Tag Archives: Seattle

The zoning straightjacket

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

DC is nearing the end of a lengthy process to re-write the city’s zoning code. The re-write is mostly a reorganization, combining overlays and base zones in an effort to rationalize a text that’s been edited constantly over the better part of half a century. While there are a number of substantive policy changes (all good and worth supporting – reducing parking requirements, allowing accessory dwelling units, allowing corner stores, etc.), the intent of the re-write is to look at the structure and policy of the code, rather than look for areas of the city where the zoning classification should change.

Actual re-zoning will require an update to the city’s comprehensive plan (as all zoning changes must be consistent with the comprehensive plan). As promising as the policy changes in the zoning re-write may be, they do not represent any kind of change to the basic city layout – areas currently planned for high density will see more development, and areas zoned for single-family homes will not.

Last year, the District Government and the National Capital Planning Commission worked on dueling reports (see the documents from DC and NCPC) at the request of Congress on the potential for changing DC’s federally-imposed height limit. Leaving aside the specific merits and drawbacks of this law, the planning team needed first to identify areas that would likely see taller buildings if the height limit were to change.

I’ve borrowed the title of this post from Charlie Gardner, to try to show how little room we’ve planned in our cities for change. Even with the perception of runaway development in growing cities, the amount of space that’s set aside for a physical transformation is remarkably small. Zoning is a relatively new force shaping our cities – about a century old. We’re now seeing the effects of this constraint.

Consider the following examples of freezing city form in place via zoning codes:

Old Urbanist – The zoning straightjacket, part II, writing about Stamford, Connecticut:

In general, the zoning maps continue to reflect the land use patterns and planning dogma of the 1920s, with a small, constrained downtown business district hemmed in by single-use residential districts through which snake narrow commercial corridors.

This, if nothing else, seems like a fundamental, if not the only, purpose and challenge of city planning: accommodating population growth in a way that takes into account long-term development prospects and the political difficulty of upzoning low-density SFD areas. In light of this, can a zoning code like Stamford’s, with a stated purpose of preserving existing neighborhoods in their 1960s form, and resistant to all but changes in the downtown area, really be called a “planning” document at all? The challenges that Stamford faces are not unique, but typical, and progress on them, as zoning approaches its 100th birthday, remains the exception rather than the rule.

Better Institutions – Look at the Amount of Space in Seattle Dedicated to Single-Family Housing, writing about Seattle:

Putting aside the issue of micro-housing and apodments, [ed – I wrote about Seattle’s apodments here] what I’d actually like you to draw your attention to is everything that’s not colored or shaded — all the grey on that map. [ed – here is a link to the map] That’s Single-Family Seattle. That’s the part of the city where most people own their homes, and where residents could actually financially benefit from the property value-increasing development necessary to keep Seattle affordable. It’s also the part of the city that’s off-limits to essentially any new residential construction because preserving single-family “character” is so important. And it’s why residents in the remaining 20% of the city can barely afford their rents.

Dan Keshet – Zoning: the Central Problem, in Austin, Texas:

Zoning touches on most issues Austin faces. But with these maps in mind, I think we can get more specific: one of the major zoning problems Austin faces is the sea of low-density single-family housing surrounding Austin’s islands of high residential density.

Daniel Hertz – Zoning: It’s Just Insane, in Chicago, Illinois:

So one thing that happens when I bring up the fact that Chicago, like pretty much all American cities, criminalizes dense development to the detriment of all sorts of people (I’m great at parties!) is that whoever I’m talking to expresses their incredulity by referencing the incredible numbers of high-rises built in and around downtown over the last decade or so. Then I try to explain that, while impressive, the development downtown is really pretty exceptional, and that 96% of the city or so doesn’t allow that stuff, or anything over 4 floors or so, even i n neighborhoods where people are lining up to live, waving their money and bidding up housing prices.

Chris D.P. – The High Cost of Strict Zoning, in Washington, DC:

Across town, the Wesley Heights overlay zone strictly regulates the bulk of the buildings within its boundaries for the sake of preserving the neighborhood character. Is it ethical for the city government to mandate, essentially, that no home be built on less than $637,500 worth of land in certain residential neighborhoods?

The largest concentration of overly restrictive zoning (from an economic perspective) appears to be downtown, along Pennsylvania Ave and K Streets NW. If we value our designated open spaces, and won’t concede the exclusivity of certain neighborhoods, but understand the environmental and economic benefits of compact development, then isn’t downtown as good a place as any to accommodate the growth this city needs?

DC’s height study shows a similar pattern. The very nature of the thought exercise, the hypothetical scenarios for building taller and denser buildings in DC requires first identifying areas that might be appropriate for taller buildings. As a part of this exercise, the DC Office of Planning identified areas not appropriate for additional height based on existing plans, historic districts, etc.

These excluded areas included: all federal properties, all historic landmarks and sites; low density areas in historic districts; all remaining low density areas, including residential neighborhoods; institutional sites and public facilities. Those areas are illustrated in the Figure 4 map below. The project team determined that sites already designated as high and medium density (both commercial and residential) were most appropriate for the purposes of this study to model increased building heights because those areas had already been identified for targeting growth in the future through the District’s prior Comprehensive Plan processes.

Put this on a map, and the exlcuded areas cover 95% of the city:

Now, this isn’t analogous to the comparsions to areas zoned for single-family homes in other cities, nor are all of the areas in red innoculated from substantial physical change. However, it does illustrate just how limited the opportunities for growth are. It broadly parallel’s the city’s future land use map from the Comprehensive Plan, where large portions of the city are planned for low/medium density residential uses (click to open PDF):

The plan’s generalized policy map also illustrates the extent of the planned and regulatory conservation of the existing city form (click to open PDF):

The areas without any shading are neighborhood conservation areas.

All of this should be reassuring to those concerned about the proposed zoning changes, since all changes must be consistent with the comprehensive plan.

More on the geometry of transportation: “Transport is mostly a real estate problem”

In June, the Urbanization Project at NYU’s Stern Center posted several graphics looking at the space devoted to transportation in our cities. As the author, Alain Bertaud, frames it, “transport is mostly a real estate problem.” That is, different transportation modes require different amounts of space to accomplish the same task.

Comparison of population/employee density and street area per person. Image from NYU Urbanization Project.

Each of the selected examples cluster around the diagonal blue line, representing an average of 25% of a city’s land devoted to streets.

Percent of land use devoted to buildings, streets, etc. Image from NYU Urbanization Project.

Two observations: the 25% pattern is remarkably consistent; as is the geometric relationship between modes of transport and the intensity of land use. The green horizontal lines show how much space a car uses at various speeds – the faster the car goes, the more space it requires. A parked car occupies 14 square meters, while one moving at 30 kph takes up 65 square meters.

The obvious corellation is between a city’s density and its type of transportation network. Cars take up a large amount of space relative to their capacity, and a transport system based on cars alone cannot support a great deal of density.

Alex Tabarrok frames this in terms of “the opportunity cost of streets.” While there is certianly an opportunity cost to various street uses, it’s worth noting that some space must be devoted for streets in order to access property. Charlie Gardner at Old Urbanist takes note that the role of streets is not solely about transportation:

In addition to their transportation function, streets can also be understood as a means of extracting value from underserved parcels of land. The street removes a certain amount of property from tax rolls in exchange for plugging the adjacent land in to the citywide transportation network. Access to the network, in turn, increases the value of the land for almost all uses. For the process to satisfy a cost/benefit analysis, the value added should exceed that lost to the area of the streets plus the cost of maintenance. (This implies rapidly diminishing returns for increasingly wide streets, and helps explain why, in the absence of mandated minimum widths, most streets are made to be fairly narrow.) For many of the gridded American cities of the 19th century, as I’ve written about before, planners failed to meet these objectives, although these decisions have long since been overshadowed by those of their 20th century successors.

Charlie also notes that many great, dense, walkable cities around the world devote about 25% of their land to streets, yet many American downtowns use a much higher percentage of their land to streets.

Some of those numbers might depend on the exact method of accounting. While Charlie’s estimate for downtown DC shows 43% of the land used for streets, DC’s comprehensive plan shows approximately 26% for the city as a whole:

Land Use Distribution in DC, from DC’s 2006 Comprehensive Plan.

The graphic doesn’t specify if the street figure refers to street right of way, or just the carriageway portion of the street, but not the ‘parking area.‘ Seattle’s planning documents also showa similar pattern: 26% of land city-wide used for streets, but also a higher percentage of downtown land devoted to streets.

Seattle land use distribution by neighborhood. Image from Seattle’s 2005 Comprehensive Plan.

The Seattle calculation looks at land devoted to right of way for streets, rather than just impervious surface.

Making better or different use of existing right of way is one thing; however, once that right of way is set, it is very difficult to change. Transportation networks awfully path dependent. Chris Bradford looks at Austin’s post-war planning and the abandonment of the street grid – path dependence in action:

Back then, “planning” chiefly meant “planning streets.” It’s a shame that planning lost that focus. The street grid that permeated Austin in 1940 is of course still with us, and forms the backbone for a number of quite livable neighborhoods.

So what happened? Developers building large, planned subdivisions (Allandale, Barton Hills) continued to add decent street networks after 1940. But the City itself appears to have gotten out of the grid-planning business not long after this map was made…

Collectively, these could and should have been platted into 40 or so city blocks. Instead, they remain two big blobs of land. The lack of connectivity funnels traffic onto South Lamar and Manchaca; impedes east-west mobility, dividing eastern and western neighborhoods; forces people to make circuitous trips to run even simple errands; and forecloses any sort of low-intensity, mixed-use development in the area. Then there’s the sheer loss of public space: South Austin should have a few more miles more of public, connected streets than it has today.

Once the street grid is set, it is very difficult to change.

A visual survey of selected elevated rail viaducts: part 4 – monorails, active uses under viaducts, and precast concrete in Puerto Rico

Pulling together some suggestions from the comments of the series prologue, part 1, part 2, and part 3…

Monorails: Always popular as a technology that can reduce the visual bulk of elevated rail, Alon Levy collected some comparisons showing that purported monorail cost benefits to be mostly illusory. But what about visual bulk? Alon makes a note of the smaller required structure:

It includes a diagram of monorail structures, which can be seen to be quite light and thin. The width of the structure from guideway to guideway is 4.5 meters including both guideway widths, and including the outside appears to raise it to 5.5. Two-track elevated conventional rail structures typically range from 7 to 10.5 meters wide.

Mumbai has monorail under construction:

Mumbai monorail, under construction. CC image from Wiki.

One long-standing example is Seattle’s monorail:

Seattle Monorail, as seen from a neighboring downtown building. CC image from Bala Mainymaran

Seattle Monorail from street level. CC image from The West End.

New York: Commenter Matthew (of Walking Bostonian) offered two photos from New York of mainline rail infrastructure. The approach for the Hell Gate bridge towers over parts of Queens:

Hell Gate bridge approach. CC image from Matthew in Boston.

Another example is from the Long Island Railroad, with retail spaces crammed underneath a viaduct in Flushing, Queens:

LIRR viaduct, Flushing. CC image from Matthew in Boston.

The LIRR shows an example of re-using the space beneath a vaiduct with retail; perhaps without the architectural glamor of the archways in Berlin or Vienna. Nevertheless, it shows the potential for re-using some of the space beneath elevated rail.

Vienna: Neil Flannagan (after looking at Berlin examples) suggested Vienna:

The Queens Boulevard and Berlin examples really seem like missed opportunities we could have had in Tysons: cheap infill retail using the bridge structure as a roof. It would reduce the barrier effect of the median, focus activity near the stations, and set an example of urban form.

This was the solution nobody was looking for because we were so set on fighting out the tunnel-versus- overground plan and trying to keep the project afloat. I certainly was guilty of believing that no viaduct could be attractive, and kept arguing for a tunnel. I was looking at the types without considering design. It’s the same trap that NIMBYs do, wanting to minimize the impact by making a building smaller, rather than better. Damn. Looking outside of the box is why Jarrett Walker is so great.

I would really take a look at Otto Wagner’s Wiener Stadtbahn. The infrastructure is pretty street-friendly. It’s also very well designed, particularly the bridge over the Wienzeile.

Some images from Vienna:

Vienna viaduct and bridge structures, with retail spaces beneath. CC image from Wiki.

Retail beneath a viaduct in Vienna. CC image from Wiki.

San Juan, Puerto Rico: San Juan’s Tren Urbano was also mentioned in the comments. Google does not have streetview images in San Juan, but a brief Flickr search for CC images turns up the following examples of the system’s elevated structures:

Tren Urbano. CC image from I Am Rob.

Panorama of the Torrimar Tren Urbano station. CC image from davsot.

Tren Urbano. CC image from Paul Sableman.

Table of contents:

Housing demand and the regulatory path of least resistance: Seattle and microapartments

Seattle Space Needle. Photo by author.

The feature piece in The Stranger last month delved deeply into Seattle’s trend of micro-apartments. Dominic Holden offers an in-depth look at not just the development trends, but the politics of the policy and planning conversation around development in an expanding city.

A few things popped out:

Room for rent: The article describes Seattle’s micro-apartments like this:

But inside each town house, the developer was building up to eight tiny units (about 150 to 250 square feet each, roughly the size of a carport) to be rented out separately. The tenants would each have a private bathroom and kitchenette, with a sink and microwave, but they would share one full kitchen for every eight residents. The rent would be cheap—starting at $500 a month, including all utilities and Wi-Fi—making this essentially affordable housing in the heart of the city.

If that sounds familiar, it should – it’s a situation similar to what already happens in big cities – renting a room in a group house. For a fraction of cost of a studio or 1-bedroom apartment, you can instead rent a room in a shared house. Considering that comparison, there is clearly a market for these kinds of spaces, and it’s not exactly new.

It ain’t much, but it’s home: While the rise of micro apartments is in the news in Seattle, it’s not a new thing for cities. Single-room occupancy (SRO) apartments have a long history in cities. The Blues Brothers highlighted this housing typology in their 1980 homage to the city of Chicago (“how often does the train go by?” – “so often you won’t even notice it.”).

Chicago’s WBEZ documented the dwindling numbers of SROs in the city, noting how this particular form of affordable housing has served a different market of individuals than the kinds of tenants mentioned in Seattle:

The Chateau is among the city’s shrinking pool of single-room occupancy hotels (map below), which offer an important housing option for people with low- and fixed-incomes. SROs also serve clients with troubled credit or criminal histories. The North Side has long been an SRO hub, but in recent years many such buildings have been purchased by developers and closed, only to reopen as more expensive housing — often beyond the means of prior tenants. Some SRO residents and community organizers worry the Chateau Hotel might be the next building in this trend.

The key difference is in the level of maintenance, and thus the target market. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to see how micro-apartments like likes in Chicago or the new construction in Seattle would appeal to a number of potential markets. None other than The Stranger’s own Dan Savage makes note that he lived in an SRO when first moving to Seattle, and “I wasn’t sketchy then, I’m not sketchy now.”

As a part of re-evaluating the SRO’s sketchy reputation, Next City focused on the role this type of housing can have in the future of our cities.

Meeting housing demand: As Holden notes, a dynamic and expanding city like Seattle needs room to grow, and needs opportunities for a wide range of incomes. He also makes note of the only sure-fire way American cities have to meet growing demand post-WWII – sprawl. “Accommodating our growing population by shipping workers into the low-density sprawl of the exurbs is not the way a city should operate.”

This isn’t unique to Seattle. Other cities (including New York and DC) are struggling to meet the demand for housing, and are considering micro apartments as one potential solution.

The politics of neighborhood opposition: Holden’s Stranger article offers a fascinating dive into the politics of those opposed to these projects. Holden examines the stated objections to these projects (which include everything but the kitchen sink – or, in the case of complaints about shared kitchens, why not bring it up?) and finds most opponents to be “dramatically exaggerating” the impacts. “Tick through the neighborhood groups’ complaints,” he writes, “and they don’t add up to a logical argument.”

The two issues in opposition that Holden deems to have legs deal with a tax break loophole for these developments and an exemption from the city’s normal design review process (more on this later). The principal objection is that the apartments count as many units for the purposes of a tax break, but few units to avoid the threshold for additional design review scrutiny.

Holden’s article goes into substantial detail about his interactions with some of the individuals and groups in opposition, highlighting a kind of fanaticism. Even without the crazy elements, the strength of the opposition and relative lack of proponents involved in the discussion shows the kind of game theory challenge for urban development regulations – opposition is strong, but only in a narrow segment of the population; support is broad, but few individuals feel the need to organize in favor of developments like micro apartments. The existing legal procedures favor the organized, and therefore give organized groups leverage in discussions.

The limits of design review: While a procedural loophole exempts micro-apartments in Seattle from design review (and Holden flags this as a legitimate complaint from opponents), there are limits to what such reviews can accomplish. Holden notes that such reviews in Seattle are largely administrative. He also ferrets out the intentions of those pushing for design review: “What public reviews will do is give activists a chance to obstruct microhousing by quibbling with the appearance.”

Holden understands the importance of process, and the cost it can impose on any new development. Since developers must (at a minimum) cover their costs to even entertain a proposed project, any increase in procedural time and costs means those costs must eventually be baked into the cost of the final product.

If the city pursues design and environmental reviews—which could improve the aesthetics and aren’t inherently flawed processes—they should be administrative reviews. They should be conducted by city staff who notify the public but limit input to letters in writing. They shouldn’t involve neighborhood meetings that are easily sidetracked, shouldn’t require multiple revisions to the architecture, and shouldn’t allow appeals.

If the public is allowed to obstruct these projects—and their arguments thus far have been specious—the results will be predictable: Every time developers must redesign the buildings to satisfy the neighbors, every time the project is delayed for further review, every time a spurious appeal is filed, the more it costs to build that project. And that has one predictable outcome: It will make them more expensive to rent, i.e., fewer people will be able to afford them. In other words, whether deliberate or not, the effect of neighborhood advocacy and its input on development projects will make living in these places more expensive and push out workers with less money. That would seem like a terrible mistake—unless pushing out poor people is the actual goal.

Development following the path of least resistance: Given the increasing costs of compliance with the regulations and procedures, it’s not hard to understand why so much real estate development seeks to follow the path of least resistance.

Leaving aside the question of whether micro-apartments are a worthy policy for cities to pursue (as opposed to other expansions of zoning allowances), it does show the catch-22 inherent in things like design review: the additional regulatory review is required because the outcome those reviews shape is a desirable policy goal – but the very cost of the review makes achieving those desired outcomes less likely.

The ideal would be a case where the desired outcome is prioritized, given the path of least resistance. Holden’s discussion of keeping reviews administrative and not subject to lengthy public hearings and appeals is an example. I suspect that (with the exception of some special cases), changing the outcomes from the path of least resistance cannot be accomplished through de-regulation alone.

However, the larger question looms in the background: what agreement is there about the most desired outcomes?

What would land use regulatory reform look like?

Law Library. CC image from Janet Lindenmuth

Via the always interesting Land Use Law Professors blog, I came across this summary from interfluidity (written by Steve Waldman) of the main points of Avent, Glaeser, and Yglesias. Dubbed the econourbanists, Waldman summarizes their arguments:

In a nutshell, the econourbanists’ case is pretty simple: Cities are really important, as engines of the broad economy via industrial clustering, as enablers of efficiency-enhancing specialization and trade, as sources of customers to whom each of us might sell services. Contrary to many predictions, technological change seems to be making human density more rather than less important to prosperity in the developed world… The value of human work is increasingly in collaborative information production and direct personal services, all of which benefit from the proximity of diverse multitudes. Unfortunately, in the United States at least, actual patterns of demographic change have involved people moving away from high density, high productivity cities and towards the suburbanized sunbelt, where the weather is nice and the housing is cheap. This “moving to stagnation”, in Avent’s memorable phrase, constitutes a macroeconomic problem whose microeconomic cause can be found in regulatory barriers that keep dense and productive cities prohibitively expensive for most people to live in. It is not that people are “voting with their feet” because they dislike New York living. If people didn’t want to live in New York, housing would be cheap there. It isn’t cheap. Housing costs are stratospheric, despite the chilly winters. People are voting with their pocketbooks when they flee to the sun. (“The rent is too damned high!”) Exurban refugees would rush back, and our general prosperity would increase, if the clear demand for high-density urban living could be met with an inexpensive supply of housing and transportation. The technology to provide inexpensive, high quality urban housing is readily available. If “the market” were not frustrated by regulatory barriers and “NIMBY” politics, profit-seeking housing developers would build to sell into expensive markets, and this problem would solve itself.

Waldman, however, is skeptical of how effective these solutions would be:

One should always be careful of claims that problems could be solved if only we “let the market do its work”. I don’t mean to go all PoMo, but to the degree that there exists an institution we might refer to as “the market”, it is doing its work and it is not doing the work Ygesias and Avent ask of it.

Far be it from me to play down the role of unintended consequences. However, what would ‘letting the market do its work’ actually look like? Letting the market work isn’t a binary choice, either – our housing and real estate markets “work” now in one fashion under a certain regulatory regime, and they would continue to do so in a changed regulatory environment – perhaps with wild changes in outcomes, or perhaps not.

The most likely outcomes, however, would be via incremental changes to the regulatory process – not fundamental ones. In The Atlantic Cities, Charles Wolfe discusses proposed land use reforms in Seattle, such as:

Allow Small Commercial Uses in Multifamily Zones and Bring Back the Corner Store

Concentrate Street-Level Commercial Uses in Core Pedestrian Zones Near Transit and Allow Residential, Live-Work or Commercial Uses in Other Areas Based on Market Demand

Enhance the Flexibility of Parking Requirements

Change Environmental Review Thresholds

Encourage Home Entrepreneurship

Expand Options for Accessory Dwelling Units and Rental Incomes

Expand Allowance of Temporary Uses

These are the kinds of reforms that stand realistic chances of approval. They are marginal changes, tweaks to regulations that loosen some aspects and tighten others. Allowing small-scale commercial uses and home entrepreneurship in residential zones is a minor change in the allowed uses; legalizing accessory dwelling units is a minor change to allowed unit densities (and not necessarily a change in built space); adjusting thresholds for environmental review is a matter of process.

Waldman argues that the “thicket” of zoning and process is a de facto property right for a landowner, ensuring controlled change under certain parameters for the surrounding land – and that changing these de facto rights is not easy, nor should it be:

If we reform away urban zoning restrictions, are we going to invalidate the restrictive covenants of suburban developments? Affluent urban property owners would have almost certainly evolved institutions that perform the functions of community associations if they were not able to rely upon the good offices of municipal government for the same. If restrictions on higher-density development are illegitimate, then should the state refuse to enforce such restrictions when they are embedded in private contracts? Perhaps the answer is an enthuastic “Yes!” After all, over the last 60 years, the state intervened very nobly to eliminate a “property right” enshrined in restrictive covenants and designed to exclude people of certain races from their neighborhoods. Three-thousand cheers for that! But state refusal to enforce previously legal contracts sounds a lot less like “letting the market work” and a lot more like deliberate government action.

This passage raises two issues. First, as seen in the Seattle example, no reformer is realistically proposing to reform away all zoning restrictions. Indeed, many of the proposed solutions actually involve changing the processes involved in making those decisions (and adjusting them over time) to allow for more incremental changes over time.

In other cases, legitimate concerns are often mis-matched with the available regulatory tools. Zoning can easily regulate form, and more broadly, use – but is it the proper mechanism to regulate the locations of yoga studios (bonus points for headline puns)? Historic preservation processes can easily be co-opted out of a broader desire for some kind of design review, as another example.

Second, the idea of some ideal, free-market outcome is misplaced. There’s no doubt that the forms of our cities are shaped by all kinds of regulation and legal structure. Rather than pushing the result of reform as a move towards some free(r) market ideal, I think these attempts at reform instead reflect a growing understanding of how markets work and how market forces can be used in public policy (see Chris Bradford on the role of economics education in urban planning and other public policy professions).

Likewise, the move towards using market forces to better allocate scarce parking resources in San Francisco is perfectly valid, if not economically pure. At Market Urbanism, Emily Washington summarizes this disconnect:

He points out that assigning prices to spots is not equivalent to allowing a market to determine a price. For a real price to emerge capital (the parking space) cannot be state-owned.

Sandy points out that the “shortage” of parking arises because no one owns street parking, so the appropriate incentives are not in place for someone to charge an equilibrium price for parking. While the San Francisco program may be a step in the right direction, he explains that “more intervention usually doesn’t solve the problems that were themselves the result of a prior intervention.” In this case, the city is trying to set a price for something that it could instead auction off to eliminate the original intervention.

I’d reject that view. As ‘Danny’ notes in the comments, the government can be (and is) an economic actor. The goal with SF Park isn’t to “eliminate the original intervention,” but rather to better manage on-street parking. The goal is inherently about incremental change, and that’s what any realistic regulatory reform will also look like.

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.

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.

City Block

a work in progress…