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Is Diversity “Segregation”?

Headlines last month proclaimed that “Cities Have Grown More Diverse, And More Segregated, Since the 90s.” The headlines originate in the key findings of a new, detailed study from the Othering and Belonging Institute (OBI) at UC Berkeley. The study leans heavily on a relatively new metric – the Divergence Index – which has impressed many researchers (myself included) with its versatility. But now that we have seen the Divergence Index in action, its versatility clearly comes at a cost: the Divergence Index conflates what we would intuitively call diversity with “segregation.” As a result, more-diverse metro areas are usually ranked as more segregated by the Divergence Index. And as America became far more diverse over the past 30 years, it is logical that the Divergence Index would rise in most metro areas. Why is it so hard to measure segregation? Racial segregation is easy to see. You walk down the street and almost everybody in one neighborhood looks different than you and almost everybody in another neighborhood looks the same as you. The human eye and ear can also distinguish categories that are meaningful in some contexts but not others. Everybody but me in the café where I watched European soccer last week appeared to be not only Black but specifically Ethiopian. Was that café integrated or segregated? I certainly felt welcome as I bantered at the bar with an Ethiopian-American tennis instructor. But statistically, the café was far more Black and vastly more Ethiopian than the D.C. region as a whole. In this context, “segregation” refers to places where one group is overrepresented – like the café – not to the legal regime that imposed second-class citizenship and pervaded every aspect of life for black Americans. Given the word’s loaded history, it would have been wiser for social […]

The Duplex: Gateway Drug to Urban Density

duplex

After over a century, Berkeley, California may be about to legalize missing middle housing – and it’s not alone. Bids to re-legalize gradual densification in the form of duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes, and the like have begun to pick up steam over the last several years. In 2019, Oregon legalized these housing types statewide while Minneapolis did the same at the city level. In 2020, Virginia and Maryland both tried to pass similar legislation, though they ultimately failed. This year, though, Montana and California may pick up the torch with their own state bills (even while the cities of Sacramento and South San Francisco consider liberalizing unilaterally alongside Berkeley). Allowing gradual densification is an absolutely necessary step towards general affordability. Supply, demand, and price form an iron triangle–the more responsive we can make supply to demand, the less price will spike to make up the difference.* What I really want to focus on here, though, is less about policy and more about political economy. I believe allowing medium-intensity residential development could make additional reforms easier to achieve and change views around development going into the future. We Love What We Know More often than not, I think a generalized status quo bias explains a lot of NIMBYism. Homeowners are most comfortable with their neighborhoods as they are now and are accustomed to the idea that they have the right to veto any substantial changes. Legalizing forms of incrementally more intense development could re-anchor homeowners on gradual change and development as the norm. The first part of the story is about generational turnover. If the individuals buying homes today–and the cohorts that follow–are exposed to gradually densifying neighborhoods in their day-to-day, they’ll anchor on that as what’s normal and therefore acceptable. Moreover, if we’re debating whether to rezone an area for mid-rise […]

Latest rent research

A recent paper by UCLA researchers discusses 2019-20 literature on the relationship between new construction and rents. The article discusses five papers; four of them found that new housing consistently lowers rents in nearby buildings. For example, Kate Pennington wrote a paper on the relationship between new construction and housing costs in San Francisco.  What is unique about this paper is that while other papers focus on a broad sample of new construction, Pennington focuses on one subset of the market: “new construction caused by serious building fires.” Why?  Because most new construction is in high-demand areas.  Any study that focuses on such construction will be more likely to conclude that the new construction is related to high rents, when in fact the real cause of increased rents is increased demand for certain neighborhoods. Pennington found that rents actually decreased within 500 meters of new buildings- by 2.3 percent, compared to similar blocks without new buildings.   Pennington also found 17.1 percent less displacement (which she defines as moves to poorer zipcodes) near the new buildings, and found that landlords were less likely to evict rent-controlled tenants. One paper was a partial exception to the pro-supply trend of recent scholarship: a paper by Anthony Damiano and Chris Frenier found that new buildings in Minneapolis lowered rents for most nearby buildings, but increased rents for the cheapest buildings. But the UCLA researches point out that “Damiano and Frenier do not adjust the rents in their study for inflation, which is an unusual decision, and one that makes the rent increases they report look much larger than they actually were.” Adjusted for inflation, rents near new buildings declined by 7 percent overall, and increased by only 0.2 percent for the cheapest buildings. One point that the UCLA researches do not mention: although the […]

How YIMBYs used Ostrom to recruit conservatives

A major barrier to the market urbanist’s ability to make the case for building more housing is the question of aesthetics. When you refer to density in cities, it’s easy to picture large brutalist towers and the slum-like conditions that can be seen in much of the developing world. Of course, this isn’t what we advocate, but it is a problem we have to repeatedly address. Homeowners, whether we like it or not, are a powerful voter group and they want to live in areas that look nice.  Fortunately, the British Government has found the golden mean of housing plans by accepting the results of the Building Better, Building Beautifully Commission.. The key takeaway of this report is street-voting. This represents an excellent middle ground between the seemingly opposite need for housing to be popular, and the need for housing to be plentiful.  The current system used in England fails to provide a fair way of measuring public views on plans. This works by assessing the views of nearby residents through a consultation. This allows any resident to attend, or write in, laying out their views on the plan. It may sound democratic, but local consultations are notoriously unrepresentative of a community. Those who take part are overwhelmingly middle-class, property-owning white people who stand to benefit from a housing shortage. Rather than taking into account the views of the local area, this method merely measures the views of those who would be economically burdened by addressing the crisis.  The city as a commons What we’re left with is what social scientists would call the tragedy of the commons. This is where you have a common-pool resource where individual use of that resource depletes the stock for other parties. Cities can also be understood to be “the commons” in that they […]

Why Houston Isn’t An Argument for Zoning

Someone just posted a video on Youtube using Houston, Texas as an argument in favor of zoning. The logic of the video is: Houston is horrible; Houston has no zoning; therefore every city should have conventional zoning. This video and its logic are impressively wrong, for several reasons. First, I’ve been to Houston and most of what I saw looks nothing like the video – there are plenty of blocks dominated by houses and the occasional condo. Second, most of the photos in the video could have easily happened in a zoned city, because one block in a neighborhood could be residential and the next block could be commercial, so the commercial or industrial activities can be easily viewable from the residential areas (not that anything is wrong with that). Third, most other automobile-dependent cities aren’t any prettier than Houston; a strip mall in Houston doesn’t look any worse than a strip mall in Atlanta. Fourth, it completely overlooks the negative side effects of zoning as it is practiced in most of the United States (many of which have been addressed more than once on this site). Typically, residential zones are so enormous that most of their residents cannot walk to a store or office. Moreover, density limits everywhere limit the supply of modest housing, thus creating housing shortages and homelessness. Finally, Houston’s negative characteristics are partially a result of government spending and regulation; as I have written elsewhere, that city has historically had a wide variety of anti-walkability policies, so it is far more regulated than the video suggests.

What’s Wrong With Hong Kong?

One common argument against new housing is that the laws of supply and demand simply don’t apply to dense cities like New York, San Francisco ands Hong Kong, because new housing or upzoning might raise land prices.*  After all (some  people argue) Hong Kong is really dense and really expensive, so doesn’t that prove that dense places are always expensive? A recent paper by three Hong Kong scholars is quite relevant.  They point out that housing supply in Hong Kong has grown sluggishly in recent years.  They write that in the late 1980s, housing supply grew by 5 percent per year. But since 2009, housing supply has grown at a glacial pace.  Between 2009 and 2015, housing supply typically grew by around 0.5 percent per year;  in the past couple of years, it has grown by between 1 and 1.5 percent per year.   The authors note that these numbers actually overstate supply growth, because they do  not include housing that has been demolished. Not surprisingly, housing prices have grown more in recent years.  In the 1980s, housing costs increased by roughly 1 percent per year; in the past decade, costs have risen by as much as 3 percent per year. (Figure 4d).   Thus, Hong Kong data actually supports the view of many American scholars that housing prices tend to be highest in places where housing supply fails to grow.  Why is supply stagnant?  The authors point out that in Hong Kong, as in some U.S. cities, government limits housing density through floor area ratio regulations. And because Hong Kong land is government-owned, the local government can restrict housing supply by refusing to sell vacant land.  Because high land costs mean more revenue for the government, government has an incentive to sell land slowly in order to keep land prices high.  […]

How to Price Congestion: The Benefits of Dynamic Variable Tolling

Find the full-length report draft here. New York’s political community and the general public have yet to come to terms with reality on congestion pricing. While COVID-19 has suppressed travel demand across the region — deeply for now and to an uncertain extent over the next several years — that decrease has been concentrated in mass transit. Bridge and tunnel crossings into Manhattan are, as of this summer, only down 9% from the pre-COVID baseline. The average daytime travel speed in Manhattan below 60th Street is already back down to 8MPH, barely above the pre-COVID average of 6.9MPH. As the recovery continues, traffic will only get worse — and we need a flexible and dynamic tolling regime that can “roll with the punches” of varying traffic and economic fluctuations as it permanently solves the congestion problem. The paper offers four novel suggestions for congestion pricing in New York City: 1. A speed target should be at the center of policy, rather than revenue, and the fee should vary dynamically in response to traffic volumes to achieve the target speed subject to a maximum peak toll. (Subject to political constraints, the closer the peak toll cap can get to $26, the better the economically estimated balance of speed and toll price). 2. Upstream tolls should be credited broadly to increase regional equity and ensure the incentives to choose any given route to Manhattan depend only on traffic management, not on revenue considerations. 3. Dynamic tolls on each entry point to Manhattan should float independently to incentivize only useful “toll shopping”. Current toll differences on priced and unpriced crossings are arbitrary and divert traffic to the busiest free crossings, while independently floating tolls would equilibrate to balance traffic volumes across all crossings. 4. The cap on licenses for For-Hire Vehicles should be removed and […]

Survey: New Yorkers like Manhattan, the subway and more housing

The Manhattan Institute, a conservative (by New York standards) think tank, recently published a survey of New York residents; a few items are of interest to urbanists. A few items struck me as interesting. One question (p.8) asked “If you could live anywhere, would you live…” in your current neighborhood, a different city neighborhood, the suburbs, or another metro area. Because of Manhattan’s high rents, high population density, and the drumbeat of media publicity about people leaving Manhattan, I would have thought that Manhattan had the highest percentage of people wanting to leave. In fact, the opposite is the case. Only 29 percent of Manhattanites were interested in leaving New York City. By contrast, 36 percent of Brooklynites, and 40-50 percent of residents in the other three outer boroughs, preferred a suburb or different region. Only 23 percent of Bronx residents were interested in staying in their current neighborhood, as opposed to 48 percent of Manhattanites and between 34 and 37 percent of residents of the other three boroughs. Manhattan is the most dense, transit-dependent borough- and yet it seems to have the most staying power. So this tells me that people really value the advantages of density, even after months of COVID-19 shutdowns and anti-city media propaganda. Conversely, Staten Island, the most suburban borough, doesn’t seem all that popular with its residents, who are no more eager to stay than those of Queens or Brooklyn. Having said that, there’s a lot that this question doesn’t tell us. Because no identical poll has been conducted in the past, we don’t know if this data represents anything unusual. Would Manhattan’s edge over the outer boroughs have been equally true a year ago? Ten years ago? I don’t know. Another question asked people to rate ten facets of life in New York […]

Mini-review: From Mobility to Accessibility

I just read a 2018 book by a variety of authors (most notably Jonathan Levine, author of Zoned Out), From Mobility to Accessibility: Transforming Urban Transportation and Land Use Planning. The key point of the book is that rather than focusing solely on “mobility”, planners should focus on “accessibility”. What’s the difference? The authors describe mobility as speed or the absence of congestion; thus, a new highway that saves suburban commuters a few seconds increases mobility. “Accessibility” means making it easy for people to reach as many major destinations as possible, regardless of the mode of transport. For example, allowing more housing near downtowns and other urban job centers increases accessibility because it makes it easier for more people to live near work. However, residents of these neighborhoods might oppose such housing based on concerns about mobility; that is, they might fear that new neighbors might reduce mobility by increasing traffic. Obviously, an emphasis on increasing accessibility favors more compact development: people benefit from living closer to work, even if they are not driving 80 miles an hour. It also seems to me that the emphasis on accessibility favors more market-oriented land use policies; in the absence of government control, landowners will naturally want to increase accessibility by building housing near job centers and vice versa.

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