Unified Development Ordinance

[jtmonk]

There's a number of reasons for not including a curb.  The one I run into a lot is due to stormwater regulations.  Sometimes the City's stormwater administrator will prefer ditches as a better means to control stormwater runoff as it's cheaper to maintain and allows water to naturally filter through the ground.   Now I always prefer curbing because of aesthetics but if our stormwater administrator prefers ditches I usually go along with his recommendation.  

[tozmervo]

17 hours ago, nyxmike said:

All across the city, mostly in more suburban locations... there's lots of instances where one side has them and the other side doesn't, or there's no curb at all on either side. Just curious why it's so inconsistent. 

Oh, got it. I would suppose it either has to do with the road engineering (does all of the water shed to one side, for example), or whatever the last road project done just didn't touch that side as part of the scope. If there's a sufficient swale that can naturally absorb/control stormwater, a curb isn't needed to control water. Poured curbs are definitely a premium so you often don't see them on older roadways or suburban/ rural areas. 

[kermit]

I -think- the UDO will dramatically reduce the number of rezonings necessary in Mecklenburg but this is a valid point IMO:

 

[RANYC]

What might last night's election mean for UDO passage?  Well, the council that barely passed the Comp Plan will vote on the UDO in August, so one would think it should pass by a similar slight margin.  

2040 Plan Yes Votes

• Winston - Reelected
• Ajmera - Reelected
• Graham - Reelected
• Eiselt - Leaving Council
• Phipps - Leaving Council (Had been viewed as swing vote, but voted yes to move on)
• Egleston - Leaving Council and replaced by Anderson

2040 Plan No Votes

• Watlington - Reelected
• Johnson - Reelected
• Newton - Leaving Council and Replaced by Molina
• Driggs - Reelected
• Bokhari - Reelected

[kermit]

These numbers suggest the UDO is mostly on the right track with its enabling of infill, but attention to parking minimums is also critical to stimulating infill. These numbers also indicate that transit expansion (enabling reduced VMT) will also be critical to meeting climate goals (and facilitate parking removal). Electric vehicles appear to have roughly the same impact as eating less meat on carbon outputs.

These data are for Sacramento, which is not hugely dissimilar to Charlotte in terms of land use and climate.

https://coolclimate.berkeley.edu/ca-scenarios/index.html

 

Edited August 14, 2022 by kermit

[kermit]

I don’t have any real sense of public comments on the UDO (other than the standard "they are banning single family housing" nonsense) so I can’t evaluate the accuracy of this, but it is interesting and it surprises me.

 

Edited August 21, 2022 by kermit

[RANYC]

4 hours ago, kermit said:

I don’t have any real sense of public comments on the UDO (other than the standard "they are banning single family housing" nonsense) so I can’t evaluate the accuracy of this, but it is interesting and it surprises me.

 

Haven't done an audit of the public comments, but if you look at the red-lined changes in the "adoption draft" versus drafts earlier this year, there has been a marked trend toward density.  Rear and side setbacks in residential zones have gone down in a number of cases, and max lot coverages have gone up.  Vertical allowances are higher in most place types, and provisions like allowing the tree-save area to count toward open space requirements are also encouraging density.  Following the UDO passage, there will be 9 months for it to take effect.  Also, UDO implementation will include "Neighborhood Character Plans" where neighborhoods will set policy to direct the aesthetics of all this added density.

Edited August 21, 2022 by RANYC

[KJHburg]

One thing not in the UDO is short term rental issues aka Airbnb/VRBO rentals.  Ledger had this piece about it today and how it is problem in some neighborhoods.  Most newer neighborhoods and condo banned short term rentals less than 30 days or even 6 months.

https://charlotteledger.substack.com/p/stopping-charlottes-airbnb-party

[kermit]

3 hours ago, KJHburg said:

One thing not in the UDO is short term rental issues aka Airbnb/VRBO rentals.  Ledger had this piece about it today and how it is problem in some neighborhoods.  Most newer neighborhoods and condo banned short term rentals less than 30 days or even 6 months.

https://charlotteledger.substack.com/p/stopping-charlottes-airbnb-party

this is a problem in parts of Dilworth. Lots of Airbnb parties around MLS games.

Edited August 23, 2022 by kermit

[RANYC]

Victoria Watlington leads the Cul-de-sac Coalition.  Tarik has stood down, and now she's speaking up, as though there's a pact.   Her reasoning is spotty, but she seems willing to pull out every stop to thwart this thing.

Newton also against.

So looks as though this will line up along 2040 Comp Plan margins.

Edited August 22, 2022 by RANYC

[KJHburg]

One way to regulate this and not shut down peoples property rights is say you can have an Airbnb or short term rental on your property as long as you live there as well.  I have stay in garage apartments next to or above in San Antonio, West Palm and Miami but in all cases the owner lived on site.  I agree with the statement that under the lack of current rules the city is allowing hotel like places in areas not zoned for such.    I have an Airbnb rental in a highly regulated condo complex in Hilton Head and places like that are not the problem as our HOA allows this.  Most newer neighborhoods in Charlotte do not allow short term rentals of any kind unless longer than 6 months.  No one in  residential neighborhood should have to put up with folks creating problems just because they happened to live next door to a short term rental.  So require the owner to live on site and this will shut down really quick unless it outside the city.    And if there is a problem short term  rental in  your neighborhood look up the owner and call the police if there are problems.  Once you have multiple complaints they are supposed to fine the owner I know that is the way it is with long term rentals so why not with short term rentals.  

I just did a quick search and way too many people in Charlotte offer rentals for 1 night.  That is part of the problem.  Min 2 night you wont have many of these problems.  My min. night is even higher than 3-14 nights min.  all different times of the year.  But after a quick search on Airbnb for a Friday night in Oct.  I found multiple places I could have stayed in Charlotte.  

[RANYC]

UDO has passed, and takes effect on June 1, 2023.

Charlotte is a stand-out in the country for passing this.  Whereas most cities in America constrain land use to single family only, Charlotte has broken free of that.

An amendment to delay provisions allowing triplexes/duplexes fails.

Yes Votes to Adopt the UDO:

• Eiselt
• Egleston
• Adjmera
• Winston
• Graham
• Phipps

No Votes opposing Adoption of the UDO:

• Newton
• Bokhari
• Driggs
• Watlington

Absent:

• Johnson would have been another "no" vote, but she is out because of Covid

 

Edited August 23, 2022 by RANYC

[southernnorthcarolina]

 

It will be interesting to see how Mecklenburg County responds to this ordinance with respect to the unincorporated parts of Mecklenburg, and how the other incorporated towns in the county respond.

Meanwhile, my home town of Weddington (Union County, sharing a border with Mecklenburg) will continue to welcome Charlotte escapees like me who see R-40 single-family zoning, neighborhood schools, and lower property taxes as virtues.  

[Blue_Devil]

10 minutes ago, southernnorthcarolina said:

 

It will be interesting to see how Mecklenburg County responds to this ordinance with respect to the unincorporated parts of Mecklenburg, and how the other incorporated towns in the county respond.

Meanwhile, my home town of Weddington (Union County, sharing a border with Mecklenburg) will continue to welcome Charlotte escapees like me who see R-40 single-family zoning, neighborhood schools, and lower property taxes as virtues.  

K

[Norm2]

22 minutes ago, southernnorthcarolina said:

 

It will be interesting to see how Mecklenburg County responds to this ordinance with respect to the unincorporated parts of Mecklenburg, and how the other incorporated towns in the county respond.

Meanwhile, my home town of Weddington (Union County, sharing a border with Mecklenburg) will continue to welcome Charlotte escapees like me who see R-40 single-family zoning, neighborhood schools, and lower property taxes as virtues.  

I doubt the county or other Mecklenburg towns will respond to this or modify their own codes to density. Single family zoning, lower taxes and neighborhood schools are not virtues, as these do not support good morals. Instead, more housing options, equity in education, and taxes that support the services of a growing city are what we need.

[southernnorthcarolina]

34 minutes ago, norm21499 said:

Single family zoning, lower taxes and neighborhood schools are not virtues, as these do not support good morals.

 

Wow.  I guess I'm immoral by the new standards of Charlotte's City Council.

People in the "ring counties" are already suspicious of any sort of regional zoning or planning.  UDO will sharpen the political and economic divisions between blue Mecklenburg and the red suburban counties.  

[KJHburg]

With the new UDO adoption I do think this will increase supply of more housing in the city but I don't think it will increase affordability one bit.  Smaller cheaper SF homes in older neighborhoods will be snapped up to build triplexes or duplexes and those will cost much more than the existing housing stock.  I think many neighborhoods will see smaller houses being plowed over for larger duplexes or triplexes at much higher prices.  We already see some of this so get ready it will really increase.   Gentrification the good the bad and the ugly will increase not decrease.  There are not suddenly going to be $300K duplexes in Myers Park or even NoDa it is just not going to happen.      Many newer neighborhoods which already have a mixture of housing types will be unaffected and also because they have deed restrictions about size and kind of houses.   Think Berewick or Ballantyne they have all types of housing from big to small rental and for sale.  Most new neighborhoods in Charlotte already have apartments, townhomes and SF homes in one neighborhood. 

It will increase density but not affordability.  Unless the city eliminated all zoning like a Houston (which never had it to begin with) we still restrict where housing can be built.   In Houston vast older industrial areas have been turned into residential neighborhoods with no rezoning needed.  Plus you can build very dense or even tall just about anywhere.  But still Houston's housing prices increased in the last few years for the same reasons as Charlotte's (population growth and low interest rates).  The interesting thing to me is how the stricter heritage tree ordinance is going to work with these new houses on the lots lots more big trees will come down and be replaced with smaller trees.  

But I guess we will see in 5 years from next summer when it goes into affect.  Would be a good study for the UNCC Urban Institute willing to say right now affordability will not increase with this but density will. 

[kermit]

Why do so many people think that the continued regulation of housing markets via zoning helps to keep prices affordable? Are housing markets somehow exempt from the laws of supply and demand?

Edited August 23, 2022 by kermit

[tozmervo]

55 minutes ago, KJHburg said:

With the new UDO adoption I do think this will increase supply of more housing in the city but I don't think it will increase affordability one bit.  Smaller cheaper SF homes in older neighborhoods will be snapped up to build triplexes or duplexes and those will cost much more than the existing housing stock.  I think many neighborhoods will see smaller houses being plowed over for larger duplexes or triplexes at much higher prices. 

The problem is those affordable houses are already being knocked over for gargantuan (often laughably) single family homes. Just as mass transit is not the single fix for congestion, this won't immediately fix affordability but it can stem the tide. 

[RANYC]

• Last night's vote doesn't mean ground gets broken on units that 30%-AMI residents can now run out and sign up to lease or buy.
• UDO was, however, a step toward a long-awaited modernization of urban land use in Charlotte
• We can't make more land, but we can loosen the bounds on its usage to allow for more housing stock per unit of land and a wider variety of housing stock per unit of land
• If there's no market for triplexes or quadplexes, then they won't get built en masse
• If there is, then the UDO has given an ignored market the space within which to flourish
• Because the UDO increases our city's residential lot capacity, I think there's a possibility it acts as a massive economic stimulus, directing developers and capital into vast stretches of under-invested Charlotte where ranch houses, often rented out and poorly kempt, sit on 1/4 or 1/2 acre lots
  • Suddenly those landowners perk up and realize that because of Charlotte's easing of restrictions, their lots now have higher and better uses, and so new projects are spurred
  • Hotspots like NODA are desirable to people with means now, and they remain so after UDO passage.  While NODA will remain a luxury residential hotbed, the UDO's loosening up of usage likely allows a wider variety of stock so that a wider range of luxury buyers and lifestyles can buy into NODA.  Some lots that only allow a single family home now might accommodate luxury duplexes so that two wealthy families can use the one lot, somewhat easing transition pressures on another lot down the street.  Post-UDO, some lots in NODA might now accommodate a quadplex, which according to the UDO, must include 1 affordable unit - so there's a codification of an incentive for affordable housing on a lot in NODA that doesn't exist pre-UDO
  • In zones of the city not yet desirable to the wealthy (yes, we still have those - Nathan Ford area, Beatties Ford, Sugar Creek), I think rental rates per dwelling unit stay where they are, but modifications (sometimes even relatively minor) are made to structures to allow multiple families on a single lot, which results in upticks in rental rates per square foot meaning more total rental revenue to the property owner, but the modifications also afford 4x the number of families access to a dwelling unit, even if the average unit size is likely to go down. 
    • Take an aerial shot of "undesirable" stretches of Nathan Ford where no luxury buyer wants in, and I don't think UDO suddenly makes Nathan Ford appealing to luxury buyers.  Instead, Nathan Ford property owners modify and enlarge structures on the current lots to allow 4x the families, thereby increasing their rental revenue for the lot.

 

Edited August 23, 2022 by RANYC

[kayman]

8 hours ago, southernnorthcarolina said:

 

Wow.  I guess I'm immoral by the new standards of Charlotte's City Council.

People in the "ring counties" are already suspicious of any sort of regional zoning or planning.  UDO will sharpen the political and economic divisions between blue Mecklenburg and the red suburban counties.  

Spoken like someone who doesn't know how to read the room....

[Nathan2]

11 hours ago, norm21499 said:

I doubt the county or other Mecklenburg towns will respond to this or modify their own codes to density. Single family zoning, lower taxes and neighborhood schools are not virtues, as these do not support good morals. Instead, more housing options, equity in education, and taxes that support the services of a growing city are what we need.

The Town of Huntersville has allowed multifamily (duplexes to apartment buildings by right) in a good portion of the town for almost two decades now. The only areas that it isn't allowed in is in the far flung Rural areas and Corporate business. 

10 hours ago, KJHburg said:

With the new UDO adoption I do think this will increase supply of more housing in the city but I don't think it will increase affordability one bit.  Smaller cheaper SF homes in older neighborhoods will be snapped up to build triplexes or duplexes and those will cost much more than the existing housing stock.  I think many neighborhoods will see smaller houses being plowed over for larger duplexes or triplexes at much higher prices.  We already see some of this so get ready it will really increase.   Gentrification the good the bad and the ugly will increase not decrease.  There are not suddenly going to be $300K duplexes in Myers Park or even NoDa it is just not going to happen.      Many newer neighborhoods which already have a mixture of housing types will be unaffected and also because they have deed restrictions about size and kind of houses.   Think Berewick or Ballantyne they have all types of housing from big to small rental and for sale.  Most new neighborhoods in Charlotte already have apartments, townhomes and SF homes in one neighborhood. 

It will increase density but not affordability.  Unless the city eliminated all zoning like a Houston (which never had it to begin with) we still restrict where housing can be built.   In Houston vast older industrial areas have been turned into residential neighborhoods with no rezoning needed.  Plus you can build very dense or even tall just about anywhere.  But still Houston's housing prices increased in the last few years for the same reasons as Charlotte's (population growth and low interest rates).  The interesting thing to me is how the stricter heritage tree ordinance is going to work with these new houses on the lots lots more big trees will come down and be replaced with smaller trees.  

But I guess we will see in 5 years from next summer when it goes into affect.  Would be a good study for the UNCC Urban Institute willing to say right now affordability will not increase with this but density will. 

I think its just your perception of affordability. Great thread on this posted on twitter yesterday. 

[Guest]

What makes this all complicated is the very likely housing bubble crash that has begun. It's rather odd but I would say there is a shortage and bubble at the same time.

Bubbles don't form in vacuums after-all, some kind-of shortage needs to kick off higher prices. When the market becomes heated for too long though, bubble psychology begins. More institutional money gets involved.

The FED driving interest rates to near zero and big banks dumping cash into every nook and cranny in real estate was the primary cause of the second housing bubble.

So, were all gonna have to wait 3-4 years to see how much of these absurd prices are due to bubble hysteria or the real shortage of walkable urbanism. We need to see how far prices bottom out.

A big complicating factor is recent surveys suggesting there's a fair amount of people who had been anticipating this (including institutional money), so they might put in enough money to soften the landing.

Best case scenario, the demand for horrible overpriced oversized homes gets wiped off the face the Earth.

[RANYC]

Everyone thinks the UDO is going to be responsible for the growth in luxury housing in NODA, a phenomenon predating the UDO by a long shot, but they don’t consider that something like the pic below is even more likely to go up along some random street somewhere in the part of Charlotte near Harrisburg.

Something not discussed much is what a loosening of land use restrictions might do for the “micro-developer” industry in Charlotte.  We should probably expect to see growth in a more varied number of small-scale, small-lot developers trying their hand at multi-unit adaptive reuse projects.  With a single plat of land, these developers can now build a bundled portfolio of revenue streams, which may serve as an enticement into development.

Multi-Plex has been beaten down and denied as a market segment for generations, not because the need didn’t exist, but because of our country’s real estate prohibition.  It will take some time for an ecosystem supporting this type of real estate product to make its revival.

Edited August 23, 2022 by RANYC

[15895]

I think this is one of the more significant things to happen in Charlotte. Good for the city. It could be super transformative. And it could really reshape say NoDa and other inner neighborhoods into thriving urban neighborhoods. They're already great, but adding in density, adding in these new uses will really give these great neighborhoods into something potentially more.