Tag Archives: Smart Growth

Searching for suburbia’s new business plan: Fairfax Co, VA edition

Fairfax County Ambulance. Image from Elvert Barnes.

Fairfax County Ambulance. Image from Elvert Barnes.

The front page of Sunday’s Washington Post (below the fold) featured this article on the fiscal challenges facing Fairfax County, VA. No longer the bleeding edge of the suburban frontier in Northern Virginia, Fairfax County now must deal with the rising costs of maintaining the lifestyle it marketed to residents: good schools, good parks, low taxes and low density.

Antonio Olivo writes:

A population that is growing older, poorer and more diverse is sharpening the need for basic services in what is still the nation’s second-wealthiest county, even as a sluggish local economy maintains a chokehold on the revenue stream.

Since the 2008 recession, local officials have whittled away at programs to the tune of $300 million. They now say that there is no fat left to trim.

Instead, they are searching for ways to raise taxes, draw new businesses and revitalize worn neighborhoods. Their effort mirrors the struggle of aging suburban communities nationwide, as a turn-of-the century economic boom settles into a sluggish post-recession status quo.

Few greenfield development opportunities remain; the county’s older facilities are at the end of their useful lifespans and must be replaced. Demographics are changing. Now the bill is coming due. Fairfax is coming to terms with what Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns termed the suburban growth ponzi scheme.

Olivo’s article highlights several anecdotes of the fiscal struggle:

  • Shorter hours of operation for libraries
  • Deferred maintenance for government vehicles
  • Shrinking benefits for public school employees
  • Growing backlog of park maintenance needs

The basic business model for suburban places like Fairfax relied on low costs to provide a high quality of services at low tax rates and with relatively low productivity from the land (e.g. low density development). As those once high-quality facilities need replacement, as operating costs rise, the business model previously fueled by growth on the suburban edge has no place left to go.

Some of those amenities seem wildly implausible today: eight different Fairfax high schools had planetariums built into the structures:

Fairfax built state-of-the-art planetariums at eight of its high schools decades ago, an embodiment of the county’s belief that the sky was the limit.

Now the equipment is out of date… Astronomy teacher Lee Ann Hennig has been promised a new digital projector for the planetarium at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, part of a $90 million renovation project that, among other things, is supposed to bring new labs for neuroscience and oceanography to the elite magnet school.

When part of the attraction of suburbia is getting more for your money – more square footage, a bigger yard, a bigger garage – it’s not hard to see that mentality of suburban excess creep into government spending. Installing a planetarium in each of eight (“the greatest concentration of planetaria in the United States except for Dallas, Texas”) high schools instead of funding one facility and send students on occasional field trips? It’s not only a large capital cost, but the indefinite obligation to maintain and operate those facilities.

In addition to those challenges on the cost side, Fairfax is facing revenue pressures as well. Homeowners are weary of property tax increases, and commercial property tax revenues have yet to fully recover from the Great Recession:

Cuts in federal spending — about $1.5 billion less in Fairfax than in 2010 — have emptied out office buildings, leading to a 16.5 percent vacancy rate that is the highest since the 1991 recession. Since 2013, commercial property taxes have dropped $23.2 million.

Much of that drop in commercial property value is tied to the massive shift in favor of Metro-accessible office locations and walkable places – away from suburban office parks. Fairfax is wisely focusing redevelopment of their metro-accessible places into a denser, more fiscally sustainable urban model, but this is big lift.

And demographics are changing: there’s more poverty, more diversity, and an older, grayer population. This mirrors national trends (for more, see this three part series from Amanda Kolson Hurley in Citylab; including an interview with Myron Orfield, a scholar who has long forecast the need for a change in the suburban business model).

Fairfax is left with three basic options:

  1. Urbanize: redevelop in a denser, more efficient pattern (both for tax revenues and for providing services)
  2. Raise taxes to continue providing high quality services, despite increasing costs
  3. Muddle through

The most likely path will involve bits from all three. Fairfax is lucky to have some assets to urbanize around and a stronger regional real estate market to fuel that transformation; other suburban jurisdictions around the US aren’t so lucky.

The power of skyscrapers

Chicago SkylineChicago skyline CC image from 1’UP on flickr

Several friends have pointed me to this Atlantic piece by Ed Glaeser on the power of skyscrapers and density in shaping the city, and the role cities play in our economy.  Some snippets:

On the micromanagement of zoning codes:

New York slowed its construction of skyscrapers after 1933, and its regulations became ever more complex. Between 1916 and 1960, the city’s original zoning code was amended more than 2,500 times. In 1961, the City Planning Commission passed a new zoning resolution that significantly increased the limits on building. The resulting 420-page code replaced a simple classification of space—business, residential, unrestricted—with a dizzying number of different districts, each of which permitted only a narrow range of activities. There were 13 types of residential district, 12 types of manufacturing district, and no fewer than 41 types of commercial district.

Each type of district narrowly classified the range of permissible activities. Commercial art galleries were forbidden in residential districts but allowed in manufacturing districts, while noncommercial art galleries were forbidden in manufacturing districts but allowed in residential districts. Art-supply stores were forbidden in residential districts and some commercial districts. Parking-space requirements also differed by district. In an R5 district, a hospital was required to have one off-street parking spot for every five beds, but in an R6 district, a hospital had to have one space for every eight beds.

On gentrification, growth, and the hidden costs of height limits and other restrictions:

The relationship between housing supply and affordability isn’t just a matter of economic theory. A great deal of evidence links the supply of space with the cost of real estate. Simply put, the places that are expensive don’t build a lot, and the places that build a lot aren’t expensive. Perhaps a new 40-story building won’t itself house any quirky, less profitable firms, but by providing new space, the building will ease pressure on the rest of the city. Price increases in gentrifying older areas will be muted because of new construction. Growth, not height restrictions and a fixed building stock, keeps space affordable and ensures that poorer people and less profitable firms can stay and help a thriving city remain successful and diverse. Height restrictions do increase light, and preservation does protect history, but we shouldn’t pretend that these benefits come without a cost.

On the inherent dynamism of cities and the shapes of growth:

Great cities are not static—they constantly change, and they take the world along with them. When New York and Chicago and Paris experienced great spurts of creativity and growth, they reshaped themselves to provide new structures that could house new talent and new ideas. Cities can’t force change with new buildings—as the Rust Belt’s experience clearly shows. But if change is already happening, new building can speed the process along.

Yet many of the world’s old and new cities have increasingly arrayed rules that prevent construction that would accommodate higher densities. Sometimes these rules have a good justification, such as preserving truly important works of architecture. Sometimes, they are mindless NIMBYism or a misguided attempt at stopping urban growth. In all cases, restricting construction ties cities to their past and limits the possibilities for their future. If cities can’t build up, then they will build out. If building in a city is frozen, then growth will happen somewhere else.

It’s a fantastic read.  I imagine this piece is a prelude for Glaeser’s recently released book, “The Triumph of the City.”  I will have to pick up a copy.

Weekend Reading

CC image from sabeth718

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: