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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
Two Substacks this week suggest that YIMBYism will or should merge with broader urbanist concerns to become something more like a political party. Two professors aligned with YIMBYism – Chris Elmendorf and David Schleicher – argue that YIMBY needs a…
I recently saw a tweet complaining that left-wing YIMBYs favored urban containment- a strategy of limiting suburban sprawl by prohibiting new housing at the outer edge of a metropolitan area. (Portland’s urban growth boundaries, I think, are the most widely…
Check out Dan Bertolet’s review of the productive legislative year in Washington, where lawmakers preempted local parking, design, and unfunded inclusionary zoning requirements, among other things.
walkable suburbs have as many children as more typical suburbs
A review of a book that endorses more flexible zoning, but doesn't reject zoning entirely.
In New York City, one common argument against congestion pricing (or in fact, against any policy designed to further the interests of anyone outside an automobile) is that because outer borough residents are all car-dependent suburbanites, only Manhattanites would benefit. For example, film critic John Podhoretz tweeted: “Yeah, nothing easier that taking the subway from Soundview or Gravesend or Valley Stream.” Evidently, Podhoretz thinks these three areas are indistinguishable from the outer edges of suburbia: places where everyone drives everywhere. But let’s examine the facts. Soundview is a neighborhood in the Southeast Bronx, a little over 8 miles from my apartment in Midtown Manhattan near the northern edge of the congestion pricing zone. There are three 6 train subway stops in Soundview: Elder Avenue, Morrison Avenue, and St. Lawrence Avenue. Soundview zip codes include 10472 and 10473. In zip code 10472* only 25.7 percent of workers drove or carpooled to work according to 2023 census data; 59.6 percent use a bus or subway, and the rest use other modes (including walking, cycling, taxis and telecommuting). 10473, the southern half of Soundview, is a bit more car-oriented- but even there only 45 percent of workers drive alone or carpool. 41 percent of 10473 workers use public transit- still a pretty large minority by American standards, and more than any American city outside New York. In the two zip codes combined there are just 45,131 occupied housing units, and 24,094 (or 53 percent) don’t have a vehicle. In other words, not only do most Soundview residents not drive to work, most don’t even own a car. Gravesend, at the outer edge of Brooklyn over 12 miles from my apartment, is served by three subway stops on the F train alone: Avenue P, Avenue U and Avenue X. It is also served by […]
We identified large 91 cities and counties that regularly fail to report their building permits to the Census Bureau - including some surprising culprits.
Autonomous vehicles will cause a congestion apocalypse on downtown streets unless we price their use of the roads.
Last year disappointed pro-housing advocates in Colorado, as Governor Polis’s flagship reform was defeated by the state legislature. But Polis and his legislative allies tried again this year, and yesterday the governor signed into law a package of reforms which cover much of the ground of last year’s ill-fated HB23-213. HB24-1152 is an ADU bill. It applies to cities with populations over 1000 within metropolitan planning areas (so, the Front Range – home to most of Colorado’s major cities – along with Grand Junction), and CDPs with populations over 10,000 within MPOs. Within those jurisdictions, the law requires the permitting of at least 1 ADU per lot in any zone that permits single-family homes, without public hearings, parking requirements, owner-occupancy requirements, or ‘restrictive’ design or dimensional standards. The law also appropriates funds available for ADU permit fee mitigation, to be made available to ADU-supportive jurisdictions which go beyond compliance with the law to make ADUs easier to build (including jurisdictions not subject to the law’s preemption provisions). HB24-1304 eliminates parking minimums for multifamily and mixed-use buildings near transit within MPOs (though localities can impose parking minimums up to 1 space per unit for buildings of 20+ units or for buildings with affordable housing, if they issue a fact-based finding showing negative impacts otherwise). This bill was pared down in the Senate and would originally have eliminated parking requirements within MPOs entirely. HB24-1313 is a TOD and planning obligations bill. The bill:– Designates certain localities as ‘transit-oriented’ (if they are within MPOs, have a population of 4,000+, and have 75+ acres total either within ¼ mile of a frequent transit route or within ½ mile of a transit station – in effect, 30 or so localities along the Front Range).– Assigns all transit-oriented communities (TOCs) housing opportunity goals, which are simply […]
On March 25, the city council of Burlington, VT, voted to pass a major zoning reform that one observer of Vermont politics (X.com’s pseudonymous @NotaBot) compared to the celebrated overhaul of Minneapolis’s zoning code. Burlington – the largest city in Vermont, at 45,000 inhabitants – has not escaped the housing crisis affecting the country. Burlington was an attractive destination for new residents during the pandemic and the rise of remote work; severe flooding last year put additional pressure on the housing supply. Policymakers statewide were well aware of the challenge and last year passed S.100, a sweeping package of housing reforms. Now Burlington, led by a pro-housing mayor, Miro Weinberger, has taken action at the local level. Burlington’s reform, known as the Neighborhood Code, is a welcome simplification of the city’s zoning. The Neighborhood Code eliminates the city’s ‘waterfront’ zoning districts and a ‘dense housing overlay’, adding a higher-density ‘residential corridor’ district, for a total of four residential zones. There are also significant increases in allowed density across the city. The Neighborhood Code allows up to fourplexes in all residential districts, allows townhouses everywhere but the low-density residential zone, and expands the option to create a cottage court or add a second freestanding unit on the same lot. The new code also limits requirements for minimum lot size, lot coverage, and setbacks. The reforms took some haircuts before final passage in response to pushback from organized groups of residents, but remain a meaningful change. In their report presenting the Neighborhood Code, Burlington’s city planning department reviews the city’s history. Planners explain that much of Burlington’s housing stock predates its zoning code, and in particular many existing lots are smaller than the official minimum lot size. Also, in Burlington’s first era of zoning, the city had a single residential district which […]
