Who is this guy?

I'm a city planner, I'm a gardener, I'm a dog-lover, and most of all, I'm curious.

I grew up in Augusta, GA, with my first foray into city planning/politics being a petition-drive I led to create a public skateboard park. (Yep, I was as skate punk - see evidence below.)

Me and a friend figuring out the vagaries of mini-ramp construction, 1993 (left).  The same friend and I with decidedly worse haircuts, 1995 (right).  Sonic Youth will always be a great band.

In college at UNC-Asheville, I was part of a student environmental group that convinced our chancellor to rebuild an existing school entrance with a roundabout vs. building a NEW entrance over a creek crossing.  I also lived in Portland, Ore., where a summer job and brief college attendance sold me on bikes, beer, and transit.

I've always had a travel-bug, so after college, I got a 4-month work visa and lived in Sydney in 2002.  I made sure to get out beyond my Inner West Sydney neighborhood, exploring much of eastern and central Australia's countryside, plus livable cities like Adelaide and Melbourne. [I lucked out for a second trip in 2017, 10th wedding anniversary, below].

Australia puts convicts on their [plastic] money!  Also, they put Target in an 1880s-era wool warehouse in Geelong, Victoria (a city 1.5 hours southwest of Melbourne worth visiting)

Upon returning stateside from Australia in 2002, I put my journalism degree to use as reporter for a small newspaper in Western North Carolina.  I covered local government, which at the time included the town's planning department and their wrangling with second-home development on ridge lines/steep slopes.  I soon discovered that I'd rather DO planning than write about planning, so that sent me to grad school.

After considering schools in California and Oregon, I rolled down the hill from Western North Carolina to Clemson University (the then-girlfriend, now-wife would've frowned upon anything longer than a 2-hour drive from Asheville).

While I was getting a Master of City and Regional Planning (MCRP) degree at Clemson, I also had opportunities for learning further afield, including an internship with METRO, Portland, Ore.'s regional government, and attending Transportation Research Board (TRB) conferences in Washington, D.C.

From grad school, I moved to Nashville, TN, working as a transportation planner for Metro Nashville-Davidson County's planning department.  In my three years there, I experienced a 500 sq. mi. city-county that deals with planning issues ranging from skyscrapers to silos.

My next experience after that was an almost opposite setting - the City of Baltimore, who at 80 sq. mi. had finalized their city limits in 1918.  I worked as a transportation planner in the City's Department of Transportation (DOT), focusing on urban issues ranging from bike lanes, intercity and local bus stop interactions, traffic impact studies, and pedestrian issues.  I also found my dream home - the humble, yet immensely versatile rowhouse.  "Daylight Rowhouses" (below) are a favorite of mine! I was lucky enough to see a real, live "Jesus Christ Bail Bonds" car downtown one day! : )
See YouTube video link below for a good laugh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AJFleIrQ1Y

Source: The Baltimore Rowhouse, by Charles Belfoure and Mary Ellen Hayward

At that time, my wife worked for NPR in Washington, D.C. and we lived in Riverdale Park, MD (Prince George's County, Maryland), so she'd WMATA into D.C. and I'd MARC to Baltimore. (You can turn a mass transit agency's acronym into a verb, right?).  Life in the Mid-Atlantic was more hectic than our liking, and this quote from a fellow commuter rail passenger to a tourist was apt: "Visitin' here is easy, but livin' here is HARD!"  With that sentiment, we moved back south to Charlotte, NC in summer 2012, thinking kids might be in our future.

I took a job with a planning/engineering firm that did transportation work (transit, highways, bike/pedestrian, railroads, etc.), but drew the "Lucky Layoff" card when the planning work dried up in spring 2014.  If you're in a planning group of five people in an office with over 100 engineers and the company's always focused on high-dollar engineering work, then yeah, the planning work might not be the priority.  Years later, an Environmental Impact Study (EIS) that I worked on for the Durham-Orange Light Rail line got nixed.

My GIS color palette (below) included Duke blue (RGB 0 48 135) and Carolina blue (RGB 75, 156, 211). Mapping tip: Avoid ambiguity and keep colors in high contrast for colorblind people like me! The Brits are tops at this nationwide and in cities.

My next job was my favorite thus far: working as Senior Planner for a mid-sized city (Concord, NC) where I got to dabble in a parking study, a market analysis study, and plenty of urban design supporting a downtown master plan (images below).  The only reason I left that job after a couple of years was the 10 hours/week I was commuting from Charlotte to Concord and back (1-hour each way).  Some people are "Super Commuters", but it's not for me.

In spring 2016, I landed a job in Charlotte, NC, five mile from my house, with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Department, but a bigger salary and bigger agency aren't always better (I did get to help Charlotte illustrate its food truck ordinance, below).  No kids were in our future, and after visiting Glacier National Park in summer 2017, hiking though Western Red Cedars, humidity-free, I declared that the Pacific Northwest was once again in my future.

SketchUp modeling supporting Charlotte-Mecklenburg food truck ordinance.

In spring 2018, I started as a Transportation Planner for Multnonmah County (Oregon) and my NC-born-and-bred wife made the move 3,000 miles to metro Portland. Planning in Oregon is certainly never boring - the images below illustrate how I had to negotiate between a property owner wanting to build a house and paved road that happened to have a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) strip of leftover land from Oregon Territory days in the 1850s!

Roughly a year later, some things had been well-established:

1. We noticed a discernible lack of sunshine at times [Okay, weeks and months.]
2. Every time we wanted to see the majority of our family, it required a 5-hour flight to the South.  [My mom's in Colorado, but that's STILL a 2 hour flight from Oregon.]  My wife's an only-child and she wun't havin' it. In fact, I've joked that our move was a 3M move:
1. Momma - The wife missed her momma in the NC Piedmont.
2. Moods - Rain/gray/cold for weeks at a time were not for my Southern wife. As for me, heat/humidity bring out a special kind of crazy in me.
3. Money - Rents and housing costs are metro Portland are the lowest among major West Coast metros (aside from Sacramento), but that's still EXPENSIVE almost anywhere else in the US.  We were likely never going to be able to afford decent long-term housing there.

So, what to do?  "Hey, let's do a West Coast-meets-South-compromise," I joked.  And that's what brought us back to Asheville, NC in September 2019.  I've been gone 15 years (left for grad school in 2004), so it's a full-circle return to a place that's stayed the same and changed a whole lot - those two conditions can coexist, right?

We're both here now, job-searching.  Outside of work, I enjoy taking my dog for walks in our West Asheville neighborhood, poking around in gardens and the woods, and exploring food and drink; Hungry Times Two gives my wife (and sometimes me) a chance to discuss meals at home, restaurants/bars, farmers markets, and whatever else comes to mind).  I look forward to sharing my observations on the built environment, natural environment, and whatever else catches my eye.