Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

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

Elevated rail vs. road, and…monorails?

I started reading Fogelson’s Downtown with the intention of learning more about elevated trains, and though I’ve been slightly disappointed in that regard (more to come on that after I finish and attempt a more comprehensive review), he does include a lot of interesting history. I’m posting this more so that I remember it, but the first paragraph offers an interesting rejoinder to those who say that els could never be viable because of the blight factor, and the Second Avenue elevated line makes a cameo towards the end: In view of the longstanding and deep-seated opposition to elevated railways, the construction of elevated highways is more than a little puzzling. This opposition has grown so vociferous that by the 1920s most Americans had come to believe that elevated railways should never have been built in the first place. Despite assurances by several leading engineers that it was possible to build els that were quiet, clean, and attractive (and would not reduce property values), they remained convinced that under no circumstances should any more be constructed. The cities should not only stop building elevated railways, many Americans insisted; they should start demolishing them. This idea, which had surfaced in the first two decades of the century, caught on in the 1920s, especially in New York and Boston. In favor of it were abutting businessmen and property owners, who believed that the removal of the els would improve trade and raise values. Allied with them were public officials (among them Julius Miller, borough president of Manhattan and chief advocate of the West Side Elevated Highway), who thought the demolition of the els would foster economic development; traffic experts (including New York City Police Commissioner Enright, another advocate of elevated highways), who assumed that the removal of the elevated structures would facilitate […]

Parking lots as tax arbitrage during the Great Depression

I’ve learned a lot from Fogelson’s Downtown, but one thing that I had absolutely no idea about before I read this book was how Depression-era tax policies encouraged downtown landlords to tear down their buildings and replace them with parking lots (emphasis mine): By the mid 1930s the owners of Detroit’s Temple Theater, a nine-story office building that had once been the home of the city’s most successful vaudeville house, had had enough. In a city reeling from the Great Depression, the vacancy rate for office buildigns was running between 35 and 40 percent. With tenants hard to find – and rents, which had been falling steadily, hard to collect – the Temple Theater no long paid. In an attempt to lower property taxes and operating expenses, its owners did what other downtown property owners in Detroit and other cities had done. They demolished the building and turned the site into a parking lot. [These] were commonly referred to as “taxpayers.” The “taxpayers” were as much a legacy of the depression as the “Hoovervilles,” bread lines, soup kitches, and dance marathons. They symbolized downtown in the 1930s as much as skyscrapers, department stores, and high-rise hotels had in the 1920s. […] Things were much the same in downtown Los Angeles, where so many buildings were torn down and replaced by parking lots or “taxpayers” in the 1930s that by the early 1940s roughly 25 percent of the buildable land was used to store autos. In a business district of less than one square mile there were no more than nine hundred parking lots and garages, with space for more than sixty-five thousand cars. […] By tearing down the buildings, the owners could lower their tax bills and reduce their operating expenses. By replacing them with parking lots or one- and […]

New Years link list

Behold, your first link list of 2011! 1. The automobile may officially in decline (very good article!). 2. Interesting parallels between China and its HSR intellectual property disputes and post-WWII Japan and Korea. More here. 3. Fred Barnes writes a stupid article for the Weekly Standard (“The road to hell is paved with bike baths”), and Jarrett Walker responds with a treatise on “coercion” (“We are the libertarians!”). 4. I forget that although rent control has been thoroughly discredited in the real world, NYC developers are still grappling with it. Vornado and another developer had to shell out tens of millions to break the rent control grip on a Central Park South building they bought, with 15 rent controlled tenants receiving payouts of around $1.5 million each. 5. Vancouver is loosening its grip on the street food market, while Stephen Goldberg is trying to create a one-stop shop for getting NYC restaurant permits/licenses/certificates/inspections. 6. The market-defying schemes that liberals come up with would be amusing if they weren’t so horrifying. Read here as they puzzle over why excess luxury condos built in NYC during the boom couldn’t easily be used as affordable housing (Vancouver redux), and watch out for the part on the third page where an organization called “Right to the City” advocates “using eminent domain to seize vacant residential buildings and turn them into affordable housing.” 7. Niagara Falls’ decades-long megaproject failures. The article ends on a positive note, citing federal money for a new train station and grants for a wine bar and a concert hall, but I wonder if anyone in Niagara Falls ever bothered trying to loosen up the parking restrictions and maybe upzone a few blocks.

The environmental review strikes again: Lake Oswego edition

Lake Oswego, a suburb of Portland where development began over a hundred years ago, has learned the hard way about the strings that come with taking federal money: In the dim light of recent news and numbers, you’ve probably forgotten that the Lake Oswego streetcar was, once upon a time, a project worth celebrating as a wise and timely investment. […] But the value of that astute move has been all but lost in the recent traffic of misleading budget numbers and the self-defeating “environmental impact” process mandated by the leaden, one-size-fits-all feds. […] But the streetcar is the environmental alternative when a community is wrestling with carbon footprints, traffic congestion and our addiction to OPEC, and the draft environmental impact study — draft, mind you — placed an 18-month hammerlock on the project. “Interminable and ridiculous sums up the federal process,” says Judie Hammerstad, the former Lake Oswego mayor. “Portland circumvented it with its first streetcar by not asking for federal funds. We don’t have that luxury.” “To get federal funding, you have to do an environmental impact statement,” notes Doug Obletz, who heads the project team. “The federal government dictates the process.” That does no one any favors, save the Dunthorpe residents who will move heaven and rail-line to ensure a streetcar never intrudes upon the sanctuary of their river estates. In exchange for this needlessly complex review, the feds pick up 60 percent of the project cost, which has been mischievously pegged in the vicinity of $458 million. And here’s how the money was spent: Another is the cost of the draft EIS, a 543-page report that cost — thanks to the feds — $4.3 million to produce. Let’s put that price tag in perspective. If you paid a reasonably bright engineer $75 an hour and gave […]

Why I don’t like Inclusionary Zoning

Inclusionary zoning is a hot item among urban planners today, and is often seen as a solution to residential segregation and high housing costs. Exact implementations vary, but the general idea is that developers of multi-unit housing projects are encouraged to set aside a certain percentage of their units, generally ranging from 10-30%, but sometimes even more, as “affordable housing” units. In other words, some proportion of the units are under rent controls to the point where they must be rented (or sold) at a loss by the developer. Sometimes the schemes are voluntary and give developers density bonuses, sometimes developers can pay a fee instead of setting aside units. The exact proportion of units that must be set aside and loss developers take on each unit also varies. As you can imagine, I’m not in favor of this system, but it’s a complicated issue, so this is going to be a long article. Inclusionary zoning is a relatively new concept, first implemented in the 1970s, to combat the growing problem of residential segregation of classes and races, whose origins are interesting and, I think, germane to the conversation. I generally see two explanations given by proponents of IZ for why segregation and unaffordability arose in the first place: market forces and zoning (or, as they call it, exclusionary zoning). Quoteth a law review article: Affordable housing has always been a problem in the United States. Cities and towns originally engaged in forms of discrimination through exclusionary zoning to exclude low-income residents. Of course, this is only true if your history begins in 1930. But from the mid-18th century to the turn of the century, America underwent a tremendous urban population boom fueled by railed transit and a massive immigration wave from Europe, and the housing stock adjusted just fine […]

Mohamed Atta as urban planner, and more from the Middle East

The NYT has an interesting article on urban planning developments in Aleppo, Syria (the largest city in the Levant – bigger than Beirut, Tel Aviv, Damascus, and Amman!), which includes this section about the history of planning in the Middle East, with a development-as-preservation lesson at the end: The role of postwar urban planning in the rise of fundamentalism is well documented. In the 1950s and ’60s nationalist governments in countries like Egypt, Syria and Iraq typically viewed the congested alleys and cramped interiors of historic centers not as exotic destinations for tourists but as evidence of a backward culture to be erased. Planners carved broad avenues through dense cities, much as Haussmann had before them in Paris. Families that had lived a compartmentalized existence — with men often segregated from women in two- or three-story courtyard houses — were forced into high-rises with little privacy, while the wealthy fled for villas in newly created suburbs. But while preservationists may have scorned Modernist housing blocks, they were often just as insensitive to the plight of local residents who got in their way. Even as they worked to restore architectural monuments in the Muslim world, they could be disdainful of the dense urban fabric that surrounded these sites. Neighborhoods were sometimes bulldozed to clear space around landmarks so they would be more accessible to tourists. Agencies like Unesco often steered governments toward a Western-style approach to preservation. Traditionally a family might have built onto a house to accommodate a newly married son, for instance, adding a floor or a shop out front. But those kinds of changes were often prohibited under preservation rules. I’m also pleased to see that Aleppo won’t be razing its slums: And the city’s mayor, Maan Chibli, said that he recently asked GTZ to help plan for […]

Systemic Failure on HSR

One of many reasons why high-speed rail in America is doomed, from Systemic Failure: When DB or Renfe or even SNCF needs to buy a high-speed train, they simply call up Siemens (or Alstom or Talgo) and order some trains. Simple as that. Customization consists of painting a logo on the outside, and maybe choosing colors for the interior. It is no different than how United or Continental orders airplanes, or how Hertz orders automobiles. Now consider the process for building trains in the USA. Under FTA rules, all train components must be 100% manufactured in the US. And to guarantee no foreign manufacturing takes place, regulators will devise enough oddball design specs that bidders have no choice but to custom design the rolling stock from scratch. Then, local municipalities compete to offer huge tax breaks to lure a manufacturer. For transit agencies, this nonsense results in 100% higher costs for vehicle procurement. And even as a jobs program, the cost-effectiveness is abysmal. I know I haven’t really addressed high-speed rail in a comprehensive way, but that’s mostly because the concept so enrages and saddens me that it’s hard for me to sum up all my negative feelings about it in one post. The arguments against it seem so obvious, and yet the idea has somehow become the primary plank of Obama’s transportation policy. It gives railed transit a bad name, and the fact that its current incarnations are supported by Greater Greater Washington and Streetsblog – blogs whose regions aren’t even being considered for the money! – and pretty much every other urbanist blog out there really disappoints me. To everyone who’s sullying the name of transit and urbanism with this ridiculous white elephant: shame on you.

Calling your opponents “socialists” and “un-American” is as American as skyscrapers

It’s pretty amusing to me that liberals today are still whining about being called “socialists,” considering the charge is at least a century old. Here one example from Robert Fogelson’s excellent Downtown chapter on height restrictions around the turn of the century: The Post voiced especially strong objections to the argument that a height limit was necessary to prevent new buildings from undermining the profitability of old ones and to deter the business district from moving from one location to another. That was “Municipal Socialism,” it declared. The city had no more business regulating development than running a department store. Municipal authority was already encroaching on private enterprise in too many ways. “And if it be permitted to limit the economic development of the city it might as well buy the city outright and conduct it as a Socialist Elysium.” And here’s another example later in the chapter about comprehensive zoning, with an extra “un-American” mixed in there: In some cities, the efforts to impose height limits through zoning ran into strong resistance. Sometimes the resistance was fueled by the opposition to zoning, which, it was charged, was “unfair, undemocratic, and un-American.” It was unfair because it discriminated among property owners. As Horace Groskin, director of the Philadelphia Real Estate Board, declared: “By what right has a zoning commission to set itself up as the judge and distributer of property values? To take the value away from one property owner and give it to another, or not to give it to anyone but to destroy it entirely for the imaginary benefit of the community, strikes me as coming mighty close to Socialism.” And while I’m in the mood to fill posts with others’ work, here’s another good (unrelated) quote from market anarchist Kevin Carson, as a Christmas Eve bonus: As […]

Vancouver shows how seeking community amenities from developers can go horribly wrong

A lot of time I hear liberal urbanists claiming that trading development rights for community amenities (I’d definitely include affordable housing mandates here) is a win-win situation, but there’s a real danger of killing the goose that laid the golden egg, as appears to be happening in Vancouver: Development of the Cambie corridor is being “paralyzed” because the City of Vancouver is taking too much of the profits resulting from property rezonings, the Urban Development Institute says. Paul Sullivan, chair of the UDI taxation committee, said at least three potential developments along the new Canada Line have fallen apart because the city is being too aggressive in seeking community amenity contributions when rezonings take place. The city uses the money — an average of 75 per cent of the profits resulting from rezonings — for community amenities like parks and seniors’ centres. It’s interesting that the city openly admits to taking the vast majority of the upshot from the rezonings. One could interpret this as a marginal tax rate on dense development of 75% – I’m not sure that you could find a single politician or economist who would support a such a tax bracket on income, but I guess developers are viewed as less productive and more easy to leech off of than even the ultra-rich. Another odd aspect of the story is that the rules are in fact not even formalized: Sullivan, a real estate appraiser by trade, said the city could solve the problem by establishing a set amount for CACs that developers can factor into their purchase prices. “What we need is certainty in the policy, not just in the density but in the lift so that land can get priced fairly,” he said. “If you don’t have that it makes it very hard to get a […]

DC link list

I didn’t mean for these all (except the last one) to be about DC, but it looks like it turned out that way… 1. Matt Yglesias on lot occupancy rules in DC. I have a feeling, though, that these are more or less irrelevant in the face of other, stricter limits on density. 2. The feds, along with the Committee of 100 (surprise, surprise), are having a hissy fit over overhead wires on proposed streetcar lines. Regarding San Francisco: “But then you see these wires in the center. It’s like: Oh, great.” 3. WAMU manages to do a whole segment about DC’s historical streetcars without once mentioning that they were built and operated (at least for most of their history) by private industry. 4. WMATA institutes random bag checks on the Metro – an anti-terror strategy that has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. 5. Washington authorities might purposely make the Dulles Metro station inconvenient, to avoid “dual” terrorist threat. “We are not just looking at this (project) from a cost perspective.” 6. The price of gas in Iran skyrockets from 10¢ to 40¢ a liter, and China raises its fuel prices much more slightly, as governments feel the pinch of subsidized gasoline.

Trending now

A self-defeating argument
Texas MUD
gentrification
Only 2 Ways to Fight Gentrification (you’re not going to like one of them)
The problem with “public” transportation