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Emily Hamilton

Emily Hamilton

  • Joined: May 21, 2025
  • Articles: 154

Historic preservation: Bad for neighborhood diversity

Even while the likelihood of tax reform in 2015 is questionable, historic preservationists are actively lobbying to save the historic preservation tax credit from the chopping block. Currently, developers who renovate historic buildings can receive up to a 20% tax credit, significantly reducing the cost of renovation relative to redevelopment. New York Preservation League President Jay DiLorenzo is leading the effort to increase the historic preservation tax credit to 30% rather than eliminating the break. Those in support of the tax preference argue that  preservation makes neighborhoods more affordable, more walkable, and even more conducive to innovation than neighborhoods in which market incentives guide re-use versus redevelopment incentives.  A recent study by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Preservation Green Lab supports these claims: Findings from the three study cities show that mixing buildings from different vintages—including modern buildings—supports social and cultural activity in commercial and mixed-use zones. Many of the most thriving blocks in the study cities scored high on the diversity of building-age measure. Scale also played an important role. Grid squares with smaller lots and more human-scaled buildings generally scored higher on the performance measures than squares characterized by larger lots and structures. These results support the concept of adding new infill projects of compatible size alongside older buildings. Preservationists frequently point out that Jane Jacobs favored preserving old buildings with her famous quote: Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them…. for really new ideas of any kind—no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be—there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings. She favored preservation for both the cheap rent that older and perhaps run down buildings could provide for new businesses  and for the […]

How Land Prices Obviate the Need for Euclidean Zoning

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-zESacteu4 Yesterday, Reason TV released a video comparing Houston with more heavily regulated East Coast cities, explaining that Houston’s relatively lax land use regulations contribute to its housing costs that are much lower than in other large cities. While the video paints an exaggerated picture of Houston as a free market paradise in spite of its codified sprawl, Todd Krainin makes some great points about Houston’s land use tolerance. For example, the city’s tin houses that save on construction and energy costs would be illegal in many cities that have tighter restrictions on building codes. In the video, the former mayor of Victoria, TX makes the great point that in spite of the absence of Euclidean Zoning in some Texas cities, residents don’t need to worry about heavy industry cropping up in their neighborhoods. “Economics dictates that you’re not going to put a rendering plant next to a residential subdivision,” he says. He’s referring to rent gradients that lead to land near amenities being priced at higher rates than land farther from amenities. Owners of low-value land uses don’t choose to pay high prices to be near these amenities. While there are occasionally legitimate nuisance cases in which housing and industrial uses impose externalities on each other because of their proximity, in a free market these cases would be very rare because it doesn’t make sense for industrial uses to take place on the land that people are willing to pay premium prices to live on. While city planners make the case for Euclidean zoning by saying that they are protecting residents from living near industry, zoning often results in the exact opposite outcome. Valuable property in cities including New York and San Francisco that is zoned industrial gets surrounded by residential neighborhoods over time as the city grows. Planners’ inability to keep codes up to date […]

Glamour in streetscapes

A while ago I attended an Urban Land Institute event on development trends in Fairfax’s Mosaic District. A presenter from the retail developer EDENS described their strategy of adding “sidewalk jewelry,” a design technique used to entice shoppers to travel down sidewalks between stores. Having never heard the term before, it nonetheless stuck with me as I thought about retail developments that manage to create relatively lively pedestrian environments from the top down. At Mosaic District, this street jewelry takes the form of signage designed to engage pedestrians, fountains, and planters: It’s certainly more aesthetically pleasing and engaging to pedestrians than the average strip center. While the typical strip mall has a parking lot for a set back, Mosaic District has a parking garage that allows the rest of the center to be more pedestrian-scaled. With the “sidewalk jewelry” framework in mind, it’s easy to see that many retail developers have embraced this trend toward focusing on the pedestrian experience once shoppers have left their cars at the center’s periphery. While Easton Town Center in Columbus has many of the same stores as any major mall, it’s outdoor shopping environment is distinctly different, attempting to emulate the “town center” in its name: For shoppers who value retail ambience, these “lifestyle center” sidewalks provide a much nicer atmosphere relative to more dated strip center or shopping mall designs, but they can’t compare to environments where storefront decorations developed more organically. A recent trip to Quebec City reminded me of the sidewalk jewelry term, but there the visual treats that lure pedestrians down the sidewalk have much more texture than the shopping centers’ above because they are the result of an emergent order among the street’s businesses and residents rather than one developer’s vision: This type of street meets social critic Virginia Postrel’s framework of glamour. In […]

Parking is not a public good

Writers at Salon, Slate, and Time have criticized new San Francisco-based apps that allow users to purchase access to a parking spot as another driver is leaving it. The apps MonkeyParking, Sweetch, and ParkModo provide a platform for drivers to let others know when they’re leaving a spot, and reserve the spot until the another user bidding on the spot arrives to pull in. As of last week, the future of these apps is unknown since San Francisco issued a cease and desist order based on the city’s rule against auctioning or leasing public parking spots. All three writers express outrage that the apps’ creators and users are profiting off of government-owned parking spots. At Salon, Andrew Leonard writes: Monkey Parking’s solution intended to generate profit off of a public good by rewarding those who are able to pay — and shutting out the less affluent.  One problem with this line of reasoning is that parking is clearly not a public good. It is both perfectly rivalrous and easily excludable. Unlike a public good, the price system provides the right incentives for suppliers to provide the optimal amount of parking based on consumers’ willingness to pay. While Leonard uses the term public good, he may mean simply a good that the government provides, and he argues that entrepreneurs should not be permitted to profit from these public services. While this argument provokes a populist sense of unfairness, Monkey Parking should be evaluated against the current problem of under-priced curb parking rather than against the assumption that city governments are currently pricing curb pricing appropriately. City governments systematically undercharge for street parking, especially in cities like San Francisco where land is very valuable. These apps are able to profit because the city charges prices for parking below the level that drivers are willing to […]

DC streetcar: Worse than nothing

On Tuesday, DC’s city council passed a tax reform package that will cut funding for future streetcar construction. These cuts come as the H Street streetcar delays continue to mount, and much of the commentary supporting the streetcar has shifted from touting its transportation benefits to its economic development role. As Stephen has explained, the benefits of streetcar over bus depend heavily on streetcars having dedicated lanes, which most of DC’s streetcars wouldn’t have. Earlier this spring, I was in a bike accident that cemented my opposition to DC’s streetcar. Because the streetcar tracks cover the right two-thirds of H Street’s right-hand lanes, bicyclists typically ride between the two tracks. This creates a situation in which the sudden need to swerve or a brief loss of concentration puts cyclists at a risk of catching their front tire in the track, causing an over-the-handlebars accident when the front wheel comes to a sudden stop. In Toronto, streetcar tracks are a factor in nearly one-third of serious bicycle accidents. While I can say I’ll now go to great lengths to avoid riding on H Street, DC’s lack of good east-west bike routes make it unrealistic to expect all cyclists to avoid the streetcar tracks. Avoiding tracks will be much more difficult for cyclists under DDOT’s plan to eventually construct 22 miles of tracks. Aside from creating a hazard for cyclists, this streetcar will only provide effective transportation for people visiting H Street retail destinations from the adjacent residential neighborhoods. It does not connect residential neighborhoods to job centers. While some have argued that it’s designed to serve tourists rather than District residents, the streetcar line doesn’t pass by any sightseeing, I don’t think that H Street’s retail is a common destination for tourists. Passengers using the streetcar to travel east from Union Station have to navigate a large parking garage to board the […]

How Affordable Housing Policies Backfire

Affordable housing policies have a long history of hurting the very people they are said to help. Past decades’ practices of building Corbusian public housing that concentrates low-income people in environments that support crime or pursuing “slum clearance” to eliminate housing deemed to be substandard have largely been abandoned by housing affordability advocates for the obvious harm that they cause stated beneficiaries. While rent control remains an important feature of the housing market in New York and San Francisco, even Bill de Blasio’s deputy mayor acknowledges the negative consequences of strong rent control policies. In the U.S. and abroad, politicians and pundits are beginning to vocalize the fact that maintaining and improving housing affordability requires housing supply to increase in response to demand increases. While support for older housing affordability policies has dissipated, the same isn’t true of inclusionary zoning.  From New York to California, housing affordability advocates tout IZ as a cornerstone of successful housing policy. IZ has emerged as the affordable housing policy of choice because it has the benefit of supporting socioeconomic diversity, and its costs are opaque and dispersed over many people. However, IZ has several key downsides including these hidden costs and a failure to meaningfully address housing affordability for a significant number of people. Shaila Dewan of the New York Times captures the strangeness of IZ’s popularity: New York needs more than 300,000 units by 2030. By contrast, inclusionary zoning, a celebrated policy solution that requires developers to set aside units for working and low-income families, has created a measly 2,800 affordable apartments in New York since 2005. Montgomery County, a Maryland suburb of DC,  has perhaps the most well-established IZ policy in the country. After 30 years, the program has produced about 13,000 units. Montgomery County is home to over one million people, 20 percent of whom have a household income of less than $43,000 annually. While this is an extraordinarily high income distribution relative to the rest of the country, this makes the […]

Urbanism without government

Asking, “But who will build the roads?” is a cliched response to proposals for a more libertarian political system. However, it leads to the interesting historical question of “Who has built the roads in anarchic societies?” Colonial America provides a few examples that answer this question. Perhaps the best known example of anarchism in American history was in Rhode Island, or “Rogue’s Island,” founded by Baptists fleeing Massachusetts. The stateless Baptists founded the cities of Portsmouth and Warwick. Unlike the Baptists, William Penn didn’t intend to create an anarchic colony, but Pennsylvania was, in fact, without a government from 1684 to 1691 as evidenced by Penn’s failure to successfully levy any taxes during that time. It’s difficult to know much about street building from this time period in part because of how much time has passed and in part because, as Murray Rothbard writes, “The lack of recordkeeping in stateless societies — since only government officials seem to have the time, energy, and resources to devote to such activities — produce a tendency toward a governmental bias in the working methods of historians.” However, we do know that Philadelphia’s neighborhoods near the Delaware River were growing during this time. One of the country’s oldest continually occupied streets is Philadelphia’s Elfreth’s Alley. It was dedicated in 1702, shortly after this period of complete anarchy and served  as a route to connect local merchants’ property with the already thriving Second Street. As the society dedicated to the alley’s preservation writes: Elfreth’s Alley — popularly known as “Our nation’s oldest residential street” – dates back to the first days of the eighteenth century. Twenty years after William Penn founded Pennsylvania and established Philadelphia as its capital, the town had grown into a thriving, prosperous mercantile center on the banks of the Delaware River. Philadelphians […]

Culs de sac for safety?

At Cato At Liberty, Randall O’Toole provides a list of recommendations for reversing Rust Belt urban decline in response to a study on the topic from the Lincoln Land Institute. He focuses on policies to improve public service provision and deregulation, but he also makes a surprising recommendation that declining cities should “reduce crime by doing things like changing the gridded city streets that planners love into cul de sacs so that criminals have fewer escape routes.” This recommendation is surprising because it would require significant tax payer resources, a critique O’Toole holds against those from the Lincoln Land Institute. Short of building large barricades, it’s inconceivable how a city with an existing grid of streets would even go about turning its grid into culs de sac without extensive use of eminent domain and other disruptive policies. O’Toole is correct that the grid owes its origins to authoritarian regimes and that today it’s embraced by city planners in the Smart Growth and New Urbanist schools. But while culs de sac may have originally appeared in organically developed networks of streets, today’s culs de sac promoted by traffic engineers are hardly a free market outcome. As Daniel Nairn has written, the public maintenance of what are essentially shared driveways “smacks of socialism in its most extreme form.” Some studies have found that culs de sac experience less crime relative to nearby through streets, perhaps in part because they draw less traffic. However, it’s far from clear that a pattern of suburban streets makes a city safer than it would be would be with greater street connectivity. Some studies find that street connectivity correlates with greater social capital. O’Toole’s promotion of social engineering through culs de sac to create a localized drop in crime at the expense of a city’s residents’ social capital is […]

Los Angeles’ Pedestrian Environment

Last week, Tyler Cowen wrote that Los Angeles is the best city in the world based on several factors, including that it’s one of the best cities for walking. While he makes the valid point that LA’s beautiful weather gives it an advantage over many other American cities with good walking opportunities, I have to disagree that it ranks among the best cities for walking as a tourist or for enjoyment. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic because my boyfriend is from LA and has often tried to convince me that it has great walking neighborhoods. Tyler is clearly correct that weather is an important aspect of walkability, so whether or not LA can compete with older, colder American cities on walkability depends on the walker’s preferences for weather relative to other factors like aesthetics and safety. Personally, I weight urban design much more heavily for walkability than weather, and from this standpoint I don’t think LA can compete with the few cities built before wide boulevards became standard street construction. As Nathan Lewis points out, American city planners began building wide streets well before personal cars became common for transportation. Only the U.S.’s oldest neighborhoods that predate the Revolutionary War feature the narrow streets that facilitate a pedestrian scale environment. Stephen Stofka at Strong Towns supports 1:1 as the best ratio of building height to street width, but personally, I prefer a “really narrow street” design with mid-rise buildings, with a ratio often approaching 2:1. With buildings taller than the streets, pedestrians feel a sense of enclosure and close-in building facades pull the walker along as compared to the expansiveness of wide streets that make comparable walking distances feel farther. Although some call Boston’s financial district an urban canyon, to me it’s one of the most interesting places to walk that I’ve […]

Potential for Voluntary Infrastructure

Last fall I visited Budapest and learned some interesting history of the city’s beautiful Chain Bridge. Before 1849, the small cities of Buda and Pest were connected by a temporary bridge that was only viable during warm months. In the winter, the bridge had to be taken down due to ice, making it impossible to cross the Danube between the two cities if the ice wasn’t solid enough to walk on. Count István Széchenyi, a Hungarian statesman who traveled extensively throughout Europe, made it his mission to secure financing for a bridge to improve economic growth opportunities and Budapest’s standing on the world stage. His experiences in rapidly modernizing cities like London taught Széchenyi the importance of mobility for economic growth. Legend has it that Széchenyi was motivated to build a bridge between Buda and Pest because ice on the Danube prevented him from getting to see his sick father before he died, but it’s unclear to me if this is an accurate history. The bridge was the realization of both a politician’s ambitions and a private financiers goal to profit from tolling the bridge and by increasing the value of his landholding in Pest. While the bridge lost money during its financier’s life, it ultimately began turning a profit in 1860. It’s impossible to understand Széchenyi’s motivations for securing the bridge centuries later, but it seems he was likely motivated by a combination of profit seeking, nationalistic pride, and philanthropy. The Chain Bridge joined a slew of other privately built bridges and other infrastructure around the world, built either by people who hoped to profit from providing transportation services or who sought to increase their land value by providing mobility. While a voluntarily built bridge seems exceptional from today’s vantage point — when a public private partnership or contracted toll road management seems […]

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