The Grey Box

Every day after work I walk home to my apartment on Bland St. My view overlooks the heart of South End where I’m greeted with a mix of brick buildings, townhomes, and soon-to-be highrises.

I always find myself in the same position, lounging on my couch, staring out my window, wondering what this city is supposed to be and whether I actually fit into it.

One evening, mid-stare, I noticed a nearby apartment getting a paint job. The original coloring was cheery with bright pastels. A beachy looking building for such an inland city, but easy on the eye nonetheless. “Maybe they are freshening it up”, I thought to myself. Over the next few weeks, my optimism faded. They were not repainting the building with those same sunny colors. Instead they opted for a bleak millennial grey and a pasty white. The building wasn’t getting a little baby botox, it was getting an unnecessary face lift.

The contrast was striking, even just a quick glance at the newly painted building made me squeamish. Rather than sitting with my feelings of disapproval, I took a stroll along the rail trail. Except, the whole time, all I could notice were all these apartment buildings that looked eerily alike, as if they were made by an AI model. Boxy, Grey, I couldn’t tell them apart. It was giving me the ick, the one I get when I see the same type of guy on Hinge, a finance bro who’s only hobby is going to gym and his bio says he’s not political but is really conservative. No matter how hard I swipe, there are more. That’s what South End felt like, grey boxes one after the other, but without a way to swipe no on my own neighborhood. Maybe that’s what I get for living on Bland St.

I think back to some of my recent domestic travels, Denver, Austin, and Nashville and when I try to differentiate between their city-scapes, I can’t. Somehow they’ve all been hit with the same issue: think instagram face, but for buildings. This isn’t just a Charlotte problem. It seems to be spreading like a disease, targeting booming cities across the nation. Will it kill us the same way suburban sprawl did, or our car-infested highways did? It’s hard to believe that we live in an image obsessed society, when our newest developments look so dull.

So, who’s really at fault here? Developers, building codes, private equity, lazy design, or tight budgets? I’m sure the truth is some depressing combo but I decided to question some people that may actually know.

Turns out, these ‘grey boxes’ are more formally known as podium style apartments. This 5-over-1 style of construction entails a mid-rise apartment building that has around five stories that lie over a base of steel and concrete. The ground level typically contains retail spaces or parking with a courtyard of some sort in the middle. Alternatively, the “Texas donut” is a similar wrap-around building differing with the parking garage sitting in the center. Another element of these apartments include the incorporation of different materials on building exteriors, which in theory is supposed to give these facades visual appeal. In practice, they just give off a blocky and unimaginative feel.

(The Seline at Southline, is a typical podium-style apartment with an enclosed courtyard, mismatched facade materials)

In Charlotte, our city planning commission is split into a zoning committee and a planning committee. The zoning half reviews rezoning petitions while the planning side makes suggestions around land use, urban design, and transportation. They work in conjunction to guide our city council with recommendations regarding the topics above, like a bureaucratic assembly line. What Charlotte doesn’t have is a design review board.

Cities that have design review boards, such as Charleston, Philadelphia, and Seattle, are able to weigh in on how a building fits a block before its construction, not just whether it's met certain requirements. Charleston, for example, has multiple design boards based upon where the building is being built. The Board of Architectural Review handles its historic districts and the Design Review Board oversees commercial and residential projects outside of the historic areas. It’s not a flawless system, as the review boards are stretched thin assessing roughly 2,000 requests a year, but it’s why Charleston looks like Charleston instead of like everywhere else.The state of North Carolina prohibits design review boards for primarily single-family housing. However, the City of Charlotte substitutes this with an Urban Design Review process under the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), but it only applies to Uptown’s mixed-use districts and transit-oriented areas.

The UDO’s goal is to stop the worst possible design outcomes like prohibiting giant windowless walls spanning whole city blocks, and single materials across entire facades. The UDO design rules are not inherently bad, but they sometimes have unintended side effects. One of them being massing separation requirements which means buildings must break up their exterior materials to avoid unbroken blocks. Massing separation should help create visual interest but it’s actually why so many of these apartment buildings look like repetitive tetris blocks. At least their hearts were in the right place.

(The Winston, a podium-style apartment with a better formula: mixed-use building and groundfloor retail, eye-catching colors, smaller scale building, and right next to Wilmore Centennial Park)

I sat down with Clayton Sealey, a member of the Charlotte Planning Commission, who didn’t sugarcoat the tradeoffs of creating a design review board: timelines would become longer, costs would rise, and fewer developers would be willing to commit to the projects. “[However] even without these design review boards, you still end up having high rent on shitty-looking buildings, it’s not fair,” Clayton admitted.

Some other cases where the UDO means well but has ramifications are the stormwater and tree canopy requirements. Stormwater regulations exist to keep runoff, like chemicals, dirt, and trash, out of our water systems. Charlotte’s UDO requires proper stormwater management for multi-family housing. Tree canopy requirements mandate that 15% of the site be a green space or preserved tree canopy.

All of this sounds like good regulation, and it mostly is, but it also drives up costs for developers. I’m not saying we should waste any tears on the real-estate mogul types, but when costs go up, they respond by building more units, cheaply, in order to make their money back. Even affordable housing requirements follow the same logic with good intent and high price tags. Consequently, whenever costs rise, design is usually the first thing to go.

The small-scale developers feel it the worst, since they don’t have the same volume to counteract all of the costs. When I spoke to a local urban planner who asked to stay anonymous, very mysterious, I know, they broke down everything developers have to budget for before construction even begins: consulting fees, civil engineering, designs, permits. They pointed out that a lot of those costs stay roughly the same whether you are building 20 units or 200. A developer doing small, human scaled projects ends up paying almost the same fixed costs as a podium style complex. The big guys can absorb the costs, and the small guys get squeezed out, just like every other industry in this country.

Something the Charlotte UDO did get right was removing parking minimums within a 0.5-mile walking distance of a transit station (i.e. a transit oriented district). Parking minimums are quotas set by local governments based on a building’s size. When parking minimums are removed, it alters the neighborhood by boosting its walkability factor and simultaneously creating aesthetic spaces…because who wants to look at parking garages while meandering in the city?

(These brick townhouses sit right on the rail, in a transit oriented district, and add charming middle density housing))

Tesho Akindele, a former pro-soccer player turned urbanist/developer—that’s a career trajectory you don’t see everyday—had similar thoughts when we discussed this. “If you don't have to build parking, that's millions of dollars you can put towards other things, either making the building look better or lowering rent. If you don't have a parking garage, you can make buildings more compact too.” A parking space, on average, runs a developer around $30,000 per spot! If the parking garage has 100 parking spots, this would total to $3 million. This means that developers could potentially redirect money allocated for parking and funnel it into better design…as long as there’s decent transit around, but that’s a whole other article.

Spacecraft, a progressive real estate development firm, is implementing more transit oriented design at both of their new NoDa complexes. Instead of spending their money on parking spaces, they built their complexes near the Blue Line. The apartment buildings are purposely located within the UDO’s transit oriented districts which freed up their budgets for nicer exteriors and higher quality building materials.

(Oxbow, Spacecraft’s newest project under construction, testing if less parking can buy better design)

Usually the blame on these dull, monotonous apartment buildings gets put on the developers, rightly so. However, all my interviewees mentioned another powerful force at hand: the banks. Developers aren’t the ones financing the entire project, there’s investors and lenders at the decision table too. Say a building costs $100 million to build, the developer might put in $10 million, investors contribute another $30 million, and the bank funds the remaining $60 million. This shows that in most multi-family housing projects, the people with the most power, and regrettably those known to be risk averse, aren’t the ones with taste in design. These financiers like sticking to the podium-style blueprint, essentially hitting copy-paste for each project, which is the easiest way for a developer to raise the money needed for construction. “Once a lender has financed the same type of building ten times, they’ll do it an eleventh time,” Tesho said, expressing that the banks value their bottom line over experimentation with people-centric urban design concepts. Sealey expressed similar thoughts saying, "The banks just take the requirements and build as cheaply as possible.”

The frustrating thing is that Charlotte knows how to build better. We already have charming row houses, duplexes, and human-scale blocks. Other cities have shown it’s possible to choose differently. Grand Rapids has spent the last decade revitalizing their downtown, with developers restoring historic buildings into mixed-use living, offices, and retail insteading of building podium style apartments. In Nashville’s Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood, developers have improved the aesthetics by incorporating more brick and color to former industrial and warehouse-filled blocks. We haven’t lost our instinct for beautiful buildings, we just built an entire financial and regulatory system that makes the boring version the safest bet every time.

None of this can be changed immediately. Nevertheless there are also smaller, cheaper fixes that are hiding in plain sight. Murals, painted by local artists, give an otherwise forgettable wall fresh life, or at the very least Charlotteans a reason to slow down as they walk past. If a giant mural feels too risky for developers, even just painting the building a color that isn’t related to our Pantone color of the year would help. The urban planner said something that’s stuck with me since, “We need to care less about what the building is for, and more about the building’s relationship to the street.”

Landscaping matters too. A lot of these podium-style apartments have courtyards in their centers. Adding decent public seating and making them open to the general public would turn the whole block into something that feels lived-in instead of gated and unused, a hipster’s heaven. Tesho spoke about this solution and how “it might not even cost that much, but it makes people’s experience of the building better.”

(Row houses on W. Bland St. with a tree canopy that makes walking on a sidewalk pleasant to walk on)

Constructing these complexes even utilizing one of these approaches would go a long way.

While I don’t have a master plan for zoning reform or convincing banks to consider the public’s well-being. I do have a couch, a window, and some opinions a la armchair urbanist. What we can do as a community is show up for UDO public comment periods, attend community area planning meetings, or support the developers who care by choosing where to spend your rent money. If you’re a developer reading this - hi, please no more grey boxy buildings, that’s all we ask for. We used to have color and character and we can bring this back. I’m not saying we should repaint every grey box in South End. I’m saying I will personally supply the paint

XOXO - From the girl who lives in a Grey Box on Bland St.