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‘Snow’ links: finding the right level of regulation

Mush on my windowsill.

I’m sitting in DC, looking out a window at a mushy, mostly liquid ‘snow’ storm named after an obscure federal budgetary procedure. There’s a joke in there somewhere about failing to meet the hype. But instead, I’ll offer some links to articles of interest over the past few weeks.

Regulatory challenges. Slate blogger Matt Yglesias is buying a new house, and instead of selling his old condo, he plans on renting it out and turning it into an income property. He documents the bureaucratic red tape encountered in the process to make this business legal, highlighting the absurdity that drives people nuts about government bureaucracy – the fact that none of the hoops you must jump through seem to actually matter to the regulatory issue at hand:

The striking thing about all this isn’t so much that it was annoying—which it was—but that it had basically nothing to do with what the main purpose of landlord regulation should be—making sure I’m not luring tenants into some kind of unsafe situation. The part where the unit gets inspected to see if it’s up to code is a separate step. I was instructed to await a scheduling call that ought to take place sometime in the next 10 business days.

Yglesias notes that DC fares poorly on many metrics of regulatory efficiency and friendliness to entrepreneurs. Granted, those rankings all ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as they often fail to measure what really matters and instead focus on indicators not directly linked to entrepreneurship (there is also the matter of state-by-state rankings lumping in a city-state like DC into their metric – not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison).

The real issue, as Yglesias touches on in a later blog post, isn’t whether regulations are good or bad, but whether the regulations we have are effective and if they cover the right topics:

The way I would put this is that the American economy is simultaneously overregulated and underregulated. It is much too difficult to get business and occupational licenses; there are excessive restrictions on the wholesaling and retailing of alcoholic beverages; exclusionary zoning codes cripple the economy; and I’m sure there are more problems than I’m even aware of.

At the same time, it continues to be the case that even if you ignore climate change, there are huge problematic environmental externalities involved in the energy production and industrial sectors of the economy. And you shouldn’t ignore climate change! We are much too lax about what firms are allowed to dump into the air. On the financial side, too, it’s become clear that there are really big problems with bank supervision. The existence of bad rent-seeking rules around who’s allowed to cut hair is not a good justification for the absence of rules around banks’ ability to issue no-doc liar’s loans. The fact that it’s too much of a pain in the ass to get a building permit is not a good justification for making it easier to poison children’s brains with mercury. Now obviously all these rules are incredibly annoying. I am really glad, personally, that I don’t need to take any time or effort to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s new mercury emissions rules. But at the same time, it ought to be a pain in the ass to put extra mercury into the air. We don’t want too much mercury! We don’t want too much bank leverage!

The more ideological stance (regulation is bad!) might be easier to communicate; it might resonate with the public based on their experience at the local DMV. It’s a complicated reality, and our regulations not only need to reflect that, but also likely need periodic review and revision.

Regarding a common issue in the urban context, Matt writes:

“This city has too many restaurants to choose from” is not a real public policy problem—it’s only a problem for incumbent restaurateurs who don’t want to face competition.

This reflects some of the tension on liquor license moratoria in DC (see the discussion about IMBY DC). The contrasting position is that restaurants do indeed create some negative externalities that need to be addressed. The challenge for public policy is then in addressing the negatives without falling into the trap of mis-stating the problem.

Regulatory reform. Assuming we correctly state the problem, then what do we do to change things? DC is forming a task force to look at these issues. In some googling of related articles, I ran across an old op-ed from Helder Gil about a potential direction for regulatory reform, radical simplification:

One solution is the radical simplification of existing business laws and regulations. “Radical simplification” is the wholesale rethinking of a law’s original intent, its current actual effect and whether those two points still intersect in a way that advances public policy.
Consider the contrast to DC’s zoning regulation review process, and the power of the status quo bias. Even the terminology of ‘zones’ is no longer useful, Roger Lewis writes:

 Let’s dump the word “zoning,” as in zoning ordinances that govern how land is developed and how buildings often are designed. Land-use regulation is still needed, but zoning increasingly has become a conceptually inappropriate term, an obsolete characterization of how we plan and shape growth.

I would go farther than Lewis and suggest that the terminology is not the only problem; the content of the regulations is also problematic. Lewis goes on to list numerous shortcomings of the existing regulatory framework – perhaps inadvertently making the case for radical simplification?

Beware non-governmental regulation. To be clear, these challenges are not solely governmental. The burden often falls on the government in protecting the public purpose, but governments are not the only entities with the common good in mind. Consider the home-owners association.

Last month, the Washington Post reported on an epic legal battle between a Fairfax County HOA and a member over a very minor size violation for a political sign. HOA representatives on a power trip sought to impose penalties for violating rules that were not expressly granted to the HOA in the association’s bylaws. The HOA lost the case, the resulting legal fees bankrupted the association, forcing it to pursue the sale of a privately-owned park area.

These kinds of battles are common – and often invoke words like ‘tyranny’. They highlight both challenges of regulation and also of governance. Clearly, the content of some regulations are an issue, but so is the process for changing or even just reviewing those regulations.

Perhaps HOAs are not strictly necessary for a grouping of semi-detached homes (as is the case in the Fairfax County example), but some level of common-area administration is necessary in multi-unit buildings, no matter how you slice it. The need for HOAs also raises the question about the role of home-ownership in multi-unit buildings and the regulatory environment that enables it (see Stephen Smith asking “why do condos even exist?” at Market Urbanism) – which, after all, is a relatively young and untested legal field.

Who are the ‘urbanists,’ anyway?

CC image from STREETART PHOTAGRAPHIE

Aaron Renn has a provacative post, asking if “urbanism is the new trickle-down economics.” He writes:

Have urbanists used this as a call to arms to put all of their energy into helping those left behind in the knowledge/creative class economy? No. Instead, urban advocates have gone the other direction, locking onto this in a reductionist way to develop a set of policies I call “Starbucks urbanism.” That is, the focus is on an exclusively high end, sanitized version of city life that caters to the needs of the elite with the claim that this will somehow “revitalize” the city if they are attracted there.

First, who are these urbanists? And why are they acting as one ideologically coherent bloc?

What does the word ‘urbanist’ mean, anyway? Merriam-Webster simply calls it “a specialist in urban planning,” but I would broaden the term to simply be people who are interested in cities. Given the diversity of opinions within that population, Renn’s broad brush misses the mark.

Then there’s the ideology. There’s an irony in Renn criticizing the role of urbanism-as-trickle-down and the reductionisim of urban policy, mirroring trickle-down’s reductionism of economic policy. Renn takes no care to distinguish the diversity of opinions on all things urban, instead lumping all urbanists under this label. He doesn’t lump all economists together as if were in favor of trickle-down policies.

This isn’t the the only example; there are plenty of cases where New Urbanism is falsely equated with urbanism (as in – an interest in cities) – and even more that innaccurately describe what New Urbanism is (the N and U are capitalized for a reason). San Francisco’s SPUR publishes a magazine entitled The Urbanist. There is also the distinction on the market orientation of urbanists (‘demand-side urbanists’ – as phrased by David Schliecher and Witold Rybczynski) and a whole host of other factions with interests in the city.

This isn’t to say there isn’t a truth to Renn’s point about ‘Starbucks urbanism’, but the broad brush weakens the argument. Any way you slice it, urbanists are a pretty diverse group. Often argumentative, too.

Middle class in Manhattan?

Manhattan. CC image from sakeeb.

Breaking news! Last week, the New York Times reported that it is expensive to live in Manhattan. The Times frames the question through the lens of the middle class, asking what the definition means in the context of they city’s densest borough.

In a city like New York, where everything is superlative, who exactly is middle class? What kind of salary are we talking about? Where does a middle-class person live? And could the relentless rise in real estate prices push the middle class to extinction?

There’s lots of discussion in the article about incomes in New York, as well as the high cost of living – particularly for housing. The article notes that the New York, urban context makes the traditional symbols of the American Dream (e.g. home ownership) less applicable, and most of the text is spent searching for some other indicator of middle-class-ness. Matt Yglesias notes that such a search for a single metric isn’t always useful. Likewise, it’s not as if this is a new topic in New York, or even for the Times.

There’s lots of discussion about housing costs and the demand for living in a place like Manhattan, but not a single word about housing supply. I understand the author is looking to explore the perception of what constitutes the middle class, but a word about the supply of housing is warranted. Even a short mention of the constraints to supply would be a worthwhile addition to these kinds of articles.

David Schleicher’s twitter response asked that same question, and provided a link to Glaeser, Gyourko, and Saks’ work on regulatory constraints to housing supply in New York. From the paper’s abstract:

Home building is a highly competitive industry with almost no natural barriers to entry, yet prices in Manhattan currently appear to be more than twice their supply costs. We argue that land use restrictions are the natural explanation of this gap. We also present evidence consistent with our hypothesis that regulation is constraining the supply of housing so that increased demand leads to much higher prices, not many more units, in a number of other high price housing markets across the country.

As noted, Manhattan certainly isn’t the only place with these kinds of constraints. Another recent article focuses on San Francisco, this one from tech writer Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo makes the case that San Francisco needs to grow in the face of tremendous demand for urban living. More importantly, he argues that opponents to growth, those who fear how growth might change the things they love about San Francisco, need to get over themselves.

Don’t look good fortune in the mouth. Yes, growth will bring some problems. But they’re not nearly as bad as the problems you’ll find in decline (ask Detroit). Instead of complaining or blocking growth, San Francisco’s old-guard would do better to propose ways to ease the city’s transition into its digital future. This doesn’t mean opposing newcomers. It means recognizing a new reality, that San Francisco needs to become much larger and more accommodating place than it is. And it means adopting polices that will make that reality a pretty good one.

In particular, for San Francisco, adopting that reality means one thing above all: It needs to build more buildings.

As an example of the fear of change, Manjoo links to this article by David Talbot, blaming the influx of tech workers to the city for forcing things to change – forcing the city to battle for its own soul.

One point that Talbot ignores is that obstructing the physical change in the city (e.g. blocking development) will not save the idealized city he loves. In fact, it might even accelerate the process of gentrification.  Some level of change is inevitable. Fighting any kind of change to the physical environment might even accelerate changes to the city’s socioeconomic environment.

While the overall thrust of Manjoo’s policiy is correct, it’s not hard to see why many fear for the loss of San Francisco’s soul. Manjoo laments that the city has not built more densely, and implies that old Victorian houses are the culprit: “this city is defined by, and reveres, its famous Victorian houses” he writes.  “Those houses are very pretty. They’re also very inefficient. Collectively, they take up a lot of space, but don’t house very many people.”

The truth is that San Francisco could add a great deal of new housing supply without touching those houses that are worthy of preservation. Consider this thought experiment from Keep Houston Houston for transit improvements and upzoning in the Sunset District:

All of this in one neighborhood, and without straying from the basic SF vernacular architecture of low/mid-rise, wood-framed buildings. Apply this same rubric to the rest of the city, allow towers in a few places, you could easily accommodate 200,000 more people.

Likewise, Stephen Smith makes the case for dramatic upzoning in large parts of Brooklyn, but not on the borough’s brownstone blocks:

In some neighborhoods, this sort of conservative zoning makes sense. The tree-lined blocks of Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope, for example, thick with brownstones and pre-war apartment houses, are urban treasures worth preserving.

But northern Brooklyn is not brownstone Brooklyn.

We’ve seen the same thing in DC (and seen the impacts of zoning). And we’ve also seen anecdotes of what adding new supply can do to downmarket properties, thanks to the process of filtering.

Each of these strategies at least hold the promise of keeping the market rate housing prices within reach for the middle class. Obviously, the dynamics of these markets are quite complex, and the nature of neighborhood change is not well-understood (not in a way we can forecast, anyway) and the housing market for a given metro area is larger than any one jurisdiction, but the macro signs are quite clear. Given the constraints to supply in the Zoned Zone, removing these regulatory constraints on the market’s ability to add supply seems like an obvious prerequisite to a change in policy.

To Charles Marohn’s concerns about density, and those that fear for San Francisco’s soul: will this new development ensure a quality place? No, probably not. But allowing this kind of growth is a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition.

Density – the limitations of zoning

San Francisco. CC image from C1ssou

A few days ago, Charles Marohn posted “It’s so much more than density” on his Strong Towns blog.  In it, Charles pushes back against the idea that density is good, arguing that the reality of great places is more complex. Marohn’s conclusion is spot on, but throughout his post he creates several strawmen arguments, some of which rubbed me the wrong way:

Equating planners with zoners: Charles styles this as “planners zoners.” In this world, all planners love zoning, and love the available tools that zoning offers. In my professional experience, this is rarely the case.

I’m not sure why planners zoners are generally so keen on density, but they are, to the point where it often comes across as an obsession. I have a theory. I think a lot of planners zoners yearn to be spatial planners. They go to school to build great places. They get out into the real world and are given this ridiculously blunt instrument — zoning — and are frustrated that they can’t wield it to create Paris. Few stop to ask what zoning regulations were used to create Paris (hint: there weren’t any). Density, especially when given as a bonus for attainment of certain performance objectives, is the closest thing a modern planner zoner gets to their professional roots. We all suffer the consequences.

Perhaps it’s the personalization of this that bugs me, because the analysis of the systems is spot-on. Zoning is a blunt instrument at best, but many of my fellow planners (not merely zoners) do indeed ask about Paris. They understand the limitations of zoning. They are also constrained within the system. They make use of the tools available.

The most realisitic path to change is from within, usually via a zoning re-write like currently underway in DC, or recently completed in Philadelphia. Wholesale repeal of zoning codes seems unrealistic. Even Houston, without Euclidian use zoning still bears many of zoning’s ills through other regulations, such as parking requirements. Change in the regulatory environment is likely to be incremental.

Still, these professionals must contend with pressures on them from various stakeholders. In Philly, the city council is trying to un-do many of the recent changes. In DC, many of the bad practices Marohn decries (using the mindset of zoning as incentive rather than allowance)  are urged by residents, not by planners.

Location matters: Regarding the desirability of density, there needs to be a distinction between using bonus density as an incentive and merely allowing greater density and letting the market supply it organically. Part of this confusion might stem from your frame of reference. During the rise of the housing bubble, Paul Krugman made note of America’s two distinct housing markets:

When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it’s easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don’t really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can’t even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions – hence “zoned” – makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up.

For those of us in the Zoned Zone, simply allowing for more growth (and density) will produce different results than a similar regulatort adjustment in Flatland.  Anecdotes of these constraints in expensive cities abound: consider recent articles from Brooklyn and San Francisco, among others.

Marohn  notes that density does not cause productivity in places; density is a byproduct of productive (and valuable) places:

A strong town — a productive place — is generally of a higher density than an unproductive place. That financial productivity, however, is not caused by the density. There is a correlation — as productivity goes up, so does density — but one does not cause the other.

Leaving aside the question of correlation vs. causation, nothing in Marohn’s post takes the context of the place and pent-up market demand into account. Two planners talking about the desirability of density could use the same argument, but the location of the planner (Flatland or the Zoned Zone) dramatically changes the impact of that argument. In Flatland, where supply is not constrained, density not supported by the market must be shaped via some sort of regulation. However, urbanists advocating for density in the Zoned Zone are often just asking to remove the constraints that make density illegal.

With that in mind, attacking planners for pushing density without considering their context and market conditions (and the nature of the intervention) can confuse the issue. There’s no doubt that incentives can backfire – zoning is a blunt tool, after all. But that’s not always the motivation when arguing in favor of more density.

Perceptions of density often miss the mark: Marohn also cites the example of urban renewal as a failure of the fetishizing of density. I’m not sure that this narrative holds up to the history, however – at least as it applies to the density of urban renewal projects. As I’ve written before, perceptions of density are often well off from the reality.

This isn’t to endorse either the process or product of urban renewal, but the goals of those projects were often aimed at reducing density and overcrowding.

Beware unintendend consequences: As I noted at the top of this post, I don’t disagree with Marohn’s conclusion at all:

Ultimately, the notion that we can solve the problems that we face in our cities by simply increasing the density requirement in our zoning codes is not just naive, it is dead wrong. Density is an expected byproduct of a successful place, not the implement by which we create one. Building a Strong Towns is a complex undertaking, one that defies a professional silo or a simple solution.

More on Marohn’s follow-up, Density Redux, to follow…

Metro highlights frequency in new bus map

This week, Greater Greater Washington highlighted WMATA’s latest iteration of their new bus map (as post on the first iteration is here), which opts for a diagrammatic representation of the bus network, highlighting frequent, all-day bus services over infrequent and irregulat coverage bus routes.

The new map is a huge improvement of the old one.  Digging through the archives, I found this post, with a screencap of roughly the same part of the city – just for the purposes of comparison.

The inspiration for posting about the shortcomings of the WMATA map back in 2010 came after reading Jarrett Walker’s blog.  Walker emphasizes the value of frequency, and the importance of highlighting frequent services in an operator’s communications, such as maps. WMATA’s old maps made no such distinctions – in fact, the map highlighted rather useless distinctions, such as whether or not a bus crossed state lines.

The timing of Metro’s release of the new map was fortuitous.  Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in Walker’s two-day transit network design course.  The exercises in the course force participants to deal with the trade-offs between conflicting goals, limited budgets, constrained geography, and the fundamental geometry of efficient transit service.

(Jarrett has posted reviews of the DC course here – I would definitely recommend the course both for those working on transit/transportation, as well as anyone interested in how cities function)

On comments

CC image from premasagar.

A few days ago in my RSS reader, David Levinson’s Transportationist blog has a post about the end of comments on his blog. I’m somewhat sad, as (at appropriate volumes) comment sections can produce valuable discussion. Commenting on blogs was part of the reason I started my own. David’s platform (hosted by the University of Minnesota) requires registration for commenting, however – the reason I never offered comments on his blog. If compulsory registration was indeed out of his control, then there’s not much difference between disallowing comments and burdening them via registration.

David’s post shared a few links on blog comments I found interesting.

On trolling: Never read the bottom half of the internet. The idea here being that trolls are aiming to provoke you into an argument, whether solely for the purpose of exposure and notoriety, or to discredit the idea of a post.

The sad thing is, tolling works: One of the purposes of trolling would be to discredit the main content, fighting an honest post with FUD, disingenous comments, or outright lies – all without accountability. The sad thing is that it works. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

A new obstacle to scientific literacy may be emerging, according to a paper in the journal Science by two University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers.

The new study reports that not only are just 12% of Americans turning to newspaper and magazine websites for science news, but when they do they may be influenced as much by the comments at the end of the story as they are by the report itself.

In an experiment mentioned in the Science paper and soon to be published elsewhere in greater detail, about 2,000 people were asked to read a balanced news report about nanotechnology followed by a group of invented comments. All saw the same report but some read a group of comments that were uncivil, including name-calling. Others saw more civil comments.

“Disturbingly, readers’ interpretations of potential risks associated with the technology described in the news article differed significantly depending only on the tone of the manipulated reader comments posted with the story,” wrote authors Dominique Brossard and Dietram A. Scheufele.

“In other words, just the tone of the comments . . . can significantly alter how audiences think about the technology itself.”

Comments as a dinner party: One piece that immediately came to mind in reading Levinson’s links was this On The Media session (written semi-transcription here) with Ta-Nehisi Coates, discussing the challenges (positive and negative) of comment sections – perhaps thinking of comments as a dinner party with interesting conversation, but noting that good commenting requires curating the comments – e.g. a lot of work.

Nonetheless, I love the idea of curating comments, if only thanks to seeing interesting and productive discussion in many blogs.  Perhaps these places have the virtue of a critical mass of commenters (unlike, say, this blog) without the vice of too much trolling – or even too much volume (with too many people shouting, how can one expect to get a word in edge-wise?)

Application to this blog: Limited. I don’t get too many comments here, nor do I post frequently to spark much discussion. Despite the value in commenting under the right circumstances, one of Levinson’s last points did hit home for me:

If you have comments, you should get a blog (or if you have one, post there). As someone on the web remarked, that will get a lot more attention for both of us due to Google’s PageRank formula than posting on comments with a nofollow tag.

Again, that’s part of the reason I’m here.

Avis, Zipcar, and the spectrum of car-sharing services

Old Avis ad in Australia - CC image from Bidgee

Last week’s big transportation news: Avis purchased Zipcar for a cool $500 million.  Reaction to the sale is all over the map, with some analysts praising the move and some hating it.

On the ‘pro’ side of the ledger – Felix Salmon:

The acquisition solves a number of problems with the Zipcar model. For one thing, it gives Zipcar easy access to the one thing it needs more than anything else: money. The car-rental business is at heart a financing business: you need to be able to finance the acquisition of new cars, efficiently dispose of them once they get too old and too used, and generally make profits by juggling enormous cashflows both coming in and going out. When you’re a small and risky company like Zipcar, that kind of fleet and cash management is much harder than when you’re a giant like Avis Budget.

The other big problem that Zipcar had was that it couldn’t meet demand at weekends: the company’s slogan is “wheels when you want them”, but in practice the cars tended to be sold out at precisely the times that members really wanted them. By merging with Avis, Zipcar gets to offer its members Avis cars when dedicated Zipcars are unavailable

On the ‘con’ side, pretty much anyone who hates the standard car-renting process – Sarah Lacy:

That’s how much I loathe Avis. As far as I’m concerned they only “try harder” to piss me off. And thanks to a tightly controlled oligopoly, the rest of the rental car world isn’t much better. There’s little innovation or even need to innovate, when a few players control the entire market.

People hate renting cars – myself included.  The process stinks all around.  Pricing is anything but transparent or simple; even with a reservation you must wait in line; employees are constantly pushing insurance packages of dubious value; you constantly feel like you’re about to get nickel and dimed for a small scratch or a gas tank that’s not quite full – the entire process feels kinda sleazy.

With that in mind, it’s easy to understand the angst of some users (see the concerns voiced in Ben Kabak’s post).  From the ‘man on the street’ in this Dealbook summary of the sale: “Please don’t let them screw it up.”

So far, Zipcar is looking to reassure folks they won’t lose that innovative spirit, with the CEO expecting Zipcar to remain a standalone subsidiary, also while announcing plans to offer memberships to the service without the annual fee.

For me, however, Zipcar use is way down.  My personal membership expired several years ago.  I maintain an account so I can be a member of my employer’s business membership (and will use that service for business trips that require a car), but my personal use is almost non-existent.  Conversely, I’ve been using Car2go‘s point-to-point carsharing far more frequently in DC (and I’m not the only one).

Car2go’s service isn’t an exact analogue for Zipcar, however.  If you think of carsharing services as a spectrum, between traditional car rentals on one hand (longer terms, frequently used during travel) and short trips within the city on the other (as Car2go’s trips have more in common with taxi rides for DC users than car rentals), there is room for a whole host of products and services, each tailored for a different segment of the travel market.

The spectrum of car-based transport would look something like this:

  • Car ownership
  • Traditional car rental (home space; by the day)
  • Zipcar-type car-sharing (home space; by the hour)
  • Car2go-type car-sharing (point-to-point; by the minute)
  • For-hire service (taxi, sedan services, etc; by the minute/mile)

Note: there are lots of other models out there, including ones where car owners can offer up their personal vehicle for rentals when they are not using it – sort of an Airbnb for cars.

Zipcar’s current model (where every car rental must begin and end at the same ‘home’ parking space) is more similar to the traditional rental car model, just dispersed to locations around the city, and with the details of the rental handled online and with standardized pricing.   Lydia DePillis notes this might not be the cutting edge in carsharing services anymore, but offering a wide variety of useful vehicle types (including the Zipvan) is valuable.

The next evolution for a service like Zipcar would be to offer point-to-point car sharing (rumors hint that Zipcar is interested in this market as well). Fears of Avis turning Zipcar into something more Avis-like are valid, but the opposite could be just as valuable – airport car rentals with the ease of a Zipcar online reservation.   Others are working on this very concept as I type.

Even without tailoring a business model to this market, there’s opportunity for disrupting the standard airport-car-rental-while-traveling model. On a recent trip from DC to San Diego, I found myself stuck at my downtown hotel, wanting to get to the beach without the burden of a large taxi fare – an Car2go’s all-electric San Diego fleet (and a membership that works across the country) was there to serve.

No need to deal with the hassle of renting car – my hotel had a free shuttle from the airport.  On trips like this (where the beach trip is the only one I wanted a car for), why bother?  Perhaps this is a place where a company like Avis can learn from car-sharing.

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.