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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)

Parking, misunderstood

CC image from Atomic Taco

Let’s take a trip up and down the Northeast Corridor and look at recent parking news.  All three show some misunderstandings about parking, cities, and markets. Time for some Shoup reading assignments!

New York:  Looking to discuss changes to the zoning code parking requirements in downtown Brooklyn, the New York Times comes down with a severe case of windshield-itis:

In traffic-clogged New York City, where parking spaces are coveted like the rarest of treasures, an excess of parking spaces might seem like an urban planner’s dream.

Yet city officials, developers and transit advocates say that in Downtown Brooklyn, there is this most unusual of parking problems: There is simply too much of it.

Admittedly, many urban planning principles seem counter-intuitive at first glance.  When you add in the challenge of altering a regulatory status quo (such as modestly changing the zoning code, as is proposed in Brooklyn), the weight of conventional wisdom is enormous.

Still, it’s interesting to see a parking glut framed as an “urban planner’s dream.’ (particularly when compared against later articles from DC) It’s sure not my dream, either in terms of result (excess parking) or process (via the unintended consequences of regulation).  Building parking is expensive, so we don’t want to build too much of it.  Requiring us to build too much means that those costs just get passed along to the rest of us.

It’s worth noting that New York is not proposing to eliminate these requirements and rely on the market to determine how much parking to provide, they are merely reducing the requirement from mandating 40% of new units have spaces (in a neighborhood where only 22% of households own cars!) to 20%. Why not reduce it to zero?

Likewise, there are likely opportunities for new developments to make use of the excess parking already built. Hopefully, those kinds of arrangements would allow for new buildings to still be parking-free if the market so desires.  Nevertheless, a reduction in the requirement is moving in the right direction.

Philadelphia: A few miles south on the NEC, Philadelphia might be backtracking on parking, rather than moving in the right direction. Philly has already altered their zoning code to eliminate parking requirements in the city’s dense rowhouse neighborhoods.  Now, members of the city council want to roll those changes back. The council’s interference in a code change that’s only been in effect for a few months is troubling, as is the lack of reasoning.  From the Inquirer’s article on the topic:

“Most developers wish that they didn’t have to get approvals from anybody,” says Clarke. “I have to be responsive to the needs of the residents. They don’t have enough parking.”

Perhaps this is where a dose of that counter-intuitive planning wisdom would be useful.

The reasoning put forth for changing the rules back is equally troubling, particularly given the Philadelphia Planning Commission’s charge in rewriting the zoning code: reduce the need to grant so many variances.  Attempting to graft a comprehensive zoning ordinance onto a pre-existing (and pre-automobile) cityscape is bound to be a challenge no matter what; but pushing a code to require elements so geometrically opposed to the pre-code fabric is foolhardy.  Such changes, often made in the name of providing more parking only end up inducing unintended consequences.  From the Next American City article:

Gladstein said the bill’s proposed changes could set Philadelphia back on the path back to when the city issued more variances than nearly any other big city in America because of unrealistic demands in the zoning code.

“There are many instances in rowhome neighborhoods where you simply cannot provide parking by right because of factors like narrow lot lines,” she said. “We thought these changes would send too many cases to the zoning board.”

Gladstein also noted that lack of a parking requirement in the original code was intentional, as on-site parking, which often manifests itself as a front-loading garage, actually diminishes the supply of public parking spaces.

A code that doesn’t respect geometry, doesn’t reflect the city’s history, and achieve its stated goals is a bad code. Here’s to hoping those changes do not go into effect.

DC: In the District, the parking conversations aren’t focused on zoning (yet! – but they will be, and soon), but rather the management of on-street parking spaces. Policy changes take a different tack than in Philadelphia – instead of providing parking for residents via zoning code requirements, the city is strengthening on-street protections for residents with parking permits.

The reaction is all over the map – Ward 1 Councilmember says this is about a future that “discourages car ownership,” yet the goal of enhanced residential permit parking protections is about “striking a balance in favor of those who are residents with stickers who paid for them.”  Did those residents pay enough for a scarce resource?  If the price reflected the scarcity of spaces, would there be as much of a parking problem?  And how does making on-street parking for residents easier discourage car ownership?

Other elements of the Post parking article talk about the difficulty of parking for non-residents visiting the city, as well as the city’s efforts to re-purpose some curb space away from parking and towards other uses (such as protected bicycle lanes) – but fall into the trap of equating all things parking together.  Metered, permitted, for residents, for visitors, using curb space for parking or for other uses – these are all big differences, and conflating them all together is problematic, and increases the chances of misunderstanding.

DC height limit trade-offs, part 2

DC skyline. CC image from James Calder

Continuing on the discussion of DC’s height limit (and potential changes to it), I wanted to take note of a few more articles on the subject.  George Mason law professor David Schleicher (he of land-use law and procedure fame) asks height limit proponents six basic questions, all of which more or less ask proponents to weigh the trade-offs – or explain why they think the trade-offs do not exist. The six questions:

  1. Do you believe supply is important in determining prices in housing and office markets?
  2. Why do you think development should be spread out?
  3. What effect do you think limiting heights has on agglomeration, including the depth of local markets and information spillovers?
  4. Why do you think D.C. will grow without going up?
  5. Do you think D.C. would instantly become as tall as New York upon repeal?
  6. How much is the D.C. aesthetic worth?

All good questions. So much of planning work is about discussing these trade-offs; an honest discussion of the costs is a prerequisite.

One comment on numbers 5 and 6: DC can indeed go taller while still maintaining the aesthetic of a ‘flat’ skyline, if that is something of value to residents (and therefore worth the cost).  The height limit’s maximum and the flat nature of DC’s skyline are two separate things; if DC’s height limit were set at 200′, we could expect buildings to eventually fill that envelope with numerous buildings up against that limit, rather than form the wedding cake shape of many other American skylines.

Indeed, if that flat-ness is what we value, then we shouldn’t fear adjusting the heights upward – opportunities to shape the city will still exist.

I also wanted to highlight a comment in Kaid Benfield’s original Atlantic Cities piece from ArtR:

1) at current demand for jobs and housing DC has at least a 30 year supply of land to add over 200,000 more jobs and 169,000 people without changes to zoning or the height limit (DC Office of Planning).

I don’t doubt that this is true, but the question of how much land is available gets back to the old real estate cliche of location, location, location.

2) Density through high rise steel and concrete construction will not increase housing affordability. Hard costs alone are over $200/sf with soft cost, land and profit you are well over $400/sf and with even minimal parking you are over $500/sf, thats $500,000 for a small two bedroom. To the extent high-rises syphon off high-income households that might stabilize less costly forms of housing but I am skeptical.

Art is making two points: one about costs, and one about filtering within the market.  In terms of costs, Art is absolutely right – relaxing the height limit will not magically lower construction costs. However, couple that reform with others (such as the aforementioned reduction in required off-street parking) as well as efforts to speed approvals and reduce the lead time required for building and we’re on to something (all potentially positive outcomes of DC’s zoning code review).

The point about filtering is trickier.  Certainly, in the abstract, adding more supply should relieve pressure on older housing units to filter up to more expensive submarkets, but the key phrase in all such abstractions is “all else being equal.”  All else is clearly not equal, and I can’t blame someone for skepticism on the ability for upzoning to make this happen – particularly when such changes to the zoning code happen on an ad-hoc, case-by-case basis.

3) There is a difference between capacity and supply. Raising the height limit may increase capacity but it does nothing for supply. Supply is a function of developers meeting demand and development stops the instant prices stop rising.

While this point is also true, the nature of the equilibrium depends on the other factors influencing cost.  For example, take the examples from Portland, where the elimination of on-site parking requirements allows some development to pencil out a lower price point.

There’s also a point to be made here about location.  If our goal is to add supply, the market might be able to support a lot more supply in more desirable locations.  However, if most of the District’s developable capacity (in point 1 above) is not in those locations, then it will take something else to turn that capacity into new supply.

4) There is nothing to suggest that height alone will increase demand. In fact, too much capacity can increase uncertainty because you never sure how much your competitor can absorb. Denver learned this when they down zoned neighborhoods and they took off.

I hope no one takes away the idea that changing the height limit alone will lead to some magical change in DC’s built environment. Given the fact that zoning is usually an even greater constraint (and given the procedural challenges it can impose), it shouldn’t be seen as a panacea.

Height limit trade-offs

The Cairo. CC image from NCinDC.

Following up on some of the trade-offs mentioned at the end of the previous post on DC’s height act.

In the discussion of Kaid Benfield’s piece supporting DC’s height limit, several comments are worth highlighting. First, Payton Chung notes the need to discuss more than just supply, but to also realize the strength of the demand for living in DC:

I think that a splendid city could be built within the current Height Act, or a revised one, or perhaps even none at all. However, I’ll raise a few counter-factuals, recognizing that I also have not gotten around to writing more extensively about the topic:

1. The growth projections for this region are staggering: +874,394 households and +1,625,205 jobs from 2010-2040. Yet your (and my) preferred strategy of retrofitting mid-rise corridors has a limited upside. Toronto’s Avenues plan, which promotes redeveloping its extensive streetcar commercial strips with a 1:1 street enclosure ratio (building height=street width), only projects an additional 2,000 residents (=1,000 units) per mile of redeveloped “avenue” frontage. Given the District’s small footprint, that’s not going to be enough to absorb very many new residents, much less to increase the city’s housing stock by enough to improve housing affordability.

2. As you well know, a huge difference between Washington and the world’s great mid-rise cities (not just the European capitals, but also cities like Buenos Aires and Kyoto) is that Washington’s mid-rises peter out into single-family houses just one or two miles from the core, while those cities have multifamily-density housing stretching clear to the city limits. This brings me to your point about creativity: what high-rise downtowns do is to concentrate high-value uses within a small area instead of letting it spill out into neighborhoods. High-value office, hotel, and retail uses have priced out most of the creativity in Dupont Circle, Woodley Park, Georgetown, Mount Vernon Square, etc.

Toronto’s Avenues planning study can be found here, and the report’s executive summary is here.  This kind of development is excellent infill and definitely worth pursuing for many cities (not just those with height constraints like DC).  Still, the constraints are real and the opportunity for this kind of infill is limited, however promising it may be.

On Twitter, Neal Lamontagne takes note of the positive abilities of regulations to shape urban development, and the need to balance against their costs:

 [link] @ryanavent Agree, but – limits also linked to + land values. Still, not only economic but also design arguments. Better to shape than squish

Another comment from Payton, making note of the trade-offs in accommodating growth in other areas of the city:

In theory, it should be possible to significantly increase population and jobs within the District and not raise the existing heights. However, the city isn’t exactly littered with vacant lots; such increases would require a lot of demolition, and a lot of density within existing single-family neighborhoods.

Household sizes are *dramatically* smaller than they were: even though the city’s population dropped by 184,000 over the past 60 years, the number of housing units increased by 70,000. Much of that change came from carving up single-family houses into apartments, which is now much more controversial than it used to be.

Under the new Sustainable DC Vision, the city will need over 100,000 new housing units over just the next 20 years. Accommodating more households within the more location-efficient city will, as you know, reduce the region’s ecological footprint. But I genuinely wonder where these units can go: as I mentioned, due to the city’s small size there’s only 3-4 miles of redevelopable land along key arterials like Georgia, Rhode Island, and East Capitol — I’d add some in Upper NW, but you and I both know that’s highly unlikely — and those are only sufficient to address 10% of the total housing demand.

The real reason why Vancouver went whole hog for downtown skyscrapers was not about views, not about impressing people; it was about accommodating dramatic population growth while leaving its single-family neighborhoods mostly untouched, after a citizen revolt over “secondary suites” (accessory units). I know that my neighborhood is (mostly) ready for a few thousand more, perhaps even several thousand more, but is yours?

The point about feasibility is important.  It just might be easier to go to Congress to change the height limit than it would be to fight a million NIMBY battles in established neighborhoods.  There’s a case to be made for more of that type of development to be allowed by-right, but that too represents a big change.

Some of the trade-offs will involve resolving tensions within the urbanist community.  On Twitter, in response to Ryan Avent’s frustrations, Yoni Appelbaum notes:

[link] @ryanavent First-wave urbanism was fundamentally nostalgic. Redevelopment was the threat, and revival the solution.

[link] @ryanavent It’s less an allergy to empiricism than an exposure of the simmering tension between that nostalgia and more progressive visions.

Payton again, asking rhetorically where this mid-rise development will go:

Again to the last two commenters: how do you propose to add mid-rise density without demolishing huge swathes of low-rise buildings, either in the District or Arlington? Already, rowhouse neighborhoods like Chinatown, Foggy Bottom, Southwest/L’Enfant Plaza, the West End, and now Navy Yard and NoMa (particularly its eastern flank) have been sacrificed to extend the medium-rise downtown. Facadectomies are the only way that we have to remind ourselves that these were indeed low-rise at one point in time. Which neighborhoods should be demolished next for the growing downtown?

@tassojunior: we live in small enough apartments already — we have to, what with a median sales price of almost $500/square foot!

Payton, (again!), this time in a thread at Greater Greater Washington:

The problem is not with mid-rise densities, it’s with low-rise densities. I would be happy, perhaps even elated, to see mid-rise densities spread across a wide swathe of Washington, D.C., but I know that many others would not. Indeed, they, including many of Kaid’s neighbors in Ward 3, are already in open revolt, with dire consequences for the city, region, and planet.

You can’t squeeze a fast-growing balloon on the sides (protecting low-density neighborhoods) and the top (height limits) forever.

Bold is mine, and it’s spot on.

 

Bad reasons to support DC’s Height Act

DC Skyline. CC image from Ed Uthman.

DC’s lack of tall buildings is certainly one of it’s defining characteristics.  Given our human tendencies to be loss averse, to embrace the status quo, it shouldn’t be a surprise that changing such a characteristic can be shocking to some.

I’ve written on the height limit before, as have many others.  The most recent defense of the law comes from Kaid Benfield (both at the NRDC and Atlantic Cities). Kaid outlines some good qualitative reasons to embrace the limit – unfortunately, marred by some of the serious shortcomings and logical fallacies from his other arguments in support of the limit. I share Ryan Avent’s frustration with some of the manners of argument.

As an example, some of the arguments Kaid presents in favor of the height limit, and a brief response:

Actually, DC can grow under current law. In 1950, with the height restrictions fully in effect, the city’s population was 802,178. In 2011, its estimated population was 617,996. The truth is that we were a “shrinking city” until about a decade ago, and we are nowhere near full capacity today.

It is misleading to call DC a ‘shrinking city’ solely based on population, as that description misses several confounding variables.  One is household size: it has been steadily decreasing over time (averaging 2.72 persons per hh in 1970, down to 2.16 in 2000), meaning fewer people occupy the same amount of space.  Furthermore, DC has indeed grown – it has more housing units than it did when its population peaked, and it has more jobs, too (and thus more office space).

So, no – the fact that DC’s population is lower today than in 1950 does not suggest the city has excess capacity.

A lot of other things are going well under current law, too. As Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic, Washington is the richest and best-educated metro area in America, leading the nation in economic confidence.

I don’t know that being rich proves success.  In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that areas like DC and SF are so rich because they are exclusive, and that high prices prevent the middle class from paying reasonable prices for housing.  Ryan Avent has written on this extensively. Simply put, more wealth is not the sign of a healthy economy.

Building height has little to do with affordability.  The argument that a limit on building height restricts housing supply and thus leads to higher prices is essentially the same argument made against Portland’s urban growth boundary. In both cases, it’s hogwash: if affordability were closely related to building height and density, New York City and San Francisco would be the two most affordable big cities in America.

This one is just absurd.  No one is proposing increasing building heights in DC just for the sake of going taller; the entire reason to change them would be to remove a constraint to growth.  The constraints to growth do indeed have costs.  Portland’s UGB is also a constraint.  Constraints do not need to be a negative if there are other means to allow growth; then they can shape that growth instead.  But to imply that elevation alone is the key to affordability is absurd. Asserting those who would change the height limit believe such absurdity is beyond reason.

In any event, denser doesn’t necessarily mean taller. These numbers may surprise you: Barcelona is denser than New York City, housing 41,000 people per square mile compared to New York’s 27,000. Barcelona’s beautiful and thriving, mid-rise central district L’Eixample is denser than Manhattan, at 92,000 people per square mile compared to Manhattan’s 71,000. It does not have buildings taller than Washington’s. In D.C., we could increase density substantially by incrementally converting many aging one- and two-story buildings in commercial and mixed-use districts to a still-human three to five stories.

The comparison of DC to Paris drives me nuts.  Paris is indeed dense, and mostly low-rise.  However, Paris has little of the small-scale rowhouse and single family homes that populate DC’s neighborhoods – if DC were Paris, those areas would be built out with 5-7 story apartments.

Yes, DC could likely increase density to Parisian levels and remain beneath the limit; but people seldom note what would be required to make that happen, what the trade-offs would be.  Would DC residents trade the complete redevelopment of its historic rowhouse neighborhoods for that to happen?  Benfield does not discuss the trade-offs.

One of Ryan Avent’s chief frustrations is a failure by height limit proponents to acknowledge the costs of the policy.  Ryan makes an estimate of those costs in his blog at The Economist:

Even simply taking the 22% figure, we’re left to conclude that the policy is extraordinarily costly. It represents a sigificant transfer of income from renters to homeowners. It represents a rise in the cost of business for all those operating in the area (which translates into more expensive government, as the impact of high housing costs on real wages forces the government to pay higher nominal salaries to attract qualified workers). And it captures the stultifying economic effect of crowding out in the Washington-area economy, as relatively location-sensitive activities (effectively, those not conducting business with the government) are driven out of the District into the suburbs or other metropolitan areas.

Regardless of what the actual cost is (and another Atlantic Cities piece quibbles with Ryan’s calculations), it is clear that the cost is substantial.  And, as the case of the Portland urban growth boundary mentioned above notes, there can be good reasons to have these constraining policies in place.  Avent continues:

There is a more practical case for limiting development, namely, that as Washington becomes more dense there will be negative spillovers accompanying the positive ones: more traffic, for instance, and more noise. Such costs aren’t negligible and often help explain NIMBY attitudes. Yet these shouldn’t dissuade Washington from making it easier to build. The net benefits of easier building should be large enough to help compensate losers and invest in projects to ameliorate negative effects.

Indeed, the discussion about DC’s height limit would be better off with a discussion of costs and trade-offs.  Likewise, an acknowledgement of  the fundamental truth about cities would help: the only constant is change.

Choice architecture and zoning

Parallel parking on-street. CC image from Eyton Z.

Following up on the previous post, two pieces showing the limits of the zoning code in structuring choice architectures in urban environments:

Parking. Zoning code provisions that require adding off-street parking seriously distort both the urban fabric as well as the decision-making of individuals using those buildings – and thus those parking spaces (some previous thoughts on this here and here).  Portland has eliminated minimum parking requirements under certain circumstances (and has had this regulation on the books for many years – only recently have both developers and financiers been on the same page about parking-free development).  Of course, a parking-free development is nothing new – huge swaths of our cities built before the imposition of such codes function just fine without the ‘benefit’ of such codes guiding their maturation.

The most recent news about these parking-free developments in Portland is that those living in the parking-free apartments are not car-free themselves:

But a city of Portland study released this week suggests that no-car households are the exception, not the rule, even in apartments that don’t provide parking. And those vehicles have to go somewhere.

…

But it also found that 73 percent of 116 apartment households surveyed have cars, and two-thirds park on the street. Only 36 percent use a car for a daily commute, meaning the rest store their cars on the street for much of the week.

Point being, rescinding parking requirements from zoning codes alone is not enough to change behavior.  That doesn’t mean that changing parking requirements isn’t a good idea – it is. As the quote above also notes, very few of these residents use their cars for a daily commute.  However, there is a limit to what zoning can do.  Parking requirements in the zoning code are a crude form of parking management; rescinding those rules likely warrants better parking management programs.

Portland appears stuck in between market equilibria here: people complain about more parkers on the the street, but those people are only parking there because it’s cheap and available.  Likewise, off-street spaces are available for rent, but many are unwilling to pay the price to do so:

But developers can’t count on tenants to pick up the tab, particularly when there is street parking easily available nearby.

“The market is the market,” Menashe said. “If the guy down the street has no parking and he’s able to get $800 a unit, that’s probably all we can get, too.”

Great news for the city, and for consumers who value market-rate affordability in their apartments.  This suggests that a) the old requirement for parking was indeed too high, and b) moving some of those cars to the street hasn’t put too much strain on on-street parking.

Nonetheless, the lesson is that zoning can only do so much.  Zoning is a blunt instrument, it can regulate form well.  To the extent that use and form are tied together, it can regulate use.  But you can’t dictate behavior with a zoning code – and trying to do so will likely bring unintended consequences.

The excellent Portland Transport blog takes note of these findings and asks: what policies would get you to go car-lite or car-free?  Options within this realm – things like charging for on-street parking permits, encouraging car-sharing services, enabling additional dense development to thus provide more ‘stuff’ within a walkable distance, thereby reducing the need for car ownership, etc.  Those kinds of policies are the ones to build into the choice architecture to reduce car use and ownership, and also to reduce the tension from good policy changes like the removal of minimum parking requirements.

Restaurants. Writing at Greater Greater Washington, Herb Caudill calls for the removal of a zoning restriction on restaurants in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of DC. The rule is a part of an overlay zoning district and limits restaurants from occupying more than 25% of the linear storefront footage in the area.  The goal is to require a diversity of retail uses in the area. The effect, however, has been for a lot of longstanding vacancies as well as some rather odd tenants (such as a vacuum cleaner repair shop).

Here again, zoning can only do so much.  Once you step outside the physical purview of what zoning is good at regulating, all bets are off. Zoning can require that buildings provide retail space, for example – but exactly what type of retail is a lot harder to regulate.  Leaving aside the wisdom of even trying to regulate such a thing (rather than allowing the market some flexibility to operate), the goal of diverse retail uses is probably better met with other types of policies than changes to the zoning code.

Choice architecture and behavior change

CC image from sparktography.

In the DC urbanist blogosphere (or, David Alpert across multiple platforms), ‘choice’ is all the rage these days. GGW writes about DC Planning Director Harriet Tregoning being “pro-choice” on transportation; Alpert in the Post writing about housing choices and transportation options; and Alpert again talking about zoning and parking requirements on News 8.

And of course, who isn’t against choice? Richard Layman pushes back on the ‘choice’ rhetoric a bit, noting that maximizing choice alone isn’t sufficient for good policy, and then focusing on outcomes, noting that it’s about “making the right choices.”

My most recent Metro read was Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, devoted to a lengthy discussion of the vital importance of ‘choice architecture’ in our lives (also mentioned in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow – in the reading list). Choice architecture is all about framing the decisions we make, usually with large impacts on the final outcomes.

In that vein, Layman’s critique of the narrative about choice is spot on – there’s a lot more to a successful policy outcome than just providing choice. However, Thaler and Sunstein might disagree a bit with Layman’s goal of getting people to make the “right choices.” They frame their goals as using choice architecture to nudge us into better outcomes, while still being free to make choices as we see fit – calling this ‘libertarian paternalism.’  Making the choice for someone would be straight-up paternalism.

I don’t want to speak for Layman (and this is almost certainly splitting hairs in terms of semantics), but I can see how his framing on transportation choice would not meet the libertarian threshold. That sense of having decisions made for you certainly explains some of the all-too-predictable ‘war on cars‘ backlash, no matter how misplaced it might be.

There is also the matter of rhetoric. While simply maximizing choices might not be a complete policy, it makes an effective argument. Implementing a good choice architecture is imperative, but is also rather in-the-weeds for common debate. Given how skewed our transportation system is towards framing auto use as the default, changing the choice architecture often is the policy change – people’s behavior will follow.

Examples of transportation nudges can range from how fringe benefits are offered to employers to how parking is leased/bought in apartment buildings. Decisions about the physical environment, such as how much parking to build, are more about broader development markets, as renters/buyers already factor the price/availability of parking into their decision making.  Barring interference from something like minimum parking requirements in the zoning code, the choice is faced by developers, not end users.

The existence of such minimum parking requirements (as well as other aspects of land use regulation) is also an interesting look into choice architecture.  I’ve often heard Chris Leinberger speak not just about doing the right thing with development, but also shifting our regulations so that doing the right thing is easy. So much development follows the path of least resistance. In terms of choice architecture, they opt for the default. Even if not speaking about the choices of individuals (but rather firms and corporations), the impact of choice architecture is enormous.

The parallel that comes to mind is David Schleicher’s emphasis on the process of land-use decision making, and how that impacts outcomes. Schleicher’s argument is that our procedures for land-use decision making provide multiple opportunities for (as an example) NIMBYs with concentrated, hyper-local interests to influence decisions over broader, city-wide interests.  In essence, the procedures and process for this kind of decision-making is a kind of choice architecture – arguably, one with (in Richard Layman’s words) “sub-optimal” results. Opposed to the libertarian paternalism that aims to structure the choice architecture to achieve better outcomes, this architecture is not structured at all – there isn’t an architect.

Nonetheless, this is a complicated discussion – ‘libertarian paternalism’ and ‘choice architecture’ aren’t likely to be effective talking points in a community meeting.  There’s a reason why opponents to some of these changes fall back on incendiary language (“war on cars,” etc), as that rhetoric is simple and accessible.  The rhetoric of providing choice is just as simple (and, I would argue, more honest than the “war on cars”), even if the underlying policies must be more complex.

(EDIT: as I publish this post, Richard Layman writes another post on choice, also mentioning Thaler and Sunstein)

Miscellaneous thoughts on Hurricane Sandy

A few items to share in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy:

Hurricane Sandy from NASA GOES-13

Prediction: As the son of a meteorologist, I feel obligated to note that this storm was very well forecast.  Given a broader critique of science on a number of fronts, the accuracy of the forecast and the warning it provided is worth noting.  For other examples of pushback against reason, see: Frontline on climate change; the various reactions against Nate Silver; Michael Gerson’s trouble understanding statistics, etc. (I thought Ta Nehisi Coates has written well in response to this assault on logic, reason, and objectivity). Nate Silver devoted a chapter to meteorology in his recent book, much of which is discussed in this teaser in the New York Times entitled “The weatherman is not a moron.”

Accurate prediction for storms like this gives lots of time to prepare. While I was attending the NACTO conference in New York, I had a chance to visit NYC DOT’s traffic management center in Long Island City on Friday afternoon before Sandy hit; city officials were preparing for the storm well in advance at the time, thanks to a good forecast.

Resiliency: Prediction can help you prepare on a shorter timescale, but ensuring our cities are resilient to these kinds of events requires a whole host of other adaptations. Some ideas:

Financing Improvements: Matt Yglesias makes a point made before in the aftermath of DC’s derecho storm: burying power lines is expensive, and funding that cost is a lot easier to do in a densely developed community. The specific improvement need not be burying power lines, as the threats in some areas will be different (as Mayor Bloomberg noted, just pulling emergency generators out of basements prone to flooding is a good start – along with other “granular improvements”). \

Recovery: Leaving aside the opportunities for hardening vulnerable infrastructure like New York’s subway, the response and rather fast recovery of New York’s subway system (given the extent of flooding) is remarkable.  New York Magazine tells the story:

The first thing the MTA did right was informed by a colossal mistake. After the 2010 blizzard, which embarrassed the mayor and took out the subway for days, the MTA was too slow bringing its trains and equipment somewhere safe and dry. “We kind of dropped the ball and we learned from that,” said Tom Prendergast, president of New York City Transit, the part of the MTA that handles city subways and buses. This time the MTA shut everything down on Sunday evening, the day before the storm arrived. Waiting longer would have wasted time and man power needed for the cleanup afterwards.
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In the future, Prendergast says, the system will have to rethink the way it designs its infrastructure. At the very least, ventilation ducts and gratings should be moved higher up or built so that they can be covered and made water-tight along with station entrances.
Implications for DC: The Washington Post looks at the worst case scenario for storm surge in DC.  In 2003, Hurricane Isabel wasn’t far from the worst case in terms of storm track, pushing water up the Potomac and into DC’s low-lying areas.

 

The most affordable city in America!

Why didn’t anyone tell me that DC is the most affordable city in America?

Such was one of the headlines of a summary article about a new report from the Center for Housing Policy and the Center for Neighborhood Technology.  The report’s title (Losing Ground: The Struggle Of Moderate-Income Households To Afford The Rising Costs Of Housing And Transportation) might not square with the idea of making places like DC and San Francisco the most affordable city in the nation. Indeed, the headlines popping up in my Google Reader window show the range of interpretation:

Now, granted, that middle Planetizen link wasn’t referring to this study, but to a GGW piece from the GMU Center for Regional Analysis. Still, the divergence among the headlines is interesting. CNT published studies in recent years aimed to demolish the idea of ‘drive ’til you qualify’, noting that the transportation costs embedded in those housing choices are large and do not favor autocentric suburbs. Since the gist of those studies were that the seemingly more expensive cities were actually more affordable, I guess the snap conclusion about affordability here makes sense.

But in reading the report itself, it’s clear that DC’s affordability is not the key finding here.  The report’s title should be an indicator of that (again, the title is “Losing Ground”).

That said, the critique of the report stems from the practice of defining each area’s affordability in relative terms to the area’s median income.  While this might make sense if looking at any one metro area in isolation (as in the previous studies on combined housing and transportation costs within metro areas), I’m not sure that it is the best way to compare different metro areas to one another. Matt Yglesias made this point:

By the same token, measuring affordability in H+T terms is a great idea, but presenting it in income share terms is misleading. In general, a person can increase his earnings power by leaving a poorer place for a richer one. […] But it turns out that for many Americans the productivity and wage gains involved in moving to a rich city end up being clawed back by a lack of affordable housing. So the tendency is only for the most educated people—the ones with the least objective need—to be able to take advantage of the migration possibilities. This is a huge social problem that contributes to stagnating living standards, and it’s totally obscured by saying that the DC area is affordable because it’s full of rich people.

In short: the fact that DC, SF, et al are ‘affordable’ because they are rich is not exactly a good thing.  For one case, see Ryan Avent’s 2011 NYT piece (preivewing The Gated City) on the impact of high housing costs on GDP; for another, see Binyamin Appelbaum in the NYT Economix blog on the impact of high housing costs on income inequality, and therefore on the overall economy:

A recent paper by researchers at Harvard University argues that the prohibitive cost of living in the areas with the greatest economic opportunities has forced low-wage workers to migrate instead to areas with inferior opportunities.

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And here’s the crucial point: It doesn’t have to be this way. High housing prices are the result of public policies that discourage new development. Those policies are generally embraced by the residents of wealthy areas, who benefit, at least in the short term, from restrictions on the supply of new housing. But this paper is one more reason to worry about the long-term economic consequences.

The three animated charts accompanying the Harvard paper are illustrative. Meanwhile, the broad policy implications for the region can be summarized in the concluding paragraph of the GGW piece from George Mason’s CRA (linked above):

Most local governments are not planning enough housing for their future workers, and may hinder new housing with regulations on new development. Meanwhile, builders need to recognize the need for more multi-family housing and smaller, more affordable owner and renter homes in the region.