Monthly Archives: April 2012

Height and zoning links

DC Zoning Map - CC image from Payton Chung

Every so often (just as we’re seeing right now), someone will suggest changing DC’s height limit and a flurry of articles/blog posts/tweets/etc will go up, arguing for or against.  This past week has been no exception.

Zoning and process: At the Atlantic, Josh Barro argues that the height limit isn’t the real villain:

But the real crisis of land use in Washington goes way beyond the height limit. It’s that the District’s planning and zoning apparatus is overall hostile to new development, usually allowing far less building that would be permitted by the Heights of Buildings Act of 1910. And while D.C.’s planning rules are restrictive, they are also arbitrary and unevenly enforced, making it a difficult market to enter.

I hinted at this in my post on the limit as well, but Barro really highlights two distinct issues.  One is a matter of the content of the regulations – how much density is allowed, what kind of uses, etc.  Barro highlights some DC examples of rather low densities allowed by right in otherwise obvious areas for denser development.  The other is a matter of process. Barro notes that many developments don’t take advantage of by right zoning, but rather look to the Planned Unit Development process, which adds flexibility at the expense of certainty.

The proposed project is not out-of-character for its surroundings. But even though Wisconsin Avenue in the area is characterized by six- and eight-story apartment buildings, this parcel happened to be zoned for a “floor-area ratio” of 1.0. That mans only one square foot of building area per square foot of lot area.

So, the owners of the property filed a Planned Unit Development application that would have allowed a FAR of 2.0. This was hardly an earth-shattering level of density. Permitted FARs in D.C.’s main business district go as high as 12.0. Yet the neighbors fought the project tooth and nail, suing to block Zoning Commission decisions and even trying to get the old supermarket named a historic landmark. Don’t laugh. The “Park and Stop” strip mall on Connecticut Avenue in Cleveland Park, right next to a subway station, is a protected historic landmark, on the grounds that it is one of the oldest strip malls in the country.

In practice, these two constraints (content and process) work hand in hand. The unfortunate outcome is that good projects have to jump over more procedural hurdles, while inferior projects are often approved by right.   The by-right density on such a parcel should be higher than 1.0 (and probably higher than 2.0, too), but the process could also stand to be improved.  Process matters, as does the regulation content.

Zoning is killing America: No, I don’t think that overstates what Jonathan Rothwell argues in The New Republic. Taking a cue from discussions about Why Nations Fail, Rothwell posits a thesis about why regions fail, and the answer is zoning:

Specifically, they contrast “extractive institutions” that concentrate power and hamper development, such as slavery (at the extreme) and limited voting, civil, or property rights, with open institutions that diffuse power and opportunity, providing universal incentives to invest and innovate.

Urban scholars and policymakers have much to learn from such institutional analysis. While most political economists think of institutions operating at the national or even state level, there is one essential but overlooked institution operating at and within the metro scale: zoning.

…

Previously, my work has found that zoning laws inflate metro-wide housing costs, limit housing supply, and exacerbate segregation by income and race. Other work faults these laws for their damaging effect on the environment, since they make public transportation infeasible and extend commuting times. With a few possible exceptions (see Michelle Alexander), it’s hard to think of an existing political institution in the United States that is more destructive of human and social capital.

Emphasis mine.

And it’s not just zoning: Will Doig at Salon writes about the practical impacts of historic preservation:

When Jacobs’ neighborhood was protected in 1969, it was no tony enclave. In fact, the justification for the urban-renewal project was that Greenwich Village was allegedly a slum. But now that the Village is wealthy, suddenly there are three expansions of its protective boundaries in six years. The timing invites cynical conclusions, bluntly summed up by urbanist Alon Levy on his blog last year: “Let us remember what historic districts are, in practice: They are districts where wealthy people own property that they want to prop up the price of.”

This isn’t to say that zoning or historic preservation are bad for cities – far from it.  However, the very nature of cities is dynamic.  It’s inherent to their economic purpose, as agglomerations of human and social capital.  Zoning, if it isn’t forced to evolve (via a zoning budget or other potential solutions), constrains the city.  Historic preservation also faces the challenge of dealing with dynamic, growing places, as that movement gained traction in an era of divestment in urban places.  To the extent that preservation is about more than just edifices, you have to confront these questions. (Aside: See Benjamin Schwarz discussing the economic moment behind the Village of Jane Jacobs’ era, and also this video on the techno culture of Berlin and how it evolved out of a fleeting and unique circumstance, hat tip to Aaron Renn)

Random factoids about height: Shilpi Paul at UrbanTurf highlights an inforgraphic that aims to quantify the price premium in New York for height.

Random factoids about density: BeyondDC pulls some travel mode statistics from COG’s travel survey at the neighborhood level, and the impact of density on travel behavior is quite obvious.

In less dense areas (and I’m judging density solely on my own impressions from other research), walking plummets as a work commute mode.  In almost all areas, the commute trip is biased towards modes better at covering longer distances (cars, transit) and less to walking and biking.

Thoughts on changing DC’s height limit

With both city leaders and members of Congress discussing alterations to DC’s height limit, I think there are a few things worth highlighting.  These are just some thoughts on what I think are the core issues here, and how DC might proceed.

Why do this?  The compelling reason must be economic, and the reasoning behind this change will need to be carefully communicated to the public at large.  A limitation like this involves a number of trade-offs, and must be understood just as the costs of other zoning restrictions need to be understood.

There ought to be a campaign that both illustrates the benefits of density, but also the costs of restricting development – both in terms of opportunity costs of limiting agglomeration economies, but also of the general costs that raise rents and prices for all sorts of real estate in the region. (see many previous posts from Ryan Avent – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, among many others)

At the same time, changing the height limit won’t be a panacea.  The real estate market in DC is regional, other local governments will need to pull their weight as well.

Reverse the question: why shouldn’t we do this?  Taking a page from the concept of shifting the procedural burden of land use regulation, perhaps the question needs to be flipped on height limit proponents – if not up, where will the city grow?  Will commercial areas encroach into residential ones?  What about the costs of pushing development further out into the region?  What about the costs of rising rents?

The height limit is not zoning.  It’s worth remembering that most of the District is regulated to maximum densities well below the maximum envelope of the height limit.  Likewise, these areas represent some of the best opportunities for cost-effective, small scale infill development: the “missing middle” of housing densities.

 It is important not to get too caught up in the density numbers when thinking about these types. Due to the small footprint of the building types and the fact that they are usually mixed with a variety of building types, even on an individual block, the perceived density is usually quite lower–they do not look like dense buildings.

There are many opportunities for this kind of infill development in DC, whether on alley lots or via the conversion of English Basements and other additions of multiple units into otherwise single-family zones.  Smaller scale multi-unit buildings can also be designed as to be visually indistinguishable from neighboring single-family homes.  This kind of development ought to be allowed across the board (and DC is moving in this direction), an example of incremental changes to the regulatory environment.

That said, those kinds of developments won’t impact the height limit.  In DC’s largely residential areas, I doubt a taller limit would have much effect.  Conversely, raising the height limit without increasing the allowed density brings little economic benefit.

“Vistas” and “views” are overrated.  Atrios said it.  Most of the ‘views’ people talk about when discussing DC’s tourist-caliber photo shots are enhanced by tall buildings, not the other way around.  The buildings frame the views down street corridors.   Most of the people are not viewing things from the stereotypical aerial shot, but rather from street level.

Instead, what people seem to be concerned about is about the city’s skyline becoming a vista in and of itself, distracting from monuments and memorials.   I don’t think this is of concern, as skylines can be manipulated just as easily as other physical elements of the city.  Likewise, any alteration of DC’s height limit is not likely to suddenly trigger a free-for-all of skyscraper construction, but rather a slow climb to a new, higher equilibrium.  The overall impression from afar would still be that of a ‘flat’ skyline, the monuments and memorials would get their respect while the rest of the city would have room to grow.

The “Monumental Core” and “Downtown” are not synonyms.   The reported initial conversations on height involve minor changes in the already-tall areas, and transit-oriented height districts elsewhere. Matt Yglesias:

 They seem to be contemplating two different ideas, either or both of which could be implemented. One is to tinker at the margins with the restrictions on downtown structures to allow an additional floor or two of leasable office space. The other is to allow for substantially taller buildings in a few outlying areas, with the thinking being that if we can have tall buildings right across the Potomac in Arlington County there’s no reason peripheral parts of D.C. shouldn’t have them too.

The idea of protecting the monumental core from the intrusion of tall buildings is a worthy urban design cause, but also largely a strawman.   The NCPC’s Monumental Core Framework Plan is discussing this area in blue, while the broader ‘downtown’ is represented in brown/tan, showing the area of DC’s Center City Action Agenda.

 While adding some buffer around the White House, the larger point is that downtown already has most of the city’s tall buildings.  Furthermore, if we’re talking about adding a modest increase in heights allowed in DC (something along the lines of allowing buildings to be twice as tall as the streets they front on, rather than the current limit of street width + 20 feet), then views like this and this within the monumental core will look exactly the same in all of the tourist photos.

Always remember – the reason to do this is to add density, and perceptions of density (such as equating it with height) are often inaccurate.

There will be a plan. Lydia DePillis wisely notes that any change would need a plan, and not just open the door to willy-nilly skyscraper development.  In the event that this comes to pass, I’d expect both a detailed map and accompanying restrictions to protect the vistas we do have, as well as a strong urban design component.   Potential options could be altering the existing formula (what if the limit were 2x of street width?  Or street width + 75 feet instead of 20?) and could easily introduce mandatory setbacks at certain heights to avoid urban canyon effects (think along the lines of a less-tall version of New York’s 1916 zoning code building envelope).

Such a plan could also identify areas for truly tall buildings, DC’s own version of La Defense or Canary Wharf.  Doing so should be part of a conscious urban design, rather than the isolation of the Tour Montparnasse.

Added density provides opportunities to finance new infrastructure.  What better way to link transportation and land use than to fund new transportation infrastructure via tax revenues from new development?

Links: The new American Dream

House for rent. CC image from Sean Dreilinger

Foreclosed sprawl – the next frontier of renting?  The New York Times looks at the practice of firms buying up foreclosed, cookie cutter sprawl housing at relatively low prices with the idea of renting these houses out to tenants.

As an inspector for the Waypoint Real Estate Group, Mr. Hladik takes about 20 minutes to walk through each home, noting worn kitchen cabinets or missing roof tiles. The blistering pace is necessary to keep up with Waypoint’s appetite: the company, which has bought about 1,200 homes since 2008 — and is now buying five to seven a day — is an early entrant in a business that some deep-pocketed investors are betting is poised to explode.

With home prices down more than a third from their peak and the market swamped with foreclosures, large investors are salivating at the opportunity to buy perhaps thousands of homes at deep discounts and fill them with tenants. Nobody has ever tried this on such a large scale, and critics worry these new investors could face big challenges managing large portfolios of dispersed rental houses. Typically, landlords tend to be individuals or small firms that own just a handful of homes.

Cities usually have more rentals, and for good reason.  Apartments have common structural elements and provide for economies of scale in managing multiple units.  Applying this to large-scale single family detached homes is a different and challenging model, but a seemingly inevitable result of the decline in home prices in these areas once built on speculation.

It’s also an example of housing market filtering in action.

This isn’t quite what the concept of filtering is about… Cap’n Transit disputes the concept of filtering, noting that such shifts are not permanent.  However, I don’t think anyone was asserting they were.  Filtering is a process, a description of the market responding to shifting demand.  It is not a description of an end state.

It’s true that most of those buildings were not well-maintained, but the causation is more likely the other way around: the landlords didn’t put a lot of money into them because they didn’t bring in much rent. So why were the rents so cheap? I’m guessing that there were several related factors: racism, city services, crime, noise, fads and the suburban ponzi scheme.

I don’t think any of those really disproves the filtering concept.  Filtering doesn’t really describe causation, just the correlation – as demand drops (and therefore the potential rent income), so to does maintenance, and the units on the margins will filter down to more “affordable” prices. Each of those factors listed at the end could be construed, one way or another, as an influence on demand.

The rest of the Cap’ns post on the politics and emotions of gentrification and filtering up are spot on, however.

The fiscal benefits of density: While renting out old McMansions might be a challenge due to diseconomies of scale, Emily Badger looks at Asheville, NC and makes the fiscal case for density and urban infill development.

The whole idea is pretty simple. But it’s sort of baffling that we haven’t been looking at our land this way for years. Cities, Minicozzi laments, are woefully ignorant about exactly which types of neighborhoods and development put the most financial strain on public coffers and which kick in the most money. This is why Minicozzi has been deploying every metaphor he can think of – cash crops, gas tanks, french fries! – to beat home the math.

Fundamentally, this is the same concept as the Geoffrey West observation of urban agglomeration and the inherent efficiency it offers.

How to make use of the reverse commute: Perhaps someone should inform various secondary job centers along transit lines of their fiscal potential.  Alon Levy looks at what’s required to make for successful secondary CBDs along rail transit lines, and what’s wrong with our current land use around suburban stations:

But really, the kind of development that’s missing around suburban train stations in the US is twofold. First, the local development near the stations is not transit-oriented, in the sense that big job and retail centers may be inconvenient to walk to for the pedestrian. And second, the regional development does not follow the train lines, but rather arterial roads, or, in cities with rapid transit, rapid transit lines…

In both cases, what’s missing is transportation-development symbiosis. Whoever runs the trains has the most to gain from locating major office and retail development, without excessive parking, near the train stations. And whoever owns the buildings has the most to gain from running trains to them, to prop up property values. This leads to the private railroad conglomerates in Tokyo, and to the Hong Kong MTR.

Commenter Jim notes how the DC region has a decent track record in this regard with Metro, but not with commuter rail:

The experience in Washington has been that when a Metrorail station (either an extension or infill) is proposed, the planners tear up their existing plans and write new ones for the area immediately surrounding the new station. Metrorail-catalysed TOD is a well understood and appreciated phenomenon. But no-one cares about commuter rail. Planners don’t assume that commuter rail stations will change anything, so don’t change their existing plans to accommodate them.

That’s the disconnect you have to fix.

Indeed – creating that symbiosis requires solving a bit of a chicken-egg problem.  Still, some opportunities exist in the DC region.  New Carrollton jumps to mind, both for Metro access for DC reverse commutes, as well as its mid-line location on the MARC Penn line.  However, the challenge there is on the development side, not the transit service side.

Parking requirements matter: Downtown LA’s revival based on adaptive re-use might not have been possible without changes to LA’s minimum parking requirements.  Making a place built pre-requirement conform is unnecessary, and shows how influential and destructive the requirements can be.  It also speaks to the ability of changing regulations to make doing the right thing the path of least resistance:

Passed by the L.A. City Council in — yes — 1999 and at first applied only to Downtown, ARO gave the go-ahead for the conversion of historic and other older — and often under-used, under-appreciated or even abandoned — office buildings into residences. ARO was expanded in 2003 into various other parts of the city.

“[The Ordinance] provides for an expedited approval process and ensures that older and historic building are not subjected to the same zoning and code requirements that apply to new construction,” reads text on the city’s Office of Historic Resources site.

Fitting in with the econourbanist theory about reduced land use regulation allowing for the market to better address issues of supply, the response was impressive:

During an almost thirty-year period beginning in 1970, Downtown Los Angeles gained a grand total of 4,300 units in housing stock.

Then, between 1999 and 2008, Downtown gained at least 7,300 housing units just from long-term vacant buildings.

That said, it’s not like LA completely abandoned these regulations:

Shoup’s article notes that pre-ARO, developers were required per each housing unit to provide two or more parking spaces. Those spaces, Shoup emphasizes in his piece, were required to be on-site.

Post-ARO, Shoup’s piece says that the average number of on-site parking spaces fell to 0.9 in those converted, previously vacant buildings. Including off-site parking, the number was still 1.3 spaces per unit. That’s a 65% drop in required parking spaces in an area where many residents already self-select to reside in for reasons unrelated to having a multi-car garage.

Nearly one space per unit is still a lot of parking.  Granted, this is LA that we’re talking about.  The flexibility to meet that requirement off-site (flexibility likely required to make the adaptive reuse of historic buildings possible) speaks to the benefits of allowing such changes as a matter of right.

The point about residents self-selecting to live in such conditions is key, contrary to common NIMBY complaints – no one is forcing Angelenos to move in at gunpoint.

Different thoughts on transit service metrics: Jarrett Walker looks at San Francisco’s transit speed (same as it was 100 years ago, or slower) and offers thoughts on various metrics and the need to think about the reliability of the network as a whole.

My own work in this area has always advocated a stronger, more transit-specific approach that begins not with the single delayed line, but rather with the functioning of an entire network.  Don’t just ask “how fast should this line be?” which tends to degenerate into “What can we do to make those forlorn buses move a little faster without upsetting anyone?”  Instead, ask “What travel time outcomes do we need across this network?”  Or turn it around: How much of the city needs to be within 30 minutes of most people?  — a question that leads to those compelling Walkscore travel time maps, which are literally maps of individual freedom.

What would land use regulatory reform look like?

Law Library. CC image from Janet Lindenmuth

Via the always interesting Land Use Law Professors blog, I came across this summary from interfluidity (written by Steve Waldman) of the main points of Avent, Glaeser, and Yglesias.  Dubbed the econourbanists, Waldman summarizes their arguments:

In a nutshell, the econourbanists’ case is pretty simple: Cities are really important, as engines of the broad economy via industrial clustering, as enablers of efficiency-enhancing specialization and trade, as sources of customers to whom each of us might sell services. Contrary to many predictions, technological change seems to be making human density more rather than less important to prosperity in the developed world… The value of human work is increasingly in collaborative information production and direct personal services, all of which benefit from the proximity of diverse multitudes. Unfortunately, in the United States at least, actual patterns of demographic change have involved people moving away from high density, high productivity cities and towards the suburbanized sunbelt, where the weather is nice and the housing is cheap. This “moving to stagnation”, in Avent’s memorable phrase, constitutes a macroeconomic problem whose microeconomic cause can be found in regulatory barriers that keep dense and productive cities prohibitively expensive for most people to live in. It is not that people are “voting with their feet” because they dislike New York living. If people didn’t want to live in New York, housing would be cheap there. It isn’t cheap. Housing costs are stratospheric, despite the chilly winters. People are voting with their pocketbooks when they flee to the sun. (“The rent is too damned high!”) Exurban refugees would rush back, and our general prosperity would increase, if the clear demand for high-density urban living could be met with an inexpensive supply of housing and transportation. The technology to provide inexpensive, high quality urban housing is readily available. If “the market” were not frustrated by regulatory barriers and “NIMBY” politics, profit-seeking housing developers would build to sell into expensive markets, and this problem would solve itself.

Waldman, however, is skeptical of how effective these solutions would be:

One should always be careful of claims that problems could be solved if only we “let the market do its work”. I don’t mean to go all PoMo, but to the degree that there exists an institution we might refer to as “the market”, it is doing its work and it is not doing the work Ygesias and Avent ask of it.

Far be it from me to play down the role of unintended consequences.  However, what would ‘letting the market do its work’ actually look like?  Letting the market work isn’t a binary choice, either – our housing and real estate markets “work” now in one fashion under a certain regulatory regime, and they would continue to do so in a changed regulatory environment – perhaps with wild changes in outcomes, or perhaps not.

The most likely outcomes, however, would be via incremental changes to the regulatory process – not fundamental ones. In The Atlantic Cities, Charles Wolfe discusses proposed land use reforms in Seattle, such as:

  • Allow Small Commercial Uses in Multifamily Zones and Bring Back the Corner Store
  • Concentrate Street-Level Commercial Uses in Core Pedestrian Zones Near Transit and Allow Residential, Live-Work or Commercial Uses in Other Areas Based on Market Demand
  • Enhance the Flexibility of Parking Requirements
  • Change Environmental Review Thresholds
  • Encourage Home Entrepreneurship
  • Expand Options for Accessory Dwelling Units and Rental Incomes
  • Expand Allowance of Temporary Uses

These are the kinds of reforms that stand realistic chances of approval.  They are marginal changes, tweaks to regulations that loosen some aspects and tighten others.  Allowing small-scale commercial uses and home entrepreneurship in residential zones is a minor change in the allowed uses; legalizing accessory dwelling units is a minor change to allowed unit densities (and not necessarily a change in built space); adjusting thresholds for environmental review is a matter of process.

Waldman argues that the “thicket” of zoning and process is a de facto property right for a landowner, ensuring controlled change under certain parameters for the surrounding land – and that changing these de facto rights is not easy, nor should it be:

If we reform away urban zoning restrictions, are we going to invalidate the restrictive covenants of suburban developments? Affluent urban property owners would have almost certainly evolved institutions that perform the functions of community associations if they were not able to rely upon the good offices of municipal government for the same. If restrictions on higher-density development are illegitimate, then should the state refuse to enforce such restrictions when they are embedded in private contracts? Perhaps the answer is an enthuastic “Yes!” After all, over the last 60 years, the state intervened very nobly to eliminate a “property right” enshrined in restrictive covenants and designed to exclude people of certain races from their neighborhoods. Three-thousand cheers for that! But state refusal to enforce previously legal contracts sounds a lot less like “letting the market work” and a lot more like deliberate government action.

This passage raises two issues.  First, as seen in the Seattle example, no reformer is realistically proposing to reform away all zoning restrictions.  Indeed, many of the proposed solutions actually involve changing the processes involved in making those decisions (and adjusting them over time) to allow for more incremental changes over time.

In other cases, legitimate concerns are often mis-matched with the available regulatory tools.  Zoning can easily regulate form, and more broadly, use – but is it the proper mechanism to regulate the locations of yoga studios (bonus points for headline puns)?  Historic preservation processes can easily be co-opted out of a broader desire for some kind of design review, as another example.

Second, the idea of some ideal, free-market outcome is misplaced. There’s no doubt that the forms of our cities are shaped by all kinds of regulation and legal structure.  Rather than pushing the result of reform as a move towards some free(r) market ideal, I think these attempts at reform instead reflect a growing understanding of how markets work and how market forces can be used in public policy (see Chris Bradford on the role of economics education in urban planning and other public policy professions).

Likewise, the move towards using market forces to better allocate scarce parking resources in San Francisco is perfectly valid, if not economically pure.  At Market Urbanism, Emily Washington summarizes this disconnect:

He points out that assigning prices to spots is not equivalent to allowing a market to determine a price. For a real price to emerge capital (the parking space) cannot be state-owned.

Sandy points out that the “shortage” of parking arises because no one owns street parking, so the appropriate incentives are not in place for someone to charge an equilibrium price for parking. While the San Francisco program may be a step in the right direction, he explains that “more intervention usually doesn’t solve the problems that were themselves the result of a prior intervention.” In this case, the city is trying to set a price for something that it could instead auction off to eliminate the original intervention.

I’d reject that view.  As ‘Danny’ notes in the comments, the government can be (and is) an economic actor.  The goal with SF Park isn’t to “eliminate the original intervention,” but rather to better manage on-street parking.  The goal is inherently about incremental change, and that’s what any realistic regulatory reform will also look like.