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Links

1. Shocker: The federal government is too incompetent to even sell its own buildings. Eh, oh well – it’s not like it holds most of that property in the city with the most expensive office space in America or anything. 2. Two State Senators from Queens are calling plans to toll the East River Bridges in exchange for relieving Long Island and Hudson Valley counties of the need to pay the MTA pay roll tax “nothing more than another tax on Middle Class families and small businesses.” First of all, it’s not a tax, it’s a user fee, but secondly, how many Middle Class (in caps, for christsake!) families are we supposed to believe really have to drive into Manhattan? 3. The FHA is loaning money to people with “less than stellar credit” to buy condos in New York City with only a 3.5% downpayment. In December I blogged an article claiming the federal government is shifting its subprime portfolio back to the FHA from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose implosion has cost taxpayers $150 billion. 4. Green roofs: Is there anything they can’t do? This report lists a whole slew of financial benefits, but if they’re such a great deal, why do developers need “significant public policy support” to install them? All the talk of creating jobs without even attempting to make a cost/benefit analysis is also disconcerting, but is typical of boosters of government programs. And are we really to believe that green roofs “reduce crime”? And if they really “improve property values for nearby buildings by 11 percent,” then why aren’t landlords falling over themselves offering to pay neighbors to install green roofs on their buildings? Seems like for such a supposedly huge benefit and relatively small number of beneficiaries, the collective action problem could be […]

Yet another non-bike-related NYC transit reform bites the dust

Well that was quick: Mr. Bloomberg made the so-called “five-borough taxi plan” a centerpiece of his State of the City address in January. The proposal called for creating a new class of livery cabs, with meters and, perhaps, a single color, that would be allowed to pick up passengers on the street outside of Manhattan who hadn’t arranged a ride ahead of time. Currently, such pickups are illegal but widespread. Only yellow taxis—whose numbers are limited to the 13,237 medallions in circulation—can pick up passengers who hail them. But now talks between the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the taxi industry are focusing on a series of plans that would use yellow cabs—not livery cars—to expand taxi service outside of Manhattan. “I believe we are completely off the mayor’s original plan,” said one person familiar with the talks. “I would go as far as calling it dead.” As it stands now, the vast, vast majority of yellow cab pick-ups are in Manhattan or at airports, and it’s pretty much impossible to get a cab in Brooklyn, Queens, or the Bronx to take you anywhere but Manhattan. The silver lining is that the number of medallions might be increased, but it’s not clear by how much. I’d also like to point out that this is yet another transit failure for the Bloomberg administration, which only seems to be willing to go to the mat for bike lanes in wealthy, white neighborhoods. (To say nothing of transit advocates – I could be wrong, but I don’t think Streetsblog ever found time amidst its daily barrage of bike agitprop to come out in favor of outer borough taxi deregulation.) The private van plan was poorly thought-out and from what I can tell has been forgotten, the physically separated 34th St. Transitway was defeated, […]

Affordable Housing for the Rich and the Failure of Zoning Bonuses

In the past I have not been kind to affordable housing programs. I have a lot of deeper problems with them that I’ll get to in a minute, but I think the extraordinarily high upper income limits on some of the projects are indicative of the broader problem of the essentially arbitrary and random (literally – they’re usually decided by lottery!) nature in which they’re doled out. In a way, even when the beneficiaries are blatantly undeserving, everybody wins – politicians get votes, and affordable housing advocates get paid. Everybody, that is, except market-rate renters, but when’s the last time they ever voted somebody out of power for sabotaging their interests? Anyway, your latest affordable housing outrage story comes from New York City (where else?) – specifically 138th Street in Harlem, where the 73 units at Beacon Towers are almost all under contract, and Curbed claims that most of the remaining units are income-restricted “up to $192,000”!!! Oh yeah, and they can’t even find enough people who qualify. Which brings me to another point: the Beacon Towers are not towers, and are certainly not any kind of beacon. They’re eight stories tall, and considering we’re talking about new construction in Manhattan, I’m going to take a wild guess and say they built right up to the zoning envelope. The immediate neighborhood is a mix of turn-of-the-century five- and six-story walkups (but little in the way of even cornice lines), some post-war towers-in-a-park-style buildings that reach up to 15 (!!) stories, along with a smattering of parking lots and other woefully underused lots. As Robert Fogelson wrote in Downtown, the New Yorkers of 1900 fully expected that by 2000, the whole island of Manhattan would be a river-to-river block of commercial skyscrapers. Perhaps that was unrealistic even if there had been no zoning code, […]

The Little-Known History of “Light and Air”

“Light and air” is a very common excuse that people give for why we must have basic zoning laws, and while nowadays a lot of people mean it simply in an aesthetic sense – another way of saying “I like to be able to look out a window and not see another skyscraper 50 feet away” (though for some reason when said interaction happens on the second or third floor, it’s okay?) – the origins of it are very interesting, and I believe crucial to understanding today’s urban plans. Of course, the ideas that turn-of-the-century planners had about disease and density turned out to be totally incorrect – privacy and being able to look out a window is nice, but the lack thereof is not a great health risk. As Robert Fogelson writes on pages 125-26 of Downtown: Skyscrapers were also a serious menace to public health, advocates of height limits charged. As early as the mid 1880s, they said that tall office buildings were turning the streets below into dark, damp, and gloomy canyons. During the winter they blocked the sun, leaving the cold streets even colder. During the summer, wrote American Architect and Building News, they acted as “storehouses of heat,” driving up the temperature after sunset, making the once cool and refreshing nights unbearable. The skyscrapers also shrouded the nearby buildings in darkness, forcing the office workers to rely on artificial light – which, it was believed, put a strain on the eyes. Worst of all, the skyscrapers deprived both the streets below and the adjacent buildings of fresh air and sunlight. To Americans who still held that disease was a product of the “miasma,” the noxious vapors that permeated the cities, the lack of fresh air was bad enough. To Americans who believed in the new […]

Socialism and the roads, then and now

I’ve been reading Stephen Goddard’s Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century, and it’s a great book with lots of excerpable content, but here’s one thing that caught my eye on page 170. I should note that when Goddard talks about “the highwaymen,” he’s talking about the old technocratic highway corps that focused on improving rural roads, which was only a small subset of the overall highway lobby. (The broader highway lobby included politicians looking for Keynesian votes, auto/tire/rubber/oil companies looking for customers, and, increasingly, big city mayors in a misguided attempt to reverse the auto-powered trend towards decentralization.) Seeing to advance these watershed ideas, yet wary of the power of the highway coalition, FDR set up the urban-oriented Interregional Highway Committee (IHC) in 1941. He borugh traditional engineers and visionaries together and named his osmetime-nemesis MacDonald its chair. Its mix of disciplines led the IHC to the pregnant conclusion that highway building was not merely an end in itself but a way to mold the declining American city while reviving it. At the core of the concept was a twofer: by cutting a selective swath through “cramped, crowded and depreciated” cities and routing downtown highways along river valleys, Washington could eradicate “a long-standing eyesore and blight” while easing gridlock. The autobahns may have inspired the interregional highways, but on one element they differed fundamentally: the German roads sought to serve the cities, while the American roads aimed to change them. The variance would become startingly apparent a generation later. To the highwaymen, the Roosevelt administration’s visionary proposals were anathema. Michigan Representative Jesse P. Wolcott warned that a “small coterie of individuals who would socialize America” were taking control of American highway policy. A member of the House Roads Committee decried the NRPB’s “cradle […]

Annotated simplified DC land use map

Our friends at BeyondDC have made a nifty little simplified map of the DC zoning code (yellow is residential, red is commercial, gray is park/institutional/industrial) out of GIS data provided by the local government. It’s nice and all, but when you reduce such a beautifully complex and meticulous plan to a mere three colors, you lose all the local flavor that makes DC unique. So, I’ve taken the liberty of mining the GIS data and annotating the map a bit, in an attempt to better present the true spirit of The Zoning Code: …I was tempted to put the “Fine. But only till the black people leave” in a big fat watermark over the entire city, but alas, I made it with Pixlr. DC residents, feel free to leave additional annotations in the comments.

Links

1. NYT reports on dense suburban projects being scaled back across Long Island not because of financing constraints or the recession, but because local governments are refusing to accept the density. At the end it cites AvalonBay as saying that after the its rebuke on the Island, it will reconsider “whether we would stay on Long Island and be an investor.” AvalonBay is a developer that specifically targets “high barrier-to-entry markets,” so the fact that it’s considering pulling out of the market entirely is a bad sign for Long Island’s long-term growth prospects. 2. Cap’n Transit on the private bus battle brewing in New York City that we should all be paying more attention to. Coincidentally, earlier today I did a search for new about dollar vans, and the only coverage I found was about car crashes – anyone know of any new developments that have flew under the radar of the mainstream media? Separated by language and legality, private buses might be one of New York City’s most undercovered industries. 3. An incredible list of demands from DC Walmart foes. I have no particular love for Walmart – it’s clear that their business model relies heavily on government intervention in favor of roads and sprawl – but any self-styled “community” group that’s demanding free buses every 10 minutes to the Metro, transit benefits for workers, and “free or low-priced parking spaces” is not to be taken seriously. I also like how they want Walmart not to screen workers’ backgrounds at all but also want “no less than two off-duty D.C. police officers on its premises at all times.” The demand for direct cash bribes at the end is also pretty classy. 4. SFpark, the San Francisco market-based on-street parking pricing scheme, has launched. Apparently the price can get up […]

Links

1. NYT A-1 headline! Number of new single-family homes sold in February was at its lowest point since data was first collected in 1963, but multi-unit sales are up. 2. Lydia DePillis with an example of some abhorrent NIMBYism from DC. 3. Anti-laneway housing propaganda from Vancouver. It looks like some are bucking the requirement that you have one parking spot per lot and are “putting in large windows and heated flooring in the garage of their laneway homes.” 4. A Toronto developer on “podiumism,” or skyscraper form that zoning rules force architects to build. New York City’s first zoning code in 1916 had setbacks that had a similar effect, though it formed more of a ziggurat – a much bulkier shape than is allowed today. 5. The Overhead Wire and The Transport Politic criticize new surburban-oriented low-ridership American commuter rail lines.

More Libertarians on Jane Jacobs

The Ludwig von Mises Institute publishes a podcast performed by Jeff Riggenbach called “The Libertarian Tradition”, which discusses significant figures in the libertarian movement.  The most recent edition is dedicated to Jane Jacobs, who’s ideas are highly regarded by many libertarians, despite the fact that she publicly distanced herself  from being associated with the term or movement.  It’s a great listen, and mentions fellow Market Urbanists and friends of the site, Sandy Ikeda and Thomas Schmidt.  It’s great to see more attention given to Jane Jacobs and urbanism by free market advocates. Mises Podcast on Jane Jacobs ______________________________ On a similar note, Market Urbanist, Sandy Ikeda will be hosting a “Jane’s Walk” in honor of Jane Jacobs in Brooklyn Heights.  Here’s a description from the site: Eyes on Brooklyn Heights The beautiful and historic neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights offers excellent examples of Jane Jacobs’ principles of urban diversity in action. Beginning at the steps of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall, we will stroll through residential and commercial streets while observing and talking about how the physical environment influences social activity and even economic and cultural development, both for good and for ill. We will be stopping at several points of interest, including the famous Promenade, and end near the #2/3 subway and a nice coffeehouse. Please wear comfortable footwear and weather-appropriate clothing, and be sure to have lots of questions. See you there! Date: Sunday May 8, 2011 Time: 1:00pm-2:30pm Meeting Place: The tour will meet at the steps of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall (2nd stop on the #2/3 subway) and end at the Clark Street station of the #2/3 subway. Host:Sandy Ikeda Host Organization: Purchase College www.purchase.edu Contact info: [email protected] I plan to attend.  It would be great to see some other Market Urbanists there!

Links

1. PlaNYC 2.0 may try to tackle off-street minimum parking requirements for new development, though Transportation Alternatives and Tri-State Transportation Campaign are skeptical. 2. The TLC has been cracking down on illegal livery cab street hails as the Bloomberg administration considers allowing the black cars to pick people up off the street in the outer boroughs (and maybe Manhattan above 96th St.). Other than when Bloomberg first proposed it in his 10th State of the City, though, I haven’t seen any progress on that initiative. 3. The LPC is considering a proposal for a new East Village historic district “containing nearly 300 buildings,” and according to my quick Google Map’ing, a few completely non-historic post-war buildings and a gigantic parking lot. 4. More on the California redevelopment agencies that Jerry Brown is trying to kill. 5. The blog ArlingtonGOP chides county Democrats’ “failure to require adequate parking at new development projects,” which I guess means they are not in favor of free markets in off-street parking. I’ve emailed the Arlington GOP for clarification and further comment and will post it if I receive it.

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