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Category Policy

Planned Manufacturing Districts: Planning the Life Out of Districts

They are called different things in different cities, but they are similar in form and intent among the cities where they are found.  For simplicity’s sake, a Planned Manufacturing District (PMD), as they are called in Chicago, is an area of land, defined by zoning, that prohibits residential development and other specific uses with the intent of fostering manufacturing and blue-collar employment. Proponent of PMDs purport to be champions of the middle-class or blue-collar workers, but fail to consider the unintended consequences of prohibiting alternative uses on that land.  At best, PMDs have little effect on changing land-use patterns where industrial is already the highest-and-best-use.  At worst, they have the long-run potential to distort the land use market, drive up the costs of housing, and prevent vibrant neighborhoods from emerging. A Race to The Bottom Before getting into it further, it is important to examine the economic decisions industrial firms make in comparison to other uses.  Earlier in the industrial revolution, industry was heavily reliant on access to resources.  Manufacturing and related firms were very sensitive to location.  The firms desired locations with easy access to ports, waterways, and later railways to transport raw materials coming in, and products going out. However, the advent of the Interstate Highway System and ubiquitously socialized transportation network have made logistical costs negligible compared to other costs.  Where firms once competed for locations with access to logistical hubs and outbid other uses for land near waterways in cities, they now seek locations with the cheapest land where they can have a large, single-floor facility under one roof.  This means sizable subsidies must be combined with the artificially cheap land to attract and retain industrial employers on constrained urban sites. Additionally, today’s economy has become much more talent-based rather than resource based, and patterns have shifted accordingly.  In contrast to industrial, residential and office uses are […]

How Hong Kong Pulls Off Transit Oriented Development

Integrating rail and property development is the cornerstone of the MTR’s success. In the U.S., coordination between transit authorities and developers tends to be mediocre at best. In Hong Kong, however, the MTR is both the transit authority as well as the property owner, and this makes all the difference. Coordination Problem Most attempts at transit-oriented development in the U.S. involve multi-party negotiations. The agency responsible for the transportation system haggles with different developers interested in undertaking projects along the line. Instead of implementing a unified plan, the transit agency has to negotiate specific agreements with each developer. And, because the priorities of the transit agency and the developers are never perfectly aligned, development agreements become subject to second-best compromises. Further, any disputes that arise once significant capital has been committed are costly to resolve. This arrangement makes leveraging land values difficult as well. Developers frequently get tax breaks as an incentive to undertake projects. Whether abatements on property tax or straight-forward rate reductions, tax incentives typically preclude the use of land values to help fund transit. And, even without special incentives, major property owners who stand to benefit from proximity to a transit system have every reason to resist tax increases of any kind if there’s a chance of free-riding. The MTR, on the other hand, uses the integrated rail-property development  approach which combines the two roles of landlord and transit developer. The MTR owns the right-of-way as well as the surrounding properties. This removes the necessity of extended negotiations, having to settle for second best solutions, and the potential downside of disagreements partway through a project. By combining the functions of landlord and transit developer, the MTR is also able to internalize land values. The rail line drives up the value of the MTR’s properties and that value covers […]

Shortfalls in non-profit disaster rebuilding

After receiving years of praise for its work in post-Katrina recovery, Brad Pitt’s home building organization, Make It Right, is receiving some media criticism. At the New Republic, Lydia Depillis points out that the Make It Right homes built in the Lower Ninth Ward have resulted in scarce city dollars going to this neighborhood with questionable results. While some residents have been able to return to the Lower Ninth Ward through non-profit and private investment, the population hasn’t reached the level necessary to bring the commercial services to the neighborhood that it needs to be a comfortable place to live. After Hurricane Katrina, the Mercatus Center conducted extensive field research in the Gulf Coast, interviewing people who decided to return and rebuild in the city and those who decided to permanently relocate. They discussed the events that unfolded immediately after the storm as well as the rebuilding process. They interviewed many people in the New Orleans neighborhood surrounding the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. This neighborhood rebounded exceptionally well after Hurricane Katrina, despite experiencing some of the city’s worst flooding 5-12-feet-deep and being a low-income neighborhood. As Emily Chamlee-Wright and Virgil Storr found [pdf]: Within a year of the storm, more than 3,000 residents had returned [of the neighborhood’s 4,000 residents when the storm hit]. By the summer of 2007, approximately 90% of the MQVN residents were back while the rate of return in New Orleans overall remained at only 45%. Further, within a year of the storm, 70 of the 75 Vietnamese-owned businesses in the MQVN neighborhood were up and running. Virgil and Emily attribute some of MQVN’s rebuilding success to the club goods that neighborhood residents shared. Club goods share some characteristics with public goods in that they are non-rivalrous — one person using the pool at a swim club doesn’t impede others from doing so — but club […]

Emergent Order in Cities and Markets

Last week at The Atlantic Cities, Allison Arieff posted a Q&A with Alex Marshall about what Marshall asserts are Jane Jacobs misunderstanding of how cities work. Marshall says: Human interaction takes place, but it shouldn’t obscure what makes it possible, which is government. As much as I admire Jacobs, I suspect her experiences fighting Robert Moses, the master builder and destroyer of New York City, turned her off to government. So much so that I suspect she began to ignore it. Jacobs described how urban economies, such as say the computer ecosystem in the Silicon Valley, emerge in an organic way. I argue that these business ecologies emerge only within the containers that government builds. Both cities and economies emerge as overt political acts. They are constructed things. Here Marshall completely eschews the historical evolution of both cities and markets in making his assertions. Both cities and markets are vehicles for human exchange, but neither is built by a person or a government. Populations, not infrastructure, are cities’ most important assets. Population changes, much like prices in a market, are a product of human action but not of human design. Historians have found evidence that the emergence of cities was not the result of ancient leaders’ direction but was rather the result of individuals acting in their own best interests. Likewise, we see both historical and current examples of trade emerging without government. States have much more power to limit trade or initiate plunder than they do to facilitate successful trade. Jacobs identified that the spontaneous order that allows prices to direct trade likewise leads city streets to serve their residents’ commercial and civic needs when they are not restricted from doing so. Marshall asserts that Silicon Valley didn’t emerge organically because it came about within the legal and infrastructure “containers” that government provides. While it’s true that government […]

Opportunity for States to Protect Land Use

If this season’s political campaign rhetoric has demonstrated anything, it’s that governors love to take credit for job creation. What I haven’t seen any governor mention, though, is that there is huge opportunity for economic growth in relaxing zoning codes. Most obviously, allowing new opportunities for infill development will create construction jobs. More significantly though, in the long run, cities allow for faster economic growth (and job growth) than other locations. The regulations that prevent cities from growing keep economic progress below what it otherwise would be. While researchers disagree over whether population density or total population is the variable that is most significantly correlated with economic growth, either way zoning plays an important role in holding back job growth, providing policymakers who are willing to deregulate with opportunities to improve their competitive standings next to other cities. Political incentives stand in the way of this growth opportunity, however. Most zoning restrictions benefit a city’s current residents at the expense of potential residents. For example, minimum lot size requirements serve to raise the price of homes, preventing low-income people from moving into neighborhoods that current residents wish to keep exclusive. By changing this current order, policymakers risk losing the support of their homeowning constituents, and interest likely to be better organized than renters and potential city residents. Limitations on housing supply raise the value of existing homes, artificially raising the value of residents’ assets, which homeowners strongly fight to protect. At the local level, policymakers are therefore incentivized to privilege homeowners’ interests at the expense of broad economic growth. At the state level however, the incentives may be different, such that economic growth may benefit state policymakers more than protecting home values. State policymakers have constituents who live in a wide variety of municipalities, some where land use restrictions are less binding in […]

Randal O’Toole: “If you didn’t have those suburban restrictions, you wouldn’t have that pressure for density in DC”

Earlier today I posted the video of the Cato discussion on housing with Randal O’Toole, Ryan Avent, Adam Gordon, and Matt Yglesias, but I wanted to transcribe one segment towards the end. (Like I said, it’s hard to skip to the end of the streaming video because you can’t scroll beyond what’s already been downloaded.). For the last question, someone from the audience says he’s a fan of Randal’s who lives in DC, and asks Randal, and the rest of the panelists, what they about the recent calls to lift the city’s height limit in response to development pressures. Randal responds first: Well this is where I think the policy questions [and the difference between Randal and the other panelists] come in on density. I think we ‘ve got Maryland, which has all these restrictions on supposedly protecting agricultural land, we have Loudoun County and other counties in Virginia that have zoned most of their land for 20-acre large lot sizes, those have restricted the ability of people to live in single-family, to build new single-family homes in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. And so it’s created a pressure for more density in Washington, DC, but if you didn’t have those suburban restrictions, you wouldn’t have that pressure for density in Washington, DC. So I’d say, let’s get rid of the suburban restrictions, and then see if there really is a demand for high-density high-rise in Washington. If there really was a demand, there’s a lot of three-story buildings that could be redeveloped to be six and seven stories if you wanted to. Matt: “You’re not allowed to!” Ryan: “You should try to do that – if you can make it happen, then that would be a great profit opportunity.” Randal: “Well, I’ve seen streets of row houses here [in DC] […]

Market Urbanism vs. Market Suburbanism smackdown at Cato: “The Death and Life of Affordable Housing”

The debate you’ve been waiting for! Randal O’Toole, Matt Yglesias, Ryan Avent, and Adam Gordon participated yesterday in a discussion at the Cato Institute moderated by Diana Lind from Next American City/Forefront. (How had this never happened before??) Randal O’Toole did not disappoint, arriving in top form in his shoestring necktie and armed with a surprisingly interesting Powerpoint, but I think New Jersey-based attorney Adam Gordon stole the show with his discussion of inclusionary zoning and the Mt. Laurel doctrine (probably because he was on the only one on stage who hasn’t already spewed hundreds of thousands of words on the subject). You can download the 90-minute discussion as an MP3 from Cato (much easier to scroll through), or watch the video streaming:

Height Limit Links

1) Yesterday, two pieces on Congressman Darrell Issa’s proposal to relax the federal limits on DC’s buildings heights got a lot of coverage. At City Block, Alex Block makes the key point that outside of downtown, DC’s density is limited by zoning, rather than the height limit. He supports allowing more multifamily housing by, for example, dividing row houses into apartments. He also makes the point that taller buildings can actually add to the vistas that height limit proponents are so concerned about. I think this is particularly true on the 14th Street Corridor, Connecticut Ave, and New Hampshire Ave. 2) On the other hand, Harry Jaffe at the Washington Examiner denies the laws of supply and demand, claiming that increasing allowable height could not possibly lower rents. He writes of the limit, “It has forced development out of downtown and into the neighborhoods, around Metro stops, which is healthy growth: out, not up.” The most troubling part of his piece is that he suggests developers’ use of the profit incentive is “about greed, period,” ignoring the mutual benefits that increased density in the city would permit. 3) Will Doig interviewed me for a piece on historic preservation at Salon. He concludes, “Landmarking is meant to preserve structures whose loss would be an affront to history. Removing entire neighborhoods from the natural evolution of cities is another thing entirely.” 4) Matt Yglesias observes that in Tom Vanderbilt’s series about pedestrianism, most of the cities with the highest Walk Scores are liberal. I think Matt rightly concludes that this correlation is primarily driven by older, more walkable cities being coastal, where more liberal people tend to live. However, this also ties in to a question Charlie Gardner raised a while back with regard to proposed changes to the zoning process in Tennessee and Arizona: Oddly, the idea of selectively or fully repealing zoning  – […]

The North Korean Origins Of Renzo Piano’s Shard Tower

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks London’s Shard skyscraper (shameless article-I-wrote-about-London-skyscrapers plug) looks like Pyongyang’s Ryugyong Hotel. Koryo Tours, the only tour group that offers westerners package to North Korea, plays up the similarities on its blog: To the eyes of us all at Koryo Tours it looks like Renzo Piano has been copying Pyongyang… (Note the following is not 100% accurate – but close!…

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