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Nicole Gelinas responds to Alon Levy on MTA pay

Last week commenter Alon Levy criticized the Manhattan Institute’s position on transit unions, and Nicole Gelinas in particular, as being too focused on overall pay levels while neglecting overstaffing. Nicole wrote to me soon after to defend her record on the transit issue, and it does indeed look like she’s addressed the issues that Alon talks about: Alon Levy takes my comments out of context. I have talked about pay cuts in regards to token-booth clerks – retail-level workers who earn more than $54,000 a year (plus benefits) to staff stations. The MTA, because it has no flexibility to cut the pay of these workers, has simply dispensed of the workers wholesale, leaving many station entranced unmanned. There is a disconnect here: the public prefers to see a person in the station; the MTA loses revenue when no one is there to monitor fare-beating (also, at some stations, including downtown, the NYPD must deploy people to stations to deter this fare-beating, at a much higher cost); and there are many people with retail skills looking for part-time jobs who would happily do the job at a market wage at less than $54,000 a year. The MTA should have the flexibility to hire part-time workers at lower wages and benefits to staff empty stations. She then points to this article she wrote back in 2009, where she takes aim at union work rules – which, as she pointed out in the email, is an indirect way of talking about staffing: Track workers are one obvious opportunity for smart cost-cutting. The MTA employs 1,865 of them on the city’s subways. According to seethroughny.net, a project of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, each gets paid an average of nearly $59,000 (not including benefits or health care), for a total of $109 […]

Long-form link list

1. Another empirical paper claiming that anti-density zoning increases racial segregation: Previous research on segregation stresses things like urban form and racial preferences as primary causes. The author finds that an institutional force is more important: local land regulation. Using two datasets of land regulations for the largest U.S. metropolitan areas, the results indicate that anti-density regulations are responsible for large portions of the levels and changes in segregation from 1990 to 2000. A hypothetical switch in zoning regimes from the most exclusionary to the most liberal would reduce the equilibrium gap between the most and least segregated Metropolitan Statistical Areas by at least 35% for the ordinary least squares estimates. 2. Wendell Cox, in a discussion about the relatively dispersed downtowns of the biggest mainland Chinese cities, notes that development along Beijing’s ring roads “resemble[s] more the post-World War II corridor form of Central Avenue in Phoenix than Manhattan, Seattle or Pittsburgh.” Interesting that the urban system that Cox makes a living defending is so popular in communist mainland cities, whereas the market-oriented Chinese cities of Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong follow the more traditional dense downtown design. 3. The NYT reports that the mayor’s office runs a non-profit that organizes farmers markets in rich neighborhoods that already have good food availability, while throwing up barriers and red tape that prevent private groups from starting their own in poor neighborhoods. 4. One company wants to start building prefab skyscrapers, which they claim are quicker and cheaper than traditional construction, although apparently current building codes don’t allow them to build such structures more than six stories tall. In New York City, Forest City Ratner wants to build “the world’s tallest prefabricated steel structure, a 34-story tower that would fulfill his obligation to start building affordable housing at the site,” though the building […]

How Important Are Skyscrapers, Really?

Mary Newsom, in a review of Ed Glaeser’s new book Triumph of The City, makes some arguments about skyscrapers that I’ve never heard before: In his eyes, skyscrapers are the height of green living. But as architect Michael Mehaffy and others have pointed out, tall buildings can be less energy-efficient than shorter ones. In cities lacking the intense development pressure of a New York or Hong Kong – i.e., most other U.S. cities – one skyscraper can suck up a disproportionate chunk of the existing market, leading to the odd sight of tall towers surrounded by surface parking lots – not your greenest landscape. Regarding the energy efficiency of skyscrapers, she doesn’t link to any one claim in particular so I’m not sure what exactly Michael Mehaffy’s argument is, but I suspect that it doesn’t account for transportation energy use. Tall buildings (4+ stories), when built in large numbers, transfer a lot of energy spent on transit from horizontal modes (cars, rail, your feet, buses) to the one relatively energy efficient vertical mode: the elevator. As for skyscrapers surrounded by a sea of parking, when does this actually happen? I can think of two instances: public housing projects, and places with high minimum parking requirements. Neither of these are really the fault of skyscrapers. Mary also makes some similar, more reasonable, arguments against Glaeser’s skyscraper obsession – as one blogger who I can’t remember or find right now pointed out a while ago [edit: It was Charlie at Old Urbanist], skyscrapers make up a pretty small portion of NYC’s total number of units. But then again, skyscrapers are also the most regulated-against form, so I’m not sure how much we can learn from revealed preferences. I don’t have any one fact in particular to back this up, but I suspect […]

From the comments: Public transit’s problem is overstaffing, not wages

Alon Levy writes in the comments in response to an item in yesterday’s links about a Republican legislator in Texas looking to cut bus drivers’ salaries: Repeating my comment on the Austin Contrarian, and similar comments I’ve made on Second Avenue Sagas: the problem is more staffing than salaries. At New York City Transit, salaries are the same as at Toei – a little more than $100,000 in total compensation per employee. (No data for Tokyo Metro, alas.) The difference is that NYCT has 47,000 employees and Toei 6,400, a factor-of-7 difference, even though NYCT only carries twice as many passengers, and provides only four times as many train revenue-hours and stations. A train driver on Toei spends 700 hours a year driving a revenue train, versus about 450 in New York. And Toei isn’t even the most efficient agency: Tokyo Metro is three times as big as Toei but has only 8,400 employees. Republican outfits advocating pay cuts likely do not know anything about staffing levels. I’ve never seen the Manhattan Institute, which is arguing for union-busting and pay cuts in New York, say a single thing about staffing levels. On the contrary, Nicole Gelinas gleefully points out that if wages were lower, staffing levels could be maintained or increased – in other words, making New York more like a third-world city and less like a first-world city. It’s not a serious efficiency measure – it’s ideological opposition to unions, justified post hoc on financial grounds. I would suppose that this would be slightly less relevant to bus service – low levels of productivity there could be the inevitable result of sprawling land use patterns and being forced to run lots of low ridership routes. That could also apply to rail service to some extent, but the comparatively low […]

Links: Transit worker wages, farmers markets, parking, and beyond!

1. Austin Contrarian comes out in favor of a Republican proposal to lower bus drivers’ wages. I wish more liberal urbanists (i.e., urbanists) would comment on issues like these. I don’t see (m)any of them vociferously defending transit labor unions, but I also don’t see them criticizing them for making transit more costly and inefficient. 2. While NYC has a program that opens farmers markets in rich neighborhoods, regulations make it too difficult for private citizens to start their own markets, without government assistance, in parks and other open spaces in neighborhoods that could actually use them. 3. LA considers devolving some control over parking policy to neighborhood groups. Most of the powers that they’d give them appear to be liberalizing (reduce minimums, allow off-site parking to count), but it’d also give them the power to raise parking minimums. Can anyone who knows a bit more about LA tell me if this is, on net, a good idea? My gut says no – at least in my experience, the more local the power, the more likely people are to use it to stop dense development. 4. Apparently New York City maintains a dog run in Tribeca. Should the city really be subsidizing the laziness of incredibly wealthy dog owners in lower Manhattan? Regular parks at least increase land values nearby (well, at least in theory), but given that this one appears to be made of concrete and is covered in dog poop, I have a feeling that most of the neighbors wouldn’t miss it. 5. Lydia DePillis has a profile of DC-area real estate consultant/VIP Stephen Fuller. 6. Cap’n Transit on how regulation aimed at making buses safer could end up making us less safe.

Another historic preservation district fail

The other day I got some pushback from my weird (non-)historical preservation example, with some people saying that it wasn’t a great example of what’s wrong with preservation districts – the thing got built, after all! And of course I was being coy – that building was obviously going to pass the commissioners’ muster. But I noted that anything even the least bit more controversial – taller, say, or more modern – does not fly through so easily. Welp, Curbed NY (your number 1 source for real estate porn) has heard your cry and presented me with a perfect example of how fucked up New York City’s historical preservation districts are: Meet the Gansevoort Market Historic District, in the heart of the Meatpacking District in Lower Manhattan The image you see here is a rendering of a design that was actually rejected as being, among other things, too tall for the Landmarks Preservation Commission, despite it being very similar in height to buildings that were there about a hundred years ago. (And then, of course, there’s the Standard Hotel, a much taller building, right across the street!) So the architect lobbed off two stories (bringing it down to six total, which makes it less than half the height of lot of buildings in my suburban Philadelphia hometown), but still no go. The architect is going to go back for a round three at some point, but time is money, and these delays are only going to make the project more expensive. Now, in general I think that additions should be allowed to nearly all historical buildings. If you can cram an 80-story skyscraper through the middle of the Dakota, I say go for it! I understand, however, that this is a minority viewpoint, but the case for preserving the “skyline” of […]

When “affordable housing” is just a random middle class housing subsidy

Affordable housing and inclusionary zoning are complicated subjects and it’s hard to sum up all my thoughts and objections to the schemes in one post, so I’m going to take the death-by-a-thousand-cuts approach. Today’s installment: income eligibility levels. Now, the stated intent of affordable housing set-asides has always been a bit unclear to me. The cynic in me thinks it’s just a way for politicians to buy votes with public money by essentially randomly redistributing from the many (market-rate renters and buyers) to the few (the lucky handful to win the lotteries for coveted subsidized units). The stated motivation, though, seems to range anywhere from a combination of helping the poor find housing to having a little bit of housing diversity, even if that “diversity” means upper-middle class alongside upper class. In my experience, though, the programs end up overwhelmingly fulfilling the latter goal. The latest example I’ve come upon, which doesn’t seem too out of the ordinary, is from a project called Tivoli Square in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of  DC, which looks like it’s associated with the big development corporation-driven DCUSA project (As an aside, DCUSA was basically a huge urban mall in what was an obviously gentrifying neighborhood. The city ended up spending a large amount of money on a parking garage that now mostly sits empty, and they’ve been having trouble renting the retail spaces set aside for local businesses. It’s also architecturally pretty ugly, and houses way more national chains than the rest of the neighborhood. Politicians hail it as a success, but in my opinion it’s the worst thing to happen to Columbia Heights since urban renewal.) Anyway, the zipcode’s median household income in 2009 was $57,393, and the project had a 20% set-aside for some combination of low- and medium-income. The upper limit for “low income” ranges from $50,000 for […]

The effects of the Bloomberg rezonings

Here’s a chapter in a book (you can read a lot of it for free) by the same authors of the NYC parking minimum study, but this time on the practical effects of the Bloomberg rezonings. Here’s an excerpt from the conclusion: This study helps to shed light on the land use consequences of this tension between citywide goals and the political and administrative realities often emanating from neighborhood concerns about development by analyzing the cumulative impact the rezonings the City enacted between 2003 and 2007 had on residential development capacity. By identifying lots that were affected by these zoning changes and estimating the resulting change in residential development capacity, we find that the net impact has been a modest overall increase in the City’s residential capacity. Consistent with the City’s desired development patterns, this modest increase has overwhelmingly been concentrated in neighborhoods near rail transit stations. We also find, however, that about half the capacity added near rail stations from upzonings was effectively canceled out by downzonings of lots near transit. While these downzonings may be important to protect neighborhoods from new development that existing infrastructure cannot support or that is inappropriate for other reasons, they may limit the City’s ability to grow, or force growth into other neighborhoods, including, perhaps, those that are even less well served by rail transit (or otherwise less suitable for development). The analysis only took into account maximum FAR, and did not consider parking minimums, height limits, or open space requirements as limiting factors. Those are, however, difficult to factor into analyses, since they influence development by adding costs rather than imposing hard limits, and the extent to which those costs inhibit development is dependent on future market conditions that are beyond the scope of any model.

From the comments: “Architects always ask, with a haggard look in their eyes…”

In response to yesterday’s post about landmark districts, one commenter said that it wasn’t a good example of landmarking gone awry, since the project was approved, apparently without controversy. Of course, he’s right – even the Landmarks Preservation Commission isn’t going to turn down an incredibly tasteful four-story neoclassical flagship store of a major American retailer in place of an unremarkable, run-down, two-story post-war building – the risk premium on this project was probably very low. But change any of the variables – have the new building be a bit taller or more modern, or, god forbid, have it replace a pre-war building – and all of the sudden you’re going to end up paying extra for the uncertainty. (And in fact, it’s highly likely that the only reason Ralph Lauren could afford to build such a store in that location in the first place was because the land was devalued by its restrictive landmarking and perhaps zoning.) As one commenter, whose email address suggests he works in real estate finance, puts it: It is always difficult and costly. Think of a few months delay. There is also the uncertainty. With zoning, you can build “as of right.” So, as long as you follow the law, you can spend vast amounts of time and money and care planning your project. With [the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission], there is no certainty. That’s another ball game. Architects always ask, when you speak to them about your project, with a haggard look in their eyes, if the property is landmarked. It’s like having a high strung and unpredictable spouse who could blow up your project at any point, for any reason, and for none.

A question for the blogosphere: How much affordable housing is enough?

Reading about a new ultra-luxury Far West Side rental project going up where over 40% of the apartments are going to have controlled rents (“affordable housing”), I’d like to pose a question to supporters of affordable housing mandates in the planning blogosphere (which includes pretty much the whole planning blogosphere): How high is too high? I’d also be interested to know why exactly the developers included so much affordable housing. I’m pretty sure there’s no program that requires that much affordable housing (the 80/20 state program obviously only requires 20%), but I think commenter Alon Levy is probably right when he suggests that various subjective review processes pressure developers into including more subsidized units than the government officially asks for. Tom Duane, a State Senator, has some testimony up on his website about the project that gives us a look into the mind of what seems to be a typical (at least for New York City) affordable housing-type NIMBY. Back in 2009, when he gave the testimony, the plan was for 50% of the 1,200 units to be kept at below-market rents “permanently,” but even that wasn’t enough for Duane. He was upset that “only” 40% of those units will have two or more bedrooms, and also wanted the amount of commercial space scaled back from two floors (i.e., an FAR of 2.0) to just one (1.0 FAR). Oh yeah, and he doesn’t like the 31-story tower and he wants the developer to really promise not to transfer the unused development rights elsewhere. Obviously, I oppose setting aside this much of new developments for affordable housing. People tend to think of different segments of the real estate market as distinct – how on earth could limiting the number of rich people on Far West Side make prices rise in Bed-Stuy? […]

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