A urban visionary who saw what Charlotte might become
.jpg "Urban writer Neal Peirce was decades ahead of his time in his vision for cities including Charlotte.")
Urban writer Neal Peirce, who died Dec. 27 at age 87, was often two steps ahead of other thinkers about cities – but for the Charlotte region, make that two decades ahead.
Peirce and his colleagues came to Charlotte twice to write reports on the city and region: The 1995 Peirce Report and a 2008 Citistates Report. In both, some ideas were well outside the day’s conventional wisdom but proved prescient. Consider these 1995 recommendations:
Nurture a livelier uptown Charlotte.
Preserve the historic charm of the region’s smaller cities and their downtowns.
Build a mass transit system.
Or this, from 2008: Welcome the world to your global city.
Done, done, done and done.
Peirce was a unique national voice. As a syndicated Washington Post columnist, unlike the scrum of pundits swarming national issues, he focused on what was happening in cities and states. He was an early adopter of urbanism ideas now widely accepted: Historic preservation matters. “Transportation” includes transit, bicycling and walking – not just highways. And, crucially, that cities, suburbs and exurbs make up one geographic and economic region, and a region needs a healthy city downtown at its core. In the 1970s and even into the ’90s those ideas lived well outside conventional thinking about cities.
Some disclosure: I edited both Peirce reports on Charlotte, which were published in the Charlotte Observer and smaller publications in the region. (Read them at https://ui.uncc.edu/story/citistates-reports.) And I helped Peirce with several journalistic ventures over the years. He was a mentor and a friend.
In rereading the Charlotte reports, I found some ideas were prescient. Some weren’t. And some are tough goals we’re still working on.
Leadership. “Who will lead? And to where?” That headline opened the 1995 Peirce Report. Good question still.
“This region is a place where people perennially assume a powerful bunch of bank presidents and other men (always men) call the shots,” it said. Yet the writers discerned a leadership change afoot. Hugh McColl Jr., chair of then-NationsBank, told them, “The so-called group that people think controls everything downtown cratered about four or five years ago.” He probably understated the group’s power, but 20 years later those 1995 chieftains are retired or deceased, and today’s seem to wield less clout, or are living in Boston.
“Future leadership becomes everyone’s job,” the report advised.
Growth. The 1995 Peirce Report scolded the region for toothless planning and urged stronger anti-sprawl measures: “No successful enterprise would settle for operating on a hundred disjointed plans, some enforced and some not, hoping for the best.”
Real regional planning, they warned, was coming from developers, financiers, and state highway planners. “Charlotte and Mecklenburg County need a shot of democracy into their planning process,” they advised.
Today? A few municipalities tried to curb the worst sprawl development. Some later retrenched. I’m looking at you, north Mecklenburg. Charlotte still hasn’t updated its vintage 1980s, sprawl-enabling zoning ordinance, although the city is working on a new comprehensive plan and says a new ordinance will follow.
Green. The 2008 report pushed for strong, regional environmental measures. A few good steps have been taken, but the region lags many others in serious water, air and habitat protections. This line jumped off the page: “Stop genuflecting to the gods of parking.” Um, we’re still genuflecting.
Of course, some of those 1995 and 2008 words prove Yogi Berra was right when he (reportedly) said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”
From 1995: “The roaring growth of the past decade will slow.” Spectacularly wrong.
1995: “Will Charlotte emerge as a trend city, with a fast-moving, urban, cosmopolitan life? We doubt it. … Uptown rolls up its sidewalks at 5 p.m.” That crystal ball was cloudy.
From 2008, about transit: “The first phase of the Purple Line [now the Red Line] (north toward Mooresville) opens in 2012 but completion isn’t scheduled until 2019.” OK, stop guffawing. Or sobbing.
Neal Peirce believed metro regions were the key building block for national prosperity. But has the Charlotte region come around to considering itself one place?
I asked Bill McCoy, my former colleague at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute who was deeply involved in the 1995 report. He’s been a close observer of the region for decades. His conclusion: The continuing lack of regional identity and cooperation on major issues – failing to see ourselves as a region – remained a disappointment.
Maybe we still can roll up our sleeves on that one.
Mary Newsom is a Charlotte free-lance writer and former associate editor of The Charlotte Observer.