Keeping The Urban, Losing The Sprawl

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

( a review of the work of Alex Marshall)

Published: SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2001
Section: COMMENTARY , page J1
Source: BY JOHN-HENRY DOUCETTE

For a book that isn’t about Norfolk, there’s a lot of Norfolk in ”How Cities Work” by Alex Marshall.

And for a book that isn’t per se a criticism of New Urbanism, a design movement that attempts to incorporate urban ideals into suburban development, it misses no opportunity to knock the movement.

Marshall’s opinions of New Urbanism have been stingingly vocal, and among Hampton Roads planning and city officials his notoriety lives on.

A Virginian-Pilot reporter from 1988 to 1997, Marshall comes from a long line of Norfolkians. His great-grandfather, Albert Grandy, was the first publisher of The Virginian-Pilot.

Marshall was a Loeb Fellow in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University last year, and later moved to New York City. ”How Cities Work” was published last month (University of Texas Press, 288 pp., $50 hardcover; $24.95 paperback).

I recently sat down with Marshall in the basement cafeteria of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to talk about his book. The following is an excerpt from that conversation.

Q: Did you want to write this book when you were a reporter in Norfolk?

A: Yes. I’d been writing about cities for almost 10 years for the newspaper. I was constantly asking myself: How does this all fit together? Or what is making this all go?

Then, when I started writing for national magazines, I kind of had that same spirit. I guess in the course of these past eight or nine years I came up with some things that had not been said much.

Q: Such as?

A: I went to Europe on a fellowship in 1994, and it made me realize that suburban sprawl is not just a product of American bad taste. I really love traditional urban cities but you sort of have to examine your love.

Q: So. New Urbanism?

A: I started out as a big fan of New Urbanism and I ended up as a big critic. At first it seemed to offer a very coherent solution to urban sprawl. It seemed to say that we could have these really nice cities and places where people walk, where people do not rely on cars so much, if we just design things a little differently.

Q: In the book, you talk about designing the trappings of a city, but there’s no foundation.

A: Right – there’s no there there. A lot of it was going to Europe, which made me realize transportation is really a fundamental driver of development and of the type of development.

And, secondly, just visiting these New Urban places. If you pull away your starry-eyedness, you see these places as essentially charades or mirages. . . . just another isolated subdivision in the middle of a cornfield, not that much different from the isolated subdivision down the street.

Q: I thought your best argument was for transportation. Thing is, the car exists. People like their cars.

A: I’m not sure people realize how significant it was to have built those highways into Norfolk in the 1960s, that they destroyed Norfolk as much as they helped it.

The highway is as much of a knife into it as a helpful artery. Without the highway, arguably, Norfolk would have thrived more because, rather than fleeing into the suburbs, people would have stayed closer to the downtown, which would have kept more of the traditional downtown.

Q: How does Norfolk, which has the big mall and a highway running into the downtown, stay vital?

A: That’s the million-dollar question. It’s very easy to criticize. It’s much more difficult to work with what’s there. I think the mall is a very good thing, even if it’s horribly designed.

You could do a couple of things – though some of these proposals are outlandish. One, get the highway engineers out of downtown Norfolk. The new streets being built downtown are too much like suburban highways. They should be designing traditional city streets.

More radical things? Tear down some highways. Norfolk should have a Tear Down Highways contest. What would Norfolk lose? If they made it more difficult for commuters to reach their jobs at the naval base or medical center, so what? It just means people would move back to Norfolk. Other cities have done it with pretty big results.

More outlandish: Examine reviving the streetcar system. No city in the country I know of has done this, so maybe this means it’s a good idea. Most of the main streets in Norfolk have street line tracks buried under the asphalt.

Q: How important is it to have people live downtown? Or at least close by?

A: I think that’s a good thing. A lot of it is having a vision of what Norfolk should look like. My vision might be a dense, compact city where people can walk, bicycle, take the streetcar, bus or drive to a lot of different places. That has neighborhood business centers that are alternatives to the more standard neighborhood shopping mall model.

Q: Do you see MacArthur Center in that tradition?

A: My view on MacArthur Center is kind of nuanced. I think it’s a good thing it was built. Right now it’s helping downtown. I would have voted for it if I were on City Council.

But it’s fatally flawed in its design, which in the long run will probably hurt both the mall and the city. To repeat an old charge, it’s built like a hermetically sealed box, which limits how much the mall can help the rest of downtown – and which also limits how much the rest of downtown can help the mall.

If Granby Street continues to take off, it’s going to be very difficult for people to casually walk from Granby Street to the mall. It’s not impossible, but difficult. The mall lives and dies by itself too much.

Q: What are some of the good things that have happened downtown?

A: The Collins housing (a relatively new development along Boush Street) is very good but it’s also built too much as a suburban housing complex. The electric bus system is good.

All the cities in Hampton Roads have an unofficial policy of not allowing poor people to live there. It’s immoral, un-Christian and wrong. For all its strengths, the ward system has still not allowed Norfolk to treat all its residents as citizens.

Q: So if all that money spend in the 1950s and 1960s on redevelopment and transportation had been spent on a public transportation system, say, and not slum clearance or a highway that dumps into downtown, Norfolk would be a better city?

A: It would have required stunning 20/20 foresight, but in hindsight, yes. In the book, I talk about money, government and transportation, and all three are connected. On the business side, (people) should look at how they can change the region’s economic vantages. They should look at their key transportation link to the outside world.

Politically, if we can have more of a regional government and more state growth control and more regional land use plan, we would have less sprawl, more prosperous neighborhoods, and a more livable region. That would make us more attractive to businesses.

On the smaller-mode transportation, we should make our neighborhoods more livable and make car travel less of a priority. Using a car is a personal decision, but building highways is a public decision.

Journalist’s Answer On Suburban Sprawl May Not Be Palatable

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

(a review of the work of Alex Marshall)

From Charleston Neighborhood Post & Courier
By Robert Behre
BOOK REVIEW: How Cities Work, By Alex Marshall

Journalist Alex Marshall shows how to end sprawl; the only question is, do we want to listen?

Are we bothered enough to make the tough decisions needed to change things? Make no mistake – they are tough decisions. Take the automobile (please!). Marshall notes that cities always developed according to the transportation of the day. Older downtowns feel different because they were built for pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages; Wal-Marts and post-World War II subdivisions were built for the car.

Marshall cites three steps needed to change the growth patterns found in most U.S. cities, including larger Charleston: recognition that residents have the right to direct growth.

While not dismissing property rights, Marshall notes that growth stems from public spending on sewer lines, schools and (mostly) transportation. If it’s our money, we should be able to say where it goes.

There needs to be recognition that we need to support other ways of getting around, especially within the city. He notes a trade-off: With more mass transit, bike lanes and sidewalks, you will have the option of not using a car. But to get this option, you have to accept that using a car will be more difficult, a recognition that growth control is not simply a local matter.

A city can tinker with its zoning laws, but today’s growth often leapfrogs past city limits and county lines. Only a regional approach – with the state’s backing – will work.

As the accompanying review by Rosemary Michaud rightly notes, Marshall’s solutions have had few serious takers.

But where she sees this as a lack of vision on Marshall’s part, there is an alternative view: seeing it as underscoring the difficulty of the task. ‘The problem for contemporary Americans is that enhancing social cohesion (and limiting sprawl) may mean giving up some things we really like, like personal mobility, low taxes, and a footloose economic structure,’ Marshall writes. ‘We have not figured out yet that creating wealth is not the same as creating community.’

Perhaps most importantly, Marshall explodes the outdated thinking that cities’ older downtown areas are different than the mid- to late-20th century development that rings them. To him, it’s all one big city. ‘The suburban world of highways, shopping centers, and office parks is now a place of blind market forces and impersonality – exactly what the city represented in the past,’ he says. Older downtowns have become cherished because we realize they’re a past art form that won’t be built anew. The question is where we go from here. We can pursue Marshall’s solutions or simply wait for personal jetpacks or flying cars.

‘Actual shaping of cities requires making choices. More of this, less of that. Some people lose, some people win,’ he writes.

‘What we are starting to see in Portland (Ore.) is a city that recognizes you can have easy suburban growth with big homes on large lots, or a coherent city with a vital mass transit system, but not both.’

Robert Behreis the editor of The Post and Courier Neighborhood Editions and a columnist on preservation.

Faux Urbanism

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

(a review of the work of Alex Marshall)

The American Prospect
June 18, 2001
BY JOANNA MARETH

Book Review:
How Cities Work: Suburbs, Sprawl, and the Road Not Taken, by Alex Marshall.
University of Texas Press, 243 pages, $ 24.95.

Celebration, Florida, is a picturesque town built from the ground up by the Walt Disney Corporation and planners Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, pioneers of New Urbanism. By some measures, Celebration is a success. It has a thriving downtown retail district and homes that sell for seven times what similarly sized houses in neighboring towns go for. What it doesn’t have, according to Alex Marshall in How Cities Work, is any real claim to urbanism, new or old.

Marshall, a journalist based in Norfolk, Virginia, picks out four places with little in common — California’s Silicon Valley; Jackson Heights, Queens; Portland, Oregon; and Celebration — for his study of the interplay of forces that determine the shape of cities and towns. In each instance, he shows how the public’s decisions and money are the most important variables in creating urban places. It is government, he emphasizes, that ultimately shapes cities by building the transportation systems that form the skeleton of any place. Rails, ports, interstates, and airports support the flow of goods and capital, while sidewalks, subways, and highways determine how people get around once they’ve arrived.

Silicon Valley, to take one example, may look like a hastily strung-together collection of supersize office parks and shopping developments. But governmental entities made zoning decisions, built mass transit, and stretched country roads into six-lane highways and suburban boulevards. Each decision requires trade-offs. Places with good public-transportation systems are rarely easy to navigate by car, as anyone living in a city like Boston can attest.

What Marshall finds in Celebration is a modern-day automobile subdivision that has been pinched and pulled to resemble small-town America, at least as it exists in popular imagination. But like most contemporary suburban developments, Celebration is dependent on the nearby interstate highway. The dynamics of such a place have not made Marshall into an enthusiast for New Urbanism. “Celebration and most New Urban developments,” he writes, “will remain winking ornaments on the more gritty reality of American urban life, make-believe worlds that, like Disney’s theme parks, lure a public and society

away from addressing the challenges such developments advertise with their image.” New Urbanism’s “have your cake and eat it too” approach should not be confused with real urban policy, which requires tough choices and the involvement of not-so-tidy institutions of democracy, as opposed to the top-down plans of well-oiled corporations.

Marshall’s paragon is Portland, where growth decisions are consciously channeled through local and regional governments. The policies are simple: Use growth boundaries to keep downtowns dense, build fewer freeways (or even tear some down), and fund mass transit. The results aren’t perfect. A ballot initiative approved by Oregon voters last November makes growth boundaries more difficult to enforce and may signal a backlash against the state’s strict land-use laws (a development that is too recent to have been included in Marshall’s book). Still, Portland remains one of the few midsize cities that have a thriving downtown and don’t compel their residents to drive everywhere.

Marshall writes: “If Andres Duany or Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk want to design towns, then they should be working for the planning department of some state or county. Their often elegant streets and squares should be drawn on public documents, which should match the transportation system government is designing.” Too bad that in most of the country, government doesn’t get much respect. In the absence of a cohesive national urban policy, the planning and design of communities have fallen under the jurisdiction of other, more energized movements such as environmentalism, historical preservation, and architectural philosophies like New Urbanism.

New Urbanism’s most important legacy may be the discussion it continues to provoke over the shape and design of communities and the fresh thinking it brings into the field of urban planning. In books, seminars, and demonstration communities like Celebration and Seaside, Florida, New Urbanists get people talking about what they mean when they talk about urbanism. And in fact, what people want isn’t new at all: the ability to walk to the store, drive less, get to know the neighbors. With its sidewalks, front porches, and densely built neighborhoods, Celebration provides these touches with corporate efficiency.

The task now is to move beyond Celebration and tackle the thornier question of how far we are willing to go to get the sort of pedestrian scale that is missing from most newer places. Are we really willing to drive less and live closer to our neighbors if it means giving up some mobility — and giving up the ability to stop undesirable elements at the front gates? Marshall’s enthusiasm for urban places and active government is contagious. Still, while historical memory is short, the bulldozer scars from midcentury urban-renewal projects haven’t disappeared. There’s hope that the almighty interstate won’t reign forever, but urban advocates who call for sweeping government intervention would do well to remember that we’ve been down that road before.

Can You Be an Urbanist and Still Like Cities?

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

(a review of the work of Alex Marshall)

BY ALAN EHRENHALT

The 20th century produced a pantheon of brilliant urban thinkers and planners. Some built, some mostly wrote, some did both. Some did better than others at translating their ideas into reality. But one way or another, we are living with the consequences of their vision: Ebenezer Howard’s “garden cities,” Le Corbusier’s “radiant city,” Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City” ‘ even Lewis Mumford’s unrealized dream of regional planning ‘ all of them represent the baseline for anyone who wants to create a modern urban revival.

But there’s a dirty little secret that nearly all the legendary members of the urbanist Hall of Fame have in common. They really didn’t like cities very much ‘ at least the ones they lived in and knew about. Wright and Le Corbusier considered the urban industrial metropolis of their time to be dirty, smelly, noisy, crowded and vastly inferior to the skyscraper-and-park cities they could conjure up on their drawing boards. Mumford acquired a reputation as one of the most passionate urbanists of all time, but what he really admired most was the medieval village, where, as he saw it, people could be in touch with nature every moment of the day. The more he saw of mid-century Manhattan, the unhappier he became.

The purpose of this column, however, isn’t to focus on this set of individuals, but rather to celebrate the accomplishments of the one great 20th-century urbanist who really loved cities ‘ loved them for their noise, their energy, their complexity, for the sheer quantity of life they managed to generate.

As you may have guessed, I’m referring to Jane Jacobs. This year marks the 40th anniversary of her masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Happily, Jacobs is alive and well, still writing and lecturing from her home in Toronto at age 85. Even more happily, her work has become a readily available classic, still on the shelves in almost every good bookstore in the country.

Nobody, of course, would be foolish enough to claim that Jane Jacobs’ wisdom has become settled doctrine in the world of city planning and urban design. The battles she ignited are still being fought, and not always with success for her side. But to a remarkable extent, she set the agenda in 1961, and it remains about where she set it. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that contemporary urban thought is a series of footnotes to Jane Jacobs.

When she wrote Death and Life, downtown renewal in American cities consisted largely of the destruction of two-story commercial structures, their replacement by large office towers, and the creation of huge windswept plazas in which no one congregated.

Now, at the very least, most of us realize that empty plazas are no urban adornment. But the person who first taught us that was Jane Jacobs, insisting that expert opinion was wrong: that successful cities are built out of street life ‘ people of all sorts, coming and going at all hours, working, playing and gossiping on the same sidewalks, forming the casual relationships upon which trust can grow.

“Life begets life,” Jacobs wrote. Busy streets are safe streets. Empty streets are dangerous. That’s no more than simple common sense now. But it was heretical 40 years ago.

Death and Life was prescient in so many ways that one short column couldn’t possibly acknowledge them all. Jacobs argued for the reclaiming of seedy industrial waterfronts for recreational purposes. “The waterfront itself,” she argued, “is the first wasted asset capable of drawing people at leisure.”

She warned against single-purpose zoning and described mixed-use development as the foremost weapon in rebuilding a city neighborhood. Today that is accepted wisdom not only among New Urbanists but in the planning department of virtually every big American city.

Perhaps even more important ‘ and certainly less heeded ‘ was Jacobs’ corollary warning that financial capital and physical rebuilding will not restore a community whose social life has been depleted. “It is fashionable,” Jacobs wrote, “to suppose that certain touchstones of the good life will create good neighborhoods ‘ schools, parks, clean housing and the like. How easy life would be if this were so!… There is no direct, simple relationship between good housing and good behavior…” and “important as good schools are, they prove totally undependable at rescuing bad neighborhoods.” Billions of wasted dollars and limitless human disappointment could have been averted by a public willingness to face up to those Jacobean truths.

Nobody is right about everything, though, and I would argue ‘ although I doubt she would agree ‘ that she was wrong about at least a couple of things. Based on her experiences as an activist in New York’s Greenwich Village, Jacobs felt that no organized urban neighborhood of fewer than 75,000 people could be large enough to wield meaningful clout in the political structure of a huge city. It seems to me that this was more true of New York in the 1960s than of cities in general. Communities smaller than Jacobs’ prescribed minimum have fought City Hall and won numerous times in the largest cities in the past 40 years.

Moreover, she was utterly disdainful of metropolitan regionalism. She described a region as “an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.” She thought that regional alliances and consolidation of political power were no answer to the difficulties either of cities or of the suburbs sprouting up around them. It seems to me that if regionalism is a difficult and often unpalatable choice, it may be the only realistic one left for quite a few of the struggling metropolitan areas in this country.

But if Jacobs was wrong about a couple of things, she was breathtakingly right about so many ‘ and she was able to express her insights in a casual, ironic, unpretentious way that makes her as much a pleasure to read now as she was in the 1960s, when I first encountered her in college.

And that suggests one more crucial lesson about Jane Jacobs worth paying some attention to: She was an amateur. Jacobs was by training neither a planner nor an architect nor an urban historian nor anything else that might suggest uncommon learning in her field. She was a newspaper reporter from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who moved to New York with her husband and children in the early postwar years, settled into a Greenwich Village apartment, took an interest in Village affairs, read the urban policy literature, traveled around the country to check on other cities, and emerged with a fund of common sense that no formal degree or professional credential could possibly have given her.

It is a silly question to ask who will be the Jane Jacobs of the 21st century. No one will be; she is as original and irreproducible as anyone who has ever written about cities and community. But it may be reasonable to observe that, when and if someone makes literate and persuasive sense out of the next round of urban problems and challenges, it won’t be someone with a long series of titles and degrees surrounding his name. It will be someone with the virtues of an intelligent and curious amateur.

In the decade or so since New Urbanism exploded onto the local policy and planning scene, it has generated millions of words of analysis and prescription detailing how intelligent design can restore the sense of community and rootedness that city life has lost in the past half century. Some of this literature is readable and useful; some of it is not.

But none of it has seemed more sensible and appealing to me than How Cities Work, Alex Marshall’s new book of urban reporting and commentary. Marshall shares with Jane Jacobs one characteristic: He is an amateur: a longtime Virginia newspaper reporter whose methods consist largely of watching, reading, traveling and thinking.

Marshall is both sympathetic to New Urbanism and critical of it. His criticisms are simple and cogent ones. Essentially they boil down to this: Transportation is destiny. Communities are creatures of the transportation systems that grow up around them. American downtowns and Main Streets of the early 20th century were compact and vibrant because people walked there or came in on trains and moved in and out of stations twice a day. It’s fine to be nostalgic for the physical intimacy of the old-time small town or gritty city, but it’s impossible to have it in a society dependent for its mobility on the automobile.

Therefore, Marshall argues, there is something inescapably false about New Urbanist efforts to re-create a small-town America of picket fences, front porches and sidewalk gossip in developments constructed as enclaves along freeways and virtually inaccessible except by car. “Bringing back the street,” he concludes, “is not possible unless we bring back the forms of transportation that made it essential.”

Marshall would actually like to see those old urban forms return to life. He likes the idea of compact downtowns friendly to pedestrians and fed by fast and efficient public transportation. He is merely making the point that if we are to create such a societal change in the coming century, we will need to think through all the trade-offs and sacrifices it will entail. We will have to return to old ways of getting around. We will not be able to revive the neighborhoods of the past simply by redesigning streets and houses.

Reading Alex Marshall and rereading Jane Jacobs in quick succession leaves a similarly bracing feeling: Their books amount to a cold bath of common sense whose implications an urban cheerleader might just as soon avoid, but whose logic is ultimately difficult to escape.

This is not to say that Alex Marshall is the next Jane Jacobs. That would be unfair to both of them. It’s merely a reminder of something we might all stop and ponder. In urban policy, as in most other fields, smart amateurs are worth paying attention to. They have a way of keeping us all in touch with reality.

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Alan Ehrenhalt’s Assessments columns from Governing have been collected in a book entitled Democracy in the Mirror: Politics, Reform, and Reality in Grassroots America. For more information on the book and how to order a copy, click here.

Rich People in Ugly Buildings

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

This story, about the New York apartment building, ran in Slate magazine. Because it is accompanied by slides, it is best to see it on Slate’s web site.

Long Boats and Underground Vaults by the River Charles

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

By Alex Marshall
For The Powhatan Review
November 1999

Crewing is the ultimate wasp sport. It requires patience, diligence and years of work at the simple task of pulling oars through water, as you park your butt in the bottom of a tiny slivered almond of a boat. Crew is not flashy. There is no crew equivalent of passing the ball behind your back on your way to a slam dunk over the head of a surprised defender. No, crew is all about steady effort for the sake of some future reward that may never come.

To the uninitiated, crew is that sport where teams of two, four, six or eight people sit in skinny boats and haul themselves through the water like ancient teams of galley slaves. The boats are tiny, just a foot or so across, and bizarre looking. It is mostly practiced at or near elite colleges, I suspect, with Harvard being the epi-center.

The sport and its spectators were on display recently on a fall weekend on the Charles River here at Harvard in Cambridge. It was the annual Head of the Charles’ regatta, a crew tradition which involves hundreds of teams coming from all over the world. They came to race along the river and glide under the Parisian-style stone bridges, a classic moment in the sport, like playing tennis at Wimbledon. According to the newspapers, some two hundred thousand of us stood on the banks and the bridges watched the thin boats and their denizens.

In their motion, these boats in motion looked like water bugs jetting over the surface of the water. Their teams pulled themselves across in smooth yet jerky movements. They also reminded me of air hockey pucks, from that game you’d play for quarters where jets of air kept a thin plastic puck floating on top of a table as you whacked it about. The boats appeared to rest on top of the water, not in it.

But to the guys and gals hauling the boats, it probably did not feel so effortless. They were hauling themselves through the water with their thighs, backs and arms. The men were muscular but in a lean, mean way.

The women varied more physically. I watched their backs float underneath me, and noticed with pleasure rounded shoulders and lean arms jutting out of shapely T-shirts, with a pig- or pony-tail usually hanging somewhere. But some women had bulky, linebacker style bodies, with big butts and broad backs. I wonder if they made up for their weight with their strength, or whether their bulk slowed the ship down. I wonder if the other girls ever thought, Jeez, I’m tired of dragging Cheryl’s flab through the water.

Crewing is one of the classic Harvard traditions — one of the few I have bumped across. I arrived here for my year sabbatical expecting to be submerged in tweedy accents and various obscure customs. But although it’s a pretty place, the people and customs are more average looking and acting than in my imagination.

The students look like students elsewhere. Among the undergraduates at Harvard College, there are the standard cliques. The jocks, who walk around the campus in groups and have buzz haircuts on their bullet heads. The artsy students, with interesting haircuts and fashionable clothes. Then the mass of students, who wear conventional clothes on conventional bodies and look pretty non-descript. I suspect most of the undergraduates have been so busying studying in order to get here, that they have not had time to craft the elaborate personal identities as say a slacker, or a rapper, or one of the many other sub-cults of American youth.

Partly though, the student’s casual attire reflects the changing norm of personal dress. The 60s have made us all more casual. Even in the pampered, ultra-elite world of Harvard Business School, which lies across the Charles river on its own carefully maintained campus, the students, who are generally in their 20s and 30s, look like students everywhere. These men and women, who will become CEO’s of major corporations some day, wear jeans and casual shirts. They do not look corporate at all.

You can still find some classic Harvard sights and roles, however. One of my favorite things to do has been to dine at the Harvard Faculty Club. Because I am a fellow, I am rated on the same level as a faculty member and thus automatically a member of this club. This feels like a bit of a charade, but one I fully enjoy and exploit.

The Harvard Faculty club looks as you would expect. Its building is a conservative brick house. The rooms are furnished in dark wood with heavy carpeting and serious paintings on the wall. In the main drawing room, you can lounge on big leather sofas while a nearby fire crackles, helping yourself to one of the many newspapers and magazines placed there daily. The men’s bathroom has a supply of colognes out for use.

On the upstairs walls of the faculty club, there were hung framed photos of the interiors of Harvard dormitories in the 1880s. I saw rooms stuffed with furniture, paintings and knick-knacks. The students wore coats and ties, sat in deep leather chairs and puffed on pipes, probably with nearby servants ready to refill their tea cups. Evidently, class and privilege used to be much more obvious here.

Within the faculty club dining room there is an air of gentle care and attentiveness. The male waiters take my orders without fuss. There is no tipping. The head waiter, Pierre, remembers my name. The only unpleasantness intruding on my comfort is the irrational fear that someone will recognize me as an imposter and throw me out. So far, that hasn’t happened.

Harvard is one of the intellectual capitals of the world, so as well as crewing and leather chairs, you might expect more intellectual treasures and vistas to be found here. They are here, but they are also elusive. No one has yet ushered me into a room and said, Here, you have admittance to the secrets of the universe. There are a lot of smart people here, but I am struck that the professors here are often dealing with the same questions I am, even if they do so with perhaps more facts and skills at their disposal. This can be liberating.

One past fellow in my program said attending Harvard gave him the confidence to try new things in his job, because he realized that even Harvard professors were still trying to figure things out. Final answers are elusive. In all but the hard sciences, (and possibly not even there), accuracy or truth is more a matter of percentages, getting either the practice or a theory right enough to work in some situations some of the time, before events and time wear a model out and exhaust its utility.

Many of the tangible, physical secrets at Harvard are buried, literally, within their many libraries. The dozen libraries here are a vast, intimidating vault packed with records of human striving. Widener Library, the imposing, Greek-style main library with massive columns, has more floors below ground than above it. And these tunnels lead to subterranean chambers of adjacent libraries. I have only briefly explored these dark depths. And when I do so, I find myself quickly clamoring back up into the light, to get away from so many words packed into narrow corridors in low-ceilinged rooms. These subterranean chambers seem like some vast hidden machinery laboring away, below the genteel public face of Harvard’s green lawns and classic brick buildings.

I hope during my time here at Harvard, I discover a few of its secrets. I will try to bring them back, when I resume my more ordinary life in Norfolk.

The Peirce Report: Shaping A Shared Future

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

A Generation Ago It Would Have Seemed Absurd To List Charlotte With Atlanta, Miami, Denver, Dallas, Seattle. No Longer. Now, As The Carolinas’ Undisputed Economic Capital, Where Is The Charlotte Region Headed In The 21st Century

Sunday, September 17, 1995
The Charlotte Observer
Written by Peirce, LaRita Barber, Alex Marshall, and Curtis Johnson

This region is a place where people perennially assume a powerful bunch of bank presidents and other men (always men) call the shots. As the big oaks of business and civic leadership have fallen across America, Charlotte has seemed a case of arrested development. The mysterious group of business folks called ”The Vault” (they met at a bank) has long faded in Boston. The once-powerful Citizens Council has turned warm, fuzzy and conciliatory in Dallas. The immodestly named ”Phoenix Forty” has retreated from dominant leadership.

But change in Charlotte? Never, it seemed. The legend has been constantly renewed by the activism of the bank chieftains – remarkable financial buccaneers, ranging America in search of banks, capturing one big fiscal house after another and dragging the prize back uptown – much like the hunters of old returning home with the bounty.

The triumphs of Ed Crutchfield, Hugh McColl Jr. and their colleagues have made a huge difference: Look at all those new bank jobs in the region, at Charlotte’s soaring reputation.

Even so, a leadership revolution is under way in the Charlotte region. The leadership clique, led by the bank CEOs and other corporate chieftains, has not disappeared. But it is less cohesive, and rebellions against it more serious. Residents of Charlotte-Mecklenburg and neighboring counties, from York to Cabarrus, Gaston to Union, err when they glance up at those soaring bank towers and assume power is as centralized as it was.

Consider the rebellions:

Populist conservatives, saying government power is at the root of much evil and highly suspicious of ”uptown power,” have swept to power themselves in recent local elections. Yellow dog Democrats are cowering in confusion. (”We were the party of the people; what’s this revolt from the right all about?”)

Tom Bush, a Mecklenburg County commissioner elected last fall, told us, ”Elected officials used to operate at the beck and call of the big banks and corporations. The business leaders had a close relationship with a powerful Chamber of Commerce that could both help local government and dictate to local government. Now many of us have been elected whom the economic powers in Mecklenburg didn’t know or weren’t interested in. Obviously there’s nervousness on the part of the chamber, the major banks, that they may be losing some of the control they previously had. My attitude’s not to do just uptown’s will, but also what University Park, southeast Charlotte and all the other areas need.”

Years of harmonious approval of major school bonds came to a surprising, discordant end last spring, as Mecklenburg voters defeated a mega-bond issue, more than $300 million, despite its strong support in the corporate community.
A gaggle of organizations has emerged across the multicounty, bi-state Charlotte citistate. The object of each: regional consensus or cooperation. Why? It’s becoming obvious no jurisdiction or power group has the power to carry the day by itself.

Examples: The Carolinas Partnership tries to catalyze economic development on a regional basis, consciously including development interests from the counties. Such groups as the Carolinas Transportation Compact and the Committee of 100 have looked at issues from highways to rails. After years of being trounced by rural and small-town politicos from other N.C regions, a Southern Piedmont Legislative Caucus organized to get a better deal in Raleigh.

A whole array of programs are training potentially more independent future leaders, including the three-year-old Carolinas Leadership Program. New citizen groups are emerging. One, in its infancy, is the Queen City Congress, under which a group of neighborhoods, both affluent and poor, recently signed a ”Declaration of Interdependence.”

There’s a plausible argument that with a rough brush of the arm, big business leadership could neutralize any of those groups. Some of them, the leadership training groups, for example, are largely establishment- financed anyway.

But as more groups and people begin to exercise leadership, commands sent down from executive suites are (1) less likely to get sent, and (2) more likely to be circumvented or ignored.

What’s more, leadership naturally disperses when problems get tougher. The big guys can hardly snap their fingers and provide answers to today’s pressing problems:

How to prepare a work force that can sustain the region’s stunning record of almost full employment?
How to avoid choking on the congestion of the thousands of cars – in other words, how not to become a Houston or Los Angeles?
How to build a society that works for all, across races, neighborhoods, counties?
How to make sure the region has functioning schools, ample parks and that people feel safe from crime?
How to cultivate big-city opportunities and small-town civility in the same region?

Those who doubt the power transfer in the Charlotte region should ask the man himself, NationsBank Chairman Hugh McColl Jr. We did. ”Maybe the baton’s already passed,” McColl said. ”The so-called group that people think controls everything downtown cratered about four or five years ago.”

McColl and First Union Chairman Ed Crutchfield acknowledge there was a strong partnership seeking to guide Charlotte, among themselves and such leaders as former Duke Power Co. Chairman Bill Lee, developer Johnny Harris, retail leader and former mayor John Belk, Observer Publisher Rolfe Neill and the Dickson family, whose Ruddick Corp. owns Harris Teeter supermarkets and other companies.

But today, they say, the group mainly coalesces on charity issues. Business figures such as Crutchfield disclaim almost any contact with the local political structure.

The regional counterparts to Charlotte’s power brokers are well-known – the Cannon family in Cabarrus County, the Close family of York and Lancaster counties, the Broyhills in Catawba and Caldwell, and the Stowes, Carstarphens and other textile titans in Gaston.

This Carolinas culture is wrapped in strong country-city ties. Crutchfield noted many Charlotteans (like McColl and himself) were born in small towns within 100 miles of the city, ”sort of one-horse towns where some old rich guy controls the land and the buildings, and they think that’s what’s happening in Charlotte.” Result: The symbolism of power remains, reinforced by Charlotte’s soaring bank towers, even if it’s less often exercised.

Whether or not McColl and Crutchfield protest too much about their modest power, no one can gainsay the achievements of Charlotte’s recent leaders. By their imagination and will power, they played a catalytic role in catapulting Charlotte from the third tier of cities – the category of a Norfolk, Birmingham or Jacksonville – to a firm place in the constellation of major U.S. regional centers.

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. Savvy leadership is the obvious reason. As Belk is fond of saying, ”Charlotte is a man-made town.”

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. It holds some excellent shopping centers, but you can look long and hard for an eccentric coffeehouse or used bookstore. Uptown rolls up its sidewalks at 5 p.m. SouthPark is thriving, but urbane it isn’t.

Even among residents, the joke is: ”Charlotte’s a nice place to live, but you wouldn’t want to visit there.” Or the perhaps apocryphal comment we heard, attributed to a Hornets player: ”You can’t do nothing in Charlotte except live.”

Yet with its quieter style, Charlotte has an immense asset – its culture of cooperation and participation. More than in most cities, citizens are expected to take part in civic projects, volunteer on civic boards and committees, even run for office. Not by accident does Charlotte have more Habitat for Humanity houses – nearly 250 – than any other city in America.

In the same spirit, this city is quite open to outsiders. ”If people come in and want to work for the community, Charlotte lets them,” said Belk. ”Some cities are jealous of people coming in and won’t let them help. But we’re different.”

An outsider looks across the Charlotte region and sees a high quotient of what political scientists call ”civic capital.” Community-based organizations proliferate, as do an extraordinary number of churches, at least some of which support important social work. Charlotte boasts a stronger tradition of racial amity than most other Southern cities, including strong early efforts to make school desegregation work, and election of a black mayor ahead of many Southern towns.

The effort to excel continues. The city government is making a heroic try to ”reinvent” itself, to become more responsive to neighborhoods and citizens. Whether or not full city-county merger is approved, the consolidation of multiple Charlotte and Mecklenburg County services stands out as a beacon of common sense among America’s quarrelsome metropolitan regions. Indeed, here’s a region where it’s at least possible to discuss the idea of merged regional government services. For example, the successful police merger in Charlotte-Mecklenburg could be tried in surrounding counties, where the elected sheriff is becoming an anomaly in an increasingly urban age. Think further: Wouldn’t regional fire and emergency medical services make sense, too?

And consider Rock Hill’s strategic planning process, begun in the early ’80s, which has transformed it from a depressed, unemployment-plagued mill town to one of the nation’s most economically vibrant, highly attractive suburban centers. The transformation was accomplished in part, leaders told us, by convincing firms ”that if they were in Rock Hill, they were really in Charlotte.” Yet Rock Hill, with its public art, quality industrial parks, restored downtown and emphasis on neighborhood revival, is anxious not to bleed into Charlotte proper.

Perils exist, and they start with the region’s success. Does Charlotte aspire to be more than a boom town? When an Observer columnist recently asked, ”Would you challenge a bulldozer for anything in Charlotte?” only a tiny proportion of readers offered any examples of physical places to which they felt real attachment.

Can thousands of newcomers be integrated successfully into the region’s civic life? Newcomers are arriving in such numbers that thousands are in danger of being mere ”residents,” not true ”citizens.” A number of newcomers, interviewed in shopping malls by our colleague Alex Marshall, talked of the Charlotte region as if it were a disposable commodity, not a community to which they have reciprocal obligation.

More challenges relate to development. For example: Since the 1960s, the dominant form of construction has been self-contained, single- income-group subdivisions, each with one entrance onto an arterial road and a country-club-type sign proclaiming a Quail Hollow or whatever, hinting strongly of safety, seclusion, exclusivity. Missing, as a rule, are connecting roads to the next development.

Such problems are typical. It’s no accident the Charlotte region’s greatest pockets of congestion turn up in areas most recently developed – exactly the opposite of what one would expect.

The developers’ land-use decisions will increasingly leave the public to suffer serious inconvenience, from long driving times and congestion to worse air quality and a palpable loss of community.

Is it too heretical to suggest, in this land of free enterprise and ferocious distrust of government, that abdicating so much public decision-making, and letting private developers determine a lot of the region’s shape and form, may have been a very bad idea?

The region’s cities and counties should return to the practice, common until the 1940s, of laying out and mapping streets. On a big wall at city hall or the county government office should be a map of how the city will grow over the next half-century. It might take 40 years before a developer paves that street and puts in lots, but when that happens, it will fit into a whole.

People will predictably reiterate that such planning smacks of socialism. Again and again, we heard that this is a region of prickly, independent, ”Don’t Tread on Me” folks. The Scotch-Irish pioneers who settled the banks of the Catawba River brought their deep resentment of aristocrats, government and the authorities, and those sentiments endure.

But even if government is viewed with a jaundiced eye, does it make sense to assume a mill owner, a banker or a subdivision builder knows best? We believe there’s a third route – broader citizen participation, not just in elections but thousands of forums.

The region’s citizens need to take charge. The native intelligence of the people of this region needs a workout. The citizens of the Charlotte citistate must address the most critical challenges of the times, personally, intensively, in all kinds of formats.

Take one problem: the poverty, crime and social chaos that plague some of Charlotte’s older neighborhoods. Rural areas have parallel pockets of deprivation. These problems already besmirch the region’s reputation.

Unattended, they could prove deeply injurious in the future. A number of constructive, neighborhood-based recovery strategies have been proposed, based on self-help, accountability and strategic public investment. But is the whole society – businesses, nonprofits, universities and affluent citizens – ready to provide the political and financial support to get progress rolling and sustain it?

If a growing proportion of the region’s crime problem is rooted in youth crime, for example, are youth being called on to help analyze the problem, work with peers, suggest solutions? Are young people in general being drawn into discussions of the Charlotte citistate’s choices and future?

Is UNC Charlotte, with its huge repository of brainpower, being tapped sufficiently? UNCC and the community colleges are making an effort to contribute to the region’s public dialogue. UNCC has many students engaged in some form of community service. Regardless of the discipline, UNCC officials told us, the university does not hire department heads without being clear that relating to the community will be part of the job.

But the community shouldn’t wait for outreach from the academics. They need to be sought out, challenged, drawn into critical public debates.

One example: North Carolinians are debating subsidies to draw industries. UNCC should be ready, perhaps working with the local press, to do cost analyses on subsidy deals as they’re proposed.

Finally, consider government itself. In the new international economy, regions must be keenly competitive. That means not just wages, but a technically skilled work force, a clean environment, quality health care, arts and professional sports, parks and open space, and, especially, efficient government.

Good or bad, government makes up roughly a fifth of a local economy. If government is inefficient, so is the citistate.

Only informed citizens can hold government accountable. Services must be merged, bureaucracies thinned, performance benchmarks set. Public-private partnerships for more economical and effective local government must be devised across the region’s neighborhood, county and state lines. If not, the discordant cacophony of competing governments will start driving new businesses away.

It won’t do any more just to say, ”No – I don’t like taxes, I don’t like government, I distrust city people or minorities or whoever, so get government off my back, let free enterprise reign and everything will be fine.”

Some of the Charlotte region’s radical populists seem to go that far. We believe these new conservatives should be welcomed into the political debate, since they bring insights and challenge many of government’s encrusted and outmoded ways of operating. But they should not go unchallenged. Because at the end of the day, real solutions to shared problems must be found, or the region will falter.

Thousands of citizens of the ”can-do” Charlotte region, operating across the barriers of political persuasion, class and color, need to think through their problems and challenges and design their own collaborative answers.

The region’s newspapers can enrich the process immeasurably. So can the broadcast media, broadening the debate to thousands of people who might otherwise not be engaged. Churches, Rotaries, chambers of commerce, schools – all should be facilitators and leaders.

Gather these forces and, we believe, there will be no stopping the Charlotte citistate, advancing confidently into the 21st century.

DEAR READERS:

On a Sunday afternoon, soaring over your communities at low helicopter altitude, it hit us. Your region has magic. Historic neighborhoods, a stunning uptown skyline, recreational lakes spreading from the spine of the Catawba River. Your Rock Hills and Gastonias, Davidsons and Kannapolises in stages of renaissance. And a marvelous vast canopy of trees standing guard over your places still unfilled.

We’re two journalist observers invited to delve into your region and offer counsel on its future, as we have done for 10 other cities.

In more than 100 interviews last June with your fellow citizens, your enthusiasm for your high quality of life came through.

Famous or humble, you were also as candid about your problems as you were proud of your prosperity. We try to match your candor, in the series starting today in Perspective, on Page 1D.

We’ve studied metro regions coast to coast. We’ve seen what happens when planning is scorned, sprawl tolerated, historic urban centers abandoned, education dishonored, crime and neighborhood decay left to fester.

Don’t let it happen to you. You don’t need to.

As friends of your region, we propose a bunch of ideas today. For example: walkability and livability for uptown and your historic county seats. Next Sunday we focus on growth guided to corridors and town centers, to protect your environment. A third Sunday we’ll try to show how computer learning can overcome anti-education sentiments left over from your pioneer days. We’ll wind up Oct. 8 addressing the potential for nationally significant breakthroughs in your crime- and poverty-plagued neighborhoods.

Whether you warm to our specific ideas or not, do yourselves one big favor: Try democracy. Too often the Charlotte region looks for direction to bankers and corporate chieftains. Of course, they’re a talented lot. But from clean air to the work force to family stability to crime, they can’t and won’t solve your most basic problems for you.

Create multiple forums – regionwide and locally – to put the decisions about your physical growth, your educational future, your parks, towns and neighborhoods, into the hands of thousands of citizens. Make Everyman and Everywoman an author of your region’s future. Trust yourselves, challenge yourselves. Have fun at it. Build a great 21st-century citistate. Remember, no one else can do it for you.

CHALLENGES TO THE REGION

Accept that the bank CEOs and their friends no longer control the region. Future leadership becomes everyone’s job on the big problems for the region’s future: Quality work force, traffic, crime, equity.
Celebrate Charlotte’s ascension among the ranks of America’s leading cities.
Cultivate and protect the region’s special, open, ”can-do” culture. Work to accumulate more ”civic capital.”
Integrate the thousands of newcomers into the region’s life.
Think about regional services beyond Mecklenburg’s borders.
The public – not developers – should plan streets, roads and neighborhoods.
Recognize the age of the ”citistate” has dawned. Reduce attitudinal splits between Mecklenburg and outlying counties. Focus on a common future.
As the old power brokers die or retire, the region’s leadership must come from its people – city and suburban – working together. Tap citizens, youth, universities. Build trust, and expect the media to help.
Recognize uptown is the region’s signature piece to the world. Make it as welcoming for people as for big buildings.
Support the region’s other uptowns – Concord, Monroe, Rock Hill, Davidson and Gastonia, for example – where the real character of town life is preserved. Use local zoning and other powers to make sure the downtowns become a focus of development.

THE PEIRCE REPORT

This series is based on a simple premise: Charlotte and its sister communities are one region, one economy, one environmental area, one society.

Clearly, Mecklenburg County is the population and income heavyweight. But in no way is it the only guy on the block. The daily lives of people across at least eight counties – Mecklenburg, Union, Cabarrus, Iredell, Catawba, Lincoln, Gaston and York, S.C. – are ever more tightly intertwined. And clear ties are developing to an outer ”ring” of counties – Anson, Stanly, Rowan, Alexander, Burke, Cleveland, and Chester and Lancaster, S.C.

The Charlotte area is becoming a major national and world economic region. It fits well the definition of ”citistate,” which we have developed in our work with other regions (and hope some day to get accepted by Random House or Webster):

A region consisting of one or more historic central cities surrounded by cities and towns which have a shared identification, function as a single zone for trade, commerce and communication, and are characterized by social, economic and environmental interdependence.

The definition doesn’t mention city or county lines. A citistate is organic. The citistate is what the economy does. It’s the ”commute-shed” for workers, the signal area for local newscasts, the geographic base of fans for pro sports teams. It’s the market for top regional hospitals.

No matter what you check – from air pollution to water quality, the arts to crime, shopping, higher education, day care – the interdependence of the Charlotte citistate is underscored.

It’s absurd for this region to do anything but think and plan collaboratively. One hears of a growing split between suburbanites and Charlotte’s old guard. But Rock Hill, for one, is making an asset, not a liability, of strong ties with Charlotte.

Citistates that quarrel will suffer the unhappy fate of families mired in conflict. Those that see opportunity in the variety of their regions, that mobilize people and communities to work together, will be far more resilient – better places to live and work.

UPTOWN: SYMBOL OF THE REGION

When ”Nell” appeared at theaters last winter, the origin of the rural scenes was a mystery to most moviegoers. Not until the credits did they learn those stunning mountain scenes came from Western North Carolina.

But in a theater as far away as Minneapolis, when a city skyline loomed, there were audible whispers: ”That’s Charlotte.”

Charlotte’s skyline has become the region’s signature.

Anchored by the NationsBank and First Union towers, the skyline symbolizes banking clout. It signals Charlotte is now an ”instant recognition” city. Goodbye to confusion with the South’s other ”Ch’s.”

Charlotte needs its uptown to keep emphasizing its newly won status. A depressed or abandoned uptown would be a disaster for the entire Charlotte citistate.

Right now, uptown shows lots of big-project dynamism: the new convention center, the huge Carolinas Stadium, Discovery Place, Spirit Square, the Afro-American Cultural Center and the North Carolina Blumenthal Performing Arts Center.

But what about people? Will uptown be a place for them, too? Will the streets be fun to walk on, with restaurants and galleries and little shops? Will uptown warmly welcome an entire region? Will it stop looking like a stage set for a ghost town after 5 p.m.? Can a human, real city be built?

What’s missing is glaringly obvious. We discovered it one evening, in search of a good meal. Unless you know where the restaurants are hidden, you’re in trouble.

We stood at Trade and Tryon, unthreatened by cars or buses, watching stoplights flash green, then red again, regulating unseen traffic. A few human figures wandered about, reminding us of the hotel concierge’s warning to be wary of street people.

We found Bistro 100, deep in an indoor retail complex, and enjoyed a fine meal. As we paid, we were advised to call a cab, since it wouldn’t be a good idea to walk around at night.

The next evening we found an excellent restaurant, Carpe Diem. Wonder of wonders, it actually had a street entrance on South Tryon.

The chances for a more vibrant uptown rest heavily with NationsBank, through its Transamerica Square project and Chairman Hugh McColl Jr.’s personal, active interest in a major sweep of development through uptown’s entire northern end.

McColl talks both of investment and his personal legacy to Charlotte when he discusses plans for an urban village of offices, townhomes, apartments and stores stretching eventually to the Brookshire Freeway, filling the gaps from Third and Fourth Wards to Earle Village to the new transportation center on East Trade Street. A huge chunk of it would be residential development. That has major promise. Double the 7,500 people living uptown, and just watch the gathering parade of restaurants, as well as places to buy groceries, get hardware and have your suits cleaned.

Developing a strong residential base is key to everything else.

One worries that all this development could be hurried forward without full public participation.

When citizens are involved from the start, they become stakeholders, defenders of the new. Ideas emerge: What about a day-care center at the new transportation stop? What about special arts and music fairs to celebrate Charlotte’s ring cities – a Rock Hill or Gastonia or Monroe day? Will uptown have housing for every income group (the goal successful cities such as Portland, Ore., have set)?

Let’s fast-forward five years. Is this what visitors will see as Charlotte turns the century?

Fifteen thousand uptown workers awaken to the smug reminder that their commute is a pleasant walk. No congestion. No extra car to keep up, no parking fee. A quick breakfast is easy to find, whether it’s coffee and muffins at St. Ruby’s Java Joint II at CityFair, or biscuits and livermush at the New New Big Village on North Tryon.
A second awakening comes later, as dozens of restaurants on Tryon and Church streets fill with people headed to the Performing Arts Center to hear the Carolinas Symphony, formerly the Charlotte Symphony, conducted by Christoph von Dohnanyi, recently lured from the Cleveland Orchestra.
The south end of uptown goes seismic several times a month with suburbanites, Dilworthites riding the trolley up South Boulevard from Dilworth, and conventiongoers heading for concerts in the new Hornets Nest, a basketball arena near the Carolinas Stadium. The older Charlotte Coliseum continues to be booked solid, as well, with tractor pulls, Amway meetings and Ice Capades.
After the concert, the crowd spills into a nearby complex of movies, bars and restaurants developed in the late ’90s. Residential life is also returning to this end of town. The pioneer was developer Jim Gross, who followed his successful Ivey’s project on North Tryon by converting the old Lance factory into condos.
The transportation center works so well that last year nearly half of all commute trips to uptown were by transit. There are buses, van shuttles, even a jitney lane of specially marked cars to make short trips around uptown. Uptown residents use the transit center for van rides to Lake Norman, University City or shopping malls.
Meanwhile, work is getting under way to convert one transit way to the first line of light rail, linking uptown to the airport.
Instead of steering around it, Charlotteans proudly include Earle Village as they show guests around. The public housing project, developed in 1967, was almost completely rebuilt with $41 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (just a year before HUD itself was replaced). And NationsBank, despite its earnings hitting a rough patch after it swallowed the Bank of Boston in 1996, kept its promise to hire 100 Earle Village residents.
CityFair bursts with higher education offered by UNC Charlotte and Central Piedmont Community College. They opened a job and training information clearinghouse, which offers a package of interest- and aptitude-testing and computer-based searches for the best matches in jobs.
After years of debate over the old convention center building, the city – over some local retailers’ objections – courageously struck a deal with Nordstrom to buy the facility for $1 and turn it into a department store.

Don’t believe it’s possible? Fifteen years ago, no one would have believed uptown Charlotte would look the way it does now. One thing is certain: The roaring growth of the past decade will slow. Executives such as First Union CEO Ed Crutchfield warn that the region’s financial services job gains won’t be anything like what they were in recent years.

The attractions of the suburbs won’t fade. Crutchfield makes a strong case for the communications ease and less-expensive parking at his bank’s massive, Pentagon-style building in University Research Park.

Still, a diverse, well-planned uptown can strengthen and give focus to an entire region – as the business center and symbol of the citistate, as its entertainment and arts and culture center, and as the area’s lived-in, welcoming heart.

In the chase to outpace Atlanta and Dallas, building a vibrant uptown could be the go-ahead move.

CHARLOTTE THEN. . . AND NOW

1. In an aerial view of The Square on Sept. 27, 1981, North Carolina’s first ”skyscraper” – the 14-story Independence Building – is imploded to make way for new development. 2. The bottom photo is a current view of The Square and uptown, looking south down Tryon Street. The triangular structure in the foreground right is the Independence Center, one of the buildings that replaced the Independence Building. 3. At left is the 60-story NationsBank Corporate Center, which opened in 1992. 4. When fire destroyed Crockett Park (above) in 1985, baseball had been played on the site for a half-century. When it came time to build a new stadium, however, team owner George Shinn took Charlotte’s minor league team south of the border to Fort Mill. 5. Olmstead Park (below) – a development combining single-family homes and apartments – filled the vacancy.

ON CHARLOTTE AND THE REGION

Tom Bush, Mecklenburg commissioner: ”Elected officials used to operate at the beck and call of the big banks and corporations. . . . Now many of us have been elected whom the economic powers in Mecklenburg didn’t know or weren’t interested in.”

Hugh McColl Jr., NationsBank chairman: ”Maybe the baton’s already passed. The so-called group that people think controls everything downtown cratered about four or five years ago.” *

Michael Gallis, Charlotte planner: ”Rock Hill is Richardsonian Romanesque, Monroe is variegated Victorian, Concord is Second Empire, Davidson is Georgian or Palladian. Gastonia is neo-classic.”

John Belk, retail leader and former mayor: ”If people come in and want to work for the community, Charlotte lets them. Some cities are jealous of people coming in and won’t let them help. But we’re different.”

AREA CITIES DISTINCTIVE, CAN CHOOSE TO REMAIN SO

Walk around the downtowns of the cities surrounding Charlotte – Monroe, Rock Hill, Concord, Davidson or Gastonia, for example – and you’ll find something uptown Charlotte lacks.

These cities have character, a sense of history, a sense of place. They have straight streets where 100-year-old buildings perch on sidewalks and storefront windows invite passersby inside. They have fine Victorian homes with wraparound porches. They offer old hardware stores. They have churches and schools as rooted in their places as old oaks.

Charlotte may have the Panthers, flashy attractions and a lot of money. But most buildings look inward, not to the street, once the river of life flowing through every town. Central Charlotte is strangely devoid of the intricate web of homes, stores, offices and churches that used to make up a city.

Charlotte’s special character oozed out during postwar development. Charlotte tore down its past with scarcely a thought. Only traces remain, principally in Fourth Ward, a reconstructed hint at the Charlotte of yesteryear.

But outside Charlotte lie cities with distinct personalities. Michael Gallis, an architect and planner, can even discern separate architectural flavors: ”Rock Hill is Richardsonian Romanesque, Monroe is variegated Victorian, Concord is Second Empire, Davidson is Georgian or Palladian. Gastonia is neo-classic.”

The good news is that while Charlotte (like Atlanta) has been willing to destroy much of its architectural past, the Piedmont’s history lingers in its smaller cities.

That makes for a nice balance. You could go to a football game or ballet uptown; then browse for antiques or lick an ice cream cone in Concord or Davidson.

As Concord, Gastonia and all the smaller cities and towns try to shape their identity over the next half-century, leaders should keep that in mind. Those cities may covet Charlotte-style office buildings, shopping malls or subdivisions. (The Rouse Co. plans a 110-acre mall in Gaston County, which is surely stirring enthusiasm now.)

In our talks with development officials from the counties surrounding Mecklenburg, the sole melody was growth-growth-growth – even when that growth, in several counties, turned out to have been primarily in mobile homes.

In Iredell we were told, ”Growth is stretching us like a rubber band,” but, ”We believe in a man’s unfettered right to do with his property as he pleases.”

This region seems also to have a fetish for bigness – the massive convention center and stadium in Charlotte, the mega-Speedway in Cabarrus County, the soaring, pink-hued Calvary Church on N.C. 51. All are reminiscent of the big-growth boosterism that preoccupies Charlotte proper and sometimes makes it look a tad silly to outsiders.

Our question to the ring cities and counties: If you want quality growth without overwhelming size, why not plan consciously for it? What are the realistic goals that represent appropriate growth, development matched to your history and traditions?

It is vital for each of the ring cities to develop, preserve and enhance their own historic identities. If a town is tempted, say, to clear away an old church or neighborhood to make way for a new office building or subdivision, it should consider what it will lose as well as what it will gain. If an industry wants to move in, does the location fit the county’s own plans? Reality check: There are big obstacles to restoring and developing older downtowns. We noted dozens of vacant storefronts, deserted streets and serious disinvestment in the cities ringing Charlotte.

Downtown Monroe, with its blocks of largely vacant storefronts, was the most tragic, but not alone. Many others suffer from lack of use, despite a booming regional economy. Even Rock Hill, a star of the group, needs more downtown activity.

The public sector – a government the people elect – must insist zoning and taxes and other regulatory powers be exerted more strongly, to make sure downtowns remain centers, the jewels of their counties, and that new development fits and creates a livable, balanced community.

We don’t intend to say growth is bad. Quite the contrary. It’s a necessity for prospering communities. It means jobs, prosperity. But how development is done – whether it relates to established growth centers, supports a city or county plan, or simply devours and exploits the countryside – is a decision many developers would rather keep the public out of.

That’s why each community must ”be its own man,” determine the growth it can absorb, then stand its ground when developers or mega-corporations seek to build on the periphery and let the town center deteriorate.

Growth itself needs to be redefined, from sheer numbers of new houses built or gross dollars spent in stores to a measure that makes a difference for ordinary people: How many adults are fruitfully employed? How are people’s skills being expanded? How many youth are being adequately prepared for 21st century jobs?

One answer is to design or channel growth so it hugs tightly to the existing cores rather than heading for some cornfield 3 or 4 miles from town.

Where possible, extend the old grid of streets and build offices and homes in the so-called ”new urbanist” fashion – close to the street.

If you plan a new office park, make it fit with the core city, as Rock Hill has done.

Do not encourage leapfrog development. Instead, mobilize to fight it. The farther each town sprawls from its center, the more difficult it will be to keep those centers viable.

And don’t expect zoning alone to ensure a healthy city. Planners, with citizens’ help, must craft how new sections of the city will appear and how they will fit together.

Some Charlotte ring cities are taking steps in the right direction. Gaston County’s Belmont has adopted a new code encouraging traditional, small-town development and restricting suburban-style sprawl.

And consider Concord, with its old homes and charming downtown. It looks as though the consultant the city hired a few years ago did well. Fashioning growth around Concord could ultimately make all Cabarrus County more prosperous. We were told one reason Cabarrus residents are talking about controlling growth is that they don’t want to become another Gwinnett, the suburban Atlanta county that lost its charm and identity in helter-skelter growth.

Davidson is considering a new town plan to preserve and encourage its historic core, which centers on Davidson College. But its housing prices have skyrocketed, and even some professors can’t afford to live in town. That points to a pitfall: Growth must be fair. If a city simply prohibits growth, it protects ”haves” at the expense of ”have-nots.” That sows the seeds of a phenomenon familiar to Boulder County, Colo., or Sonoma County, Calif., where the gentry live in town. Those who can’t afford it have nowhere to go.

The way out is to channel development around cities so that old and new co-exist in harmony. This takes planning and discipline.

But remember the sprawling future you avoid. Think of preserving the identity that brought many of you to Gastonia or Rock Hill in the first place. You came, most likely, because it was not just another Charlotte suburb. Maybe you need to form some regional alliances to make sure it doesn’t become one.

Again and again, we heard how much people in the Charlotte region love their towns, how much they want to keep their towns’ identities, to avoid being lost in faceless suburban growth.

The best way not to become Charlotte is to stand one’s ground and tell fast-talking mega-developers to take a walk until they’re willing to respect each place’s unique history, culture and vision of its own future.

ABOUT THE PEIRCE REPORT

If you’re curious how urban writer Neal Peirce’s team came to study Charlotte, you have several people to thank – or, if you wish, blame.

Peirce, 63, is a nationally syndicated writer whose column appears in 50 newspapers, including The Observer. He studies cities; he has written 10 other Peirce Reports, including one in 1993 for The News and Observer of Raleigh.

He’s also a sociable and curious fellow. So when he visited Charlotte more than a year ago for a speech at UNC Charlotte, he spent time talking with folks here about the region.

”There were various people saying, Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone of his stature to come into our community – an outsider, unbiased – to look at where we are?’ ” remembers Bill McCoy, director of UNCC’s Urban Institute.

Bill Spencer, president of the Foundation for the Carolinas, and Mark Heath, president of the Carolinas Partnership, were particularly enthusiastic. Spencer, with the Urban Institute, approached The Observer and several smaller daily newspapers, which agreed to publish the report.

So in June, Peirce’s interview team arrived and began work. They talked for seven days with roughly 100 politicians, executives, neighborhood leaders and everyday people about the Charlotte region, past and future. They toured by car and helicopter. Interviewers were:

Curtis Johnson, 52, Peirce’s writing partner. He chairs the Metropolitan Council of Minneapolis-St. Paul, a planning agency. He has been chief of staff to Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson and executive director of the Twin Cities Citizens League.
Alex Marshall, 36, city government and urban affairs reporter for The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk.
LaRita Barber, 32, formerly community services director at the Urban Institute. She is director of internship programs at Queens College.
Peirce, who lives in Washington, was a founder of The National Journal and has been political editor of Congressional Quarterly. His books include ”Citistates” and ‘The Book of America: Inside 50 States Today.”

Funding, raised by the Foundation for the Carolinas, came from: the Carolinas Partnership, the Belk Foundation, the Duke Power Foundation, Foundation for the Carolinas, NationsBank, the Blumenthal Foundation, the Cannon Foundation, First Union National Bank, Southern Bell Telephone Co., Wachovia Bank and Trust Co., Lance Inc., Branch Banking and Trust Co. and First Charter National Bank.

Donors had no say in the reporting and writing and did not see the articles before publication. The writers did not know who the donors were.

The Gaston Gazette, The Herald of Rock Hill, The Concord Tribune, The Enquirer-Journal of Monroe and The Daily Independent of Kannapolis are also publishing the report.

The Peirce Report was edited by editorial writer Mary Newsom. Photos are by Observer photographer Mark B. Sluder, graphics by staff artist Dean Neitman. The pages were designed by Perspective editor Greg Ring; Steve Johnston was copy editor.

A Scary Trip To The Suburbs

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

SENT WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3, 1999
BY ALEX MARSHALL

My wife and two friends and I were lured out of our secure neighborhood of Ghent recently by the promise of seeing “Rushmore,” the latest Bill Murray movie. The closest theater was Greenbrier Cinema 13, so we climbed into a car and made our way down the interstate to the wilds of Chesapeake.

The cinema we chose is one of the big new movie complexes in Hampton Roads. Its innovation is not only stadium seating on some screens, but to package what is basically an entire amusement park around its 13 auditoriums. You enter this big box behind a strip shopping center and find yourself ushered into a gymnasium-size hall. Its two floors hold not only long rows of elaborate video games, but bumper cars, laser tag, miniature golf, skeeball and more — all amid waterfalls flowing over fake stone.

We wandered around this complex like small town rubes visiting the big city. We were dazed by the lights, floored into dumb silence by this enormous new retail life form. We wandered around docilely, letting the escalators and the hordes carry us to and fro. The place was packed with families and adolescents.

And we had fun. We shot people on the video screen. We planted our feet on a virtual-reality skateboard, and banked around a high-thrills coarse on a screen in front of us. We thought about playing laser tag but the line was too long.

The developers’ innovation was to realize that you could capture a movie goer for more than the allotted two hours. Rather than just shake them out of popcorn money, you could get a family to drop additional bucks for bumper cars or pinball. Instead of wandering around the mall after a movie, they would wander around here. (The mall probably isn’t happy about that.)

It was an example of how the suburbs are still on the cutting edge of emerging urban life forms. Love ’em or hate ’em, the suburbs are still the place that new ways of living, working, shopping and recreating are born, driven by the more unstable combination of roads, subdivisions and virgin or semi-virgin land. Driven by dog-eat-dog competition, Malls turn into Big Box Stores into Movie-Palace Entertainment Complexes. You never know what’s going to pop up next.

Greenbrier 13, for example, sat in front of a Pentagon-sized complex holding some sort of Sentara research or office facility. How strange! A big box office, behind a big box movie palace, behind a long strip shopping center, all three adjacent but not connected except for parking lots.

Other aspects of the Movie Palace startled me. The crowd was roughly half African-American or other minorities. It was a far more diverse crowd than the people who sat at the outdoor cafe tables on Colley Avenue. I had written stories years ago about how the newer suburbs, including Greenbrier, were the most integrated neighborhoods in Hampton Roads. But it was still startling to compare this diverse suburban world with the largely white world of Ghent. My urban neighborhood was more diverse in some ways than Greenbrier, but less so in others, including racially.

Secondly, I contemplated what this entertainment complex meant to the urban fortunes of Hampton Roads. Ideally, I would have preferred all this energy and life to be downtown. If Hampton Roads had grown inward rather than outward over the last few decades, that could have happened.

From a long term perspective, Greenbrier 13 troubled me. It was clearly not built to last. All the fancy lights and equipment were housed in what was basically a giant toolshed. In five or 10 years, developers could move on, leaving an empty tin box to be disposed of.

The placement of the complex had that chaotic, random feel so common to the suburbs. Despite its size, the cinema was actually quite difficult to find. It’s hidden behind the strip shopping center, with no sign out front on Greenbrier parkway.

But whatever its drawbacks, for now it was darn interesting.

We liked the movie Rushmore. Afterward, we made our way back home, leaving the bracing winds of suburban change, heading back to the calm, more predictable harbor, of the city.

A Path Not Taken

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

BY ALEX MARSHALL
COVER STORY
PORT FOLIO MAGAZINE

Sometimes I like to mull over the choices we have taken as a region and then, in a masochistic mood, try to pick the absolutely worst one, savoring the special flavor of failed dreams and paths not taken.

My personal favorite for all-time blooper is Virginia Beach, Chesapeake and Suffolk opting to split off in the 1960s into mega land-area cities and cut off Norfolk’s expansion. In one fell swoop, we separated rich fro poor, city from suburb, growth from decay, and thus insured that it would be vastly more difficult to tackle common problems and challenges together. We built a political fence through our common garden.

But vying for second place is the decision made 30 years ago not to build a big regional airport out in Chesapeake.

For you see, Norfolk was not doomed to have a tiny airport with terrible service. From 1968 to the early 70s, a debate bubbled across the region. It was clear the old Norfolk airport was outmoded. What should be done?

As Norfolk prepared to expand the old airport off Military Highway, a vocal lobby emerged, saying no, that was the wrong decision. They advocated building a new and larger airport out in Chesapeake or Suffolk that would serve both sides of the water, and position the region to capture more business growth.

It didn’t happen. Despite accumulating voices, Norfolk, recently burned by its suburban neighbors over annexation, stuck to its guns. If needed, we can move the airport later, its leaders said. That didn’t happen. We missed a chance, and it never came again.

This was a crucial decision. With different choices and some luck, we could have had a large regional airport just a short drive from downtown, with direct jet service to New York and other major cities. Our economic development would have been ratcheted up a notch, as we played with the Charlottes and the Clevelands, rather than the Winston-Salems and Lexingtons.

What more, if the region had managed to cooperate to finance and build a big regional airport, the Southside would have been knitted to the Peninsula and the region made one in more than name. Cooperating on an airport might have set the stage for joining together on universities, roads, stadiums, and things like tackling poverty and crime.

Even the very culture of the area might have changed because new ideas and people would have more easily come into our region.

But that didn’t happen. Norfolk expanded its small airport, Newport News eventually expanded Patrick Henry, and the region was stuck with two small airports without a lot of market power.

“It really cast us inexorably in being a second-rate community,” said businessman and community leader Andrew Fine.

“Hindsight is 20-20, but I’d be surprised if anyone didn’t think that wouldn’t have been a better approach,” said George Crawley, a member of the Norfolk Airport Authority and former assistant city manager of Norfolk. “That might have been the piece that solidified us as a region.”

The airport story shows how our fragmentation as a region probably directly hurt our future. Although this is often said, rarely do you see it so clearly as in the tale of a big airport not built.

Somewhere, Hunter Hogan, that wiley, Yoda-like real-estate salesman, is smiling, his grin and voice triumphantly saying “I told you so.”

For it was Hogan that resolutely pushed to build a regional airport outside of Norfolk proper that would serve both the Southside and Peninsula. True, he no doubt would have somehow made a lot of money off of it. Hogan, one of the founders of Goodman-Segar-Hogan, was an excellent businessman. But he also spoke repeatedly about the long-term health of the area.

“Norfolk is being sold short; the whole Tidewater community is being sold short because we are not being far-sighted enough,” Hogan said in 1969. He would keep saying this over the next few years.

The site Hogan and his allies were pushing was on the edge of the Dismal swamp in Chesapeake. {SEE LOCATOR MAP?} Roughly at the apex of a triangle, it would be easy to access to from both sides of the water. It would be close enough from the Norfolk downtown– 12 miles — to be reached easily, but far enough out to handle larger planes and future growth.

Twelve miles from downtown. It’s funny how far that seemed to people at the time. Now, new airports are built more than 30 miles outside town. The new Denver airport is a 45 minute drive from the center city.

Hogan’s plan and site had difficulties.

There were questions even in those environmentally-unaware days about building in or near a swamp. It unquestionably would not be allowed today.

James Crumbley, 77, executive director of the airport at the time and former head of Virginia International Terminals, said he and a group traveled out to the proposed site when it was under consideration.

“We went down there one day, and we broke off a big limb, and you could push it 5 feet into the ground,” Crumbley said. “You would have had to pile all the runways.”

Of course, Hogan insisted that the Dismal Swamp site was just one option. After all, Chesapeake, which is now covered with subdivisions, was then mostly open fields.

Crumbley defends the decision to keep the old airport site. There was no guarantee that we would have captured more traffic with a bigger airport, he says. Coastal cities like Hampton Roads are rarely chosen as hubs because planes cannot draw traffic from all sides, he said.

Roy B. Martin Jr., who was mayor at the time and opposed moving the airport, said finances, location and future usage all pointed away from a new regional airport.

“Who would have built it?” Martin asked in a recent interview. “Where would the money have come from? You weren’t talking $20 million. I think the idea was good, but there was no highways there. The state wasn’t going to help.

“None of the other cities came to the table and said OLet’s go do it.’ I never remember a push to move the airport” by the other cities.

Perhaps, but the record seems to show otherwise. Elected officials and community leaders from all the surrounding cities were reported voicing support for an expanded regional airport. Virginia Beach Councilman Lawrence E. Marshall was quoted in The Virginian-Pilot saying, “We should look beyond 20 years and invest in a tremendously large international airport.” Chesapeake Mayor G. A. Treakle came out in favor of it. Even one of Norfolk senators, Peter K. Babalas, urged then Gov. Linwood Holton to use “benevolent authority to force Southeastern Virginia localities to accept creation of regional airport.”

And sure, a $50 million to $100 million new airport — which was the figures loosely thrown around — would have been difficult to finance. But one of the advocates of a new airport was Edwin MacKethan, a trust officer for Virginian National Bank and more importantly, the guy who helped set up the bond issues for the $200 million Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. If the guy who financed the bridge tunnel was on board, maybe financing a regional airport was not out of the question.

Other groups came out against the old airport. Pilots said it was too close to existing schools, like Azalea Garden and Landsdale Elementary. Landing at the airport required a steep angle of descent that was not optimal. They urged a new airport be built farther out.

Norfolk resisted. A consultant the airport hired recommended expanding on the old site. Airport officials pointed out that both New York’s La Guardia and Washington’s National sat on sites no bigger than Norfolk’s airport. The consultant confidently predicted 4 million passengers annually by 1990.

Present traffic in 1999: Under 3 million — below its traffic in 1984. By comparison, Charlotte went from 5.5 million passengers in 1982 to 22 million passengers in 1996. The Virginian-Pilot, which uneasily arbitrated the debate in its pages, seemed to sense that the region was making the wrong decision, but seemed not to have the nerve to oppose Norfolk.

“Perhaps Tidewater would be better served by a new and larger airport elsewhere. The Port Authority believes otherwise and . . .at this point it would be asking much to demand that the authority back up and start over,” said a 1969 editorial.

It was classic Virginian-Pilot. Squishy. It vaguely supported the status-quo, while leaving you with the feeling that something was being lost.

Another Virginian-Pilot editorial advised:

“Hampton Roads may in time attract a significant amount of long-haul traffic. Meanwhile, Patrick Henry and Norfolk Regional must base their plans on what is probable. It is improbable that either will become a major airport. And simply building a major facility is not the way to enter the big time. Demand must be there. Dullas International Airport, with its sweeping runways and uncluttered setting, is scandalously underused.”

Hindsight is easy, but it’s amusing how wrong this editorial is. In fact, Dullas would eventually be swamped and is now being expanded. And notice the passivity of the editorial voice. It captures much of our faults as a region. It doesn’t say, “If we build a big airport, we can capture much of the long-haul traffic.” It essentially says, “We should only build a big airport if we have captured the long-haul traffic.” Which of course, would never happen without the right runways and facilities.

It seems obvious now that Norfolk chose the wrong path and so hurt the future of itself and the entire region. Norfolk proceeded with its plans even though Piedmont Airlines — the predecessor of USAir — was sniffing around for a hub airport — WHICH EVENTUALLY WENT TO CHARLOTTE. It proceeded even though it knew larger jet planes could not land there, although later technological advances would reverse this. It built it even though it put civilian airplanes too close to military traffic.

Why did it persist on such a wrong-headed path? It’s here we see how one good turn begets another, and how the suburban cities urge to separate themselves from Mother Norfolk would come back to haunt them.

At the time of the airport debate, just a few years had passed since old Princess Anne county had “double-crossed” Norfolk and merged with the town of Virginia Beach to become a separate city. Nansemond and Norfolk counties soon followed suit, becoming Suffolk and Chesapeake.

Can you blame Norfolk for not exactly being eager to relinquish control of one of its few remaining assets — its airport — to a bunch of folks who had just recently told it in effect, “We’ll take your jobs, money and water, and you can have your problems with schools, race and retail flight.”

“I think the argument turned on that the City Council did not want it moved out of Norfolk,” said businessman Edward Power Sr., who was a close associate of Hogan. “It was the old story is that each city wanted to protect its own image, and not share a large asset with another community.”

In effect, the decision not to move the airport really was a continuation of the decision by the suburban areas not to be a part of Norfolk. We can’t have your suburbs, you can’t have our airport.

The new expanded airport opened in January 1973 to much fanfare. The new terminal, sitting on the edge of the Botanical Gardens, was declared one of the prettiest in the country.

Hogan, speaking before it opened, labeled it “A first-class terminal with a fifth-class runway.”

Paying for the $30 million expansion wasn’t difficult. The airlines paid for it through higher landing fees. Of course, by not paying then, we may be paying now. A state study in 1997 concluded Virginians pay 20 percent more than the national average for air travel, and that our fares have risen in recent years while declining slightly in the rest of the nation.

NEW SECTION {capitalize first few words} Twenty-five years pass. Norfolk International is a nice, pleasant airport. It is also a very small one. In national rankings based on number of passengers travelling annually, Norfolk International has slipped from 43rd in 1973, to 53rd in 1982, to 60th today.

Construction is now underway on a $60 million new arrivals terminal, and a $35 million additional parking garage. THIS WILL EXPAND THE NUMBER OF TICKET COUNTERS AND LANDING GATES, AND SO IMPROVE THE AIRPORT’S COMPETITIVENESS. But these are unlikely to radically change the airport’s national position, because it IS STILL HEMMED IN AND LACKS ROOM TO EXPAND RUNWAYS. THE AIRPORT LACKS PARALLEL RUNWAYS, WHICH ARE NECESSARY TO LAND JETS IN HIGH VOLUME.

THE AIRPORT MAY EVENTUALLY BUILD A PARALLEL RUNWAY. BUT BECAUSE VIRGINIA BEACH HAS BUILT ITS INDUSTRIAL PARK UP TO THE EDGE OF THE AIRPORT, THE FUTURE PARALLEL RUNWAY WILL NOT BE THE REQUIRED 800 FEET FROM THE ORIGINAL RUNWAY. BECAUSE OF THIS, THE RUNWAYS WILL NOT BE ABLE TO BE USED FOR SIMULATANEOUS LANDINGS, ONE OFFICIAL SAID. LACK OF COOPERATION BETWEEN THE TWO CITIES ON THIS ISSUE STRANGLED THE AIRPORT’S CAPACITY FOR GROWTH.

Our main airport is still pretty. The rectangular terminal is majestic, and is enhanced by its frame of trees and lush gardens. It is also convenient. You can drive right up to it, and get from car-door to plane without jogging down endless corridors or navigating multiple access lanes.

But the rest of your voyage is likely to be hellish. Odds are, you’ll find yourself crammed into a tiny cylinder of an airplane, transferring to get any destination beyond a stone’s throw away, and being served last and least in everything.

Airline service is lousy all over the country. It’s not just Norfolk that puts up with cramped seating, aging planes, discriminatory pricing and monopolistic airlines. They are largely the product of airline deregulation which some experts are labeling a failure.

But as airlines become semi-monopolies ruling over land-locked fiefdoms, it’s the little guys like Norfolk that suffer most. Stories of air travel out of Norfolk sound like those from a war zone or some natural disaster. No direct flights. Horrible layovers. Horrible prices. No respect.

Virginian-Pilot columnist Dave Addis, who apparently leaves his beloved car sometimes for a plane, hit nerves recently when he pointed out that airline service in Bulgaria was better than that in Norfolk.

Recently I was in the Newark airport, changing planes of course, on my way back to Norfolk from distant Boston. I had to shlep my way to gate 133 in a dim rusty corner of the airport. There, an official ushered us out a door, where we found ourselves on a sidewalk in the rain. We were boarded onto a Greyhound-style bus that then drove us to the tiny plane on the runway that would take us to Norfolk. It was very clear where we were on the status ladder.

Business theorist Ted Goranson, who lives in Virginia Beach, recently missed his plane from New York to Italy for an important meeting. Winds and rain in New York shut out the tiny planes leaving Norfolk, although regular full-size jets were landing fine. Goranson remembers standing in line next to a businessman from Brazil who had just missed his own flight back. He was vigorously scratching the area off his list of potential sites.

More and more, one has to transfer in Washington or Philadelphia even to get to New York City. Direct service is usually in tiny commuter planes.

“Without question, we should have jet service to New York,” said Kenneth R. Scott, current executive director of the airport. “But talk to the airlines, and they all have different reasons for the inability to put jets in.”

And then there are the prices. A trip to Boston without a Saturday stayover, even bought several weeks in advance, recently was costing $700 on USAir.

Ouch.

Of course, all this sets back the economic potential of the area. Having good direct service is simply indispensable for many companies.

We like to talk of how we are the 25th largest metropolitan area, and the only one without a professional sports team. Might it have something to do with us having the 60th largest airport in passenger volume?

Our decision to have two smaller airports — Norfolk International and Patrick Henry in Newport News — mirrors our decision to have lots of other smaller things, say some area observers. Because we can’t cooperate, we end up having four or five convention centers, rather than one or two that would bring in the big guys. The same goes with stadiums and airports.

“We are going to have more mediocre things than anyone else,” said Brad Face of The Face Companies, A MEMBER OF THE AIRPORT EXPANSION ADVISORY COMMITEE, AND PRESIDENT OF THE FUTURE OF HAMPTON ROADS. and a regional business leader. “We are going to have more 10,000 seat arenas than anywhere else in the country. Scope. The Coliseum. ODU. William and Mary. Hampton University. But we don’t have one 25,000 seat stadium. We have two airports. Do we really need them?”

We do have one great big thing. Our port — Virginia International Terminals. What would have been our economic development potential if we had a great airport to go with it?

So what can we learn from all this? The point is to look ahead and see what other major decisions or projects lie ahead that might improve the region’s future.

It is a paradox that as we opt to let the free market rip, as private capital swarms across the globe looking for a home, it is increasingly the public, tax-payer financed decisions of metropolitan regions and their states that determine their competitiveness for that capital. Do we invest in that university or not? Do we build that airport? This even includes decisions like, Do we make the area more liveable by controlling sprawl, or by cooperating on controlling crime and social problems.

A region’s economy depends on its ability to move goods and people quickly and easily to other parts of the country and world. In our modern era, this usually means planes, interstates, ship and rail. Of those, only shipping is really top-notch in Hampton Roads, although freight links for rail are excellent. What if companies in and around Norfolk could easily transfer goods between interstate, air, ship and rail?

But the age of building big airports may be over, even though there has been loose talk of a Superport between here and Richmond. The same goes with interstates. Those transportational networks are largely in place.

The next major transportation revolution may be high-speed rail. As the possibilities and benefits of up to 300 mph travel becomes increasingly real, there is more and more talk of a high-speed network stretching along the East Coast.

Can Hampton Roads get in line for it? Or will we be bypassed? To be a part of it might require money, commitment and cooperation. Already, Charlotte is talking about a link between it and Washington D.C. by high-speed rail.

We’ll see what happens. Will we learn from our past?

Or repeat it?

The Future of Transportation, And Thus Our Cities

Posted on September 24, 2007 by Alex Marshall

The Future of Transportation

Will the auto and airplane reign supreme?

By Alex Marshall

With the fall of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, the political scientist Francis Fukiyama caused a sensation with an essay called “The End of History?” It postulated that, with the relative collapse of Communism, the struggle among rival political systems had ended with a permanent victory for liberal, democratic capitalism. All that was left to do was to refine it.

Is something similar happening with the way we get around? Have we reached “the End of History” with transportation? Will the current system of automobile and airplane travel reign supreme’for now and for centuries hence? Or will something new come along to remake our world, as it has in the past?

The context of such a question is this: Since about 1800, revolutionary changes in our transportation systems have created new types of cities, neighborhoods, and housing, while leaving old ones to wither away, or become antiques.

If history is any indication, we are due for another revolution soon. The car and the highway, and the airplane and airport, have been dominant for almost a century. By comparison, canals lasted about 50 years, streetcars about the same, and railroads about a century as dominant modes of travel.

Yet, some people say that the automobile and the highway are so imbedded in our landscape and lifestyles that nothing will ever challenge their dominance. In effect, they say we have reached the end of the historical road.

“It’s hard to imagine a fundamental change because the automobile system is so flexible,” says urban historian Robert Fishman, author of the 1989 history of suburbia, Bourgeois Utopias, and a professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “All I can imagine is a better balance with a revival of the train and transit connections that have been so shamefully neglected.”

But, if the past is any guide, we won’t see a new revolution until it is upon us. People, maybe even particularly experts, have difficulty envisioning a new transportation context from within the current one. Fishman, although himself skeptical of any coming big change, recalls the scholar who around 1900 predicted that the automobile would never go far because it couldn’t match the utility of the bicycle.

Hovering over this discussion is a single word: sprawl. Our low-density, car-clogged environment is the product of our transportation system. Highways and airports produce low-density sprawl. Old transportation revolutions, such as streetcars and subways, made cities denser because housing and businesses flocked to these transportation points. If we do have another transportation revolution ‘ the personal jet pack, high speed trains, the humble bicycle ‘ it could make sprawl even worse. Or, it could reconstitute our cities around new transportation hubs.

The Past As Prologue
Six words summarize transportation over the last two centuries: canals, railroads, streetcars, bicycles, automobile, and airplanes. Each mode remade the economy and the landscape. Each was generally adopted only after government got behind it financially and legally.

The canal era started in earnest in 1817, when New York State had the gumption to sell $7 million in bonds to pay thousands of laborers to dig a 350-mile trench from Albany to Buffalo. The Erie Canal, when it went into service in 1825, opened up the entire Midwest to shipping and made New York the commercial hub of the New World. Other states and cities frantically dug their own canals in an unsuccessful effort to catch up.

Spurred in part by these efforts, other cities and states began investing in a new technology’railroads’that gradually replaced canals. The railroad created railroad cities, like Atlanta, and converted canal cities, like Chicago, into railroad cities. With the railroads came streetcars, first horse-drawn and then electric.

Because the first railroad tracks were often laid alongside the first canals, the canal cities tended to prosper even as the canals declined in importance. Economists call this phenomenon “path dependence,” (even as they debate its significance), and it still occurs. New York City, for example, is no longer dependent on the Erie Canal, but its because of the canal that that the rail lines, highways and airports were located in and around the city.

From about 1875 to 1925, railroads were at their peak. Urban palaces like New York’s Grand Central Station and Pennsylvania Station were built and opened, so that millions of passengers could shuttle across thousands of miles of tracks that stretched to every corner of the country. Few riders could have imagined that within their lifetimes, weeds would grow along thousands of miles of abandoned tracks.

Although the automobile dates to the 1890s, drivers were scarce until cities, towns, and states began paving roads’which took awhile. Many of the first roads were built, ironically, at the urging of bicyclists, who needed better roads to use their two-wheel contraptions. The League of American Wheelmen convinced the Department of Agriculture to create the Bureau of Public Roads. This small agency would grow into the Federal Transportation Department.

But better roads did not happen overnight. In 1922, 80 percent of U.S. roads were dirt and gravel. At first, railroad companies lent their political muscle to the “good roads” effort. After all, their leaders reasoned, better highways would get rail passengers to the stations more easily.

After World War I, the automobile and later the airplane, served by publicly funded roads and airports, began to supplant the passenger rail system and its intimate companion, the streetcar.
World War I helped convince government and business that investing in roads was worthwhile. During the war, massive railroad congestion brought on by the war effort forced some inter-city industrial transportation onto roads via trucks. Surprisingly (for the time,) it worked. Soon, states and the federal government began investing more in roads and airports, and less in train service.

As urban historian Eric Monkkonen noted in his 1988 book, America Becomes Urban, governments and taxpayers were the fundamental builders of this country’s transportation systems. New York state built the Erie Canal. Federal and state governments gave away a fifth of the nation’s total land area to the railroads. Congress, at the urging of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, financed the Interstate Highway System. Cities and states built airports. Even the New York City subways, although operated by private companies at first, were built with taxpayer dollars.

Each of these transportation innovations’canals, railroads, streetcars, cars, highways, and airplanes ‘ created new ways to live and work, and thus new types of neighborhoods and cities. The banks of Schenectady, New York are still lined with the ornate buildings created during the heyday of the Erie Canal. The streetcar era, which lasted from the late 19th century to World War II, led to thousands of streetcar suburbs, densely populated communities at the fringes of 19th century cities. And of course, the highway and air travel system created the current pattern of low-density sprawl that defines our built environment.

The Next Big Thing
If history is any indication, we are overdue for another change that will change how we travel, and thus change the form of our cities and towns.

“Nothing really revolutionary has occurred since the Wright brothers and the combustion engine, and that’s now about 100 years old,” says Elliot Sander, Director, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management at New York University. While some might say this is evidence of the longevity of car-use and air travel, it’s also evidence that we are overdue for a big change. After all, past transportation eras, such as canals to railroads, have lasted from about 50 to 100 years. Then, something new has come along, and created a new dominant transportation system.

What might the next big thing be? Among the possibilities is the nifty Segway, the “gyro-scooter” that enables someone standing on it to point and ride. Or it could be the Solotrek Helicopter Backpack. A user straps it on and rotating blades overhead carry him where he wants. So far only prototype versions exist. Another variation is the Airboard, which hovers four inches off the ground and costs a mere $15,000. Of all these, the Segway actually seems to have a chance to live up to some of its hype.

Maybe the revolution will come in the form of small airplanes. In his 2001 book, Free Flight: From Airline Hell to a New Age of Travel, James Fallows, who is himself a pilot, foresees a future where people use small planes like taxis or rental cars for short flights between the thousands of small airports that now are underused.

Rail is another, more likely, option. High-speed rail networks are common in Europe and Japan, and in theory they hold great promise in more densely populated areas of the United States.

The situation now, as is typical in the United States, is a scattershot mix of aggressive policies by some states mixed with erratic federal actions. Various states and coalitions of states are aggressively lobbying to create or preserve high-speed rail corridors, under the assumptions that being in the high-speed loop will be as important as being on the Interstate in the 1950s. North Carolina are creating a ‘sealed corridor’ for high-speed rail across the state; California and Florida have both received Federal grants toward high-speed rail initiatives; The Wisconsin-based, Midwest Regional Rail Initiative, which is a coalition of Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, and Wisconsin, is pushing for a high-speed network with Chicago as the hub. And of course in the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak is running what might be called its ‘almost-high-speed’ service, Acela Express. Meanwhile though, Congress perennially discusses killing or reorganizing Amtrak and has yet to really get behind any national rail policy, even while some members are quite passionate about it.

The Buck Rogers version of high-speed rail, a Magnetic Levitation train, has been around for a while, but working examples are still few. Demonstration versions exist in Germany, Japan and even Norfolk, Va. But the only real working version is in China. Shanghai has just finished a $30 billion Magnetic Levitation rail line between its airport and downtown. The train reaches 250 mph and travels the 19 miles between airport and downtown in eight minutes, compared to an hour by taxi. Theoretically, Maglev trains, which float above the tracks on magnets, could reach speeds up to 500 mph. Despite generally parsimonious funding, the Federal Railroad Administration is administering a national competition, the winner of which would get funds to build a working maglev line in the United States.

Whether it’s Maglev or a Segway, the challenge in predicting radical change is that by its very nature it tends to be unforeseen.

“We’re very bad at predicting those big discontinuities,” says Bruce Schaller of Schaller Consulting, a transportation consulting firm in New York. “It’s like the Internet. I remember in the early 1980s, I visited a friend at Stanford who had e-mail on the early ARPA network. I said, ‘That’s really cool.’ But I never thought about it as something I could do.” Schaller notes that for the last few years, mass transit use has increased faster than highway use. This hasn’t happened in a half-century.

In fact, most transportation planners are conservative in their predictions. “I would not be investing in jumbo helicopters, dirigibles, personal rapid transit systems, motorized scooters, powered roller skates, etc., although they sure would be fun,” says Elliot Sander of the Rudin Center.

Autophilia
To its defenders, the automobile is irreplaceable, no matter what the predictions. If we run out of oil, they say, we can switch to hydrogen fuel cells. If gas prices skyrocket, we can buy smaller cars. If global warming increases, we can reduce emissions. And if our roads become overwhelmingly congested, we will simply build more roads.

“I don’t think congestion will stop the automobile,” says Jose G’mez-Ib”ez, the Derek Bok professor of urban planning and a leading transportation planner at the Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School at Harvard University. “I think the solution to congestion is to spread out more. There’s no doubt that we will have more mass transit in the future, but as people get richer in places like China, are they going to want to drive, and be mobile, and maybe drive SUVs? The answer is ‘yes.'”

“The automobile will continue to be the dominant mode of getting around,” says Mark Kuliewicz, traffic engineer for the American Automobile Association in New York. “Cars may be powered by something other than gasoline, and hopefully soon, but they’ll still be there.”

End of the Road?
But auto travel is dependent on roads. And an increasing number of critics believe that the expanding universe of highways’what historian Kenneth Jackson has called “the Big Bang of decentralization that started in the 1920s’ — has about reached its limit.

Robert Yaro, president of the Regional Plan Association in New York (where I am a senior fellow), argued in a speech last year at the World Economic Forum in New York that for political, financial, and practical reasons, it is becoming increasingly difficult to build more highways. More and more citizens accept the fact that we cannot build our way out of congestion and sprawl, he said.

Yaro pointed out that highway construction has drastically slowed in the tri-state New York metropolitan area. From 1951 to 1974, the region’s highway system added some 54 miles a year. In the last decade, it has added only four miles per year.

The message is clear, said Yaro in an interview. “I strongly believe that we’ve used up the capacity of our 20th century infrastructure systems, and we’re going to need a heroic and visionary (and expensive) set of new investments to create capacity for growth in the 21st century.’

A key investment would be “new or significantly upgraded intercity rail systems in the half-dozen metropolitan corridors where high-speed rail makes sense.” Yaro is essentially endorsing some version of the high-speed or improved rail networks being pushed in Congress and by coalitions of cities and states.

Smart Roads
Most experts foresee increasing use of high-tech or “smart” technology to wrest more capacity from overloaded roads. In its more elaborate forms, smart technology includes things like imbedding highways with magnets, which would pull cars or trucks along at 100 mph and stop them when needed.

It also includes cars that brake themselves; GPS positioning systems that allow drivers (or their cars) to sort their ways around traffic jams; and computer chips and scanners that allow governments to price highways and charge drivers for using them, with different rates for different times.

The latter, usually called Congestion Pricing, is the Holy Grail of transportation specialists. Although once considered politically impossible, the idea of paying for using roads may now be acceptable to a public searching for a way out of congestion’even it means ending one of the last arenas of egalitarianism, the highway.

Highway space “is a scarce resource, and if it is scarce, we have to manage it. In a market economy, this means pricing,” says Sigurd Grava, professor of urban planning at Columbia University, and author of the new book, Urban Transportation Systems: Choices for Community.

“This will be the first time we will manage the use of the public right of way. In the past, anyone has been able to walk, ride a horse, or use a motor vehicle without restrictions except for traffic control. But this is changing,” says Grava.

By definition, congestion pricing would eliminate traffic jams on any highway or road in the country. But at what price? In recent years in a federal experiment on Interstate 15 in San Diego, drivers paid as much as $8 during peak periods for congestion-free traveling on an eight-mile stretch of highway. At less busy times, prices dropped to 50 cents.

In 2000, transportation planners with Portland’s Metro regional government modeled how congestion pricing would change the region if used on key highways. They found citizens would buy smaller cars, drive less, and live closer to where they work.

With evolving computer technology, drivers could be charged for using even a neighborhood street. This could work similar to Mayor Ken Livingstone’s successful attempt to charge drivers to enter center-city London. Automatic cameras photograph license plates and send drivers a bill. Instituted in March 2003, the plan has already reduced traffic in London by 20 percent and won over many of its initial opponents.

Managing traffic, whether through smarter internal guidance systems in the automobiles or some version of congestion pricing, has the potential to substantially add capacity and efficiency to our road network, say most experts. “We’ve doubled and tripled the number of planes in the skies in the last generation, even though very few new airports have been built,” notes one federal highway official who chose to remain anonymous. “We’ve done it through better air traffic control.” Reasoning by analogy, the official said the ground equivalent of air traffic control, such as automated guidance systems, better traffic information and more pervasive tolling, could wring substantially more capacity out of our current allotment of asphalt.
On The Ground
Whether the future brings simply better cars, or Star-Trek like transporters, cities and towns here and abroad will change as a result. As current transportation systems evolve, cities and towns are evolving with them.

In France, for example, the high-speed train network is producing new commuting patterns. For example, some people are living in Paris, yet commuting to jobs in Tours, a medium-sized city about 150 miles southwest from Paris. On the high-speed train, this journey takes 58 minutes. In New Jersey, suburban rail towns are reviving around improved transit connections to Manhattan. In Atlanta, the excessive highway building of the last few decades has produced both suburban sprawl, and, paradoxically, a revival of inner city neighborhoods as people flee congested freeways.

So what’s ahead for our communities? Yaro and several others see a future in which new transit lines make the suburbs more like the city. This future is not so imaginary. Around the New York region, classic commuter rail towns are reviving around substantial reinvestments in the rail system, like the new, $450 million rail transfer station in New Jersey’s Meadowlands.

Cities evolve in unexpected ways. The introduction of freeways decimated many downtowns in the 1950s, something unpredicted at the time. Houston’s downtown in 1960, for example, had become mostly surface parking lots. But today in Houston, tall parking garages have replaced much of the surface parking, and the downtown is substantially denser. Perhaps in the future, more office buildings will replace the parking garages, and people will take commuter rail service to work. In fact, the city is already building a light rail line downtown.

We could also go the other way. If auto use continues at the same level and personal jets take off as Fallows and some others predict, sprawl is likely to increase. New homes and businesses would spring up around small airports throughout the country.

An unstable mix of government subsidies, technological promise, and private profit will determine what comes next, and this will vary from place to place. Indicators like wealth will not always offer reliable clues as to what transportation systems particular societies will adopt.

Consider the humble bicycle. It’s used extensively in China, which has a very low per capita income, and in Scandinavia, which has a very high per capita income. In Copenhagen, more than a third of commuters use bicycles. The point is that wealth alone does not adequately predict transportation use. You might say that the Chinese use bicycles because they have to; the Danish because they want to.

What Planners Can Do
For the most part, U.S. urban planners work separately from transportation planners. The average state or city planning director tends to react to transportation decisions, rather than to make them. Planners have tended to focus on zoning and land-use regulation, which is often auxiliary to the real work being done by the transportation engineers.

In a better ordered world, land planners would have responsibility for transportation planning, (or supervise those who do it), and urban designers would be directly involved with state and federal highway planning.

We probably haven’t reached the end of history when it comes to transportation. But whatever the future, it would be a better one if we had a broader range of choices. As a country, we have tended to lurch from one extreme to another. In the 1890s, we had the most extensive rail system in the world’and one of the worst road systems. By the 1950s, we had abandoned our extensive streetcar system. Today, we lack a decent passenger rail system but have a great highway system. Like the fiber-optic cable industry and the Internet rage, transportation has proceeded in a boom-bust fashion.

When the next big thing does comes along, let’s not be too quick to abandon proven modes. The past teaches not only that change comes, but that the best societies offer a range of transportation choices, including using one’s own two feet.
END

–Published in Planning Magazine, May 2003

Resources
–Midwest High Speed Rail Coalition. www.midwesthsr.org
–High Speed Ground Transportation Association. www.hsgta.org.
–National Association of Railroad Passengers. www.narprail.org.
–American Highways Users Alliance. www.highways.org
–Transportation Alternatives. www.transalt.org
–Surface Transportation Policy Project. www.transact.org

Alex Marshall

writer, journalist, speaker

I'm an independent journalist in New York City. My articles, books and talks are on this site.

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