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Category planning

Mercantilist logic and land-use regulation

Adam Smith taught the world that mercantilism impoverished 18th-century nations by erecting barriers to trade and reducing opportunities for specialization and economic growth. Regulations that restrict urban development likewise reduce opportunities for innovation and specialization by limiting cities’ population size and density. Even as improvements in communications technology and falling transportation costs reduce the burden of distance, many industries still benefit from the geographical proximity of human beings that only dense development can provide. Removing land-use regulations will allow greater gains from trade as more people are allowed to live in important economic centers like New York City and Silicon Valley. Cities facilitate innovation by placing people with diverse backgrounds and goals in close proximity. While Israel Kirzner’s research provided a comprehensive analysis of entrepreneurs in the market process and in economic growth, economists have not given sufficient attention to the geography of entrepreneurship. The settings in which entrepreneurs work – Sandy Ikeda’s “action space” – matters, and cities provide a crucial role as the action space for much of human innovation. Silicon Valley is an urban action space where geographical proximity has made entrepreneurs more successful than they would have been without the inspiration they provided one another. The Homebrew Computer Club, a social group founded in 1975 for computer hobbyists, played a crucial role in the development of personal computers. The programmers, engineers, and inventors who attended those early meetings would go on to revolutionize computing thanks, in large part, to the information they gathered from swapping ideas, hardware, and skills from the other group members they encountered. The club began meeting in garages, parking lots, and university auditoriums, but it was only possible because these enthusiasts all worked for semiconductor companies that brought them to the same region of California. Empirical evidence bears out the importance of cities in facilitating […]

No, ‘New Urbanism’ And ‘Smart Growth’ Are Not The Same

There are two political movements in urban development that have a lot of overlap but are not the same.  ‘New Urbanism’ advocates the legalization and building of communities resembling the 19th century American town, with a fair number of single family homes [or maybe ‘single family’ with granny flats], row houses, and clumps of apartments, close enough to commercial places to be walkable, and diverse in terms of income, hopefully without subsidy.  Smart Growth, on the other hand, goes farther and advocates the forbidding of building that is not either New Urbanist or denser, sometimes even high-rise; and also any building at all outside a ‘growth boundary’.  It is a fact that perhaps 90% of New Urbanists are also Smart Growthers, though many of the leaders of the New Urbanist movement are not; that still does not mean the two philosophies are identical.  Smart Growth, in fact, finds itself an ally in many areas of No Growth, which is not the same as Smart Growth either, but is quite popular in the suburbs as people desire to conserve the values that brought themselves to the suburbs in the first place, and not have the value of their investments diluted by ‘printing’ new housing, as the value of our money is diluted by ‘printing’ money. A disproportionate number of Jewish people are ‘progressives’ and ‘socialists’ for very historical reasons, for example, but that does not mean that Judaism and progressivism are the same.  And there is a lot of overlap between conservatism and evangelical Christianity, but the two are not the same either.  Overlap does not, and must not, mean identity. I will admit that, though the single family suburban house was favored for many years by government policy, nevertheless it is what many people, including especially families with children, desire; […]

Reclaiming “Redneck” Urbanism: What Urban Planners Can Learn From Trailer Parks

"Life in a Trailer Park in Florida" (Boston Public Library/Flickr)

  Given that “redneck” and “hillbilly” remain the last acceptable stereotypes among polite society, it isn’t surprising that the stereotypical urban home of poor, recently rural whites remains an object of scorn. The mere mention of a trailer park conjures images of criminals in wifebeaters, moldy mattresses thrown awry, and Confederate flags. As with most social phenomena, there is a much more interesting reality behind this crass cliché. Trailer parks remain one of the last forms of housing in US cities provided by the market explicitly for low-income residents. Better still, they offer a working example of traditional urban design elements and private governance. Any discussion of trailer parks should start with the fact that most forms of low-income housing have been criminalized in nearly every major US city. Beginning in the 1920s, urban policymakers and planners started banning what they deemed as low-quality housing, including boarding houses, residential hotels, and low-quality apartments. Meanwhile, on the outer edges of many cities, urban policymakers undertook a policy of “mass eviction and demolition” of low-quality housing. Policymakers established bans on suburban shantytowns and self-built housing. In knocking out the bottom rung of urbanization, this ended the natural “filtering up” of cities as they expanded outward, replaced as we now know by static subdivisions of middle-class, single-family houses. The Housing Act of 1937 formalized this war on “slums” at the federal level and by the 1960s much of the emergent low-income urbanism in and around many U.S. cities was eliminated. In light of the United States’ century-long war on low-income housing, it’s something of a miracle that trailer parks survive. With an aftermarket trailer, trailer payments and park rent combined average around the remarkably low rents of $300 to $500. Even the typical new manufactured home, with combined trailer payments and park rent, costs […]

Why No Micro-Apartments in Chicago?

  Several cities have jumped on the bandwagon of building Micro-apartments, a hot trend in apartment development.  San Francisco and Seattle already have them. New York outlawed them, but is testing them on one project, and may legalize them again. Even developers in smaller cities like Denver and Grand Rapids are taking a shot at micro-apartments. At the same time, Chicago is building lots of apartments, and is known for having low barriers to entry for downtown development.  Yet we aren’t hearing of much new construction of micro-apartments here.  Premier studios are fetching as much as $2,000 a month.  Certainly there must be demand for something more approachable to young professionals.  In theory, we should expect to see Chicago leading the way in innovative small spaces. Chicago doesn’t have an outright ban on small apartments like New York, but there are four regulatory obstacles in the Chicago zoning code.  These are outdated remnants from eras where excluding undesirable people were main objectives of zoning, and combined to effectively prohibit small apartments: 1. Minimum Average Size:  Interestingly, there is no explicit prohibition of small units.  This is unlike New York City’s zoning, which prohibits units smaller than 400sf. There is, however, a stipulation that the average gross size of apartments constructed within a development be greater that 500sf.  Assuming 15% of your floor-plate is taken by hallways, lobbies, stairs, etc; this means for every 300sf unit, you need one 550sf unit to balance it out. Source:  17-2-0312 for residential; 17-4-0408 for downtown 2. Limits on “Efficiency Units”: Zoning stipulates a minimum percentage of “efficiency units” within a development. The highest density areas downtown allow as much as 50%, but these are the most expensive areas where land is most expensive. In areas traditionally more affordable, the ratio is as low as 20% to discourage studios, and encourage […]

9 Barriers To Building Housing In Central City Austin

The Austin area has, for the 5th year running, been among America’s two fastest-growing major metro areas by population. Although everybody knows about the new apartments sprouting along transportation corridors like South Lamar and Burnet, much of the growth has been in our suburbs, and in suburban-style areas of the city. Our city is growing out more than up. How come? The desire for living in central Austin has never been higher. But Austin, like most cities, has rules that prevent new housing from getting centrally built. That makes it easier to buy and build on virgin land in the suburbs. Here are some of those rules. 1 MINIMUM LOT SIZE Historically, expensive houses were built on expensive, large lots; cheaper homes were built on smaller, cheaper lots. Austin decided that new houses can’t be built on small lots. Even if you want to build a small, cheap house, you still need a lot with at least 5,750 square feet. In central Austin, that costs a lot of money, even without the house! If somebody owns a 10,000 square foot lot, they aren’t allowed to split it into two 5,000 square foot lots and build two medium-sized houses, let alone three 3,333 square foot lots with three small houses, let alone three 3,333 square foot lots with triplexes! In 1999, Houston reformed its minimum lot size laws. Since then, environmentally-friendly central-city urban townhomes have flourished.         2 MINIMUM SITE AREA For areas that are zoned for apartments and condos, there is a cap on the ratio of number of apartments to lot size known as “minimum site area.” 3 IMPERVIOUS COVER MAXIMUMS Impervious cover is any surface that prevents water from seeping into the ground, including buildings, driveways, and garages. There is a cap on the ratio of impervious cover to lot size. 4 FLOOR-TO-AREA RATIO MAXIMUMS Floor-to-area ratios (aka FAR) maximums are a cap on […]

Urbanism In A Time Of Terror

Brussels, Belgium–I had recently moved from Los Angeles, my home of twenty years, to Brussels. It would be my first time living in a traditional city since becoming interested in urban design. So I was constantly looking for little urban insights and pleasures on the ground. For instance, I immediately noticed that housing prices here are roughly half of what I encountered in Los Angeles. Within a few weeks of my arrival, the bombings of Brussels occurred. The atrocity raises some interesting questions in regards to urbanism—are there certain urban designs that can prevent or discourage terrorism? Should the threat of terrorism influence the design of our cities? How would it? While terrorism may leave us shocked and breathless, it’s worth remembering that traffic deaths greatly outnumber deaths due to terrorism. In sheer numbers of lives lost and saved, cars are the bigger culprit. Terrorism, for its part, exacts a great toll paid in fear as well as loss of life and limb. What makes a city resilient in the face of terrorism? Walking The more ways one can move about the city, the more resilient it will be in the face of crisis. But, these options are not equal; cars are big compared to the space available for them—if everyone were to drive, no one would move. Here, man in his humblest form is king—we are always ready to walk, several miles if need be, without the aid of any special operator or infrastructure. Density and proximity ensure walking home is a reasonable or even routine affair. Walking loses its appeal, however, as travel distances increase, especially for the less physically able among us. And as much as walkability is ideal, many cities are just not suited for it, in their current state. Work is too far to reach via […]

Autonomous Vehicles: Expect the Unexpected

A recent trip to the tax attorney’s office put me in close proximity to a fellow client as we waited. This guy was one of the lead developers of autonomous vehicles so I picked his brain for a while. He said his company is on track to have products on the road in four or five years. Here’s a little heads up for those of you who think you know how driver-less cars will play out in the culture and economy. The first commercial adopters of this technology (other than the military) will be fleets of long haul trucks. The big box retailers have already calculated the savings on labor and fuel efficiency as well as just-in-time delivery optimization with vehicles that aren’t burdened by humans. . Uber and other taxi services have already announced their desire to convert to driverless cars in an attempt to improve service and lower costs. Car sharing services may convert to the on demand driverless taxi model as well. The U-Haul folks will eventually morph with the storage pod pick up and delivery services that are already in operation. Municipal governments hemorrhaging cash for salaries, health insurance, and pension costs will find it irresistible to phase out humans for sanitation vehicles. When I was a kid there were three men (and they were, in fact, always men) on each truck. Today there’s one person with a video camera and a robotic arm collecting the trash. Soon the truck and the robot arm won’t need a human at all. We can expect the same trajectory for mail carriers, utility meter readers, and other such activities. City buses will eventually see the end of human drivers, particularly as dedicated bus lanes and BRT come to dominate the surviving transit systems. In many suburban locations public buses may […]

Who Plans?: Jane Jacobs’ Hayekian critique of urban planning

Cities are fantastically dynamic places, and this is strikingly true of their successful parts, which offer a fertile ground for the plans of thousands of people. – Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities For most of the field’s history, prominent urban planning theorists have taken for granted that cities require extensive central planning. With the question framed as “To plan or not to plan?” students and practitioners answer with an emphatic “Yes,” subsequently setting out to impose their particular ideal order on what they perceived to be, as Lewis Mumford put it, “solidified chaos.” Whether through the controlled centralization of Le Corbusier or the controlled decentralization of Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright, cities were to be just that: controlled. When in 1961 Jane Jacobs set out to attack the orthodox tradition of urban planning, it was this dogma that landed squarely in her crosshairs. With her characteristically deceptive simplicity, she invites us to ask, “Who plans?” While many take Jacobs’ essential contribution to be her insights into urban design, her subversion begins at the theoretical level in the introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Despite their diverse aesthetic preferences, Corbusier and Howard share much in common. Both assume that planning entails the enshrining of a single plan and the suppression of all other individual plans. Both insist on imposing a “pretended order” on the “real order,” treating the city as a simple machine rather than a manifestation of organized complexity. Like Adam Smith’s “man of system,” each thinker was “so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he [could not] suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.” Jane Jacobs’ critique of this orthodox tradition unfolds in three steps, closely following F.A. Hayek’s argument in […]

A Public-Private Shopping Mall

Forest City Enterprises recently received approval from Arlington County to redevelop its Ballston Common Mall. The deal is a public-private partnership in which the county will pay for $10 million in infrastructure improvements around the mall and provide $45 million in tax increment financing for the reconstruction. The deal is not only a waste of taxpayer money, but it also perpetuates development through political favoritism as opposed to allowing competition to determine the best use of land. Opened in 1986, today Ballston Common Mall is a sad structure with a high vacancy rate. However, a public-private partnership isn’t needed to turn it into an updated, profitable development. The mall sits on incredibly valuable land. A nearby parcel less than half the size of the mall site recently sold for $7.5 million. With demand so high for land along Arlington’s Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor, county money certainly isn’t needed to facilitate retail development. The mall owner, Forest City Enterprises, is well-versed in navigating public-private partnerships. In DC the company has received over $100 million in subsidies for recent projects. Forrest City Ratner, the corporation’s New York office, was the developer of the famed Atlantic Yards (now Pacific Park) project that has become a poster project for cronyism in real estate. Like the Atlantic Yards project, the Ballston Common Mall redevelopment will involve both direct subsidies and a TIF. The TIF that will help finance the new mall is debt financing that will be paid back with property tax increases that county officials believe the new mall will bring. This will be the first TIF ever used in Arlington. The Ballston project follows a high-profile retail development in Fairfax County, where the Mosaic District was completed as that county’s first TIF. By allowing municipal policymakers to spend future tax revenues today, TIFs provide a tool for obscuring the costs of economic development […]

A Smart City in Your Pocket: From top-down command centers to bottom-up app markets

Woman sitting on a bench in a park using a smartphone

  Cities, for most of human history, were dumb. At least, that’s what the “smart cities” movement might lead you to believe. Over the past few years, a chorus of acquisitive multinational tech corporations, trend-savvy politicians, and optimistic developers­­—an odd mixture of former SimCity players, in all likelihood—has come to sing of technology’s potential to solve urban problems. Through implementation of technologies like augmented physical infrastructure, central command centers, and information exchange, proponents of smart cities argue that information technology offers new solutions to old problems like trash collection, public health, and traffic congestion. While the movement’s ideological variations are many and varied, a focus on top-down smart city solutions has ultimately distracted urban observers from the bottom-up smart city revolution that’s already underway. In his 2014 book Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, scholar Anthony M. Townsend paints a troubling picture of the former in Rio de Janeiro’s modestly titled Center for Intelligent Operations. Developed by IBM, the center acts as a hub for hundreds of surveillance cameras and sensors. At best, the center achieves little more than, in Townsend’s words, “looking smart.” At worst, the center seems to be a regression back to twentieth century centralization. Townsend’s explorations of Songdo, South Korea, a city purported to be both centrally-planned and smart, hardly quells these concerns. The discussion leaves the reader with a healthy skepticism of top-down smart city solutions. Other criticisms have made the top-down smart city feel less like something out of 1984 and more like something out of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. In a couple of recent posts, Emily points out the roadblocks presented by poor incentives and a lack of market signals, both for politicians and high-ranking public servants. For similar reasons, both parties lack the incentives to implement […]

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