Tag Archives: Parking

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 evolution of infrastructure: 4-track subways and parking decks

With Rail~volution complete, several recaps of conference sessions have sparked some interesting discussion. One panel posed the hypothetical question – what would DC look like today if we had never built Metro?

WMATA’s Nat Bottigheimer emphasized the linkage between high capacity rapid transit and the ability to support dense urban development, drawing a contrast to the spatial inefficiency of automobile-based systems:

Bottigheimer gave an analogue for Washington, DC, saying that the parking needed to serve all the cars that would come in place of Metro could fill the entire area from 12th to 23rd Streets, Constitution to R (including the White House) with 5-story parking decks.

That’s a lot pf parking. It’s an absurd amount, really – but it shouldn’t be a surprise. Consider an auto-oriented business district like Tysons Corner:

Tysons’ dependence on the automobile, and a place to park it, is dramatic when compared with other areas. With about 120,000 jobs, Tysons features nearly half again as many parking spots in structures, underground and in surface lots. That’s more parking, 40 million square feet, than office space, 28 million square feet. Tysons boasts more spaces, 167,000, than downtown Washington, 50,000, which has more than twice as many jobs.

Of course, downtown DC never would’ve developed in such a fashion. Bottigheimer’s hypothetical is meant to draw a contrast rather than represent a plausible alternate universe. Never the less, the ratio of space devoted to parking compared to space devoted to other stuff (offices, retail, housing, etc) is striking. An auto-based transportation system requires the devotion of half of your space to just the terminal capacity for the car.

While acknowledging Metro’s power to shape development and growth when paired with appropriate land use and economic development policies, the GGW discussion turned (as it often does) to Metro’s constraints. Several commenters ask – why not four tracks like New York? Why not have express service?

Sample of Midtown Manhattan track maps from nycsubway.org

New York’s four-track trunk lines are indeed impressive pieces of infrastructure, but it’s worth remembering that they are essentially the second system of rapid transit in the city. New York did not build those four-track lines from scratch, they built them to replace an extensive network of elevated trains. Consider the changes from 1904 (left), to 1932 (center), to present (right):

Red lines are elevateds, blue lines are subways – source images from Wikipedia. The process of replacing older elevated trains with subways is clear, particularly in Manhattan and around Downtown Brooklyn. The relevance to DC is that four-track subway lines don’t just happen. The circumstances in New York that desired to get rid of most of the elevated tracks provided an opportunity to rebuild all of New York’s transit infrastructure. Metro is not provided with such an opportunity. Adding express tracks to the existing system would require essentially rebuilding the entire system, and without a compelling reason to do so (such as New York’s removal of Els), it’s simply not going to happen – no matter if it were a good idea and a cost-effective idea or not.

Perhaps the single biggest opportunity for an express level of service would be the conversion of MARC and VRE into a through-running S-Bahn-like transit service. Portions of the Red Line do indeed have four tracks – its just that two of them are for freight and commuter rail. Likewise, should there be future expansion of Metro within the core (such as a separated Blue line) there would be the opportunity to study making such a tunnel a four-track line. That concept would have to include a number of different ideas, however – future expansions to link into that capacity, surface/subway hybrid service for streetcar (such as in Philadelphia or San Francisco), etc.

Parking, lots and lots of parking!

There’s been a horde of great parking posts in the last few days:

First, Jarrett Walker documents San Francisco’s new adventure in market pricing for on-street spaces:

The goal is to ensure that there’s always a space available, so that people stop endlessly driving in circles looking for parking. People will be able to check online to find out the current parking cost in the place they intend to visit. Parking garages will have a better chance of undercutting on-street rates, so that those garages can fill. If you’ve ever driven in San Francisco, you know that it’s hard to decide to use a garage because, well, if you just drive around the block once more, you might get lucky. Under SF Park, if you just drive around the block once more, you’ll probably find a space, but it will cost more than a garage, especially if you’ll be there for a while. So drivers are more likely to fill up the garages.

Jarrett illuminates some of the problems with truly dynamic pricing – ideally, you’d want to have a price set for a given location and time so that a driver knows what they’ll likely have to pay prior to beginning their trip. This is similar to all sorts of other goods, where the prices are fixed for consumers, even if the actual prices fluctuate more often.

Jarrett also notes the potential for San Francisco to predict and target prices based on the data these meters will collect. The city has collected lots of useful parking data, the question is now about using that data and infrastructure effectively. Walker notes:

In a recent post on congestion, I observed that current road-pricing policy requires us to save money, a renewable resource, by expending time, the least renewable resource of all. If you’ve ever circled a block looking for parking, while missing or being late for something that’s important to you, you know that the same absurdity is true of our on-street parking policy. SF Park deserves close watching. And if it doesn’t work well, ask yourself: “Is it because it doesn’t make sense to charging for parking based on demand, or is it because they were too timid to do it completely?” The answer will almost certainly be the latter. The policy itself relies only on free-market principles that already govern many parts of our economies, because they work.

Indeed, market forces do work. Similarly, Tyler Cowen raised the subject in this weekend’s New York Times. Cowen focused on all aspects of Donald Shoup’s excellent book The High Cost of Free Parking. In addition to market pricing for parking spaces in order to ensure efficient use, Cowen also addresses parking development requirements:

If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.

The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars — and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars — and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life.

Market Urbanism chimes in specifically about minimum parking requirements, taking note of New York City’s efforts to change their laws (including references to Streetsblog’s coverage of the issue earlier this year). Many more also chime in, including Cowen’s personal blog – with posts expounding on his NYT article, Arnold Kling’s response, and Cowen’s response to the response – all worth reading. As usual, Ryan Avent also responds.

In a similar vein to the parking discussion, Ryan Avent also offered this paper up for review, drawing the conclusion that congestion pricing works best in places that have good transit networks – i.e. where there is an effective alternative to driving. The abstract notes that the two congestion pricing successes had solid transit systems to rely on. Ryan notes that congestion pricing can be used for improving transit, but it might be politically necessary to front the costs of those transit improvements prior to implementing the congestion charge.

The limited polling prior to the death of New York’s congestion pricing plan also suggested this – dedication of revenues to transit improvements was crucial for garnering public support. New York, of course, has the advantage of a transit system as an alternative means of transport. If a city without such infrastructure were to implement such a plan, might some borrowing against future revenues (similar to Los Angeles’ 30/10 plan) be in order?

The true cost of gasoline

The New York Times’ oil map now includes a close-up of the landfall area around the Gulf Coast.

In Sunday’s Washington Post, Ezra Klein provides some much-needed context as to the true cost of oil, and in turn the gasoline we buy to power our cars. The key part is framing the overall cost in terms of externalities:

Most of us would call the BP spill a tragedy. Ask an economist what it is, however, and you’ll hear a different word: “externality.” An externality is a cost that’s not paid by the person, or people, using the good that creates the cost. The BP spill is going to cost fishermen, it’s going to cost the gulf’s ecosystem, and it’s going to cost the region’s tourism industry. But that cost won’t be paid by the people who wanted that oil for their cars. It’ll fall on taxpayers, on Gulf Coast residents who need new jobs, on the poisoned wildlife on the seafloor.

That means the gasoline you’re buying at the pump is — stick with me here — too cheap. The price you pay is less than the product’s true cost. A lot less, actually. And it’s not just catastrophic spills and dramatic disruptions in the Middle East that add to the price. Gasoline has so many hidden costs that there’s a cottage industry devoted to tallying them up. At least the ones that can be tallied up.

Klein lists pollution, congestion, the need for our military to secure oil reserves, and citing some other research from Ian Parry at RFF, he concludes the premium is $1.65 per gallon of gas – which put on top of the current average cost per gallon of $2.72, would mean we’d need $4.37 gas to cover the true costs – a number Klein notes is almost certainly an underestimate. However, Klein notes that while higher gas prices would certainly curb some driving (and data suggests this to be true), the larger move over the past decades has been the entrenchment of our auto-dependence, and thus our gasoline dependence.

The key to reducing use is to provide alternatives:

That gets to the bigger issue, which is that energy sources are cheap or expensive only in relation to one another. And the heaviest anchor beneath our reliance on oil is that, at this point, there’s nothing to replace it with.

“We’re pretty much stuck with our dependency on oil,” Parry says. “We don’t have any substitutes. Even if we hugely increase the price on oil, we’d only have limited impact on it. People need to drive and get to work.”

In urban situations, reducing oil use means reducing driving. A key part of that equation would be to provide more alternative transportation modes. If we were to raise the price of oil via an increase in the gas tax, that revenue could be used directly to build those new transportation infrastructures – internalizing the externality.

In other urban, externality pricing schemes, linking the revenue generated from the tax to a tangible benefit for users is the key to gaining political support. Donald Shoup talks extensively about funneling parking revenue to parking benefit districts; polls in New York suggested that dedication of congestion pricing revenue to transit improvements was the key to securing popular support (if not legislative support). Linking revenues to the tax is a key part of helping people understand the value of the virtuous cycle – no matter how counter-intuitive it might be.

Weekend Reading

CC image from sabeth718

There’s a whole host of good stuff out there this weekend, covering the economy, smart growth, transit, high speed rail, and more:

Smart growth is nothing to fear: Roger Lewis aims to quiet the fears of Washington Post readers:

In fact, as new long-range plans are implemented in the coming decades, your property’s value will probably go up, your way of life and neighborhood character will be enhanced, and traffic congestion will not worsen. Indeed, it may ease. Also remember that such plans primarily serve future generations.

Optimism is justified. Stable, low-density residential neighborhoods and subdivisions will remain untouched. Transportation network plans do not depend on routing future traffic through subdivisions and local residential streets, many of which are loops and cul-de-sacs. And redeveloped areas actually will provide new, desirable conveniences for residents able to walk or bike to buy a quart of milk or sip coffee in a cafe.

Daniel Gross puts that into a larger context: Complete with quotes from Richard Florida, Mr. Gross looks to optimistic visions of the future and the chance to re-shape our economy, using the pending economic rebound to re-shape things – putting those kinds of smart growth plans into action:

So what will our new economy look like once the smoke finally clears? There will likely be fewer McMansions with four-car garages and more well-insulated homes, fewer Hummers and more Chevy Volts, less proprietary trading and more productivity-enhancing software, less debt and more capital, more exported goods and less imported energy. Most significantly, there will be new commercial infrastructures and industrial ecosystems that incubate and propel growth—much as the Internet did in the 1990s.

Not everyone is so optimistic: Reihan Salam at The Daily Beast isn’t nearly as optimistic about our economic prospects, despite the good intentions and aspirations of folks like Roger Lewis.

But one could just as easily argue that we’ve been furiously spending taxpayer dollars propping up the McMansion-and-Hummer economy. To protect homeowners, we’ve launched an extraordinary series of interventions designed to buttress housing prices, an approach that effectively transfers wealth from those who rent to those who own. Collapsing housing prices could prove a boon for less-affluent households or cautious investors who were reluctant to buy at the top of the market. That can’t help unless we accept that housing prices can and should collapse, even if that hurts key constituencies in the short term. And the same goes for efforts to keep the domestic automotive industry on life support.

So, are we in a moment of change or not? The point about renters and owners is well taken, it reminds me of plenty of discussion around tax day about the perils of the mortgage interest deduction.

Beyond these big, national-level policy questions, there’s plenty of room to debate the local impact. Housing Complex notes that DC has lots of jobs (relatively) and high rents, circling back to the notion that the ability to change things won’t be uniform across the nation. Places like DC are positioned well to make the transformation – provided the Federal framework enables these kinds of changes.

On that note, Aaron Renn looks at a potential city-friendly federal policy framework, emphasizing talent, innovation, and connection – looking at policy areas of transportation, housing, the environment, and immigration. Perhaps the key takeaway is the requirement of flexibility – many of today’s problems stem from federal policies that are too rigid to be of much use in urban environments.

Density discussions: Density is good for cities. It’s also often misunderstood and feared – see Roger Lewis’ calming of fears regarding smart growth. A few posts on the subject:

Yonah Freemark questions whether streetcar suburb densities are enough to get real urbanism and transit use.
Aaron Renn asks if density is overrated for smaller cities, as they can still compete without it, taking advantage of highways and cars that work well at lower densities.
Cap’n Transit criticizes both thoughts, emphasizing the bigger picture about why we want to encourage urbanism and transit use in the first place – arguing that Renn’s rationalization isn’t helpful in the long run.

Miscellany:

Parking nightmares – requirements, history, and the path (or lot location) not taken.
Ed Glaeser – Cities demonstrate “the power of agglomeration — the enormous value that human beings place on being near one another.”
Guerrilla subway art in New York demands better etiquette from riders. Reminds me of Metro’s anti-rapture campaign.
Interesting thoughts on the added value of HSR to local land uses around stations.
NPR looks at songs for the urban cyclist.

Parking, Census, & Maps

Some cool map-related items:

San Francisco’s Parking Census – with one of those ideas that’s so obvious that no one ever thought of it before, San Francisco has completed the first known census of all the publicly available parking spaces in an American city. The census found 441,541 spaces in the city, just 280,000 of which are on-street spaces – occupying an area comparable to the city’s Golden Gate Park.

The release of the public parking space census coincides with the redesign of the website for SFPark, an occupancy-based parking management trial funded with a $19.8 million federal congestion mitigation grant, which among many objectives, seeks to manage the supply of parking by adjusting the cost to match demand. To put that in laymen’s terms, if SFPark works well, there should be enough parking at the curb so that drivers don’t have to circle the block endlessly searching for that elusive space. By gradually adjusting the price of parking up or down in the pilot areas, the city expects to create roughly one or two free spaces per block face at any time, the original purpose of parking meters when they were introduced in the 1930s.

Jay Primus, who directs the SFPark trial for the MTA, said the parking census was the first step toward a better understanding of how parking works in San Francisco, filling a void where city planners could only make rough estimates previously. “If you can’t manage what you can’t count, doing a careful survey and documenting all publicly available parking was a critical first step for the MTA for how we manage parking more intelligently,” he said.

The importance of this data, especially to this level of detail, cannot be understated. Applying this type of information to performance pricing systems is just one potential application. The study’s accompanying PDF map shows just how detailed and granular the data is:

Each dot along the streets represents a meter, the larger circles within blocks represent off-street parking. Garages and non-metered street spaces with less than 25 spaces per block aren’t even shown.

The real Census also has some cool maps – the Census Bureau’s Take 10 map allows you to see real time (relatively speaking) response rates by census tract for DC:

Currently, DC’s response rate stands at 44%. Tract 4902, highlighted above, is only at 39%.

Assorted Portland tidbits

Portland Aerial Tram - image from joseph readdy on flickr

Ah, Portland. Metropolis of planning, bicycling, and all things creative. A couple of things have piled up in my open tabs or in my reader.

Portland hasn’t seen huge shifts in mode share (as noted here previously – hat tip to Jarrett Walker here and here), despite large investments in light rail, streetcars, and even an aerial tram.

Picture perfect? Aaron Renn penned an op-ed piece for the Oregonian, providing a little perspective about Portland’s image as the perfect planning city. Renn doesn’t question Portland’s overall quality, just if the reputation is deserved or not – if the praise matches the performance.

Renn follows his op-ed with a blog post, delving deeper into the stats, comparing hip and cool Portland to the decidedly less cool Indianapolis.

I note as a positive that Portland was clearly ahead of other similar sized cities in understanding the importance of density, transit, bike lanes, etc. But more importantly, that the “Portland model” had a wide influence in America. Perhaps Portland has had a greater influence on America’s urban environments than any other city its relative size in history. That’s an amazing accomplishment if you think about it. And what’s more, that influence has been a good thing.Naturally, they don’t need me to just tell them “It’s all good”. So on the areas for development side I noted their underperforming economy. It’s not so much that Portland is particularly suffering in this recession, though it is, or that it is a failure in an absolute sense, which it is not. No, rather I look at it like diving. There are two aspects: execution and degree of difficulty. Portland has very low degree of difficulty, so we would expect it to perform much better.

Renn’s takeaway is that policy can only do so much. That’s true, to some extent – policy sets the rules in place, and the dynamics of the city have to do the rest. There are also factors well beyond any city’s (or any region’s) control.

Like any data set, it’s wise to look at the limitations of the data.

Putting the emphasis back on Portland’s transportation policies, Jarrett Walker looks at car ownership rates in cities across the US – and Portland doesn’t even crack the top 50. (DC checks in at #4, with a 36.93% of households owning no cars – jurisdictions 1, 2, and 3 are all in Metropolitan NYC). Walker identifies three criteria that correlate with high rates of non-auto households – age of the city’s fabric (with an anecdotal correlation to density and design), poverty, and presence of major universities.

So here’s the question: How long will it take for a city that lacks age, poverty, or dominant universities to achieve the kind of low car ownership that these 50 demonstrate? How soon, for example, will a city be able to create a combination of density, design, and mixture of uses that yields the same performance as an old city that naturally has those features?

Portland is probably the most promising such city in the US, and it’s not on the list. Only 14% of households there don’t have a car, so it’s probably well down in the second 50. Like many cities, Portland has been doing everything it can to build a dense mixed-use urban environment. It’s the sort of city that convinces the Safeway supermarket chain to rebuild their store with townhouses and residential towers on top. But while people are moving into the inner city, they don’t seem to be selling their cars when they do, nor do they seem to be going to work by transit.

For me, the takeaway from this is the long lag time and staying power of transportation infrastructure. Even as older cities, built around walking and transit, have decayed, they remain more car-less than their fellow cities built with the car, to say nothing of cities built for the car.

I recall attending a lecture in grad school (and I cannot for the life of me remember who exactly gave it), noting the staying power of our street networks and other infrastructure patterns. In short, land use changes on a big, extensive scale take a long time to happen. Walker continues:

How much are zero-car households constrained by overly abundant residential parking? It’s still hard to sell a modern tower unit without a parking space included, even though there are many such units in pre-car cities like Manhattan and San Francisco, and many are quite desirable. What would it take to replicate that desirability in new inner cities like Portland’s? Couldn’t it be done at least in the name of affordable housing?

All good questions to ask, even if only asked rhetorically.

Finally, some pretty pictures. Free Association Design has some great planning graphics from Portland. Fun stuff to look at.

Portland's public realm. Image from the City of Portland

Portland's zoning code, graphically depicted w/ height limits and mixed uses (red shading).

Good stuff.

Links – bad day for the Midwest

Soldier Field, US v. Honduras World Cup Qualifier, summer 2009. CC image from flickr

The US has narrowed their list of potential host cities for the US Soccer Federation’s bid to host either the 2018 or 2022 World Cup – and shockingly, that list does not include the Windy City.

The final cities are Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Denver, East Rutherford, N.J., Houston, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Mo., Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, Seattle, Tampa, Fla., and Washington.

“With Chicago, I think there was some Olympic fatigue,” Gulati said, referring to that city’s unsuccessful bid to host the Summer Games in 2016. “And in this group, Soldier Field was one of the smallest stadiums.”

Good news for DC – both FedEx Field and M&T Bank Stadium in Baltimore made this cut, which almost assures the region of hosting some World Cup games should the US win the right to host. This list of 18 cities will be trimmed to a final list of 12 stadiums.

However, the exclusion of Chicago is baffling. Chicago regularly hosts US World Cup qualifiers, Gold Cup matches, is home to an MLS team, and hosted many matches the last time the US hosted this event in 1994. Renovated Soldier Field is indeed small in terms of capacity, but this is Chicago we’re talking about here.

Only slightly less confusing is the exclusion of any stadia from the San Francisco Bay Area, but at least this can be explained by the poor quality of the extant stadiums in both SF and Oakland. However, the San Francisco 49ers stand to get a new football stadium in the near future, certainly before 2022 rolls around. Likewise, given Dan Snyder’s constantly rumored talks about wanting to build a new stadium for his micromanaged Redskins, DC could be looking at a new stadium, too.

Point being, 12 years is a long time from now. Leaving off two of the US’s greatest cities from a bid that’s meant to showcase not just America’s stadiums and hosting abilities but the host cities as well is just inexplicable.

(advice to the USSF folks – it’s 106 miles to Chicago. Hit it.)

Picture of 'Detroit Industry' mural. CC image from flickr

Detroit is another city that hosted World Cup matches in 1994, but was left of this bid’s list. That obviously isn’t the focus of Detroit’s current issues. Mammoth directs our attention to a piece by Bruce Katz on re-industrializing Detroit. Katz looks to international precedents (Turin, Bilbao), addresses the need to Detroit to shrink and shift – even with re-development and re-industrialization, and the huge impact this might have on the shape of the city.

Obligatory DC connection:

Detroit has to change physically because it simply cannot sustain its current form. It was built for two million people, not the 900,000 that live there today. Manhattan, San Francisco, and Boston could all fit within Detroit’s 139-square-mile boundary, and there would still be 20 square miles to spare. Even more than its European counterparts, which had much less severe population losses, Detroit will have to become a different kind of city, one that challenges our idea of what a city is supposed to look like, and what happens within its boundaries. The new Detroit might be a patchwork of newly dense neighborhoods, large and small urban gardens, art installations, and old factories transformed into adventure parks. The new Detroit could have a park, much like Washington’s Rock Creek Park, centered around a creek on its western edge, and a system of canals from the eastern corner of the city to Belle Isle in the south. The city has already started on the restoration of the Detroit River waterfront, largely bankrolled by private philanthropy. The city has created a new “land bank,” which can take control of vacant and derelict properties and start the process of clearing land, remediating environmental contamination, and figuring out what to do next with the parcel, whether that’s making it into a small park, deeding it to a neighbor to create a well-tended yard, or assembling large tracts of land for redevelopment or permanent green space.

Also from mammoth, Rob Holmes takes a peek at the massive scale of some new solar infrastructure, linking to this post on the sprawling SEGS facility in California – conveniently located next to the world’s largest boron mine for scale comparisons.

Similarly, the scale comparisons remind me of a video recently shared with me about mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. The video comes from Yale University’s Environment360. the 20 minute video is extraordinarily well shot and edited, and well worth a watch. Given DC’s proximity to Appalachia and our (relative) reliance on coal power in this region, it’s definitely of interest to those of us in the Mid Atlantic region.

At a bare minimum, the images in the video alone are worth a watch.

When I think of tools for urban living, GMC trucks aren’t the first thing that come to my mind. I guess using that kind of comparison is like saying a jackhammer is a tool for hanging picture frames around the house.

Portland hasn’t seen big shifts in travel modes recently, as Jarrett Walker notes. However, Jarrett and a few of his trusty commenters seem to have a bead on to the potential cause – relatively cheap parking.

In other recent work we’ve been doing, we’ve repeatedly seen that parking price is the most powerful locally-controlled lever for shifting people out of single-occupant cars, in the absence of more direct congestion charges. Increases in parking costs drive big shifts to transit or other options.

In my experience working on various transportation demand management programs, this is absolutely true. Since TDM programs do not usually have the scope to implement congestion pricing, parking pricing is the single biggest contributor to mode shifts.

Hump-day late-night link-dump

CC image from chethan shankar on flickr

Stuff that’s been piling up in my open tabs…

Jarrett Walker takes a look at Seattle, and how the city’s geography of natural chokepoints and barriers aid the city’s transit usage, despite lacking an extensive rail transit system (though it’s getting bigger as we speak).

Transit planning is frustrating in such a place, but road planning is even more so. Ultimately, Seattle’s chokepoints have the effect of reducing much of the complex problem of mode share to a critical decision about a strategic spot. If you give transit an advantage through a chokepoint, you’ve given it a big advantage over a large area.

A follow-up post on the subject delves deeper into chokepoints.

For DC, there are a whole lot of factors that shape the balance (or lack thereof) of development between the western portion of the metro area and the eastern half – but these kinds of choke points are certainly part of the success in shaping that development around transit for Metro’s Potomac River crossings.

Free parking FAIL. This is out of date now, but the Mayor of Providence’s plan to offer free on-street parking as means of encouraging downtown shopping backfired, big time.

Since there’s free parking all day at metered spaces, employees from the nearby courthouse and some from other government offices are taking parking spots early and are staying all day.

It’s leaving holiday shoppers out of the stores.

Not a good idea to try and offer the same things malls offer when you don’t have the means to do so. Better to use price to encourage turnover and maximize usage, while marketing the advantages that urban shopping districts do have over malls.

Seventy Percent. Previously, I’ve looked at some details of transit plans elsewhere, and Denver’s FasTracks system, centering on a revamped Union Station is as interesting of a case study as any. They’ve now released the 70% design documents for Union Station (large PDF – 15.3 mb).

Denver Union Station - Diagram of transit facilities, with underground bus concourse connecting light rail platforms (left) with commuter rail/inter city rail (right) and the historic station building.

Headquarters? What is it!?! It’s a big building where Generals meet, but that’s not important right now.

Huh? Oh, that. Northrup-Grumman is moving to town. Ruth Samuelson handicaps the race for capturing the actual HQ building, and she’s not betting on DC:

So I guess being right in the thick of Washington D.C. could make a difference. But, realistically, people are betting against the city (this is again from the Sun story):

Washington, which has 1,000 Northrop jobs now, strikes him as out of the running. The potential threat of a terrorist attack is omnipresent in defense contractors’ minds, so he doubts one would choose to locate its leaders there. Maryland and Virginia benefit from being near the nation’s capital but at a potentially safer distance, though “there’s a clear pattern among the recent arrival of defense companies in Washington: They tend to favor Northern Virginia,” [Loren B. Thompson, a military analyst at the Lexington Institute] said.

Now, if we’re all blown into oblivion by a rogue nuclear weapon, is there really that much of a difference between having your HQ in Rosslyn or Crystal City, as opposed to NoMA or the Capitol Riverfront?

The Census is coming. And Maurice Henderson wants you to fill it out. Do it. Doooo it.

US v. Canada. While this particular hockey fan is basking in the glory of a thrilling, 6-5 overtime victory for the US over Canada in the World Junior ice hockey championships (with the game winner scored by John Carlson, a prospect for the Washington Caps), TNR’s Avenue blog looks at the economic and metropolitan implications of re-shaping the NHL into more of a rivalry between countries and between cities. Taking the same passion you see from national team competitions and channeling it into club competitions – perhaps taking a page from soccer’s rivalries and sense of place?

Biosphere. BLDGBLOG takes a look at the abandoned and deteriorating Biosphere 2 project in Arizona.

Plenty of Parking

DCist takes note of a great photo of the Mt. Vernon Square area from 1992, looking south towards the Portrait Gallery and what’s now the Verizon Center:

It’s amazing to realize how much the area has changed over the past 15-20 years. Looking back at the historical images available from Google Earth, you can piece together the evolution of the area over the years. Google Earth’s imagery isn’t universally available over time, so there are some rather big gaps between some aerial sets.

North is to the left in all the images.

1949:

Note the fine grain of the urban fabric, almost all of the buildings occupy narrow lots with zero setback from the property line – and there are virtually no vacant lots. You can see the beginnings of site clearance at the top if the image for the enormous Government Accountability Office building. That structure would be dedicated in 1951.

1988:

In 1988, things have changed a great deal. Obviously, lots of surface parking lots here. Though the Gallery Place-Chinatown Metro station opened in 1976 with the first operable segment of the Red line, the North-South connection along the Green-Yellow lines wasn’t yet open when this picture was taken. The Mount Vernon Sq, Shaw-Howard, and U St stations all opened in 1991, just prior to the taking of the opening photograph in this post.

1999:

In 1999, the (now) Verizon Center has been open for business for about a year and a half. Site preparation is well underway for the new convention center, but there are still some significant parcels in key downtown locations occupied with vacant lots or surface parking.

2004:

Gallery Place is taking shape, the new convention center is done, and other vacant lots fill in. Still some significant vacant lots to the North of Mass Ave.

2009:

The old convention center has been removed, just about all of the once vacant lots in old downtown (i.e. the right side of this image) are filled in, and stuff to the north of Mass Ave is beginning to see some real development. There’s a little error in image stitching between L and M streets, with the aerials to the right taking a slightly more oblique angle, showing the heights of the buildings in Old Downtown.

Watching this section of DC devolve and then redevelop shows some clear trends. The newer buildings are all much bigger than their predecessors – both in terms of heights and footprint. The fine-grained urban fabric of the 1949 image is largely gone from the downtown portions of the images, aside from a few stretches where the original facades have been retained behind newer developments or a few blocks in Chinatown, where the finer grained structures remain.

The interesting thing to note is how much of Downtown DC turned first to surface parking before redeveloping back into urban forms. This intermediate, destructive step prevents preserving that kind of fine grained urbanism. Nevertheless, the redevelopment of the area is a rousing success, showing the versatility of the traditional city grid – particularly when reinforced with urban rail transit.

Cross-posted at Greater Greater Washington

City Block

a work in progress…