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On Favored Quarters, Off-Center Skyscraper Districts, and Poverty

Following up on my post yesterday skyscrapers in Europe, I’d like to explain why, in detail, central business districts are generally superior to off-center ones like La Défense outside Paris or Washington’s Virginia suburbs. It’s not that I just enjoy the spatial symmetry and organic shape of a centralized city – it’s actually more efficient! Neglect it, and you’re doing a disservice to your poorest citizens, who too often find themselves out of commuting range of many of a city’s jobs. …

Old Urbanist on New Public Housing

Charlie Gardner at Old Urbanist, one of my favorite urbanist blogs, has a great post that echoes what I said a few days ago about the latest wave of American public housing projects. Here he first quotes a Nashville public housing official: “Part of the problem with public housing in the U.S….

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. …

Affordable Housing vs. Density: The Unintended Consequences of Zoning Bonuses

California Assembly Bill 710 was introduced to earlier this year to tackle the problem of municipalities requiring onerous amounts of parking for new development, widely recognized as one of the main impediments to transit-oriented development and infill growth. The bill would have capped city and county parking requirements in neighborhoods with good transit to one space per residential unit and one space per 1,000 sq. ft. of non-residential space, with an exemption process for areas with a true parking crunch and some other caveats….

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 […]

Japanese transit and what it can teach us

For a libertarian urbanist blogger, I’ve always felt kind of embarrassed by my lack of knowledge about East Asian transit, considering that it’s the only place left on earth with a thriving competitive private transportation market (they even have profitable monorails!). I’ve heard good things about South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong, but it looks like Japan is really the world leader in market urbanism. I always found Japan’s post-WWII dynamism quite intriguing – despite its supposed lost decade and what I understand to be a fairly corporatist entrepreneurial model (in the end, they lost the tech innovation game to Silicon Valley), Japan has managed to remain an elite economic power. I have a (completely unfounded) theory that a lot of the dynamism comes from not having to carry the burden of a shitty, state-run transportation network and stunted land use market – as I understand it, private railway companies are pillars of the Japanese economy, similar to what the auto industry was to the US at its height. Anyway, I’ve been reading papers on Japan’s transit companies, and the first half of the abstract of this one I think sums up pretty succinctly the reasons why private transit (and, therefore, urbanism writ large) succeeds in Japan and fails in the US: In Japan, a liberalization policy was implemented over railways and buses in 2000 and 2002 respectively. Under that policy, quantity regulations for railways and buses were abolished, withdrawal regulations were eased, although fare regulations were maintained. However, even after this liberalization, institutional design remains considerably different between Japan and EU countries. An argument for competitive tendering is missing in Japan as 87.5% of rail passenger transport in the three major metropolitan areas is provided by profitable private railway companies that enjoy high social evaluation in respect to managerial […]

Hard Truths About Why Conservatives and Libertarians Hate Urbanism

It’s no secret that conservatives and libertarians don’t have very warm feelings towards urbanism. But with their emphasis on upzoning and reducing parking minimums, shouldn’t new urbanism and smart growth have at least some libertarian constituency? And given that local roads are paid for almost entirely out of general funds – that is to say, local roads are a blatant example of socialist redistribution – you’d think that there would be people on the free market right advocating raising the gas tax and tolling highways. But alas, no such luck. Michele Bachmann thinks roads shouldn’t count as earmarks, Carl Paladino’s never met a road he didn’t want to detoll, and Mother Jones managed to cobble together a whole article’s full of “We don’t need none of that smart growth communism”-style rhetoric coming from the Tea Party. Now, it could just be that there are just too many suburban Republican voters whose homes, lives, and culture are invested in sprawl for any politician to oppose it. But that doesn’t explain the lack of support from libertarian think-tanks and magazines, who, by virtue of their complete lack of political viability, don’t have to worry about politics and getting re-elected in the suburbs. Cato and the Reason Foundation still toe the “war on drivers” line, with Randal O’Toole denying that any developers even want to build less parking than current minimums require. So why don’t conservatives and libertarians have more compunction about sprawl? I believe the problem is more the messengers than the message. Despite the free market aspects of modern-day urbanism, smart growth and new urbanism are not libertarian movements. Urban planning is dominated by liberals, and it shows – few even seem aware of the capitalist roots of their plans. The private corporations that built America’s great cities and mass transit […]

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