Can Charlotte
keep growing?
In 12 years, city goes from sitting back to moving forward
CHRISTOPHER D. KIRKPATRICK
Eleventh-floor terrace view overlooking uptown Charlotte at the Trademark condos, Trade and Mint Streets in uptown Charlotte. GARY O'BRIEN - gobrien@charlotteobserver.com
Newspaper columnist Neal Peirce couldn't find a good restaurant in uptown 12 years ago when interviewing local leaders about the region and its future.
"It was an area of lonely concrete streets," the syndicated columnist remembered Tuesday. "I'm surprised by the sheer immensity of the development."
Looking back, Peirce also remembered a region with a patchwork transportation system and too many low-skilled workers. He remembered a community still looking to business giants, such as Bank of America's Hugh McColl Jr., for civic leadership. He saw scattered development moving away from central city and threatening sprawl.
The columnist, along with partner Curtis Johnson, were invited in 1995 by the Observer and several nonprofits to look under the Charlotte region's hood. They were considered experts on regional growth and urban revitalization and run The Citistates Group, a Washington D.C.-based think tank. The Observer published the findings in four Sunday installments in the fall of 1995.
The two returned Tuesday to give a talk at a forum at UNC Charlotte about regional cooperation and again to discuss what's going right and what's going wrong. The talk coincided with the release of a new set of regional indicators developed by the university's Urban Institute and meant to gauge quality of life and economic development when compared to other regions.
On this visit, Peirce and Johnson marveled at the now-bustling uptown business district, the scads of restaurants, and the region's vast and organized transit system. They said the Charlotte region was ahead of most in embracing downtown and mixed-use development -- building communities closer to where people work and shop and closer to present and planned mass transit. The idea is for people to drive less to cut down on pollution and traffic.
"That was pretty strange talk 10 years ago," Peirce said. "There's a real change in attitude."
They and other speakers at the five-hour forum stressed the need for more regional cooperation and for leaders to be "audacious" in solving problems, such as stepping up construction of the region's light-rail system to cut down on pollution and to guard against a global oil crisis, Johnson said.
Charlotte should emulate the Denver, Colo., region, Johnson said, which has suffered for years from gridlock and smog. Unable to coax a legislative solution, that region's 31 mayors combined forces over objections from the governor to pass a $5 billion sales tax increase in 2005 to pay for doubling existing rail service, Johnson said.
"Drop the excuses. If you want to do something, just do it," he said. "Charlotte needs to grow its capacity to think and act like a region."
Mayor Pat McCrory, who spoke at the five-hour forum, said that solving the problems requires local leaders not to "get into their political shells."
He said economic development and environmental issues and immigration are among the Charlotte region's biggest challenges. They do not know political, county or state boundaries, he said.
Differences in state-level tax incentives to recruit businesses that end up pitting North Carolina and South Carolina counties in the same region against each other need to disappear, McCrory said. Also, he said the region is too susceptible to the ripples of corporate decision making, such as US Airways' recent attempt to merge with Delta Air Lines Inc. and possibly move the Charlotte hub to Atlanta.
"The way you battle that is to persuade corporations to increase their investment so it becomes too expensive for them to leave," he said.
McCrory said that he and other elected leaders have to be willing to make decisions that might be unpopular in the short run, such as when leaders decided to expand the airport a quarter century ago, he said. "If we hadn't done that, we'd be a different city today."
The region, 20 years ago, used to rely on a small group of "white men," including McColl, to run the region, Peirce said. Leadership today has evolved from that notion, but it still needs to involve a more expansive array of voices, the speakers said.
More businesses and foundations need to be involved in governing, in trying to solve problems, said Paul Grogan, president of the Boston Foundation and a speaker at the forum. His foundation has set about improving Boston's school system and is raising money to study graduation rates and to create reliable statistics, he said.
Politicians are too hamstrung by the needs of special interest groups to always make the best decisions and to lead effectively, he said.
Johnson and Peirce said that the Charlotte region was riding a high of employment and growth but that dark clouds threaten: The region struggles with a higher-than-average high school dropout rate, increasing traffic, a stressed water supply and other growing pains.
And Peirce said that Charlotte depends too much on skilled labor imported from other regions.
How progress is monitored
UNC Charlotte's Urban Institute has developed indicators to judge economic, environmental and social progress in the 14-county region that includes South Carolina. Here are a few examples: • Median household income for the Carolinas is rising quicker than the Charlotte region. And in some of those counties, the gap between rich and poor is widening.
• Even though manufacturing continues to decline as a regional employer, it still leads all other sectors at 15.2 percent of all jobs.
• The region's unemployment rate has risen to 5.1 percent from 3.5 percent in 2000, but was lower than any annual rate between 2001 and 2005.
• The number of graduates in arts, music and theater from the region's higher education institutions rose to 564 in 2005 from 367 in 2002.
• The region saw an increase in grant money spent per capita cultural activities to $0.74 in 2006 from $0.53 in 2005. But per capita government spending on libraries has remained constant.
In their 1995 four-part series, urban experts Neal Peirce and Curtis Johnson studied where the Charlotte region is headed in the 21st century. At the time they weren't bowled over by uptown.
"A generation ago it would have seemed absurd to list Charlotte with Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Dallas, Seattle. No longer. The big banks, the audacious skyline, the NBA and NFL franchises, the thriving airport, the city's dynamism have all seen to that. Charlotte is the Carolinas' undisputed economic capital. ...
But will Charlotte emerge as a trend city, with a fast-moving, urban, cosmopolitan life? We doubt it.
Here's a city and region that seems to care more for trim, green lawns than urban spice. ... Uptown rolls up its sidewalks at 5 p.m. SouthPark is thriving, but urbane it isn't."
Today, uptown is a much different picture.
Developers have proposed, started or completed 20 high-rise residential projects in the center city over the past four years. The projects could produce more than 3,000 residential units and skyrocket the center city population from about 10,000 today to more than 21,000 by 2012.
In addition, six office projects planned or under way total about 1.7 million square feet, enough to add 7,000-plus people to uptown's work force of about 65,000. 1995
2007
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Christina Brown
Realtor/Broker
Cottingham-Chalk & Associates
6846 Morrison Blvd Charlotte, NC 28211
www.cottinghamchalk.comwww.christina-brown.comcbrown@cottinghamchalk.com(c) 704-770-7249
(f) 704-625-1871
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