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The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 10-14

This post follows on the earlier discussion of the The High Cost of Free Parking. I realized that I left a couple of important points out of the last post. First, Shoup applies the Hippocratic Oath of “first, do no harm,” to parking requirements. What a great way to think about city planning. If this standard was applied to all policies, we’d be living in libertarian utopia already. Secondly, he gives great treatment to the issue of why politicians sometimes choose regulations over taxation. Regulation imposes costs on everyone, but because these costs are hard to see, their costs are not easily traced to government. It is a less transparent way of manipulating behavior. Chapter 10 – Reduce Demand Rather Than Increase Supply This chapter explores some of the policy alternatives available to cities that could reduce the number of parking spaces needed to satisfy demand. Shoup supports programs that allow employers to provide their employees with unlimited transit passes. In cities where transit operates below capacity, transit agencies may be willing to sell this type of pass to employers at a low cost, knowing that many pass employees won’t use their passes regularly. As of 2002, Dallas, Denver, Salt Lake, and San Jose had adopted this type of program. In two studies, providing these eco passes reduced employees’ demand for parking by 19%, offering employers an opportunity for significant cost savings if they can provide 19% fewer parking spaces as a result. Shoup points out that in some cases this policy can be a win for everyone involved because employees receive an additional benefit, employers can save money, traffic is reduced for the cities’ other commuters, and transit agencies earn some additional revenue at near zero marginal cost, assuming they are operating below capacity. Unfortunately, Shoup finds that in some California cities that […]

En bloc condo redevelopment in Japan and Israel

So this weekend we learned that condos are bizarre and pretty much guaranteed to cause problems in the longrun, when maintenance bills skyrocket, the buildings are out of date, and the land beneath them appreciates, but you can’t redevelop the property because all the owners will never agree. You guys posted some great comments, but I wanted to highlight a few. This weekend we learned that Singapore has a method called “en bloc” redevelopment, whereby a condo building can be sold in its entirety to a single developer, with the idea that he’ll soon tear it down, if 90 (now 80) percent of the building agrees. Canada, on the other hand, is just starting to deal with the issue, but so far the only option for redevelopment is going to court – much messier compared to how it’s done in Singapore. And today, Japan and Israel! Turns out they’re dealing with the issue of aging condos pretty much the same way as Singapore. First comes Philip Brasor’s comment about Japan. Philip has a great blog and writes a column for the Japan Times about real estate in the country. In his comment he sums up a JT article he wrote on the topic which covers pretty much everything you wanna know about redeveloping condos in Japan:  The problem is that many of the condos built in the 60s and 70s are now quite old, and unlike in the West, where it’s expected that property values will always increase over time, many in Japan are not worth much of anything unless they’re in the center of major cities. Until 2002, there was no specific law dealing with redevelopment of resident-owned condominium buildings, so if residents wanted to tear their building down and put up something new they had to gain 100% […]

Why do condos even exist?

It sounds like a dumb question – they exist because people like the security of owning a home combined with the services and lower costs that apartments offer, duh! But upon further reflection, condominium-style tenure can be a bit problematic. The main problem, as I see it, is that a building that’s been carved up into condo units can almost never be redeveloped. So much so that preservationists have been known to cheer on developers doing condo and co-op conversions of historic properties: Indeed, sometimes preservation advocates look to condo developers as white knights. Since the Bialystoker Center for Nursing and Rehabilitation on East Broadway closed last year, Laurie Tobias Cohen, the executive director of the Lower East Side Jewish Conservancy, has been “extremely eager” for a developer to buy the historic building and convert it to co-ops or condos. The closing of the nursing home was a great loss, she said; the goal now is to prevent the demolition, or further deterioration, of the building. “What we don’t want,” she said, “is to lose any more of the built historic fabric.” This is no doubt an elegant solution to the problem of unprotected historic buildings, but what about the less-than-stunning condos and co-ops that have been built in the US – and pretty much every where else in the world! – since the end of World War II? Why are condo buildings impossible to redevelop? Simple: gravity! You can’t keep your apartment on the 17th floor while someone demolishes their 5th floor unit. In Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, they call condos “strata” apartments, which reflects what they really are: floors of apartments layered inseparably atop each other. To redevelop a condo or co-op building, you have to buy every single unit, after which you can dissolve the condo structure […]

Tokyo’s surprising lack of density

Wendell Cox has received his fair share of criticism from this blog, but his post last week about Tokyo’s surprising lack of density is very interesting. Sure, Tokyo’s suburbs are dense enough to be connected by job centers by rail, but the core is almost completely low- and lower-mid-rise, and thus not very dense: Tokyo does not have intensely dense central areas. The ku area [historic core] has a density of 37,300 per square mile (14,400 per square kilometer). This is well below the densities of Manhattan (69,000 & 27,000) and the ville de Paris (51,000 & 21,000). Only one of the ku (Toshima) exceeds the density of Paris. And then the suburbs themselves aren’t as compact as they could be: Further, according to the Japan House and Land Survey of 2008, Tokyo has a large stock of detached houses, by definition lower density. Nearly 45 percent of the Tokyo region’s housing is detached. One-third of the dwellings within 30 kilometers (18 miles) of the core are detached. This figure rises to more than 60 percent outside 30 kilometers from the core and 85 percent between 60 and 70 kilometers (37-43 kilometers) from the core (Figure 2). Some might see this as a validation of New Urbanism (which is sort of a bastardization of Old Urbanism), whose response to tall building enthusiasts like myself, Ed Glaeser, and Alon Levy is that “dense doesn’t have to mean tall.” And it’s true – Tokyo manages a relatively high density with very few tall buildings. But there are costs that Tokyo bears for its lack of height and downtown density. First and foremost are the high housing prices. Imagine New York City if Midtown and the Upper East and West Sides were still tenement neighborhoods, and everyone living and working above the sixth floor […]

The High Cost of Free Parking Chapters 5-9

This post follows on the earlier discussion of the first four chapters of The High Cost of Free Parking. Chapter 5- A Great Planning Disaster Shoup sets up parking requirements as a great planning disaster. If an individual developer chose to dedicate more of his land to parking than his customers demanded, he would lose money on the margin. If he is a major property owner and somehow made this mistake repeatedly at many properties, we might consider it a disaster. But a planning disaster occurs when no individual loses a lot of money in this type of error, but rather we all lose some. Shoup explains that parking requirements breed demand for more parking. By subsidizing driving, these rules lead more people to become drivers and encourages sprawling development. This in turn creates an increased demand for free parking and leads to higher parking requirements, since many cities base these requirements on the peak number of people who would like to park at a building for free, leading to the parking disaster we have today. Shoup explains that oftentimes parking requirements are so onerous that they dictate development both in use and in architecture. For example, Los Angeles’ “dingbat” apartments which are apartments built on stilts over driveways were created to fulfill requirements for covered parking. This chapter includes the empirical evidence that I find most persuasive so far, a study of changes in development after Oakland implemented a parking requirement in 1961. For new developments in the two years after the regulation went into effect, residential construction costs increased 18% per unit, housing density decreased by 30%, housing investment decreased by 18%, and land values fell by 33% compared to the four years before the requirement. This is strong evidence that in Oakland, at least, parking requirements, rather than demand […]

A quick primer on CBTC and driverless trains

While doing some research for an article about driverless trains, I came across this document by Mircea Georgescu (who most recently worked at Thales [I think?] and whose email I can’t track down! Mircea, if you’re reading this, trimite-mi si mie te rog frumos un email la [email protected]!), that’s a sort of primer on CBTC and its application in driverless train operation. The paper is very short as far as these things go, and surprisingly readable, even if Mircea’s English ain’t the best. You can download the PDF here, and here’s the abstract: Reliable driverless operation requires specific features implemented at system and subsystem levels of the train control system. Communications-Based Train Control (CBTC) is now proven as the best choice for driverless systems due to inherent high levels of safety and reliability with a low life cycle cost. This paper proposes a systematic approach that may be used to determine the most efficient way to fulfil the requirements specific to each customer faced with driverless operation (green field or re-signaling). It also defines “must have” requirements (functionality) to obtain the desired performance and cost. The paper also addresses issues related to the operability, maintainability, and availability of different types of driverless CBTC systems implementations, and the advantages and disadvantages of each solution. By the way, the article references another written by Mircea Georgescu and Firth Whitwam called “Moving to Full Automatic Operations,” whose citation is “IEEE Hong Kong 2005.” Anyone know where I could get my hands on this? [email protected], as always!

Where is the Canadian real estate bubble going to hit hardest?

We’ve been hearing for a while now about a coming crash in Canadian property values, and it’s really reached a fever pitch lately – seems like denying a Toronto bubble, at least, is pretty rare. What’s interesting to me, though, is how different the bubble seems to be from the American one about five years ago. In the US, urban real estate definitely took a dive – tons of people went bankrupt, cranes got taken down – but ultimately it recovered much more quickly than the suburbs, and especially exurbs and sprawling Sunbelt cities. What from what I can tell about Canada, the overvaluation is focused on urban properties, epitomized by the glassy blue towers going up in Vancouver and especially Toronto, and to a lesser extent Calgary. The Vancouver market has cooled and all the worry now is about Toronto, where sales volumes are still up from last year, but I’m not hearing too much worry out of Vancouver, even months after sales supposedly started cooling. Anyway, the worry in Toronto is really rising. In a very widely-circulated Financial Post opinion piece last week, Diane Francis advocated placing restrictions on foreign (read: Asian) buyers. Despite the jingoism it was an interesting piece, but this chart is more interesting: Complicating things is the mining energy boom in central Canada, which is also being felt in North Dakota and nearby states. As you can tell, this is less of an informational post than a post calling for information. Canadians – what do you think is going to happen? Where is the bubble going to hit hardest, who’s going to recover first, and who’s never going to recover? I want your opinion! (Yes, yours!) Or is there in fact no bubble at all, and all we’re seeing is that Canadians are falling (back) in love […]

Transpo bill gridlock staves off federal transit regulation

There are two general attitudes among urbanists towards the transportation omnibus bill that Congress has been struggling to pass in recent years (?). Some, like Streetsblogs and a number of political advocacy groups, hope for swift passage because of the bill’s transit spending. Others, like Cap’n Transit, balk at all the highway spending, and cheer on the gridlock. And here’s one other reason to be on Cap’n Transit’s side: no new bill means no federal regulation of rapid transit. Right now, the federal government only has the power to regulate safety on rail lines that feed into the national mainline network, and could therefore, at least in theory, run into a freight train. This includes all intercity trains (Amtrak and possibly All Aboard Florida), commuter trains (Metro-North, Caltrain, etc.), and the occasional light rail line using an older right-of-way that’s still connected to the national network (e.g., New Jersey’s River Line). Self-contained “rapid transit” networks – subways, elevated trains, and new light rail and streetcar lines – are beyond the feds’ reach. To many legislators, the Fort Totten crash on DC’s Red Line in 2009, operated by WMATA, was evidence that federal regulation is needed. (WMATA’s MetroRail is actually one of the most technologically advanced systems in America – or at least it was, until after the crash when they turned the ATO off, which drives the train while the operator opens and closes the doors.) There was a big outcry about it right after the crash and a few times since then, and the debate seems to be coming up again. But despite the liberal leanings of most transit enthusiasts, you’d be hard pressed to find one who thinks that federal regulation will do WMATA – an admittedly heinous agency that needs to be reined in – any good. […]

Libertarians at the Reason Foundation oppose latest California parking minimum reform bill

From Baruch Feisenbaum, who’s the Reason Foundation’s transportation analyst (disclaimer: I did an internship at Reason magazine a few years ago), surprising agreement with the American Planning Association’s California branch on the parking minimum reform bill (or at least, it surprised me): The proposed bill has both positives and negatives. The positives include introducing a market-based approach to parking, allowing local governments to set higher standards if it is appropriate for the community, granting certain exemptions to the law including rent control and deed-restricted housing and using substantially more quantitative standards than the old ITE approach. (Under the ITE standards, there were multiple categories for each business using insufficient data points and low r-squared values. For example, adult entertainment had multiple categories. The nude dancing category had separate subcategories for different types of nude dancing including fully nude, partially nude, etc.) However, there are significant problems with the bill that outweigh its positives. First, the bill sets a statewide standard. California is one of the largest, most diverse states in the country. What is effective in San Francisco may not work in Truckee, CA. He also takes issue with the fact that the bill was sponsored by the California Infill Builders Association (disclaimer: I’m friendly with Mott Smith, who runs the group), which obviously stands to gain from reduced minimum parking requirements: The bill is sponsored by the California Infill Builders Association. The association is a trade group working to increase infill housing. As parking spaces cost money, for developers to be able to build these apartments/houses they need something in return. The something could be lower parking standards. Parking should be priced and I understand the desire for infill housing. However, the bill would be best originating from someone without a stake in the game. Such legislation can then be reviewed by a university […]

Ending rent control may not lower prices for non-regulated units

That’s one takeaway from a paper sent to me by one of its co-authors, Andy Garin, at MIT, on the effects of the end of rent control in Massachusetts in 1995 on property values in Cambridge. Fascinating topic, and much thanks to Andy for sending it to me – it’s always nice when other people write my blog posts for me! Andy assures me that they “went through great pains to make sure our results do, in fact, have a causal interpretation, and meaningful,” but as always, I don’t have the statistical background to fisk its methods, so feel free to go at it in the comments. Here’s the abstract of the working paper, available on NBER, called “Housing Market Spillovers: Evidence from the End of Rent Control in Cambridge Massachusetts”: Understanding potential spillovers from the attributes and actions of neighborhood residents onto the value of surrounding properties and neighborhoods is central to both the theory of urban economics and the development of efficient housing policy. This paper measures the capitalization of housing market spillovers by studying the sudden and largely unanticipated 1995 elimination of stringent rent controls in Cambridge, Massachusetts that had previously muted landlords’ investment incentives and altered the assignment of residents to locations. Pooling administrative data on the assessed values of each residential property and the prices and characteristics of all residential transactions between 1988 and 2005, we find that rent control’s removal produced large, positive, and robust spillovers onto the price of never-controlled housing from nearby decontrolled units. Elimination of rent control added about $1.8 billion to the value of Cambridge’s housing stock between 1994 and 2004, equal to nearly a quarter of total Cambridge residential price appreciation in this period. Positive spillovers to never-controlled properties account for more half of the induced price appreciation. Residential investments can […]

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