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Market Urbanism vs. Market Suburbanism smackdown at Cato: “The Death and Life of Affordable Housing”

The debate you’ve been waiting for! Randal O’Toole, Matt Yglesias, Ryan Avent, and Adam Gordon participated yesterday in a discussion at the Cato Institute moderated by Diana Lind from Next American City/Forefront. (How had this never happened before??) Randal O’Toole did not disappoint, arriving in top form in his shoestring necktie and armed with a surprisingly interesting Powerpoint, but I think New Jersey-based attorney Adam Gordon stole the show with his discussion of inclusionary zoning and the Mt. Laurel doctrine (probably because he was on the only one on stage who hasn’t already spewed hundreds of thousands of words on the subject). You can download the 90-minute discussion as an MP3 from Cato (much easier to scroll through), or watch the video streaming:

APA California hints (strongly) at opposition to parking minimum reform bill

Minimum parking requirement reform bills have been floating around the California legislature for a while – last year it was AB 710, and this year it’s AB 904, both authored by East Bay Asm. Nancy Skinner. This email blast to members from the American Planning Association’s California chapter doesn’t take an official position and does ask at the end for input, but their feelings on the bill are kind of hard to miss (all emphasis theirs, edited slightly for clarity): AB 904 [.pdf], sponsored by the Infill Builder Association and authored again by Assembly Member Skinner, is a gut and amend that is now similar to AB 710 (Skinner). This bill requires restrictive parking standards similar to those included in AB 710, which you’ll recall died on the Senate floor at the end of last year. AB 904, in a different form, already passed the Assembly, and is now awaiting hearing in the Senate. APA California is not opposed to the concept of lower parking requirements near transit when a community decides it is right for them – the issue is that a one-sized-fits-all statewide standard is not appropriate. AB 904, on and after January 1, 2014, would prohibit a city or county (including charter cities) from requiring minimum parking requirements in transit-intensive areas greater than the following: • One parking space per 1000 square feet for nonresidential projects (including commercial, industrial, institutional, or any other nonresidential projects regardless of type of use). • One parking space per unit for non-income-restricted residential projects. • 75/100ths parking spaces per unit for projects that include both income restricted and non-income restricted units. • 5/10ths parking spaces per unit for units that are deed restricted at least 55 years to rents or prices affordable to persons and families making less than 60% of area […]

In Defense of Chicago

First of all, I should start out by saying that I’ve only ever been to Chicago once, and I really don’t remember anything but the inside of my aunt’s house. I remember asking them if there was good mass transit, and they said Metra is good, but the L, which is near them, is not something they’d ride. My aunt, who led the family, was a financial services executive in Chicago, but they moved to the Research Triangle in North Carolina when she went into tech/healthcare. I imagine just the people Aaron Renn has in mind when he wrote “The Second-Rate City?” for City Journal. That anecdote aside, I think Aaron Renn is being a little too hard on Chicago. I’m sure my view of the city unduly weights its land use and transportation policies, but I do think it’s got more potential than Aaron gives it credit for. A lot of his article is based on this grim demographic observation, which I admit, is hard to stomach: Begin with Chicago’s population decline during the 2000s, an exodus of more than 200,000 people that wiped out the previous decade’s gains. Of the 15 largest cities in the United States in 2010, Chicago was the only one that lost population; indeed, it suffered the second-highest total loss of any city, sandwiched between first-place Detroit and third-place, hurricane-wrecked New Orleans. While New York’s and L.A.’s populations clocked in at record highs in 2010, Chicago’s dropped to a level not seen since 1910. Chicago is also being “Europeanized,” with poorer minorities leaving the center of the city and forced to its inner suburbs: 175,000 of those 200,000 lost people were black. Poor minorities abandoning the center to wealthy whites, while it has a lot of unfortunate aspects, doesn’t seem to me to be an altogether bad […]

Photos and renderings of buildings going up across New York

In honor of my new home (as of this February), New York City, here are some new towers going up in Midtown Manhattan! All photos from (where else?) the SkyscraperCity forums…click for source. The first is the International Gem Tower in the Diamond District (which looks to me like textured steel rather than precious metals), then there are three recent shots of One57, a bright blue residential skyscraper going up on West 57th Street, and then there’re a few renderings of Rafael Viñoly’s skinny modernist 432 Park (Ave?). The Gem Tower and One57 are by Extell, and 423 Park is CIM/Harry Macklowe. All are as-of-right, I believe. Plus, a video of Christian Portzamparc talking about about One57. And here’s a bonus: an old rendering of Rafael Viñoly’s plans for Williamsburg’s old Domino Sugar site, which may by given life again now that Two Trees, creator of Dumbo, owns it. (Most definitely not as-of-right!)  

Montgomery County’s loss is Calgary’s gain: Rollin Stanley escapes from the coven to Canada

Not sure how this escaped me, but it seems that a few weeks ago, Rollin Stanley was announced as Calgary’s new chief planner. Rollin Stanley, you’ll recall, was the very vocal pro-urban growth planner in Maryland’s Montgomery County, north of Washington, DC, who resigned after these four sentences appeared in Bethesda Magazine: He has little patience with dissenters. Stanley goes so far as to accuse them of being “rich, white women…spreading fear.” He says they stalk his appearances before community groups, sowing discord. He claims they refer to themselves as “the coven.” Most Americans still don’t think of Calgary as a very urban place, but it’s been holding its own against Vancouver and Toronto lately when it comes to urbanism in Canada (which is generally much more advanced than urbanism in the US), even without true rapid transit (the C-Train, while impressive as light rail, still has to cross streets). Calgary’s skyline’s been booming, and as the Calgary Herald writes, the city also has an urbanist mayor: Stanley’s approach somewhat resembles that of Mayor Naheed Nenshi, and beyond his unconventionally frank yet also high-reaching rhetoric. Nenshi, too, deplores suburban sprawl and the financial challenges it brings for government, and praises more walkable districts and transit. While Nenshi avidly uses social-media site Twitter, Stanley blogs prolifically with long rhapsodies on everything from master plans and neighbourhood walkabouts to census data and criticism. Here’s his old Montgomery County blog – does anyone know if he’s keeping one in Calgary? Or if maybe we could lure him to Twitter? There appears to be a general political consensus – that thing Alon Levy’s always talking about – towards urbanism in Calgary, so Calgary will likely get good urbanism: While the developer sector in Calgary is well-organized, there’s not as professionalized and unified community movement against […]

Were NYU and Chelsea Market’s hotels just stalking horses?

An item from Crain’s NY Business, behind a paywall (I think?): Sacrificial hotels Two hotel developments in Manhattan were effectively killed last week. The City Planning Commission cut a proposed 190-room property from New York University‘s expansion plan, and Community Board 4 rejected Chelsea Market‘s proposal for a 12-story boutique hotel next to its historic building. That was no surprise to one insider, who suggested the hotels merely served as smoke screens to provide cover for controversial developments. “It seems like there’s a new strategy out there,” the source said. “Add a hotel to any large-scale development. And when the community comes running and screaming, you sacrifice it.”

Market Urbanism Book Club

I’m very excited that some of you expressed interest in doing a book club this summer. I think we should start with The High Cost of Free Parking. It’s the longer of the two books, but it looks like the relative beach read. I am thinking that what makes the most sense is for me to post some brief thoughts on sections of the book here on the blog that we can discuss in the comments. Other options for the book club would be doing a Google Group which is basically an email chain, or we could do a Google Hangout or Skype discussion live. Please let me know if you have strong preferences for one of these methods. Otherwise, I’ll plan to do a first post on the first four chapters of the book late next week.

An Early Defense of Zoning

At Discovering Urbanism, Daniel Nairn offers an interesting summary of Edward Murray Bassett’s 1922 defense of zoning (available as a free e-book). Bassett faced opponents who were against a new type of land use regulation, many arguing that zoning was unconstitutional. In retrospect, some of his arguments defending zoning are comical. He asserts that zoning would never go so far as to direct aesthetics because the courts would protect us from the overreach. It would be interesting to hear what he’d have to say about a planning commission meeting today. Nairn’s entire analysis is interesting, but I was particularly intrigued by Bassett’s assertion that zoning fosters cooperation. As Nairn summarizes: Cooperation yields overall larger return on investment for all property owners. This was Bassett’s primary concern, one that he underscored with a number of prisoners’ dilemma scenarios. For example, “In some of the larger cities a landowner in the business district is almost compelled to put up a skyscraper because if he put up a low building, his next neighbor would put up a higher one that would take advantage of his light and air.” He asserted that skyscrapers were probably not a sound investment in their own right, but they were built anyway in a virtual arms race for public goods of light, air, privacy, and scenery. Zoning was the truce that made everyone better off. I’m not sure that I follow Bassett’s logic here. If light and air are only available on floors that are higher than the floors of the neighboring buildings, then only the top few floors of any building would typically have this asset. It’s almost as if he’s talking about a race to the highest roof deck here. Aside from the problems with how he makes this argument, it is worth a look to determine […]

A Request for Readers

1. I’ve been writing for Market Urbanism for about a year now and have thoroughly enjoyed it. Getting your comments and hearing from readers is so rewarding. To provide more of what you’re interested in, I would really appreciate any comments about what topics or types of posts you would like to see covered here. 2. This summer I’m hoping to read two urbanist staples that I’ve read a lot about but am ashamed to say I’ve never actually read: The Economics of Zoning Laws: A Property Rights Approach to American Land Use Controls by William Fischel and Donald Shoup’s The High Cost of Free Parking. If anyone else would like to tackle these in the next few months or has already read them and would like to contribute to some discussion on them, I’d be happy to set up a Google Group for that.

Walk Score Regression Results

Thanks for the comments on my Walk Score model! Per a few reader requests, here are the full results. I should have thought to provide them initially but didn’t realize there would be interest. Also, I don’t know a good way to put STATA or Excel charts here, so apologies for the screenshots. Here are the results from the OLS model. The 259 datapoints represent all cities with population greater than 100,000 for which there is Walk Score data, except for two or three for which I couldn’t find the MSA data The unemployment is the 5-year January moving average at  2010.   And here are the results of the IV regression, where the instrument is the year that the city was founded. First stage: And the second stage:  

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