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Four Warnings For Los Angeles On Measures S

The alternative title for this piece was: “Ballot Box Zoning: Where Needed Housing Goes to Die.” Next month, Los Angeles will be voting on Measure S, a proposed 2-year policy that will effectively serve as a moratorium on new construction.  That is, Measure S will require a public vote on any new development that does not fit within existing zoning.  Most of the city’s major leaders, including Mayor Eric Garcetti, have come out against the measure, and the Los Angeles Times followed suit just a few days ago. I’m not going to rehash arguments for or against the measure.  Instead, I’m going to offer several warnings based on the experience of Davis, CA, which passed its own Ballot Box Zoning Measure in 2000.   Measure J, our ballot box zoning measure, requires voter approval on any attempt to change the zoning designation of open space or agricultural land that sits on the community’s edges.  The law also explicitly names two particular parcels that must be voted on prior to approval.  So for the purposes of this piece, consider it a ballot box zoning law targeting sprawl. Warning 1: These Measures Are Hard To Roll Back Measure J passed in Davis with just 53.6% percent of the vote in a March primary when residents cast just 19,000 votes (in a city with at least 49,000 voting-age residents).  The law contained a renewal clause, and when it came up for renewal in 2010, support jumped to 76.7% percent.   This increased support may be an artifact of how the opposition attempted to stall the measure’s renewal.  Opponents of the renewal made a NIMBY argument the centerpiece of their case: they argued that slowing growth at the edge of town meant more infill pressure in the city’s core, threatening the character of neighborhoods.  As I’ll discuss in a […]

World City Profiles: Ancient Rome Really Knew How To City

I’ve been enjoying the series Meet the Romans, and episode 2 really revealed what I love about many ancient Roman cities.  I’ve been to quite a few, though often without knowing beforehand that they were ancient Roman cities.  These include cities like Dubrovnik, Split, La Spezia, Florence, Istanbul, Budapest, and yes, Rome.  The attributes I’ve come to love include: 1. very narrow streets, often not accommodating cars 2. countless 4- to 6-story buildings with a variety of units, from cheap tiny units to large family units with courtyards 3. built into the 1st floor of these buildings are tiny shops – everything from restaurants to banks to bakeries 4. in ancient Rome most housing units weren’t used for much more than sleeping – living was done in the city. You often didn’t have a kitchen, laundry facilities, or even a bathroom. The host Mary Beard tells about the horrors of these things (barely enough room to lie down, the danger of dark small alleys), but I think in a modern world they’d be wonderful (ok, keep private bathrooms). Walk to your job, spend time in a vast variety of restaurants or pubs, experience the feeling of a busy narrow street, chat with neighbors at a public park, and take your kids to relax and play at the public bath or let them play in a public square while you grab a cappuccino. This is heaven to me. The only reason most modern cities aren’t like this is because we force them not to be. We require minimum space for all housing types, design our streets for cars instead of people, limit the height of buildings in most places, and separate our retail from our living zones. The effect is to push the less-rich outward, separate us from other people, and […]

Market Urbanism MUsings February 10, 2017

1. Announcement Michael Lewyn, a UPenn legal scholar and MU contributor, just wrote a book about our concept:  “Government Intervention and Suburban Sprawl: The Case for Market Urbanism.” More info at Amazon. 2. This week at Market Urbanism: Only In California: Twisting an Anti-Exclusionary Law To Rationalize Exclusion by California Palms Exclusionary zoning is the use of zoning to price people out of a community. The classic example is minimum lot sizes or minimum unit sizes: cities only zone parcels big enough to ensure low-income families cannot afford the housing. 3. Where’s Scott? Scott Beyer completed another week in the San Francisco Bay Area, and this weekend will take a detour to Sacramento and other parts of California’s agricultural central area. 4. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group Borna Khoshand is “curious to hear your thoughts on the “mansionization” of city neighborhoods.” (citing Chicago‘s Lincoln Park) Christopher Ard asks,”So, what are your real thoughts on Market Urbanism in a place like New Orleans where historic preservation is a large part of our economy?” Adam Millsap wrote: Economic policies and institutions matter John Morris discusses Japan‘s housing prices Jeff Andrade-Fong has news from the Bay Area Front: “TL;DR: We routed a bunch of NIMBYs at PlannComm. A major project moved closer to full approval. And we should remember that good things can happen if we work for them.” John Morris posits a general question/theory, “my guess is that given the dramatic increase in living space per person, many neighborhoods have to increase building heights, just to sustain current density levels.” via Krishan Madan, ‘Meandering, navel gazing piece that boils down to “I don’t understand filtering”‘: How to Be a Housing Ally (Or, Why I’m Not a YIMBY) via Matt Robare: When Do Renters Behave Like Homeowners? High Rent, Price Anxiety, and NIMBYism via Jaap Weel: Housing […]

My New Book On Market Urbanism

I am happy to announce that my new book “Government Intervention and Suburban Sprawl: The Case for Market Urbanism” is now available at Amazon.  There is a “look inside the book” feature at the book’s Amazon webpage for those who would like to know more. I would like to thank not just the readers of this blog who commented on drafts, but also on those of you who helped me refine my thinking by commenting on blog posts.

Only In California: Twisting an Anti-Exclusionary Law To Rationalize Exclusion

As a Market Urbanism reader, you are hopefully fluent in the problems of exclusionary zoning.  If you’re new to the term, there are some good pieces on the topic here and here.  Basically: exclusionary zoning is the use of zoning to price people out of a community.  The classic example is minimum lot sizes or minimum unit sizes: cities only zone parcels big enough to ensure low-income families cannot afford the housing.  When subsidies for affordable housing require specific unit attributes, like reduced parking ratios, a community can simply require parking ratios above that threshold (although states can move swiftly to stamp out such practices). States have also responded to exclusionary zoning practices with a wide array of policy interventions known collectively as “anti-snob laws.”  One key component of California’s anti-exclusionary efforts is called the Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA).  The law requires each jurisdiction in the state to produce a Land Inventory (or Adequate Sites Inventory, or Sites Inventory, or Buildable Land  Inventory) that demonstrates the jurisdiction possesses space to accommodate anticipated housing needs at adequate densities.  Read “adequate densities” as dense enough to produce affordable units. Scott Wiener, the state senator representing San Francisco, is pushing to give the RHNA some real teeth. The most contentious component of the process is the definition of “need” for each jurisdiction.  The state calculates anticipated need based on population and jobs projections for each region.  Regional councils of government (COGs) are then empowered to distribute the regional need to each jurisdiction within that region.  Need is quantified in terms of units, and these needed units are further categorized into four groups: units affordable to Very Low Income, Low Income, Moderate Income, and Above Moderate Income households. Regional agencies had some flexibility in making these allocations in the past.  Thanks to SB 375, which passed in […]

Market Urbanism MUsings February 3, 2017

  1. Announcement Market Urbanism and the Foundation for Economics Education are partnering on a special 6-session track focused on Market Urbanism at this Summer’s conference in Atlanta. Mark your calendars for June 15-18 (we are also going to try to plan some gatherings separate from the FEE itinerary on Sunday, the 18th). Here’s the description on FEE’s website: Wherever you live, your city uses archaic regulations to restrict what can be built, and for what purposes buildings can be used. The Urbanism, Development, and Your Neighborhood track is a joint effort by Market Urbanism and FEE to shed some light on the vast spectrum of land use and transportation regulations that suck the vibrancy out of neighborhoods, cause traffic congestion, and constrain housing supply to the point we have an affordable housing crisis in cities across the world. This track provides you with the intellectual tools you’ll need to make a case for liberty in your own backyard and bring liberty to your streets. 2. This week at Market Urbanism: New contributor “California Palms“–who is using a pen name to avoid any workplace drama from Nimbys in his home city–authored his first piece When NIMBYs Use Renters’ Health To Stop Rental Housing Stay tuned, as Davis-style development laws are starting to appear on the ballots of big cities like Los Angeles, which will vote on Measure S (or the “neighborhood integrity initiative”) in March. I want to make sure you see exactly how much more difficult your community’s land use politics will become if you mistakenly go the Davis way. Michael Hamilton How to finance a sanctuary city Many cities will maintain their sanctuary status, since a large percentage of their workforce and entrepreneurial base are undocumented….Assuming that this decision robs sanctuary cities of federal funding, liberalizing land-use regulation and selling city-owned property […]

The Land Value Argument Against New Housing

One common argument against new housing is that permitting it causes land to become more valuable, thus leading to higher rather than lower rents.  It seems to me that this argument is unpersuasive for a few reasons. First, if it was true, places with permissive zoning would have higher rents rather than lower rents, as the possibility of building would cause land values to explode.  Obviously this is not the case. Second, the argument leads to absurd results.  If downzoning reduces land values, obviously the best way to ensure low rents is to prohibit as much housing as possible.  Perhaps we could prohibit all housing not on five-acre lots.  But suburbs with large-lot zoning tend to be pretty expensive, suggesting that such policies are more likely to increase property prices than to lower them. Third, the argument suggests that land costs are the primary determinant of rents.  But in fact, land values are much more volatile.  The Lincoln Institute has created a database of land value data, and shows huge swings in land prices.  For example, in the New York City metro area, the land price (apparently per house) swung from $99,000 in 1996 to just over $433,000 in 2006, down to under $225,000 in 2012, and up to about $250,000 today.  It goes without saying that rents and housing prices follow very different patterns.

When NIMBYs Use Renters’ Health To Stop Rental Housing

Davis, CA, is a small college town a twenty minutes’ drive outside of Sacramento (on a good day).  It has a vacancy rate on par with Manhattan despite being surrounded by flat, developable farmland.  Some critics attribute this absurd vacancy rate to Measure R, a ballot initiative approved by Davis residents in 2000 that requires a public vote on any peripheral development.  Since it’s passage, three developments went up for a vote, and all of them failed. The group that defends Measure R is known as the “Citizens for Responsible Planning” or CRP.  Throughout various development battles, CRP has strategically utilized air quality concerns to push new development further away from existing neighborhoods. They opposed the most recent Measure R development, Nishi Gateway, because toxic air quality made the site virtually uninhabitable, at least in their minds! In fairness: the site is sandwiched between railroad tracks and a major highway, Interstate 80.  So it’s a real concern. But fast-forward just six months later, and CRP is demanding the University of California, Davis, the area’s largest employer, dramatically expand its on-campus housing options for students, staff, and faculty.  In an effort to appear proactive, they produce a map of optimal sites to locate student housing on the UC Davis Campus.  One of the sites they select is adjacent to the Nishi parcel they so aggressively opposed development on just six months earlier.  Another parcel they suggest building housing on is also sandwiched between the same railroad tracks and highway that Nishi sat between, but just a couple miles further south (and further from existing neighborhoods).  You can see all of this in a map provided below, where the Nishi site they killed at the ballot is marked in red and the sites they claim to support student housing on are colored in blue: […]

The Sheer Craziness Of New York City’s Rent Stabilization Mandates

Recently, I met someone who was trapped in a terrible apartment.  Why “trapped”?  For months (if not years) she had been in an adversarial relationship with both her landlord and her neighbors, but she can’t quite bring herself to leave.  Why not? First, she is in a rent-stabilized apartment, and is afraid to give that up because such units are hard to find.  Second, because of rent stabilization, she had made the sort of capital investments in her apartment–such as repairs–that are normally made by landlords, but neglected when they are overseeing these price controlled units. By contrast, in a normal city, my friend’s dysfunctional relationship with her apartment would have ended long ago: either the landlord would have evicted her (something very difficult in New York), or she would have moved to someplace less atrocious.

How To Finance A Sanctuary City

President Trump has threatened to withhold all federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities–municipal governments that do not enlist their police departments in the president’s mass deportation plan. If he makes good on his threat, cities that insist on maintaining their sanctuary status can offset revenue losses with two policies: liberalizing land-use regulation and depoliticizing public land sales. It’s unclear exactly how much money each city would lose by maintaining its sanctuary status, but New York City, to name one example, relies on federal funding for 10% of its budget, according to state comptroller estimates. A sudden drop of that magnitude would devastate many jurisdictions, and Miami-Dade County has already caved. However, a handful of cities with high rents and very restrictive land-use regulations could dramatically increase property tax revenue and the value of city-owned real estate through liberalization. Millions of Americans would love to live in cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, San Jose, Austin, Portland, and Denver, but legal restrictions on what can be built limit the number of housing units available and increase the cost of each unit. Some estimates have found that regulation alone accounts for fifty percent of the cost of housing in San Francisco. At the same time, land-use regulation has the opposite effect on the price of land itself. A plot of land with limited legal potential for development is worth much less than a plot a developer could use to build a large, lucrative building. Economist Keith Ihlanfeldt has found that the decrease in land values more than offsets the increase in home prices—meaning some cities are decreasing potential revenues by restricting development. San Francisco has large neighborhoods of single-family homes where rent levels would sustain large apartment towers. The drastic mismatch between what is currently allowed and what consumers demand suggests that land values would skyrocket if restrictions were relaxed. […]

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