Tag Archives: zoning

The most affordable city in America!

Why didn’t anyone tell me that DC is the most affordable city in America?

Such was one of the headlines of a summary article about a new report from the Center for Housing Policy and the Center for Neighborhood Technology.  The report’s title (Losing Ground: The Struggle Of Moderate-Income Households To Afford The Rising Costs Of Housing And Transportation) might not square with the idea of making places like DC and San Francisco the most affordable city in the nation. Indeed, the headlines popping up in my Google Reader window show the range of interpretation:

Now, granted, that middle Planetizen link wasn’t referring to this study, but to a GGW piece from the GMU Center for Regional Analysis. Still, the divergence among the headlines is interesting. CNT published studies in recent years aimed to demolish the idea of ‘drive ’til you qualify’, noting that the transportation costs embedded in those housing choices are large and do not favor autocentric suburbs. Since the gist of those studies were that the seemingly more expensive cities were actually more affordable, I guess the snap conclusion about affordability here makes sense.

But in reading the report itself, it’s clear that DC’s affordability is not the key finding here.  The report’s title should be an indicator of that (again, the title is “Losing Ground”).

That said, the critique of the report stems from the practice of defining each area’s affordability in relative terms to the area’s median income.  While this might make sense if looking at any one metro area in isolation (as in the previous studies on combined housing and transportation costs within metro areas), I’m not sure that it is the best way to compare different metro areas to one another. Matt Yglesias made this point:

By the same token, measuring affordability in H+T terms is a great idea, but presenting it in income share terms is misleading. In general, a person can increase his earnings power by leaving a poorer place for a richer one. […] But it turns out that for many Americans the productivity and wage gains involved in moving to a rich city end up being clawed back by a lack of affordable housing. So the tendency is only for the most educated people—the ones with the least objective need—to be able to take advantage of the migration possibilities. This is a huge social problem that contributes to stagnating living standards, and it’s totally obscured by saying that the DC area is affordable because it’s full of rich people.

In short: the fact that DC, SF, et al are ‘affordable’ because they are rich is not exactly a good thing.  For one case, see Ryan Avent’s 2011 NYT piece (preivewing The Gated City) on the impact of high housing costs on GDP; for another, see Binyamin Appelbaum in the NYT Economix blog on the impact of high housing costs on income inequality, and therefore on the overall economy:

A recent paper by researchers at Harvard University argues that the prohibitive cost of living in the areas with the greatest economic opportunities has forced low-wage workers to migrate instead to areas with inferior opportunities.

…

And here’s the crucial point: It doesn’t have to be this way. High housing prices are the result of public policies that discourage new development. Those policies are generally embraced by the residents of wealthy areas, who benefit, at least in the short term, from restrictions on the supply of new housing. But this paper is one more reason to worry about the long-term economic consequences.

The three animated charts accompanying the Harvard paper are illustrative. Meanwhile, the broad policy implications for the region can be summarized in the concluding paragraph of the GGW piece from George Mason’s CRA (linked above):

Most local governments are not planning enough housing for their future workers, and may hinder new housing with regulations on new development. Meanwhile, builders need to recognize the need for more multi-family housing and smaller, more affordable owner and renter homes in the region.

More on parking requirements and impacts to the city

Portland parking meter. CC image from Ian Broyles

Several tangentially related articles on parking over the past few weeks: 

In a previous post on zoning and unintended consequences, I linked to an Oregon Public Broadcasting piece on zero-parking development in Portland, OR – taking advantage of a clause in the zoning code that removes the requirement to provide off-site parking in developments around high-frequency transit corridors.  The key word is in removing the requirement, as the developers are free to provide on-site parking if they wish, but are no longer required to do so.  And may have decided to forgo off-street parking entirely.

Portland’s Willamette Week followed with a feature piece on the same issue a month later. Unfortunately, the writer frames the rule as letting developers off the hook for something they ought to pay for, like they were building bathrooms without toilets:

The Portland City Council more than a decade ago created this exemption—a huge financial benefit to developers—to increase density and discourage people from owning and driving cars.

If there’s a single fragment in the zoning code that encapsulates the ambition of city planners and the ethos of Portland, this may be it.

But the policy has its costs, and nearby residents such as Gold-Markel are paying for it.

Throughout the article, the ‘problems’ of this policy are presented in terms of spillover parking – that is, the residents of the new parking-less developments did not get rid of their cars entirely, and now park them on the street.  One obvious solution would be to manage parking on the street via pricing, permits, and many other available tools – rather than the blunt instrument of parking space requirements in the zoning code.  The zoning code works best when roughly governing broad land use and built form.  It is not a particularly strong management tool.  Nothing is mentioned about the cost to residents and to the city as a whole of requiring this expensive construction.

Along the same lines in DC (which does have some residential parking management programs in place), a local ANC recently signed off on a parking-free development near a metro station – but only in exchange for the promise that residents of the new building would not be allowed to get Residential Parking Permits for their vehicles.  On the one hand, the existence of a management program ought to help mitigate the impacts of such construction; on the other, the fact that the DC project had to negotiate to build without parking in the first place opens the door to “excessive localism” in Matt Yglesias’ terms.

Back in Portland:

Hales tells WW that when the city was rewriting the zoning code in 2000 to eliminate the parking requirement, he never thought developers would actually build apartments without parking.

“We were trying to get developers to put in one [parking] spot instead of two,” he says. “I certainly wasn’t smart enough to anticipate that banks would finance projects with no parking whatsoever.”

The simple fact is that parking doesn’t always pay.  Often, the economic case for it is quite weak if it isn’t seen as an absolute requirement (in either the legal sense or in terms of feasibility).  Another interesting (but very different case) is Yankee Stadium, where several large new parking garages adjacent to the new ballpark have defaulted on their bonds thanks to low utilization.

This situation is different from a run-of-the-mill zoning case, but it dramatically shows the cost  (and the lack of a return) in building too much parking.  With that kind of cost in providing parking when demand is low, it’s no wonder that one of the developers in the OPB piece made the claim that “Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment.”

In a more quantitative analysis of parking reforms, the Atlantic Cities looks to London:

In an upcoming issue of Urban Studies, researchers Zhan Guo and Shuai Ren of the Rudin Centre for Transport Policy and Management at NYU consider two core questions when it comes to London’s reform. First, does the parking minimum truly create more parking than people want? Second, is a parking maximum necessary to promote sustainable transport, or will the market alone take care of it?

On the first question, Guo and Ren returned a pretty definitive yes. They examined parking supply at 216 residential developments in London approved from 1997 to 2000, when the parking minimum was in effect, and then roughly 8,250 developments approved from 2004 to 2010, after the minimum was removed and the maximum imposed. Before parking reform, developers created 94 percent of the required minimum; after it, they created just 52 percent of the old minimum.

Those parking spaces that were formerly required obviously were not free to build.  As for parking maximums (that is, a requirement that a development not build more than a given amount of off-street parking):

Onto question number two: the effectiveness of the new maximums. Since the purpose of London’s parking reform was to promote alternative transportation, the researchers looked at how parking supply fluctuated in areas with high density and transit access after 2004. What they found is that that the actual parking supplied was higher in Central London, where density and access are greatest, compared to adjacent outer areas.

Guo and Ren call this finding “unexpected.” They suspect that local authorities may want to keep a high maximum (and therefore allow more spaces) to avoid a parking spillover onto already crowded streets in Central London. Another explanation is that the market simply wants more spaces there: people who can afford to live downtown are willing to pay a premium for parking.

I can’t see much problem in allowing parking to be built where the market is willing to bear the cost of construction and operation.  Likewise, a developer of a non-residential property could easily see value in providing a great deal of parking as a draw to their development.

None of this changes the fact that a robust system for managing on-street spaces will likely be needed in any case.   Such a program in Portland could easily soothe the concerns of nearby residents (though many of their concerns seem to be about the very existence of the newer, dense development in the first place); and a more market-responsive system in DC (hypothesis: most of DC’s RPP stickers are far too cheap relative to the demand for on-street spaces) might have avoided some of the negotiations in Tenleytown.

Parking requirements and unintended consequences

Surface parking in Minneapolis. CC image from Zach K.

Writing in MinnPost, Marlys Harris asks why (seemingly) nothing is getting done in Minneapolis. She comes up with three broad reasons: a negative attitude towards new development, economic justifications that don’t pencil out for new projects, and the impact of zoning and land use regulations – often unintended impacts or perverse outcomes. While all three are certainly factors, the real interesting implication is the interplay between them: as an example, regulations that dictate long and uncertain processes, enabling those opposed to new development to organize in opposition, thereby adding time and cost to a building project to the point where it’s no longer feasible.

In the comments, Max Musicant offers an example of these chain reactions on the regulatory side:

[T]he zoning code is very often in conflict with how multi-story buildings are actually built – which also drives the almost constant demand for variances. If one wants to build a multi-story building, you are required to provide an elevator. If you need an elevator, you need to build 4-6 stories to spread out the cost. If you are building that high, you will likely be required to build parking on-site. If you have to build parking on-site in an urban location, it will have to be underground – which is very expensive. All of this can be avoided only if 1) you build one story suburban style or 2) your price points are affordable only to the wealthy.

The parking requirements are particularly onerous. Oregon Public Broadcasting took note of parking-less apartment building projects in Portland back in August. New buildings are going up without off-street parking, taking advantage of a change in the zoning code that allows exemptions from parking requirements under certain conditions. While the article’s narrative focuses on the kinds of people who would live without a car or without a designated parking space, this cultural focus is misplaced – as Max Musicant noted later in his comment, these kind of walk-up apartment buildings without off-street parking were commonly constructed in American cities in the not-so-distant past.

The real takeaway from the OPB piece isn’t about the behavior of the tenants, but of the impact on the bottom line of the builders:

One of those developers is Dave Mullens with the Urban Development Group. He opened the Irvington Garden in a close-in Northeast Portland neighborhood last year. It’s 50 units with no parking places.

“The cost of parking would make building this type of project on this location unaffordable,” Mullens says.

Mullens calls the difference “tremendous.”

“Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment. Or, the difference between apartments and condos,” he says.

In other words, these kinds of regulations have severe costs. Taking Mullens’s price figure at face value, it’s not hard to see how removing a requirement like this would help market rate development target demand at lower price points. Likewise, it’s not hard to see how seemingly narrowly-focused and well-intentioned regulations can have much broader consequences when layered with other constraints.

Of course, these points are all on the micro scale of an individual project, but the macro scale also matters. The regulations have to allow the market to increase supply in order to meet demand – otherwise bad things happen. In the Washington Business Journal, Montgomery and Fairfax counties in metropolitan DC are concerned about housing becoming unaffordable even for those with six figure incomes.

It’s not until the end that simply relaxing zoning requirements to a) increase supply, or b) lower the cost of development (see the parking requirement discussion) is mentioned. The article does not mention option c), all of the above.  Since there would still be a need for deeply affordable dwelling units, relaxing or eliminating parking requirements would be a good place to start in striking the balance between good, well-intentioned, and effective regulations and an efficient marketplace for new development.

Density links – process and constraints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Urban density and innovation

CC image from Seth Waite

One more round on density – this time focusing on affordability via the tangentially related prospect of innovative and creative economies.

Richard Florida chimed in at The Atlantic Cities, asking this:

Stop and think for a moment: What kind of environments spur new innovation, start-ups and high-tech industries? Can you name one instance, one, of this sort of creative destruction occurring in high-rise office or residential towers, in skyscraper districts? The answer is no. High-rise districts typically house either corporate office functions or residences. During the post-war era, while they were building these towers for their corporate functions, large U.S. companies housed their research scientists in green, low-rise R&D campuses, where the scientists could interact more freely.

The backlash on Twitter was swift and merciless – with plenty of anecdotes of innovative, creative destruction going on in high rise office towers.  Timothy Lee at Forbes noted that Florida is probably a bit sloppy with his terminology here, equating a high rise with an expensive building.  Citing Jane Jacobs, he writes:

While Jacobs framed this principle as being about old buildings, it was really about cheap buildings. Young innovators need to keep their expenses down to maximize the time they can spend on their project and minimize time spent waiting tables. And when they start companies, they need to minimize their rent to maximize their chances of reaching profitability before they run out of money.

So Florida is right that innovators almost never start their careers in gleaming office towers. But it’s a mistake to conclude from that that an excess of skyscrapers makes a city bad for innovation. The innovators themselves won’t move into the skyscrapers, but the construction of more housing units places general downward pressure on rents. That allows innovators to move into the less swanky, more affordable, homes and offices that were abandoned by the people who do move into the skyscrapers.

That is, those older high rises will filter down to lower rents and therefore be attractive to startups and other innovative uses (see the case of Silicon Alley in New York – Florida mentions it as a ‘low rise’ example, but equating that to a Sunnyvale office park is quite a leap).  The actual form of the building doesn’t play nearly as much of a role as Florida would imply.  The jury is out on the role of the city form and urban design (though I have my guesses).

As mentioned above, Florida was a bit sloppy in what he considered a high rise, later commenting that 14-20 stories is fine, but taller heights might not work. Perhaps it’s my time in DC that’s shifted my perspective on tall buildings, but I would argue that 14-20 stories is plenty tall enough to be considered a high rise.  Regardless of my definition of a high rise, the question is then – what is tall enough, dense enough?  David Schleicher and Ryan Avent make the case that you can’t know that in advance.

Some more back and forth shifted the discussion to the tradeoffs inherent to density, but in DC that discussion of density can’t be considered in isolation of other constraints on development – the kind that see low rent buildings redeveloped rather than letting them filter down where innovation might take hold (given several other key ingredients).  The gleaming new corporate office tower reduce rent pressure on the older high rise office buildings, as well as smaller and shorter legacy structures.

It’s somewhat curious to see a discussion about the power of markets to foster innovation when talking about the massive constraints on real estate. The creative destruction of capitalism at its best in the idealized start-up office park Florida described, yet that physical outcome is anything but a free market outcome.  Timothy Lee makes the case that if the real estate markets were more free to operate, the Bay Area would have 4 million more people living there today. The Bay Area’s natural geography limits sprawl and favors density, as well – if given the chance to grow.

That, of course, is a big if. Matt Yglesias takes note of some dense residential construction proposed for Downtown San Jose – precisely the kind of place that you would expect to grow more densely if allowed:

The San Jose and San Francisco metropolitan areas are ground zero for the phenomenon of regulations that provide for an insufficient quantity of construction in America’s high-value areas, so I was somewhat surprised to read an article about the municipality of San Jose implementing an incentive program to encourage more residential investment in the city. Why are incentives needed? The incentives, however, all turn out to be nothing more than temporary relaxation of anti-development rules:

The incentive package includes a 50 percent break in construction taxes; a 50 percent reduction in fees that downtown residential developers must set aside for a park as a portion of their project costs; expedited reviews by the planning department staff and eliminating a city requirement for an expensive air container system for firefighters in high-rise buildings.

What you have here are an explicit tax on construction, a de facto tax on construction, a regulatory barrier to construction, and a second regulatory barrier to construction. The “incentives” are relief from those barriers if your projects breaks ground by 2013.

From Wired (cited in Timothy Lee’s piece above):

As an investor Hartz points to the usual signs of too much money-chasing deals. The billboards on highway 101 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley touting startups no one has heard of. The bus stop signs in tech-heavy locales like Mountain View and Palo Alto advertising scads of engineering jobs.

“Everyone is competing for the same people, going after the same real estate, the same support services,” Hartz says. “The natural resources of the startup world are getting scarcer and scarcer, and the cost is getting higher and higher. It’s all an outgrowth of an abundance of capital.”

Lee’s point (same as Yglesias’s) is that the constraints on some of those resources aren’t as natural as you might think.

Density helps provide public benefits

Ryan Avent, writing at Architect Magazine, takes a look at the recently floated idea of putting a Redskins practice facility at Reservation 13 in DC.  One of the reasons for the backlash against the idea was the opportunity cost of a metro-adjacent, develop-able site (a scarce enough commodity in DC) lying fallow for the purposes of football practices. Regardless of the merits of that particular idea, Avent notes that denser development all around creates more capacity for these kinds of public goods.

Consciously, in the case of urbanists opposed to the practice facility, or unconsciously, as is likely to be true of nearby residents, opponents are expressing an awareness of the importance of density to urban life. To make Reservation 13 come alive, there must be people there—enough of them to support local businesses such as coffee shops and corner stores. With sufficient critical mass, the neighborhood might support restaurants, bars, and shops, which could then draw residents from other corners of the city. A healthy density helps integrate a neighborhood into the broader city, which then reinforces that neighborhood’s local amenities. Were more than half of the parcel dedicated to a relatively stultifying land use, critical density might fall out of reach.

Lurking within this compelling argument, however, is an unjustified assumption. On its own, the use of 33 acres for football need not reduce the parcel’s density. Development proposed for the remaining land could simply be made taller. In the 2003 master plan, the city recommends building heights of two stories on the western, neighborhood-facing side of the property, rising to 10 stories on the waterfront side (the property slopes downward toward the water). In practice, the only thing preventing Washington from having its cake and eating it too is a devotion to short buildings.

Not only in terms of opportunity costs for limited parcels of land, there’s also the matter of revenue.  Constraints on development limit the ability to ask for public amenities, ranging from new infrastructure to affordable housing via inclusionary zoning.  There’s only so much juice that can be squeezed from the orange.

Indeed, the core urban logic of density is taking root (“Height in this city isn’t about height. It’s about density,” Hickok said). While a great deal of the discussion has focused on changing the height limit, there’s a lot of potential capacity between the more restrictive zoning and the federal height limit. Avent continues:

Indeed, the scarcity of land that has so energized residents to question the mayor’s efforts is entirely a product of the District’s laws and regulations. The neighborhoods just west of Reservation 13, like much of the city’s residential land, are zoned R-4. This allows for matter-of-right development of single-family homes on lots with minimum specified widths and maximum specified heights. If Washington wanted to do so, it could substantially increase the available developable area. A zoning area that doubled the District’s population density—essentially creating an entire second city on top of the first—would be achievable without so much as questioning the city’s statutory height limit—and leaving the District at less than a third of the population density of Manhattan.

Utilizing modest-in-appearance, yet substantial increases in density amongst DC’s residential areas (mentioned here), we could greatly increase the effective overall density of the District.  But those small interventions (alley dwellings, english basements, etc) won’t produce that ‘second city’ that Avent discuses.  That would require more intense development.

Writing in Crosscut, Ed McMahon discusses some of those forms:

Julie Campoli and Alex MacLean’s book Visualizing Density vividly illustrates that we can achieve tremendous density without high-rises. They point out that before elevators were invented, two- to four- story “walk-ups” were common in cities and towns throughout America. Constructing a block of these type of buildings could achieve a density of anywhere from 20 to 80 units an acre.

Mid-rise buildings ranging from 5 to 12 stories can create even higher density neighborhoods in urban settings, where buildings cover most of the block. Campoli and McLean point to Seattle where mid-rise buildings achieve densities ranging from 50 to 100 units per acre, extraordinarily high by U.S. standards.

The challenge, however, is meshing that modestly tall kind of density (respectful of the federal height limit) with the current structures on the ground.  It would require large scale redevelopment of already extant neighborhoods.  Indeed, some of those structures that DC does have are threatened by the lure of development potential. This manse on K St is one of the last of its kind.

The irony is that the constraint on height (and thus density) in DC is one of the key reasons legacy lowrise structures are under such development pressure.

Google Streetview - Northeast corner of 6th Ave and 38th St

A quick stroll around Midtown Manhattan will reveal lots of really tall buildings, both old and new.  But there are also lots of small and short structures mixed in – since development pressures have the ability to go up (not that New York is free of development constraints – see Ed Glaeser), they don’t have to knock down all smaller structures as a matter of course.

Google Streetview - Southwest corner of 6th Ave and 38th St

The takeaway is about tradeoffs – preserving structures like the remaining manse on K St is a constraint.  It can be a workable constraint, depending on what other constraints are also in place.  But the combinations of affordable housing, historic preservation, a flat skyline, shorter buildings and smaller scale development might not be feasible together.

McMahon’s larger point is one of context – simply plopping a skyscraper down amidst a sea of shorter buildings is a recipe for another Tour Montparnasse.  But context is relative and probably speaks more to the pace and evolution of the change than to the nature of the change itself.  Likewise, additional height might be the very thing that helps preserve the small-lot fabric of a place while still providing a release valve for growth, as it has in many locations in Manhattan.

Avent concludes with a cautionary note about the costs of these preferences:

What the battle over Reservation 13 makes clear, however, is that Washington’s height aversion crowds out attractive amenities—a football facility in this case; parks or museums in others; willing would-be residents, artists, entrepreneurs, and taxpayers in many, many others. It has a substantial cost, in other words.

As mentioned above, this is really a discussion about trade-offs.  Paris is often mentioned as a fellow flatly-skylined city with far greater density than the District today. But would DC residents really embrace the intensity of redevelopment required to turn rowhouse neighborhoods into 5-6 story walk-up neighborhoods?  If not that particular trade-off, then what other trade-offs are on the table?

Should be an interesting conversation.

Constraints to affordability

'Truth' - CC image from Kellan

A few items on affordability and development:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simple economics.

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

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

Or, you know, we could build more housing.

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

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

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

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

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

Height and zoning links

DC Zoning Map - CC image from Payton Chung

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

Emphasis mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on changing DC’s height limit

With both city leaders and members of Congress discussing alterations to DC’s height limit, I think there are a few things worth highlighting.  These are just some thoughts on what I think are the core issues here, and how DC might proceed.

Why do this?  The compelling reason must be economic, and the reasoning behind this change will need to be carefully communicated to the public at large.  A limitation like this involves a number of trade-offs, and must be understood just as the costs of other zoning restrictions need to be understood.

There ought to be a campaign that both illustrates the benefits of density, but also the costs of restricting development – both in terms of opportunity costs of limiting agglomeration economies, but also of the general costs that raise rents and prices for all sorts of real estate in the region. (see many previous posts from Ryan Avent – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, among many others)

At the same time, changing the height limit won’t be a panacea.  The real estate market in DC is regional, other local governments will need to pull their weight as well.

Reverse the question: why shouldn’t we do this?  Taking a page from the concept of shifting the procedural burden of land use regulation, perhaps the question needs to be flipped on height limit proponents – if not up, where will the city grow?  Will commercial areas encroach into residential ones?  What about the costs of pushing development further out into the region?  What about the costs of rising rents?

The height limit is not zoning.  It’s worth remembering that most of the District is regulated to maximum densities well below the maximum envelope of the height limit.  Likewise, these areas represent some of the best opportunities for cost-effective, small scale infill development: the “missing middle” of housing densities.

 It is important not to get too caught up in the density numbers when thinking about these types. Due to the small footprint of the building types and the fact that they are usually mixed with a variety of building types, even on an individual block, the perceived density is usually quite lower–they do not look like dense buildings.

There are many opportunities for this kind of infill development in DC, whether on alley lots or via the conversion of English Basements and other additions of multiple units into otherwise single-family zones.  Smaller scale multi-unit buildings can also be designed as to be visually indistinguishable from neighboring single-family homes.  This kind of development ought to be allowed across the board (and DC is moving in this direction), an example of incremental changes to the regulatory environment.

That said, those kinds of developments won’t impact the height limit.  In DC’s largely residential areas, I doubt a taller limit would have much effect.  Conversely, raising the height limit without increasing the allowed density brings little economic benefit.

“Vistas” and “views” are overrated.  Atrios said it.  Most of the ‘views’ people talk about when discussing DC’s tourist-caliber photo shots are enhanced by tall buildings, not the other way around.  The buildings frame the views down street corridors.   Most of the people are not viewing things from the stereotypical aerial shot, but rather from street level.

Instead, what people seem to be concerned about is about the city’s skyline becoming a vista in and of itself, distracting from monuments and memorials.   I don’t think this is of concern, as skylines can be manipulated just as easily as other physical elements of the city.  Likewise, any alteration of DC’s height limit is not likely to suddenly trigger a free-for-all of skyscraper construction, but rather a slow climb to a new, higher equilibrium.  The overall impression from afar would still be that of a ‘flat’ skyline, the monuments and memorials would get their respect while the rest of the city would have room to grow.

The “Monumental Core” and “Downtown” are not synonyms.   The reported initial conversations on height involve minor changes in the already-tall areas, and transit-oriented height districts elsewhere. Matt Yglesias:

 They seem to be contemplating two different ideas, either or both of which could be implemented. One is to tinker at the margins with the restrictions on downtown structures to allow an additional floor or two of leasable office space. The other is to allow for substantially taller buildings in a few outlying areas, with the thinking being that if we can have tall buildings right across the Potomac in Arlington County there’s no reason peripheral parts of D.C. shouldn’t have them too.

The idea of protecting the monumental core from the intrusion of tall buildings is a worthy urban design cause, but also largely a strawman.   The NCPC’s Monumental Core Framework Plan is discussing this area in blue, while the broader ‘downtown’ is represented in brown/tan, showing the area of DC’s Center City Action Agenda.

 While adding some buffer around the White House, the larger point is that downtown already has most of the city’s tall buildings.  Furthermore, if we’re talking about adding a modest increase in heights allowed in DC (something along the lines of allowing buildings to be twice as tall as the streets they front on, rather than the current limit of street width + 20 feet), then views like this and this within the monumental core will look exactly the same in all of the tourist photos.

Always remember – the reason to do this is to add density, and perceptions of density (such as equating it with height) are often inaccurate.

There will be a plan. Lydia DePillis wisely notes that any change would need a plan, and not just open the door to willy-nilly skyscraper development.  In the event that this comes to pass, I’d expect both a detailed map and accompanying restrictions to protect the vistas we do have, as well as a strong urban design component.   Potential options could be altering the existing formula (what if the limit were 2x of street width?  Or street width + 75 feet instead of 20?) and could easily introduce mandatory setbacks at certain heights to avoid urban canyon effects (think along the lines of a less-tall version of New York’s 1916 zoning code building envelope).

Such a plan could also identify areas for truly tall buildings, DC’s own version of La Defense or Canary Wharf.  Doing so should be part of a conscious urban design, rather than the isolation of the Tour Montparnasse.

Added density provides opportunities to finance new infrastructure.  What better way to link transportation and land use than to fund new transportation infrastructure via tax revenues from new development?

Links: The new American Dream

House for rent. CC image from Sean Dreilinger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the disconnect you have to fix.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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