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Campaign season is over links

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 […]

Fields of Dreams in Tysons Corner

Earlier this week Cap’n Transit wrote about Tysons Corner in the context of the Silver Line TIFIA loan application and Tysons’ Smart Growth redevelopment. This development plan is something I am quite familiar with as it was the subject of my MA thesis, and his post brought to mind some of the weird issues in the plan. I am skeptical of Smart Growth generally, and the Tysons plan exemplifies some of the problems that are common to grand Smart Growth redevelopment plans. In an effort to win the support of all progressive causes, Smart Growth plans sometimes encompass many competing objectives. For example, a Smart Growth agenda may advocate increased density while simultaneously championing historic preservation and open space without acknowledging that these goals are opposed. Because of the emphasis on top-down planning inherent in Smart Growth, prices do no reconcile these competing goods. In the Tysons plan, this planning and consensus building somehow came to include strong support for emphasizing athletic fields. Developers who build in Tysons are required to either provide fields or pay into a fund to support fields on public land. I think that the support for athletic fields comes from the popularity of intramural sports on the National Mall where 20-somethings play sports in think tank or Hill staff leagues after work. Maybe Fairfax planners think that providing athletic space will lure young adults to the suburbs. This issue has gotten so much attention that residents outside of the Tysons area have even started lobbying for fields in Tysons to avoid the traffic of young Tysons residents driving to other parts of the county to find sports fields. The plan calls for 20 new fields of two-to-three acres each for a projected population increase from 17,000 to 100,000. From a pedestrian perspective, dedicated sports fields in Tysons will create long expansions of […]

A message to journalists and academics from George Haikalis

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.

A Moral Case for More Immigration

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 […]

The Renewed Debate on Inclusionary Zoning

Stephen Smith and I co-wrote this post. In case you haven’t been following Stephen elsewhere, he’s also been writing at The Atlantic Cities and Bloomberg View.   This year, some of the first apartments and condos subject to inclusionary zoning laws in DC are hitting the market, stoking debate over development laws that the city adopted in 2007. The inclusionary zoning requirement is currently stalling the city’s West End Library renovation with Ralph Nader leading efforts to include an affordable housing aspect with the library project. Inclusionary zoning advocates often base their support on the desirability of mixed-income neighborhoods, while challengers argue that inclusionary zoning is an inefficient way to deliver housing with unintended consequences. Heather Schwartz, who studies education and housing policies at the RAND Institute, says that one important feature of this policy tool is that it gives low-income families access to high-income neighborhoods while at the same time limiting the number of low-income residents in a neighborhood. She said, “Since IZ is a place-based strategy that tends to only apply to high-cost housing markets, it can offer access to lower-poverty places than housing vouchers and other forms of subsidized housing have historically done.” David Alpert, editor-in-chief of Greater Greater Washington, a local urban planning blog, offers another argument in favor of inclusionary zoning, “a policy that builds support for both greater density and affordable housing,” he said in an email. “Much of the opposition to greater density involves a feeling that it is just a ‘giveaway’ to developers who make the profit and impose some collateral burden on a neighborhood, but many people are more supportive of the density if it serves an affordable housing goal.” While inclusionary zoning proponents may see its ability to introduce just a few low-income residents to a higher income neighborhood as an […]

From the experts on charter cities

After my post on charter cities, I received some interesting feedback from Michael Strong, CEO of MGK Group, the company investing in Honduras’ charter cities and Brandon Fuller, a Research Scholar at NYU’s Urbanization Project. The Urbanization Project is headed by Paul Romer who is no longer involved with the Honduras effort. Both stressed that their visions of charter cities do not rely on heavy-handed urban planning or much initial infrastructure. Brandon, speaking from his own perspective rather than on behalf of the Urbanization Project, said that he views the role of charter city investors as building arterial roads and providing some open space. The charter city government would not set any parking requirements or height limits, so the market would drive urban form at the block level. He writes: For planning, we favor a decidedly light touch approach. Our thoughts on planning are influenced by our colleague Solly Angel, an adjunct at NYU and one of our principal researchers at the Urbanization Project. Michael explained that the charter cities where MGK is investing will draw more from LEAP zones than from Romer’s charter city model. One important distinction is that MGK is purchasing land where these zones will be located whereas Romer suggests charter cities should be built on land donated by the host country. He writes: The Honduran government is not designating a specific location for us.  The current proposal is for them to designate fairly large regions within which we can identify specific parcels and sub-regions that are most appropriate for getting started. While Brandon might support a larger role for city leadership in building a street grid than Michael does, both made clear that urban development should fall to entrepreneurs rather than charter cities’ initial investors or governments. Both envision that a change in the rules governing the sites of charter cities […]

Opportunity for States to Protect Land Use

If this season’s political campaign rhetoric has demonstrated anything, it’s that governors love to take credit for job creation. What I haven’t seen any governor mention, though, is that there is huge opportunity for economic growth in relaxing zoning codes. Most obviously, allowing new opportunities for infill development will create construction jobs. More significantly though, in the long run, cities allow for faster economic growth (and job growth) than other locations. The regulations that prevent cities from growing keep economic progress below what it otherwise would be. While researchers disagree over whether population density or total population is the variable that is most significantly correlated with economic growth, either way zoning plays an important role in holding back job growth, providing policymakers who are willing to deregulate with opportunities to improve their competitive standings next to other cities. Political incentives stand in the way of this growth opportunity, however. Most zoning restrictions benefit a city’s current residents at the expense of potential residents. For example, minimum lot size requirements serve to raise the price of homes, preventing low-income people from moving into neighborhoods that current residents wish to keep exclusive. By changing this current order, policymakers risk losing the support of their homeowning constituents, and interest likely to be better organized than renters and potential city residents. Limitations on housing supply raise the value of existing homes, artificially raising the value of residents’ assets, which homeowners strongly fight to protect. At the local level, policymakers are therefore incentivized to privilege homeowners’ interests at the expense of broad economic growth. At the state level however, the incentives may be different, such that economic growth may benefit state policymakers more than protecting home values. State policymakers have constituents who live in a wide variety of municipalities, some where land use restrictions are less binding in […]

Urban Development in Charter Cities

In light of approval in Honduras for three new charter cities (REDs), much has been written recently on their potential to improve economic development. Economist Paul Romer makes a compelling case for the potential of charter cities, asserting that countries with institutions that impede economic growth can benefit by designating small areas with rules that permit free trade. Despite the promise of REDs, designating new areas for urban economic zones may pose some challenges that haven’t been addressed elsewhere. Cities almost always grow through spontaneous orders in locations that emerge through human migration. Cities are a product of human action, not of human design. Older cities grew through their accessibility to trade and natural resources. More recently, towns have become cities as they have become centers for specific industries. This process happens not with top-down planning, but rather as the market process leads individuals to move to specific places, resulting in the urbanization patterns that we see. In the case of Honduras’ REDs, however, the locations were selected by the state. Unlike the approved sites for REDs in Honduras, Hong Kong and Singapore (models of charter cities) were not greenfields before they became charter cities. Since becoming models of charter cities, both islands’ populations have exploded, but some level of development existed before British rule, and the British did not set out to create large cities. Rather than being planned, the success of these two islands was an accident, in which good institutions in fortunate locations have facilitated enormous economic growth. In contrast, all of the infrastructure and design for the REDs will be built from scratch, at first by one company, MKG, until other investors and individuals move to the city. In a sense, city construction may have to begin before there is demand for it. MKG has pledged $15 million […]

David Gunn on Amtrak’s $151bn NEC plan and how he rebuilt the Harrisburg line

First order of business: I wrote two articles for Bloomberg View (the opinion counterpart to Bloomberg News) on the high cost of US transit – one on private-sector gouging, and one on public-sector gouging. Secondly, I’ve been talking to former Amtrak president David Gunn a lot recently – at first for the labor piece I just linked to, but the conversation has veered into other topics. (If you have any burning questions you’d like answered, leave them in the comments.) The other day I got around to asking him what he thought about Amtrak’s $151 billion proposal for the Northeast Corridor and the $7 billion Union Station plan. His verdict? “It’s all a fuckin’ pipe dream.” His response was basically that big, flashy plans never work out, and that the only way to get things done at Amtrak is to do them under the radar. He used the rebuilding Amtrak’s Harrisburg line from Philadelphia to Harrisburg as an example. The Harrisburg line (the eastern half of Pennsylvania’s original Main Line) is the most important stretch of tracks that Amtrak actually owns after the Northeast Corridor, so I think there’s a lot to be learned  Corridor itself. Here is my transcription of what he said about rebuilding the Harrisburg line. Most parts are verbatim, but there are a few sentences that I wrote from memory, and a few things that I probably missed. The Harrisburg line was a wreck. From Paoli on in [towards Philadelphia – i.e., SEPTA’s most important regional rail line], it was a bad 60 mph railroad, and from Paoli to Harrisburg it was a bad 70-80 mph railroad. The signals were ancient, the track was rough, trees were brushing up against the cars, weeds were growing on the ballast. I rode the line with a fellow who’s got a private car, and we […]

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Centrally Planned City

On my last post about Ayn Rand’s views on cities, I received feedback in the comments that obviously she loved cities and on Twitter that obviously she did not. I think I come down on the side that she likely saw cities, and particularly skyscrapers, as embodiment of human achievement. However Frank Lloyd Wright — the likely inspiration for her character Howard Roark in The Fountainhead — strongly opposed population density both for his architectural preference and from a public policy angle. Wright called his urban development vision Broadacres because he thought that population density should be less than one person per acre. In part this may have stemmed from Wright’s practice of organic architecture. Many of the tenets of organic architecture, such as designing buildings with their users’ needs as the foremost priority, can be practiced as well in dense development as in houses like his most famous Fallingwater. However, Wright seemed to draw particular inspiration from designing buildings in greenfield locations, inspired by the natural landscape. This is all well and good for those who want to live far from cities. However, Wright went on to argue that density of people and buildings is not merely an issue of preference, but one of democracy. He argued that city life restricted individuals’ freedom of movement, and that skyscrapers limited individualism by increasing congestion and “keeping concentration where it is,” as if working or living in a skyscraper was like being in prison rather than a voluntary activity. Like many who have argued against building density because it increases congestion, Wright downplayed the necessary traffic congestion that occurs when land use restrictions require people to live far from their workplaces. Wright saw Broadacres as the anthithesis of Corbusian design, but both share a focus on green space and both would rely on heavy-handed planning, making them unlikely to […]

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