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Category Zoning

How Los Angeles’ Rent Got So Damn High

[Research help for this article was provided by UCLA student Hunter Iwig] The rent in LA has gone up 30% in the last three years. What the hell? Three big things happened, two of them awesome, and one dumb. We decided living in cities was cool again (awesome), city centers are creating tons of new jobs (awesome), and we didn’t build very many new places to live in our cities (not awesome). Living in cities is cool again (awesome) In the 1950s and 1960s our cities stopped growing and people started moving to the suburbs. We kept it up for a long, long time. But something has changed in the last 10-15 years. More and more people prefer to live in walkable, urban areas. Today, 52% of Americans say they would like to live in a place where they do not need to use a car very often. For millennials, it’s even higher – 63% say they want the walkable convenience of cities. City dwellers do less environmental damage and cause less traffic, so that sounds like pretty damn good news. Cities are creating tons of jobs (awesome) New jobs used to be created in suburbs. But since the Great Recession until 2011, that’s changed – cities are where the new jobs are. And, surprise surprise, people want to move to places where they can get jobs. We’ve made it incredibly hard to build more houses in LA and other cities (not awesome) First, a quick primer. You can’t build anything you want wherever you want. Zoning and planning rules dictate what can be built on any given plot of land. In 1960, L.A. had a population of 2.5 million, but its zoning rules allowed for housing for 10 million if every lot was built to it’s maximum density. Today our […]

Densifying Transit Corridors Is Not Densifying Enough

Curitiba One recent urban planning trend advocates for so-called “Transit-Oriented Developments”, or TODs. This is when cities allow already built-up areas to increase development along mass transit corridors, such as bus or rail lines. If such transit infrastructure didn’t exist, the potential development increase in these areas would be restricted. The TOD idea is mainly based on the Curitiba model, a city that allowed denser building and populations along Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridors. The above image shows the effects: high-rise buildings with minimum or absent setbacks along the corridors, and sharp decreases in density on adjacent streets, since these latter streets would theoretically use the BRTs less. The same logic is being applied for São Paulo’s new recently-approved Zoning Code: sharp density increases in allowed built-up areas along mass transit corridors, and more low-slung buildings further into the neighborhoods.   This TOD model is certainly better than previous ones, wherein dense development was restricted altogether, even when near mass transit. As I’ve previously noted, lower densities undermine the economic feasibility of transit networks, which rely on intense agglomerations. Many factors justify TODs’ attractiveness to current planners, including that they make transit viable, increase the centrally-located housing stock, and satisfy residents of low-rise areas, who usually enjoy keeping their neighborhoods’ original features. But I haven’t become a broad advocate of TODs because they disproportionately favor these low-rise residents, disregarding everyone who must be pushed into suburban peripheries. A TOD-driven approach has a correct logic of analyzing neighborhood scale, and trying to organize it likewise, based on transit and street availability. But it doesn’t account for the factthat every unit left unbuilt within a neighborhood will necessarily be built in the outskirts, generating longer commutes and higher infrastructure costs. Peripheral residents certainly are not the same as downtown ones, but they would still […]

Exclusionary Zoning and “Inclusionary Zoning” Don’t Mix

Inclusionary Zoning is an Oxymoron The term “Inclusionary Zoning” gives a nod to the fact that zoning is inherently exclusionary, but pretends to be somehow different.  Given that, by definition, zoning is exclusionary, Inclusionary Zoning completely within the exclusionary paradigm is synonymous with Inclusionary Exclusion. What is Inclusionary Zoning? “Inclusionary Zoning” is a policy requiring a certain percentage of units in new developments to be affordable to certain income groups.  Sometimes, this includes a slight loosening of restrictions on the overall scale of the development, but rarely enough loosening to overcome the burden of subsidizing units. Many cities, particularly the most expensive ones, have adopted Inclusionary Zoning as a strategy intended to improve housing affordability.  Often, demand for below-market units are so high, one must literally win a lottery to obtain a developer-subsidized unit. Economics of Exclusion We must first acknowledge the purpose of zoning is to EXCLUDE certain people and/or businesses from an area.  Zoning does this by limiting how buildings are used within a district, as well as limiting the scale of buildings .  These restriction cap the supply of built real estate space in an area.  As we know from microeconomics, when rising demand runs into this artificially created upward limit on supply, prices rise to make up the difference. As every district in a region competes to be more exclusive than its neighbors through the abuse of zoning, regional prices rise in the aggregate. Since the invention of the automobile, and subsequent government overspending on highways, sprawl has served as the relief valve. We’ve built out instead of up for the last several decades and this sprawl has relieved some of the pressure major metropolitan areas would have otherwise felt. In fact, it’s worked so well–and led to the abuse of zoning rules for such a long time–that exclusionary zoning has become the accepted paradigm. Zoning is the default flavor of […]

Mercantilist logic and land-use regulation

Adam Smith taught the world that mercantilism impoverished 18th-century nations by erecting barriers to trade and reducing opportunities for specialization and economic growth. Regulations that restrict urban development likewise reduce opportunities for innovation and specialization by limiting cities’ population size and density. Even as improvements in communications technology and falling transportation costs reduce the burden of distance, many industries still benefit from the geographical proximity of human beings that only dense development can provide. Removing land-use regulations will allow greater gains from trade as more people are allowed to live in important economic centers like New York City and Silicon Valley. Cities facilitate innovation by placing people with diverse backgrounds and goals in close proximity. While Israel Kirzner’s research provided a comprehensive analysis of entrepreneurs in the market process and in economic growth, economists have not given sufficient attention to the geography of entrepreneurship. The settings in which entrepreneurs work – Sandy Ikeda’s “action space” – matters, and cities provide a crucial role as the action space for much of human innovation. Silicon Valley is an urban action space where geographical proximity has made entrepreneurs more successful than they would have been without the inspiration they provided one another. The Homebrew Computer Club, a social group founded in 1975 for computer hobbyists, played a crucial role in the development of personal computers. The programmers, engineers, and inventors who attended those early meetings would go on to revolutionize computing thanks, in large part, to the information they gathered from swapping ideas, hardware, and skills from the other group members they encountered. The club began meeting in garages, parking lots, and university auditoriums, but it was only possible because these enthusiasts all worked for semiconductor companies that brought them to the same region of California. Empirical evidence bears out the importance of cities in facilitating […]

Why No Micro-Apartments in Chicago?

  Several cities have jumped on the bandwagon of building Micro-apartments, a hot trend in apartment development.  San Francisco and Seattle already have them. New York outlawed them, but is testing them on one project, and may legalize them again. Even developers in smaller cities like Denver and Grand Rapids are taking a shot at micro-apartments. At the same time, Chicago is building lots of apartments, and is known for having low barriers to entry for downtown development.  Yet we aren’t hearing of much new construction of micro-apartments here.  Premier studios are fetching as much as $2,000 a month.  Certainly there must be demand for something more approachable to young professionals.  In theory, we should expect to see Chicago leading the way in innovative small spaces. Chicago doesn’t have an outright ban on small apartments like New York, but there are four regulatory obstacles in the Chicago zoning code.  These are outdated remnants from eras where excluding undesirable people were main objectives of zoning, and combined to effectively prohibit small apartments: 1. Minimum Average Size:  Interestingly, there is no explicit prohibition of small units.  This is unlike New York City’s zoning, which prohibits units smaller than 400sf. There is, however, a stipulation that the average gross size of apartments constructed within a development be greater that 500sf.  Assuming 15% of your floor-plate is taken by hallways, lobbies, stairs, etc; this means for every 300sf unit, you need one 550sf unit to balance it out. Source:  17-2-0312 for residential; 17-4-0408 for downtown 2. Limits on “Efficiency Units”: Zoning stipulates a minimum percentage of “efficiency units” within a development. The highest density areas downtown allow as much as 50%, but these are the most expensive areas where land is most expensive. In areas traditionally more affordable, the ratio is as low as 20% to discourage studios, and encourage […]

9 Barriers To Building Housing In Central City Austin

The Austin area has, for the 5th year running, been among America’s two fastest-growing major metro areas by population. Although everybody knows about the new apartments sprouting along transportation corridors like South Lamar and Burnet, much of the growth has been in our suburbs, and in suburban-style areas of the city. Our city is growing out more than up. How come? The desire for living in central Austin has never been higher. But Austin, like most cities, has rules that prevent new housing from getting centrally built. That makes it easier to buy and build on virgin land in the suburbs. Here are some of those rules. 1 MINIMUM LOT SIZE Historically, expensive houses were built on expensive, large lots; cheaper homes were built on smaller, cheaper lots. Austin decided that new houses can’t be built on small lots. Even if you want to build a small, cheap house, you still need a lot with at least 5,750 square feet. In central Austin, that costs a lot of money, even without the house! If somebody owns a 10,000 square foot lot, they aren’t allowed to split it into two 5,000 square foot lots and build two medium-sized houses, let alone three 3,333 square foot lots with three small houses, let alone three 3,333 square foot lots with triplexes! In 1999, Houston reformed its minimum lot size laws. Since then, environmentally-friendly central-city urban townhomes have flourished.         2 MINIMUM SITE AREA For areas that are zoned for apartments and condos, there is a cap on the ratio of number of apartments to lot size known as “minimum site area.” 3 IMPERVIOUS COVER MAXIMUMS Impervious cover is any surface that prevents water from seeping into the ground, including buildings, driveways, and garages. There is a cap on the ratio of impervious cover to lot size. 4 FLOOR-TO-AREA RATIO MAXIMUMS Floor-to-area ratios (aka FAR) maximums are a cap on […]

Why Does Houston Have Such A Great Restaurant Scene?

  Browsing through peoples’ posts of their favorite things to do in Houston, there’s a recurring theme of eating out. USA Today called Houston “the dining-out capital of the nation”: on average, we eat out more often than any other city in the country, at the second-lowest average price (Zagat). The Chronicle claims Houstonians eat out a third more times per week at 20 percent lower cost than the national average, with 9,000 area restaurants to choose from (which also makes us one of the nation’s leaders in restaurants per capita). Finally, I’ve talked to tons of people who have moved away from Houston, and one of the first things they mention missing is the restaurants. So it’s definitely one of the great strengths of Houston, but also one that raises skepticism from anybody who hasn’t lived here: why would Houston have more or better restaurants than anywhere else? What’s so special about Houston? I think there are set of factors that have come together to create the “perfect storm” of great restaurants in Houston: Diversity. Start with Houston having a very diverse population from all over the globe, so there’s plenty of people available to start restaurants in their native ethnic cuisine. Not a whole lot of cities can say that. I think a lot of that is related to being the capital of the energy industry, which is an inherently global industry. That plus being a major port city and proximity to Latin America and Cajun Louisiana. Lack of zoning. Houston’s open development culture makes it easy for anybody to start a restaurant. Plenty of inexpensive space and not a lot of regulations/permitting. The freeway network. This may seem to be an odd factor, but think about it. We have a very well developed freeway network compared to […]

The need for low-quality housing

The market urbanism axiom — permitting housing supply to increase is key to achieving affordable housing — has been made recently by Rick Jacobus at Shelterforce and Daniel Hertz at City Observatory. However both argue that even with an increasing supply, low-income people will need aid in order to afford what the authors feel is adequate housing. History shows us, though, that if developers are allowed to serve renters in every price range, they will. The movie Brooklyn portrays the type of housing many of our grandparents and great-grandparents lived in when they emigrated to the United States. People of very little means could afford to live in cities with the highest housing demand because they lived in boarding houses, residential hotels, and low-quality apartments, most of which are illegal today. Making housing affordable again requires not only permitting construction of more new units, but also allowing existing housing to be used in ways that are illegal under today’s codes. Young adults living in group houses with several roommates have found a way around these regulations, but low-income renters were better-served when families and single people could pay for housing that was designed to meet their needs at an affordable price. Alan During explains the confluence of interest groups that successfully eliminated cheap, low-quality housing: The rules were not accidents. Real-estate owners eager to minimize risk and maximize property values worked to keep housing for poor people away from their investments. Sometimes they worked hand-in-glove with well-meaning reformers who were intent on ensuring decent housing for all. Decent housing, in practice, meant housing that not only provided physical safety and hygiene but also approximated what middle-class families expected. This coalition of the self-interested and the well-meaning effectively boxed in and shut down rooming houses, and it erected barriers to in-home boarding, too. Over more than a century, […]

Liberate the Garage!: Autonomous Cars and the American Dream

Apple garage

When it comes to the impact autonomous cars will have on cities, there’s plenty of room for disagreement. Will they increase or decrease urban densities? Will they help with congestion or make it worse? At the same time, there seems to be widespread agreement on at least two things: First, far fewer people will own cars. Second, we are not going to need nearly as much parking. By combining the technology of autonomous cars with the business model of transportation network companies like Uber and Lyft, low-cost, on-demand ride-hailing and dynamic routing bus lines could eliminate the need to keep an unused car hanging around for most of the day. When that happens, we will need far fewer parking spaces, turning on-street parking into wider sidewalks and bike lanes and surface lots and parking ramps into residential and commercial uses. So how does the humble American residential garage fit into all this? On its face, the garage is little more than the sheltered parking space that comes with most single-family homes. Yet the garage holds a certain mythological status in the American psyche: It gave rise to iconic American brands like Disney, Harley Davidson, and Mattel. It offered a space in which the firms that would launch the digital economy could get their start, including HP and Apple. Google and Microsoft, which both started in garages, maintain “garage” work spaces to this day in order to cultivate innovation. By providing a flexible space in which knowledge, free time, and ambition can transform into entrepreneurial innovation, the garage has played a crucial role in the American economy.   At least in the near term, garages are not going anywhere. Unlike municipal governments and large private landowners who will likely face immediate political and market pressures to retool their parking spaces, many homeowners are structurally stuck with their garages. Millions of garages could go unused, occasionally kept active by automobile hobbyists, most likely turning into de facto storage units. But it doesn’t have to be […]

Reforming Zoning in a Kludgeocracy

To market urbanists and many others, it’s clear that there is a positive relationship between high housing costs and land-use restrictions and that liberalizing zoning would lower housing costs relative to what they would be in a more regulated environment. Given this relationship, reducing zoning would improve efficiency in the housing market by allowing consumer demand to drive the amount of resources that are put into housing development. However, land-use reform would also affect other policy areas such as public schools, transportation infrastructure, and sewer and water provision. Predicting how a liberalizing reform in one policy area will affect the complete public policy landscape is as impossible as predicting how one private sector innovation will affect other markets. Political scientist Steven Teles coined the term “kludgeocracy” to describe the complexity of contemporary American policy. For example, zoning has become a tool to make high-performing public schools exclusive, even though land-use policy and education policy are seemingly unrelated areas governed by different agencies. Because providing zero-price quality education to every child in the country may be impossible, zoning is a kludge that allows policymakers to provide this service to their high-income and influential constituents. Teles describes this policy complexity: A “kludge” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of an existing system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes. Any user of Microsoft Windows will immediately grasp the concept. […]

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