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Ayn Rand on Urbanism

Ayn Rand’s recent appearances in the news made me think about her position on urban issues. Some of her novels suggest that she is anti-city, believing that individualism can only be achieved by living in remote areas. In Anthem, for example, her protagonist lives in a type of dorm where people are never allowed to be alone. He achieves the freedom that he couldn’t realize in this totalitarian society by escaping to an isolated home in the woods. Likewise, her description of Galt’s Gulch, the mountain utopia in Atlas Shrugged for productive capitalists, is based on Ouray, Colorado. Ouray is a beautiful town in a beautiful part of the country, but its built landscape notably shares little in common with the urban areas where her villains live. While her Galt’s Gulch description is clearly fanciful, I think it is important to note that the characters would not have been able to support themselves in a small market with the specialties they chose before dropping out of society. Galt himself is an electrical engineer, and other residents of the Gulch include a railroad manager, a metallurgist, and a famous actress. Since the Gulch does not engage in trade with the outside world, those living in the Gulch would not be trading in a market nearly large enough to be specializing in their chosen professions. In The Gated City, Ryan Avent provides an excellent description of the specialization that is only possible within large cities. Going  back to the Ouray example, this small mountain town provides opportunities for a certain type of specialization, such as spa manager or ice climbing guide, but this is only because tourists visiting the area have the requisite standard of living to visit resort towns. Since the division of labor is limited by the size of the market, the division of labor within Galt’s […]

Selling the Rights to Greater Density

At Next American City, Mark Bergen has an interesting long-form piece on municipal infrastructure financing. He argues that the property owners who benefit from public policies, such as infrastructure investment, should be required to fund these policies. He suggests infrastructure improvements should be paid for with Tax Increment Finance or value capture (PDF). I don’t necessarily agree with his infrastructure funding prescriptions, and may take these up in a future post. What I found even more interesting, though, is his suggestion that developers should pay for zoning changes. The basis for this proposal comes from the Georgist land tax. Because in urban settings, land’s value largely comes from the amenities surrounding it, landowners do not have the exclusive rights to this value, according to Henry George. The suggestion that developers should pay for the rights to build on the land they own is based, Mark explains, on a policy from São Paulo, called Certificates of Additional Construction Potential (CEPAC). These bonds, representing rights to build, are transferable and are publicly traded. He quotes Gregory K. Ingram of Lincoln Institute of Land Policy: “They’re essentially selling zoning changes,” explained Ingram. Crucially, the building fees have not eaten away at developers’ profits. By some accounts, the rates of return for real estate in the districts increase. […] The notes, sold by municipalities, are one of the world’s most innovative public financing techniques. Across many sections of São Paulo, if a developer hopes to build or do nearly anything with her property — adjust its uses, expand outward or upward — she must first buy a CEPAC. On a fairness level, selling zoning changes seems wrong to me. Current zoning policies are an arbitrary starting point, so it doesn’t make sense that developers should have to pay for permission to change a policy that […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Preface and Afterword

This is the last post in the series on Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking. Previous can be found here: Chapters 1 – 4 Chapters 5 – 9 Chapters 10 – 14 Chapters 16 – 18 Chapters 19 – 22 Preface In these two chapters, which Donald Shoup added for the paperback edition of the book, he discusses some of the changes in parking policy since the original edition in 2004. He also reiterates his three prescriptions for saner parking policy: 1) Set the right price for curb parking; 2) Return parking revenue to pay for local public services; 3) Remove parking minimum requirements. He points out that cities that have tried “performance parking” have had successful results. San Francisco’s SFpark is perhaps the country’s most advanced system for performance parking. Curb spaces include sensors that can tell whether or not the space is occupied. Then parking managers can adjust prices remotely to approach the 85% occupancy goal as closely as possible. Shoup argues that performance parking should not be a politicized change. Setting an 85% occupancy target is not designed to raise revenue or to benefit any group at the expense of another. Rather, prices can eliminate parking shortages, so that people pay for parking with money rather than with time spent cruising. These prices also incentivise greater turnover. Nonetheless, he points out that performance parking has opponents: Thinking about parking seems to take place in the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain responsible for making snap decisions about urgent fight-or-flight choices such as how to avoid being eaten. The same could be said about many land use decisions which do not seem to be made on the basis of rationality. He points out that performance pricing is very unlikely to reduce customers in […]

Anthony Ling on private buses

A guest post from Market Urbanism’s Brazil correspondent, Anthony Ling, who blogs in both Portuguese and English at renderingfreedom.blogspot.com… For a long time I’ve been thinking about why collective transportation is a synonym to public transportation. Is there anything special about the activity of taking people from one point to another that makes it valid to prevent competition, prohibit entrepreneurship and end with different types of services in a city according to passengers’ needs? Public transportation in Brazil is known to be inefficient, and it is the poor, the most dependent on this service, that ends up being harmed. How could a company enter the market or technologically innovate in collective transportation? Far beyond the basics that are missing in the Brazilian bus lines, such as a route identification system, both online and on the bus (in Porto Alegre you have to know what codes like T1 and T5 mean as a route), knowing which buses pass in each bus stop would already be a start and a great comparative advantage to a new company on the business. While we depend on the inefficiency of the public sector, the group from Porto Alegre Shoot the Shit has started a collaborative initiative to find out which bus passes at each stop, action that was initially seen by the EPTC as an act of vandalism. Another strategy would be the identification of which routes are overloaded with passengers, trying to profit with one more bus to be used by people that aren’t being served on the margin. Or do just the opposite: try to find out if there is demand to nonexistent routes through market research. Still, a much simpler way would be what many schools use for the transportation of their students, but in different types of establishments. A company could go to […]

The Zoning History of Barcelona’s Eixample

Server glitch wiped the last few articles, so here’s a repose of the Barcelona one. Also, comments should be working now, should you deign to leave one… Somehow I managed to visit Barcelona a few years ago and not learn about the history of the city’s Eixample (x pronounced sh in Catalan), or extension/widening (ensanche in Castilian). So to spare you all that fate, I’ve assembled a short history of Barcelona’s Eixample, which has parallels in eixamples/ensanches/zabalgunes (Basque!) across Spain. So here’s the history, as told by Eduardo Aibar and Wiebe E. Bijker! (.pdf) It starts in 1714, when Philip V, the Bourbon King of Spain based in Madrid and supported by the Castilians, conquered the Catalan capital of Barcelona, creating modern, unified Spain. Catalan culture and language was suppressed for more than a century, but more relevantly for urbanists… The technical shape of society was also checked. An enormous military engineering project was launched to put the city under continuous surveillance of the Bourbon troops. A huge pentagonal citadel, designed by the Flemish military engineer Prosper Verboom, was built near the harbor to dominate the city. The army thus could bombard any target within Barcelona with heavy mortars. A high wall, fortified with bastions and fronted by a moat, zigzagged from the western face of the citadel up the north side of the city, around its back, and down south again to the port, meeting the sea at the ancient shipyards. This way, Barcelona became an enormous fort in which the military installations covered almost as much space as the civilian buildings. The result of Philip V’s project was to enclose Barcelona in a rigid straitjacket of stone that prevented any further civic expansion and industrial development. The walls soon became the main urban problem of Barcelona, and the […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 19-22

This post from the series on Donald Shoup‘s The High Cost of Free Parking is reposted from last week because the site’s database caused recent posts to be deleted. Chapter 19: The Ideal Source of Local Public Revenue In this chapter, Donald Shoup makes the case that passing up the potential revenue source of curb parking doesn’t make fiscal sense for cities. He bases his case heavily on Henry George’s theory of land taxation. George argued that land is the fairest and least distortive good to tax because its value comes not from individuals, but from the community. Milton Friedman agreed saying, “the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land.” One obstacle to relying on a land tax as a sole revenue is that accurately appraising unimproved land is difficult. But Shoup points out that charging for parking avoids this problem because cities can use prices as demand management. Shoup further explains the political potential for parking benefit districts and includes a section discussing the potential to create similar benefit districts for freeway tolls. He points out that dedicating toll revenues to the neighborhoods that they pass through would create an interest group for congestion pricing and that this would benefit the often low-income neighborhoods where freeways are located. I think a key part of this chapter is that Shoup explains how charging for parking to prevent shortages illuminates the opportunity cost of dedicating land to curb parking. As this price becomes visible, it may open up opportunities to lease current parking spaces for other uses, such as outdoor dining or outdoor retail. While he is optimistic about the potential for parking reform, he includes this great line: “Staunch conservatives often become ardent communists when it comes to parking, and rational people quickly turn emotional.” […]

NYU 2031: Rise of the Mole People

A few things. First of all, the New York Times in 1992 on the postmodern skyline blight that is the Sony Building (then still the AT&T Building): This proposal marks the latest instance in which landlords have tried to recreate ill-conceived or little-used arcades and plazas, which generated lucrative bonuses for builders but not much in the way of genuine public amenities. In one of the most dramatic cases, a dank arcade under 2 Lincoln Square, an apartment tower on Columbus Avenue, between 65th and 66th Streets, was enclosed in 1989 and turned into a home for the Museum of American Folk Art. The Sony plan is likely to provoke wide debate on whether the public will gain or lose through the renovation, given the celebrity of 550 Madison Avenue itself, which was designed in 1978 by Philip Johnson and is marked on the skyline by a Chippendale-style broken pediment. Sony’s proposal calls for a net reduction of 8,727 square feet of space at ground level that is now devoted to the public; space that could conceivably be rented to retailers for about $200 a square foot. And now the New York Observer in 2012, on NYU’s 2031 plan, which will involve upgrading the quality and quantity of open space while adding new buildings to their modernist superblocks in the Village: “We are making publicly accessible [existing] open space that is not—and is not perceived—as publicly accessible now,” university spokesman John Beckman told The Observer. Still, this ignores the fact that this is already N.Y.U. owned land, and many of the impediments in place that the university cites, such as fences and locked gates and requisite visitor passes, could merely be done away with by the institution. The public space would not be the best, but it still underscores the […]

The Zoning History of New York’s White Brick Apartments

The rehabilitation of the postwar glazed white brick apartment building continues apace, with the condoization of 530 Park Ave., a 1941 (okay, almost postwar) 19-story white brick building. I happen to like New York’s postwar white brick buildings, and am even warming up to the red brick variants – I’ve always consider anonymous white brick to be the most New York of New York buildings. One reason that I like them is that because of the history of New York City zoning, they have the form of prewar buildings, with the embellishments (or lack thereof) of the postwar era. Up until 1961, New York’s developers were still building under essentially the 1916 code. While the 1916 code definitely restricted and guided growth in the dense commercial core, where it encouraged set backs and discouraged Equitable Building-like dense massings, developers in residential neighborhoods like the Upper East Side generally did not bump up against the zoning limits. The setbacks on 530 Park are slight and decorative, and likely built according to the style of the day (which was heavily influenced by larger buildings downtown whose shapes were dictated by zoning). So buildings erected before the 1961 code took effect tended to be lower than those that came after, but they covered more of the lot and their façades were flush with the sidewalk. Some of them included garages for the newly-motorized middle- and upper-classes, but they were small compared to those that came after. Above all they were governed by the laws of supply and demand. If you ignore the materials and lack of ornament, they were a lot like prewar buildings. But the brick apartment buildings of the ’40s and ’50s were the last in New York City built according to supply and demand, which is why I think we’ll come to hold them […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 16 – 18

This post follows on the earlier discussion of Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking. Chapter 16 — Turning Small Change in Big Changes Here Donald Shoup gets to the idea of using Business Improvement Districts to manage street parking as Brandon Smith mentioned in the last post’s comments. When parking revenue goes to municipalities’ general funds, drivers see it as a fee with questionable benefit. Contrarily, when parking revenue stays in the neighborhood, it can provide tangible benefits in the form of neighborhood improvements. This may make drivers more willing to pay for parking. More importantly, it creates an interest group in favor of charging a rate for parking that provides an funding source for neighborhood improvements. Seen from this angle, paid street parking benefits businesses from multiple angles. He uses to Los Angeles neighborhoods to demonstrate the potential benefits of parking revenues. In the 1980’s, Old Pasadena was suffering from a vacant building problem because historic buildings did not include onsite parking. As a result, they could not be repurposed. In 1993 the city introduced parkign emters and gave the revenues to the neighborhood to finance public improvements. Additionally, building owners were given the right to pay a fee for parking in a public garage rather than providing parking onsite, allowing existing buildings to be repurposed. These policy changes have created an environment where drivers can easily find parking and a streetscape that is more inviting for pedestrians. Shoup contrasts Pasadena with Westwood Village which has been in decline since the 1980s. In 1994 a parking study revealed that curb parking was 96 percent occupied, meaning the neighborhood had a significant cruising problem. As a response to the neighborhood’s decline, though, the city decreased hourly parking rates from $1 to 50 cents, worsening the parking shortage. This revenue goes to […]

What I learned today about SNCF and California HSR

If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you’ll know that I spent this afternoon on the phone with folks in California, looking into the recent SNCF-CHSRA bombshell. To summarize: SNCF, the highly experienced French national high-speed rail operator, apparently had a plan for California’s HSR network, but was turned off by the highly politicized routing. Namely, they wanted to make a straight shot from LA to San Francisco by running along the flat, government-owned I-5 corridor with spurs out to the eastern Central Valley, whereas the California High Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) and state politicians wanted the main line to go through every little town in the Central Valley, directly. Now, all of this wouldn’t be a scandal, except for the fact that nobody at SNCF ever mentioned it to the public or the media. That’s what the LA Times reported, but David Schonbrunn, a pro-HSR, anti-CHSRA activist, says there’s more to the story – SNCF not only advocated I-5, but they actually had private investors lined up! Here’s his letter to the LAT: Your otherwise excellent story “High-speed rail officials rebuffed proposal from French railway” was far too kind to California High-Speed Rail Authority officials. At the time of its proposal, SNCF had the investment backing to actually build the LA-SF line, in a deal that sheltered the State from the risk of subsidizing an unprofitable project. The Authority’s 2012 Business Plan covered up this offer, instead insisting that no private capital would be willing to invest until the first high-speed line showed a profit. The $6 billion Central Valley project approved last week by the Legislature thus exposes the State to unlimited operating losses. Worse yet, before that line can be completed, it will need an additional $27 billion from the federal government–quite unlikely in today’s political climate. I’d […]

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