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Alon Levy has a blog! Or: How Florida’s HSR money is being wasted in New York

Longtime commenter Alon Levy…has a blog! So far there’s only one post up – a critique of one $295 million “HSR” grant for New York, money that was originally intended for Florida – but it’s a good one, and I recommend everyone add the blog to their feed readers. He gets into the nitty-gritty details of New York City’s rail network, and comes to the following conclusion: So the $300 million the state applied to has no relevance to either Amtrak or LIRR traffic. The only use is to let Amtrak use the southern tunnel pair to Penn Station without conflicts. Since Amtrak can already use the northern tunnels without any conflict apart from the one mentioned above, it is a pure nice-to-have. It would be good for operational flexibility if the tunnels were at capacity, but they aren’t: total LIRR plus Amtrak traffic into Penn Station peaks at 37 trains between 8 and 9 am, where the capacity of the tunnels is about 50 – and as with Hunterspoint traffic, Penn Station LIRR traffic will go down once East Side Access opens. I always thought that Obama’s high-speed rail strategy was absurd and any money spent on HSR-only infrastructure would be wasted, so I was at least marginally pleased when Rick Scott gave up Florida’s money and it was sent to the Northeast Corridor. But after reading this, and especially Alon’s suggestion earlier in the post that the money would be better spent on a similar project in Brooklyn that would benefit the MTA’s 3 and 5 trains (see comments), I’m beginning to wonder if spending the money on inter- and not intracity rail is the bigger problem. While regular intercity service might be more practical than HSR service (which, somehow, the Obama administration still claims is the goal), […]

Laneway housing in Vancouver and beyond

Vancouver holds a special place in most urbanists’ heart – a sort of supercharged version of Portland, with its stunning skyline and bold embrace of density and transit. In addition to the glassy forest of skyscrapers, it also passed a law enabling laneway housing under former mayor Sam Sullivan’s EcoDensity initiative. Sullivan was pretty controversial, but he never even came up for a second vote after Peter Ladner launched a party coup and then went on to lose the election anyway. As a result, it doesn’t look like the laneway housing rules have been revised, which is a shame, since as Vancouver architect Graham Barron (who has an excellent blog on development in Vancouver) writes, there are some problems: The objective of the infill design guideline is to encourage the retention of existing buildings, but the guideline’s own side yard setback makes this nearly impossible. In practice, this means that the vast majority of developers of these lots demolish the existing building and construct a new duplex. (Many of these new duplexes look like character buildings, but in fact are built slab-on-grade, i.e. without basements, and without attics, much like the cheap Vancouver Specials that preceded them). This is the first irony. The second irony is that many of the two-family zones in the City are meant to be heritage-friendly zones, which promote the preservation of character and heritage houses. Since it is largely impossible to build infill, and very costly to renovate or expand an older building, most developers will demolish the existing house, and then design the new duplex in a faux heritage style in order to get a density bonus that allows for greater floorspace. Result: character is being replaced with faux character. The final irony is that these new duplexes are then required to have a […]

Garden apartments and letting go, then and now

In doing research for a post the other day, I stumbled upon this excerpt from a book called A History of Housing in New York City by Richard Plunz that I think has a useful lesson about development and regulation: The garden apartment would not have emerged unless it was profitable. In this aspect the garden apartment represented a major change in developers’ perceptions of profitability in relation to the issue of coverage for moderate-income housing. Prior to the 1920s, it was always assumed that of reduction of coverage [sic] would increase costs and reduce profits. The arguments for reduced coverage remained exclusively within the realm of social good, or of marketing, in the belief that apartments associated with better conditions for light and air could be expected to demand higher rents. This common wisdom changed, especially with the new accessibility to cheap outer borough land. It became apparent that reduced coverage on low-cost land might reduce costs enough to increase profits, in spite of the lower number of apartments. Thus, the financial imperative in New York City for moderate-income housing evolved from the 25-by-100 food lot mandated by the Tenement House Act of 1879 to the 100-by-100-foot lot of the Tenement House Act of 1901, to the perimeter block of the 1920s. A key these larger-scale developers was the use of a unified open space, with simplified construction detailing and reduced investment costs per room while raising rental rates. Higher tenement densities with less open space were less desirable because they required more complex and expensive spatial organization in order to provide adequate light and ventilation. The new economic formulas applied especially to housing for the arriving middle class, whose space standards were far less stringent than for tenement design. In the developing outer areas, open land and reduced values permitted reduced site coverages. The “garden apartment” is essentially […]

The irony of preserving that which was intended to destroy

From the front lines of the New York City preservation wars, one landlord is trying to convince the Landmarks Preservation Commission to allow him to demolish two of his landmarked buildings on the Upper East Side – something the commission has only approved 11 times for the 27,000 landmarks it oversees. The only circumstance in which the commission allows buildings to be torn down is if they are losing money, and the landlord claims to be losing $1 million a year on the buildings, whose apartments have an average rent controlled/stabilized price of $600/mo. He’s offering to move all the current tenants into other units (I assume at the same price), and also redo the interiors of 13 other buildings, but the tenants are putting up a fight. Architecturally the buildings are completely unremarkable, and in fact the façades were ruined by the landlord right before the buildings were landmarked in a futile attempt to stop it – an unfortunate but legal and unavoidable side effect of the current preservation process. The reason that the buildings are landmarked, though, is actually quite interesting and ironic: Those buildings along York Avenue in the East 60s, part of a complex of 15 walk-ups built between 1898 and 1915, were designated landmarks in 2006 because they were examples of a Progressive Era effort to improve tenement design for low-wage earners. The tan brick buildings offered snug apartments that overlooked courtyards and let in more air and light than a typical tenement’s railroad flat. The irony here is that the buildings were models for buildings that were supposed to be built in place of the “tenements” in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side – which back then were dark and dingy, but nowadays have had their interiors refurbished and are far more desirable than […]

Randal O’Toole’s responds on “per passenger miles”

I’ve had my disagreements with Randal O’Toole, a libertarian defender of suburban sprawl, but to his credit, he’s done the most convincing accounting of subsidies (well, accounting costs, at least) that I’ve seen yet. And though he normally concentrates on federal costs, his write-up of an American Bus Association report includes this paragraph about mass transit: What about state and local subsidies? A first approximation of such subsidies can be found by subtracting expenses from revenues in National Transportation Statistics. The results suggest that total subsidies to air travel are tiny, subsidies to highways are large (but tiny per passenger mile), and subsidies to transit are in between (but much larger per passenger mile). National Transportation Statistics doesn’t have state and local subsidies to Amtrak or intercity buses, but I suspect the former are much larger than the latter. All of this is probably true, but I’ve criticized the use of “per passenger miles” in the past (as had Michael Lewyn, unbeknownst to me at the time) on the basis that trips in areas served by mass transit can be shorter than trips made with in the suburbs and the exurbs with a car. I emailed Randal O’Toole and asked him what he thought of this argument, and as always, he was kind enough to send me his response: You make a valid point. But it is most valid in regions where transit is concentrated in dense areas and jobs are concentrated in those dense areas. In post-automobile regions, such as San Jose, Phoenix, and Houston, neither of those conditions apply. The same is true in pre-auto regions that have undergone massive decentralization, such as Cleveland and St. Louis. Even in Chicago and San Francisco, jobs have decentralized to the point where dense downtowns hold only a small share of the […]

Links: “At least they’re being honest” edition

1. NY Governor Cuomo promises the “most aggressive” strengthening of the state’s (read: NYC’s) rent laws. 2. Bronx <3 parking: “This community wants a moratorium on any more building until we get a parking lot.” “We don’t want any bigger buildings and we want parking space for everyone.” 3. Do people realize that “I don’t mind modernist architecture” and “All new buildings must have decorative cornices and intricate brickwork” are fundamentally incompatible statements? 4. Witold Rybczynski on density. Nothing you haven’t already heard a million times before, but, Witold Rybczynski! 5. DC’s zoning code finally allows building owners to enclose the once-encouraged outdoor arcades.

Links

1. The fact that we even have to have a debate over whether residential development should be allowed in Midtown, where new residents will have perhaps a smaller impact on transportation infrastucture than anywhere else in the country (they can either walk to work or do a reverse train commute), is pretty pathetic. 2. The plan for San Jose’s Diridion Station is is so loaded down with boondoggles and bad ideas that it’s hard to keep track of them all. As if a stadium and HSR station weren’t bad enough it’s also getting a neo-Euclidean zoning plan (business and R&D park to the north, entertainment, retail, and office space by the station, and residential and retail to the south), “adequate parking,” and what looks to me like probably too much parkland. One panelist from the Greenbelt Alliance said it was necessary for the plan to include “parks, trails and public plazas.” But given that it looks like we’re only really talking about an area that’s a dozen or two blocks in size, is all that really necessary? 3. Second Avenue Subway on Bloomberg’s transit failures. Looks like my bike lane rabble-rousing is spreading… 4. More union shenanigans: Unsuck DC Metro uncovers with a FOIA request $2.4 million paid out in the last five years “in grievance back pay for work never done.” Some of it is paid out in petty seniority squabbles, some in more reprehensible cases, including to people who have literally killed, assaulted, and stolen on the job. Also, if you’re interested in how exactly unions suck the lifeblood out of American mass transit, Unsuck’s three–part series on the DC Metro’s escalator problems is an excellent case study. 5. Highway interchange transit-oriented development. Not a joke. Courtesy of the Overhead Wire.

“I’ve Walked Away From Projects Because of Parking Minimums”

Streetsblog NYC has been doing an excellent job of hounding the city on its lack of action on parking reforms, but this article with developer Alan Bell talking about his experience with parking minimums in the city is, I think, the best so far. Here’s an excerpt: Hudson might have built more housing were it not for parking minimums, however. Bell said in an interview that he’s walked away from a number of projects because he couldn’t make the required parking fit or evade the parking minimums by subdividing the development into small pieces. “One comes to mind on Grand Street in East Williamsburg. You couldn’t get out with the waiver because you’re building too many units.” Without the ability to claim an exemption from parking minimums, the economics of the development didn’t add up. “If you have a modest size building, it’s really prohibitive,” said Bell. In addition to the direct costs of building structured parking, which Bell said can range from $25,000 to $50,000 per space, making room for the parking can also reduce revenues. “If you’re up against other buildings on both sides, you’re going to have to reduce your perimeter retail frontage because you need an entrance for a garage.” Other times, said Bell, he’s able to manipulate the structure of the development to ensure that he can avoid parking minimums. In East New York, he divided one project into four different five to six story buildings. “We just played around with the unit mixes so that we could get each of them under the waiver.” Had he not been trying to avoid the parking regulations, said Bell, “theoretically, we could have built more units.” (In practice, a different set of city regulations would have prevented that at this particular site, even without the parking requirements.)

Links

1. Shocker: The federal government is too incompetent to even sell its own buildings. Eh, oh well – it’s not like it holds most of that property in the city with the most expensive office space in America or anything. 2. Two State Senators from Queens are calling plans to toll the East River Bridges in exchange for relieving Long Island and Hudson Valley counties of the need to pay the MTA pay roll tax “nothing more than another tax on Middle Class families and small businesses.” First of all, it’s not a tax, it’s a user fee, but secondly, how many Middle Class (in caps, for christsake!) families are we supposed to believe really have to drive into Manhattan? 3. The FHA is loaning money to people with “less than stellar credit” to buy condos in New York City with only a 3.5% downpayment. In December I blogged an article claiming the federal government is shifting its subprime portfolio back to the FHA from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose implosion has cost taxpayers $150 billion. 4. Green roofs: Is there anything they can’t do? This report lists a whole slew of financial benefits, but if they’re such a great deal, why do developers need “significant public policy support” to install them? All the talk of creating jobs without even attempting to make a cost/benefit analysis is also disconcerting, but is typical of boosters of government programs. And are we really to believe that green roofs “reduce crime”? And if they really “improve property values for nearby buildings by 11 percent,” then why aren’t landlords falling over themselves offering to pay neighbors to install green roofs on their buildings? Seems like for such a supposedly huge benefit and relatively small number of beneficiaries, the collective action problem could be […]

Yet another non-bike-related NYC transit reform bites the dust

Well that was quick: Mr. Bloomberg made the so-called “five-borough taxi plan” a centerpiece of his State of the City address in January. The proposal called for creating a new class of livery cabs, with meters and, perhaps, a single color, that would be allowed to pick up passengers on the street outside of Manhattan who hadn’t arranged a ride ahead of time. Currently, such pickups are illegal but widespread. Only yellow taxis—whose numbers are limited to the 13,237 medallions in circulation—can pick up passengers who hail them. But now talks between the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the taxi industry are focusing on a series of plans that would use yellow cabs—not livery cars—to expand taxi service outside of Manhattan. “I believe we are completely off the mayor’s original plan,” said one person familiar with the talks. “I would go as far as calling it dead.” As it stands now, the vast, vast majority of yellow cab pick-ups are in Manhattan or at airports, and it’s pretty much impossible to get a cab in Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx to take you anywhere but Manhattan. The silver lining is that the number of medallions might be increased, but it’s not clear by how much. I’d also like to point out that this is yet another transit failure for the Bloomberg administration, which only seems to be willing to go to the mat for bike lanes in wealthy, white neighborhoods. (To say nothing of transit advocates – I could be wrong, but I don’t think Streetsblog ever found time amidst its daily barrage of bike agitprop to come out in favor of outer borough taxi deregulation.) The private van plan was poorly thought-out and from what I can tell has been forgotten, the physically separated 34th St. Transitway was defeated, […]

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