The Triad an Interconnected Web
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The Triad An Interconnected Web September 2013 Southside Neighborhood : Greensboro The Triad An Interconnected Web orth Carolina is blessed with a collection of metropolitan areas as diverse as its landscape. Traditional areas with one prime center Nlike Charlotte exist alongside polycentric metropolitan areas like the Triangle, which encompasses several large cities and a web of medium cities and small towns. The Triad is another example of a polycentric metropolitan area. It is home to three of the top ten highest-populated cities in the state: Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point rank third, fifth, and ninth respectively. Access to three large cities within a 30 minute drive is unique in North Carolina to the Triad, and rare by any standard of the majority of states in the country. The proximity and growth of these cities can be tracked to its three major industries: tobacco, cotton, and furniture. The fingerprints of these industries can be found throughout the Triad. Even some of the smallest Sponsored by: of towns can credit still-operating factories as their base industry; others have converted their historic factories to new uses which have been key revitalization efforts. While the Triad has strong business centers and a diverse housing stock, this history of industry is the fabric that makes this region of North Carolina unique and sets it apart from Charlotte and the Triangle. Research Credit: The study area for the Triad is immense. It’s a wedge-shaped area that spans from Mt. Airy and Surry County in the northwest to Burlington and Alamance County in the east and Lexington and Davidson County at the southern tip. If the same area were dropped over Buffalo, NY, it would cover the Buffalo metro and span from Lake Ontario to the Pennsylvania border. If it were dropped over Connecticut, it would cover the entire state. It’s hard to believe that if a commuter were to make a drive from one side to the other along I-40, it would be equivalent to driving from Rhode Island to New York. 2 Southside Neighborhood : Greensboro The future of this region has been part of an ongoing study called Piedmont Together, which is a partnership of the Piedmont Triad Regional Council and the Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation (PART) that is funded through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Sustainable Communities. Above: Map of North Carolina counties Piedmont Together asked Urban3 to complete a “per acre” analysis that with Piedmont Authority for Regional Transportation (PART) shaded in red. would help area citizens, public servants, and officials better understand revenue analysis by land use type. Inset: The same area transposed by New England and Long Island. Note that PART is as big as Connecticut. Maps Why Per Acre? above and inset are not the same scale. Often times municipalities look at land development on a “per unit” or “per project” basis. Though this is an accurate measure of the revenue or expense of the project, it doesn’t allow for measuring land-use patterns that vary in size or scale. Urban3 promotes this methodology to gauge the relative revenue production of different property types—much in the way we gauge efficiency of cars on their gas consumption, where gas is a finite commodity. Just as miles per gallon becomes the bellwether for fuel efficiency, value per acre is a way to compare the revenue production of real estate patterns. Using value per acre, a municipality can determine how the revenue is being produced to pay for community services. And for a county, city, or town, acres are a finite commodity. When assessing value of commercial areas in particular, analysis has traditionally looked at the value of one building, one business, or one development (such as a mall) and compared it to another. In doing so, large land-hungry stores on the edge of a community—which cover significant acreage—will always appear more valuable than a downtown building (whose lot might only be a tenth of an acre). This method also ignores the tremendous infrastructure that is necessary to access the larger site and to get around it. So, just as we don’t compare the fuel efficiency of automobiles by how far a car can go on a tank of gas, 3 A Great Experiment For thousands of years, human settlements were scaled around the predominant transportation technol- ogy of the day: walking. This impacted the way streets were scaled, the way buildings were spaced and the way public areas were utilized. The approach to building places for people who walked was estab- lished by trial and error over millennia. It was a system that was optimized by experience. Beginning in the early 20th Century and then accelerating after World War II, America undertook an approach to building places based on the newly predominant mode of transportation: the automobile. New building styles were developed, new ways of locating and separating uses implemented and a new approach to growth adopted. These systems were based largely on the theories of academics and intel- lectuals, people who had studied how to deploy a new way of thinking to address the perceived deficien- cies of the historic development pattern. Initial results were largely confirming. New growth generated windfall gains for local governments and provided much needed jobs for a generation that had lived through hardship in the Great Depression. As time went on, however, the nature of these financial exchanges started to become evident. When the federal or state governments, the DOT or a developer pays for new infrastructure, it costs the local government very little to create new growth. The day to day burden of maintenance, however, falls largely on local governments. Since that burden doesn’t come due for two decades or more after each new growth project, it creates an illusion of wealth as new tax revenue pours in but distant obligations go unaccounted for. Today, what seems the normal way of doing things is, in reality, a very young experiment. Just sixty years – two generations – of building in this new style has passed. Local leaders struggle today to make good on those distant and unaccounted for obligations of prior generations. The answer developed dur- ing this experiment – induce new growth – is proving insufficient. What we are now finding is that our cities are not burdened by a lack of growth but by decades of unproductive growth. When the long term service and maintenance obligations from new development exceeds the cumulative amount of revenue that new development generates, an insolvency crisis is un- avoidable. So what do we do now? Instead of pursuing growth for growth’s sake, local governments need to pursue growth that is finan- cially productive, places that generate more revenue than overall expense. It is no coincidence that, as we study the Piedmont Region, we find that the places built in the historic development pattern fit this objective while those shiny, new places we think of as “growth” don’t quite measure up. These insights are valuable data to policy makers and the public when they are trying to understand why the current approach is not working and then develop strategies that do. All of the cities we studied are blessed with areas that are financially strong and productive.These places form the foundation of a healthy, prosperous and productive Piedmont. Charles L. Marohn, Jr. PE AICP President and Co-founder Strong Towns 4 we can’t compare the value of buildings or businesses to a community solely by their total tax value without consideration for the amount of land they are using. By analyzing property based on its value per acre, we can normalize the value of all land to the acre. This analysis can compare property value in a whole new—and much fairer—light. Urban3 and Piedmont Together created a set of maps based on value per acre. The higher values per acre were given a hotter red color while those patterns of lower value per acre received a cooler green color. One glance at the map paints a familiar picture. You generally find the more valuable, productive lands where you would expect to: in the bigger cities. It is easy to spot Greensboro, Winston-Salem, and High Point. Smaller towns that have some properties generating similar values per acre as those found in the downtowns of their bigger city brothers and sisters are also apparent on these maps. An MRI of the body gives you an overall picture of your larger health, but it can also be a lot of data to look at. The same is true of this regional map. The map is helpful, but most citizens are familiar with their own neighborhood or community. As more localized maps are produced, it allows for a finer grain of analysis, and a deeper understanding of the land-use effect in each community—much in the way that that same MRI would be easier to read of your wrist, rather than the whole body. The relationship to the region should also serve as a reminder of the connection that the smaller parts have upon the region: the neighborhoods build to towns and cities and the cities become counties and regions. For the purposes of this study, Urban3 focused on five municipalities: Greensboro, Winston-Salem, High Point, Burlington, and Lexington. Though the cities vary in shape, population, land area, economic base, and to some degree, culture, there are more similarities than differences. Indeed, there are lessons that transfer across communities that should be acknowledged and shared. In order to maintain brevity in the report, the following will discuss the key opportunities and challenges of each community, with a brief view of the highlights found in each location.