Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Category Uncategorized

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, […]

Annotated simplified DC land use map

Our friends at BeyondDC have made a nifty little simplified map of the DC zoning code (yellow is residential, red is commercial, gray is park/institutional/industrial) out of GIS data provided by the local government. It’s nice and all, but when you reduce such a beautifully complex and meticulous plan to a mere three colors, you lose all the local flavor that makes DC unique. So, I’ve taken the liberty of mining the GIS data and annotating the map a bit, in an attempt to better present the true spirit of The Zoning Code: …I was tempted to put the “Fine. But only till the black people leave” in a big fat watermark over the entire city, but alas, I made it with Pixlr. DC residents, feel free to leave additional annotations in the comments.

Links

1. NYT reports on dense suburban projects being scaled back across Long Island not because of financing constraints or the recession, but because local governments are refusing to accept the density. At the end it cites AvalonBay as saying that after the its rebuke on the Island, it will reconsider “whether we would stay on Long Island and be an investor.” AvalonBay is a developer that specifically targets “high barrier-to-entry markets,” so the fact that it’s considering pulling out of the market entirely is a bad sign for Long Island’s long-term growth prospects. 2. Cap’n Transit on the private bus battle brewing in New York City that we should all be paying more attention to. Coincidentally, earlier today I did a search for new about dollar vans, and the only coverage I found was about car crashes – anyone know of any new developments that have flew under the radar of the mainstream media? Separated by language and legality, private buses might be one of New York City’s most undercovered industries. 3. An incredible list of demands from DC Walmart foes. I have no particular love for Walmart – it’s clear that their business model relies heavily on government intervention in favor of roads and sprawl – but any self-styled “community” group that’s demanding free buses every 10 minutes to the Metro, transit benefits for workers, and “free or low-priced parking spaces” is not to be taken seriously. I also like how they want Walmart not to screen workers’ backgrounds at all but also want “no less than two off-duty D.C. police officers on its premises at all times.” The demand for direct cash bribes at the end is also pretty classy. 4. SFpark, the San Francisco market-based on-street parking pricing scheme, has launched. Apparently the price can get up […]

Links

1. NYT A-1 headline! Number of new single-family homes sold in February was at its lowest point since data was first collected in 1963, but multi-unit sales are up. 2. Lydia DePillis with an example of some abhorrent NIMBYism from DC. 3. Anti-laneway housing propaganda from Vancouver. It looks like some are bucking the requirement that you have one parking spot per lot and are “putting in large windows and heated flooring in the garage of their laneway homes.” 4. A Toronto developer on “podiumism,” or skyscraper form that zoning rules force architects to build. New York City’s first zoning code in 1916 had setbacks that had a similar effect, though it formed more of a ziggurat – a much bulkier shape than is allowed today. 5. The Overhead Wire and The Transport Politic criticize new surburban-oriented low-ridership American commuter rail lines.

Links

1. PlaNYC 2.0 may try to tackle off-street minimum parking requirements for new development, though Transportation Alternatives and Tri-State Transportation Campaign are skeptical. 2. The TLC has been cracking down on illegal livery cab street hails as the Bloomberg administration considers allowing the black cars to pick people up off the street in the outer boroughs (and maybe Manhattan above 96th St.). Other than when Bloomberg first proposed it in his 10th State of the City, though, I haven’t seen any progress on that initiative. 3. The LPC is considering a proposal for a new East Village historic district “containing nearly 300 buildings,” and according to my quick Google Map’ing, a few completely non-historic post-war buildings and a gigantic parking lot. 4. More on the California redevelopment agencies that Jerry Brown is trying to kill. 5. The blog ArlingtonGOP chides county Democrats’ “failure to require adequate parking at new development projects,” which I guess means they are not in favor of free markets in off-street parking. I’ve emailed the Arlington GOP for clarification and further comment and will post it if I receive it.

Nicole Gelinas responds to Alon Levy on MTA pay

Last week commenter Alon Levy criticized the Manhattan Institute’s position on transit unions, and Nicole Gelinas in particular, as being too focused on overall pay levels while neglecting overstaffing. Nicole wrote to me soon after to defend her record on the transit issue, and it does indeed look like she’s addressed the issues that Alon talks about: Alon Levy takes my comments out of context. I have talked about pay cuts in regards to token-booth clerks – retail-level workers who earn more than $54,000 a year (plus benefits) to staff stations. The MTA, because it has no flexibility to cut the pay of these workers, has simply dispensed of the workers wholesale, leaving many station entranced unmanned. There is a disconnect here: the public prefers to see a person in the station; the MTA loses revenue when no one is there to monitor fare-beating (also, at some stations, including downtown, the NYPD must deploy people to stations to deter this fare-beating, at a much higher cost); and there are many people with retail skills looking for part-time jobs who would happily do the job at a market wage at less than $54,000 a year. The MTA should have the flexibility to hire part-time workers at lower wages and benefits to staff empty stations. She then points to this article she wrote back in 2009, where she takes aim at union work rules – which, as she pointed out in the email, is an indirect way of talking about staffing: Track workers are one obvious opportunity for smart cost-cutting. The MTA employs 1,865 of them on the city’s subways. According to seethroughny.net, a project of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, each gets paid an average of nearly $59,000 (not including benefits or health care), for a total of $109 […]

Long-form link list

1. Another empirical paper claiming that anti-density zoning increases racial segregation: Previous research on segregation stresses things like urban form and racial preferences as primary causes. The author finds that an institutional force is more important: local land regulation. Using two datasets of land regulations for the largest U.S. metropolitan areas, the results indicate that anti-density regulations are responsible for large portions of the levels and changes in segregation from 1990 to 2000. A hypothetical switch in zoning regimes from the most exclusionary to the most liberal would reduce the equilibrium gap between the most and least segregated Metropolitan Statistical Areas by at least 35% for the ordinary least squares estimates. 2. Wendell Cox, in a discussion about the relatively dispersed downtowns of the biggest mainland Chinese cities, notes that development along Beijing’s ring roads “resemble[s] more the post-World War II corridor form of Central Avenue in Phoenix than Manhattan, Seattle or Pittsburgh.” Interesting that the urban system that Cox makes a living defending is so popular in communist mainland cities, whereas the market-oriented Chinese cities of Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong follow the more traditional dense downtown design. 3. The NYT reports that the mayor’s office runs a non-profit that organizes farmers markets in rich neighborhoods that already have good food availability, while throwing up barriers and red tape that prevent private groups from starting their own in poor neighborhoods. 4. One company wants to start building prefab skyscrapers, which they claim are quicker and cheaper than traditional construction, although apparently current building codes don’t allow them to build such structures more than six stories tall. In New York City, Forest City Ratner wants to build “the world’s tallest prefabricated steel structure, a 34-story tower that would fulfill his obligation to start building affordable housing at the site,” though the building […]

How Important Are Skyscrapers, Really?

Mary Newsom, in a review of Ed Glaeser’s new book Triumph of The City, makes some arguments about skyscrapers that I’ve never heard before: In his eyes, skyscrapers are the height of green living. But as architect Michael Mehaffy and others have pointed out, tall buildings can be less energy-efficient than shorter ones. In cities lacking the intense development pressure of a New York or Hong Kong – i.e., most other U.S. cities – one skyscraper can suck up a disproportionate chunk of the existing market, leading to the odd sight of tall towers surrounded by surface parking lots – not your greenest landscape. Regarding the energy efficiency of skyscrapers, she doesn’t link to any one claim in particular so I’m not sure what exactly Michael Mehaffy’s argument is, but I suspect that it doesn’t account for transportation energy use. Tall buildings (4+ stories), when built in large numbers, transfer a lot of energy spent on transit from horizontal modes (cars, rail, your feet, buses) to the one relatively energy efficient vertical mode: the elevator. As for skyscrapers surrounded by a sea of parking, when does this actually happen? I can think of two instances: public housing projects, and places with high minimum parking requirements. Neither of these are really the fault of skyscrapers. Mary also makes some similar, more reasonable, arguments against Glaeser’s skyscraper obsession – as one blogger who I can’t remember or find right now pointed out a while ago [edit: It was Charlie at Old Urbanist], skyscrapers make up a pretty small portion of NYC’s total number of units. But then again, skyscrapers are also the most regulated-against form, so I’m not sure how much we can learn from revealed preferences. I don’t have any one fact in particular to back this up, but I suspect […]

From the comments: Public transit’s problem is overstaffing, not wages

Alon Levy writes in the comments in response to an item in yesterday’s links about a Republican legislator in Texas looking to cut bus drivers’ salaries: Repeating my comment on the Austin Contrarian, and similar comments I’ve made on Second Avenue Sagas: the problem is more staffing than salaries. At New York City Transit, salaries are the same as at Toei – a little more than $100,000 in total compensation per employee. (No data for Tokyo Metro, alas.) The difference is that NYCT has 47,000 employees and Toei 6,400, a factor-of-7 difference, even though NYCT only carries twice as many passengers, and provides only four times as many train revenue-hours and stations. A train driver on Toei spends 700 hours a year driving a revenue train, versus about 450 in New York. And Toei isn’t even the most efficient agency: Tokyo Metro is three times as big as Toei but has only 8,400 employees. Republican outfits advocating pay cuts likely do not know anything about staffing levels. I’ve never seen the Manhattan Institute, which is arguing for union-busting and pay cuts in New York, say a single thing about staffing levels. On the contrary, Nicole Gelinas gleefully points out that if wages were lower, staffing levels could be maintained or increased – in other words, making New York more like a third-world city and less like a first-world city. It’s not a serious efficiency measure – it’s ideological opposition to unions, justified post hoc on financial grounds. I would suppose that this would be slightly less relevant to bus service – low levels of productivity there could be the inevitable result of sprawling land use patterns and being forced to run lots of low ridership routes. That could also apply to rail service to some extent, but the comparatively low […]

Trending now

gentrification
Only 2 Ways to Fight Gentrification (you’re not going to like one of them)
The problem with “public” transportation
The Great American Streetcar Myth
O’Toole Under More Fire