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Category Environment

Bike Sharing

My Other Bike is a Public Transportation System by Greg Beato at Reason.com: A bike delivers a strong sense of autonomy, too—stronger even than a car in many ways. It doesn’t, for example, require a license, registration, insurance. You aren’t beholden to routes or schedules. You go where you want, when you want. Unless the bike you’re riding is part of a bike-sharing program. Then your usage is more proscribed. Take, for example, SmartBike D.C., America’s first high-tech bike-sharing program. Launched in August, and, like Velib, funded by an advertising company (Clear Channel Outdoor in this case) in return for the right to advertise on the city’s bus shelters, the program currently consists of 120 bikes and ten docking stations, all of which are clustered within a relatively small radius downtown. For a $40 annual fee, users get a smart card that allows them to unlock a bike from its docking station and start contributing to America’s energy independence. Sounds like a great free-market solution. Right? Greg doesn’t think it’s so great: it’s like you own the bike, except you don’t. You’re not permitted to let someone else ride it. You’re not permitted to put too much stuff in the front basket. (The baskets are for “light goods” only.) You aren’t supposed to ride it in “inclement and dangerous weather.” You have to return it to very specific places at very specific times. If something on your bike breaks while you’re riding it, you aren’t supposed to take it to the nearest bike shop or attempt to make the repair yourself. Instead, you have to call SmartBike’s customer service line and wait for a repair person to respond to your request for help. At least when a bus breaks down, you can abandon ship and take destiny in your own […]

Conservatives and Urbanism

Matthew Yglesias – Straight Talk on Gasoline on drilling and how conservative deviation from free-market principles has hurt the environment: Meanwhile, take something like the accessory dwellings issue. Here you have a bunch of regulations that make it illegal for people to live more densely. Illegal, in other words, to build the kind of communities where the gas price issue wouldn’t hurt so much. But there’s a movement afoot to change things. Similarly with minimum parking rules — regulations that interfere with the operation of the free market in such a way as to make it more difficult for people to live energy efficient lives. And again, there are people trying to change this. These things are regulatory barriers to solving our energy problems every bit as much as the ban on offshore drilling is. And conservatives are against regulation, right? Except the anti-drilling regulation is good for the environment and for coastal economies whereas anti-urbanist regulation is economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. Naturally, conservatives have chosen to aim all of their fire at anti-drilling regulations. And that’s the sort of thing that makes the conservative movement hard to take seriously — it’s an organized defense of existing power and privilege that now and again adopts principled rhetorical modes of various kinds but basically can’t be moved to act unless some lobbyists pay them too. Similar arguments could describe progressives too, but that (and drilling for oil) is a topic for other blogs… I agree about the inconsistent anti-market sentiments of conservatives when it comes to urbanism. Conservatives tend to embrace socialism when they can abuse government to create barriers that exclude others from their communities, but not when others benefit from socialism. (Public schools, free parking, government roads, exclusionary zoning, community centers, etc…) They are just fighting over different […]

Urban[ism] Legend: Density is Bad for the Environment

This is a topic I want to cover more thoroughly, but for now I present a one hour documentary video on green buildings for you leisurely viewing. I came across the snagfilms website from a recent Wall Street Journal article. Most of the documentary videos lean towards “progressive” tastes, but hopefully they’ll add some free-market content such as Friedman’s “Free To Choose” videos. Through quick browsing, this video seemed to be the only one that had relevance to Market Urbanism. I think it does a decent job dispelling the Urbanism Legend that high density is bad for the environment. However, some of the commenters seem to fall for the myth that further government intervention will somehow solve the problem. They all seem to forget that progressive government meddling in transportation and land use has done much to cause the problems of sprawl and auto-dependency that modern progressives are now trying to fight with more intervention. [Watching it a second time, I wanted to point something out. One commenter stated that European and Japanese developers plan for a 50 year life-cycle of buildings, while in the US only 12 months. This is absolutely false. Developers usually use a 10-year discounted cash flow model, but still incorporate a sale value of the property based on projected incomes in the 11th year. That sale value could be calculated on the cash flow of the next 10 years and so, on, but they usually use a more simple calculation for the 10th year sale. They could use 50 year models, but they wouldn’t give much better information than the standard 10-year model. European developers use the same methods as the US. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to decieve you.]

New Research on the Economics of Green Buildings

There is little reliable research into the economic returns of high-performance (green) features of buildings, but Professor John Quigley plans to release his groundbreaking research on the subject this Fall. I am very excited to learn this news, and will certainly look forward to reviewing the results. Especially if implementation could improve my own development practice. Professor John Quigley Discovers Green Building Pays Greenbacks Everyone’s talking about “going green,” but in the building industry, the cost of investment has been difficult to justify – until now. Haas Professor John Quigley has undertaken the first systematic analysis of environmentally sustainable construction and its economic impact on the real estate market. In the working paper, “Doing Well by Doing Good? Green Office Buildings,” Quigley and co-authors Piet Eichholtz and Nils Kok of Maastricht University, Netherlands, determined investments in proven green building practices lead to sizable increases in a property’s market value and effective rent, the average per-square-foot rent paid. Green-certified buildings produced an 8.5 percent increase in effective rent. The additional annual rent for going green amounts to almost $309,000, based on the average size building. Likewise, the incremental value of a green structure is an estimated $5.1 million more than an ordinary building. The study did not calculate the incremental cost of investing in green building practices. When asked why he decided to research the economic value of green-certified buildings, Quigley, the I. Donald Terner Distinguished Professor in Affordable Housing and Urban Policy, replied, “To see if this was hype or real.” While Quigley’s work concludes the resulting profitability is real, he is continuing to research why green commercial buildings produce higher rents and market value by using engineering data from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The research focused solely on commercial property. It first identified 694 buildings, green certified by […]

Does Urban Farming Make Sense?

Matthew Yglesias just posted a thought referring to a recent NY Magazine article about skyfarming: Should we build agricultural skyscrapers in-or-near our major cities? It’s certainly a cool idea. I think I’m going to put the notion that this is actually environmentally sound and feasible in my “too good to check” file. More plausibly, green roofs really are an environmentally sound idea, though not something with a good prospect for replacing farms. Check out the article, it’s very cool. Here’s my take: I think this would be really cool, but I can’t imagine this being economically feasible, except under extreme circumstances. 1. To locate this in a dense city would mean it would compete for land with the most expensive office and residential properties, where developers pay huge land prices to build in those locations. They build there because the most productive companies and individuals desire to locate there and can pay for it. The competition from farms, of all things, would drive prices for office and residential even higher. Perhaps, it might make sense to locate on less desirable urban land such as near highways or industry. 2. Construction costs of building vertical are enormous. Especially compared to the construction cost of traditional farms: nearly 0. 3. Labor costs: city labor is much more expensive than rural labor. Perhaps the skyfarm will be fully automated, but you’ll need engineers on site and other staff a typical farm does not require. 4. Traditionally, farms locate on land that is much less productive than agglomerative cities, which is why land is cheaper and farming can become profitable. Add in extraordinary construction costs, and it makes little economic sense. I can’t imagine farms competing with urban offices in productivity or profit per square foot. 5. The skyfarm probably isn’t so good for […]

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