Charlotte NC Real Estate News

Michele Schultze and Joyce Spencer live in nearly identical townhome complexes less than a mile apart in south Charlotte.
Both were built by Portrait Homes in the late 1990s. Both have at least four units per building. Both have driveways and garages.
But there's one big difference:
City garbage trucks rumble past Spencer's home each week and collect her trash. Schultze pays a private company $150 a year for the same service.
The discrepancy stems from a city garbage policy that stokes the anger of townhome owners across the city.
"It's unjust," Schultze said. "We pay our taxes and we should be provided with the services the rest of the city gets."
The basic rule seems simple: Charlotte does not provide rollout service for multifamily complexes with more than 30 units. That includes apartments, townhomes and condominiums. Residents can pay for private service -- or the city will pick up their trash from large metal trash bins, commonly known as Dumpsters.
In practice, however, the policy is rife with problems and inconsistencies. Among them:
o Thousands of residents pay twice for trash collection, first through city taxes and then again to private haulers.
o The policy is not applied equally. More than 7,000 residents got exceptions to the city policy, mostly because they were politically astute enough to complain in the mid-1990s.
o The rule is so arcane that residents and even city garbage supervisors have trouble understanding it.
City officials say that as long as they offer some kind of public garbage collection to everyone, they're giving equal service. Providing rollout collection to all of the complexes now using private haulers would cost at least $2.5 million more each year.
"It would be a burden to all of the taxpayers if we didn't have this rule," said Wayman Pearson, the city's solid waste director.
The city could save at least $500,000 a year by ending the exceptions. But any change would spark a political brouhaha, and city staffers say they want to leave the policy alone.
"I've been here long enough to know this is the most sensitive issue we deal with as a department," said Pearson, who started working in Charlotte in 1990.
The issue burns steadily, however, as townhomes remain popular and planners encourage denser development. Further, city staffers are already deciding which areas of unincorporated Mecklenburg County to annex in summer 2005.
The issue flared up the last two times Charlotte expanded, particularly among owners of townhomes, whose driveways and garages make their homes seem like single-family houses.
Many residents expected the ubiquitous gray cans. Instead, they were told the city would pay only for Dumpster-style pickup.
City Council member James "Smuggie" Mitchell voted to reaffirm the policy in 2001, but now he says it's unfair.
"We need to revisit it," said Mitchell, a Democrat who represents north Charlotte. "If they're paying taxes, we need to provide a rollout container or deduct the yearly taxes."
Exceptions and mistakes
The city adopted this policy in 1994 as part of a decades-long scaleback of Charlotte's garbage service designed to save money.That year, Charlotte switched from backyard to curbside pickup at homes, reducing the number of employees needed per truck.
At the same time, city officials ended curbside service to larger multifamily complexes. They said the tight turns and narrow streets in many of those communities made it difficult to use automatic loaders, forcing crews to spend extra time there. The city continued to pick up rollout carts at small multifamily complexes, those with fewer than 30 units.
Residents across the city objected, saying their streets and parking lots could not handle the eyesore and smell of a large container.
They persuaded city leaders to make exceptions for them. Pearson said he favored a uniform policy, but the politics of garbage collection overruled him.
Even since 1994, the city hasn't stuck closely to its own policy. In at least four cases, companies hired by Charlotte mistakenly delivered city rollout carts.
"It was easier not to take the carts back," Pearson said, "because they all started calling council members."
Now, the city does not allow new exceptions and monitors its contractors more closely, Pearson said.
Fairness is important, said Allan Blalock of the Glen at Highland Creek, a northeast Charlotte complex.
"They need to be consistent in how they apply their policies," he said. "They're consistent in charging us for our taxes," he said.
Despite the exceptions, the 1994 changes to curbside pickup and large-bin service paid off for the city's bottom line. In 1990, Pearson said, Charlotte had 345 employees in its collection division, serving 120,000 residences. Today, he said, Charlotte serves 185,000 locations with less than half the work force.
A complicated definition
How can you tell the difference between a single-family home and a multifamily development? It's not as easy as looking.
The official dividing line between rollout and large-bin service is an arcane zoning term: "planned multifamily development."
What does that mean? It's almost impossible to know.
Pearson acknowledges that even he has difficulty understanding the distinction.
"You read it, then you read it, then you read it again," he said. "It's not really understandable just by reading it. You need someone to show you."
In at least one case, city officials misread their own definition. In 2001, residents of Towne Meadows, a north Charlotte townhome development, demonstrated that their neighborhood qualified as single-family homes, in part because of the shape of their lots. They now get rollout collection.
Michelle Wilkins of south Charlotte said the city should revise its definition of multifamily housing. She lives in a two-story, 1,990-square-foot townhouse with a driveway and a garage.
"They can't lump apartments in with townhomes," Wilkins said. "(These are) individual units that for all intents and purposes are a house, except they have a connecting wall."
National solid-waste experts disagree on how to classify townhomes. Some say they are more like single-family homes and deserve rollout service. Others say they are more like businesses, which get no city service.
The City Council last considered the policy in 2001, but made just one small change: Developers must provide space for large, central bins in new complexes.
Democratic City Council member Susan Burgess, who was not on the council for the 2001 vote, said the policy works against city efforts to encourage dense development close to uptown and along transit corridors.
But Republican Don Lochman disputes that idea, contending that even if the large bins are a nuisance, they don't drive homebuyers' decisions.
"We beat this subject to death and never did come up with something that we were all happy with," said Lochman, part of the unanimous vote affirming city policy in 2001.
A big can of trouble
When the garbage issue flares up, it's tough to tamp down.Quail Hollow Estates condominiums in south Charlotte gets rollout service as an exception. But late last year, a city employee told the property manager that residents must convert to bins or get private service.
When homeowners association president Marvin Wyant found out about the employee's comments, he was floored. He started contacting City Council members, saying it was unfair for Charlotte to remove rollout carts.
That prompted city staffers to send a clarification memo to the City Council, explaining that the solid waste department was studying the issue, not ending the exceptions.
Pearson called the flap a misunderstanding, sparked by an "overzealous" employee searching for ways to make the garbage collection more efficient.
Instead, he found political dynamite, buried in the trash. -- DATABASE EDITOR TED MELLNIK CONTRIBUTED TO THIS ARTICLE.
-- RICHARD RUBIN: (704) 358-5832; RRUBIN@CHARLOTTEOBSERVER.COM
What's Multifamily?
The city of Charlotte denies rollout garbage service to complexes of more than 30 units that meet the following definition:
"A group of two (2) or more attached, duplex, triplex, quadraplex, or multifamily buildings, or a single building of more than twelve (12) units constructed on the same lot or parcel of land under single ownership, and planned and developed with a unified design of buildings and coordinated common open space and service areas in accordance with the requirements of Chapter 9 for the zoning district in which it is located."

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