I Visited the World Capital of Sprawl, and I Have Thoughts

I visited where just maybe the sprawl capital of planet Earth and the question I had was are cities like this just completely hopeless well I went on a little field trip to find out and what I found out was not what I was expecting the Charlotte North Carolina content you've all been waiting for coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always welcome and well I got invited to go to Charlotte and speak at the strong towns conference and I asked people on social media for suggestions on things I should see and do and possibly film and I got way too many responses but it was pointed out to me that Charlotte is possibly the most sprawling City on the planet according to demography is 2022 World urban areas report it ranks dead last in the world for population density in an urbanized area of a million people or more and if you just look at the data Charlotte is pretty objectively bad it really was the worst of the worst in my urbanism tier list the census journey to work numbers are awful and the walk score bike score and Transit score ratings are all bottom of the barrel among U.S cities so look the easiest most obvious thing here would have been to do what honestly a lot of my followers asked for which was just to roast all the worst aspects of Charlotte like I had a bunch of people who literally wanted me to go out and hang out in the shrapnel zone of say Independence Boulevard and just make a video that was 15 minutes of me dunking on it I'm talking full-on like Shawn Kemp over Alton Lister style and don't get me wrong the idea was sort of appealing and I'm absolutely Pro dunking dunking is completely just provide in some cases but I just wasn't in the mood for it but it is important to understand that Charlotte does have all the elements that promote suburban sprawl because knowing that context makes what Charlotte's been doing more recently all the more impressive I'm talking about elements like Street networks with such terrible connectivity that the only way to get anywhere is a Strode some extremely bad walking environments generally woeful Transit amazing car oriented shopping centers like a lot of these Aerials look like they could be from the 1960s and I talked about Ring roads last week and the kind of land use patterns that Fester around Beltway interchanges well here's how it's going in Charlotte in case you're wondering just amazing stuff but I really did want to strike a more hopeful tone today because the flip side of all this is that like a lot of US Cities there's tremendous capacity to build dense housing in the city's core and in Charlotte's case they're actually doing that let's start with the obvious downtown or Uptown as they call it here you have older single-family neighborhoods that are still hanging on even though the state DOT put freeways right through them and those neighborhoods like First Ward are still very walkable even for non-centient beings apparently you know for my accommodations I actually went with an Airbnb in my number one surprisingly walkable neighborhood which is Fourth Ward also still a lot of old low-rise old Charlotte vernacular architecture I guess but a lot of newer high-rise housing too as for the rest of Uptown lots of office this is basically the banking capital of the US at least pound for pound and the city has put a lot of effort into bringing people Uptown by locating all the sports video there not to mention the Nascar Hall of Fame although I don't know about decorating crosswalks with checkered Flags maybe not the message you want to send to drivers I do feel like a city's downtown should be a great place to live and work and walk and take transit but it shouldn't really be a great place to drive a car and park the i-277 freeway Loop that exists today took shape between roughly 1968 and 1988 and you do wonder why we invest so much in making it as easy as possible for the worst least efficient most polluting vehicles to drive to the center of the city when there are so many other good Investments we could be making in the public realm like the light rail system which is really just a single line with kind of unimpressive frequencies right now but there are plans for expansion and what I really want to talk about today is how the city is leveraging the existing line as well as close in areas that are planned for future alignments to create some really vibrant Urban nodes first stop optimist park just north of the 277 Loop there are a pretty staggering number of housing units going in here would I call them luxury apartments that's kind of in the eye of the beholder but at least with the Alton you'd have to say the amenities they're offering are objectively classy another thing about optimist park I do like a good adaptive reuse project but was the world really crying out for one more bougie food haul I guess maybe the answer was yes judging by the business they were doing on a weekday afternoon the Belmont neighborhood just to the east not really densifying yet and it is one of these places where you sort of get a feel for the old Charlotte that's being replaced somewhat further East Plaza Midwood and its main thoroughfare Central Avenue which is supposed to see a Gold Line Streetcar extension would I call Central a Strode probably not development generally comes right up to the sidewalk and you can see the dense infill starting to show up with cranes in the air with a one exception where you have a bit of I don't know like Pixar cosplay okay all the areas I've talked about so far are very bikable from Uptown maybe even walkable but I have to tell you the Charlotte Bike Share system is just wild like ten dollars for 30 minutes you know a few months ago I paid 13 for a week of Bike Share in Valencia I know economic conditions are a bit different in Spain but man at some point you gotta align your incentives with the modes of travel you want to encourage okay and I had several people tell me you should go see Camp North End and from a map it it looked likeable but the local Charlotte people told me you can't walk there it's totally inaccessible on foot well first of all realize that you're talking to someone who lived in Suburban Las Vegas without a car for a full year so telling me I can't walk is just kind of poking the bear and I'm definitely going to take it as a challenge you do have to walk under the freeway Loop but I mean it's not like there isn't a sidewalk or it's prohibited and I feel like the implication was there wouldn't be sidewalks like it would just be debris strewn shoulders with guard rails I mean there were guard rails but they doubled as like SoundCloud promos and I'm not going to say it was the absolute most pleasant walk there are curb tight sidewalks a couple points and the prevailing traffic speeds are pretty high but you can't say walking wasn't an option and you might say sitting or you're weirdo why would you waste all that time on an unpleasant walk when you could just order a ride hail well you know people ask me where do you get enough ideas to make a 15 minute video every week well more often than not the answer is just walking around so you might think walking half an hour to Camp North End is inefficient and a waste of time but walking is really when you're alone with your thoughts plus there's just a lot you don't see when you're driving by at 50 miles an hour so anyway it's all good until you actually have to cross Graham Street like they literally didn't put any kind of Crossing treatment at the main entrance to the complex as if it's assumed that not a single person is gonna walk or take transit here self-fulfilling prophecy not on my Watch Camp North End itself it's more adaptive reuse and I am a bit of a sucker for that I guess the location has a a long history of industrial and military uses and now it's going to have a further history of co-working spaces expensive Wellness Services pour over coffee yeah still I'd probably hang out here okay let's head north on the blue line to another rapidly transforming Area North Davidson one thing that occurs to you as you visit these areas is a lot of them were redlined so you do Wonder as areas densify and add amenities who it is that gets to participate in that and enjoy the Surplus value of all the new urbanism and who's forced to look further out for a place to live because they can't afford new housing units and bougie Food Hall food it's just something to consider everything here isn't new Tod stuff there is traditional Main Street Urban fabric basically a block away on Davidson with lots of local businesses still flourishing and I have to say the city does have this interesting mix of a chill Southern Vibe and some Urban sophistication it's a bit disarming and it was hard for me to find things to be annoyed about which is my brand well there was one thing on the west side of 36th Street Station more cranes in the air did I mention there are a lot of cranes in Charlotte right now but the structure closest to the station platform is a massive parking garage which I'm guessing means it's for park and ride I'm not a fan and I'll talk more about why in a future video but for now please just build housing near train stations that's all while we're on the topic can we just stop art washing parking garages I saw these everywhere stop trying to pretend they're huge canvases for cool street art it isn't cute okay I'm actually saving the one place in Charlotte that really made my eyes pop but before that usual reminder to like And subscribe as appropriate connect on all the usual websites including patreon among other things I do post a little bit of written content there usually kind of a behind the scenes of what was on my mind when I was making my weekly video so consider joining up if that's of Interest okay so you all know I can get pretty sarcastic on this channel but the truth is being a City nerd means that you actually legitimately like cities even the ones that the data tell you are extremely car oriented and I'm not going to try to tell you that Charlotte style urbanism is some kind of Silver Bullet I mean are a million people living in Charlotte going to help us reach Global Climate goals as fast as a million people living in Manhattan probably not but the US is full of places like this that have huge potential and where people just have to be introduced to the idea of great Urban places and with that let's go to our last stop on the tour the South End also on the blue line you know I'm used to Transit oriented development being like 4 or maybe six story buildings around the light rail stops and that's what I thought I was going to see based on what I'd Street viewed the last time I looked at Charlotte's a light rail but man what they're building in South End right now is just a different scale much much more height than I was expecting mixed in with a lot of the original low-rise industrial building stock so lots of housing including the dreaded luxury apartments definitely still lots of traces of what you might think of as Old Charlotte but a lot of newer chain stuff too and the evening I went down there it was absolutely crazy honestly this might be the only light rail line I've been to where the trail they built alongside the line is maybe more popular than the transit itself but all the development particularly around East-West station is just Bonkers so do charlatans Charlottes care about Urban density and amenities do they value walkability or is it a top-down government plot backed by globalists to get us all to live in 15-minute cities and eat bugs well judging by the number of people driving their extraordinarily large vehicles in from who knows where just to be in an unmistakably urban environment that's designed for people to walk from place to place I think it's pretty clear that a conspiracy is not required to get people to see the benefits of urbanism is there a weird disconnect between the look and feel of a place like South End and the fact that there's so much parking including gravel Lots which you hope are placeholders for more dense development is it ironic that the overwhelming majority of people drive to a place like this sure but I think of it like this how do you drive from the suburbs into a place like this and not think man I could probably live here so I guess the question for Charlotte and honestly a lot of American cities is if you build a bunch of urban amenities in a very limited set of locations doesn't really matter and I think the answer is in the way people do swarm to these kinds of places and my big takeaway from visiting the most sprawling major city on the planet was that even in American cities that are obviously very easy to dunk on there are people fighting for better things call them urbanists if you must and there's really impressive progress and it's inspiring because this is really what my channel is all about that even in the most car centered U.S cities urbanism can get a foothold and there are people out there working to build something better okay that's all I got thanks for joining and thanks to the patrons who really do help make these obligation visits possible I was invited to Charlotte for other reasons but I absolutely had to spend my own time exploring I do plan to travel to more cities this year because I do find it very thought provoking and inspiring so let me know if you get value out of these City visits because I'd really like to do more otherwise keep the great topic suggestions coming including Urban destinations you'd like to see me visit and document I will be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 426,204

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban talk, urbanism sociology, urban exploration, urbanism as a way of life, urbanism architecture, urbanist exploring cities, urbanist session, urban planning problems, urban planning, city planning, urban design, cities, cities skylines, queen city, north carolina

Id: QgZcQIp4CL0

Length: 16min 13sec (973 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023