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Links

1. An excellent Wikipedia article about the old DC streetcars. I wish there were more economics, and I’d also like to know about the state-mandated consolidation that they talk about in the mid-1890s. Also note that streetcar use reached its peak in the mid 1910s – when people talk about interstate highways and the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy, they’re starting the story decades too late. 2. A dissenting (heh) view of Ed Glaeser’s book. My criticism of Glaeser would be that sometimes he starts speaking very generally and starts sounding a little whacky (which I think is what the reviewer here is picking up on). Perhaps his work wouldn’t be so popular if not for this tendency to paint in broad strokes, but I would like to see more specific analysis of land use laws and how Glaeser would like to change them. I haven’t read the book, though – does it get more nuanced than the excerpt in the Atlantic? 3. Human Transit publishes a reader comment and gives some great analysis of transit agency’s staffing and frequency. Apparently labor is the biggest constraint on frequency outside of peak hours, but many systems have labor and safety regulations that force transit agencies to overstaff trains. The efforts of unions to keep the unnecessary second man on transit vehicles are almost a century old, despite massive advances in transportation technology that have long since obviated the need. 4. This is cool. 5. DC’s gas stations are not long for this world as the condo onslaught continues. Urban gas stations rarely seem to me to be efficient uses of space (the gas station on Houston Street in Manhattan is the prime example) – does anybody know how rigid the zoning guidelines they fall under generally are? Are they zoned only for […]

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1. China’s high-speed rail scandal. So much for Obama’s State of the Union shout-out. 2. Boston, Philadelphia, and DC are all moving towards parking reform – both of minimum off-street requirements (unfortunately to be replaced with maximums in most cases) and of underpriced curb parking – but NYC’s the laggard. Like I noted a few weeks ago, this could be sabotaging its recent upzonings. 3. One Democratic Assemblyman wants to hamstring the NYC subway with yet another ridiculously overbearing safety rule – literally forcing trains to come to a complete halt right before entering a station – adding significant time to existing commutes. 4. NYC’s FRESH initiative gives money to a politically-connected supermarket for a parking lot. Wait, isn’t car-owning food desert victim an oxymoron? 5. Downtown San Jose’s Diridon station – the most transit-accessible place in San Jose – is getting $10 billion worth of new rail. Zoning consultants were paid for a year, and came up with the following recommendation: “no proposed changes to current code.” Got that? $10 billion in rail investment in one of the most progressive places in America and there will be no new TOD allowed.

Ed Glaeser on New York City, development as preservation, and more

Ed Glaeser has a sprawling feature story in The Atlantic about skyscrapers that’s full of urbanist history and themes that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a few days now. It’s a great article, with a lot of New York history in it, but I wanted to highlight a few bits. The part I liked most was where Glaeser talks about what I’ve called development as preservation and others have called adaptive reuse – the idea that making use of existing developed land is the best way to preserve historic buildings, although Glaeser also points out that it’s useful for preserving open land like parks, too: In 2006, the developer Aby Rosen proposed putting a glass tower of more than 20 stories atop the old Sotheby Parke-Bernet building at 980 Madison Avenue, in the Upper East Side Historic District. Rosen and his Pritzker Prize–winning architect, Lord Norman Foster, wanted to erect the tower above the original building, much as the MetLife Building (formerly the Pan Am Building) rises above Grand Central Terminal. The building was not itself landmarked, but well-connected neighbors didn’t like the idea of more height, and they complained to the commission. Tom Wolfe, who has written brilliantly about the caprices of both New York City and the real-estate industry, wrote a 3,500-word op-ed in The New York Times warning the landmarks commission against approving the project. Wolfe & Company won. In response to his critics in the 980 Madison Avenue case, of whom I was one, Wolfe was quoted in The Village Voice as saying: To take [Glaeser’s] theory to its logical conclusion would be to develop Central Park … When you consider the thousands and thousands of people who could be housed in Central Park if they would only allow them to build it up, boy, the problem is […]

Jamaica, Queens upzoning was great, but don’t forget the parking minimums

In Next American City, Aaron Barker discusses the failure of NYC’s massive rezoning in the highly transit-dependent black and immigrant neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens: One of the centerpieces of [NYC’s] initiative to house an expected 1 million new arrivals in the coming decades was the Jamaica Plan. Covering 365 square blocks surrounding a major rail hub in Queens, it was the largest rezone in the city’s history, projected to bring 9,600 jobs and 3 million square feet of new commercial space to the area. Even though it’s been over three years since the resolution passed, almost none of the expected 5,100 units of new residential construction have materialized. In fact, the only real activity has been at MODA, a 350 unit, mixed-income rental complex that opened this summer. He then poses the question: “Can redevelopment on a meaningful scale really only occur in already sought-after areas?” While it’s true that Jamaica did undergo a tremendous upzoning, there was one element missing: Minimum parking requirement reform. From what I can tell from NYC’s zoning maps and code (which are notoriously difficult to understand), there was barely any let-up at all in the Special Downtown Jamaica District (zoning district “DJ”), despite the NY Metro Chapter of the American Planning Association asking the city planners to eliminate the minimums (.pdf). Streetsblog actually wrote about this tendency to upzone without lifting parking minimums a year ago. Now, I don’t have any specific knowledge of Jamaica – I’ve only actually been to Queens once. But based on this study that we featured a few weeks ago, developers in NYC in general (and actually the study focuses on sites in Queens) only build as much parking as the zoning code mandates, implying that it is a binding constraint on development. So before we declare that zoning […]

A bleg about vending in stations

Something that’s always bothered me about mass train stations in America is that very few take advantage of the commercial advantage in having access to huge numbers of semi-captive customers with nothing to do for a few minutes. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the key reasons that Japanese rail is profitable is that the mass transit companies internalize the positive real estate externalities by owning land in the vicinity. Since transit agencies in America are publicly owned and very inefficient as a result, getting them directly involved in real estate is probably not the best idea. But they should still try at least to maximize the real estate they already have – on their station platforms, both above ground and beneath. Washington, DC’s Metrorail system is the perfect example of a lost revenue opportunity. Because the stations were built relatively recently and with enormous government largesse, they are quite large compared to normal subway stations. Especially in crowded transfer stations like Metro Center and Gallery Place, there’s a ton of room for vendors to set up booths and sell things like coffee, food, and magazines. And in fact DC desperately needs an underground pedestrian pathway between the aforementioned stations to ease extreme crowding on the Red Line, which could be at least partially funded by selling off space in the new tunnel. (Ditto with one linking Farragut North and Farragut West.) DC currently doesn’t allow eating or drinking in its stations, but this would be a silly thing to let get in the way of funding for a system that desperately needs it. The metros in Paris and Bucharest both allow food to be sold underground, and neither seemed any more or less dirty than the DC Metro. Outside of DC, a lot of the regional rail stations in […]

Virginia land use law: Marc Scribner from CEI responds

After I put up the post this weekend about a Virginia Tea Party group’s opposition to a state law forcing counties to upzone enough land for medium-density development, I sent an email to Marc Scribner at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian group, asking his opinion on the law. He was kind enough to give us his thoughts, and here they are: While I would like to see a lot more upzoning and would support state-wide legislation that would limit local exclusionary zoning (or ideally prohibit it!), subsection (1)(B) provision (6) seems problematic. Basically, legislatures should restrict exclusion, rather than force inclusion by establishing UDAs and specifying design and form aspects, if they are to pursue land-use liberalization at the state level. Also, the lack of a provision limiting property condemnations within UDAs could spur more eminent domain abuse, which has been a nasty side effect of poorly structured upzoning that results in things such as access to transit and new sanitation capacity being prioritized over property rights. David Alpert might not agree, but I consider the government robbing private property owners of their land to be a far greater offense than prohibiting multi-unit housing or mixed-use development, as much as I dislike these regulatory takings. (Although I believe Virginia has an interesting requirement that jurors in an eminent domain case be property owners.) The reason why one might see more ED abuse within upzoned areas is that going from less intense development to more intense generally calls for more public infrastructure investment (or worse, grandiose PPP projects). This is particularly true in more residential areas, as commercial and industrial zones typically have near-adequate or overbuilt sanitation facilities, etc., that can accommodate more growth. Not saying that dev is bad, but any time comprehensive redevelopment becomes more likely, people need […]

Who believes that smart growth caused the recession?

So, I have a question. This might sound like I’m trying to be snarky, but I’m actually genuinely in search of an answer: Is there any economist out there other than Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin who actually believes this? This all should give some pause to the relentless hoopla about the country’s supposed “urban renaissance.” The roots of the current economic crisis lie deep in urban economies, where employment growth that has lagged even in good times.  During the last economic expansion, urban job growth was roughly one-sixth that of suburbs and one-third that of smaller communities. I believe the smart growth-caused-the-subprime-mortgage theory originated with Wendell Cox, and while Joel Kotkin’s statement is rather vague and leaves a lot of wiggle room, it sure sounds like he’s buying into it, too. Any others to add to the list?

Bloomberg pokes (again) at hornet’s nest of entitled drivers

The New York Daily News broke the story yesterday that New York lawmakers are once again trying to push congestion pricing through the state legislature, a task at which Mayor Michael Bloomberg failed in 2008 after meeting fierce resistance from outer borough and suburban drivers. Learning from his previous failed bid to charge drivers $8/day to enter Manhattan below 60th Street, the plan is being rebranded as “traffic pricing” and will be linked to payroll tax relief for those outside the five boroughs in an attempt to win the support of suburban legislators who torpedoed the 2008 proposal. Despite being the most transit-saturated city in America, New York City drivers have had free reign of its surface streets since the days when they were maintained by private streetcar companies. Unlike highway users and transit riders, drivers have never been asked to pay a penny in direct fees for the local roads they use. This has created generations of Americans who feel entitled to freeride on the backs of their poorer, car-less fellow citizens, which has made congestion pricing one of Bloomberg’s rare failures during his decade-long tenure as mayor. New York State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R-Nassau County) calls it “just another tax,” but it differs from a general tax in one critical way: It is levied solely on those who drive in Manhattan, meaning that it does not redistribute wealth from those who don’t use the roads to those who do. And while the accounting costs for modes of transportation are subsidized to some extent, roads have enormous opportunity costs—far higher than transit, which uses relatively marginal underground land and has a minuscule footprint relative to paved roads. Land is extremely expensive in New York City, so these opportunity costs are larger than they might be out in […]

Links

1. Laneway housing, Vancouver vs. Toronto. 2. New York state lawmakers want to ban using a phone or listening to headphones while crossing streets. Unfortunately for us pedestrians, there are very few limited access, grade-separated walkways, so in essence this would criminalize listening to an iPod while walking. 3. An interesting article about transportation in Singapore, with an emphasis on congestion pricing and other ways of recouping the enormous opportunity costs of urban roads. 4. I’ve been aware of this for a while, but it still shocks me every time (emphasis mine): We know New Yorkers are being injured and killed just about every day. (Like the 35-year-old woman who was run over by a dump truck on the Upper East Side Monday while legally crossing the street. Did you hear about that one? The dump truck driver stayed at the scene and wasn’t drunk, so it was basically a freebie for him — a clean, legal kill as far as the NYPD is concerned. Can you imagine if she were your wife or sister or colleague? Anyway… back to those damned bikes, right?…) 5. Yet another example of why I don’t think the Texas Transportation Institute’s congestion metrics are useful. 6. As if we needed any more proof: Big cities are inherently green.

Links

1. Systemic Failure praises Gov. (again) Jerry Brown’s efforts to do away with California’s redevelopment agencies and “enterprise zones” (there’s a euphemism if I’ve ever heard one), which the author claims promote autocentric development with public funds. He then cites a few examples of redevelopment agencies pushing such plans in San Jose. If he can come up with that many in one city, I can’t even imagine how much damage they’ve done throughout the whole state. So far I’m liking Jerry Brown’s second act. 2. A very interesting Wikipedia article about a controversial Brooklyn-based developer. 3. One Staten Island councilman wants to use the dreaded environmental review against bike lanes. 4. An article about the Toronto condo boom. I’d like to know more about this: But perhaps the biggest demographic that will continue to drive sales this year is the investor market, both local and international. Mr. Lamb says there are few developers building rental towers any longer, in part due to the city’s rent control laws, so investors hold the key to rental accommodation. He says it’s not uncommon for 40% of a building to be owned by investors, with most rentals situated below the fifteenth floor because they are less expensive than those with a brighter view. Mr. Myers estimates 50% to 60% of downtown condo units are owned by investors who rent them out.

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