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“This is the dirty secret of California’s Density Bonus law…”

Inclusionary zoning – everyone wants to talk about it! Dave Alpert at GGW started the discussion with his pro-IZ piece, and hot on the heels of Emily’s post earlier today, I got an email from a California developer who wishes to remain anonymous: This is the dirty secret of California’s Density Bonus law: it’s primarily a way to give 100% affordable projects easy land use concessions. It has barely any effect on market-rate projects, despite all the attention it gets from affordable housing advocates. Incidentally, the number of affordable units in market-rate density bonus projects – 212 – over the total number of units produced in L.A. during the same period – 53,000 – is 0.4%. Vanishingly few. The number of units produced exclusively with the parking concession – the 6 condo conversion units – is 0.01%. Statistically the same as zero. If people really want to get affordable housing built, they would do much better to find more direct ways to pay for it – like through property tax revenues or other sources where everybody pays. Trying to pay for affordable units by constraining market-rate development and trying to the capture value that is “created” when those constraints are released is not only a pretty ineffective way to create affordable housing, it’s an excellent way to make market rate housing more expensive. I’ve got some thoughts of my own on inclusionary zoning and the anti-density sentiment it can engender among some affordable housing activists, which I’ll hopefully post tomorrow.

Florida East Coast looks to hook up with Orlando International

The mystery of why in the hell Florida East Coast Industries would want to start private passenger service from Miami to Orlando just got a little bit clearer: they may also be getting an intermodal freight connection to Orland International Airport! A press release from the airport authority (.pdf): Demonstrating a vision for the future, the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, which operates Orlando International Airport, has already invested in infrastructure for a station that could accomodate up to four rail systems. In discussing the integration of rail [Phil Brown, Executive Director Orlando International Airport] explained, “We have planned our intermodal facility in a central location to service both the north and the future south terminal and All Aboard Florida is vying to be the first rail system to operate from it.” […] After considering FECI’s proposal, the Board approved the request and authorized the Executive Director to develop an agreement with FECI to provide commercial passenger service to Orlando International Airport’s Intermodal Facility to be presented to the Aviation Authority Board. The railroad clearly wants to continue to grow its freight business while introducing passenger service, which will make them one of the few private constituencies for FRA crash safety reform. They already have very good signaling because of their reliance on time-sensitive intermodal freight (most American railroads carry slow bulk freight like coal, chemicals, and grain), which will help them when they get in front of the FRA and have to prove that they can prevent and mitigate crashes without bulking their trains up like tanks. A cynic could say they’re only starting passenger service to get subsidies from the government for their freight business, but for the moment I’d like to be optimistic and think that it’s a genuine synergy. And then there’s this out of Rep. John Mica’s […]

Before the landmarks…

The other day I was stumbling around Wikipedia when I found pictures of what was apparently the first iteration of New York’s Grand Central train station, called Grand Central Depot. The “depot” opened in 1871 and was built in the neo-Renaissance style that was popular back then (as opposed to the final, neoclassical incarnation), and stood for less than 30 years. It was partly torn down and reconstructed in 1899, and then totally demolished “in phases” between 1903 and 1913 to make way for today’s Grand Central Terminal. This got me thinking about the old Pennsylvania Station whose demolition was a catalyst for the modern preservationist movement. Like nearly every big old building in New York, it was of course not the first building to stand there – development in cities during the prewar era was as much about redevelopment as it was about building in greenfield sites. It was a given that building would come down and new ones would be built – a city that’s been disrupted in most American downtowns. (Midtown Manhattan is of course one of the few places in the U.S. where this still happens – the Drake Hotel was of course torn down a few years ago by Harry Macklowe, on the site of what is now 432 Park Ave., and the Hotel Pennsylvania across from Penn Station will likely be replaced with an office tower once the market comes back.) Anyway, I put out a call on Twitter for pre-Penn Station history, and lo and behond @enf alerted me to a panel at an exhibit at the Transit History Museum in Brooklyn, which I managed to find some pictures from on Flickr. Here’s a wide shot of the panel (though you can zoom in pretty close), and here’s some of the text that […]

New York transit officials grudgingly consider using existing track more efficiently

Now that Chris Christie killed the ARC project, which would have built another rail tunnel between New Jersey and Manhattan, Transportation Nation is reporting that MTA boss Joe Lhota is asking the different New York area railroads to do what they were supposed to do half a century ago when they were nationalized: cooperate! What to do in the meantime? Lhota tossed out three ideas, each aimed at boosting capacity at Penn Station in Manhattan, the hemisphere’s busiest railroad station and a terminal for New Jersey Transit trains. He said the station’s 21 platforms should all be made to accommodate 10-car trains, which would mean lengthening some of them. He also said that the railroads using the station—Amtrak, New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road—should do a better job of sharing platform and tunnel space. Each railroad currently controls a third of the platforms, which sometimes leads to one railroad having too many trains and not enough platforms at the same time another railroad has empty platforms. The railroads also vie with each other for access to tunnels during peak periods. Lhota said capacity would be boosted if dispatchers in the station’s control room could send any train to any platform, and through any tunnel, as they saw fit. Lhota’s third suggestion was the most ambitious. He said the three railroads—plus the MTA’s Metro-North line, which connects Manhattan to Connecticut and several downstate New York counties—should use each other’s tracks. In other words, trains should flow throughout the region in a way that sends them beyond their historic territory. For example, a train from Long Island could arrive in Penn Station and, instead of sitting idly until its scheduled return trip, move on to New Jersey. That way, trains would spend less time tying up platforms, boosting the station’s […]

TRD: Bushwick is staying industrial – no residential rezoning for East Williamsburg!

The Real Deal says that Bushwick, a neighborhood on the L that’s seeing a lot of housing demand spill over from Williamsburg, is not getting a residential rezoning. TRD describes how the “sought-after northwestern area […] is zoned for manufacturing, so residential building is largely banned there,” but then buries the lede deep down: And while the city passed a high-profile rezoning for the Williamsburg and Greenpoint waterfront in 2005 — paving the way for high-density housing in formerly industrial sites — no such rezoning is on the horizon in Bushwick, the department of City Planning said. The North Brooklyn Industrial Business Zone, which encompasses a portion of Bushwick, was created in 2005 by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as “a sort of policy statement: ‘Hey, these are industrial and are currently used for manufacturing — and should stay that way,’?” explained Mitchell Korbey, head of the land-use department at law firm Herrick Feinstein. The Bloomberg administration has done a record number of rezonings, but sources said the mayor, along with Brooklyn borough president Marty Markowitz, wants to keep Bushwick’s zoning predominantly industrial to preserve the city’s manufacturing base. Dolgin, for example, said he recently sold a 46,000-square-foot parcel at McKibbon and Bogart streets for $4.37 million, and the site will be used as storage for scaffolds. In some southern portions of Bushwick, a mixed-use building can be redeveloped as residential, but a variance is required to do that in most of the popular East Williamsburg area, and they are rarely granted, Dolgin said. The article says that the SoHo loft law is occasionally being used to convert existing structures, and that hotels and hostels are being built since they’re allowed by zoning. Then again, Bloomberg’s rezoning days are over after the Midtown East upzoning, so his opinion on rezoning Bushwick isn’t […]

APA California hints (strongly) at opposition to parking minimum reform bill

Minimum parking requirement reform bills have been floating around the California legislature for a while – last year it was AB 710, and this year it’s AB 904, both authored by East Bay Asm. Nancy Skinner. This email blast to members from the American Planning Association’s California chapter doesn’t take an official position and does ask at the end for input, but their feelings on the bill are kind of hard to miss (all emphasis theirs, edited slightly for clarity): AB 904 [.pdf], sponsored by the Infill Builder Association and authored again by Assembly Member Skinner, is a gut and amend that is now similar to AB 710 (Skinner). This bill requires restrictive parking standards similar to those included in AB 710, which you’ll recall died on the Senate floor at the end of last year. AB 904, in a different form, already passed the Assembly, and is now awaiting hearing in the Senate. APA California is not opposed to the concept of lower parking requirements near transit when a community decides it is right for them – the issue is that a one-sized-fits-all statewide standard is not appropriate. AB 904, on and after January 1, 2014, would prohibit a city or county (including charter cities) from requiring minimum parking requirements in transit-intensive areas greater than the following: • One parking space per 1000 square feet for nonresidential projects (including commercial, industrial, institutional, or any other nonresidential projects regardless of type of use). • One parking space per unit for non-income-restricted residential projects. • 75/100ths parking spaces per unit for projects that include both income restricted and non-income restricted units. • 5/10ths parking spaces per unit for units that are deed restricted at least 55 years to rents or prices affordable to persons and families making less than 60% of area […]

In Defense of Chicago

First of all, I should start out by saying that I’ve only ever been to Chicago once, and I really don’t remember anything but the inside of my aunt’s house. I remember asking them if there was good mass transit, and they said Metra is good, but the L, which is near them, is not something they’d ride. My aunt, who led the family, was a financial services executive in Chicago, but they moved to the Research Triangle in North Carolina when she went into tech/healthcare. I imagine just the people Aaron Renn has in mind when he wrote “The Second-Rate City?” for City Journal. That anecdote aside, I think Aaron Renn is being a little too hard on Chicago. I’m sure my view of the city unduly weights its land use and transportation policies, but I do think it’s got more potential than Aaron gives it credit for. A lot of his article is based on this grim demographic observation, which I admit, is hard to stomach: Begin with Chicago’s population decline during the 2000s, an exodus of more than 200,000 people that wiped out the previous decade’s gains. Of the 15 largest cities in the United States in 2010, Chicago was the only one that lost population; indeed, it suffered the second-highest total loss of any city, sandwiched between first-place Detroit and third-place, hurricane-wrecked New Orleans. While New York’s and L.A.’s populations clocked in at record highs in 2010, Chicago’s dropped to a level not seen since 1910. Chicago is also being “Europeanized,” with poorer minorities leaving the center of the city and forced to its inner suburbs: 175,000 of those 200,000 lost people were black. Poor minorities abandoning the center to wealthy whites, while it has a lot of unfortunate aspects, doesn’t seem to me to be an altogether bad […]

Photos and renderings of buildings going up across New York

In honor of my new home (as of this February), New York City, here are some new towers going up in Midtown Manhattan! All photos from (where else?) the SkyscraperCity forums…click for source. The first is the International Gem Tower in the Diamond District (which looks to me like textured steel rather than precious metals), then there are three recent shots of One57, a bright blue residential skyscraper going up on West 57th Street, and then there’re a few renderings of Rafael Viñoly’s skinny modernist 432 Park (Ave?). The Gem Tower and One57 are by Extell, and 423 Park is CIM/Harry Macklowe. All are as-of-right, I believe. Plus, a video of Christian Portzamparc talking about about One57. And here’s a bonus: an old rendering of Rafael Viñoly’s plans for Williamsburg’s old Domino Sugar site, which may by given life again now that Two Trees, creator of Dumbo, owns it. (Most definitely not as-of-right!)  

Montgomery County’s loss is Calgary’s gain: Rollin Stanley escapes from the coven to Canada

Not sure how this escaped me, but it seems that a few weeks ago, Rollin Stanley was announced as Calgary’s new chief planner. Rollin Stanley, you’ll recall, was the very vocal pro-urban growth planner in Maryland’s Montgomery County, north of Washington, DC, who resigned after these four sentences appeared in Bethesda Magazine: He has little patience with dissenters. Stanley goes so far as to accuse them of being “rich, white women…spreading fear.” He says they stalk his appearances before community groups, sowing discord. He claims they refer to themselves as “the coven.” Most Americans still don’t think of Calgary as a very urban place, but it’s been holding its own against Vancouver and Toronto lately when it comes to urbanism in Canada (which is generally much more advanced than urbanism in the US), even without true rapid transit (the C-Train, while impressive as light rail, still has to cross streets). Calgary’s skyline’s been booming, and as the Calgary Herald writes, the city also has an urbanist mayor: Stanley’s approach somewhat resembles that of Mayor Naheed Nenshi, and beyond his unconventionally frank yet also high-reaching rhetoric. Nenshi, too, deplores suburban sprawl and the financial challenges it brings for government, and praises more walkable districts and transit. While Nenshi avidly uses social-media site Twitter, Stanley blogs prolifically with long rhapsodies on everything from master plans and neighbourhood walkabouts to census data and criticism. Here’s his old Montgomery County blog – does anyone know if he’s keeping one in Calgary? Or if maybe we could lure him to Twitter? There appears to be a general political consensus – that thing Alon Levy’s always talking about – towards urbanism in Calgary, so Calgary will likely get good urbanism: While the developer sector in Calgary is well-organized, there’s not as professionalized and unified community movement against […]

Were NYU and Chelsea Market’s hotels just stalking horses?

An item from Crain’s NY Business, behind a paywall (I think?): Sacrificial hotels Two hotel developments in Manhattan were effectively killed last week. The City Planning Commission cut a proposed 190-room property from New York University‘s expansion plan, and Community Board 4 rejected Chelsea Market‘s proposal for a 12-story boutique hotel next to its historic building. That was no surprise to one insider, who suggested the hotels merely served as smoke screens to provide cover for controversial developments. “It seems like there’s a new strategy out there,” the source said. “Add a hotel to any large-scale development. And when the community comes running and screaming, you sacrifice it.”

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