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4 Things Austin’s City Council Could Do Today To Fight The Housing Shortage

Central Austin needs more housing. Prices have been rising, more and more people want to live where they have short commutes, but are only able to afford homes near the periphery. We have a long-term plan to alter our land development code in a way that would help…but our need is now. What options are available today? END PARKING REQUIREMENTS IN WEST CAMPUS Every year, West Campus adds more and more dense student housing, and, along with it, pedestrian amenities like wide sidewalks and street trees. A parking benefit district meters on-street parking with proceeds plowed back into neighborhood improvements. Surveys have shown the vast majority of West Campus students get around without cars. Allowing housing for students without parking could allow denser housing, lower construction costs, or allow more creative buildings that take advantage of unique lots. Removing minimum parking rules has already resulted in a few buildings downtown targeting markets that either don’t need cars or have other places to park them; this could be even more true in student-rich West Campus. REDUCE PARKING REQUIREMENTS NEAR TRANSIT ROUTES The same logic of reducing parking requirements applies outside the student market to apartments near transit routes. More and more people in Austin want to live car-free or car-light. That is easiest to do in buildings created with that lifestyle in mind–a step that can both reduce construction costs and allow room for improving other amenities. Long-term, if Austin wants to be a sustainable city, parking-free typologies should be allowed everywhere. However, in much of Austin, we wrongly treat scarce on-street parking as an endless “commons” rather than managing it as a scarce resource. This means that it may be wiser to improve incrementally–reducing off-street parking requirements, improving on-street parking management, and improving transportation options. IMPLEMENT THE DOWNTOWN AUSTIN PLAN New high-rise towers are being constructed in downtown Austin all the time–but downtown is more than just the Central Business District. […]

Market Urbanism MUsings September 30, 2016

  1. This week at Market Urbanism: Joel Kotkin’s New Book Lays Out His Sprawling Vision For America by Michael Lewyn So if I interpret his book correctly, it seems that there is nothing libertarian about Kotkin’s views: he wants strong local governments that keep new housing out of cities but allows it in undeveloped exurbs where it belongs. NIMBYism As An Argument Against Urbanism by Michael Lewyn [Kotkin] cites numerous examples of NIMBYism in wealthy city neighborhoods, and suggests that these examples rebut “the largely unsupported notion that ever more people want to move ‘back to the city’.” This argument is nonsense for two reasons. The Demand Curve For Sprawl Slopes Downward by Sandy Ikeda There has been a lot of Internet chatter lately about what libertarians ought to think about urban sprawl and its causes, including pieces by Kevin Carson, Austin Bramwell, Randal O’Toole, and Matthew Yglesias. The title of Ben Adler’s post basically sums it up: “If You Love the Free Market, You Should Hate Mandated Suburban Sprawl.” Econ 101 And The Missing Middle by Chris Bradford Some cities build more single-family than multi-family. Some build more multi-family than single-family. But the fourplex is dead. We build very little small-scale multi-family these days, which is why the “missing middle” is a focus of zoning code rewrites and a meme among the New Urbanist crowd. You’re an Urbanist? Excellent. Why Aren’t You a Developer Yet? by R John Anderson This question becomes a bit more pointed when you recognize that many conventional developers are doing work in urban settings under duress or without much of a clue about how to make their efforts fit an urban context. I think the typical generalist/urbanist will do a better job than whatever big development outfits are working in their city. 2. […]

You’re an Urbanist? Excellent. Why Aren’t You a Developer Yet?

  I continue to ask urbanists “why aren’t you a developer yet?” That’s a sincere and serious question. I want to recruit architects, planners, engineers and activists who consider themselves urbanists (new or otherwise) into the ranks of the small developer cohort, because I think it is the best way for urbanists to have an impact on places they care about. If you have devoted thousand of hours of study and practice to what makes a good place, why leave the construction and renovation of buildings to developers? This question becomes a bit more pointed when you recognize that many conventional developers are doing work in urban settings under duress or without much of a clue about how to make their efforts fit an urban context.  I think the typical generalist/urbanist will do a better job than whatever big development outfits are working in their city. While urbanists are working to heal the city or build better places, they should hang onto some of the buildings that get built/rebuilt along the way.  Having a modest portfolio of buildings that pay rent will help them weather the next recession. (It is really hard to make a living doing fee for service or consulting work when nothing is getting built). With those reasons in mind, we still need to have a sober and realistic grasp of what is involved for someone to become a developer, given the arena they will likely operate in.  This stuff ain’t easy. People tend to think that all real estate developers make tons of money, because some developers have.  For every major league star in the real estate game there are scores of people hustling to make a living by making their neighborhood better. I don’t know how people arrive at the amount of money they assume is made on […]

Joel Kotkin’s New Book Lays Out His Sprawling Vision For America

Also read my other post about Kotkin’s book:  NIMBYism as an Argument Against Urbanism Traditionally, defenders of suburban sprawl have been skittish about proclaiming that government should promote sprawl and halt infill development.  Instead, they have taken a libertarian tack, arguing that government should allow any kind of development while asserting that a level playing field would favor automobile-dependent suburbia. But in his new book The Human City, Joel Kotkin, who, among many other titles, is the executive director of a pro-sprawl organization called the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, appears to take a different view.  Like more libertarian defenders of the status quo, he generally opposes attempts to limit new suburban development.  But he also writes that both city residents and suburbanites aggressively resist “densification”- that is, when nearby landowners want to build new housing or offices.  For example, he writes that Los Angeles neighborhood activists “have rallied against attempts to build denser buildings, which generate more congestion and erode both the area’s livability and its distinct urban identity.”  Similarly, he writes that some New Yorkers opposed “Mayor Bloomberg’s attempts to further densify already congested Midtown.”  But Kotkin never suggests that turning a cornfield into a subdivision creates congestion, or that doing so would erode an area’s “distinct rural identity.” He also doesn’t seem to think that new housing belongs in existing suburbs: in describing zoning that prohibits such housing, he writes that “suburbs generally can be expected to, for the most part, resist high degrees of densification”, including “attempts by planners to impose strict regulations on construction and impose higher densities”.  This language implies (erroneously) that “densification” is something imposed by a distant government, rather than by landowners who want to build places for people to live. So if I interpret his book correctly, it seems that there is nothing libertarian […]

Econ 101 And The Missing Middle

HUD has released 2015 building permit tallies. Austin’s tallies for 2015: Single Family Units: 2,846 Duplex units: 326 Units in 3-4 unit buildings: 30 Units in 5+ unit buildings: 6,890 This bipolar split is typical of American cities. Some cities build more single-family than multi-family. Some build more multi-family than single-family. But the fourplex is dead. We build very little small-scale multi-family these days, which is why the “missing middle” is a focus of zoning code rewrites and a meme among the New Urbanist crowd. Although “missing middle” housing could easily be added to established single-family neighborhoods while preserving “neighborhood character,” it is mostly illegal in Austin and most other American cities, at least within the single-family districts, and it is often staunchly resisted by homeowners in older neighborhoods, where the form of housing makes most sense. Some homeowners, in fact, seem to dislike “missing middle” housing more than any other kind of housing. It is worth thinking about why. It is useful to first think about building technologies.  After manufactured housing, the simplest, cheapest housing technology is the low-rise, wood-frame construction used in  detached single-family homes. Small apartment buildings can be built using essentially the same techniques. Most large suburban apartment projects, in fact, are developed as a cluster of two-three story buildings containing 8-12 units each. These buildings would actually form nice low-rise, urban neighborhoods if they were arranged around a public street grid, but instead they are arranged around parking lots, private drives and landscaped common areas in garden-style developments. The next step up from low-rise, wood-frame technology is the mid-rise apartment building of four to seven stories. This type of development requires elevators (and thus a concrete elevator core) and usually consists of “stick and brick” construction over a concrete podium. It is at least twice as expensive per square foot as similar quality single-family housing — more if it includes structured […]

The Demand Curve For Sprawl Slopes Downward

Suburbs have been around for as long as there have been urbs – cities, that is – a fact Robert Bruegmann reminds us of in his excellent book Sprawl.  And as sociologist Max Weber in The City and historian Henri Pirenne in Medieval Cities remind us, it’s often in the younger, freer suburbs rather than the older, more-conservative central city where entrepreneurial energy is unleashed. The difference today perhaps is that the epithet “sprawl” has been attached to this sort of outward, penumbral development, which, especially in the United States, has taken place very rapidly since World War II.  Stripping it of its negative connotations, Bruegmann defines sprawl as “low density, scattered, urban development without systematic large-scale or regional public land-use planning.” A Sprawling Debate There has been a lot of Internet chatter lately about what libertarians ought to think about urban sprawl and its causes, including pieces by Kevin Carson, Austin Bramwell, Randal O’Toole, and Matthew Yglesias.  The title of Ben Adler’s post basically sums it up: “If You Love the Free Market, You Should Hate Mandated Suburban Sprawl.” All seems to be centered on O’Toole’s recent comments on John Stossel’s program on Fox Business, which evidently defended urban sprawl against advocates of so-called “Smart Growth,” government policies intended to combat sprawl and its alleged bad consequences.  I have not yet seen the show myself, so I’m really just responding here to the interesting reactions it has provoked.  (I will perhaps explore the issue of whether sprawl is a good thing or a bad thing in another column.) On the one side are those, such as O’Toole, who hold that suburban sprawl is chiefly a free-market phenomenon and therefore an expression of consumer demand, and on the other are those, such as Yglesias and myself, who look at the […]

NIMBYism as an Argument Against Urbanism

In his new book The Human City, Joel Kotkin tries to use NIMBYism as an argument against urbanism.  He cites numerous examples of NIMBYism in wealthy city neighborhoods, and suggests that these examples rebut “the largely unsupported notion that ever more people want to move ‘back to the city’.” This argument is nonsense for two reasons. First, the NIMBYs themselves clearly want city life and a certain level of density–otherwise they would have moved to suburbia.  In cities like Los Angeles and New York, a wide range of housing choices exist for those who can afford them. Second, the fact that some people want to prohibit new housing does not show that there is no demand for new housing.  To draw an analogy: the War on Drugs prohibits many drugs.  Does that mean that there is no demand for drugs?  Of course not.  If anything, it proves that there is lots of demand for drugs; otherwise government would not bother to prohibit it. For my more in-depth review of The Human City, read:  Joel Kotkin’s New Book Lays Out His Sprawling Vision For America

Market Urbanism MUsings September 23, 2016

  1. This week at Market Urbanism: How Houston Regulates Land Use by Nolan Gray Since there seems to be a lot of confusion about land-use regulation and planning in Houston, here’s a quick explainer on what Houston does regulate, doesn’t regulate, and how private covenants shape the city. Urban Design and Social Complexity by Sandy Ikeda A planner can’t build an entire city (or neighborhood even) because she can’t begin to design and construct the necessary diversity and social intricacy that happens spontaneously in a living city. And I don’t think she should even try to because it can irreparably damage, even kill, the living flesh of a city. Episode 3 of the Market Urbanism podcast with Nolan Gray:  Sanford Ikeda on Jane Jacobs My guest this week is Sanford Ikeda, a professor of economics at SUNY Purchase and a visiting scholar at New York University. He has written extensively on urban economics, policy, and planning. Parking In A DC Bike Lane Is Extremely Cost-effective For Drivers by Jim Pagels This extreme lack of parking enforcement jives with my biking experience, during which I routinely have to dangerously swerve, often abruptly, out of the bike lane into car lane traffic due to a car or truck in the bike lane. 2. Where’s Scott? Scott Beyer spent his 3rd week in Phoenix. His Forbes article this week is about how San Francisco’s Bureaucracy, Unions Stifle Modular Housing For Homeless [Unions] oppose Kennedy’s lego housing project because the container units wouldn’t get built in America, and because his simplified construction process doesn’t conform to the local building code. This code…is favored by unions because it increases the time and costs involved in construction, meaning more work for them. 3. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Laura Foote Clark invites us to the YIMBY […]

Parking In A DC Bike Lane Is Extremely Cost-effective, For Drivers

This month, the Washington Area Bicyclist Association (WABA) published an analysis citing traffic ticket data to illustrate the following point: Of the 723,237 parking tickets issued in this 5 month period, only 2,420 were for parking in bike lanes. That’s about 3 out of every 1,000 tickets. That comes to about 16 tickets per day, spread over more than 70 miles of bike lanes, or one ticket per day for every 4.5 miles of bike lane. This extreme lack of parking enforcement jives with my biking experience, during which I routinely have to dangerously swerve, often abruptly, out of the bike lane into car lane traffic due to a car or truck in the bike lane. I wanted to answer, though: What percentage of bike lane parking violators do DC police actually ticket? Let’s use my anecdotal experience to make some simple back-of-the-envelope calculations. There are 70 miles of DC bike lanes that function 24 hours a day. This comes out to a total of (70 miles) * (24 hours) * (60 minutes / hour) = 100,800 bike lane mile-minutes per day. Here are two measures based on anecdotal evidence: Observed area: My commute to work each day, 95% of which is in bike lanes, takes roughly 10 minutes each way, meaning I experience: ((10 minutes) * (1 mile) * (2 daily trips ) * (95% of trip in bike lanes)) / 100,800 total bike lane mile-minutes = 0.01885% of all DC bike lane mile-minutes per day. Violations: On my commute, I see on average 5 parking lane violations each way for a total of 10 daily violations. These infractions come in many shapes, most often: cars waiting outside a building or sitting idle in traffic, trucks or vans parked while making deliveries, or buses forced to cut across the bike […]

Episode 03: Sanford Ikeda on Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs

  My guest this week is Sanford Ikeda, a professor of economics at SUNY Purchase and a visiting scholar at New York University. He has written extensively on urban economics, policy, and planning. Professor Ikeda introduced me to urban economics and urban planning when he gave a presentation on Jane Jacobs at a FEE summer seminar that I attended back in 2012. Here are a few of the topics we discussed in the episode: If you haven’t already, I highly suggest reading Jane Jacobs. The natural place to start is The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her other books, including The Economy of Cities and Systems of Survival, explore topics ranging from economics to political philosophy. Professor Ikeda has written extensively on Jane Jacobs. You can read a nice overview here. If you would like to read more, click here for a paper he wrote on F.A. Hayek, Jane Jacobs, and the importance of local knowledge in cities. He is also a regular contributor to Freeman and Market Urbanism. We also discussed William H. Whyte’s famous documentary on public space, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. It’s well worth checking out. Help spread the word! If you are enjoying the podcast, please subscribe and rate us on your favorite podcasting platform. Find us on iTunes, PlayerFM, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, and Soundcloud. Our theme music is “Origami” by Graham Bole, hosted on the Free Music Archive.

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