suburb when it started out of the main city of Charlotte.  Wesley Heights was  a brand new subdivision once.  So unless you living in the original 4 wards of Charlotte no one has any room to speak,  I see plenty of cars and garages in Dilworth and Myers Park for example.  

Cities either grow or die and shrink.  We are growing there is need for new housing eveywhere intown and in new subdivisions whether we like it or not.  Buffalo NY is good stagnant not growing losing population city  for example. 

[Nathan2]

19 minutes ago, KJHburg said:

Dilworth was suburb and so was Myers Park which was a greenfield development on former farm land.  NoDa was a mill village suburb when it started out of the main city of Charlotte.  Wesley Heights was  a brand new subdivision once.  So unless you living in the original 4 wards of Charlotte no one has any room to speak,  I see plenty of cars and garages in Dilworth and Myers Park for example.  

Cities either grow or die and shrink.  We are growing there is need for new housing eveywhere intown and in new subdivisions whether we like it or not.  Buffalo NY is good stagnant not growing losing population city  for example. 

Every city starts that way at some point. Dilwoth and Noda are in much better positions to adapt and access transit than subdivisions located 10 miles from the city. Are we supposed to just ignore the problem now in the name of growth and just hope we can deal with the problems associated with unmitigated sprawl later? That seems costly and counter intuitive. 

[kermit]

56 minutes ago, KJHburg said:

Dilworth was suburb and so was Myers Park which was a greenfield development on former farm land.  NoDa was a mill village suburb when it started out of the main city of Charlotte.  Wesley Heights was  a brand new subdivision once.  So unless you living in the original 4 wards of Charlotte no one has any room to speak,  I see plenty of cars and garages in Dilworth and Myers Park for example.  

Cities either grow or die and shrink.  We are growing there is need for new housing eveywhere intown and in new subdivisions whether we like it or not.  Buffalo NY is good stagnant not growing losing population city  for example. 

All of the older burbs you mention were built to be adjacent to employment. They were also built to be walkable (so they tend to be higher density than most modern burbs), served by transit, and all (at one point) had neighborhood businesses. These types of neighborhoods have been shown to emit much less carbon than newer burbs. So while you might label them as ‘suburbs’ they are orders of magnitude more sustainable than a place like Davis Lake.

I am with you about growth. We all want Charlotte to grow. But lets be really clear, suburban subdivisions are not the only way to provide new housing. Because modern suburban housing is heavily subsidized developers are reluctant to build infill — something that would make cities more, not less, sustainable.  Until we end these fiscal inequities, cities everywhere are going to continue to harm themselves by allowing more suburbs to be built. 

I understand that there are lots of people who want to live in a new suburban house, that is fine. But they need to stop asking other people (our kids mostly) to pay a significant portion of the cost of their lifestyle.

Edited July 24, 2020 by kermit

[videtur quam contuor]

If Charlotte had been designed and built to a grid then that, by itself, would have improved some of these issues. 

[Norm2]

Someone in the city needs to create a master plan for current and future roads. Instead, developers build roads mostly the way they want with minimal connections to surrounding neighborhoods. Not having. Master plan for neighborhoods and connections is one of the things that is hurting us.

[KJHburg]

Infill development is at an all time high in this city anyone can see that.  The problem is land costs are so much higher in the center city and the city is densifying anyway with more townhomes and apartments.   I am not opposed to allowing separate accessory dwelling units but don't complain about the loss of tree cover then as most of this will be done at the expense of trees. 

Improve the public schools and safety aspects on the inner city neighborhoods because people of all races are moving to the suburbs in search of better schools and more affordable housing.   Plus most new neighborhoods are built without cul de sacs these days and have interconnecting street grids.  

Building housing near employment centers is a good thing and for example University City is the 2nd largest employment hub in the county after uptown and will be even more so with Centene and their 1000s of jobs.  

Even these European model cities many adore have suburbs and new development tracks.  Short of building blocks of Chinese style high rise apartment towers everywhere I am not sure what some of you want.     What city in the USA do yall think is a model of high density urban living?

Photo from Kowloon all residential towers.   Hong Kong one of the most densely populated cities in the world and yes it has excellent public transit as it has to with the density. 

[kermit]

4 hours ago, KJHburg said:

 The problem is land costs are so much higher in the center city

No, the problem is land costs in the burbs are artificially low, particularly after you factor in the unpriced environmental costs of driving.

Edited July 24, 2020 by kermit

[Nick2]

@kermit Very well said. My issues with unbridled suburban growth is simply to do with efficiency. And you really detailed exactly why this is problematic. 

Another thing that people don't talk about is the declining land use for agriculture around growing cities especially in the piedmont area so it's further complicating the food supply chain and increasing prices of things like corn which NC used to produce enough of to feed its own people and livestock. (To be fair the increasing demand of China and southeast Asia for tobacco exports has also taken agricultural land away too)

[Boricua]

On 7/24/2020 at 12:28 PM, tarhoosier said:

If Charlotte had been designed and built to a grid then that, by itself, would have improved some of these issues. 

And why wasn't it?

[videtur quam contuor]

Downtown Charlotte has a straight street grid, but its neatness dissolves beyond the center. Incorporated in 1768, Charlotte experienced chaotic growth following a gold rush in 1799, with further spurts of growth during and after the Civil War, around the time of the First World War and more recently from the 1970s onwards, as a commercial and financial hub. What exactly makes it America’s worst-gridded city? Three reasons:

• City growth was slow in the 18th century when city planners endowed other, faster-growing Eastern cities like Manhattan or DC with strict grids. 
• Old farm paths converging from outlying villages on the Charlotte courthouse now make up a spoke-like network of roads.
• Charlotte’s wide urban expansion means it incorporates a lot more suburban ‘spaghetti grids’ than, say, Atlanta, the city limits of which remain much smaller than its wider metro area.

Slower urban growth, with smaller population until 20th century, limited public transportation options played a role. Anyone else with ideas?

From:

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/charlotte-nc-has-americas-messiest-street-grid

[CLT>]

On 7/25/2020 at 4:49 PM, tarhoosier said:

Downtown Charlotte has a straight street grid, but its neatness dissolves beyond the center. Incorporated in 1768, Charlotte experienced chaotic growth following a gold rush in 1799, with further spurts of growth during and after the Civil War, around the time of the First World War and more recently from the 1970s onwards, as a commercial and financial hub. What exactly makes it America’s worst-gridded city? Three reasons:

• City growth was slow in the 18th century when city planners endowed other, faster-growing Eastern cities like Manhattan or DC with strict grids. 
• Old farm paths converging from outlying villages on the Charlotte courthouse now make up a spoke-like network of roads.
• Charlotte’s wide urban expansion means it incorporates a lot more suburban ‘spaghetti grids’ than, say, Atlanta, the city limits of which remain much smaller than its wider metro area.

Slower urban growth, with smaller population until 20th century, limited public transportation options played a role. Anyone else with ideas?

From:

https://bigthink.com/strange-maps/charlotte-nc-has-americas-messiest-street-grid

 

Charlotte's creeks play a bigger role than most people think. Since they tend to run NW-SW that means there is much less E-W connectivity of the grid especially in post war neighborhoods, hence the creation of the loop system that was never fully realized (Charlotte Road 4 is the only remnant of that). It lives on to this day in that cul-du-sacs are disallowed unless an environmental condition (creek) makes connections prohibitive.