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On Favored Quarters, Off-Center Skyscraper Districts, and Poverty

Following up on my post yesterday skyscrapers in Europe, I’d like to explain why, in detail, central business districts are generally superior to off-center ones like La Défense outside Paris or Washington’s Virginia suburbs. It’s not that I just enjoy the spatial symmetry and organic shape of a centralized city – it’s actually more efficient! Neglect it, and you’re doing a disservice to your poorest citizens, who too often find themselves out of commuting range of many of a city’s jobs. …

Old Urbanist on New Public Housing

Charlie Gardner at Old Urbanist, one of my favorite urbanist blogs, has a great post that echoes what I said a few days ago about the latest wave of American public housing projects. Here he first quotes a Nashville public housing official: “Part of the problem with public housing in the U.S….

Brookings Study on HCVs; Results to be Expected

This post originally appeared at Neighborhood Effects, a Mercatus Center blog where we write about state and local policy issues as well as the broad concepts of economic freedom.    A new Brookings study by Kenya Covington, Lance Freeman, and Michael Stoll finds that increasingly, recipients of housing vouchers are using these subsidies to move from inner cities to suburbs. The authors support low-income people moving to high-income suburbs because they suggest that this is where they would have the best job prospects. However the study authors find that about half of all HCV recipients moved to low-income suburbs rather than high-income suburbs, and they assert that this is a problem because low-income suburbs do not have as many job opportunities as their high-income counterparts. This result is unsurprising, though, since vouchers go further in areas with lower housing costs. The study does not take into account the individualized process of housing decisions because it relies on aggregate statistics and looks only at the ratio of people to jobs, ignoring other variables such as availability of housing and transit. In the executive summary, Covington, Freeman, and Stoll suggest that “policies that … reevaluate existing zoning laws and development impact fees … could give HCV recipients access to a broader range of high-quality residential environments,” but they do not pick up on these themes in their policy recommendations. Instead they focus on shaping the way that individuals choose to use their housing subsidies. By relaxing density restrictions both in urban cores and in suburbs, policymakers would allow landlords to build housing that is accessible to a wider range of incomes with and without housing vouchers. HCVs offer a major improvement over publicly provided housing specifically because they allow individuals to choose the best place to live for themselves, using local knowledge rather than top-down planning. The Brookings authors […]

The War on Drugs Is a War on Cities

Ken Burns’ new documentary Prohibition is excellent and highly recommended on its own merits, but urbanists should take special note of its urban themes. Cities have always been caricatured as centers of licentiousness, and the booming cities of turn-of-the-century America, teeming with poor Catholic immigrants, must have been terrifying to the established white Americans of the Midwest and America’s small towns. New York and Chicago proved to be impossible to temper, and it was there that Prohibition was the most violent. …

Fictional Scandal at the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Stephen’s post on alleged corruption at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission reminded me of a great scene from The Bonfire of the Vanities that I wanted to share here. Tom Wolfe describes a scenario in which a black bishop wants to sell his church’s property in order to raise money for the congregation. The fictional mayor’s assistant explains: “The bishop wants to sell St. Timothy’s to a developer, on the grounds that the membership is declining, and the church is losing a lot of money, which is true. But the community groups are putting a lot of pressure on the Landmarks Commission to landmark it so that nobody can alter the building even after they buy it.” “Is this guy honest?” asked the mayor. “Who gets the money if they sell the church?” “I never heard he wasn’t honest,” said Sheldon. “He’s a learned gentleman of the cloth. He went to Harvard. He could still be greedy, I suppose, but I have no reason to think he is.” The mayor meets with the bishop to discuss the issue of preserving the church and realizes that Bishop Thomas is an ideal connection to improve his approval with the black community. The mayor agrees to prevent the church from being landmarked and the bishop is overcome with gratitude at the benefit selling the property will provide the congregation. Then the mayor tells the bishop that he wants him to serve on a new “blue-ribbon commission against crime.” When the bishop declines because the commission would conflict with his role in the church, the mayor says not to worry about the church remaining without landmark status: “Don’t worry about that at all. As I said I didn’t do it for you and I didn’t do it for your church. I did […]

Affordable Housing vs. Density: The Unintended Consequences of Zoning Bonuses

California Assembly Bill 710 was introduced to earlier this year to tackle the problem of municipalities requiring onerous amounts of parking for new development, widely recognized as one of the main impediments to transit-oriented development and infill growth. The bill would have capped city and county parking requirements in neighborhoods with good transit to one space per residential unit and one space per 1,000 sq. ft. of non-residential space, with an exemption process for areas with a true parking crunch and some other caveats….

DC Councilmembers Take a (Soft) Stand Against Parking

DCist reports that DC city councilmembers Tommy Wells and Mary Cheh proposed legislation that would allow the mayor to designate apartment buildings where residents would not be allowed to purchase residential parking permits. This innovative legislation would mark a sharp turn away from typical municipal policies that enforce parking minimums for developers. According to the DCist, building owners would be able to seek this designation for their properties only when no units are currently leased. I contacted both councilmembers to find out more information on this proposed rule — such as whether developers will be incentivized to achieve this designation or if this designation would be voided when these buildings sell — but have not yet heard back. My first thought on this legislation is that it has low potential for costs or unintended consequences and certainly marks an improvement over parking minimums. However, I also can’t imagine that this legislation would have a significant impact on the number of people parking on DC streets. Because people would self-select into buildings designated as parking-free, those who choose to rent in these buildings will probably be people who don’t have cars anyway. A more effective solution would be to raise the cost of residential parking permits to the revenue-maximizing levels, varying these rates across neighborhoods in accordance with demand.

Preservationists Accuse NYC Landmarks Commission of Favoritism

A scandal may be brewing at New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. The LPC has never had a reputation for being very objective or easy to work with, but now its integrity is being called into question as preservationists are accusing both a current and former official of colluding with mega-developer Steven Roth of Vornado Realty to allow a controversial interior modification to sail through the commission unimpeded. 510 Fifth Avenue, in its heyday

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