CNU31 Recap

As mentioned last week, I was in Charlotte, NC last week attending CNU31, which was held just after the Strong Towns National Gathering. This was my third CNU, after CNU26 in Savannah and CNU 30 in Oklahoma City last year. Of the three, I’d place this one solidly in the middle. It’s difficult to beat Savannah, and your first CNU when everything is new.

Quite honestly, I didn’t attend that many of the sessions at CNU this year. Most of the time I spent in the hallways and lobby talking with people. I realized this year that there are really two ways to experience CNU. You can either sit there and listen to the presentations and learn a few things, or you can skip the presentations and opt to talk with folks, and leave with a head swirling from engaging conversations and a great network of people to help expand your career. I obviously chose the latter.

However, I did do a couple of the organized things that weren’t just the parties.

Tours

Unlike in past years, I took advantage of one of the tours and went out to Birkdale. Birkdale is an early new urbanist development that was built in the 1990s. It’s a mixed-use center that has about 320 homes and a bunch of retail. It’s probably the most new urbanist new urbanism development I’ve ever seen. Birkdale excels at hiding car dependency behind a facade of walkability, which is the defining feature of early new urbanism. The basic problem is that the ratio of retail to housing is all wrong, and it needs significantly more homes to support the amount of retail it has. Instead, folks have to drive to the community, which dictates that stores with a regional draw need to fill the retail space. What you get is basically an outdoor shopping mall with a few homes. Judging it for when it was built, it was fairly revolutionary and paved the way for less car dependent communities that are now being developed. However, looking at it with modern eyes makes clear how short it comes up from a real community and how far we’ve come with the new urbanists communities being built today.

While Birkdale was the only organized tour I did, I also spent a lot of time walking around the city looking at a number of different developments. Charlotte has a couple of light rail lines, one that opened in 2007 and the second opened in 2021. These made it very easy to get around the city, and it was interesting to see the type of developments that were being built along the rail line.

I started by checking out First Ward Place, which is a HOPE VI project is the historic part of the city just outside of downtown. As someone who has done a lot of work in affordable housing in Southern California, this project was incredible. It was a bunch of two-story walkups with stoops and front porches lining tree-covered streets. Land prices prevent this type of lower density affordable housing in California, but it was incredible to see what developers are able to do in other parts of the country.

From there, I hopped on the Blue Line and went down to South End (which is a funny description because the city’s gird is at a 45-degree angle). South End had been an older industrial area that started to redevelop when the Blue Line came in. Now, South End has gentrified, although without displacement since no one lived here before. The industrial buildings have been reused as retail spaces, and vacant lots have been rebuilt as high-rise apartments. In fact, it was incredible how much new construction was being built right now. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that the market will be able to absorb the tens of thousands of homes currently under construction in Charlotte.

Further down the Blue Line was Lower South End. Unlike South End, Lower South End doesn’t have the historic buildings to make it interesting. Everything in Lower South End was newly built, and the entire area lacked character. It felt largely devoid of life.

In the other direction along the Blue Line was NoDa. NoDa was the only area along the Blue Line where I felt like an interloper into a real community. The development pressure hadn’t moved quite that far north, although there were some newer buildings and ones under construction in the area. But what was there was mostly single-story shops and restaurants that were clearly home to a vibrant artists community.

What was most interesting was how tightly the new development hewed to the Blue Line. All of the development was just on the blocks that lined the rail, and was mostly in little nodes right around the stations. Walking just a block or two down the street, perpendicular to the rail line would land you amongst abandoned buildings and vacant lots. With the amount of retail that is being built as part of these mixed-use developments, a lot more mid-rise residential buildings are going to need to be built on these abandoned blocks just beyond the train. Otherwise, they will end up with the same problem as Birkdale, where there aren’t enough doors to support the type of neighborhood retail people will need so they don’t have to drive elsewhere for their daily errand.

Sessions

As I mentioned, I didn’t go to too many sessions this year. However, I did go to a few that were informative and thought provoking.

The most interesting session for me was on pre-approved house plans. There were about three sessions on this same topic, but the one I went to was put on by Jennifer Krouse with Liberty House Plans. Jennifer brought a bunch of 3D models of some of the house plans that she licenses and had attendees build a community by plotting the homes on big butcher paper plats. This got me thinking about how these types of pre-approved house plans and 3D models could be used to ease some of the resistance to missing middle housing in California. This is an idea I expect to write about more in the future.

The theme of this year’s conference was the corridor, and I attended a few presentations about them. The one that resonated the most to me was put on by Neal Payton with Torti + Gallas about the Wilshire Corridor. There aren’t too many new urbanists in California, and it’s rare to see a presentation that is entirely Los Angeles focused. Funnily enough, it was not the first time Wilshire Blvd was featured in a presentation this week, Nolan Gray had a photo of condo canyon in his Strong Towns presentation.

There were a couple of sessions that I had wanted to check out, but the rooms were overflowing into the hallways when I arrived to them. This was the biggest problem with CNU this year. It felt like there were too many attendees for the amount of space the presentations had. Most of the rooms were fairly small, with maybe about 100 people able to fit in each one. There were seven presentations going on at any one time, two of which were in ballrooms that could fit larger crowds. It seemed like most people wanted to attend the smaller presentations, but with something like 1,500 attendees, those rooms were completely filled.

I see this shift from people attending the big talks to the smaller ones a great sign for CNU. People like Nolan Gray, Payton Chung, and all of the incremental development folks are part of a new generation of CNU rock stars powered by social media. The organization is starting to move on from its founders, and folks like Andres and Jeff Speck just aren’t the draws the had once been.

Socializing

As always, the best part of CNU was the socializing. The friends I’ve made here over the years have been literal life savers. Reconnecting with them each year is reinvigorating, and I expect that some of the topics of conversation will lead me down new paths I wouldn’t have otherwise found.

There was a four-year gap between the first and second time I attended CNU, and while I knew a few folks last year in OKC, I felt much more a part of a larger group this year without the large gap between attending.

Somewhat unsurprising, the best conversations were with R. John Anderson. Every year, he’s encouraged me to expand and grow in different ways. Last year, his advice was to start this blog, and while it took nearly a year for me to get it going, eventually I listened to him about it. This year, he encouraged me to buy a commercial building and become a small-scale developer. It might take more than a year before I execute on this advice, but it’s a path I’m excited to explore.

There were also some useful conversations regarding writing a book. It’s been a long-term goal of mine for a while, and I’m starting to have a better idea of what I want to write and now a better idea of how to get it published. A lot of what I write here will be exploring the themes I’d want to cover in a book.

Overall, CNU was, once again, an incredible experience. I’m real hopeful I can go to CNU in Cincinnati next year, although I already have some other big travel plans the first half of the year that might conflict. If I can go, I have a couple ideas of panels I want to put together so I can make the transition from being an attendee to being a presenter. If you haven’t been before, I encourage everyone interested in cities to go, and hopefully I’ll see you there.