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Month September 2010

Enforced price ceilings on private parking lots

by Stephen Smith I wrote last week about a tendency in developing Asian countries to emulate the most anti-market Western planning policies, but I didn’t realize it was this bad. Paul Barter writes: Would it surprise you to know that some cities control the price of parking even for private-sector off-street parking operations? Beijing, Guangzhou, Hanoi and Jakarta do control parking prices, so I assume the practice is common throughout China, Indonesia and Vietnam. Obviously, the “controlling” is a price cap, not a price minimum, and Barter makes a convincing case that the rates are indeed below the market price. I don’t recall ever hearing about price controls on private parking in the West, but it looks like the urge to come up with new ways to cater to car owners is universal. I should add that Paul Barter’s new blog Reinventing Parking is a must-read for anyone interested in parking policy. He’s based in Singapore and writes a lot about Southeast Asia and China, and has another more general blog called Reinventing Urban Transport.

Internalizing positive transit externalities

by Stephen Smith The Wall Street Journal ran an article a few days ago claiming that the MTA’s recent NYC transit cuts have lowered real estate prices along train and bus lines that have been axed. While it’s not a quantitative study, the anecdotes are compelling: “The buyer who buys in Astoria is looking for a cheaper price and to get into Manhattan quickly,” said Ms. Palmos, adding that she is having the same problem with a condominium building in Upper Ditmars, north of Astoria. Apartments there that she said would have easily sold for $500,000 with the express bus nearby are now languishing on the market at prices about $420,000. ” ‘How far is it to the train?’ That’s the first thing people ask me,” said Charles Sciberras of Realty Executives Today, a longtime Astoria broker. “The closer to the train the higher the demand… Two to three blocks away from transportation is very easy for me to rent.” […] “The best areas in Brooklyn have great transportation into the city—the most expensive neighborhood in Brooklyn is Brooklyn Heights—you can get just about anywhere in the city easily. You go out into where there is less transportation, the prices go down,” Mr. Giordano said. “It’s one of the many emotional decisions that people make that can add or detract value from real estate.” What’s most striking to me is that a simple express bus route can raise prices by $80,000 for a single apartment. Multiply this by the thousands of apartments along the bus route and it appears that the lost value from the cut bus route ought to exceed, by orders of magnitude, the cost of maintaining the route. But of course, since the MTA doesn’t see a penny of the value it creates, it isn’t surprising that […]

Food deserts and zoning

by Stephen Smith The other day I put up a post detailing the restrictions that small-scale restaurants and food carts face, but I should mention that grocery stores and supermarkets also face similar restrictions.  Like restrictions on restaurants, they end hitting poor, urban, black neighborhoods the hardest, creating the phenomenon known as “food deserts.”  Aside from traditional Euclidean zoning that forbids building commercial structures like corner grocers in residential neighborhoods, developers also face a raft of minimum parking regulations and mandatory reviews.  NYC’s FRESH initiative has been trying to overturn some of these restrictions (although it also offers developers a bunch of subsidies and tax breaks), but the restrictions they describe are still applicable in much of the city and in cities around the US: Other regulations can drive up the cost of developing grocery stores. The Zoning Resolution currently applies a higher parking requirement for food stores over other types of neighborhood retail and service uses. The current regulations also restrict grocery stores to 10,000 square feet in M1 Districts. These regulations have cost implications and reflect outdated assumptions about the impacts of new food stores.  New grocery stores may be required to purchase more land to accommodate parking than would be justified by the demand, in commercial districts where prevailing market rents are high and larger tracts of land are scarce. In M1 Districts where development costs are lower than commercial districts and larger tracts of land are more available, full-line grocery stores are subject to a time-consuming and costly public review process at a very low size threshold. These M1 Districts encompass light manufacturing areas in Mixed Use Districts where residential uses are permitted and light manufacturing areas directly adjacent to underserved residential districts. Supermarkets are difficult to build even in more suburban areas – zoning approval […]

Deregulating food

by Stephen Smith Urban planners like to discuss heavy things – roads, buildings, cars, trains. Food, though an integral part of humans’ lives, generally doesn’t enter into the equation as more than a footnote. This may be because food service is governed by different departments than buildings, streets, and vehicles, or perhaps because the regulation of food has acquired a quasi-scientific veneer that planners are afraid to impinge on. But that might be a mistake, considering how strongly food fits into the urban fabric of cities and how unlivable a place can be if it lacks the kind of food that people can afford and pick up on a whim. Though cheap and filling and an integral part of cities, towns, and villages around the world, street food in the United States has traditionally been thought of as dirty and backward. Twin Cities food magazine Heavy Table traces Minneapolis’ lack of street food to turn-of-the-century local regulations which regulated vendors out of existence with onerous fees and requirements, and outright bans in many high-traffic areas. The magazine ties the demise of street food in the Midwest to “the advent of automotive culture,” and notes the “uncomfortable whiff of pervasive institutional racism” that dogged the mostly-immigrant peddlers of bratwurst and tamales. Street food’s reputation has been on the mend, though. Urban foodies have embraced it, Anthony Bourdain has championed it on his Travel Channel show, and Top Chef contestants have been challenged to cook it. Cities across America are throwing street food festivals – an urban take on the quintessentially-American county fair. In the late ’90s, formidable public opposition forced Rudy Giuliani, who was supported by established restauranteurs and local business groups, to reconsider plans to ban food vendors from hundreds of blocks of Manhattan streets. Even urban planners are getting […]

Exporting (sub)urbanism: Kuala Lumpur and the communist world

by Stephen Smith Adam Martin at William Easterly’s development blog Aid Watch has a post up warning about the tendency among developing nations to adopt Western styles wholesale, even if such styles are not even efficient in their countries of origin. He posits this as a sort of developmental Whiggishness, and cites education policy and intellectual property law as possible examples of the trend. We here at Market Urbanism, by virtue of language and location, tend to focus on urbanism in North America and Europe, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss the state of urbanism in developing countries. The starkest example of misplaced developmental Whiggishness in planning I can think of is the city of Kuala Lumpur. The city was practically brand new when it was made capital of the Federal Malay States in 1895, and as a British protectorate, the Crown sent New Zealand planner Charles Reade to the Malaysian capital in 1921 to head its planning department. Schooled in the methods of the nascent Garden City movement in the UK, Reade made a name for himself by spreading the sprawling, proto-suburban style throughout Australia and New Zealand before his posting in British Malaya. Under Reade’s aegis, Kuala Lumpur became a test case for the movement’s applicability outside of the industrialized West. Unlike in the West, where dense, built-up urban cores relegated Garden City developments to small new towns and the outskirts of large cities, Kuala Lumpur offered an opportunity to build a metropolis from scratch as a Garden City. Charles Reade eagerly set to work building sprawling, low-density housing estates alongside wide roads which anticipated widespread private vehicle ownership. Residential, commercial, and industrial areas were segregated and separated by grassy, undeveloped parkbelts, characteristic of the Garden City style. Following independence, a nationalist Malaysian […]

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