Category Book Review

Book Review: What Killed Downtown?

Michael Tolle’s book, What Killed Downtown? Norristown, Pennsylvania from Main Street to the Malls, details the rise and fall of Main Street in one American small town. His case study relies on interviews with many Norristown residents who lived through the growth and decline of downtown alongside detailed analysis of downtown retail statistics. Tolle paints a picture of Norristown dating back to the time of William Penn through 1975, at which point he pronounces downtown dead. The depth of history in this case study including both economic trends and urban policy dating back to the town’s Colonial origins puts the story of the city’s street grid in a historical context that is not often available in urbanist literature. Of particular interest, Tolle details the policy debates in Norristown surrounding traffic and parking dating back to the 18th century. This includes a description of Norristown’s location near the intersection on the Native American trails fanning out from Philadelphia, to the transition from turnpikes and toll bridges, to free, public roads. He explains the origins of the town’s original street grid, with 50-feet wide streets and 24-feet wide alleys and covers in detail the Borough Council’s more recent debates on parking meters and the move to making downtown streets one way. Even having never been to Norristown, I was engaged by Tolle’s descriptions of Norristown’s retail, restaurants, hotels, and personalities. In the first chapters, Tolle explains that downtown Norristown grew increasingly successful with the advent of railroads and streetcars that made it easier to travel to and within Norristown. While the growth of highways in the following decades increased the ease of automobile travel passing by Norristown, frustrations with traffic and parking on Main Street mounted. The Borough Council implemented parking meters as a step toward managing parking supply. Initially their revenue […]

A Trial of Zoning

A recent Wall Street Journal op ed combines two of my favorite topics: Franz Kafka’s The Trial  and the inefficiencies of zoning. Roger Kimball explains the roadblocks he has faced in trying to repair his home after it was damaged in Hurricane Sandy. He writes: It wasn’t until the workmen we hired had ripped apart most of the first floor that the phrase “building permit” first wafted past us. Turns out we needed one. “What, to repair our own house we need a building permit?” Of course. Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning—citing FEMA regulations—would force you to bring the house “up to code,” which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming—not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits. Kafka would have liked the zoning folks. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can’t raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that? Disaster rebuilding efforts highlight the impediments that bureaucracies create for economic development, but they are far from the only time that land use regulations create kafkaesque obstacles for property owners. In The High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup explains that parking requirements can create a similar effect. When a business owner goes out of business and wants to sell his property, it’s likely that the next owner will want to operate a different type of business in the location or that parking requirements will have […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 19-22

This post from the series on Donald Shoup‘s The High Cost of Free Parking is reposted from last week because the site’s database caused recent posts to be deleted. Chapter 19: The Ideal Source of Local Public Revenue In this chapter, Donald Shoup makes the case that passing up the potential revenue source of curb parking doesn’t make fiscal sense for cities. He bases his case heavily on Henry George’s theory of land taxation. George argued that land is the fairest and least distortive good to tax because its value comes not from individuals, but from the community. Milton Friedman agreed saying, “the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land.” One obstacle to relying on a land tax as a sole revenue is that accurately appraising unimproved land is difficult. But Shoup points out that charging for parking avoids this problem because cities can use prices as demand management. Shoup further explains the political potential for parking benefit districts and includes a section discussing the potential to create similar benefit districts for freeway tolls. He points out that dedicating toll revenues to the neighborhoods that they pass through would create an interest group for congestion pricing and that this would benefit the often low-income neighborhoods where freeways are located. I think a key part of this chapter is that Shoup explains how charging for parking to prevent shortages illuminates the opportunity cost of dedicating land to curb parking. As this price becomes visible, it may open up opportunities to lease current parking spaces for other uses, such as outdoor dining or outdoor retail. While he is optimistic about the potential for parking reform, he includes this great line: “Staunch conservatives often become ardent communists when it comes to parking, and rational people quickly turn emotional.” […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 16 – 18

This post follows on the earlier discussion of Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking. Chapter 16 — Turning Small Change in Big Changes Here Donald Shoup gets to the idea of using Business Improvement Districts to manage street parking as Brandon Smith mentioned in the last post’s comments. When parking revenue goes to municipalities’ general funds, drivers see it as a fee with questionable benefit. Contrarily, when parking revenue stays in the neighborhood, it can provide tangible benefits in the form of neighborhood improvements. This may make drivers more willing to pay for parking. More importantly, it creates an interest group in favor of charging a rate for parking that provides an funding source for neighborhood improvements. Seen from this angle, paid street parking benefits businesses from multiple angles. He uses to Los Angeles neighborhoods to demonstrate the potential benefits of parking revenues. In the 1980’s, Old Pasadena was suffering from a vacant building problem because historic buildings did not include onsite parking. As a result, they could not be repurposed. In 1993 the city introduced parkign emters and gave the revenues to the neighborhood to finance public improvements. Additionally, building owners were given the right to pay a fee for parking in a public garage rather than providing parking onsite, allowing existing buildings to be repurposed. These policy changes have created an environment where drivers can easily find parking and a streetscape that is more inviting for pedestrians. Shoup contrasts Pasadena with Westwood Village which has been in decline since the 1980s. In 1994 a parking study revealed that curb parking was 96 percent occupied, meaning the neighborhood had a significant cruising problem. As a response to the neighborhood’s decline, though, the city decreased hourly parking rates from $1 to 50 cents, worsening the parking shortage. This revenue goes to […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 10-14

This post follows on the earlier discussion of the The High Cost of Free Parking. I realized that I left a couple of important points out of the last post. First, Shoup applies the Hippocratic Oath of “first, do no harm,” to parking requirements. What a great way to think about city planning. If this standard was applied to all policies, we’d be living in libertarian utopia already. Secondly, he gives great treatment to the issue of why politicians sometimes choose regulations over taxation. Regulation imposes costs on everyone, but because these costs are hard to see, their costs are not easily traced to government. It is a less transparent way of manipulating behavior. Chapter 10 – Reduce Demand Rather Than Increase Supply This chapter explores some of the policy alternatives available to cities that could reduce the number of parking spaces needed to satisfy demand. Shoup supports programs that allow employers to provide their employees with unlimited transit passes. In cities where transit operates below capacity, transit agencies may be willing to sell this type of pass to employers at a low cost, knowing that many pass employees won’t use their passes regularly. As of 2002, Dallas, Denver, Salt Lake, and San Jose had adopted this type of program. In two studies, providing these eco passes reduced employees’ demand for parking by 19%, offering employers an opportunity for significant cost savings if they can provide 19% fewer parking spaces as a result. Shoup points out that in some cases this policy can be a win for everyone involved because employees receive an additional benefit, employers can save money, traffic is reduced for the cities’ other commuters, and transit agencies earn some additional revenue at near zero marginal cost, assuming they are operating below capacity. Unfortunately, Shoup finds that in some California cities that […]

Book Review: The Rent Is Too Damn High

Matt Yglesias’ new Kindle single, The Rent Is Too Damn High, is a quick and engaging read on the reasons that much of the conventional wisdom about housing markets is wrong. While Yglesias has many progressive views, with regard to land use he takes a classical liberal stance. He explains that the “rent is too damn high” because land use regulations restrict housing supply, keeping prices above the free market equilibrium. My favorite part of the book was Yglesias’ discussion of unbundling the supply and demand for land from the supply and demand for buildings. He provides a very clear explanation of the differences between the two, explaining that rising land values benefit land owners, but rising housing prices serve only to decrease everyone’s real income. Under a system where land use is regulated to constrain the supply of buildings, landowners earn long term rents (higher than they would otherwise earn) that cannot be eroded by other landowners building more densely. In the chapter “The Virtues of Density,” Yglesias offers a powerful counter-argument to “market suburbanists” who argue that land use deregulation amounts to forcing density on people: People worry that a denser neighborhood will have more traffic and more noise. Generally speaking, they’re correct. But all this means is that allowing higher density will be a self-limiting process. Balancing the different costs and benefits involved in denser building is, after all, precisely the sort of thing that relatively free markets are good at. Different people have different preferences about noise, commuting mode, lawn size, amenities, and employment possibililties. . . . To say that some of America’s neighborhoods — especially in coastal cities with strong economic opportunities and limited space — should be denser is not an argument for infinite density. Nor is it an argument for central planning […]

Book Review of The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper

I’m reviewing The Heights: Anatomy of the Skyscraper by Kate Ascher as part of a TLC Book Tour. Other bloggers are also reviewing the book, and you can find links to their reviews here. I received a complimentary copy of the book, and I’d like to send it to a reader if anyone is interested in reading it. If you’d like it, just comment saying so by Monday, December 5th. If multiple readers would like it, I’ll pick one at random. _______________________________ The Heights reads like a textbook for Skyscrapers 101. It’s full of interesting skyscraper facts along with diagrams and timelines. I learned a lot from the book, having no background in architecture or engineering. For someone who has studied these subjects though, I imagine that this book would be too elementary. However for me, it offered a useful overview of the history and science of skyscrapers. Ascher details the process of planning, constructing, and owning skyscrapers, from the details of different types of foundations to building maintenance. She explains some of the challenges that skyscrapers present that I might not have thought about. For example, buildings with unusual designs that do not have straight sides must be designed with mechanisms for reaching the windows for cleaning and maintenance. She also explores skyscraper financing. I was surprised to learn that the bulk of the cost of owning a skyscraper comes not from construction, but rather from cleaning and maintenance over the life of the building: Although the annual cost of maintenance pales in comparison to the cost of constructing a building, over the life of a building — which can be upward of 100 years–it is much more significant. Holding aside capital replacement and reinvestment, the cost of the initial structure itself represents only about 5 to 10 percent of the total cost of owning […]

Book Review of Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

I’m reviewing Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep as part of a TLC Book Tour. Other bloggers are also reviewing the book throughout October, and you can find links to their reviews here. I received a complimentary copy of the book, and I’d like to send it to a reader if anyone who’d like to read it doesn’t mind a copy with some underlining and margin notes. If you’d like it, just comment saying so by Wednesday, November 2nd. If multiple readers would like it, I’ll pick one at random. _____________________________ In a manner that is rare for non fiction, Instant City is really a page turner. Inskeep takes us through the history of Karachi from Pakistan’s independence in 1947 through the present, stringing personal stories of social entrepreneurs, politicians, activists and real estate developers together to tell the city’s story. He revolves the historical accounts around a 2007 bombing, in which unknown perpetrators bombed a procession that was part of a Shia religious holiday. Following the bombing, rioters burned down blocks of wholesale retail buildings. Despite the arrests of four suspects, many of the city’s residents are so distrustful of the city’s MQM government that they believe that city officials caused the bombing and subsequent fires in order to clear out the neighborhood’s current tenants to make way for more glamorous businesses. While the city’s mayor passionately denies that city government had any involvement with burning its citizens’ property, that residents have so little faith in their government demonstrates how absent the rule of law is in Karachi regarding property rights to land. In with the history of the city’s history, growth, and conflict, Inskeep covers land use in Karachi in considerable detail. To me, “Groundbreaking” is the most interesting chapter, where Inskeep details the experience of slum clearance in the […]