Whoosh!

Once again, here are the questions I believe properly frame the NCD debate. I would love to hear anyone's answers.

1. Which housing characteristics, of existing or future housing– reinforce the things you like about your neighborhood?

2. To address infill in greater detail: which non-single family detached housing types (rowhomes, charleston houses?) would beautify your neighborhood?

Patrick,
Are you begging the question of whether homes of this type beautify every neighborhood?

I don't live in Chapel Hill, so the NCD issue isn't relevant for my neighborhood, but I have been mulling over Patrick's questions. I live in a neighborhood in Carrboro comprised mostly of one-level, 1950s houses, most well under 2000 square feet, I'd guess, with some closer to a 1000 square feet, on lots that range from probably a 1/4 to 1/2 an acre in size. We're not particiularly dense and not particularly fancy. I love our neighborhood, blemishes and all. It would only be improved by sidewalks (though most of my neighbors disagreed with me on this one) and slightly less thru-traffic.

We do have at least one duplex in our neighborhood, and it fits in just fine. It doesn't look a lot different than the other houses. To answer these questions specifically:

1. Which housing characteristics, of existing or future housing– reinforce the things you like about your neighborhood?

Smaller scale houses, one to two stories, set back a bit from the road, with a cottage feel (well, updated rancher feel if you must). Also, little gardens help. Front porches are nice. Quirky elements fit in quite nicely (whether it's chicken yard art or actual chickens in the backyard). McMansions would look terrible. I'd rather see more people in a duplex than one McMansion.

2. To address infill in greater detail: which non-single family detached housing types (rowhomes, charleston houses?) would beautify your neighborhood?

I think we could handle another duplex or two in the neighborhood, actually. I'd rather see this than lots of little guest houses or additional buidlings on lots. I think one story duplexes could work, but a nice two story building could work, too. I guess I'd rather not see townhouses, which wouldn't really fit here.

Patrick, have I done justice to your questions?

"I was just walking along Lloyd Street in Carrboro this morning and noting how great it would be to have townhouses in the huge empty lot between the Health Center and that office building. I could laso picture them in the empty lot son my street. It would certainly be appealing to my growing family - I need more house and less acreage."

I would suggest that Carrboro actually admit there is a drug problem in the Lloyd/Broad St area and start doing something to clean it up before anything gets built. Unless you enjoy the whole of Chapel Hood/Crackboro walking through your property...considering that is the main route used to get to Harris Teeter.

Here in New Orleans, multi-family housing goes back a long way, specifically in the form of the shotgun double:

Examples from the Bywater neighborhood (scroll down for photos):

http://bywater.org/Arch/shotgun.htm

Even now, shotgun doubles account for a significant portion of multi-family housing in New Orleans. The arrangement is usually that the owner lives in one side, and a renter lives in the other. This makes both home ownership affordable (rental income offsets the mortgage) and, as a result, tends to keep rents steadier and more affordable.

(That is, unless your city has been decimated by a flood and rents rise because a majority of the city's houses are uninhabitable, reducing supply.)

Also, the houses are beautiful and human scale.

This arrangement also can work with another kind of house indigenous to New Orleans, the Creole Cottage. You can see examples on the same site above.

No, I think he's skipping that land mine (wisely) and moving on to talking about what kind of multi-family can work. It's a good question.

But that is begging the question. While his is a good question, if you want to frame the entire discussion, you have to first debate if a neighborhood is suitable for higher density housing. For those who want higher density housing in all neighborhoods, it would be nice to leave that one out, but I for one wouldn't call it wise.

Patrick and Ruby,
The action in the Mason Farm neighborhood was
a temporary necessity. Put yourself in the shoes
of the the long-time residents and homeowners there for a minute.

Zalman Joffe buys a one-acre lot with an older home
that is in poor-to-fair condition. He tears down that
house, subdivides the lot into thirds, and starts to build
three very large homes there under the guise of
single-family homes. But he rents them not to
three single families, but rather each to eight UNC
students with eight SUVs. Voila! 24 students with
24 SUVs on one acre, right in the middle of an established
residential neighborhood. The neighbors see the
construction and react. They know that this is exactly
what Joffe has done on Coolidge Street and in two
other established neighborhoods in town. The neighbors
contact the town planning staff and ask what their options
are. The planners describe
the neighborhood conservation district as the tool to
use, but note that the process will take too long to
block Joffe's actions. So the neighbors ask for a rezoning
to buy time, and
it is granted by a council that is sympathetic to
established, near-to-campus neighborhoods.

Before you critique this action, please answer these
questions:

If you have lived in Mason Farm for 20 years, and saw
this occur, would you like it?
Would you passively accept it?
Wouldn't you fight it?
If you were on the council, would you tell the neighbors
that they should passivly accept this drastic change
to their neighborhood?

I thought Chapel Hill had a law that prohibited more than four un-related people from sharing a single home? Wouldn't that prevent the above scenario?

melanie

Joe, I'm not critiquing the council's action from yesterday. From your description of the issue, I probably would have voted the same way.

I am trying to provide specific questions to frame the discussion on NCDs because I believe the words "preserving neighborhood character" mean too many things to too many different people. To get NCDs right, I believe the discussion needs to be more specific than it has been thus far.

Melanie, yes there is an ordinance that limits a dwelling
unit (not a home) to 4 unrelated people. However, it is
impossible to enforce without looking into bedroom
windows, and the town has chosen not to enforce it,
reluctantly though correctly in my opinion.

Also note that I said dwelling unit, not home. Being perfectly
legal, on a newly-created, 1/3rd acre lot in a low-density
residential neighborhood, he can build a home with an
accessory apartment. He can rent the home to 4 students
and the accessory apartment to 2 students. By sliding
just a little into grayness, he can build a duplex, renting
each side to 4 students, hence the 8-student figure.
It gets gray for two reasons. First, the definition of a
duplex is complicated, involving floor plans and entrances,
and second, Joffe simply ignores
the law, knowing that he can't get prosecuted on the
too-many students ordinance.

The usual way to attack this is not by the number of students,
rather by the number of cars, which, depending on
the quality of the students, may actually form the
bulk of the problem. There is a front-yard parking
ordinance, but it doesn't work. I can show you many
examples of egregious high-quantity front-yard parking,
that do comply with the ordinance.

Like many things, successful student housing in an
existing neighborhood results when the landlord and
the tenants act the part of the neighborhood.
That's how it was when I lived on Greenwood Road during
grad school, and how some of the students in our
neighborhood have adopted wonderful lifestyles.
In Joffe's case, the opposite is true. The landlord pushes
everything to the legal limit with zero concern for
the neighborhood, and he rents to student groups who
trash the place. Feel free to visit the western end of
Coolidge Street to see what I mean.

I believe Patrick McDonough is exactly right when he says "preserving neighborhood character means too many things to too many different people" and exactly wrong when he asks "which non-single family detached housing types (rowhomes, charleston houses?) would beautify your neighborhood?" Joe Capowski paints a compelling picture of what undesirable effects the Council is trying to control, and writing stylistic prescriptions into ordinance will address these effects barely if at all. Without getting into a discussion of why neither Charleston side-yard houses nor New Orleans double-shotguns are good infill development models for our Piedmont towns I would suggest that seeking such models is in any case the proper role not of local government but of the developer. The role of government in development control is to proscribe, not to prescribe, and in this instance Chapel Hill should be writing ordinance that actually addresses the very real occupancy, traffic, gentrification and other issues faced by these neighborhoods. The real questions for framing this discussion are very simple:
1. "From what undesirable effects do the neighborhoods need protection?"
2. "What development controls (or other ordinance) will actually provide an appropriate degree of protection with a minimum of unwanted side effects?"
Finding the answers will likely be less exciting than shopping for styles in other cultures, times and places but, sorry guys, enacting responsible governance can't be fun all the time.

Joe---

Thanks for explaining. It's too bad there's no good way to enforce the current laws.

melanie

James Morgan states: “What development controls (or other ordinance) will actually provide an appropriate degree of protection with a minimum of unwanted side effects?”

We already have some ordinances, at least, that could help to alleviate some of the issues, particularly in regard to rampant on-street and front-yard parking. Unfortunately, enforcement of these ordinances is often hit-or-miss. Joe Capowski told me at a recent Board of Adjustment hearing regarding Mr. Joffe's denied application to convert single-family homes (with accessory apartments) into duplexes that ticketing the student cars doesn't do much good because they just collect or tear up the tickets. So more punitive forms of enforcement are needed: both for illegal on street parking and for illegal front yard parking. If the landlords gets hit with significant fines for illegal front yard parking it might make the whole situation much less financially attractive to them. And if the illegally parked student cars with unpaid tickets (say 4-5) got towed I think you would begin to see an least some improvement in these situations.

I agree with James Morgan that the best governance is generally proscriptive rather than prescriptive. However, I think that James misunderstands the intent of my questions. The point of asking what people like about their neighborhoods, and what housing characteristics contribute to that atmosphere-- is not a feel-good exercise, nor is it to suggest models from around the country or world to embed in our local ordinances. The point is to elicit information about what residents DO want to see in their neighborhoods, rather than only what they DON'T want to see.

I've said this before, but I think it's worth repeating- if we continue to discuss growth only in terms of its ability to be a threat, and not also an opportunity- we are setting the stage for acrimony. That's one of the key reasons for these questions. A developer doesn't need to be told exactly what to build. But only telling the developer exactly what not to build can also lead to significant unintended consequences.

I think Joan's post above is terrific, and an example of the kind of input we should be seeking.

1. Which housing characteristics, of existing or future housing– reinforce the things you like about your neighborhood?
Smaller scale houses, one to two stories, set back a bit from the road, with a cottage feel (well, updated rancher feel if you must). Also, little gardens help. Front porches are nice. Quirky elements fit in quite nicely (whether it's chicken yard art or actual chickens in the backyard). McMansions would look terrible. I'd rather see more people in a duplex than one McMansion.
2. To address infill in greater detail: which non-single family detached housing types (rowhomes, charleston houses?) would beautify your neighborhood?
I think we could handle another duplex or two in the neighborhood, actually. I'd rather see this than lots of little guest houses or additional buidlings on lots. I think one story duplexes could work, but a nice two story building could work, too. I guess I'd rather not see townhouses, which wouldn't really fit here.

From Joan's comments, I take away the following things:
-Large-size single-family does not make sense for the neighborhood
-Attached housing might not fit well
-Greenery/plants are important
-Bungalow or cottage-style housing with front porches fits the architectural vernacular

So maybe the Katrina Cottages at this link under “Using The Cottage” is a good place to start. These proposed alternatives to FEMA housing are 300 sq ft.

I'd then ask Joan— would three of these cottages, enlarged to 600-800 feet, spaced 20-40 feet apart, with raised flowerbeds in front and shared parking in the rear accessed via one gravel driveway, be a better addition to the neighborhood than one large single-family house with a two or three-car garage on the same lot? Why or why not? What impacts would either approach bring, and how could they be managed?

In closing, to be clear- with this example, I'm not trying to provide the answer as one type of housing or another- I'm more interested in seeing an iterative dialogue like this occur because I think it will enhance the clarity of the discussion.

Patrick - maybe I am missing a point here. Ruby's original post takes note of recent local government action intended to protect established older neighborhoods from predatory infill and appears to invite discussion of subtler municipal tools than than the heavy blunt instrument of rezoning. Ruby's later post seems to confirm this intent. I joined the discussion because I think this is a worthy goal. However I fail to see how a profit-motivated developer such as described by Joe Capowski is going to be moved by any neighborhood consensus (however thoughtfully derived) on the characteristics of desirable infill except if it is enforced by ordinance or by some review body working under policy guidelines, as for instance Chapel Hill's Historic District Commission does and as do Architectural Review Boards in most newer subdivisions. As I see it the 24-SUV problem remains. I feel a disconnect. And I do not see the "Katrina Cottage", however cute, as a municipal tool in this endeavour. Please enlighten me.

James, I believe that a developer who consults a neighborhood in which he/she wishes to build, and gets some feedback from the neighbors on how to build a house or development that the neighbors believe will add to the character of their neighborhood rather than detract from it- is more likely to get projects approved by virtue of motivating fewer residents to go to Town Hall to speak against the development.

I admit that my interest here is mostly germane to the second part of the substance of Ruby's first post, which is how NCDs are designed to deal with this issue.

My point is that for worse rather than better, the 24-SUV McMansion is an unintended consequence of the existing legal/enforcement structure. As I said above, I think the Town Council made the right call here, though I share Ruby's concern that the temporary becomes permanent.

As the Town deals with how NCDs are developed, I believe that housing types that are "unintended consequences" will continue to appear in some other form that will still be unappealing to neighborhoods unless the NCDs do a better job of guiding developers into what DOES belong in neighborhoods.

The Katrina cottage has nothing to do with Mason Farm Rd. I used it as an example of how Joan's answers about her neighborhood might kick off a dialogue on what housing types might be welcome in a neighborhood, rather than only focusing on what should be excluded.

I'm not suggesting that certain types of houses or architectural styles should be embedded in any ordinance. What I think I am envisioning here is "pattern books" for neighborhoods that would help guide developers. Another possibility is to look at form-based codes.

See "A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, and Construction" by Christopher Alexander for the whole package being discussed here.

Responding to James and Patrick, I maintain that appearance is a quality-of-life issue. Vernacular standards and pattern books are meant to safeguard our towns and neighborhoods from visual eyesores.

Patrick - I still don't see it. The 24SUV infill looks to me like a consequence of economic pressure effected through a carefully sought-out (by the developer) loophole in existing legislation, not an unintended consequence of that legislation. It seems just possible that a more carefully crafted ordinance might protect against predatory infill, and that it would be reasonable to have a discussion on OP about the possible content of that ordinance.
On the consult-the-neighbors strategy to reduce opposition at public hearings - lotsa luck. Check out the history of Pacifica, Sunrise Drive etc. etc. etc. And these are the good guys who have tried to nice! There are going to be a few folks in every district who want nothing on the empty lot next to them but the scrub pine and dog poop that's been there for forty years, and will fight like hell to keep it that way despite the zoning compliance and building permits that have already been legitimately issued to the lot owner. In my professional life I've recently been dealing with some of these people.
Ultimately, neighbors don't want just consultation, they want some kind of control, and that's not unreasonable. Ordinance gives them access to control, in measured, publicly accountable degree. It's true that town ordinance can be written well or badly, can be enforced well or badly, can be thoroughly or perfunctorily checked for possible unintended consequences before enactment. Is this is a forum which could help raise the bar on that process or not?
Form-based codes: I can see potential in that. What do you have in mind?

Form-based codes: I can see potential in that. What do you have in mind?

Using Joan's input above, one could attempt to try to fashion a neighborhood-specific form-based code.

For example, Joan said she'd prefer duplexes to McMansions. She also said she'd like 1-2 story buildings. She mentioned gardens and porches.

The code might specify things like:

The top roof height of new buildings should not be more than 2 stories above or below the top roof height of adjacent existing buildings.

There should be no portions of lots allocated for parking between the street right-of-way and the front facade of buildings.

A building lot of 5000 square feet may contain buildings with up to 6000 square feet in size total.

There may be no more than 2 housing units in one building.

Building units must have minimum spacing of 10 feet between them.
-----------------------
I'm not an expert in this stuff, but the goal I had in mind with the above code snippets would be to try to allow 2-4 units of 600-1000 square feet in cottage-style buildings.

Here are some form-based code resources that would probably produce much better results than my random take above.

Form-Based Code Institute Resources

Thanks Patrick for the form-based code resources reference - light at the end of the tunnel. Victor Dover's comprehensive summary of issues and concepts I found particularly inspiring.
The emphasis on visioning is important and I am beginning to understand how that meshes with Patrick's call for neighborhood connections. As a veteran and committed participant and organizer of Carrboro's visioning endeavors over the last ten years or so however I can testify that the lack of effective product at the regulatory end of all this hard work can be very, very frustrating. The most recent example of this was a proposal from town staff for an architectural code for the downtown area which had prescriptions for decorative detailing etc. which had very little precedent or justification in the existing downtown matrix. It also would have very arbitrarily prescribed a very limited palette of exterior materials, again with complete disregard for the healthy diversity of such materials in the existing downtown. As an exercise I endeavored to find existing buildings in the downtown that would satisfy this prescriptive code and was unable to identify a single one.
Reference to the existing matrix is obviously critical. For that reason I would be concerned about restrictions on front-yard parking, which is already common in many of the areas in question, hence almost impossible to force upon new construction. Documented compliance with and thorough enforcement of existing impervious surface regulations might be a smarter option than adding new unenforceable rules. Impervious surface rules would also seem to give the opportunity for lot coverage control.
One common thread in the areas of concern is a combination of both bul and height, described a looming relationship with the neighbors: standard characteristic of the McMansion is a large footprint format with a full second story. One possible form-based approach to this issue would be to limit the permissible area of upper floors, either absolutely or by ratio with the first floor. Limiting upper floors to around 1200 s.f. or less would permit for example a reasonably-sized colonial with dependencies or a handsome story-and-a-half bungalow, without needing to fret with definitions of these styles. It would also permit a wide range of other options, in a glorious range of styles both known and unknown, with little possibility of "looming".