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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.
…
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.

 

Shaping Silicon Valley

Roosevelt Island Tram - CC image from The Eyes of New York

A couple of items that came across the internet about technology, innovation, the economy, and urban form:

Tech & the City

Nancy Scola pens a long piece in Next American City about the future of the technology industry in the city.  The piece looks at how policy can shape an industry cluster – or not.  New York’s tech university on Roosevelt Island is a key piece of the puzzle in helping shape an industry within a city:

Fortunately, by the late 2000s, the tech sector was on an upswing. Venture capitalists were nosing around the city. Talk of a “Silicon Alley 2.0” was in the air. Start-ups were starting up in DUMBO. But, says Pinsky, when the city held hundreds of conversations on economic development with everyone from academics to business leaders to community groups, they came to the realization that while there was, in raw terms, a good amount of applied science activity afoot, New York City’s economy is a huge one. There simply wasn’t the critical mass needed to create the sort of idea sharing and hopping from company to company that helped spread innovation in Silicon Valley. They concluded that there was a dearth of trained technologists able to do the heavy lifting.

Now, far be it from me to dissuade an investment in education – but there’s a concern about focusing too closely on chasing a specific sector rather than setting the rules and conditions to be ripe for innovation:

So what worries her? It’s the way government is getting involved. Along with Stanford, Silicon Valley had a mess of government contracts in the 1950s, particularly in the fields of naval research and aerospace. “Silicon Valley was never a purpose-built science city,” says O’Mara. “Dwight Eisenhower didn’t say ‘We’re going to build a tech capital on the west coast.’” Sure, there was a ton of money injected into the region. But there were few strings attached. It was pure profit that went to building out iconic tech companies like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox PARC. “In a way, it was a happy accident,” says O’Mara. “Part of my skepticism about this whole enterprise is a belief that government can have this great market impact. In the case of technology, it’s just a little more slippery and unpredictable.”

One common theme is the rejection of the idea that the strip-mall office park of Silicon Valley is critical to the kind of technological innovation seen there – that linkage of form and innovation is spurious:

Cities have, of course, made a comeback in recent decades, and much modern thinking — O’Mara points to Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From — “really emphasizes the urbanity of innovation,” with the accidental encounters and collision of ideas that are the product of density seen as creative fodder.

The Boston area’s high-tech corridor that grew along Route 128 pioneered what became known as the East Coast model: Giant firms that did everything in-house. But in New York, real estate costs alone might encourage that tech firms stay small, says O’Mara, in keeping with “the other industries that have been in New York for so long that have a similar small-scale communitarian [culture] — the creative industries, fashion, media…” In that way, even a tiny start-up can be part of something bigger: An industry, an economy, a city.

Speaking of the building that will house your enterprise…

A couple of items on Facebook’s planned Frank Gehry HQ.  First, from Allison Arieff in the NYT:

The choice of Gehry might have been “game-changing” — to use the parlance of the start-up community — two decades ago. Today, it’s a safe bet, representing Facebook’s true transition from rogue start-up to the establishment (no matter how strenuously they might dispute that designation).

Writing at the New Republic, Lydia DePillis (she’s back) sounds off similarly:

That’s a frustrating response. As shrouded in moss as it might be, the 10-acre campus is fundamentally no different from the tech parks of old: Single-use, completely isolated, and shamefully wasteful of the kind of space that commands such a premium on the other end of the Bay. The designs highlight the accommodations they’ve made for pedestrian and bike access—like an underground tunnel to its other campus across the highway!—but only glancingly mention the subterranean lake of parking, with 1504 spots for a projected 2800 employees (that’s a really high ratio, even for a suburban office). The horizontal layout might comport with Mark Zuckerberg’s conception of a social universe in which relationships exist independently of any physical reality. But from a practical standpoint, it ignores one of the most important qualities of a creative place: Density, activity, and exposure to the ferment of ideas.

Arieff notes that the designer and the client both want to foster the kind of interaction and proximity that comes naturally in cities – taking note of the fact that Facebook has no offices for anyone, regardless of rank – but something is still missing:

But so very unlike a city, the New Urban-ish campus is populated not by folks from different walks of life but solely by Facebook employees. For all the talk in startup circles of “serendipitous interaction,” it’s not the sort celebrated by Jane Jacobs. There may be a place to get a latte there but there is no Third Place, those accessible anchors of community life like bars, farmer’s markets or barber shops that help foster civic engagement and interaction with both regulars and new faces. Yes, it’s stating the obvious, but Facebook workers interact with other Facebook workers. There’s next to nil outside influence to be found on a corporate campus. Indeed, many tech employees (Facebook’s and others) have observed that many of their most meaningful encounters occur not at work but while waiting on city streets for the now-ubiquitous corporate shuttles from San Francisco that take them south to Silicon Valley.

Now, it’s tricky to separate some of the urban planning issues (transportation access, urban design) from the interior design ones (office layouts, use of internal space) from the economic geography issues (Silicon Valley is dense, even if filled with stereotypical office parks).  That said, the themes are interesting to track.  Add in the region-wide issues of housing costs and other drags on the local economy, and things can get murky quickly.

It’s not like the denizens of Silicon Valley are happy with the built environment…

Two pieces in San Jose’s MetroActive (the intro, the full piece) lament the lack of urbanism and the impact it has on innovation in San Jose.  The author, Michael Malone, talks about San Jose’s inability to embrace the values of Silicon Valley while similarly stumbling in creating a big, authentic city:

And there is one more thing I would expect our elected leaders to know something about: Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship built Silicon Valley; entrepreneurship is the source of this valley’s economic power; entrepreneurship is this valley’s only hope of a prosperous future. San Jose claims to be the capital of Silicon Valley—and Silicon Valley is the world’s capital of entrepreneurship . . . so why is it that the leaders of this city appear to have no real understanding of entrepreneurship?: Who does it. How it happens. And what it needs to survive.

I know they don’t understand because their actions tell me so. Here are three truths about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs:

1. The big fancy buildings and famous company names don’t matter. The future is in the hands of men and women working on business plans in Denny’s and Starbucks.

2. Entrepreneurs don’t need support. They need benign neglect.

3. You can’t pick winners in advance. There are too many variables. Winners pick themselves.

Compare that with the approaches debated in New York.

Instead, you give the start-ups cheap office or warehouse space, tax breaks and the fastest broadband you can deliver. Then you get the hell out of the way and trust them to do the rest. Ninety percent of them will fail, but that last 10 percent will change the world—and the fortunes of the city of San Jose.

“Giving” cheap office space might not need an actual subsidy – and it likely speaks to a broader policy change that follows on the work of the Econourbanists.

Density links – process and constraints

Zoning notice from Burlington, VT - CC image from Don Shall

The ‘right’ density: In the process of putting this post together, I missed Ryan Avent’s piece in The Economist, mentioning some of the broader consequences of land use regulation constraints.  It’s a great summary of some of the key issues regarding density, constraints to growth, levels of governance, and our regulatory processes.    The genesis for the discussion is Facebook’s ability to spark a boom in Silicon Valley following their IPO.  Avent documents the constraints to this (and any other development) and the macroeconomic implications.

Avent leaves a footnote about what the ‘right’ level of density is, offering another criticism of Richard Florida’s recent piece on the subject. Avent writes:

Some urbanists claim that it’s important to cultivate the “right” density to boost innovative activity, and that tall buildings aren’t compatible with this. See this recent Richard Florida piece as an example. This strikes me as mistaken on multiple levels. I have very little confidence in the ability of planners to understand what a particular density is accomplishing and whether the “interactions facilitated” by shorter buildings either exist or are large enough to offset the higher real-estate and labour costs to which they contribute. It does not appear that technology companies have had trouble colonising central San Francisco or New York, despite the significantly greater verticality of those places relative to, say, Mountain View. And space is mostly fungible. Even if we assume that tech companies prefer short buildings while professional firms and households are happy in tall ones, the failure to provide ample supply for the latter uses will crowd out some of the former. That is, maybe the construction of lots of new residential and office highrises in San Francisco doesn’t attract a single tech firm to the new towers. The new construction will nonetheless place substantial downward pressure on rents, attracting lots of new people to the region and making it easier to start a business.

The focus on the ‘right’ density for innovation seems quite far-fetched and unsupported by evidence.  Some planners will indeed offer all sorts of reasons to limit heights of buildings, but facilitating greater innovation is not usually the stated reason.

Michael Lewyn offers a line-by-line takedown of a similar line of thinking from Ed McMahon (linked previously here). Well worth a read, despite the use of all caps.

Planning and process:  There are two competing issues that Avent touches on, however.  One is the content of the land use regulations, their substance and their scope.  That is, the kind of stuff they allow and disallow.   The other is the process of making these land use decisions.

Over the weekend, the New York Times featured a profile of New York’s planning chief, Amanda Burden.  A few things jump out: under Burden’s leadership, the planning department has substantially upzoned many areas of the city:

Since 2002, when she was appointed to head City Planning, she has overseen the wholesale rezoning of the city, with 115 rezoning plans covering more than 10,300 blocks; by the end of her administration, the department is expected to have rezoned about 40 percent of New York, an unprecedented number.

However, while the content of the regulations has increased, the process has not gotten simpler:

But that attention to detail has also received criticism. Ms. Burden’s belief in contextual zoning, for example, under which new developments in a neighborhood are required to be in the height and style of surrounding structures, leads to “profoundly conservative building,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Associationand director of its Center for Urban Innovation. “New York’s greatness as the dominant skyscraper city of the 20th century was the result of bold building, but the local zeitgeist has switched from big and bold to keeping everything small, nondescript and similar to everything else in the neighborhood.”

It has also become common under Ms. Burden’s leadership for developers and their architects to have to negotiate their designs with City Planning. “Development has become a game of second-guessing,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin said. “What will Amanda think of my project? What will I need to compromise on?

“There really doesn’t seem to be any true as-of-right development anymore,” she added, referring to the ability to build without obtaining permits or other approvals.

This strikes me as one of the fundamental tensions of urban development.  Much of it will follow the path of least resistance, building what is allowed by right due to the easier process. Chris Leinberger always made a point to emphasize how reform must make doing the right thing also the easy thing.  This is more about making the bad approach just as hard as the right approach.

In an ideal world, it would be best to make doing the right thing the easy thing; the by-right thing for developers.  You could reduce the constraint of the code’s substance while also reducing the procedural barriers to building – the timeline for approval in New York is significant:

FOR developers, the clock is ticking. Though the Bloomberg administration won’t leave office for 19 months, most projects that require rezoning or other Planning Department approval can take at least 18 months to get through the process. And the administration’s overall friendliness to development means that most builders with projects on the drawing board are scurrying to get them passed before the term’s end, rather than face the uncertainty of the next administration.

However, I’m curious if there is an absolute tradeoff between content and process.  Richard Layman advocates for precisely that – the reduction of by-right allowances with the goal of improving development outcomes.  I’m not sold that the tradeoff is absolute, however – that the only way to improve outcomes is to increase the control of the process over development.  Instead, the bar for by-right development should be higher, but without extra procedural hurdles.

Nonetheless, I am interested in seeing where exactly the borders between those tradeoffs are.  There’s also the question of personality and uncertainty – what does the rush to get approvals before Burden leaves office say about the longevity and sustainability of that regulatory mechanism? Does it become completely reliant on the people in a given office?

Open questions, all – I’m uncertain about the nature of those tradeoffs.

The wrong relationships: Echoing Richard Florida’s points about density and skyscrapers being nothing but ‘vertical cul-de-sacs’, the blog Walkable DFW unloads a lot of reasons to hate skyscrapers, none of which stand up to a closer reading.

An example.  Increased density has diminishing returns for efficient transportation:  this is true for transit ridership, but that’s because once you get to high levels of density, you don’t need transit at all – you just walk. Accessibility wins over mobility.

There are lots of other problematic statements, including some cherrypicked density datapoints from Barcelona and New York, but one in particular caught my eye: “stretching buildings upwards has the same effect as stretching them outwards.” That is, he claims building up is just as inefficient as sprawl:

I often lament living on the 19th floor.  I often walk to work.  But I still experience rush hour:  waiting for the elevators before and after typical work hours (often as much as 10 minutes if a few of the elevators are down, which invariably some always are).

I only bring this up for a chance to link to this excellent 2008 New Yorker piece on the secret lives of elevators. It would seem that this blogger’s building is under-elevated – though I would posit that’s not a particularly good reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

 

Rail transport links – carry that weight

CC image from Rob Swatski

Some illustrative links from the world of rail transportation:

From Reason and Rail: Why the freight railroads will never electrify.

This is the problem which freight electrification faces. While electrification would represent a lessening in fuel expenses, especially as the price of oil is expected to rise another 20-30% over the long-term, this is a fairly minor savings for the railroads.

Some discussion in the comments asking if government subsidies would change the calculus.  It might, but perhaps the better question is about ensuring common usage of key track segments between commuter and freight traffic, between double-stacked containers and electric multiple unit passenger trains.

Why commuter railroads will electrify:

Firstly, operational costs have a far greater prominence than do capital costs owing to the nature of government agencies as opposed to private agencies. An investment that is hard to justify for a freight operator becomes much easier for a public agency that is receiving “free” funding from another agency and in the process is able to reduce its operational costs to those to whom it is immediately responsible. In such a way does spending hundreds of millions of dollars to save a few million per year become an attractive financial option.

More importantly, however, is the fact that electric trains accelerate much faster, and electric multiple units, compared to a diesel locomotive hauling several rail cars, accelerate like a bat out of hell.

The upshot of this is that more time is spent at higher speeds, reducing the time penalty for any individual train stop and greatly increasing the average speed, making it more attractive to travelers and increasing its patronage, and political support, as a result.

Alon Levy notes in the comments that commuter lines are talking about electrifying only a fraction of the track that would be required for a transcontinental freight route.  Greater payoff and a smaller up-front investment makes sense.

Some confounding factors: speed and weight.  Alon Levy takes note of three challenges in meshing fast passenger trains with heavy but slow freight – a conflict inherent in mixing passenger and freight traffic.  They are 1) schedule conflicts, including the challenges of meshing disparate speeds together; 2) different track geometries required, particularly superelevation (e.g banking) of the tracks; 3) damage to tracks inflicted by heavy trains.

Another confounding factor: US regulations.  Systemic Failure takes note of a recent US railcar procurement.

The FRA is soliciting bids for a $551 million contract for 130 bi-level railcars. As a condition for the contract, the railcars must be manufactured entirely with American steel and components. If you do the math, that comes to 4.2 million dollars each – double the global market price for a bi-level car.

In other words, the FRA is pissing away a quarter billion dollars. Imagine all the projects that might have been done with $250 million. Imagine all the jobs that might have been created with that money. I’m talking real jobs — not bureaucrats enforcing Made-in-America rules. Jobs like installing new PTC signaling, repairing bridges, or expanding the transit network. You know, things that have tangible benefit to riders.

The really crazy thing is that there is a glut in the passenger railcar market. The last thing needed is yet another product (a hopelessly primitive one at that). And since few operators besides Amtrak will be interested in this railcar, a lot of design and development will just go to waste.

Our regulations prohibit purchasing rolling stock off the shelf from other nations, while our history of divestment in passenger rail has largely dried up rail car manufacturing in this country.  These regulations also make the adoption of the faster electric traction commuter trains mentioned above more expensive and more difficult.   They also mandate inferior performance:

Now compare that to the example of the FRA compliant Colorado Railcar as given in theFairmount DMU study. With two single level multiple units and two trailers, Colorado takes 123 seconds to accelerate to a speed of 60 miles per hour. The Talent, however, has blazed past Colorado, reaching 95 km/h (~60mph) in 40 seconds. Indeed, by the time that Colorado has reached 60 miles per hour, the Bombardier Talent has reached the FRA’s normal speed limit of 130 km/h and been cruising at top speed for 50 seconds.

The implication here isn’t just about speed for speed’s sake – the better acceleration makes it easier for the trains to keep on schedule, improving reliability and cutting travel time.

Constraints to affordability

'Truth' - CC image from Kellan

A few items on affordability and development:

Short term vs. long term: Matt Yglesias asks why we’re not building more multi-unit buildings in the face of tremendous demand, and the answer is (broadly speaking) financing:

Karl Smith, citing me, blames anti-density land use rules. Naturally I would like everyone to buy my book and it would certainly be convenient if my pet long-term issue were also the solution to our short-term problems. But I’m actually not sure it’s true. My reason for doubting it is that the construction undershooting doesn’t seem notably concentrated in the supply-constrained markets. What’s more, every time I speak to people who are involved in the development game, they assure me that the short-term constraint on big developments is financing. People have more or less shovel-ready infill projects and they need a loan. Some evidence for this is provided by the fact that there’ve been a curious volume of large 100% equity projects undertaken recently. What people say is that there’s too much liquidity risk to go into big things.

Financing is indeed a critical element.  Many of those shovel-ready projects are good ones, but the bar is much higher now than it was.  This represents a short-term constraint. Another factor is the considerable lag time involved in putting together complex development projects. That said, this doesn’t mean the long-term regulatory constraints aren’t a factor – particularly procedural ones.

Supplying affordability: Lydia DePillis takes a look at DCFPI’s most recent report, and asks why housing affordability advocates don’t do more to expand the supply of housing overall?

The DCFPI report makes mention of the fact that housing in Washington is constrained by our height limits. It doesn’t take that logic one step further to point out that there are lots of areas where D.C. limits its own capacity to build through low-density zoning.

It’s true, affordable housing people were the driving force behind inclusionary zoning, and smart growth advocates are getting to agitate more forcefully for the city to require developers who want public land to incorporate affordable housing into their proposals. But many developers avoid the public land process altogether, preferring not to deal with all the delays and frustrations. And affordable housing shouldn’t be all about setting prices artificially low—it’s also about letting builders build the amount of housing this city needs.

One option would be to look at the missing middle of density.  Regardless, the overall supply needs to expand in the face of DC’s growing population and intense demand.

Demand and that other thing I can’t remember:  Chuch Thies doesn’t seem to think there’s actually a housing price problem in DC:

The District of Columbia, for example, is a desirable place to live. Unlike in many parts of the country, there are job opportunities in our region. Many of the positions pay a good wage. A robust job market attracts new residents. In turn, the demand for housing increases. Prices go up.

Simple economics.

Perhaps a little too simple.  Simple economics would also allow for an increase in supply in the face of such demand.

But taxpayers should not be asked to spend a dime on affordable housing for young, single residents without children. There are plenty of market rate solutions to their housing concerns. They come in the form of suburbs, group homes, roommates and sacrifices.

Or, you know, we could build more housing.

Affordable for whom? RU Seriousing Me is making more maps – this one focusing on affordability, noting that affordability is relative to one’s income:

 I’ll echo Lydia DePillis‘ call to affordable housing advocates to pay attention to the effect that excessive land use regulations have on housing costs. Relaxing building height restrictions and eliminating barriers to the construction of housing is a good way to make housing more affordable across the board, even though chances are, the free market will never produce housing in DC that its many impoverished residents can afford, which is why DCFPI’s recommendations to increase subsidies for low-income housing production and homeownership are also valid.

Squeezing out the entry-level middle: The Post gets in on the action, too:

Many of the outer suburbs still have plenty of houses in the lower price ranges. But less-expensive homes are very hard to find closer to central D.C.: 68 percent of homes offered for less than $350,000 are located in the outer suburbs beyond Montgomery County, Arlington and Alexandria. In the District, Redfin counts only 862 listings for less than $350,000.

Don’t forget bad regulations that drive up costs: Such as those that demand the provision of parking on-site, like this development in Brooklyn.  The cost aspect is bad enough, but the impact on urban design is truly awful.

Height and zoning links

DC Zoning Map - CC image from Payton Chung

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

Emphasis mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links: The new American Dream

House for rent. CC image from Sean Dreilinger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the disconnect you have to fix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rent is still too damn high

CC image from Jaybird

A few more thoughts (and links) to discussion from The Rent is Too Damn High.

On rent control:  Mike Konzcal (linking to JW Mason) notes how Yglesias’ book is more or less an endorsement of renting, yet rent control and similar sorts of tenant protections are part of what helps give renters similar levels of stability to owners.  While rent control often gets a bad name because of distortions it can cause in the rental market, the purpose was not explicitly to distort the market, but to provide stability. Mason:

I would just add that a diversity of income levels in a neighborhood is also a goal of rent regulation, as is recognizing the legitimate interest of long-time tenants in staying in their homes. (Not all rights are property rights!) So by framing the question purely in terms of the housing supply, the Booth people have already disconnected it from actual policy debates in a way favorable to orthodoxy. Anyway, no surprise, orthodoxy wins, with only a single respondent favoring rent regulation. (And I think that one might be a typo.) My favorite answer is the person who said, ” Rent control will have similar effects to any price control.” That’s the beauty of economics, isn’t it? — all markets are exactly the same.

Indeed, despite the virtues of renting, many aspire to own just because of that extra measure of stability and control – see Emily Badger in The Atlantic.

Defenses of rent control aside, I think this critique misses Matt’s broader point, which is that the kinds of entities focused on maintaining affordability via non-profit affordable housing development and via rent subsidies and so on should be on the forefront of wanting to grow the overall housing supply – but they seldom are.  There’s a blind spot and a disconnect here. Peter Frase takes Matt’s argument to the extreme:

The problem, here as elsewhere, is that in the tradeoff between social stability and aggregate material prosperity, Yglesias appears to assign stability a value of zero. If people “tend to resist change”, then this is simply an obstacle to be overcome by “state and federal officials”. The ideal type of society that’s evoked here is a perfectly frictionless world of market transactions, one that fully realizes Marx’s comment that under capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air”.

Glaeser’s Triumph of the City suffers a bit from this same problem in its policy descriptions (the ones regarding historic preservation are particularly illustrative), but just because their policy ideas might be a bit extreme doesn’t negate the substance of the analysis. Glaeser’s broad point is that cities are important, density is good, and we’ve severely restricted some of our most innovative and creative places.

On incremental change: Given the huge value current regulations place on maintaining the status quo (providing too much stability in many cases), any changes will necessarily happen at the margins.  They’ll be incremental, not transformative. Even a large change to the procedural environment around these markets will take years to adjust given the current levels of pent-up demand. Frase hints at this:

It’s not that Yglesias’s line of critique is totally wrong—I agree that NIMBYism and fear of change is often an impediment to desirable policies, and I agree that people with generally Left politics often betray a confusion about these issues. But while it’s not desirable to just freeze our current cities and neighborhoods as they are, it’s unreasonable to simply dismiss the desire for stability out of hand. To take this to itsreductio ad absurdam, I don’t think most people—or probably even Matt Yglesias—would want to live in a world where we all had to change jobs and move to new apartments every few weeks, even if such an arrangement would make us materially richer.

On confounding factors in housing markets: Mike Konzcal notes (#2) the major differences in housing price due to other variables beyond just supply and demand – namely, school districts, infrastructure, and all of the other elements of ‘location, location, location.’  The economic comparison requires an assumption of all else being equal, yet it seldom is.

 The quality of your schools, the relationship you have with the police, your ability to move freely and transport yourself, how you’ll be represented democratically, the primary means through which you’ll transfer wealth across generations (if you are a homeowner) and more are all in play even before you get to the economic efficiency, public sphere and social/health arguments about what housing brings.  Perhaps we can reform housing regulations without having to reexamine these issues, but it will be difficult.

Indeed, these kinds of intermingling of various issues is part of what makes zoning decisions so emotional and contentious.

On upzoning: Matt notes two cases where upzoning could be useful (or even just relaxation of existing rules around, say, accessory dwelling units), one about the broader need to increase the overall housing stock:

The question is not whether some fixed pool of people should give up stability in exchange for more money. The question is whether the incumbents should be asked to give up some stability for the sake of other people who are currently excluded from the opportunities the incumbents enjoy. My answer is that yes they should.

Consider the reactions against such increases in the housing stock, often exemplified by those incumbents.  Again, these decisions are incredibly emotional and contentious.  However, Chris Bradford notes how this ability to add supply is working in Houston:

The difference between Houston and a lot of other cities is that it is still easy to add housing in Houston’s nice, central city neighborhoods (unless your project has “Ashby” in the title). There are currently 15 apartment projects with 4,300 units under construction in the Montrose/River Oaks area. That’s not “announced” units; that’s 4,300 units under construction. For point of reference, only 3,089 building permits were issued for housing units of any type in the entire San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan area in 2011.

Houston has a lot of needless land-use controls, including excessive minimum-space requirements and parking minimums,  but there really aren’t many other places in the country where there is both strong demand for infill development and a regulatory environment that freely allows it.

On the direct link to affordability: Matt’s second post takes aim at Arlington, VA:

What you see is a narrow thread of urbanism between Wilson Boulevard and Clarendon Boulevard, with a bit of a thicker blob of urbanism around the Metro station itself. I don’t really want to condemn this development paradigm because if you compare it to other suburban jurisdictions around the United States, what Arlington has done really stands out as practically best in class. But still the fact of the matter is that these single-family homes adjacent to the corridor of urbanism are sitting on some extremely expensive land. If you opened it up to redevelopment, you’d see denser building. Perhaps tall apartments in some cases, perhaps attached rowhouses in others. Opening this up would both bring the luxury market closer to saturation, and also just create some housing that’s a bit less convenient to the Metro and thus perhaps a bit more affordable.

One commenter expresses skepticism about the the ability of new luxury units to actually filter down as more affordable units.  As a counter, I always like to link to Chris Bradford’s posts on the subject of filtering: one here, another one, and a third.

On sprawl and governance: Charlie Gardner notes that growth on any given space has its limits.  Sooner or later, growth can’t just go up, it must go out.

A basic point I’d raise is that in almost all times and places, the solution for urban population growth has not been vertical densification, but outwards expansion into greenfield areas.  Historically, dramatic vertical growth was the product of exceptional circumstances, generally related to the presence of city walls paired with external military threats discouraging sub-urban construction, or the occasional imperial mega-city.  The development of skyscrapers in the late 19th century looked to have the potential alter this longstanding pattern, but for several reasons, greenfield development still remains today the overwhelming source of accommodation for urban population growth.

While I think Charlie is a little too attached to shorter cities (just as perhaps Glaeser and Yglesias are too attached to high rises), the point stands. I don’t recall the source, but I remember seeing a chart estimating the number of New Yorkers who live on the 5th floor or below.  Some very small portion (say 5-10%) lived above the 5th floor (i.e. in mandatory elevator territory).

Indeed, growing outward is natural. It need not be sprawl, since outward growth is only one key part of sprawl. Part of the problem (particularly when discussing regulatory and policy issues) is that of governance – and how our governance structures no longer match the actual economic geographies of our cities.

Some of this is inherently confusing our own terminology in discussing the issue. Mike Konzcal (#3):

There’s a good Foreign Affairs review of Glaeser’s Triumph of the City, which points out the trouble the economics-driven, supply-side housing costs arguments have with dealing with the suburbs.  As someone who read Suburban Nation early when he began to think critically about these issues, I find that a lot of these arguments just focus on city regulations while ignoring the whole existence of suburbs.  Foreign Affairs review:

Glaeser overlooks one of the central issues confronting cities for most of the last century: their competition with suburbs. Glaeser sees the competition as primarily between cities that restrict growth and those that accommodate it…

Getting any traction on this issue depends on defining suburbs.  The Joel Kotkin-esque definitions aren’t really useful, nor do they illuminate the differences between the real economic geographies of cities (that is, their regions) and instead focus on arcane and often anachronistic political boundaries.

None of this even gets at the key points about the regulations and governance structures that lead to sprawl – from Payton Chung:

Here’s the main problem I have with anti-government status-quo boosters: they’re somehow completely blind to how government created the existing situation, but then loudly whine about how government shouldn’t change anything! Not even removing its distortionary supports for the status quo!

On prospects for reform: Ryan Avent circles back to the same issues, albeit by approaching them from a different direction:

At some point, however, we need to stop and ask why the most sensible of ideas aren’t adopted by the American government. It’s not that congressmen are corrupt dolts—they may be, but that’s beside the point. It’s that America’s legislative institutions are not set up to encourage the adoption of the policies opinion editors want to see. Every once in a while an op-ed writer stumbles toward the truth with a “Washington is broken” sort of piece. It is incredibly rare to see a systematic analysis of the incentives facing legislators, which follows its logic through to the end: if Americans want Congress to behave differently, then it may make sense to devote more energy (or, really, energy) to assessing areas of institutional weakness and figuring out whether reform is needed.

 

Links: Metro’s disco inferno; the power of ports

Two items worth sharing:

7000 Series Metro Cars: 

Over the weekend, WMATA released a few pictures and some videos (complete with a soundtrack that would make Michael Bay jealous) of the prototype of the 7000 series, currently under assembly in Japan.

The front end of the cars looks sharp – the black background with the white Metro logo is clean and easily read and identified at a distance.  Compare against a rendering here.

It’s unfortunate that the side doesn’t share the same clean look.  The industrial design of the car body is fine – echoing other transit vehicles (both old and new) with the corrugated steel.  The contrast against the smooth finish at the window levels provides a similar effect to the current fleet’s brown stripe.

The car interiors will feature real-time strip maps showing the next stations on the line – early commentary has focused on misspellings.

While the old paint scheme (essentially just the brown stripe) might seem a little dated, the future cars feature this “disco ball” motif around the Metro logo, both inside and out.  It’s an upgrade from the hideous “America’s Metro” debacle, but still feels like it will be dated quickly.  The large penumbra around the M means that the disco ball on the exterior is centered on the entire carbody, rather than having the M aligned with the windows, as it is now with the brown stripe.  The front end of the 7000 car shows the crisp M logo well – I’m not sure why they didn’t keep the same approach with the sides and resorted to this disco gimmick.

The importance of ports: 

As each of those new Metro cars is manufactured, they’ll be shipped to the US for final assembly – likely arriving in some large port complex. Will Doig has an interesting article on the battles over waterfront land between maritime uses and real estate interests:

The problem (if you can call it that) is that this is happening just as the maritime industry is booming, thanks to an explosion of cheapo imports from Asia. It’s conventional wisdom that urban industries are dying, but shipping isn’t one of them. Even with the recession, the container trade has doubled since 2000, and 2012 is expected to be another record-breaking year. “I think it’s great to have a park, but you can put a park anywhere,” says Hughes. “There has to be someplace to do this.”

Are cities that place? After centuries of ports fueling urban growth, some people are starting to think: Maybe not anymore. “The scale of port activity requires much more space than it used to,” says Doucet, referring to the massive container ships that require not just deep-water ports, but dry-land acreage and fleets of trucks to unload their cargo. “It’s actually much more practical for ports to be located outside the city center.”

Doig’s article only touches on the changes to the landscapes that the current state of the art of shipping has brought upon our landscapes.  The article reminded me of some excellent Mammoth posts on the subject (shipping and border control, the landscape of globalization, and the physical distribution network as a sampling), noting how the economic logic and physical requirements of this type of trade, combined with legal structures and other constraints has created entirely new landscapes.

The key point that Mr. Doucet makes in Doig’s article is that the geography of shipping today is very different from the old landscape of longshoremen working on Manhattan’s docks.  Framing the battle over this real estate has something to do with the longevity and ‘stickiness’ of land uses – but often isn’t looking forward to the changing environment such infrastructure is operating in.

More thoughts on density, procedure, and neighborhood opposition

Downtown Seattle. Photo by author.

On land use procedure: 

In the same line as my previous post about procedural hurdles to adding density, a similar discussion is happening in Seattle. Within the larger realm of procedural hurdles, this focus picks up on the idea of a ‘density’ party. While party organization is a part of the larger systemic issue, it does not address the true procedural issues ow how decisions on density are made.

On the impacts of density:

Matthew Kahn visits dense New York, sees some trash on the sidewalk.  David Owen often talks and writes about urban places being counter-intuitively green, and this is a perfect example.  New Yorkers end up producing less trash per capita than average Americans, but you wouldn’t get that impression from walking the streets.

Within this counter-intuitive reality is the seed of NIMBY opposition. The things that opponents of dense, infill development often come back to tangential impacts such as parking, traffic, trash, noise, etc.  The logical response is to address each of those impacts, rather than put a stop to (or severely limit) development.

One of the items in these battles that is front and center is financial interest – yet it’s the developers that are characterized as greedy for acting in their interest, while neighboring homeowners acting in their own financial interests are pure. Seattle again provides an example of this discussion.

On the challenges of infill: 

Payton Chung highlights several promising development projects in DC. One, the group buyout offer of an old condo along 14th St shows the challenges in assembling properties in a fractured ownership environment.  Payton notes:

The buildings’ condo ownership structure makes redevelopment (in the absence of eminent domain) incredibly difficult. As Lydia DePillis writes, “each of the two separate condo associations would have to vote unanimously to dissolve themselves. Obviously, this would have been much easier with a single owner (whether a rental building or even a co-op, where only a majority of shares can dissolve the association), but condos’ recent proliferation as a way of making homeownership more attainable has the unintended consequence of hyper-fragmenting land ownership.

This reminds me of something impressed upon me in grad school: various decisions of urban form are incredibly sticky.  Once roads are laid out, they are very hard to change.  Residential land uses in particular are remarkably resilient, for essentially this same reason.

On implications for transit: 

Alon Levy draws on Jane Jacobs’ distinction between micro and macro destinations. A macro destination is a large district or place (e.g. downtown), while a micro destination is a specific shop, store, or address.  The implication is that transit-oriented places are spiky places:

It’s easy to just pronounce transit more suited to dense city centers than driving, but the situation is more complicated. Transit, too, thrives on good connections to microdestinations. It can’t serve employment that’s dense but evenly dispersed in a large area – people would need too many transfers, and the result would be service that’s on paper rapid and in reality too slow. Instead, it works best when all destinations are clustered together, in an area not many subway stations in radius.

While many of the contested transit-oriented developments aren’t on the terminal end (i.e. the work trip) of a such a destination, but rather the origin – the larger impact is the same. Transit networks have the centripetal force, while auto-oriented ones have a centrifugal force. Transit works best with density, density works best with transit – enabling the mitigation of those externalities that neighborhood opponents will harp on.