Because there are no market signals that could identify the best and highest use of street space, it is the role of urban planners to allocate the use of street space between different users and to design boundaries between them where needed.

This article appeared originally in Caos Planejadoand is reprinted here with the publisher’s permission.

As a city expands, planners and surveyors divide its area between private lots and public spaces. Architects, hired by the owners of private lots, design the buildings erected on each one. Lot owners’ taste, budget, and practical considerations shape the design of private buildings. However, land use regulations might restrict the use and shape of the final construction. Over time, changes in consumer demand, building technology, and land prices will require modifications or even the demolition of the original building, which will be replaced by a new one that responds better to current conditions.

This constant land recycling of private lots is a feature of market economies and the motor of urban land use efficiency. Unfortunately, current land use regulations, particularly zoning, tend to slow down this Schumpeterian creative destruction. A paper written by William Easterly, a professor at New York University, monitored the land use change on a Manhattan street over four centuries. The paper shows the unpredictability and necessity of constant land use changes in private urban lots.

In contrast with private lots, public spaces, which include the area occupied by streets, parks, and natural protected areas like beaches, riverbanks, and lakes, rarely change; they are not exposed to market price signals. So, when a city expands, how are the streets designed, and by whom?

On the American continent, little remains of pre-Columbian urban street design. The European colonists’ first task when creating a new town was to separate private lots from public spaces reserved for streets and plazas. Many of these original designs survive to this day. As cities expanded, private developers or municipalities created new roads.

Once fixed by the original surveyors, the city’s roads’ dimensions and patterns seldom change. Consider the design of streets in Manhattan, a borough well known for constantly demolishing and rebuilding ever-taller structures. The pattern and width of streets in the downtown Wall Street area remain identical to what they were at the time of the early seventeenth-century Dutch colony. Even the name, Wall Street, has not changed. The introduction of new, wide avenues, carved by Baron Haussman out of Paris’s medieval districts, is one of the few exceptions to the overwhelming endurance of existing street patterns. Most streets in our cities are fossils dating from the time when surveyors designed the neighborhoods.

Once they have been created, we must accept that streets’ widths and patterns are practically permanent. The areas of streets being fixed, their use has to be rationed. Because supply is inelastic, demand must be managed.

The primary purpose of streets is to allow the movement of people and goods between private lots. But in a large city, there are many ways of moving. Pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, buses, motorcycles, private cars, and cars for hire all contend for the same space. Street space could also be planted with trees. In addition, streets must have room for streetlights, electricity and telecommunication cables, and street and circulation signs. People also use the streets to rest, walk, and exercise. All these conflicting uses occupy precious space that cannot be expanded.

Because there are no market signals that could identify the best and highest use of street space, it is the role of urban planners to allocate the use of street space between different users and to design boundaries between them where needed.

With few exceptions, urban planners have neglected this critical design and regulating role. For instance, on New York City streets, more than two-thirds of the curb space is allocated for permanent parking free of charge. This neglect in the design and regulation of street space contrasts with the complex regulations that planners have applied to private lots. It is time for urban planners to switch their regulatory and design preoccupation away from private lot users and to concentrate on the design and regulation of the scarce space occupied by streets.

The use of private lots should be driven by consumer demand. Land use should emerge from a grassroot process creating an emerging order. By contrast, public spaces are not submitted to price signals that can make their use adapt to evolving demand. The separation of public space between different users is therefore by necessity a top-down design process under the entire responsibility of urban planners.

The post Urban Planners Overregulate Private Lots but Neglect the Design and Regulation of Public Spaces appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Sites and services projects are government-sponsored packages of shelter related services, which range from a minimal level of “surveyed plot” to an intermediate level of “serviced sites” to an upper level of “core housing” complete with utilities and access to community-based services. The level of services depends on the ability and willingness of beneficiary populations to afford them. Typically, such projects represent a sharp break with preexisting government shelter policies in that they attempt, in principle, to focus directly on lower-income deliver shelter and services with small or no subsidies.

Mayo and Gross, World Bank Economic Review, 1987

A 2021 paper by Guy Michaels and colleagues found that S&S has been effective in the long run in Tanzania.

Mumbai retrospective

For my own look back, I revisited a 1983-84 S&S site in Mumbai, called Charkop Kandivali in 2010. I had been part of the appraisal team on the World Bank side. Mumbai planner VK Phatak (whose book I’m keenly awaiting) was also part of the appraisal team on the regional development authority side. VK personally supervised the implementation of the project.

The key elements of the S&S design I participated in is that there are different prices of lots with different standards. Not all World Bank
S&S projects applied this pricing method based on different infrastructure standards within the same site.

The pricing method and the design are based on this document that I wrote with Marie-Agnes and James Wright. It was published in 1988 (WB publications need a lot of reviews and clearance before being approved).

Why not imitated?

Money could be made with S&S. Why was it not reproduced at a large scale by the private sector? The answer is that the Housing Board would not allow the private sector to use these standards. The private sector was obliged to use minimum standards that were a multiple of those used in S&S.

The post Retrospective: Sites & Services appeared first on Market Urbanism.

This argument is based on the assumption that almost anyplace outside Manhattan or brownstone Brooklyn is roughly akin to a suburb where all but the poorest households own cars and drive them everywhere. If this was true, outer borough car ownership rates and car commuting rates would be roughly akin to the rest of the United States.

But in fact, even at the outer edges of Queens and Brooklyn, a large minority of people don’t own cars, and a large majority of people do not use them regularly.

For example, let’s take Forest Hills in central Queens, where I lived for my first two years in New York City. In Forest Hills, about 40 percent of households own no car. (By contrast, in Central Islip, the impoverished suburb Long Island where I teach, about 9 percent of households are car-free- a percentage similar to the national average).

Moreover, most of the car owners in Forest Hills do not drive to work. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS), only 28 percent of the neighborhood’s workers drive or carpool to work.

Admittedly, Forest Hills is one of the more transit-oriented outer borough neighborhoods. What about the city’s so-called transit deserts, where workers rely solely on buses?

One such neighborhood, a short ride from Forest Hills, is Kew Gardens Hills. In this middle-class, heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, about 28 percent of households are car-free- not a majority, but again high by American or suburban standards. And even here, less than half of commuters drive or carpool to work (8479 out of 17,822, although the difference between this number and a 50 percent share is within the ACS statistical margin of error).

Even more right-wing parts of the outer boroughs are similar. The council district including Midwood, Sheepshead Bay, and Brighton Beach just elected a Republican (in fact, a former student of mine) with over 60 percent of the vote. In the Brighton Beach zip code, about 46 percent of households own no car even though this neighborhood is at the end of a subway line. Only about 35 percent of workers there drove or carpooled to work- and in Midwood, only 32 percent do so.

Moreover, many of the people who do drive to work may work in the suburbs (like many of my students). So the anti-congestion-pricing argument that a significant number of outer-borough-workers need to drive to Manhattan is not supported by any evidence. As of 2017, only 9 percent* of NYC resident who worked in Manhattan commuted by car, as opposed to 39 percent who commuted to other boroughs, and 68 percent who commuted to suburbs.

*See p.. 67 of relevant document. However, I have not found any documents breaking this data down by borough of residence.

The post The “outer boroughs” myth appeared first on Market Urbanism.

With the Democrats scrambling to come up with a legislative agenda after their November takeover of the House of Representatives, an old idea is making a comeback: a “Green New Deal.” Once the flagship issue of the Green Party, an environmental stimulus package is now a cause de celebre among the Democratic Party’s progressive wing.

While it looks like the party leadership isn’t too receptive to the idea, newly-elected Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has spearheaded legislation designed to create a “Select Committee for a Green New Deal.” The mandate of the proposed committee is ambitious, possibly to a fault. At times utopian in flavor, the committee would pursue everything from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to labor law enforcement and universal health care.

A recent plan from the progressive think tank Data for Progress is more disciplined, remaining focused on environmental issues, with clearer numerical targets for transitioning to renewable energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet in all the talk about a Green New Deal, there’s a conspicuous omission that could fatally undermine efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions: little to no focus is placed on the way we plan urban land use. This is especially strange considering the outsized role that the way we live and travel plays in raising or lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), transportation and electricity account for more than half of the US’ greenhouse gas emissions. As David Owen points out in his book “Green Metropolis,” city dwellers drive less, consume less electricity, and throw out less trash than their rural and suburban peers. This means that if proponents of the Green New Deal are serious about reducing carbon emissions, they will have to help more people move to cities.

One possible reason for this oversight is that urban planning in America isn’t a federal issue: it’s technically handled by states and administered by local governments. But when local urban planning is undermining basic civil liberties or degrading the environment, the federal government can and should step in.

Think of urban planning like education: most people agree that running schools should mostly be a local issue. Yet most people would also agree that federal interventions to desegregate local schools—against the wishes of local governments—were merited. More federal oversight over local land-use planning is wise for similar reasons: policies that enforce segregation and harm the environment don’t deserve federal deference.

So how should a federally-implemented Green New Deal approach land use? For starters, it could take on rules that only serve to reinforce car dependence and drive up the cost of urban housing. For example, take minimum parking requirements, which force developers to build more parking spaces than they otherwise would. In practice, these rules lead to greater dependence on personal automobiles and rising costs for housing in urban neighborhoods where land is scarce, which forces more people out of the city. The combined effect is higher greenhouse gas emissions.

Or take single-family zoning. These zones permit only detached single-family homes, prohibiting denser and more affordable housing types such as townhomes, duplexes, and apartments. Historically a tool of racial and economic segregation, single-family zoning today largely serves to force people into low-density, energy-hungry, auto-dependent neighborhoods. Encouraging cities to scrap these out-of-date policies—like Minneapolis did late last year—as a condition for any federal Green New Deal dollars could go a long way toward reducing carbon emissions.

Whatever your feelings on minimum parking requirements and single-family zoning, the least a Green New Deal could do is take on explicitly anti-environmental local rules. For example, a Green New Deal might require an end to local solar panel and wind turbine prohibitions as a condition for federal deductions and tax credits that mostly help the upper class, such as the mortgage interest deduction or the state and local tax credit. This type of preemption is already common at the state level and would help more people bypass regulatory barriers and transition to renewable energy.

While dismantling harmful local rules should be the priority, a Green New Deal could also help support proactive local environmental planning. Grants to cities interested in rebuilding their zoning ordinance or comprehensive plan to allow for walkable, mixed-use development patterns would do more than any federal infrastructure program to facilitate sustainable development. Getting deeper into the weeds, the federal government could also lend technical assistance to regional planning agencies like Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPOs), as FEMA often does, to ensure that local planning offices are well-equipped to handle issues like wetlands and coastal management, incentivize efficient building standards, and maintain urban sewer and stormwater systems.

A Green New Deal that pours money into green infrastructure will ultimately fail if most Americans still can’t afford to live in a walkable neighborhood or install a solar panel on their roof. And merely ramping up federal environmental enforcement can only go so far while neglecting local governments, the front lines of building, flood, and sewerage regulation. If the Green New Deal can find its way into the busy Democratic agency in 2019, let’s hope it doesn’t forget about cities.

The post Any Green New Deal Must Tackle Zoning Reform appeared first on Market Urbanism.

The post Three Policies for Making Driverless Cars Work for Cities appeared first on Market Urbanism.

On August 23rd, a California assembly bill aimed at increasing transit-oriented development, like housing, was passed by the state senate, confirmed by the assembly, and headed to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk for signing. The bill, AB 2923, specifically targets the San Francisco Bay Area—making it easier than ever for the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to build housing on the land it owns around its transit stations.

Previously, housing developments on BART-owned land were still subject to local zoning rules, pushing projects through local processes to be approved before building began. This local control led to many delays, and, as a result, housing denials in the midst of an ongoing housing shortage—on that repeatedly spurs news headlines decrying four-plus hour super commutes, median home prices over $1 million, and neighborhoods blocking affordable housing. State bills like AB 2923 are a response to these reports, as well as the local control that led to them. If passed, AB 2923 and other bills like it, will bypass local control’s draconian rules to allow more housing to be built and ease the housing shortage.

Under current law, land owned by BART is often subject to discretionary review in Bay Area cities. This forces BART to become de facto experts in every municipality zoning code, an impossible task that would take away from their focus on improving their transit system. Even attempting to master the zoning codes of every municipality takes time. Ultimately, this causes delays in building housing that’s so sorely needed. But this could easily be avoided if BART could establish their own zoning rules under AB 2923. Housing and transit is intrinsically linked and, just like suburban home developers build the roads to best suit their development, urban transit authorities like BART must utilize their capacity to build the homes best suited for their transit lines.

For instance, in housing-friendly Oakland, a transit-oriented development has taken over a decade to begin its final phase—a 402-home tower nestled in an affordable housing building, along with a five-story parking garage. The MacArthur Transit Village gained approval in July 2008, over two years after a community meeting first discussed the project. By then, the recession hit and financing disappeared. It wasn’t until 2011 that the first phase of construction began. Two more years were required after that for the current 90 affordable homes to be completed. The final phase required a work-around for a neighborhood zoning mandate that capped building heights at 90 feet. Ultimately, it was only through developer concessions, neighborhood action in support of the project, and the lack of major appeals that this project is able to exist.

Aside from a delay in building housing, local control in the form of discretionary review is often at odds with the goals of the BART-owned land—and the transit system as a whole. Transit systems are made to provide not only transit but also ease of use in the form of dependable frequent service and convenient location to work, home, and other lifestyle needs. However, BART is best at providing convenience for drivers and their cars. But this aim is incompatible with the overall goal of efficiently transporting people.

Just up the road from Oakland is another BART station parking lot waiting patiently for a housing makeover. The land BART owns around the North Berkeley Station currently houses up to 822 cars. But, according to BART’s website, there are no current plans to develop this land into much-needed housing for people. It takes a law like AB 2923 to give BART power to develop their own enthusiasm and means of housing planning.

As it stands now, BART is at the mercy of a city council that’s woefully unkind to development.  For instance, the council decided to forego over $10 million for their affordable housing trust fund after two city council members filed an appeal against a project approval— one that ultimately ended in the developer soliciting offers in lieu of actually building. But all of that could change soon. AB 2923 could finally transform a high-ridership transit station from housing for cars to housing for Californians.

For too long, cities in the Bay Area have wrested control from the hands of BART in order to meet subjective needs of citizens who make their homes around these transit stations but balk at access for new people through the building of new housing next to stations. If the Bay Area is to meet its social goal of welcoming immigrants to sanctuary cities, their environmental goal of lowering CO2 emissions, and their political goal of showing that progressivism works, more housing near transit is non-negotiable. Turning BART-owned land from housing for cars or dirt pits into housing for people is one step toward reaching the noble goals professed by Bay Area residents.

Martha Ekdahl is a Young Voices Contributor who writes about urban policy. Follow her on Twitter.

The post California Legislation Threatens to Become Law and Build More Housing appeared first on Market Urbanism.

On June 24 in Brooklyn, a driver in an SUV struck and killed four-year-old Luz Gonzalez, with many onlookers claiming the incident was a hit-and-run. The New York Police Department disagrees, and has refused to prosecute the driver, sparking multiple street protests. Beyond seeking justice for Gonzalez, activists demand that the city expand the use of speed cameras in school zones, which they hope could prevent further tragedy. Yet precisely at the moment that the community is most sensitive to the risk that dangerous driving poses to children, the New York state legislature shut off 140 school zone speed cameras. Given their unambiguous success in improving traffic safety in school zones, legislators should act now to renew and expand the program.

While there is rare consensus among Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio on the need to preserve and even expand the traffic camera program to 290 cameras, the expansion faces opposition from some members in the Senate. Opposition to the cameras has been lead by Republican State Senator Martin J. Golden—himself a notorious school zone speeder, having received over 10 tickets since 2015 alone—and Democrat State Senator Simcha Felder, who ineffectively used the cameras as a bargaining chip to install police officers in schools.

Since their implementation in 2014 as part of the broader Vision Zero initiative, school zone speed cameras have already substantially improved pedestrian safety in New York’s school zones. According to one study by the New York City Department of Transportation, the number of people killed or seriously injured in crashes in schools zones has fallen by 21 percent to 142 since the cameras came online. This is due in part to the fact that speeding drivers are getting the message: in the first 14 months following implementation of cameras, speeding violations in school zones fell by 66 percent to 35, and have remained far below historical norms since. Among those who get do get tickets, 81 percent slow down after their first and don’t get any more.

Controlling speed is central to improving safety in these zones. An increase from 20 mph to 30 mph increases the risk of pedestrian fatality from five percent to as much as 45 percent. Increase that speed to 40 mph and the death of the stricken pedestrian is a near certainty. In this sense, the existing speed camera policy in New York City may even be too lenient, contrary to the concerns of critics. The current speed limit in all school zones in the city is set to 25 mph, and tickets aren’t administered until a driver is going 11 mph over this limit, a speed at which a stricken child would likely die.

Speed cameras draw on much of what we have learned from the economics of crime. The field began when future Nobel Laureate Gary Becker faced a natural dilemma: Should he park in an illegal spot that’s convenient or a legal spot that’s inconvenient? In that moment, Becker asked himself two further questions: how likely is it that he would be caught, and if caught, how severe would the fine be? In this moment of human laziness, Becker had an epiphany: criminals are rational actors just like anyone else, and they commit crimes when they believe that the benefits outweigh the costs.

This helps to explain why so many people speed. According to a recent study of drivers in Spain, most drivers think there is next to no risk of punishment. While many cities and states respond to speeding epidemics by cranking up the fines, the more effective solution may simply be to ensure that every single speeder will be caught. For this, speed cameras come in handy. This isn’t to say that increasing fines—and heavily publicizing their increase—won’t help to reduce speeding. But this is a much more complicated analysis: if drivers thinks that the risks of getting ticketed or slim to none, fines must hit astronomical highs before they will change their behavior. Worse yet, in the rare event that they are fined, they will receive an onerous bill that can be especially painful for low-income offenders. Speed cameras cut out all this guesswork by consistently and fairly administering a modest fine. This may help to explain the near universal finding that speed cameras reduce speeds and save lives.

Luz Gonzalez isn’t the only child to have been stricken and killed by a speeding driver this year. In the borough of Brooklyn alone, at least nine children have been killed since January. According to one report by the New York City Department of Health, car crashes are now the number one source of deaths resulting from injury for children under 13. Now simply isn’t the time to scale back traffic camera technology that has been proven to inexpensively, fairly, and efficiently save lives. Albany may be inclined to play games with every issue it handles—but legislators have an obligation to get the cameras back on for the millions of children across the Empire State walking home from school.

For future content and discussion, follow me on Twitter at @mnolangray.

The post Turn New York’s Speed Cameras Back On appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Suburb: Planning Politics and the Public Interest is a scholarly book about planning politics in Montgomery County, a (mostly) affluent suburb of Washington, D.C.  The book contains chapters on redevelopment of inner ring, transit-friendly areas such as Friendship Heights and Silver Spring, but also discusses outer suburbs and the county’s agricultural areas.

From my perspective, the most interesting section of the book was the chapter on Friendship Heights and Bethesda, two inner-ring areas near subway stops.  When landowners proposed to redevelop these areas, the planning staff actually downzoned them (p. 56)- and NIMBYs fought the planning board, arguing that even more downzoning was necessary to prevent unwelcome development.

These downzoning decisions were based on the staff’s “transportation capacity analysis”- the idea that an area’s roads can only support X feet of additional development.  For example, Hanson writes that Friendship Heights “could support only 1.6 million square feet of additional development.” (p. 62).   Similarly, he writes that Bethesda’s “roads and transit could handle only 12 million square feet of new development at an acceptable level of service.” (p. 75)

Thus, planning staff artificially limited development based on “level of service “(LOS) .  “Level of service” is a concept used to grade automobile traffic; where traffic is free-flowing the LOS is A.  But the idea that development is inappropriate in low-LOS places seems a bit inconsistent with my experience. Bethesda and Friendship Heights zip codes have about 5000-10,000 people per square mile; many places with far more density seem to function adequately.   For example, Kew Gardens Hills in central Queens has 27,000 people per square mile, relies on bus service, and yet seems to be a moderately popular area.

Moreover, the use of LOS to cap density has a variety of other negative effects.  First, places with free-flowing traffic tend to be dangerous for pedestrians; for example, if an arterial is at LOS A, cars travel over 35 mph and thus create a high risk of injury or death to walkers.  Second, when people and jobs are excluded from transit-friendly places such as Bethesda, they do not disappear.  Instead, they migrate elsewhere- often to more car-dependent places, increasing regional auto traffic.  Third, policies that limit housing anywhere reduce the regional supply of housing, thus affecting regionwide housing costs.

At any rate, this book’s value for market urbanists is to show what planners really do.  Sprawl supporters often paint zoning as a reflection of the market, and planners as pro-density ideologues.  But in fact, planners often seek to split the difference between developers who seek to create housing and jobs, and nearby homeowners who want less of both.

The post Mini review: Suburb, by Royce Hanson appeared first on Market Urbanism.