Tag Archives: Unintended Consequences

A machine to make the land pay

Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building. CC image from Wiki.

Cass Gilbert famously defined a skyscraper as “a machine that makes the land pay,” the kind of structure justified (and often required) by high land values. Gilbert’s distillation of the logic behind these buildings is inherently economic (hat tip to Kazys Varnelis):

Speaking of such enterprises from the financial aspect it is a rule that holds almost invariably that where the building costs less than the land, if properly managed, it is a success and where its costs more than the land it is usually a failure. The land value is established by its location and desirability from a renter’s standpoint hence high rentals make high land values and conversely. The building is merely the machine that makes the land pay. The more economical the machine both in construction and operation provided it fulfills the needs the more profitable the land. At the same time one must not lose sight of the fact that the machine is none the less a useful one because it has a measure of beauty and that architectural beauty judged even from the economic standpoint has an income bearing value.

The economic logic still holds. For private development, you need a building that can make the land pay. The challenge, however, is when such a building isn’t feasible – or isn’t allowed. Consider the dilemma of high land prices, high construction costs, and zoning that constrains the allowable building space. Payton Chung raises this issue, investigating why DC doesn’t see more affordable mid-rise construction:

The Height Act limit for construction in outlying parts of Washington, DC, enacted back in 1899, is 90′ — effectively 7-8 stories. This particular height poses a particularly vexing cost conundrum for developers seeking to build workforce housing in DC’s neighborhoods, since it’s just beyond one of the key cost thresholds in development: that between buildings supported with light frames vs. heavy frames…

In most other cities, the obvious solution is to go ever higher. Once a building crosses into high-rise construction, the sky’s ostensibly the limit. In theory, density can be increased until the additional space brings in enough revenue to more than offset the higher costs. As Linsey Isaacs writes in Multifamily Executive: ”Let’s say you have a property on an urban infill site that costs $100 per square foot of land. Wood may cost 10 percent less than its counterpart materials, but by doing a high-rise on the site, you get double the density and the land cost is cut in half.”

In other words, the cost of building taller is not linear. Once you enter the realm of Type I construction, the marginal cost of an additional floor is relatively low. However, Type I construction is substantially more expensive in DC than the mid-rise methods; and many of the 7-9 story buildings ubiqitous in DC fall into the range that require more expensive construction methods, yet do not allow for the kind of height/density those structures can achieve.

The challenge, Payton notes, is where land is pricey enough to justify high-rise densities, but rents in that area cannot support the construction cost. It’s DC’s version of ‘the viability trap.‘

There are a few options to break the logjam: lowering construction costs, and adjusting policies. Payton makes the case for new building technology to lower construction costs – prefabrication, new materails, and so on. Each holds the promise of decreasing construction costs. In the policy realm, reducing the required parking can also substantially reduce costs, providing a pathway out of the viability trap.

For real-world examples, consider Metro’s recent request for development proposals for station-adjacent land the agency owns. Metro’s requirement that the developer replace 422 parking spaces at Fort Totten (in addition to parking required by zoning and/or demanded by the market) likely pushed any development proposal beyond feasibility. That parcel didn’t get any bids. In practice, this isn’t any different from a large minimum parking requirement via the zoning code.

Another policy change is increasing the allowed height and density. In DC’s consideration of altering the city’s height limit, the benefits of scale with taller construction become apparent:

Per square foot construction costs for new office and apartment buildings at 130, 160, 200 and 250 feet peak at 200 feet but begin to decrease at 250 feet due to cost efficiencies that occur at taller heights. Beyond the cost of construction, other conditions need to be in place to make it financially attractive for a developer or property owner to be willing to tear down an existing building with tenants and build new and taller. These conditions include a substantial increase in rentable space due to taller height; the potential for higher rents; major leases expiring or the opportunity to attract a new anchor tenant; or the need for major investment into an obsolete building. There are also a number of constraints that affect new construction, such as the need to pre-lease a major portion of a new building to obtain financing and the inadequacies of existing transportation and utility infrastructure.

A few feet of height can make a big difference.

Driverless cars: implications for city planning and urban transportation

Nevada autonomous vehicle license plate. CC image from National Museum of American History.

Building on the implications of driverless cars on car ownership, as well as the notion that planners aren’t preparing for the rise of autonomous vehicles, I wanted to dive further into potential implications of widespread adoption of the technology. Nat Bottigheimer in Greater Greater Washington argues that city planning as a profession is unprepared for autonomous vehicles:

Self-driving cars address many of the safety and travel efficiency objections that Smart Growth advocates often make about road expansion, or the use of limited street space.

Part of Bottingheimer’s concern is a lack of quantitative analysis, particularly as it relates to the impacts of self-driving cars. However, the real debate is about qualitative values that feed into our analysis.

The officials responsible for parking lot and garage building, transit system growth, bike lane construction, intersection expansions, sidewalk improvements, and road widenings need to analyze quantitatively how self-driving cars could affect their plans, and to prepare alternatives in case things change.

There is one over-arching problem with this approach: our current quantitative analysis all too often is nothing but bad pseudo-science. Donald Shoup has extensively documented the problems with minimum parking requirements in zoning codes, for example. Here, poor policy with vast unintended consequences is based on some level of flawed quantitative analysis, the kind that does not acknowledge the inherent uncertainty in our understanding or ability to project the future. Instead, the analysis is based on assumptions, yet the assumptions are really value-laden statements that carry a great deal of weight.

Even the very structure of the planning and regulation for the future carries a bias: a requirement to provide parking spaces in anticipation of future demand will, by nature, ignore the complexity of the marketplace for off-street parking and the natural range of parking demand.

Bottigheimer is also concerned about the impacts of self-driving cars on future land use forecasts:

Planners need to examine how travel forecasting tools that are based on current patterns of car ownership and use will need to change to adapt to new statistical relationships between population, car ownership, trip-making, car-sharing, and travel patterns.

By all means, we need to adjust our forecasting tools. However, we shouldn’t be doing so simply based on the arrival of a new technology. We should adjust them because they’re not particularly accurate and their erroneous projections have large impacts on how we plan. Driverless cars aren’t the problem here. The problem is in our assumptions, our inaccurate analysis, and our decision-making processes that rely on such erroneous projections.

Leaving the limitations of quantitative analysis aside for the moment, we can still hypothesize (qualitatively, perhaps) about the future world of driverless cars. Assuming that autonomous vehicles do indeed reduce car ownership and begin to serve as robo-taxis, we can sketch out plausible scenarios for the future. We assume car ownership will decrease, but vehicle-miles traveled may increase.

City Planning and Street Design:

One of Bottigheimer’s chief concerns is that “planners and placemaking advocates will need to step up their game” given the potential benefits for safety, increased car capacity,

As mentioned above, much of the ‘safety’ benefits are about cars operating in car-only environments (e.g. highways), when the real safety challenges are in streets with mixed traffic: pedestrians, bikes, cars, and buses all sharing the same space. In this case, the values planners and placemaking advocates are pushing for remain the same, regardless of who – or what – is driving the cars. The laws of physics won’t change; providing a safe environment for pedestrians will still be based on the lowest common denominator for safe speeds, etc.

The biggest concern should be in the environments that aren’t highways, yet aren’t city streets, either. Will driverless cars forever push stroads into highway territory? Borrowing Jarrett Walker’s phrasing, technology can’t change geometry, except in some cases at the margins.

Instead of a technical pursuit of maximum vehicle throughput (informed by quantitative analysis), the real question is one of values. The values that inform planning for a place or a street will set the tone for the quantitative analysis that follows. Maximizing vehicle throughput is not a neutral, analytical goal.

Congestion:

Congestion is a more interesting case, as it will still be an economic problem – centralized control might help mitigate some traffic issues, but it doesn’t solve the fundamental economic conundrum of congestion. Here, too, the economic solutions in a world of human-driven cars will have the same framework as one with computers behind the wheel.

Driverless cars might change the exact price points, but they don’t alter the basic logic behind congestion-mitigation measures like a cordon charge in London or Stockholm, or like Uber’s surge pricing (efficient and rational as it might be, but perhaps too honest). Again, technology can’t fundamentally change geometry. Cars will still be cars, and even if driverless cars improve on the current capacity limitations of highways, they do not eliminate such constraints.

Qualitative Concerns:

Instead of twisting ourselves in knots over projections about the future that are sure to be wrong, planning for autonomous cars should instead focus on the values and the kind of places we want to plan for. We should adjust our policies to embrace the values of the communities (which alone is a challenging process). We should be aware about the poor accuracy of forecasts and work to build policies with the flexibility to adapt.

The Unwinding: Erosion of our institutions and the concern that you picked the wrong profession

I’m working through my pile of books I collected at the end of the year. I just finished George Packer’s The Unwinding, a book telling the story of the Great Recession through the eyes of several main characters (factory worker turned organizer Tammy Thomas; civil servant turned lobbyist turned civil servant again Jeff Connaughton; truck stop owner turned biodiesel entrepreneur Dean Price) as well as vignettes of famous ones (Jay-Z, Oprah, Robert Rubin, Elizabeth Warren, among others).

The fourth main character in Packer’s story isn’t a single person, but the story of Tampa, Florida. Packer weaves several individuals together as a part of the storyline, including Mike Van Sickler. Van Sickler now writes for the Tampa Bay Times’ Tallahassee bureau, but reported extensively on foreclosures, mortgage robo-signing, and general planning and development issues in sprawling Tampa. Packer introduces Van Sickler, the journalist who once pondered a career change:

When he was covering city hall at The Palm Beach Post, he’d gotten deeply interested in urban planning – for a while he even thought about switching careers, until he realized that city planners had even less clout than reporters.

I had mixed emotions reading this. It’s a shot at my chosen profession that strikes awfully close to home, but also because it speaks to the challenges facing our institutions across the board – not just those involved in planning, development, and all things urban. It’s one of those uncomfortable statements we know to be true.

Packer’s focus on narrative means telling the story from the viewpoint of the characters, rather than offering an overarching analytical framework. This approach threw off Chris Lehmann (“a chronicle of the fraying of our productive lives that shuns cogent ideological or political explanations of the causes of our present crisis in favor of a thick narrative description of its symptoms”), accusing Packer of letting Robert Rubin off too easily for his role in the unwinding.

Lehmann clearly doesn’t prefer the subtlety of Packer’s method, using the perspective of different characters to critique someone like Rubin, rather than state so explicitly. Packer isn’t trying to be Chris Hayes (another good read, by the way) and lay out a theory of institutional decline. Even for Lehmann, however, adding Van Sickler’s character to the story helped provide some critical thinking:

Van Sickler’s story led to a high-profile federal indictment of Kim on money laundering and fraud charges, but the reporter wasn’t satisfied. He pushed against the complacent truisms about the mortgage meltdown that were being retailed by the other prominent outposts of his profession: “We don’t know why, we just got really greedy, and everybody wanted a house they couldn’t afford,” he says, summing up the prevailing consensus in the mediasphere. Van Sickler adds, “I think that’s lazy journalism. That’s a talking point for politicians who want to look the other way. We’re not all to blame for this.”

After Kim pleaded guilty, the United States attorney for Florida’s Middle District announced that more indictments, of far bigger fish in the mortgage food chain, were in the offing. They never came. “Where are the big arrests?” Van Sickler wonders. “Where are the bankers, the lawyers, the real estate professionals?” Packer finishes the thought for him, in a refrain his readers by now know quite well: “Kim was just one piece of a network—what about the institutions?”

Of course, urban planning isn’t separate from the unwinding. The foreclosure crisis, sprawl, and the decline of the middle class are all linked and all have spatial consequences. And these outcomes are all shaped by our institutions, often with substantial unintended consequences. Perhaps that was part of Van Sickler’s hesitation about a career change. What does that say about the planner’s role, both operating within our institutions and outside of them?

A country of hyperdense cities

“How to build good cities,” from Vishaan Chakrabarti’s ‘A Country of Cities.’

Well, that was fast.

Based on the heft of my gift, I expected to take more time to read through Vishaan Chakrabarti’s A Country of Cities. The book, however, is wonderfully illustrated and laid out, thanks to Chakrabarti’s firm, SHoP (for a sampling of the illustrations and an essay adapted from the book, see Chakrabarti’s piece in Design Observer). All those illustrations make a hefty book into a rather quick read.

Chakrabarti paints a wonderful picture of the virtues of dense, urban places. Hyperdensity isn’t so hyper anything, merely the kind of density sufficient to support subway transit. While his vision of and advocacy for dense cities is persuasive, Chakrabarti’s specific policy recommendations are not new: massive investments in urban-focused infrastructure (subways, transit, high speed rail) as well as a more broadly defined “infrastructure of opportunity” of schools and parks. This would be financed by eliminating subsidies for oil, utilizing revenue from cap and trade of carbon emissions, and eliminating the mortgage interest deduction. He proposes to allow the market to provide additional housing and density that can support expensive transit infrastructure via the implementation of “cap and trade zoning.”

After reading the book, however, the original criticism remains: feasibility. I find Chakrabarti’s call for density persuasive, but I wouldn’t shape the message with terms like ‘hyperdensity.’ His ideas on reforming the zoning process are interesting, yet the basic mechanisms for reform are difficult to execute. DC is closing in on year seven of a zoning regulations review – and the proposed revisions focus mostly on structural changes and do not take on the task of upzoning. In the meantime, the unintended consequences of existing planning and zoning procedure are adding up.

Any conversations about re-shaping the city (and removing certain legal constraints such as DC’s federal law against tall buildings) aren’t focused on the benefits of hyperdensity, but on the required procedural changes and need to amend DC’s comprehensive plan for future upzoning to take effect. At the same time, WMATA is pushing a concept for additional subway capacity at the core of the system. Their efforts are constrained by regulations that link land use plans to transportation investments, thus Metro can only plan new subway lines in the limited areas already designated for what Chakrabarti would call hyperdensity.

Linking land use intensity and transportation investment is a good idea, but codifying the concept into regulations opens the door for unintended consequences. The chicken can’t happen without the egg, the transit agency can’t plan subways without supportive land use, the planners need infrastructure before they can add density. The idea of connecting transit to land use isn’t the problem. The challenge is in implementing the concept, adjusting the regulations, and amending the procedures that shape how we build cities.

More federal funding for infrastructure isn’t a novel idea, either – but the prospect for action from Congress seems unlikely at best. Similarly, phasing out the mortgage interest deduction isn’t a new idea, either – but it seems to hold sacred status on Capitol Hill.

This isn’t to discount Chakrabarti’s ideas. His argument for urbanism is persuasive, the broad brushstrokes of his policy agenda are fine. However, the procedural, legal, and political changes required to implement the agenda are missing. Consider the comparison of affordable housing and rental apartments in suburban New Jersey to suburban Long Island: it’s hardly an embrace of hyperdensity, nor is it an unvarnished success, but the limited improvements in adding density and fighting against exclusionairy zoning in New Jersey are the product of legal battles, not a comprehensive plan or master design. The same argument can apply to city building in general, where the future may lie in selling people on the need for more permissive rules/regulations and letting cities evolve, rather than simply selling them on the benefits of hyperdensity.

The real question, however, is if we’d ever see such legal and regulatory battles without this kind of manifesto to rally around.

(note: the book has been added to the reading list)

Speed, urban transportation and geometry heuristics

Following up on this previous post, noting that “transport is mostly a real estate problem” – a few quick heuristics on cities, speed, and space:

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

Regarding speed:

Speed requires space; faster travel occupies a larger area than slower travel.

Speed alters our perception of space. Faster travel makes large things seem smaller (hat tip to this post from GGW for the links). The properties of the space affect how we use it and what we percieve it to be; wider roadways within streets get used for faster travel.

Regardless of speed, cars require large spaces relative to their capacity. Even when parked (v = 0), cars require lots of space. By extension, building cities around requires a completely different spatial footprint.

Regarding space:

There is a strong tendency for cities to devote about 25% of their land to streets. Street networks are for mobility, but also for access to land. Devoting too much land to streets is wasteful; too little makes it difficult to unlock the value of the land within a city.

Intersection density correlates with walkability and connectivity; wider instersection spacing correlates with the higher speed travel of cars.

Consider the relationship between the density of the network (intersection density), the tendency to use ~25% of land for streets (regardless of the density of the place), and street width on the kind of transportation.

Simply requiring some minimum intersection density for new developments via a code will still be subject to ‘gaming’ and open to unintended consequences.

Street networks are sticky and tend not to change once established; the cities that grow around them are path-dependent. However, transport networks can be layered – subways travel fast, require space and grade-separation, but deliver passengers to the street grid as pedestrians; just as freeways are layered above/below streets and deliver high volumes of cars to local streets.

While the physical space allocated to streets tends not to change, the use of that space can change a great deal over time.

Development and the path of least resistance

A quick link that builds on a couple of themes I’ve written about here – development following the path of least resistance, and the need for cities and urban areas to grow in the face of demand for additional development in those places.

Winchester, MA – aerial image from Google Maps

Zoning makes Massachusetts housing expensive – from the Boston Globe editorial board

Outside of Boston, developers often run into the challenges of regulatory requirements on new development, while city officials come to terms with the fact that the regulatory path of least resistance does not lead to the city’s desired outcomes.

Tidy downtown Winchester, just 20 minutes by train from North Station, should be a prime target for new development. According to one recent study, Greater Boston may need 19,000 new housing units every year just to keep pace with demand. And Winchester would welcome new residents: Town Manager Richard Howard says downtown restaurants and stores are eager to see new residential development on the city-owned lots, and that a planned upgrade to the commuter rail station next year could bring new vitality to downtown. The style of transit-oriented housing would also fall in line with the state’s environmental goals, which call for concentrating residential and commercial development near rail stations.

The obstacle, though, is the state’s dysfunctional ’70s-era zoning code, which sets the parameters for how individual cities and towns plan for development — and, in practice, sets up complex permitting rules and creates numerous opportunities for litigation. The process of securing approval to build new housing in downtown Winchester is so onerous, Howard says, that developers simply won’t bother. And in suburban towns where anti-development sentiment is stronger, the path is even steeper.

The end result? Most development follows the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance leads to sub-optimal outcomes:

What it amounts to is the worst of all worlds. Sensible, smart-growth housing plans often languish, while single-family homes proliferate on large lots in sprawling suburban subdivisions — one of the few types of housing that can be easily built in Massachusetts under current law. State officials rightly fear that the housing market dynamics squeeze middle-class families so much that they’re endangering the state’s economic health. It also ensures that much of the growth that does occur is unplanned, expensive, and environmentally harmful.

Matching the functional outcomes of a host of complex regulatory processes to a planning vision is difficult, but necessary. It’s also not enough to look at incentives for particular planning goals. Instead, one must look at the entire development process. One must understand the tensions within real estate investment, between city-building and financial performance, how those tensions impact the decision-making of developers, and how the regulatory process creates a choice architecture for those developers.

Development costs and housing affordability

Vancouver towers along False Creek. Photo by author.

Two competing narratives often emerge when talking about policy responses to housing costs. One asserts that lowering the costs of construction and development will allow those savings to be passed on to eventual users of the real estate; the other asserts that markets set prices, and lowering the cost of development would yield pure profit to developers who will charge what the market will bear. So, which is it? The Vancouver Sun has a series of articles on housing affordability in Vancouver, BC. One of these articles focuses on development impact fees(among other causes) and their role in affordability. The two basic narratives are on display:

“The significant cost premiums of building new homes in Vancouver, compared to Surrey, leads to two observable results,” said Anne McMullin, president and CEO of the Urban Development Institute. “Either the increased costs will inevitably be passed on to homebuyers or the viability of building new market housing will be suppressed. Regardless, the end game is a more unaffordable and less socially sustainable city.”

She says the most obvious way to address affordability is to look at the costs and supply of housing.

“Costs affect supply — if it’s too expensive to build, you’re going to limit the supply. But we still have the demand. There’s always going to be a demand — there are buyers who can afford it.”

But Brian Jackson, the City of Vancouver’s general manager of planning, says market demand drives the price of housing much more than the costs of development.

“If we took $1,000 off the cost of the CACs or we took $1,000 off the cost of the DCLs,” Jackson said, referring to two types of city development fees, “is the developer going to take $1,000 off the cost of selling the house? I don’t think they would – they’re going to get the highest price that they could.”

These two narratives aren’t necessarily at odds with one another. In the short run, a small decrease in development fees (thereby lowering the cost of development) wouldn’t likely lower costs. However, the total fee amounts per unit in Vancouver are substantial – on the order of $76,000 per unit, according to the Sun’s figures. That’s roughly equivalent to the cost of an underground parking space. If you were to remove the fees, would developers merely pocket the difference as extra profit? Recall research on the liberalization of parking space requirements in Los Angeles: removal of these requirements lowered the cost of development in Downtown LA, but the results were not merely additional profit for developers. Instead, the lower development costs allowed developers the flexibility to build for a wider variety of sub-markets and price points.

Instead of the high-cost regulations forcing them to build Cadillacs, lower costs allow them to build a wider variety of products to meet a wider range of price points. If the costs are too high, developers have little choice but to aim for the luxury submarkets.

Markets do indeed set prices; and in the short term, developers won’t necessarily lower their prices. However, the markets are deeper and more complex in the longer run and allowing flexibility to build to those submarkets will produce a wider range of products, not just catering to the luxury set. As that housing ages, it can filter to lower-priced submarkets. Filtering isn’t a set policy so much as it is a description of how housing markets work.

Note that some of these Vancouver fees might only apply to units in re-zoned developments. However, that raises the question of if there is enough by-right development capacity not just within a city or political jurisdiction, but in areas with demand for market-rate development. Also note that in many places, by-right development is increasingly rare, subject to negotiation and incentives as a part of the approvals process. A profile of New York’s Amanda Burden in last year’s New York Times noted that “there really doesn’t seem to be any true as-of-right development anymore.”

Those development fees aren’t just collected for fun, however. They’re paying for something. However, as is the case with parking, is collecting these fees the best way to accomplish the goals? Over at Human Transit, Jarrett Walker notes some of the perverse incentives baked into development fees, and the unintended consequences therein. Jarrett cites this post from the Pembina Institute, looking at the often-perverse incentives packaged into these fees:

Developers continue to build in sprawling greenfields because it is often cheaper and easier than building developments in walkable, transit-oriented neighbourhoods. Lack of supply means homebuyers are priced out of these locations and are literally “driven” to the urban and suburban fringes, where long and stressful auto commutes are required — and this only leads to more congestion.

Building transit is only one half of the solution. Toronto also needs to make sure we get the right mix of development in the right places to support and use transit infrastructure. Perhaps this current process of examining revenue tools will create an opportunity to do so.

As noted previously, a great deal of development will follow the path of least resistance. These kinds of fees might provide an easy way to fund new infrastructure, but they also add to the overall cost of development. Other tools for capturing that value and channeling it to the needed projects might offer fewer unintended consequences. One such unintended consequence is to push development into outlying areas, or force development to only serve the luxury submarket.

Density – the limitations of zoning

San Francisco. CC image from C1ssou

A few days ago, Charles Marohn posted “It’s so much more than density” on his Strong Towns blog. In it, Charles pushes back against the idea that density is good, arguing that the reality of great places is more complex. Marohn’s conclusion is spot on, but throughout his post he creates several strawmen arguments, some of which rubbed me the wrong way:

Equating planners with zoners: Charles styles this as “~~planners~~ zoners.” In this world, all planners love zoning, and love the available tools that zoning offers. In my professional experience, this is rarely the case.

I’m not sure why ~~planners~~ zoners are generally so keen on density, but they are, to the point where it often comes across as an obsession. I have a theory. I think a lot of ~~planners~~ zoners yearn to be spatial planners. They go to school to build great places. They get out into the real world and are given this ridiculously blunt instrument — zoning — and are frustrated that they can’t wield it to create Paris. Few stop to ask what zoning regulations were used to create Paris (hint: there weren’t any). Density, especially when given as a bonus for attainment of certain performance objectives, is the closest thing a modern planner zoner gets to their professional roots. We all suffer the consequences.

Perhaps it’s the personalization of this that bugs me, because the analysis of the systems is spot-on. Zoning is a blunt instrument at best, but many of my fellow planners (not merely zoners) do indeed ask about Paris. They understand the limitations of zoning. They are also constrained within the system. They make use of the tools available.

The most realisitic path to change is from within, usually via a zoning re-write like currently underway in DC, or recently completed in Philadelphia. Wholesale repeal of zoning codes seems unrealistic. Even Houston, without Euclidian use zoning still bears many of zoning’s ills through other regulations, such as parking requirements. Change in the regulatory environment is likely to be incremental.

Still, these professionals must contend with pressures on them from various stakeholders. In Philly, the city council is trying to un-do many of the recent changes. In DC, many of the bad practices Marohn decries (using the mindset of zoning as incentive rather than allowance) are urged by residents, not by planners.

Location matters: Regarding the desirability of density, there needs to be a distinction between using bonus density as an incentive and merely allowing greater density and letting the market supply it organically. Part of this confusion might stem from your frame of reference. During the rise of the housing bubble, Paul Krugman made note of America’s two distinct housing markets:

When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it’s easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don’t really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can’t even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions – hence “zoned” – makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up.

For those of us in the Zoned Zone, simply allowing for more growth (and density) will produce different results than a similar regulatort adjustment in Flatland. Anecdotes of these constraints in expensive cities abound: consider recent articles from Brooklyn and San Francisco, among others.

Marohn notes that density does not cause productivity in places; density is a byproduct of productive (and valuable) places:

A strong town — a productive place — is generally of a higher density than an unproductive place. That financial productivity, however, is not caused by the density. There is a correlation — as productivity goes up, so does density — but one does not cause the other.

Leaving aside the question of correlation vs. causation, nothing in Marohn’s post takes the context of the place and pent-up market demand into account. Two planners talking about the desirability of density could use the same argument, but the location of the planner (Flatland or the Zoned Zone) dramatically changes the impact of that argument. In Flatland, where supply is not constrained, density not supported by the market must be shaped via some sort of regulation. However, urbanists advocating for density in the Zoned Zone are often just asking to remove the constraints that make density illegal.

With that in mind, attacking planners for pushing density without considering their context and market conditions (and the nature of the intervention) can confuse the issue. There’s no doubt that incentives can backfire – zoning is a blunt tool, after all. But that’s not always the motivation when arguing in favor of more density.

Perceptions of density often miss the mark: Marohn also cites the example of urban renewal as a failure of the fetishizing of density. I’m not sure that this narrative holds up to the history, however – at least as it applies to the density of urban renewal projects. As I’ve written before, perceptions of density are often well off from the reality.

This isn’t to endorse either the process or product of urban renewal, but the goals of those projects were often aimed at reducing density and overcrowding.

Beware unintendend consequences: As I noted at the top of this post, I don’t disagree with Marohn’s conclusion at all:

Ultimately, the notion that we can solve the problems that we face in our cities by simply increasing the density requirement in our zoning codes is not just naive, it is dead wrong. Density is an expected byproduct of a successful place, not the implement by which we create one. Building a Strong Towns is a complex undertaking, one that defies a professional silo or a simple solution.

More on Marohn’s follow-up, Density Redux, to follow…

Parking, misunderstood

CC image from Atomic Taco

Let’s take a trip up and down the Northeast Corridor and look at recent parking news. All three show some misunderstandings about parking, cities, and markets. Time for some Shoup reading assignments!

New York: Looking to discuss changes to the zoning code parking requirements in downtown Brooklyn, the New York Times comes down with a severe case of windshield-itis:

In traffic-clogged New York City, where parking spaces are coveted like the rarest of treasures, an excess of parking spaces might seem like an urban planner’s dream.

Yet city officials, developers and transit advocates say that in Downtown Brooklyn, there is this most unusual of parking problems: There is simply too much of it.

Admittedly, many urban planning principles seem counter-intuitive at first glance. When you add in the challenge of altering a regulatory status quo (such as modestly changing the zoning code, as is proposed in Brooklyn), the weight of conventional wisdom is enormous.

Still, it’s interesting to see a parking glut framed as an “urban planner’s dream.’ (particularly when compared against later articles from DC) It’s sure not my dream, either in terms of result (excess parking) or process (via the unintended consequences of regulation). Building parking is expensive, so we don’t want to build too much of it. Requiring us to build too much means that those costs just get passed along to the rest of us.

It’s worth noting that New York is not proposing to eliminate these requirements and rely on the market to determine how much parking to provide, they are merely reducing the requirement from mandating 40% of new units have spaces (in a neighborhood where only 22% of households own cars!) to 20%. Why not reduce it to zero?

Likewise, there are likely opportunities for new developments to make use of the excess parking already built. Hopefully, those kinds of arrangements would allow for new buildings to still be parking-free if the market so desires. Nevertheless, a reduction in the requirement is moving in the right direction.

Philadelphia: A few miles south on the NEC, Philadelphia might be backtracking on parking, rather than moving in the right direction. Philly has already altered their zoning code to eliminate parking requirements in the city’s dense rowhouse neighborhoods. Now, members of the city council want to roll those changes back. The council’s interference in a code change that’s only been in effect for a few months is troubling, as is the lack of reasoning. From the Inquirer’s article on the topic:

“Most developers wish that they didn’t have to get approvals from anybody,” says Clarke. “I have to be responsive to the needs of the residents. They don’t have enough parking.”

Perhaps this is where a dose of that counter-intuitive planning wisdom would be useful.

The reasoning put forth for changing the rules back is equally troubling, particularly given the Philadelphia Planning Commission’s charge in rewriting the zoning code: reduce the need to grant so many variances. Attempting to graft a comprehensive zoning ordinance onto a pre-existing (and pre-automobile) cityscape is bound to be a challenge no matter what; but pushing a code to require elements so geometrically opposed to the pre-code fabric is foolhardy. Such changes, often made in the name of providing more parking only end up inducing unintended consequences. From the Next American City article:

Gladstein said the bill’s proposed changes could set Philadelphia back on the path back to when the city issued more variances than nearly any other big city in America because of unrealistic demands in the zoning code.

“There are many instances in rowhome neighborhoods where you simply cannot provide parking by right because of factors like narrow lot lines,” she said. “We thought these changes would send too many cases to the zoning board.”

Gladstein also noted that lack of a parking requirement in the original code was intentional, as on-site parking, which often manifests itself as a front-loading garage, actually diminishes the supply of public parking spaces.

A code that doesn’t respect geometry, doesn’t reflect the city’s history, and achieve its stated goals is a bad code. Here’s to hoping those changes do not go into effect.

DC: In the District, the parking conversations aren’t focused on zoning (yet! – but they will be, and soon), but rather the management of on-street parking spaces. Policy changes take a different tack than in Philadelphia – instead of providing parking for residents via zoning code requirements, the city is strengthening on-street protections for residents with parking permits.

The reaction is all over the map – Ward 1 Councilmember says this is about a future that “discourages car ownership,” yet the goal of enhanced residential permit parking protections is about “striking a balance in favor of those who are residents with stickers who paid for them.” Did those residents pay enough for a scarce resource? If the price reflected the scarcity of spaces, would there be as much of a parking problem? And how does making on-street parking for residents easier discourage car ownership?

Other elements of the Post parking article talk about the difficulty of parking for non-residents visiting the city, as well as the city’s efforts to re-purpose some curb space away from parking and towards other uses (such as protected bicycle lanes) – but fall into the trap of equating all things parking together. Metered, permitted, for residents, for visitors, using curb space for parking or for other uses – these are all big differences, and conflating them all together is problematic, and increases the chances of misunderstanding.

Choice architecture and zoning

Parallel parking on-street. CC image from Eyton Z.

Following up on the previous post, two pieces showing the limits of the zoning code in structuring choice architectures in urban environments:

Parking. Zoning code provisions that require adding off-street parking seriously distort both the urban fabric as well as the decision-making of individuals using those buildings – and thus those parking spaces (some previous thoughts on this here and here). Portland has eliminated minimum parking requirements under certain circumstances (and has had this regulation on the books for many years – only recently have both developers and financiers been on the same page about parking-free development). Of course, a parking-free development is nothing new – huge swaths of our cities built before the imposition of such codes function just fine without the ‘benefit’ of such codes guiding their maturation.

The most recent news about these parking-free developments in Portland is that those living in the parking-free apartments are not car-free themselves:

But a city of Portland study released this week suggests that no-car households are the exception, not the rule, even in apartments that don’t provide parking. And those vehicles have to go somewhere.

…

But it also found that 73 percent of 116 apartment households surveyed have cars, and two-thirds park on the street. Only 36 percent use a car for a daily commute, meaning the rest store their cars on the street for much of the week.

Point being, rescinding parking requirements from zoning codes alone is not enough to change behavior. That doesn’t mean that changing parking requirements isn’t a good idea – it is. As the quote above also notes, very few of these residents use their cars for a daily commute. However, there is a limit to what zoning can do. Parking requirements in the zoning code are a crude form of parking management; rescinding those rules likely warrants better parking management programs.

Portland appears stuck in between market equilibria here: people complain about more parkers on the the street, but those people are only parking there because it’s cheap and available. Likewise, off-street spaces are available for rent, but many are unwilling to pay the price to do so:

But developers can’t count on tenants to pick up the tab, particularly when there is street parking easily available nearby.

“The market is the market,” Menashe said. “If the guy down the street has no parking and he’s able to get $800 a unit, that’s probably all we can get, too.”

Great news for the city, and for consumers who value market-rate affordability in their apartments. This suggests that a) the old requirement for parking was indeed too high, and b) moving some of those cars to the street hasn’t put too much strain on on-street parking.

Nonetheless, the lesson is that zoning can only do so much. Zoning is a blunt instrument, it can regulate form well. To the extent that use and form are tied together, it can regulate use. But you can’t dictate behavior with a zoning code – and trying to do so will likely bring unintended consequences.

The excellent Portland Transport blog takes note of these findings and asks: what policies would get you to go car-lite or car-free? Options within this realm – things like charging for on-street parking permits, encouraging car-sharing services, enabling additional dense development to thus provide more ‘stuff’ within a walkable distance, thereby reducing the need for car ownership, etc. Those kinds of policies are the ones to build into the choice architecture to reduce car use and ownership, and also to reduce the tension from good policy changes like the removal of minimum parking requirements.

Restaurants. Writing at Greater Greater Washington, Herb Caudill calls for the removal of a zoning restriction on restaurants in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of DC. The rule is a part of an overlay zoning district and limits restaurants from occupying more than 25% of the linear storefront footage in the area. The goal is to require a diversity of retail uses in the area. The effect, however, has been for a lot of longstanding vacancies as well as some rather odd tenants (such as a vacuum cleaner repair shop).

Here again, zoning can only do so much. Once you step outside the physical purview of what zoning is good at regulating, all bets are off. Zoning can require that buildings provide retail space, for example – but exactly what type of retail is a lot harder to regulate. Leaving aside the wisdom of even trying to regulate such a thing (rather than allowing the market some flexibility to operate), the goal of diverse retail uses is probably better met with other types of policies than changes to the zoning code.

City Block

a work in progress…