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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:  

Some Empirical Evidence on Preference for Cities

This semester I took an econometrics class because I got an MA with the bare minimum of quantitative classes. For the class, I wrote a paper asking the question, “Are consumers willing to pay a premium to live in dense urban areas?” It’s easy to see that urban density is correlated with higher housing prices, but this could come from many factors such as people having to live in dense cities to find jobs or to earn higher salaries or from supply restrictions that impact dense cities more than suburbs. As a proxy for cities’ urban qualities, I used Walk Score. Walk Score is based on residential distance to amenities, block length, and road connectivity and ranks cities on a scales of 100. It is designed to test the feasibility of living in a city without a car, but it excludes some factors that are often considered relevant to facilitating pedestrianism, including street width, sidewalk width, and population density. Still, I think Walk Score provides a pretty good measure of a city’s urbanist quality. The correlation between Walk Score and median house price is pretty striking: To test demand for urban living, I wanted to control for the economic factors that drive demand to live in a given city. I tested the impact of Walk Score on median house prices controlling for household income, unemployment, and cost of living. The sample includes 259 cities for which I had Walk Score data and house price data from Kiplinger. The results suggest that for a one-point increase in Walk Score, we can expect a .5% increase in a cities’ median house price, and this result is statistically significant. In another way of measuring the same question (an IV regression using the year the city was founded as the instrument), I found that a one-point […]

Bike Shares and Public Goods

Yesterday, Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley announced that seven jurisdictions in Maryland will be receiving grants to start bike share programs. The money for these grants comes from the Maryland Department of Transportation’s Federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality, so these bike shares will be federally subsidized. O’Malley says of the program: “As we celebrate Bike Month, these grants will help bring Bikeshare stations to Maryland,” said Governor O’Malley.  “Bikesharing allows Marylanders an affordable option for short-distance trips as an alternative to public transportation, driving or walking.  By getting out and taking a bike ride, we also learn to enjoy more of Maryland’s natural treasures, help reduce the impact on the land, improve our fitness and well-being, and enhance our quality of life.” The program would be of a similar model to DC’s Capital Bikeshare with capital costs covered primarily with federal grants and some local contributions. I am not much of a bicyclist myself, but I can clearly see the appeal of bike share systems. They provide the convenience of riding a bike to a destination without having to ride it back again, introducing additional flexibility to this mode of transportation. Also, the bikes are better-quality than what many cyclists would buy for themselves. The problem with the politics surrounding bikeshares is that bicycles are not public goods, but elected officials such as O’Malley like to paint them as such. As Adam has previously pointed out, no transportation investment is a public good. The two characteristics that define public goods are nonexcludability and nonrivalrous consumption. Bike shares are perfectly rivalrous and excludable. Because no more than one  person (maybe two people) can ride a bike at a time, bicycles are lower on the public good scale than transit or roads. Greater Greater Washington cites a study that publicly-supported bicycle shares are, shockingly, […]

Brookings Study Ties Exclusionary Zoning to Gaps in School Performance

Last week the Brookings Institute released a study by Jonathan Rothwell on the relationship between exclusionary zoning and school performance. He points out that this is the first study linking zoning to educational outcomes. The findings demonstrate that cities with stronger exclusionary zoning policies have larger differences in test scores across schools. This finding makes sense, as exclusionary zoning policies segregate households by income, and household income is strongly correlated with children’s educational outcomes. This research is important because school district quality is a key factor in families’ decisions of where to live. I think that school quality is likely an important factor behind many NIMBY efforts too, as parents in a neighborhood may be afraid that lower-income residents moving into the school boundary will bring down the quality of education. Whether or not this is a valid concern on NIMBYs’ part, perception is all that matters. Rothwell’s dependent variable is called the school-test score gap, or the difference between a school’s test results and the state’s test results. So his results don’t tell us whether reducing exclusionary zoning will improve individuals’ outcomes or merely bring schools’ averages more in line. Of course what we would like to see is improved absolute educational outcomes, particularly for those students with the poorest performace. Theory does suggest some reasons that more equal schools could improve absolute student results, one being that more experienced teachers typically do not work in a city’s worst-performing schools. Another is that students may do better when they are surrounded by higher-achieving classmates. Through those channel and perhaps others, reducing disparities across schools could improve low-income students’ results. In developing the case for why it’s important for children of all income levels to attend schools with higher median test scores, Rothwell cites studies that demonstrate that “the quality of […]

2012 Market Urbanism Meetup

Readers, We are going to have a reader meetup on May 5. It will be a format similar to last year. Market Urbanism friend, Sandy Ikeda will be giving a tour of Brooklyn Heights as part of the Jane Jacobs Walk program that celebrate’s the life and legacy of urbanist Jane Jacobs. Sandy’s tour was so popular last year that he is giving two tours this year. In fact, the tour was so compelling, I moved back to the neighborhood. (well ok, that wasn’t the only reason) Let’s plan on attending Sandy’s tour from 4:30-6:00 pm on Saturday, May 5th. The tour starts at the steps of the Brooklyn Borough Hall. After the tour, we’ll convene at the Henry Street Ale House at 62 Henry Street, near where the tour ends. This year, Stephen is a genuine Brooklynite, so you’ll have the opportunity to meet him. Unfortunately, Emily won’t make it to town this year. Sandy will probably also join us. Last year, I assumed I’d be the only 6′-5″ person there, so that’s how I told people to identify me. However, there was another person about the same height on the tour, so readers said they weren’t sure which one was me. The best way I can assure that doesn’t happen again is to wear a White Sox baseball cap. What are the odds of two of us?… Details: May 5, 2012 Walking Tour: 4:30 PM at Brooklyn Borough Hall Meetup Afterwards: 6:00 PM at Henry Street Ale House, 62 Henry Street Hope you can make it. See you all there! Adam PS. In case you are interested, there are many other Jane Jacobs Walks that weekend. For example, this year there will be a Jane Jacob’s Walk tour of the area around the Atlantic Yards site given by […]

Height Limit Links

1) Yesterday, two pieces on Congressman Darrell Issa’s proposal to relax the federal limits on DC’s buildings heights got a lot of coverage. At City Block, Alex Block makes the key point that outside of downtown, DC’s density is limited by zoning, rather than the height limit. He supports allowing more multifamily housing by, for example, dividing row houses into apartments. He also makes the point that taller buildings can actually add to the vistas that height limit proponents are so concerned about. I think this is particularly true on the 14th Street Corridor, Connecticut Ave, and New Hampshire Ave. 2) On the other hand, Harry Jaffe at the Washington Examiner denies the laws of supply and demand, claiming that increasing allowable height could not possibly lower rents. He writes of the limit, “It has forced development out of downtown and into the neighborhoods, around Metro stops, which is healthy growth: out, not up.” The most troubling part of his piece is that he suggests developers’ use of the profit incentive is “about greed, period,” ignoring the mutual benefits that increased density in the city would permit. 3) Will Doig interviewed me for a piece on historic preservation at Salon. He concludes, “Landmarking is meant to preserve structures whose loss would be an affront to history. Removing entire neighborhoods from the natural evolution of cities is another thing entirely.” 4) Matt Yglesias observes that in Tom Vanderbilt’s series about pedestrianism, most of the cities with the highest Walk Scores are liberal. I think Matt rightly concludes that this correlation is primarily driven by older, more walkable cities being coastal, where more liberal people tend to live. However, this also ties in to a question Charlie Gardner raised a while back with regard to proposed changes to the zoning process in Tennessee and Arizona: Oddly, the idea of selectively or fully repealing zoning  – […]

Mandating attractive urban design

The most recent installment of the American Enterprise Institute’s series Society and Culture Outlook features a piece about the role of urban design in how people use cities. The article “A plea for beauty: a manifesto for a new urbanism” by Roger Scruton is a deviation from AEI’s typically conservative view toward central planning. Scruton favors heavy-handed planning of the appearance of the built environment, essentially advocating for strict form-based zoning codes: Many suggestions have been made as to how an attraction to the center might be generated. Building downtown convention centers, expensive museums, and concert halls; offering tax credits for city-center businesses; creating enterprise zones; and removing some of the regulations that make living, moving, and trading downtown so difficult have all been tried, and none has worked. And the reason they do not work is because they are addressing symptoms instead of causes. People flee from city centers because they do not like city centers. And they do not like city centers because they are alienating, ugly, and without a human face. Or rather, they do not like city centers when they are alienating, ugly, and inhuman, the normal case in America. [. . .] The proof of this is easy to find in the old cities of Europe. People choose to live in the center of Paris, Rome, Prague, or London rather than the periphery. Others who do not live in those cities want to spend their vacations there to enjoy the culture, entertainment, and beauty of their surroundings. These are flourishing cities, in which people of every class and occupation live side by side in mutual dependency while maintaining the distance that is one of the great gifts of the urban way of life. And there is a simple explanation for this: People wish to live […]

Detroit’s Financial Future

After flirting with Chapter 9 bankruptcy or a state takeover of its finances, Detroit has reached a deal with the state of Michigan that will allow it to remain independently managed with a requirement for state oversight. The Detroit Free Press reports: The city has seven days to create the positions of chief financial officer and program management director and 30 days after that to make a hire from a list of three candidates from the mayor and state treasurer. Lewis said the city is compiling a list of candidates. “We’ve got a lot of requirements that are in the agreement,” Lewis said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do (with the agreement) and then getting to the work of fixing the city. Our focus is on executing the plan and getting the resources here to execute the plan.” Snyder reiterated that the city “shouldn’t expect” a cash bailout, adding that Detroit is one of many troubled communities in the state. But he said the state would use its resources in a variety of ways to help the city. Snyder said the agreement assures the things that need to be done will get done, describing it as a “progressive series of steps” that first allow the mayor and the council to make the decisions, and then empowers the project manager to do so if they don’t. “This is a legal document designed to deal with situations when they don’t go right,” he said. While bankruptcy protection offers the advantage to cities of achieving a more manageable debt load, it doesn’t come without a cost. Bankruptcy would add an additional stigma to Detroit, already known for municipal financial distress, encouraging business disinvestment. Vallejo, CA filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and as the New York Times explains, the city is still in a difficult […]

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