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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

Seattle’s land use liberalization

It’s not often that I find a plan that I can wholeheartedly agree with, but this one from Seattle sounds damn near perfect, at least in terms of marginal change (my emphasis…apologies to Publicola for stealing their content!): 1. Instead of the current generic land-use standards, the new regulations include five different allowed housing types: Cottage housing (collections of small single-family-style houses), row houses (rows of units attached by a single wall), townhouses (attached units that occupy space from ground to roof), autocourt townhouses (townhouses that each have a private garage), and apartments. 2. The maximum allowable height would be increased from 25 to 30 feet (basically, from three to a potential four stories)—a change that prompted commenters like Eastlake gadfly Chris Leman to accuse the council of supporting “larger and taller condos… that are bulkier and …. really worse than the worst townhouses” because they would block views, make it impossible to plant trees, and displace low-income housing. 3. The size of new developments would be determined by floor-area ratio (the ratio of a building’s floor area to the lot on which it is built) rather than simple building footprint, allowing more flexibility in building size. 4. Row houses would not be subject to the same density limits as auto-oriented townhouses, allowing them to cover more of a lot. 5. The law also includes new design standards to improve the appearance of new low-rise buildings and make them fit better into neighborhoods; 6. The changes would reduce the setbacks required between housing and the street (and between low-rise townhouses or row houses and each other), allowing more development on a lot; 7. Require developers to provide space for garbage, recycling, and food waste bins for smaller buildings, making it easier for residents of small town houses and apartment buildings […]

Reinflating the housing bubble through the FHA?

I’d like to believe that, at least for another ten years or so, no amount of government money will be able to override investors’ memories of the most recent housing bubble. But we may soon find out what lessons we really learned: While everyone has been watching Fannie and Freddie, the administration has quietly shifted most federal high-risk mortgage initiatives to FHA, the government’s original subprime lender. Along with two other federal agencies, FHA now accounts for about 60 percent of all U.S. home purchase mortgage originations. This amounts to more than $1 trillion and is rising rapidly. The administration justifies this policy by saying it is necessary to support the mortgage market, yet borrowers are once again receiving high-risk loans. […] The Dodd-Frank Act [the recent financial reform], however, exempts FHA and other government agencies from appropriate standards on mortgage quality. This will give low-quality mortgages a direct route into the market once again; it will be like putting Fannie and Freddie back in the same business, but with an explicit government guarantee. For example, thanks to expanded government lending, 60 percent of home purchase loans now have down payments of less than 5 percent, compared to 40 percent at the height of the bubble, and the FHA projects that it will increase its insured loans total to $1.34 trillion by 2013. Indeed, the FHA just announced its intention to push almost half of its home purchase volume into subprime territory by 2014-2017, essentially a guarantee to put taxpayers at risk again. The subprime bubble was years in the making by the time it popped, so if this FHA lending doesn’t continue for much longer and/or doesn’t accelerate, it might not be a problem. But it does make me worry that the political incentives haven’t changed since the ’90s […]

A question and a link list

Hey guys, before I start this link list, I wanted to ask: Has anybody had trouble posting comments here with Disqus lately? Either you can’t post them, or once you do they disappear? I’ve gotten two complaints in the last few days, so if you’ve been experiencing any problems please don’t hesitate to let me know so I can try to get to the bottom of it. If you can’t post a comment, email me at smithsj[at]gmail[dot]com. 1. DC gets upzoned. Why the Washington City Paper chose to bury that behind items about “neighborhood branding” and “supporting the enactment of pending federal legislation to ensure that insurance reserves are held and invested in the U.S.” is beyond me. 2. DC has, unfortunately, also started to cap the number of cabs in the city. American politicians just can’t get enough of screwing over Somalis, I guess. 3. Jamaica, Queens gets downzoned. The Post tells us joyfully that the city is implementing the “innovative and critically important” FRESH initiative to deal with the area’s lack of supermarkets – which will be sorely needed now that the city is guaranteeing that there will be no new demand for food. 4. “Vertical parking lot” in Chicago, circa 1930. 5. Communism in America: Roosevelt Island. 6. Matt Yglesias and Megan McArdle discuss bars and clustering, but Ryan Advent has the best post in my opinion. 7. Chicago’s Metra boosts home values (duh). 8. India fails at urbanism. 9. One Tea Partier thinks that only property owners (read: homeowners) should be allowed to vote. “If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners.”

How local property taxes discourage density

In yesterday’s post about a proposal in Philadelphia to mandate adherence to certain “visitability” standards in new residential construction, but only for multifamily units, I asked if anyone knew of any other burdens that are heaped unfairly on apartment-dwellers. Regular commenter Alon Levy rose to the task, and pointed to a huge one: property taxes. He linked to this great explanation of New York City’s arcade property tax regime that favors outer-borough owner-occupied properties over apartment and condo dwellers, but after just a little bit of digging I found that these property tax differentials are in no way unique to NYC. Here’s (most of) the abstract to a 2006 paper published in the journal Housing Policy Debate (.pdf): The study finds that for the nation as a whole, multifamily rental housing bears an effective tax rate (tax divided by property value) that is at least 18 percent higher than the rate on single-family owner-occupied housing. This gap appears to have arisen during the 1990s. The level of taxation and the apartment/house differential vary considerably by location. Much—but not all—of the differential is associated with the fact that apartments have a lower average property value per unit than houses. The residential property tax, as implemented, promotes low-density development, disproportionately burdens lower-value properties, and may impose higher taxes on apartment residents than on homeowners with identical incomes. This is on top of the fact that the vast majority of property taxes in the US are used to fund local roads and schools (right?), which apartment-dwellers surely make lesser use of. So even if the taxes were levied across the board, they’d still be redistributing wealth from poorer apartment dwellers to richer homeowners. I should also emphasize that these are local property taxes, and are completely separate from the mortgage interest deduction that […]

NoMa’s missing parks

David Alpert at GGW asks us what we think about the up-and-coming DC neighborhood of NoMa and its lack of parks: And in the future, all cities and towns should avoid making the same mistake. Libertarian-leaning urbanists like Market Urbanism have recommended fewer development restrictions and greater reliance on the free market. In many cases that makes a lot of sense, but the NoMA experience shows a need for at least some mechanism to reserve for public goods some of the value an upzoning generates. Is there a more free market way to handle this? I have a few thoughts about this. The first is that, to some extent, David answers his own question: developers have to fill every inch of space because of DC’s height restrictions. Lift the restrictions, and I think you’d see some more experimentation with taller towers and more green space. But secondly, I’m not sure that I exactly agree that parks that take up large amounts of space are really the answer here. DC is the perfect example of a city with too many parks in all the wrong places – the Mall is a barren wasteland, and even a lot of the more rationally-placed parks are essentially expensive homeless shelters, but without the shelter part. I know that here in Philadelphia, at the corner of 40th and Market, there’s a park-like open space on the edge of a public housing project, and despite the large amount of foot traffic, El station, and bus stop, I have yet to see a single person in the park – people seem to prefer to hang out on the corner. And in terms of a little bit of green space to break up the monotony of buildings and some places for people to sit and eat on their […]

Empirical evidence that anti-density zoning breeds racial segregation

With nothing quick to blog about and not being in the mood to write something long, I dug into the Google Scholar pool for some interesting empirical work, which is something this blog hasn’t featured in a while.  This paper shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but it’s interesting empirical work nonetheless (.pdf): The foregoing analysis suggests that patterns and processes of racial segregation in the post-civil rights American city are strongly affected by density zoning. At any point in time from 1990 to 2000, intermetropolitan variation in Black-White segregation and Black isolation was strongly predicted by a metropolitan area’s relative openness to housing construction, as embodied in maximum zoning rules—the greater the allowable density, the lower the level of racial segregation. Moreover, our instrumental variable analysis suggests that the causal arrow runs from regulation to segregation even if the reverse is also true. In keeping with these cross-sectional findings, we also found that the prospects for desegregation are greater in areas with more liberal density regulations. From 1980 to 2000, metropolitan areas that allowed higher density development moved more rapidly toward racial integration than their counterparts with strict density limitations, even after controlling for a battery of social, geographic, and economic characteristics and for potential reverse causality between segregation and zoning. Our confidence that anti-density zoning is a true source of segregation is increased by a recent working paper by Rothwell (2009b) that uses the same data and finds essentially the same results for levels of Asian and Hispanic segregation, and consistent with Pendall’s (2000) analysis, we do not find any consistent pattern emerging for other land-use regulations. In terms of underlying mechanisms, we argue that restrictive density zoning produces higher housing prices in White areas and limits opportunities for people with modest incomes to leave segregated areas, […]

Mandates that fall only on multifamily development

So I’m reading a PlanPhilly article about a proposal to mandate half-baths on the ground level and front doors without steps for new residential units (“visitability,” they call it), and while I don’t think that it’s a bright idea to begin with, this part struck me as particularly dumb, albeit very common (my emphasis): There have been victories. Any homes that are built with money from the City’s Housing Trust Fund – money generated by fees charged for recording deeds – must be visitable. But, Salandra said, while bills that would have required all new housing to be visitable have been introduced to city council, they have gone nowhere. The visitability task force is trying anew. Klein said that they submitted comments about the proposed new zoning code, asking for a change that any development of 10 houses or more require at least half to be visitable. Unfortunately, I think that this restriction is just what they need to get this passed. Many burdens – some inscribed in law, but many wrung out in ad hoc negotiations between developers and local governments – are levied only on developers of more than a few units, which almost by definition includes everyone who builds dense housing. In some cases the cut-off is necessary due to the nature of concessions (what do affordable housing mandates mean to someone building a single house for themselves?), but this is definitely not the case here. If this is such a great idea, then why not enact it across the board? The reason is obviously that it’s easier to foist restrictions on developers, who only have one vote each, than it is to go after the mighty suburban bloc. And while few voters know much about what they’re voting for anyway, the number of apartment-dwellers who see their […]

Weekend link megalist

This is probably my favorite link list yet…enjoy! 1. The WSJ claims that delinquent homeowners can expect to stay in their homes after making their last mortgage payment – that is, they can live rent-free – for at least 16 months. The longer it takes for foreclosures to happen, the longer it will take for real estate markets to adjust to the new paradigm. 2. Fascinating article about food trucks in Houston. In it I found a second example of bad anti-terrorism policy trumping good urbanism: Chimed in Joyce: “We all know that Houston is not a walking city, as much as we wish it was. But there are two areas that are walkable – downtown and the Medical Center. The use of propane trucks is prohibited downtown, however. The regulation was originally put in place as a part of Homeland Security after 9/11, but the Houston Fire Department continues to enforce it. That’s an example of something we’re looking to work with, to allow food trucks to operate in these higher foot traffic areas.” The article also confirms my suspicion that food trucks may actually be safer than restaurants: “These are essentially open kitchens…you can look in there and see exactly what these guys are doing, where they’re grabbing the food from, how they’re cooking it.” 3. Hong Kong and Singapore are both instituting controls on their residential property markets to avoid bubbles, but they are also freeing government land for developers (in spite of Singapore’s free market reputation, most residents apparently live in public housing). Some speculate that Hong Kong’s controls might be a sign of increasing control from Beijing. Reuters says that “China, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Malaysia have also unveiled more stringent regulations in recent months” – the bubble that led to the 1997 financial crisis […]

LI Dems to councilman: oppose density so we can get reelected

Earlier today I was reading this article about “cupcake moms” at the local PTA mobilizing online against TOD in Huntington Station, a hamlet in Long Island, and while it looked like your average suburban NIMBY story, this part of the Long Island Press story jumped out at me: [Supervisor] Petrone had reportedly wanted this revitalization project for the former urban renewal area as his legacy to the town, but he won’t get it now. Instead he was reportedly blindsided by Cuthbertson’s switch last Thursday. Sources told the Press that Cuthbertson withdrew his support because Huntington Democratic Party insiders wanted to take the housing issue off the table so Republicans couldn’t use it against the Democratic incumbents in the elections next year. Councilwoman Susan Berland, who had straddled the fence for months, finally came out against the AvalonBay proposal this summer. She wanted less density. I guess we can count this as a point in favor of Matt Yglesias’ suggestion to isolate local elections from party politics by making the races non-partisan. Another part of the story that I found interesting was all the people hearkening back to their childhoods and their parents’ motivations for moving out of NYC to Long Island and using these as excuses not to let developers build on this site. This is pretty ironic, considering that the development was to be built on a plot of land that was once occupied by housing that was razed in the 1950s in an urban renewal scheme. I’m a few months late to all this, but it was apparently an important battle in the broader war over land use in Long Island – so much so that there was a post mortem held by a Long Island smart growth group that Newsday covered here and here. The articles are, […]

Development as preservation

I don’t think it’s a secret that we here at Market Urbanism are skeptical of mandatory historical preservation of private property, but until recently I hadn’t realized how utterly counterproductive some of these efforts really are. I’m talking specifically about cases where historical preservation statutes forbid additions from being added to the tops of buildings – structures that increase a building’s value and floor space without detracting much from the history, facade, or even interior of the building. New York City, with its rapacious developers and entrenched preservationists, seems to be a hotbed of addition-induced turmoil. The enormous pent-up demand occasionally surges through the legal barriers, with unapproved additions and penthouses popping up throughout the city, and developers sometimes being forced to tear them down. A relatively innocuous penthouse on top of a hotel in TriBeCa that’s partly owned by Robert De Niro narrowly avoided this fate a few days ago, but a one-story addition atop a townhouse in Chelsea wasn’t so lucky – apparently slaves used the rooftop to flee when it was a part of the Underground Railroad, so the addition is being taken down and the roof is being restored in all its slave-fleeing glory. A few months ago a building in Dumbo lost six stories that were almost five years old because the owners never got a zoning variance to add residential space to the commercially-zoned property. Developers like Ramy Issac and Ben Shaoul have become infamous as “tenement toppers,” and while their tactics are sometimes unsavory and illegal, the fact that anyone is willing to take such a risk is indicative of the extraordinary unmet demand for density in the city. And with the city’s real estate market already heating back up, this demand is only going to become stronger. Even if the preservationists win […]

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