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Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith

I graduated Spring 2010 from Georgetown undergrad, with an entirely unrelated and highly regrettable major that might have made a little more sense if I actually wanted to become an international trade lawyer, but which alas seems good for little else. I still do most of the tweeting for Market Urbanism Stephen had previously written on urbanism at Forbes.com. Articles Profile; Reason Magazine, and Next City
  • Joined: May 21, 2025
  • Articles: 282
  • Comments: 41

Links

1. Systemic Failure praises Gov. (again) Jerry Brown’s efforts to do away with California’s redevelopment agencies and “enterprise zones” (there’s a euphemism if I’ve ever heard one), which the author claims promote autocentric development with public funds. He then cites a few examples of redevelopment agencies pushing such plans in San Jose. If he can come up with that many in one city, I can’t even imagine how much damage they’ve done throughout the whole state. So far I’m liking Jerry Brown’s second act. 2. A very interesting Wikipedia article about a controversial Brooklyn-based developer. 3. One Staten Island councilman wants to use the dreaded environmental review against bike lanes. 4. An article about the Toronto condo boom. I’d like to know more about this: But perhaps the biggest demographic that will continue to drive sales this year is the investor market, both local and international. Mr. Lamb says there are few developers building rental towers any longer, in part due to the city’s rent control laws, so investors hold the key to rental accommodation. He says it’s not uncommon for 40% of a building to be owned by investors, with most rentals situated below the fifteenth floor because they are less expensive than those with a brighter view. Mr. Myers estimates 50% to 60% of downtown condo units are owned by investors who rent them out.

The origin of user fees?

I just started reading Paving the Way: New York Road Building and the American State, 1880-1956by Michael R. Fein, and though I don’t have time to talk as much about it as I’d like, I will say that I’m only a couple pages in and I can already tell it’s going to be great. Its thesis is essentially that the development of the road building bureaucracy was as important as the New Deal, if not more so, in shaping 20th century political development (this may be something that liberal urbanists, who otherwise support the expansion of the state, don’t want to hear). There’s much I’d like to excerpt, but I’ll stick with this paragraph in the introduction: Engineers framed their decisions in the language of scientific rationality and professional expertise. But these were merely forms of political expression that advanced their traffic-service vision of highway planning. Though New York’s road-building program predated mass automobility, engineers quickly seized on the phenomenon as a means of cementing their political legitimacy. Traffic censuses became the main foundational beam to engineers’ authority, a scientific measurement of public demand for highways that was difficult to contest [ed. note: reminds me of the Texas Transportation Institute]. As long as state highway construction focused on the improvement of existing roads, dissent was weakly expressed. As engineering projects increased in scale, impact, and potential for controversy, resistance spiked. It was in the process of responding to increased opposition that strong tensions developed between engineers’ service to their professional agenda (building a better highway system) and their responsibility to the public (balancing highway construction with other aspects of social development). These interests, once operating in tandem and instrumental to the engineers’ rise to power, began over time to feed conflict and meet with cross-purposes. The engineers’ solution to this […]

Russia links

1. “Experts have proposed increasing road taxes for Moscow drivers six or seven-fold in an effort to alleviate the Russian capital’s notorious traffic congestion.” 2. Moscow Mayor Sobyanin wants to regulate taxis, of which over 80% (!) are current unlicensed. Racial undertones abound (“They should get them off the road, especially those who came from the mountains”), and you know a plan is probably not a good idea when even the monopolists (i.e., current licensed drivers) are skeptical. 3. Moscow drivers are planning a protest over the recent death of a student at the hands of one of the city’s notorious official cars that use flashing blue lights to routinely halt traffic throughout the congested capital. 4. Russian President Medvedev has signed a decree banning foreigners from owning land along most of Russia’s borders with Finland and Norway. It’s unclear how they’ll deal with land already owned by them. It’s unclear to me if the ban includes land extending into, say, the Russian city of Vyborg. 5. The Potemkin Village of Skolkovo. Is there any officially-designated Silicon Valley wannabe that hasn’t been an utter failure? More on Moscow’s unfortunate urbanism here.

Even Jane Jacobs thought Houston doesn’t have zoning

“Houston has no zoning” is a very popular urban planning meme. It has its roots in Houston’s lacks one very specific kind of zoning: Euclidean separation of residential, commercial, and industrial uses. Euclidean zoning happens to be the one kind of planning that people easily understand (the whole meatpacking-plant-in-my-backyard fear), and so the usual panoply of density-inhibiting regulations (parking minimums, minimum lot requirements, FAR restrictions, etc.) is downplayed or even outright ignored, despite Michael Lewyn’s claims that Houston is in many ways more restrictive than even its Sun Belt neighbors. But still, despite its pervasiveness, I was surprised to hear from commenter Alon Levy that in a 2001 interview with Reason Magazine, even Jane Jacobs was still laboring under the myth: Reason: When the change comes, if it is an incremental, slowly evolving, uncontrolled sort of natural change, it’s easy for society to accommodate that, isn’t it? Jacobs: Yes it is. But if all that zoning is kept, that can’t happen. Reason: This is why I’m one of the few people you’ve met who likes Houston, because it has no zoning. Jacobs: It has no zoning. But all the same, it looks like all the places that do have zoning. Because the same developers and bankers who deal with places that do have zoning carry their same ideas when they finance or build something in Houston. Reason: There are not enough Houstons to change the way things are built or developed? Jacobs: Right. Maybe I’m just a sadist, but my favorite part of the interview was the first few pages where the interviewer tries to get Jacobs to support the usual libertarian “war on cars” line and she deftly avoids it. Finally, he thinks he’s gotten her when she says something bad about New Urbanism, but then it turns out […]

The Texas Transportation Institute’s funny definition of “congestion”

As if anybody didn’t realize it before, it’s now obvious that the Texas Transportation Institute, despite its prestige, is intellectually bankrupt. David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington says it better than I could: The Texas Transportation Institute today released the final version of their report on congestion, which ranks the DC area tied for first with Chicago in hours wasted in traffic. Unfortunately, the report’s methodology completely misleads as to the seriousness of traffic, and TTI is pushing the wrong policy solutions. The TTI report narrowly looks at only one factor: how fast traffic moves. Consider two hypothetical cities. In Denseopolis, people live within 2 miles of work on average, but the roads are fairly clogged and drivers can only go about 20 miles per hour. However, it only takes an average of 6 minutes to get to work, which isn’t bad. On the other hand, in Sprawlville, people live about 30 miles from work on average, but there are lots and lots of fast-moving freeways, so people can drive 60 mph. That means it takes 30 minutes to get to work. Which city is more congested? By TTI’s methods, it’s Denseopolis. But it’s the people of Sprawlville who spend more time commuting, and thus have less time to be with their families and for recreation. Sadly, despite CEOs for Cities pointing out these methodological problems last year, TTI went ahead and finalized its report without fixing them (PDFs). TTI ranks Portland as worse than Nashville, with a Travel Time Index (TTI) of 1.23 for Nashville and worse TTI of 1.15 for Portland. However, because of greater sprawl, Nashville commuters spend an average of 268 hours per year commuting, while the average Portland commuter spends 193 hours per year. What does this mean for public policy and the Washington region? […]

Links

1. A report on (Western) European parking policies. Abstract of the abstract: Big on charging market rates for on-street parking, but also big on capping private developer’s ability to build parking. I’d be interested to see an analysis like this done to see if the caps are actually set lower than the market equilibrium. Streetsblog also has a good summary. 2. It’s unfortunate that this developer chose to express himself in such an unsympathetic way (someone should teach him the meaning of the word “corruption,” in particular), but his analysis of NYC’s recent property tax assessment hikes is consistent with what we’ve seen before: people who live in apartments are taxed at higher rates than people who live in single-family homes. 3. Urbanists are trying to change Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and HUD’s policies of not funding small mixed use projects. From what I understand, the GSEs’ role in financing American mortgages has actually increased in the wake of the financial crisis, so the federal bias against mixed use may actually be stronger than it was before the recession. 4. Washington, DC may speed through zoning changes that require parking to not be out front. I’m not sure, but I think that DC currently has some laws mandating that it be out front, which means this would be yet another example of zoning codes going from density-forbidding to density-forcing without any intermediate stop. 5. Remember yesterday when I said that Gallaudet was a bigger drag on its neighborhood than the industrial-looking blight nearby? DC lawmakers may try to one-up Gallaudet by replacing the buildings with a soccer stadium.

Why are universities so bad at managing their land?

I’ve lived near a lot of schools in my life. Growing up on the Main Line I could walk to (at least?) five institutions of high learning, I went to school in Georgetown, and just a few weeks ago I’ve moved across the street from Gallaudet University in DC. And I’ve noticed a common thread among the schools: they make horrible land use decisions. I was inspired to write this by this post in Greater Greater Washington by Ken Archer about the housing situation at Georgetown, which is pretty bad. Though the university houses a lot of its students, it’s not great and a lot of people are forced out into the surrounding neighborhoods of Burleith and West Georgetown. The prices range from about $900/bedroom/month at the low end in Burleith to over $2000/bedroom/month in West Georgetown, and the campus housing could get as pricey as $2000/room/month without dedicated kitchens and bathrooms (!) for freshmen sharing dorms. Much of this is no doubt due to the neighbors’ refusal to allow affordable, dense housing in their communities for students, but at least half of the problem is universities simply making poor use of their existing space. GGW post does a good job of describing Georgetown’s failures. There is no shortage of short, architecturally-insignificant buildings on Georgetown’s campus that could be densified, and yet the university doesn’t take advantage of it. My first choices for infill projects would be New South and the awful concrete plaza next to Harbin, and I’m not sure many people would complain if the brutalist buildings were razed and replaced with something glassy and denser. And unlike, say, Villanova, there is no existing constituency of student drivers to cater to, so that can’t be it. And it’s not just Georgetown. In fact, likely due to the extreme […]

Why am I so mean?

In the past week I’ve been asked twice why, essentially, I have to be so mean: Steven [sic!], I’m struck by how well you couple true insight with meaningless insults that undermine your credibility to those who don’t share your point of view. Stephen– I like your work here quite a bit, but I find the tone is sometimes accusatory and demeaning rather than informative. I think you should explain why the NY Times is “wrong” rather than saying they “utterly humiliate” themselves. First of all, I apologize for not giving these topics – and many others – the time they deserve. Up until early January I was unemployed and had a lot of time to write, and this blog really grew, but since I started interning at Reason I’ve had much less time. Beyond that, I certainly won’t deny that I’m more bombastic and harsh than most land use bloggers. But why? One reason is that I think that the issues that Adam and I write about are far more important than they’re given credit for, and, quite honestly, it makes me angry. There are plenty of people who make a living writing about green energy, about racism and tolerance, and about culture, but few people recognize the land use origins of all of these debates. Would we have gay marriage by now if zoning and state road building projects didn’t turn us into a suburban nation? To what extent do our land use decisions impact our energy consumption and the forces of global warming? To what extent does anti-density zoning affect racial segregation? These are all interesting questions, but they aren’t ones that are often asked by journalists and commentators, who instead choose to spend their time rehashing tired but news-worthy themes. A second reason is that I […]

Long weekend links

1. The NYT utterly humiliates itself with a story on how difficult it is for a kid straight outta college from “a prominent Portuguese banking family” to rent a $2,500/mo. studio in a Chelsea coop for less than 12 months. Sounds like the perfect posterchild for Sheldon Silver’s rent control plans. 2. What does it cost in bribes to get an 11-story hotel built in Park Slope? $9,850 to Marty Markowitz and 400-space public garage. The developer called the garage a “magnificent cake,” and Irene Lo Re of the Fifth Ave. BID says, “We can’t turn our backs on 400 spaces.” The commenters are throwing a lot of scorn at the developer for the garage, but it looks to me like it’s the fault of Irene Lo Re and the parking-obsessed neighbors. 3. Vancouver considers easing up on “social housing requirement” for developer (for the first time ever?!) if they’ll give the city a few parcels of land. 4. New (again) California Governor Jerry Brown proposes elimination of redevelopment agencies.

London congestion pricing, then and now

It’s already Sunday and I’ve exhausted my cache of unread blog posts from the week, so I went in search of new blogs to read and can across this really good one: Spatial Analysis. A post from December has this set of maps – private turnpikes in 18th century London and the congestion zone map in the 21st: It looks to me like the old map is skewed and that they are actually quite similar, but I’m having trouble aligning them – maybe someone who knows London better than me could compare them for us? Again, that’s from spatialanalysis.co.uk.

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