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Why do condos even exist?

It sounds like a dumb question – they exist because people like the security of owning a home combined with the services and lower costs that apartments offer, duh! But upon further reflection, condominium-style tenure can be a bit problematic. The main problem, as I see it, is that a building that’s been carved up into condo units can almost never be redeveloped. So much so that preservationists have been known to cheer on developers doing condo and co-op conversions of historic properties: Indeed, sometimes preservation advocates look to condo developers as white knights. Since the Bialystoker Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation on East Broadway closed last year, Laurie Tobias Cohen, the executive director of the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, has been “extremely eager” for a developer to buy the historic building and convert it to co-ops or condos. The closing of the nursing home was a great loss, she said; the goal now is to prevent the demolition, or further deterioration, of the building. “What we don’t want,” she said, “is to lose any more of the built historic fabric.” This is no doubt an elegant solution to the problem of unprotected historic buildings, but what about the less-than-stunning condos and co-ops that have been built in the US – and pretty much every where else in the world! – since the end of World War II? Why are condo buildings impossible to redevelop? Simple: gravity! You can’t keep your apartment on the 17th floor while someone demolishes their 5th floor unit. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, they call condos “strata” apartments, which reflects what they really are: floors of apartments layered inseparably atop each other. To redevelop a condo or co-op building, you have to buy every single unit, after which you can dissolve the condo structure […]

The War on Drugs Is a War on Cities

Ken Burns’ new documentary Prohibition is excellent and highly recommended on its own merits, but urbanists should take special note of its urban themes. Cities have always been caricatured as centers of licentiousness, and the booming cities of turn-of-the-century America, teeming with poor Catholic immigrants, must have been terrifying to the established white Americans of the Midwest and America’s small towns. New York and Chicago proved to be impossible to temper, and it was there that Prohibition was the most violent. …

New standards for ridiculousness in historic preservation

Because Arlington County, VA is not home to many properties over 100 years old, planning officials have turned their historic preservation efforts to those properties they do have to preserve. The Sun Gazette reports: The first phase of the effort focused on only a very narrow slice of property types in Arlington: garden apartments, shopping centers and commercial properties more than 50 years old. Leventhal said those types of properties are most vulnerable to redevelopment. It sounds like preservation efforts in Arlington will be much less restrictive that the often discussed Landmark Designation in New York. However, the new policy will certainly increase uncertainty and cost for redeveloping protected property. And of course the question here is, are strip malls from the 1960s really worth preserving? Miles Grant at The Green Miles hits the nail on the head with this quote: But saying properties more than 50 years old are most vulnerable to redevelopment is like saying cars more than 10 years old are most vulnerable to being traded in. Sure, if classic cars were protected and not allowed to be traded in, we would see more on the road. The trade-off, though, would be that consumers would not be able to choose the cars that best meet their needs. While Smart Growth supporters and historic preservation activists share the same propensity for top-down control of development, this issue gets to the core of their inherent conflict. The preservation of car-centric development prevents higher density, walkable communities, even when this is what the market demands. While individuals may attempt to embrace both ideologies, protecting mediocre mid-century suburban architecture necessarily comes at the expense of Smart Growth principles.

The Little-Known History of “Light and Air”

“Light and air” is a very common excuse that people give for why we must have basic zoning laws, and while nowadays a lot of people mean it simply in an aesthetic sense – another way of saying “I like to be able to look out a window and not see another skyscraper 50 feet away” (though for some reason when said interaction happens on the second or third floor, it’s okay?) – the origins of it are very interesting, and I believe crucial to understanding today’s urban plans. Of course, the ideas that turn-of-the-century planners had about disease and density turned out to be totally incorrect – privacy and being able to look out a window is nice, but the lack thereof is not a great health risk. As Robert Fogelson writes on pages 125-26 of Downtown: Skyscrapers were also a serious menace to public health, advocates of height limits charged. As early as the mid 1880s, they said that tall office buildings were turning the streets below into dark, damp, and gloomy canyons. During the winter they blocked the sun, leaving the cold streets even colder. During the summer, wrote American Architect and Building News, they acted as “storehouses of heat,” driving up the temperature after sunset, making the once cool and refreshing nights unbearable. The skyscrapers also shrouded the nearby buildings in darkness, forcing the office workers to rely on artificial light – which, it was believed, put a strain on the eyes. Worst of all, the skyscrapers deprived both the streets below and the adjacent buildings of fresh air and sunlight. To Americans who still held that disease was a product of the “miasma,” the noxious vapors that permeated the cities, the lack of fresh air was bad enough. To Americans who believed in the new […]

More Libertarians on Jane Jacobs

The Ludwig von Mises Institute publishes a podcast performed by Jeff Riggenbach called “The Libertarian Tradition”, which discusses significant figures in the libertarian movement.  The most recent edition is dedicated to Jane Jacobs, who’s ideas are highly regarded by many libertarians, despite the fact that she publicly distanced herself  from being associated with the term or movement.  It’s a great listen, and mentions fellow Market Urbanists and friends of the site, Sandy Ikeda and Thomas Schmidt.  It’s great to see more attention given to Jane Jacobs and urbanism by free market advocates. Mises Podcast on Jane Jacobs ______________________________ On a similar note, Market Urbanist, Sandy Ikeda will be hosting a “Jane’s Walk” in honor of Jane Jacobs in Brooklyn Heights.  Here’s a description from the site: Eyes on Brooklyn Heights The beautiful and historic neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights offers excellent examples of Jane Jacobs’ principles of urban diversity in action. Beginning at the steps of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall, we will stroll through residential and commercial streets while observing and talking about how the physical environment influences social activity and even economic and cultural development, both for good and for ill. We will be stopping at several points of interest, including the famous Promenade, and end near the #2/3 subway and a nice coffeehouse. Please wear comfortable footwear and weather-appropriate clothing, and be sure to have lots of questions. See you there! Date: Sunday May 8, 2011 Time: 1:00pm-2:30pm Meeting Place: The tour will meet at the steps of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall (2nd stop on the #2/3 subway) and end at the Clark Street station of the #2/3 subway. Host:Sandy Ikeda Host Organization: Purchase College www.purchase.edu Contact info: [email protected] I plan to attend.  It would be great to see some other Market Urbanists there!

Links

1. Systemic Failure calls out the Bay Area for giving an award to a textbook example of greenwashing in urbanism: Ironically, this project was recently promoted on the SF-Streetsblog website by “New Urbanist” developer Peter Calthrope for its “highest level” of green technology. What does it say for the Bay Area environmental community, that such stupendously ugly, auto-oriented architecture can win “sustainable community of the year” awards? I love how vociferous and blunt Systemic Failure’s criticism is – it’s something that’s sorely missing in the overly self-congratulatory planning blogosphere. 2. LA rushes to get another giant hulking parking lot in before Jerry Brown turns off the “redevelopment” tap. 3. Interesting charts on the gas tax throughout history.

The roots of anti-density sentiment

Matt Yglesias, Kevin Drum, and Ryan Avent have been discussing the political economy of anti-density regulations, and I have a lot of comments, but I’m not sure I have the time (or, really, the patience) to air all of them. So, we’ll see how long this post gets. First of all, I think all this talk of federal policy is misguided. Writing about the federal government sells well in journalism since it reaches the widest audience, but even taking into account the feds’ massive power grab over the last century, the real action is still at the local level. Local property tax distortions favoring single family homes are widespread and egregious, but orders of magnitude more ink gets spilled about the relatively ineffectual mortgage interest tax deduction. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s refusal to fund mixed use developments is unfortunate, but it’s nothing compared to the almighty parking minimum. So while obviously the rural-biased Senate isn’t doing urbanism any favors, the nation’s Greatest Deliberative Body is next to meaningless when compared to lowly municipal governments. Secondly, I think that historically speaking, Ryan Avent is starting his analysis a few decades too late. He cites the Great Migration(s) of blacks out of the South and the law-and-order backlash as a reason that American politicians fear density, but the real anti-density legislation began around the turn of the century, decades before the black boogeyman hit the scene. And while the federal highway projects that Ryan cites were bad for cities, they were really the final nail in the coffin – urban business associations welcomed them as a cure for decentralization. In other words, cities were already in decline by the time the interstate highways started papering over neighborhoods. The real germ entered the system decades earlier. In my opinion, at least, the […]

The origin of user fees?

I just started reading Paving the Way: New York Road Building and the American State, 1880-1956by Michael R. Fein, and though I don’t have time to talk as much about it as I’d like, I will say that I’m only a couple pages in and I can already tell it’s going to be great. Its thesis is essentially that the development of the road building bureaucracy was as important as the New Deal, if not more so, in shaping 20th century political development (this may be something that liberal urbanists, who otherwise support the expansion of the state, don’t want to hear). There’s much I’d like to excerpt, but I’ll stick with this paragraph in the introduction: Engineers framed their decisions in the language of scientific rationality and professional expertise. But these were merely forms of political expression that advanced their traffic-service vision of highway planning. Though New York’s road-building program predated mass automobility, engineers quickly seized on the phenomenon as a means of cementing their political legitimacy. Traffic censuses became the main foundational beam to engineers’ authority, a scientific measurement of public demand for highways that was difficult to contest [ed. note: reminds me of the Texas Transportation Institute]. As long as state highway construction focused on the improvement of existing roads, dissent was weakly expressed. As engineering projects increased in scale, impact, and potential for controversy, resistance spiked. It was in the process of responding to increased opposition that strong tensions developed between engineers’ service to their professional agenda (building a better highway system) and their responsibility to the public (balancing highway construction with other aspects of social development). These interests, once operating in tandem and instrumental to the engineers’ rise to power, began over time to feed conflict and meet with cross-purposes. The engineers’ solution to this […]

The problem with “public” transportation

  The blog 2nd Ave. Sagas has written something that I think sums up pretty well transit advocates’ poor knowledge of private mass transit history: Of course, public transit is vital to the city’s well being. Because Manhattan is an island, it can’t handle the traffic. It’s a commercial hub in a geographically isolated area that needs the subway — and requires people to travel for a while — to thrive. That our city’s forefathers had the foresight to build a vast public transit system is a minor miracle, and it’s sort of silly that we have such a love-hate relationship with the subway and the public transit system. Without it, New York City as we know it simply wouldn’t exist. The biggest problem here is the conflation of “public transit” with “mass transit.” When New York’s rail lines were first built, they were private enterprises, not public ones. And Benjamin Kabak doesn’t explicitly say it, but when people talk about a city’s “forefathers,” they’re almost always talking about lawmakers. And in the late 19th and early 20th century, when New York’s massive transit networks were being built, lawmakers did pretty much everything they could to stifle the budding transit market – the idea that any of them had any “forethought” is absurd. But secondly, Benjamin Kabak’s reverence for New York City’s subway system ignores the far more important contributions to the city made by streetcar and elevated train lines. As I’m learning in Robert Fogelson’s Downtown, NYC’s publicly-built subways paled in comparison to the privately-constructed elevated trains and streetcar networks that crisscrossed the five boroughs. Even today, NYC buses, which mainly run along the old streetcar routes, have twice the ridership of the Subway. And although the Subway was heavily subsidized by the government, the truth is that it […]

This is how gentrification happens: Northwest DC and the height restriction

Lydia DePillis wrote the Washington City Paper’s cover story on the case for Congress overturning DC’s height limit, which should be very familiar to readers of this blog. It’s got some interesting history in it (DC’s height limit was apparently influenced by George Washington’s personal aesthetics, despite the fact that he never governed from the city), but the part that was really interesting to me was the part where she discusses what the new limitations should be. It’s not politically practical to advocate for lifting the limit without reservations, as we here would like, and there are the usual caveats and equivocations (“What if additional height were granted on a competitive basis, and awarded for the best design?”). But the part that really stood out to me was this graphic (click on the image and scroll to the bottom of the linked page to see a bigger version), outlining where Lydia thinks the height restrictions should be lifted: Anyone familiar with DC geography will notice that the area most insulated from change – Northwest DC – is the richest part of town, full of desirable white neighborhoods. The areas where DePillis advocates lifting the height limit – neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River figure prominently in the graphic – are far blacker and poorer than the rest of DC. Sure, there are pretty buildings in NW and a lot of ugly ones in Anacostia, but there are also beautiful homes off of Benning Road and shitty ones in Burleith. (Which, I should add, could desperately use some taller buildings, given its proximity to the perpetually housing-strapped Georgetown University and its rather ugly architecture compared to Georgetown proper.) This tactic of upzoning poor black neighborhoods while leaving white neighborhoods unchanged is very common, and I realize that Lydia is just trying […]

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