Monthly Archives: December 2012

Adaptation, environmentalism, and climate change

Some links on the evolution of environmentalism and adaptation in the face of climate change:

The Anthropocene: Over at Time, Bryan Walsh has a piece on the rise of the Anthropocene Era – an acknowledgement of the human impact on the Earth. Walsh links to a Slate piece by Keith Kloor on the tension within the environmental movement between pragmatic greens and old-school environmentalists.

Part of the tension is between pragmatism and purity. The idea of adaptation to our environment and the realization that there is no such thing as a pure ecosystem is jarring to older greens. From Kloor’s article:

Leading the charge is a varied group of what I call modernist greens (others refer to them as eco-pragmatists). They are people with deep green bona fides, such as the award-winning U.K. environmental writer Mark Lynas, whose book The God Species champions nuclear power and genetically modified crops as essential for a sustainable planet.

Another is Emma Marris, author of the critically acclaimed Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World. She argues that “we must temper our romantic notion of untrammeled wilderness” and embrace the jumbled bits and pieces of nature that are all around us—in our backyards, in city parks, and farms.

You can see this same sort of tension in other places as well, such as the debates around growth within cities.

Adaptation and climate change, part 1: In the aftermath of Sandy, New York is facing questions about how to deal with future storms.  Hard barriers and sea walls are apparently off the table, but other hardening of infrastructure is under consideration. Likewise, relocation is on the table, at least in the abstract.

Compare that map of New York’s historical wetlands to the New York Times’ map of flooded areas and depths.

Softer barriers, making use of dunes and other natural elements are one option – embracing the natural ecology of New York’s coastline to defend the city from storms, while manipulating the natural ecosystems for the ends of the city.

At the same time, it’s worth considering how those vulnerable areas ended up densely populated with New York’s poor in the first place.

Adaptation and climate change, part 2: Another change in need of adaptation is not storms, but heat. The Atlantic Cities looks at future heat waves on the east coast, based on climate models.  The increased heat isn’t quite as bad as the Mayan Apocalypse forecast, but still a bit on the warm side.

Adaptation via migration: One option under consideration would be to adapt to a changing climate and rising sea levels by simply migrating to places with more favorable conditions.  At the Economist, this video conversation featuring Ryan Avent (entitled “Goodbye New York, Hello Minneapolis”) discusses just that.

One topic is the three ways to deal with climate change.  Mitigation is one (e.g. reducing greenhouse gases to reduce the impact), adaptation is another (e.g. moving to higher ground), but the third is suffering.  A common thread in the two articles linked above discussing the Anthropocene and the new pragmatism among environmentalists is a sense of optimism.  Bryan Walsh writes this:

The modern greens paint an optimistic picture, and that in itself is a welcome change from the relentlessly pessimistic scenarios we’ve become accustomed to —a pessimism, it should be noted, that hasn’t been all that effective in marshaling public opinion. But the optimism of the modern greens is conditional on two points: first, that we have the ability and the will—politically and perhaps even biologically as a species—to plan properly for the Anthropocene. (We may be as gods, but I see plenty of evidence to suggest that we’ll never get good at it.) Second, we have to hope that nature really will prove resilient in the face of pollution, growing human population and most of all, climate change, which we show virtually no sign of being able to slow in the near future.

There are questions about both our ability to mitigate and to adapt, but the question of how much suffering is also unknown.

The Acela and economic geography

Acela - CC image from wiki

Last month, the New York Times Magazine featured a story on the “Empire of the in-between,” the places along the tracks traveled by Amtrak’s Acela Express.  Decaying post-industrial landscapes, battered and half-abandoned residential neighborhoods, and so on. The train serves as a metaphor for the changing nature of the American economy:

But for most of the 180 or so years of the train line’s existence, the endpoints of this journey — New York and D.C. — were subordinate to the roaring engines of productivity in between. The real value in America was created in Newark’s machine shops and tanneries, Trenton’s rubber and metal plants, Chester’s shipyard, Baltimore’s steel mills. That’s where raw material was turned into valued products by hard-working people who made decent wages even if they didn’t have a lot of education. Generation after generation, and wave after wave of immigrants, found opportunity along the corridor. Washington collected the taxes and made the rules. Wall Street got a small commission for turning the nation’s savings into industrial investment. But nobody would have ever confused either as America’s driving force.

This model was flipped inside out as Wall Street and D.C. became central drivers, not secondary supports, of the nation’s economy.

While the general trajectory is correct, the idea that the emergence of Washington and New York as dominant centers isn’t quite correct.  As the Economist points out, the real story is less about a nefarious capture of sectors of our economy, but the shifting nature of how our economies are structured:

Yet to pin the broad changes in the geography of the northeastern corridor (and similar shifts across the nation and rich world as a whole) on an explosion in rent-seeking is a mistake. The real story is more interesting: the economic role of the city itself has changed.

The Economist continues:

The difficulty this creates for the northeastern corridor is that this kind of clustering creates a demand for a different set of workers (and often a different infrastructure) than was necessary a century ago. Adjustment to this shift in labour demand has been taxing for major cities, but more importantly it has placed a great deal of stress on middle-income workers, whose talents are no longer needed. Cities continue to serve as engines of wealth-creation, but they are less effective as engines of broad economic mobility than they once were.

The article uses New York’s ports as an example.  The state of the art for transportation has shifted away from breakbulk cargo and towards containers.  New York remains one of the top ports in the United States, but the location of the bulk of the port activity shifted with the changing technology away from Manhattan’s waterfront and instead to container terminals.  The same pattern could be said for the industrial assets along the Northeast Corridor tracks, where freight trains are now rare and high(ish) speed passenger rail is the prime cargo.

Still, even if not the best analysis of the economic geography of the corridor, the Times Magazine piece serves as a metaphor for the shifting nature of our economy.  At the same time, however, you don’t want to overdo it, and conclude too much.  Aaron Renn does just that when asking “is the Acela killing America?” by directly linking the finance industry’s influence over DC’s regulatory apparatus to the rise of the Acela.

Never mind the logical challenges of such a claim (the old Metroliners ran faster between DC and New York on the same tracks; the two cities have been linked by frequent air service for years as well), other industries have been able to curry favor with DC.  Oil is one example; perhaps focusing on decisions like Exxon-Mobil’s location of substantial workforce presence in suburban DC (workers soon to be consolidated in Texas – such is the power of industrial agglomeration).  However, I don’t see anyone claiming Big Oil’s favorable treatment from the federal government is solely attributable to flights between Houston and Dulles.

 

Parking tradeoffs – on-street and off-street

Requiring developers to build off-street parking is expensive.  That’s the key takeaway from a City of Portland study on the impacts of parking requirements on housing affordability. (This study was linked to in a previous post)  To illustrate the point, the city looks at a hypothetical development and considers a number of different scenarios for providing parking to the building.  The results show the trade-offs involved.  The method of providing parking not only adds to the cost, but also limits the ability of a building to fully utilize a site.

For example, providing parking via an off-street surface lot is rather cheap to build, but has a high opportunity cost – that land used for parking cannot also be used for housing. The study keeps the land area and the zoning envelope constant: that is, the off-street parking must be provided on-site, and you can’t get a variance for extra building height.  The trade-offs for this hypothetical development, then, are between cost (and the rent you’d have to charge to get a return on your investment) and in utilization of the site.

Assumed cost per parking spaces are as follows:

Surface $3,000
Podium/Structured (above ground) $20,000
Underground $55,000
Internal (Tuck Under or Sandwich) $20,000
Mechanical $45,000

Apply those options to a hypothetical development site, and you can see the trade-offs emerge.  In every case, requiring parking means fewer units can be developed, and each of those units is more expensive to provide.

Requiring parking makes all of the apartments more expensive, but for different reasons.  The surface parking is cheap, but the real reason the  rent is high is due to the opportunity cost – the surface parking option only allows for the development of 30 units instead of a hypothetical max of 50.

Underground parking is also substantially more expensive in terms of rent, but also in terms of construction costs – the rent increase isn’t that much higher than the surface option (in spite of the $50k per space cost differential) due to the fact that underground parking allows for substantial utilization of the site.   Even underground parking does not allow for full utilization, as the ramps to the garage take up space that could be used for housing in the no-parking scenario.

Requiring developers to add parking in all of these cases jacks up the rent they must charge to make these developments pencil out.  The underground parking example is a 60-plus percent increase in the monthly rent – and it’s a dollar figure that probably ensures that a developer couldn’t just rent out unused parking spaces and break-even on the proposition.  Instead, that cost gets passed through to the renter – both the cost of the space, as well as the opportunity cost of not building more housing.

The other thing to remember from this is that all of those options for how to park a building might not be allowed.  Tuck-under parking might make sense (get a few spaces at a reasonable cost), but if the zoning code requires more than 0.25 spaces per unit (as it does in Downtown Brooklyn), that method would not be allowed by the zoning code.  Podium parking is also reasonable, but that means you’re devoting the entire first floor to parking – meaning you can’t use it for housing units or retail or any of the other ground-floor uses that make for vibrant streetscapes.

Framing the issue. One other page on Portland’s website does a nice job of framing the issue of zoning code reform for on-site parking requirements.  Instead of talk about reducing on-site parking requirements, we’re talking about places where parking is allowed, but not required.  Soldiers on the automotive side of the “war on cars” (a phrase worthy of the scare quotes) will frequently frame this as removing parking.  This kind of language is both more accurate about potential changes and less inflammatory in skirmishes of this “war.”

More on-street parking isn’t always a problem. One of the fears of these parking-free developments is that not all of those residents will be car-free.  The Portland study shows this to be true – but it also shows that this isn’t really a problem.  Even at the peak utilization of on-street spaces surrounding these new parking-free buildings, 25% of the spaces are still available (page 2 of this document), meaning that there shouldn’t be a problem for residents in finding an on-street space.

Even if on-street parking isn’t actually a problem yet in Portland (no matter how it is perceived), that can always change.  When demand for that parking exceeds the supply, then you turn to parking management.

Managing on-street parking.  If we’ve established that off-street parking requirements increase the cost of housing, and we know that not all residents of a parking-less building will also be car-less, then management of scarce on-street parking will be critical. The Portland Transport blog points to a proposal in Portland that has a nice structure.

The proposal would divide part of the city into essentially three kinds of areas:

  • Commercial areas: all on-street parking is metered.  Anyone may park, but all must pay.
  • Residential areas: residents (with permits) are prioritized, non-residents can park for free, but must obey time limits (similar to DC”s current RPP framework).
  • Bordering areas: on streets adjacent to commercial areas, all spaces are metered but those with residential permits do not need to pay the meters.

Now, the devil is always in the details for things like permit zone sizes, cost of the permits, meter rates, etc.  However, the basic structure does a nice job of shifting the emphasis on what kind of parking should be prioritized in certain areas.

Beyond management. One benefit of allowing more parking-free development would be to increase density in the area, thereby supporting more transit service and key destinations within walking distance.  The more parking-free units there are, the easier it gets for residents to live car-free.  Each of these represents a bit of the virtuous cycle.

More on height limit trade-offs – listening skeptically, reaching resolution

London Skyline. CC image from Elliot Brown.

One dynamic that comes up in DC’s height limit debates is the tension between gains and losses, impacts on the city and benefits to it.  New development can clearly add value, but the question is if that value is a mere ‘give-away to developers’ or if citizens (the eventual consumers of that real estate) benefit from robust markets for that product.  Likewise, value-capture methods open doors to finance new infrastructure, while others worry about the ability of a city to handle the strain of new development.

This tension raises a couple of issues.  Kaid Benfield talks about “softening urban density” in an NRDC article. (though, as Cap’n Transit notes, the same article was re-titled by Atlantic editors as “The case for listening to NIMBYs“)  The core argument is the same.  While development of the city has large, aggregate benefits, there are indeed local impacts, often perceived as negatives. Benfield discusses several ways to mitigate those negative impacts, ‘softening’ their effect.

While the outcomes of softening are well and good, the real battle is not about how to mitigate impacts of density, but whether it should be allowed at all.  In that context, the process for addressing those impacts is important. As Cap’n Transit notes (using the Atlantic’s title for Benfield’s piece), there is a case for listening to NIMBYs – but with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Here’s the problem: NIMBYs lie. They don’t all lie, and they don’t lie all the time, but enough NIMBYs lie often enough that you can’t just take their word for things. They don’t just lie to other people, they lie to themselves. Of course, developers lie, too, and planners lie. We’re all people.

NIMBYs are also irrational. Just like developers and planners and crazy anonymous transit geeks. We’re all people.

Seriously, how many NIMBY Predictions of Doom have you heard? Things that made absolutely no sense? But when you looked in the person’s eyes as they stood at the mic in the community center, you knew that they really believed that removing two parking spaces would lead to gridlock, chaos and honking twenty-four hours a day. And then the two parking spaces were removed, and there was no increase in gridlock, chaos or honking, but the person has never admitted that they were wrong. Somebody, somewhere should make a catalog of these crazy predictions.

We should listen to NIMBYs, not because that’s how you get things done, but because they’re people. People deserve respect, and one of the best ways to show respect is by listening. But listening and acknowledgment do not necessarily mean acceptance or agreement. We need to listen skeptically.

I’ll go one step further: it’s not just about listening, but about having a process in place to address these impacts and assess the validity of these claims – a process to apply a skeptical eye and reach a resolution.

Over in London, architecture critic Rowan Moore is casting a skeptical eye on London’s growing skyline, decrying a shoddy process with (to his eye) substandard results.

Almost all forms of resistance, such as the statutory bodies that are supposed to guide the planning system, have been neutralised, leaving only little-heard neighbourhood groups to voice their protests. All of which, if these tall buildings were making the capital into a great metropolis of the 21st century, might be a cause for celebration. Towers can be beautiful, and part of the genius of London is its ability to change, but what we are getting now are mostly units of speculation stacked high, garnished with developers’ ego. They are invitations to tax evaders to park their cash in Britain.

Of all the arguments in favor of removing DC’s height limit, the idea that it somehow stifles good architecture is the one I find least compelling. I love skyscrapers, but I also love good urban design and a city as an organism, an economic cluster, that functions in a healthy way.  The mere fact that some of London’s new towers might not be the most compelling designs doesn’t strike me as a reason not to build up, as many of DC’s stunted buildings aren’t compelling, either.

Some of the same arguments about the capacity to absorb such development also come up: ” It is doubtful, for example, whether Vauxhall is a major transport interchange of the kind that the London plan thinks is right for tall buildings, but it is becoming a mini Dubai nonetheless.”  Moore does mention the prospect of capturing the value of new development to fund new infrastructure and London’s Community Infrastructure Levy to help fund Crossrail, but Moore remains skeptical:

It doesn’t help that boroughs such as Southwark and Lambeth are unlikely to be tough on new towers, as they can order developers to contribute “planning gain”, which is money to be spent on affordable housing elsewhere in their territory. Livingstone liked them for similar reasons, as well us for the special delight that skyscrapers seem to have for mayors. Johnson is likely to be influenced by the community infrastructure levy raised on new developments, which helps pay for the Crossrail project. Of course, affordable housing and public transport are good things to have, but thoughtless plunder of the city’s airspace is not the way to pay for them; by the same argument, we could build on parks or on the river.

Building on parks is veering into Cap’n Transit’s above-mentioned NIMBY prediction of doom for the removal of two parking spaces.

Just as there is a simple elegance to tying congestion pricing to transit funding, there is also a simple elegance in tying the value of a growing city into the infrastructure that supports it – and it need not be dismissed as “thoughtless plunder.”  Instead, our processes should identify the impacts and seek to mitigate them rather than freeze a city in amber, never to be touched.  Participants should shape the result, not veto it.

Aligning our institutions and legal mechanisms to that end is a challenge.  The latest piece from George Mason’s Center for Regional Analysis on DC’s housing pinch looks at some of those problems.  The existence of impact fees (in the abstract) does indeed add to the cost, but so long as those fees are addressing actual impacts, that shouldn’t be a major concern.  The challenges of coordinating approval processes and dealing with local opposition, however, are tremendous obstacles. That is where the need to listen skeptically is quite clear.

 

Talkin’ parking on TV

Today I had the chance to talk parking on News Talk with Bruce DePuyt. Fellow panelist David Alpert has a summary at Greater Greater Washington.

Getting WordPress to play nice with embedded videos can be a pain, so please check out either of the links above for video.

(as a quick reminder, the views I express on this site are mine and mine alone, and do not necessarily represent the views of my employer)