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Next week the Cambridge City Council will consider a petition to require new or newly renovated buildings of 25,000 square feet or more to be net-zero emissions. Under the rule, any energy that buildings use beyond what they produce must be sourced from approved, renewable energy sources. While intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the rule would have some easy to foresee side effects: Jeff Roberts, a land use and zoning project planner for the city, said the cost of developing what is being called “net zero” buildings could be passed on to tenants, and could drive away new development. “There’s always the possibility that this would create a shift–that the cost might cause development that would otherwise occur in Cambridge to occur in other communities that don’t have similar requirements, such as Boston or Somerville or suburban areas,” Roberts said. With this rule, Cambridge would follow in the path of other cities that have attempted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the local level. Santa Monica has been one of the municipalities leading the way on  attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions since 1994. The city has adopted its own standards for greenhouse gas reduction, but has made little progress toward its defined targets, today using 35% more electricity per household than the average California household does. While the environmental activists that support these local-level rules surely realize that greenhouse gases do not recognize political jurisdictions, local greenhouse gas emissions reductions in cities like Santa Monica and Cambridge miss the real opportunities to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. It’s unsurprising that very left-leaning cities have pioneered these types of rules, but in doing so, these cities are missing the real opportunities they have to reduce emissions. Santa Monica is one of the most walkable places in the Los Angeles area, offering […]

Detroit’s art assets have made news as Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr is evaluating the city’s assets for a potential bankruptcy filing. Belle Isle, where Rod Lockwood recently proposed a free city-state may be on the chopping block, but according to a Detroit Free Press poll, residents are most concerned about the city auctioning pieces from the Detroit Institute of the Arts’ collection. I’ve written previously about the downsides of publicly funding art from the perspective of free speech, but the Detroit case presents a new reason why cities are not the best keepers of artistic treasures. Pittsburgh’s Post-Gazette contrasts the Detroit Institute of Art’s situation with the benefits of a museum funded with an endowment: As usual, Andrew Carnegie knew what he was doing. The steel baron turned philanthropist put the City of Pittsburgh in charge of operating the library he gave it in 1895, but when he added an art museum to the Oakland facility just one year later, he kept it out of city hands. “The city is not to maintain [the art gallery and museum],” Carnegie said in his dedication address. “These are to be regarded as wise extravagances, for which public revenues should not be given, not as necessaries. These are such gifts as a citizen may fitly bestow upon a community and endow, so that it will cost the city nothing.” Museums and other cultural amenities  are a sign of a city’s success, not drivers of success itself. The correlation between culturally interesting cities and cities with strong economic opportunities is often mistakenly interpreted to demonstrate that if cities do more to build their cultural appeal from the top down, they will encourage job growth in the process. Rather, a productive and well-educated population both demand and supply these amenities. While an art museum may increase tourism on the margin, […]

On Monday, Fundrise will make their newest offering at 906 H Street NE in DC available to investors. Many real estate journalists have covered this innovative investment company’s crowdsourcing strategy, with Urban Turf naming Fundrise a top real estate trend of 2012. This development is the company’s second crowd-sourced project and their third property on H Street. Without special approval, publicly advertised offerings can only seek funding from accredited investors, but Fundrise has has gone through a cumbersome process through DC, Virginia, and federal securities regulators to permit any individual to invest in their newest offering with a $100 minimum investments. Because of the high regulatory hurdles standing in the way of marketing public offerings to a broad audience, Fundrise is currently the only group in the country doing so. Daniel Miller, Co-Founder of Fundrise, explained that he thinks crowdfunding has significant potential to improve incentives for focusing on the long run in development. From an urban development perspective, one benefit of crowdsourcing is that small companies do not face the same pressure to post quarterly profits that larger, publicly-traded firms do. Because real estate is a long-term investment that doesn’t always demonstrate profits on a timetable that’s attractive to Wall Street investors, crowdsourcing provides an opportunity for development financing that will not have a short-term bias. The difficulty in getting legal approval for small investors, however, demonstrates the regulatory bias in favor of large firms. Daniel said: When you’re invested in a broader portfolio like a REIT that owns 400 or 500 malls, it’s very difficult to measure success because there are only financial indicators. But if you’re invested in a single property — the tenant is open, he’s paying rent, he has good sales — it’s much easier to measure success. There’s transparency in reporting. A lot of these big companies […]

This weekend Anthony Ling who writes the blog Rendering Freedom (and has previously written here) will be in DC. Stephen Smith will also be in town, and we’re planning a meetup on Saturday. Anthony is an architect in São Paolo. He writes about architecture, economics, and urbanism, and I’m excited to learn more about his experiences studying and working in Brazil. If you’re in the DC area, I hope that you can join us. Details: Saturday, December 1st at 1:00 p.m. Burger Tap and Shake (at Washington Circle in Foggy Bottom) Please email me at emilybwashington@gmail.com if you have any questions.

Stephen had great twitter coverage of urbanist election issues last night, but here are a few more links to significant outcomes: 1. Washington state and my home state of Colorado voted to legalize marijuana possession, private use, and in Colorado limited production. Drug policy liberalization is a huge win for cities, as arrest rates among users are higher in urban areas. However, given the current administration’s intolerance for medical marijuana dispensaries that are legal under state laws, I see little reason to hope that the feds won’t prosecute drug users  who are in violation of federal but not state laws. 2. In Alexandria, VA voters reelected democratic Mayor William Euille and elected an all democratic city council. This has ramifications for the city’s waterfront redevelopment plan; opponents of increased development have sued, and the case will be heard by the state supreme court this spring. Opponents allege that the zoning change required supermajority support from the city council, but the new democratic plurality makes supermajority support likely. 3. In Escondido, CA voters passed upzoning with Proposition N which will allow increased downtown housing development as well as allow more commercial and industrial development. The city’s conservative leadership supported Proposition N for economic development. 4. Kirk Caldwell was elected mayor of Honolulu. The opposing candidate Ben Cayetano ran on an anti-rail platform. Rail in Oahu is already under construction, but a lawsuit has stalled progress. The elevated 20-mile HART project has a projected $5.2 billion price tag, $1.55 billion of which local officials say will come from the federal government.  I don’t know enough about the project to have an opinion on whether or not it’s a good idea. 5. Virginia voters said “yes” on Question 1, requiring authorities to demonstrate public use to employ eminent domain (as opposed to the Kelo public benefit standard). 6. I won my […]

I spoke to George Haikalis (trust me, he’s a lot smarter than his HTML looks), a regional planner and former NYCTA official, about the high cost of New York City transit. He had a message to the press and academia: Part of the problem is that we don’t really have a very strong independent technical press, or independent academic community that really understands anything about railroads. We’re pretty much at the mercy of the big engineering firms, and those firms pretty much do the bidding of key bureaucrats, who have a central theme: keep this within their family. “Their family,” or course, being the agency they work for. In the case of East Side Access and the canceled ARC project, which is what we were discussion, this means (/meant) LIRR and NJ Transit getting their own unspeakably expensive deep caverns just so they wouldn’t have to share any of the existing abundant station platforms with other regional railroads.

This is a post outside of the typical urbanist issues we write about here, but one that I think is very important to cities. At Forbes, Adam Ozimek writes that economics bloggers are failing to make the case for the importance of permitting increased high-skilled immigration: I think it is professional malpractice that economists see trillions of dollars in pareto improvements going to waste and don’t scream about it from the rooftops daily because it’s not as fun to argue about. I don’t think the public has a good sense of the extent to which more high-skilled immigration would help us, and part of the problem is precisely that we don’t scream this from the rooftops with the regularity and fervor it deserves.  As urbanization is a process of migration, the issue should be of prime concern for urbanists as well as economists. Many of the world’s greatest cities were built through immigration, and the variety of cultures in cities creating diverse food, arts, and events are an important factor in making cities interesting places to live. While I’ve been broadly in favor of more immigration as long as I can remember, through a few experiences I’ve become much more passionate about broadly increasing the number of immigrants allowed to move into the United States. High-skilled immigration is an economic no-brainer, but I think from a humanitarian perspective we should be allowing more immigration from all backgrounds. I spent a semester in college in Guadalajara, Mexico. There I worked in a school for niños trabajadores, children who attended school for a few hours a day and also worked in jobs like selling flowers or gum.  The non-profit school was run by some amazing teachers, but it was difficult knowing that the prospects for these students in school and outside of school were difficult. A few […]