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

NYC’s lingering obsession with parking minimums may come to an end

by Stephen Smith Back in February Streetsblog had a good three–part series on planning changes in New York City since the beginning of Michael Bloomberg’s term, and while they had a lot of praise for upzonings that have occurred throughout much of the four urban boroughs, they highlighted minimum parking regulations as the biggest impediment to walkable, transit-oriented development. The series ran a few months ago, but I was reminded of it because of Tyler Cowen’s article in the New York Times a few days ago, in which he made the same general Donald Shoup-esque arguments about parking that readers of Market Urbanism are familiar with. But back to the Streetsblog series – the second part is mostly about parking minimums in NYC, which haven’t been lowered despite the upzonings and other policies that emphasize mass transit over cars. The article has a great map which shows that, outside of areas south of Central Park, parking minimums are barely relaxed at all in areas of all five boroughs with the best transit access, and this paragraph sums up the paradox of New York’s planning regulations pretty well: Perversely, because you can build more densely near transit, parking minimums per square foot of land are actually higher where transit options are most robust. So even as the planning department tries to concentrate growth near transit lines, it is simultaneously filling that valuable real estate with unnecessary parking. As one commenter points out, the Department of City Planning probably isn’t intentionally sabotaging its walkability goals – many current residents own cars and want to continue to use them, and a development’s car-less residents from the hypothetical future don’t get a say in local politics. Fast-forward a few months, though, and it looks as though the City Planning Department may be reconsidering its […]

HSR crowding out local transportation projects

by Stephen Smith Yet another way in which Obama’s high-speed rail plans are derailing actual progress in getting Americans out of their cars: BUENA PARK, Calif. — Mayor Art Brown spent years pushing for a commuter train station combined with nearby housing in his community. But as townhouses are being finished around the $14 million Metrolink station, he’s facing the prospect that California’s high-speed rail line may plow right through his beloved project. “The only option they presented to us was either losing the condo units or losing our train station,” Brown said of an engineering presentation to city leaders last year. That a successful effort to get car-dependent Californians to embrace mass transit could be derailed by another transportation project may strike some as ironic. But it’s also one of the hidden costs — and a potential harbinger of delay — in the ambitious plan that would enable passengers to speed the 430 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 2 1/2 hours. By the way, the projected cost of a one-way ticket on the high-speed rail line from LA to SF has risen from $55 to $105. Despite the fact that intraurban trips account for the vast majority of transportation use in America, the Obama administration and other politicians prefer to focus on expensive boondoggles like high-speed rail, often at the expense of more mundane, but much more important local projects like the Buena Park Metrolink station. Originally posted on my blog.

LA’s partial parking privatization

by Stephen Smith The LA Times reports that Los Angeles is considering “privatizing” ten public parking garages to fill a budget shortfall. The story is, unfortunately, a reminder of how infrastructure “privatization” is often little better than the status quo, and how media reporting of the issue can doom real reform. Whereas pure privatization would mean selling the buildings and underlying land to anyone for any use, this scheme is actually a 50-year outsourcing of the garages’ management (mostly, at least) and profits (again, mostly). The new “owners” could only use the structures to park cars, and using them to house people and businesses that would increase the walkability of the areas where the garages are located is out of the question. True privatization would also bring in more money for the city, which is the stated goal of the privatization. The garages would be worth more if they were being sold with complete development rights, and the tax revenues from whatever’s built on them (not to mention possible increases in adjacent properties’ values) would probably exceed the “small negotiated share of future proceeds” that the city “could retain.” The only possible benefit I can see to this plan is that parking rates will move upwards towards the true market price. But even that would be too much for the city to stomach, as the city would “retain authority over parking rates at the garages” – and who wants to guess which way they’ll be pressured to push prices? The potential downfall of this plan, however, is that the public may forever associate privatization with this pseudo-corporatism, as happened in Russia in the early 1990’s and Chicago’s parking meter privatization scheme last year, which could impede future, more truly libertarian urban reforms. Originally posted on my blog.

Amtrak’s utter incompetence

by Stephen Smith There’s a lot to be said for Amtrak’s mismanagement, but a lot of it is technical and inaccessible to the layman. This, however, is unconscionable: Amtrak still does not offer wireless internet – either free or paid – on any of its trains. Megabus and Bolt Bus (whose tickets between DC and NYC are about $20), however, have had wireless for about two years, and I’m pretty sure some Chinatown buses have had it for longer. Amtrak’s normal tickets on the Northeast Corridor are about four times the cost of tickets on Bolt Bus and Megabus. Tickets on the Acela are about eight times the cost of bus tickets, and the service is heavily marketed towards business travelers who put a high price on their time. But no internet. It’s apparently coming to Acela in about six months and the rest of the Northeast Corridor by the end of 2010. Had intercity buses and airlines not introduced wireless internet, I seriously doubt Amtrak would have ever had the business sense to do it. Originally posted on my blog.

Obama’s genius high-speed rail plan

by Stephen Smith Just in case you were under the impression that Obama’s high-speed rail commitment was genuine, the Boston Globe would like to disabuse you of that notion: The railroad tracks from Boston to Washington – the busiest rail artery in the nation, and one that also carries America’s only high-speed train, the Acela – have been virtually shut out of $8 billion worth of federal stimulus money set aside for high-speed rail projects because of a strict environmental review required by the Obama administration. Because such a review would take years, states along the Northeast rail corridor are not able to pursue stimulus money for a variety of crucial upgrades. Instead, the $8 billion is going to be split up to ten ways amongst other regions, such as California, the Gulf Coast, and the “Chicago Hub.” I love the irony of environmental standards stopping the Obama administration from making the one high-speed rail investment that has any chance of getting people out of their cars. Originally posted on my blog.

Zoning as a Tool of Class Exclusion

In regards to zoning, Discovering Urbanism has a nice post up about early 20th century urban planner Charles Mulford Robinson and his planning textbook.  It includes the following corrective to the notion that zoning originated as a way to separate polluting industry from places of residence and commerce: There’s a common narrative about how zoning unfolded in America. First, planners needed to find ways to separate dangerous and unhealthy factories from the places where people lived. Once the legal basis for this tool was secured, it was eventually employed to separate businesses from residents. The final stage of zoning was to segregating different kinds of people from each other. That’s how we reached where we are today. However, the Robinson textbook indicates that this progression was, if anything, reversed. In reality, residences at the time couldn’t be separated much from industry, because many of the working classes had to be within walking distance from their jobs. On the other hand, some of the very earliest uses of zoning were explicitly intended to separate “exclusive” neighborhoods from the lower classes, whether by requiring minimum densities or barring anything but detached single-family housing. Originally posted on my blog.

The Nation’s mass transit hypocrisy

by Stephen Smith I was heartened to see an article about the need for mass transit in the pages of The Nation, though I was severely disappointed by the magazine’s own hypocrisy and historical blindness. The article is in all ways a standard left-liberal screed against the car and for mass transit, which is a topic close to my heart, though I’d prefer a more libertarian approach to returning America to its mass transit roots as opposed to the publicly-funded version that The Nation advocates. The first bit of historical blindness comes at the end of the second paragraph, when The Nation argues for government investment in mass transit on the grounds that it will “strengthen labor, providing a larger base of unionized construction and maintenance jobs.” But don’t they realize that the demands of organized labor were one of the straws that broke the privately-owned mass transit camel’s back during the first half of the twentieth century? Joseph Ragen wrote an excellent essay about how unions in San Francisco demanded that mass transit companies employ two workers per streetcar instead of one, codifying their wishes through a series of legislative acts and even a referendum. Saddled with these additional costs, the streetcar companies could not make a profit, and eventually the lines were paved over to make way for the automobile. Mass transit companies, whether publicly- or privately-owned, cannot shoulder the burden of paying above-market wages and still hope to pose any serious threat to the automobile’s dominance. The second, and perhaps more egregious error, comes a little later, when The Nation lays the blame on every group but itself for the deteriorating state of mass transit in America: Nonetheless, smart growth and transportation activists still have high hopes that the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress will revitalize […]

Urbanization driving reforestation to outpace deforestation?

by Stephen Smith While most people associate cities with pollution and the material and ecological excess of late capitalism, I’ve long believed that urbanization has the potential to be a great environmental savior. The NYT has a fascinating article that confirms what I said about cities attracting people who would otherwise live more environmentally profligate lives: the amount of total rain forest is likely growing, due to the reforestation of towns and villages abandoned by people in Latin America and Asia who are moving to cities. Elisabeth Rosenthal, the article’s author, explains the reasons that people are abandoning land at a growing pace: In Latin America and Asia, birthrates have dropped drastically; most people have two or three children. New jobs tied to global industry, as well as improved transportation, are luring a rural population to fast-growing cities. Better farming techniques and access to seed and fertilizer mean that marginal lands are no longer farmed because it takes fewer farmers to feed a growing population. By some estimates, these demographic and technological shifts mean that forests are growing back far faster than they’re being cut down: These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest – an iconic environmental cause – may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster. There are two problems, though, with the new forests: they aren’t “old growth” forests, and they aren’t necessarily able to support many endangered species. The first part – the fact […]

Uncomfortable truths about the progressive legacy

by Stephen Smith Yesterday I was listening to the pre-inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial on the radio, and one of the speakers said something that struck me as emblematic of the challenges that Barack Obama faces, though I doubt she realized the ironic significance. She was praising Theodore Roosevelt’s conservationist legacy as a model for Obama, with some quotes from him at the Grand Canyon or Yosemite or some other celebrated national park, though she only touched on a small sliver of Roosevelt’s environmental legacy. He definitely did cherish the environment; a timeline of his life shows that in early April 1903 he “commune[d] with deer while writing letters in Yellowstone, WY.” He was indeed a conservationist, as were many progressives at the time. But the progressives were also something else – something that today’s progressives would do well to remember: ardent planners whose plans often had grave unforeseen consequences. Just after his time communing with the deer at Yellowstone, Roosevelt traveled to St. Louis to address the 1903 Good Roads Convention. The “good roads” movement dated back to before the automobile rose to prominence, and was formed to agitate for improved roads for bicyclists and farmers. But around the time of Roosevelt’s speech, the movement was hijacked by the budding auto-industrial complex. Unwilling or unable to compete on their own against mass transit, the automakers, highway engineers, and road contractors sought for the state to both acquire the rights of way necessary for the roads, and to pay for them to be paved – an advantage the streetcars and railroads did not generally have. Not wanting to appear to be too blatant in their rent seeking, these interests lobbied the government indirectly, giving organizations like the AAA money in exchange for influence and seats on their boards. The […]

Urban[ism] Legend: Is Houston really unplanned?

by Stephen Smith It seems to be an article of faith among many land use commentators – both coming from the pro- and anti-planning positions – that Houston is a fundamentally unplanned city, and that whatever is built there is the manifest destiny of the free market in action. But is this true? Did Houston really escape the planning spree that resulted from Progressive Era obsessions with local planning and the subsequent grander plans of the post-WWII age of the automobile? Michael Lewyn, in a paper published in 2005, argues that commentators often overlook Houston’s subtler land use strictures, and recent developments in the city’s urban core reaffirm this. It is definitely true that Houston lacks one of the oldest and most well-known planning tools: Euclidean single-use zoning. This means that residential, commercial, and industrial zones are not legally separated, though as I will explain later, Houston remains as segregated in its land uses as any other American city. But single-use zoning is not the only type of planning law that Houston’s government can use to hamper development. As Lewyn lays out in his paper, minimum lot sizes and minimum parking regulations abound in this supposedly unplanned City upon a Floodplain. He discusses a recently-amended law that all but precludes the building of row houses, a stalwart of dense urban areas (the paper is heavily cited and poorly formatted, so I’ve removed the citations): Until 1998, Houston’s city code provided that the minimum lot size for detached single-family dwellings was 5000 square feet. And until 1998, Houston’s government made it virtually impossible for developers to build large numbers of non-detached single-family homes such as townhouses, by requiring townhouses to sit on at least 2250 square feet of land. As Siegan admits, this law “tend[ed] to preclude the erection of lower […]

Trending now

gentrification
Only 2 Ways to Fight Gentrification (you’re not going to like one of them)
The problem with “public” transportation
The Great American Streetcar Myth
O’Toole Under More Fire