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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
When the Drunk Engineer posted about a parking-packed Oakland project winning a smart growth award, I figured it was an anomaly. And hey, it’s the West Coast – what did you expect? My rendering rule-of-thumb: The more they emphasize the green, the worse it's gonna turn out …
DCist reports that DC city councilmembers Tommy Wells and Mary Cheh proposed legislation that would allow the mayor to designate apartment buildings where residents would not be allowed to purchase residential parking permits. This innovative legislation would mark a sharp turn away from typical municipal policies that enforce parking minimums for developers. According to the DCist, building owners would be able to seek this designation for their properties only when no units are currently leased. I contacted both councilmembers to find out more information on this proposed rule — such as whether developers will be incentivized to achieve this designation or if this designation would be voided when these buildings sell — but have not yet heard back. My first thought on this legislation is that it has low potential for costs or unintended consequences and certainly marks an improvement over parking minimums. However, I also can’t imagine that this legislation would have a significant impact on the number of people parking on DC streets. Because people would self-select into buildings designated as parking-free, those who choose to rent in these buildings will probably be people who don’t have cars anyway. A more effective solution would be to raise the cost of residential parking permits to the revenue-maximizing levels, varying these rates across neighborhoods in accordance with demand.
Over at Washington City Paper‘s Housing Complex blog, Lydia DePillis takes issue with DC’s car sharing policy – and namely, the decision to auction off on-street spaces to the highest (car-sharing) bidder, “rather than allow the market’s first mover—Zipcar—[to] have them all for free.” She writes: The bigger question, it seems to me, is whether we need competition at all. The inaugural auction led to Zipcar losing 80 percent of its curbside parking spaces.
Shinjuku Station, Tokyo Train stations in Japan are a lot of things. They are busy – Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station sees two-thirds as many passengers as the entire NYC Subway. They are complex – the big ones are shared by multiple railway companies, from public to private and everything in between.
Over at Pedestrian Observations, Alon Levy has a typically well-written and researched post on the gentrification of poverty. He explores the well-researched trend that low-income Americans are increasingly moving to the suburbs as gentrification is driving up rents in inner cities. He hypothesizes that this “current” trend has really been happening for the past fifty years: Both the inner and the outer limits of poverty are pushed outward. What we saw last decade was just a tipping point in which the expansion of the gentrified core was by itself enough to offset the wealth loss coming from the expansion of the ghetto. Levy suggests that this trend is largely due to the typical pattern of poverty moving outward in a “donut” pattern, but today the center of the donut is in the suburbs. He writes: In general, a similar story played out in the first-ring suburbs of many Rust Belt cities, especially in ill-favored quarters: the places that people used to flee the city to are now cities that people flee. His post sparked two thoughts: 1) Could part of the reason that wealthy and middle income residents are moving to inner cities have to do with the demand for time? As we as a society are becoming wealthier, the value of time — the ultimate finite resource — is increasing. So as the price of free time rises, people may be moving to places where their commute times are shorter. In many cases, they are trading off quality of public schools and public safety to enjoy shorter commutes. When they move to Jacobian mixed-use neighborhoods, they could enjoy the added benefit of shorter travel time when running errands and seeking out entertainment. I think this pull toward inner cities helps explain gentrification, in addition to the push away from […]
D.C.'s Uline Arena – once a trash transfer station, now an indoor parking lot American cities have been on the rebound for about two decades now, with once moribund residential and commercial neighborhoods springing back to life.
I’m at the Living Cities 20th Anniversary today, liveblogging on the discussions that panelists are having here. This post, a little out of the vein of the topics we typically talk about at Market Urbanism, originally appeared at Next American City. Steven Johnson and Paula Ellis, of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, discussed some of the themes in his new book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, including the unique environment for innovation that cities provide. Johnson draws on the work of Jane Jacobs and Geoffrey West to demonstrate that innovation is most likely to happen in places where humans are densely clustered because entrepreneurs rely on the work of others. Both to see through the uncertainties of the future to realize profitable ideas, and to overcome the challenges of product development, entrepreneurs need to live in urban areas. Johnson began his conversation explaining that many of the ideals that emerged in the Scottish Enlightenment came out of coffeehouses, through the spontaneous conversations that many brilliant men had, and the evolution of their ideas in this urban space. Looking back to these Enlightenment ideals, we can see that Adam Smith, perhaps one of the original urbanists, explained that the division of labor is limited by the size of the market. Continued urban growth provides individuals with growing opportunities to specialize, as both the consumers and technological developments that fuel the market process are consolidated in the same place. In West’s work that Johnson referenced, he explains that, unlike firms that become increasingly bureaucratic and inefficient as they grow, cities continue to become more productive as they grow in size and density. As Johnson explained, cities have a “liquid property because they have the convergence of diverse people sharing a space. This is an incredible asset.” […]
I’m at the Living Cities 20th Anniversary today, liveblogging on the discussions that panelists are having here. This post, a little out of the vein of the topics we typically talk about at Market Urbanism, originally appeared at Next American City. Patrick McCarthey of the Annie E. Casey Foundation articulated one of the missions of the Living Cities collaboration as helping Americans in the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution. As the collaboration seeks to help cities develop, it also seeks to improve the development of human capital in these communities. To this point, Dudley Benoit of JP Morgan Chase suggested that improved efficiency in capital markets is key to achieving this goal. While microfinance has flourished in developing countries, investors have not been as eager to provide small loans to small businesses in the United States. While philanthropic organizations focused on community development have often focused on the making top-down improvements to the physical landscape of urbanities, Benoit brings up that the human capital that allows cities to facilitate economic innovation is more important than their physical components, and that economic development must be a bottom-up process. Living Cities’ President and CEO Ben Hecht points out that no one individual can solve the problems that a city poses – as Jane Jacobs and Friedrich Hayek both identified, complex human systems must draw on decentralized knowledge that cannot be centrally compiled. Access to capital for urban entrepreneurs is essential for the economic rebirth of cities that Living Cities fosters.
In July, Adam, Stephen, and I did a podcast with Jake from The Voluntary Life about the book The Voluntary City with Peter Gordon, one of the book’s editors. We had an interesting discussion, including some debate about transportation funding and free market solutions for inner cities. The podcast is now available in three parts on Jake’s blog.
The New York Times discusses a new building in Denver that embraces many of the ideals of transit-oriented development. The Spire is a mixed-use condo building that includes retail and recreation space along with residential units. Saqib Rahim explains: If they wish, the denizens of this mini-world can step outside into the arts district, or they can walk fractions of a mile to three of Denver’s light rail lines. Spire scores a 91 on WalkScore.com, earning the label “Walker’s Paradise.” To reach paradise, though, Spire residents won’t have to give up their cars. The 33 floors of residences sit atop a “parking podium” eight floors tall. It contains bikes and cars for rent, but most of the room is for 600 parking spaces. The building has 500 condos. Denver residents clearly enjoy the option to live in a walkable, transit-friendly neighborhood, as The Spire is one of the fastest-selling condo buildings in the country. It exemplifies that walkable development can be achieved in Western cities that have been primarily built around the automobile. The building’s prime location in the city’s downtown Arts District allows it to command high enough prices to pay for an underground parking podium, but Rahim questions whether transit-oriented development should include any parking at all. While Denver has adopted many Portland-style Smart Growth features including one of the nation’s largest light rail systems, many city residents still rely on and enjoy easy use of their vehicles. Scott McFadden, a Denver area developer who focuses on TOD said in the article: “You still need it to go to work and to shop and, quite frankly, to take it to the mountains, which is why you live in Denver in the first place.” The Spire is located in an area of the city that does not have parking […]
