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Category Travel

Does Home-sharing Create Negative Externalities?

  A decade or two ago, a traveler who wished to stay in a city temporarily had no alternative to a hotel. Even if the owner of a house or condominium wished to rent out a room for a short period of time, the costs of advertising in a newspaper would have at least partially canceled out the financial benefits from renting. But the Internet has made home-sharing much more economical, through websites like Airbnb.com.  At first glance, the home-sharing industry seems highly beneficial: guests get a cheaper and/or more exotic vacation, home-sharing hosts get extra money to pay off mortgages, and their neighborhoods benefit from tourist revenue. Nevertheless, NIMBYs have attacked home-sharing.  One major argument is that home-sharing creates negative externalities.  For example, a recent law review article(1)  notes that some neighborhood activists in Silver Lake (a trendy Los Angeles neighborhood) sought to exclude home-sharing from their neighborhood on the ground that shared homes are “hotel-like room rentals”  and such a “commercial use [causes] the noise and traffic levels of the area [to] increase as a result of people coming and going, and the transient nature of the establishment can increase the crime rate.” As a result of these problems, home-sharing “brings nuisances to residential areas, thereby lowering the value of all homes in the neighborhood.” In other words, the “externalities” argument rests on the following chain of logic: Assumption 1: Home-sharing, as a commercial use, is no different from hotels. Assumption 2: Commercial uses bring down property values. Conclusion: Home-sharing brings down property values. But none of these claims has significant factual support.  First,  home-sharing is somewhat different from a large hotel. An individual hotel might have hundreds or thousands of guests on one block.  By contrast, home-shares tend to be spread out over a much larger space, […]

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 […]

Glamour in streetscapes

A while ago I attended an Urban Land Institute event on development trends in Fairfax’s Mosaic District. A presenter from the retail developer EDENS described their strategy of adding “sidewalk jewelry,” a design technique used to entice shoppers to travel down sidewalks between stores. Having never heard the term before, it nonetheless stuck with me as I thought about retail developments that manage to create relatively lively pedestrian environments from the top down. At Mosaic District, this street jewelry takes the form of signage designed to engage pedestrians, fountains, and planters: It’s certainly more aesthetically pleasing and engaging to pedestrians than the average strip center. While the typical strip mall has a parking lot for a set back, Mosaic District has a parking garage that allows the rest of the center to be more pedestrian-scaled. With the “sidewalk jewelry” framework in mind, it’s easy to see that many retail developers have embraced this trend toward focusing on the pedestrian experience once shoppers have left their cars at the center’s periphery. While Easton Town Center in Columbus has many of the same stores as any major mall, it’s outdoor shopping environment is distinctly different, attempting to emulate the “town center” in its name: For shoppers who value retail ambience, these “lifestyle center” sidewalks provide a much nicer atmosphere relative to more dated strip center or shopping mall designs, but they can’t compare to environments where storefront decorations developed more organically. A recent trip to Quebec City reminded me of the sidewalk jewelry term, but there the visual treats that lure pedestrians down the sidewalk have much more texture than the shopping centers’ above because they are the result of an emergent order among the street’s businesses and residents rather than one developer’s vision: This type of street meets social critic Virginia Postrel’s framework of glamour. In […]

Potential for Voluntary Infrastructure

Last fall I visited Budapest and learned some interesting history of the city’s beautiful Chain Bridge. Before 1849, the small cities of Buda and Pest were connected by a temporary bridge that was only viable during warm months. In the winter, the bridge had to be taken down due to ice, making it impossible to cross the Danube between the two cities if the ice wasn’t solid enough to walk on. Count István Széchenyi, a Hungarian statesman who traveled extensively throughout Europe, made it his mission to secure financing for a bridge to improve economic growth opportunities and Budapest’s standing on the world stage. His experiences in rapidly modernizing cities like London taught Széchenyi the importance of mobility for economic growth. Legend has it that Széchenyi was motivated to build a bridge between Buda and Pest because ice on the Danube prevented him from getting to see his sick father before he died, but it’s unclear to me if this is an accurate history. The bridge was the realization of both a politician’s ambitions and a private financiers goal to profit from tolling the bridge and by increasing the value of his landholding in Pest. While the bridge lost money during its financier’s life, it ultimately began turning a profit in 1860. It’s impossible to understand Széchenyi’s motivations for securing the bridge centuries later, but it seems he was likely motivated by a combination of profit seeking, nationalistic pride, and philanthropy. The Chain Bridge joined a slew of other privately built bridges and other infrastructure around the world, built either by people who hoped to profit from providing transportation services or who sought to increase their land value by providing mobility. While a voluntarily built bridge seems exceptional from today’s vantage point — when a public private partnership or contracted toll road management seems […]

Italy’s Austerity Plan Spurs Transport Deregulation

There’s been a lot of handwringing by American lefties over the austerity plans that Germany is asking indebted eurozone governments like Italy and Greece to implement in exchange for bailouts, but many aspects of the plans – especially labor market deregulation – are long overdue no matter which side if the aisle you sit on (in the US, at least). In searching for information on the deregulatory aspects of Prime Minister Mario Monti’s “Save Italy” austerity plan, I came upon this interesting bit on transport deregulation in Corriere della Sera. I’ve never actually studied or spoken Italian, but hopefully this is a workable translation, if a bit literal: The recipe that the Antitrust Authority has chosen for taxi liberalization will double the number of licenses, but with each driver receiving a second one as compensation….

Cutting Costs On California HSR Doesn’t Have To Add Delays

Scrapping viaducts like this would make California HSR cheaper, faster to build, and easier to maintain, without a loss in quality The recent peer review report recommending that California delay construction on the first segment of its high-speed rail project has caused a bit of consternation in the transit twittosphere. Blogger The Overhead Wire wrote, “Sorry, but defunding HSR won’t make local agencies $10b richer.” I replied, “But it might start a long-overdo convo on costs,” and he responded (and many agreed): “and then nothing will get done in my lifetime and costs won’t matter….

In Defense Of Land Reclamation: It Ain’t All Palm Islands!

Earlier today Urban Photo Blog tweeted earlier today a link to an article about Hong Kong’s latest land reclamation project, with an obviously sarcastic “because it worked so well in Dubai!” tacked on at the end. Not to pick on Urban Photo Blog – actually, his Twitter account is definitely one of the best I follow – but I think that some of boomtime Dubai’s real estate projects, among them the infamous Palm Islands, give land reclamation a bad rap. …

California HSR Review Panel Recommends Against $2.7 Billion Bond Issue

Enormous viaducts like this are one reason for the project's ballooning cost estimates Well, the other shoe has finally dropped: the California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group is recommending that the state legislature not authorize the issue of $2.7 billion in bonds to begin paying for the state’s planned $98.5 billion high-speed rail line….

Qatar’s Skyscraper Diplomacy

London’s Shard tower, soon to be the tallest in Europe, is, financially speaking, a bit puzzling. Europe is in the midst of an economic crisis, and London’s Southwark, across from the skyscraper-crazed City of London, is gentrifying, but not the safest place for a massive real estate investment. The developers have yet to sign a major office tenant, and nobody is expecting the project to turn much of a profit. …

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