Category Archives: Unintended Consequences

On profitability and privatization

CC image from AMagill on Flickr

CC image from AMagill on Flickr

Given Metro’s current and future budgetary issues (and the plethora of ideas to fix them amongst various comment threads at GGW and other places), discussions of profits and priorities are certainly topical.  With that in mind, Jarrett Walker has an excellent post up on the fundamental goals of transit service – the public good we planners try to achieve.

In fact, high-ridership transit services are almost always the result of aggressive government investment and policies, including the pricing of car travel, the planning of dense centers around stations, and a huge range of other actions.  A democratic government must care not just about the bottom line of the transit but also about the quality of the community it serves.  In this role, it may advocate low-ridership services to serve other sustainability goals.  For example, when opening a new “transit oriented development,” the long-term health of the community may require a lot of public transit service just as the first people are moving in, to help them establish transit habits, own fewer cars, etc.  This service will be “unprofitable” but can be a rational part of a long-term sustainability strategy.

Thatcher’s formulation, swallowed whole by Judt, is that service is either “profitable” or “social.”  Judt will go on to make “social inclusion” arguments for why service to low-ridership markets, such as rural towns, should be retained.  Fine, but he’s already given away the revenue that could pay for much of that service — the “profits” gained by the private operating company running the “profitable” services.  He’s also given away funds that could be used to fund new infrastructure investments for the next generation of profitable services — investments that should be government-funded not because they’ll be profitable, but because they’ll be intrinsic parts of a humane, sustainable, and livable city — all valid criteria for government attention.

Walker describes the definition of profitability (and the relentless focus on cost effectiveness to the exclusion of other considerations) as a “conceptual trap” that does not truly capture the reality of transit benefits or the complexity of how cities and urban places function.   Defining the debate in these terms automatically puts transit on poor footing.

“Social” and “economic” are just two legs of the three-legged stool that has come to be known the “triple bottom line,” a useful scheme for thinking about all of the possible valid outcomes of public policy.  The missing third term is “environmental.”  Judt is so attached to the “social” dimension of the question that the other two terms, “economic” and “environmental,” have collapsed in his mind into a single opponent, the “economic.”  We are all used to thinking in binary (us/them, this/that) terms, but the triple bottom line requires us to hold three points of view in the mind at once — which, to be fair, is much harder than it sounds.

Indeed.

Walker’s piece is excellent food for thought, particularly as our transit agencies and other municipal entities are facing huge budget problems and often turning towards privatization (see Chicago’s parking meters) – we must make sure we consider all of the potential outcomes, as well as all three legs of the stool.

Adaptation in housing, organically

A few housing-related tidbits that I’ve accumulated over the past week.

Richard Layman laments the lack of quality development, noting the difficulties involved with larger scale infill projects, especially when compared against smaller scale renovation projects of single rowhouses or small apartment buildings.  The smaller scale renovations take on a more organic character, while the scale of the larger projects necessitates more centralized planning and development.

As for your point about “organic” development, in my experience, which I admit is relatively limited, my sense is organic (re)development that includes significant amounts of new construction is more about adaptive reuse of extant places, complemented by (hopefully high quality) infill.

Along similar lines, Rob Holmes over at mammoth points to a great discussion of housing in Haiti (Incremental House, Wired), with a particular focus on adaptation and organic elements.  This isn’t the first time mammoth has mentioned the idea of incremental housing development, which Rob touched on in his very interesting list of the best architecture of the decade (including more infrastructural/engineered spaces like the Large Hadron Collider).  Quinta Monroy, an incremental housing project in northern Chile, has a fascinating approach to both building shelter and also growing and adapting with the residents:

Quinta Monroy is a center-city neighborhood of Iquique, a city of about a quarter million lying in northern Chile between the Pacific Ocean and the Atacama Desert.  Elemental’s Quinta Monroy housing project settles a hundred families on a five thousand square meter site where they had persisted as squatters for three decades.  The residences designed by Elemental offer former squatters the rare opportunity to live in subsidized housing without being displaced from the land they had called their home, provides an appreciating asset which can improve their family finances, and serves as a flexible infrastructure for the self-constructed expansion of the homes.

Quinta Monroy

Elemental’s first decision was to retain the inner city site, a decision which was both expensive and spatially limiting: there is only enough space on the site to provide thirty individual homes or sixty-six row homes, so a different typology was required.  High rise apartments would provide the needed density, but not provide the opportunity for residents to expand their own homes, as only the top and ground floors would have any way to connect to additions.  Elemental thus settled on a typology of connected two-story blocks, snaking around four common courtyards, designed as a skeletal infrastructure which the families could expand over time:

We in Elemental have identified a set of design conditions through which a housing unit can increase its value over time; this without having to increase the amount of money of the current subsidy.

In first place, we had to achieve enough density, (but without overcrowding), in order to be able to pay for the site, which because of its location was very expensive. To keep the site, meant to maintain the network of opportunities that the city offered and therefore to strengthen the family economy; on the other hand, good location is the key to increase a property value.

Second, the provision a physical space for the “extensive family” to develop, has proved to be a key issue in the economical take off of a poor family. In between the private and public space, we introduced the collective space, conformed by around 20 families. The collective space (a common property with restricted access) is an intermediate level of association that allows surviving fragile social conditions.

Third, due to the fact that 50% of each unit’s volume, will eventually be self-built, the building had to be porous enough to allow each unit to expand within its structure. The initial building must therefore provide a supporting, (rather than a constraining) framework in order to avoid any negative effects of self-construction on the urban environment over time, but also to facilitate the expansion process.

Obviously, applying this idea to a western city (as opposed to a slum) raises a whole different set of issues, but it’s a particularly interesting idea when contrasted against the highly planned and professionally designed structures Richard Layman notes.  It provides a jumping point to look at the continuum between several of the elements that the Incremental House mentions in their self-description:

Much of the housing around the world occupies a space in between the planned/unplanned, formal/informal and the professional/non-professional, offering people a small space space to negotiate the tremendous shifts taking place in the urban landscape.

DC’s stability provides less of an opportunity to shift between those poles, but the idea is nevertheless interesting.  Rob Holmes expands on what this means:

Elemental, in other words, have exploited the values and aims of ownership culture (which mammoth has suggested understands the house to be first a machine for making money and only second to be a machine for living) not to support a broken system of real estate speculation and easy wealth, but to present architecture as a tool that can be provided to families.  While the project is embedded with some of the assumptions of the architects (such as that faith in the potential of ownership culture, for better or worse), this tool is primarily presented as a framework, a scaffolding upon which families are able to make their own architecture.

Framework is a good way to put it – much of the work in planning seeks to establish frameworks (legal, physical, financial) around which cities and grow, evolve, and adapt – Layman’s point shows there is more we can do on that front.

Burn on, big river. Burn on.

Cleveland’s most infamous image is a tremendously powerful one.  Some might say that it alone helped pushed through the Clean Water Act.   The Cuyahoga River, flanked with many industrial uses for Cleveland’s manufacturing plants, was so polluted it caught fire.

Cuyahoga River Fire. Image from the EPA.

Cuyahoga River Fire. Image from the EPA.

The image alone was a great reminder of everything that’s wrong with the Rust Belt, but it’s also been seared into memory by Randy Newman’s song Burn On (forever ingrained in my mind from the opening credits of Major League).

Cleveland city of light city of magic
Cleveland city of light you’re calling me
Cleveland, even now I can remember
‘Cause the Cuyahoga River
Goes smokin’ through my dreams

Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on
Now the Lord can make you tumble
And the Lord can make you turn
And the Lord can make you overflow
But the Lord can’t make you burn

The mythology around the fire almost became more important than the fire itself.  The Cuyahoga symbolized rampant pollution, the decline of industrial America, and neglect for the cities that it called home.

All of these make it remarkable that the Cuyahoga is now the symbol of a completely new struggle of urban pollution.  Aaron Renn (The Urbanophile) notes how the last acts of compliance with the Clean Water Act will hamstring aging cities.

The first is a great New York Times piece on the rebirth of the Cuyahoga River. You may recall that this river famously caught on fire 40 years ago. Today, it is a totally different story.

The first time Gene Roberts fell into the Cuyahoga River, he worried he might die. The year was 1963, and the river was still an open sewer for industrial waste. Walking home, Mr. Roberts smelled so bad that his friends ran to stay upwind of him. Recently, Mr. Roberts returned to the river carrying his fly-fishing rod. In 20 minutes, he caught six smallmouth bass. “It’s a miracle,” said Mr. Roberts, 58. “The river has come back to life.”
….
On Monday, people who have worked for years to clean the Cuyahoga will celebrate at its banks. “It’s just remarkable,” said Steve Tuckerman, the Cuyahoga River specialist for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency. “I never thought I would see in my lifetime, let alone in my career, such an amazing comeback of a river.”

America has cleaned up its waters greatly since the Clean Water Act. Still, the turnaround of the Cuyahoga is amazing. Once one of America’s worst polluted industrial rivers, now you can fish there. Contrast that with, say, the Indiana Harbor Canal, which remains unsafe according to every measure the EPA tracks.

Anytime you can go from the burning river pictured above to catching six smallmouth bass in a matter of minutes, you’ve made significant progress.

But this article holds a cautionary note, not just for Cleveland, but for almost every older American city. Despite remarkable progress in creating a river you can fish in, Cleveland is still facing $5 billion in future costs to fully comply with the Clean Water Act. That’s not a mis-print. It really is $5 billion.

Cleveland is far from alone. Indianapolis faces $3.5 billion in costs. Cincinnati in excess of $3 billion. And so it goes. In city after city the largest public works project by far is some sort of sewer remediation project, often involiving so-called “deep tunnels”, to eliminate combined sewer overflows.

This is not constrained to the Midwest, either.  DC has serious combined sewer overflow problems as well.  Pretty much every city of a certain age has to deal with these problems.  They’re serious issues that need to be dealt with, but we quickly run into a problem of unintended consequences.

Renn continues:

This may clean up the water to some extent but will have offsetting environmental harms that could be worse. First, many suburban areas already have separate sanitary sewers and effective stormwater management. Thus they may not have to incur any significant compliance cost in the future. With central cities like Indianapolis forced into tripling or more their already high rates, suburban districts like Carmel, Fishers, and Noblesville look even more attractive financially. Thus, sprawl is encouraged. This leads to more automobile usage and air pollution which is actually a greater danger to human health than CSO overflows, to say nothing of CO2 emissions.

I am a supporter of clean water. I believe in it. I think the Clean Water Act was a good thing and the Cuyahoga River cleanup illustrates why. But the last ten percent is the hardest to get. Looking at the cost/benefit from a purely local point of view, is there any way Cleveland will get $5 billion worth of improved public health, economic, or recreational benefits out of this project? It is extremely unlikely. And what is the opportunity cost? Huge. Think of what you could do with $5 billion. Cleveland could solve its abandoned home problem, renew a huge chunk of its infrastructure, build more transit, invest it back in lower taxes and fees, and much more – all things that could make a huge difference in that city.

Chris Bradford also chimes in on the subject:

Cleveland can’t go anywhere, but its residents can…

Renn suggests that the federal government assume the cost of replacing ancient sewer systems.  That might be the only solution.  The federal government has no incentive to weigh costs and benefits accurately when it can simply issue a mandate.  And the moral hazard risk is smaller than one might think:  the city’s main “crime” is being old enough to need a new sewer system.

Guarding against strategic behavior by a city is tricky anyway since, again, its residents can simply move when things get bad.  Rather than stick central cities with crippling legacy costs, it makes more sense for the federal government to issue reasonable regulations and pick up the tab for unforeseen costs.

Several of Renn’s commenters make great points about sensible regulations cities could enact, as well as ideas they should pursue – such as encouraging green roofs, adding greenery to parks and public space, encouraging rain gardens and bioswales – each of which can be enacted at a scale suitable to a city – rather than a $5 billion deathblow.  The case for Federal help is awfully strong – particularly when noting (as Chris Bradford does) the propensity of the feds for totally ignoring the cost-benefit implications of their regulations.

This isn’t exactly something new.   Unintended consequences are unfortunately all too common.  Discovering Urbanism noted several weeks ago the potential for stormwater regulations to undermine a holistic understanding of what makes for a sustainable community.  All too often, these well-intentioned regulations (seriously, who’s against clean water?) end up leading to some bad decisions because they focus their interests far too narrowly.  Likewise, the remedies to the problems can cripple existing cities with great infill development potential, pushing more development to the suburbs.

Putting these issues into the larger context is a must.  And given the large costs involved, Federal assistance is likely the only realistic option.  That’s not to absolve cities of their responsibility – small scale projects and efforts to reduce runoff and improve infrastructure are vital.  The Feds need partners in these enterprises, not just people grabbing the cash.