Month August 2011

Urbanist project selling well in Denver

The New York Times discusses a new building in Denver that embraces many of the ideals of transit-oriented development. The Spire is a mixed-use condo building that includes retail and recreation space along with residential units. Saqib Rahim explains: If they wish, the denizens of this mini-world can step outside into the arts district, or they can walk fractions of a mile to three of Denver’s light rail lines. Spire scores a 91 on WalkScore.com, earning the label “Walker’s Paradise.” To reach paradise, though, Spire residents won’t have to give up their cars. The 33 floors of residences sit atop a “parking podium” eight floors tall. It contains bikes and cars for rent, but most of the room is for 600 parking spaces. The building has 500 condos. Denver residents clearly enjoy the option to live in a walkable, transit-friendly neighborhood, as The Spire is one of the fastest-selling condo buildings in the country. It exemplifies that walkable development can be achieved in Western cities that have been primarily built around the automobile. The building’s prime location in the city’s downtown Arts District allows it to command high enough prices to pay for an underground parking podium, but Rahim questions whether transit-oriented development should include any parking at all. While Denver has adopted many Portland-style Smart Growth features including one of the nation’s largest light rail systems, many city residents still rely on and enjoy easy use of their vehicles. Scott McFadden, a Denver area developer who focuses on TOD said in the article: “You still need it to go to work and to shop and, quite frankly, to take it to the mountains, which is why you live in Denver in the first place.” The Spire is located in an area of the city that does not have parking […]

Obama’s sprawl-promoting industrial policy: electric cars

During the past few decades, “industrial policy” was an epithet, and you still won’t see Obama going around calling his “green jobs” projects industrial policy in speeches any time soon. But some think it’s time to shed the stigma, and the flagship Obama industrial policy seems to be electric vehicles – or more specifically, the batteries that power them: “It was a calculated risk — a lot of money, to be sure, but given the stakes, I think it was a pretty thoughtful bet,” says Ron Bloom, who recently served as an assistant to President Obama for manufacturing policy. “If vehicle electrification really does take off, as many, many people think it will, and we’re not part of it, then we could lose our leadership of the global automobile industry.” Which would be catastrophic. By some estimates, as much as 20 percent of all manufacturing jobs are directly or indirectly related to the automobile industry. Bloom points out that the United States is not the only country betting on batteries; a number of Asian countries have done so as well. And if a bunch of Asian countries jumped off a bridge, would you do it too? The Times calls it “less like Google and more like Ford,” and I’m not sure if they mean that as a bad thing. I’m not going to lay out a long case against electric cars right now, but suffice it to say I think they’re just another subsidy to the auto-based system, and that the true environmental harm in cars is not their actual emissions, but the land use patterns than they necessitate, and an electric battery doesn’t change this one bit. I’m certainly not going to lay the blame on urbanists for Obama’s electric car infatuation, but I think it should be a wake-up […]

FRA interview

I’ll (hopefully) be doing an interview with someone at the Federal Railroad Administration (probably a PR person, but since its via email, hopefully they’ll be able to go ask bureaucrats and engineers the answers to some technical questions) for Streetsblog DC next week, so, if you’ve got any burning questions, let me know and I’ll ask them! You can either leave them in the comments or email them to [email protected]. Here’s some background for those who aren’t aware of the controversy over FRA’s safety regulations.

Covenants as a substitute for Euclidean zoning

Recently, Adam, Stephen, and I did a podcast with Jake at The Voluntary Life about The Voluntary City. The book is a collection of papers on free market solutions to urban challenges, and we will post a link to the podcast here when it’s available. In one chapter of the book, Stephen Davies discusses covenants as an emergent solution to the externality challenges inherent between neighbors using their property as they see fit. Since this topic came up in the comments of a recent post about neighborhoods built before Euclidean zoning was widely adopted, I thought it deserved further discussion. A couple of commenters suggested that because properties in Baltimore’s Roland Park neighborhood were sold with deed restrictions attached, the development there was not “organic.” My word choice was ambiguous, but in the post I meant it to signify that the development occurred in response to a market process as opposed to a regulatory regime. Private contracts governed land use as opposed to municipal rules. Davies explains that covenants first came into widespread use in England, as the country was urbanizing between 1740 and 1850. Because developers could achieve higher values for their land by ensuring complementary uses between adjacent property owners, they put covenants in place to restrict the land uses that would be permitted within a community. Some of these covenants even went so far as to specify house’s architectural details. He writes: Covenants were used in almost all urban development of the period and for a long time thereafter. Whenever a piece of land or the power to use that land was transferred from one party to another, the transfer, whether a lease or a sale, would normally contain a number of specific stipulations, or covenants. Covenants (literally, treaties) were legally binding agreements between the parties that […]