Full interview with urban designer David Walters
The proposed 2040 Comprehensive Plan would lay the groundwork for fairer and more sustainable growth in Charlotte, says UNC Charlotte planner.
The Charlotte Ledger’s Tony Mecia last week interviewed semi-retired urban designer and city planner David Walters of UNC Charlotte about the city’s proposed 2040 Comprehensive Plan. Walters serves on an advisory committee that’s helping formulate the Unified Development Ordinance, which would be the legal zoning mechanism that would enforce parts of the comprehensive plan.
This interview was part of extended coverage of the 2040 plan in the March 8, 2021, edition of The Charlotte Ledger e-newsletter. [More info / sign up for The Ledger here]
Remarks were edited for brevity and clarity:
Q. What is the 2040 comprehensive plan?
It’s a plan that Charlotte has not had in living memory. Most cities have one. So we’ve been flying by the seat of our pants for a couple of generations here, and the world has gotten so much more complex and fast-paced. We can’t do that anymore. We need a calm, rational assessment, and then view where we are and where we need to go as a city.
The plan is not zoning. The plan is a plan for the future. The Unified Development Ordinance is the zoning. There’s a big difference there.
Then there’s the thing that we have begun to talk about in recent years, the legacy of racist zoning in Charlotte. Single-family zoning, as we know, was designed specifically 100 years ago to keep Blacks out of white areas. That’s planning history. That’s fact.
We are living in a world that was shaped by racism. We can see that in Charlotte’s arc and wedge. We look at the where the broadband deserts are, where the lowest incomes are, where school achievement gaps are. That’s all in the arc, and all the prosperous stuff is in the wedge.
The more we cling to a policy that was designed to keep African Americans out of white neighborhoods — and it still does, frankly — then we are never going to heal the equity gap in our city.
Ever since that Harvard report, which shows we’re 50th out of 50, that was a wake-up call. It punctured our city’s self-aggrandizing boosterism. The not-for-profit players in the community are very active, and that’s extremely good. There are a few developers who are realistically interested in more affordable housing to give more housing opportunity. That’s very good. But predominantly, we’re really a city that would prefer not to talk about this.
We’re having these difficult conversations. They’re long overdue. It’s great that we’re having them now.
I’ve got the executive summary of the comprehensive plan on my screen.
You get to the goals. No. 1 is 10-minute neighborhoods. No. 2 is diversity and inclusion in neighborhoods. Housing access for all is No. 3. Ten-minute neighborhoods is the planning idea that has sprouted. It’s the idea that you can basically live your life within a 10- to 15-minute radius, using the car only occasionally.
If we all were able to live our lives that we could walk to stuff, bike to stuff, take a short car trip or hop on a bus or a train for two or three stops and use our car for special purposes, we would go a long way toward becoming a more sustainable city and hopefully improving our grandchildren’s future. If we keep going on the way we are, our grandkids are going to be screwed.
The key thing is equity.
Council member Victoria Watlington gave a very clear exposition about why she, representing African American neighborhoods, is really terrified by the idea for duplexes and triplexes — that it will increase pressure on Black neighborhoods even more. Because your developers are going come in, buy up cheap property in Black neighborhoods and build not duplexes, but “duets” — the builders’ fancy term for duplexes of about 3,000 square feet each or more.
And, of course, the Black residents of any such community are going be under increased pressure. So that particular thing, as written in the comprehensive plan, is dead. It’s being shot at by the wealthy right … and it’s being torpedoed now very effectively by council member Watlington.
My wife and I live in a duplex in a single-family neighborhood. That’s how Dilworth and Elizabeth and Plaza-Midwood and Wilmore were built. That was normal. It was only federal housing and mortgage regulations that put all the financial support into building exclusive single-family neighborhoods after World War II.
Q. What’s the matter with the way that Charlotte currently does things?
We have been flying by the seat of our pants because we haven’t had a comprehensive plan. We’ve had a patchwork of decent ideas stitched together over the years. They’ve been cobbling stuff together, and that’s not the way to run anything.
The zoning ordinance, that’s been even worse. From the 1920s, particularly in the 1950s, there were sort of federal templates. It was all about separating everything out. Under very heavy federal guidance, single-family zoning became the way for America to build itself in the boom years after World War II.
This gets to the present fairly quickly. Zoning ordinances in Charlotte were like almost every other city. They’ve been constantly amended with little Band-Aids. Some of those Band-Aids are good. Some of them were outdated within, you know, three years of being stuck on your arm.
It’s been chaotic. Things in the tree ordinance contradict some of the things in the stormwater ordinance and, you know, yada, yada, yada.
With the UDO, the big thing is “unified.” It's a big effort to get everything together. The main bit is the essentially new zoning controls. They’ll have a more organized structure, which is desperately needed. The subsidiary ordinances won’t be conflicting with each other. So ultimately, this is largely why the development community is broadly behind the UDO. It’ll make their job easier. They won’t have to negotiate the blockages that are in the current mishmash.
Q. If the 2040 plan in its current form were to be approved and the UDO and all the supplemental things were to be approved, what would development look like in Charlotte? How would that change?
That’s the big question. You’ll get different answers. In the wedge, virtually nothing will change, because it’s easy enough in the wedge to knock down single-family homes and build expensive duplexes. Just looking at Ideal Way on the edge of Dilworth.
So in in the wedge, nothing will change. There will be the normal upset neighbors who will get some duplexes close by them. But they’ll be lived in by people of their same social class and economic strata.
I’m a huge supporter of 98% of the plan. I’ve read it. It’s only this provision that has to be recalibrated. Because in the Black community, in the arc, you will see greater inroads by developers to capitalize on the ability to tear down and build more expensive homes.
We have an absolute conundrum: We can’t leave in place a system that was bred from racism and that still frames the whole of the city. But we can’t do what we’re planning to do because of the damage to the Black, and by extension, to the Latino community. If ever we wanted Solomon to come along with his wisdom, this is it.
Q. Is that a legitimate concern among neighbors who say, “Oh, I don't want to live next to a duplex or triplex?” What would you say to those people?
I’d say you're actively discriminating against me. That’s bred of racial stereotypes: “People who earn less than I do will live in the duplex” or “They’ll bring my property values down.”
Next to me, in Dilworth, it’s million-dollar bungalows as far as the eye can see. Myers Park and Eastover are the last places you’ll get affordable housing, but Dilworth is nearly the last place you’ll get affordable housing because it’s so expensive.
But two decades ago, it was not like that. This is not a constant. My wife and I bought affordable housing in Dilworth in 1993 for $45,000. We lived there for 10 years. With a very modest inheritance from my wife’s father when he passed, we were able to trade up to live on a lovely street like Kingston Avenue, framed by what are now million-dollar bungalows in a nice little duplex.
We’re not diverse. We’re all white middle-class. There is zero diversity here. But there was, for a fairly low-paid academic and his artist wife, economic opportunity to live in a good neighborhood. That opportunity is currently frustrated by market forces. But we know 40 years ago, parts of Dilworth were nearly a slum. Nothing is constant. You have to have policies in place that look beyond the immediate market realities and which would give people of vision the opportunity to do good in our city.
The comprehensive plan acknowledges that we’ve got a huge problem to solve. It invites people to come together to search for solutions.
Q. Do people choose to love the automobile and single-family houses? Or is that just the reality that people are presented with?
Of course they’re in love with it. That’s all they’ve known. How could they not be in love with it?
But it has become channeled by 70 years of mono-cultural thinking: single family housing on big subdivisions and you drive everywhere for everything. That’s the American way of life. It was romanticized in the ’50s and ’60s when driving was actually a lot more fun, probably.
No plan can say “you’ve got to change.” But it is a fact that if someone lives in a subdivision off Providence Road and has a couple of cars and has to drive everywhere for everything, the amount of pollution they pump into the atmosphere per person per year is over twice that of someone who lives in Dilworth or South End and who walks, bikes, has very short car trips and takes the train.
What the plan does is recognize that the only way people can change to more sustainable behavior is if they have some interesting and attractive options.
Q. What should happen next?
They’re going have to do some deep, deep research, looking at every other single place that’s done this. Their consultants are not flying blind. They know what's going on in other cities, but they've got to really, really look and see if they can find a way of reframing this that calms the white fears and takes away the Black fears of gentrification.
That's going to take a lot of brain power. That's not going to happen overnight.
Need to sign up for this e-newsletter? We offer free and paid subscription plans:
The Charlotte Ledger is an e-newsletter and website publishing timely, informative, and interesting local business-y news and analysis Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, except holidays and as noted. We strive for fairness and accuracy and will correct all known errors. The content reflects the independent editorial judgment of The Charlotte Ledger. Any advertising, paid marketing, or sponsored content will be clearly labeled.
Got a news tip? Think we missed something? Drop us a line at editor@cltledger.com and let us know.
Like what we are doing? Feel free to forward this along and to tell a friend.
Searchable archives available at https://charlotteledger.substack.com/archive.
Social media: On Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Nab an “Essential Charlotte Ledger” T-shirt or hoodie.
Sponsorship information: email editor@cltledger.com.
Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory; Reporting intern: David Griffith