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BIG CITY: The downtown limits

Posted on July 26, 2012July 26, 2012 by Staff

By Kirk Ross

In its 220-year history, the vitality and the buildup of Chapel Hill’s downtown has been driven by the fortunes of the university and economic trends of the region.

For much of that time there was ample elbow room; then came the boom of the Research Triangle and the rise of its research universities. That boom shouldn’t be underestimated. Since 1960 there’s been a four-fold increase in population.

The gross square footage of the university went from 7.5 million in 1980 to around 18.8 million last year. Over the same time period, the full-time student population went from 18,252 to 24,222, payrolls on campus and the hospital rose similarly and the number of faculty more than doubled to 5,441 in 2011.

The growth of campus and the stress of construction kicked into overdrive after the successful UNC bond referendum in 2000, which ultimately sent almost $1 billion in construction and renovation money to the Chapel Hill campus. The university leveraged that money roughly three to one with an aggressive and lucrative fundraising effort that financed more than 80 major projects in all. If you went to school during this era, your memories of Chapel Hill include cranes, green screening and University of Never-ending Construction T-shirts.

One would think that the buildout on campus would result in a corresponding surge for the downtown adjacent to it. No such luck. There’s been some infill, but nearly all of the residential growth has happened in the ’burbs and new urbanist developments outside the core, and most of the commercial and retail growth went either down the road to the mall or into Durham County.

You can read into that the late-20th-century trends of urban sprawl and mallification. But what shouldn’t be lost is that what transpired revealed the constraints of downtown Chapel Hill. There was a reason it was easier or cheaper or made more sense to locate in a mall or an office park near RTP. Here’s a few constraints to keep in mind.

Geography – Any map of what the town has long considered its downtown is pretty instantly revealing as to a constraint that’s been around since Gov. Davie set the first cornerstone and auctioned the town’s first lots.

Nestled between the university and a steep ridgeline, our downtown commercial district has developed in a narrow band along Franklin and Rosemary streets. Chapel Hill is a crossroads town, but a large state institution on one side and a heavy slope on the other inhibited lateral growth out from its east-west roads and squeezed the historic commercial district along the ridgeline. Later, policy and land-use practices checked commercial growth into downtown neighborhoods where topography allows for some lateral movement. The changes posed by the linear nature of downtown come up time and again over years of studies and analysis.

Ownership – Downtown ownership is a peculiar subject. A lot of it is still owned by the heirs of beloved Chapel Hill small-business people now deceased. They and other out-of-town property owners have shown a traditional reluctance to selling off or making upgrades to properties, perpetuating inadequate commercial space, especially in older buildings. Getting property owners to allow for renovations of out-of-date, not-up-to-code and unusable space has long been a barrier to attracting new business and opening up downtown to entrepreneurship.

Imagination – Almost every Chapel Hill policy wonk in the past decade or three has had a vision of downtown. Most of the ones I’ve heard are abstract, described from a minimum of 500 feet above the place and include the word “vibrant.” That’s because once you get down close to street level you start seeing the barriers to connectivity, the hurdles in each distinct region of downtown and the utter lack of public space throughout. On the other side of the coin is that every major project, every downtown game-changer that’s been an expression of a vision – from NCNB Plaza to the Wallace Parking Deck to Greenbridge – has been met with derision, in some cases for good reason. With so much change downtown and a leap in the number of people living downtown on the horizon, the imagination gap is the most troublesome constraint of them all.

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