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Jamaica, Queens upzoning was great, but don’t forget the parking minimums

In Next American City, Aaron Barker discusses the failure of NYC’s massive rezoning in the highly transit-dependent black and immigrant neighborhood of Jamaica, Queens: One of the centerpieces of [NYC’s] initiative to house an expected 1 million new arrivals in the coming decades was the Jamaica Plan. Covering 365 square blocks surrounding a major rail hub in Queens, it was the largest rezone in the city’s history, projected to bring 9,600 jobs and 3 million square feet of new commercial space to the area. Even though it’s been over three years since the resolution passed, almost none of the expected 5,100 units of new residential construction have materialized. In fact, the only real activity has been at MODA, a 350 unit, mixed-income rental complex that opened this summer. He then poses the question: “Can redevelopment on a meaningful scale really only occur in already sought-after areas?” While it’s true that Jamaica did undergo a tremendous upzoning, there was one element missing: Minimum parking requirement reform. From what I can tell from NYC’s zoning maps and code (which are notoriously difficult to understand), there was barely any let-up at all in the Special Downtown Jamaica District (zoning district “DJ”), despite the NY Metro Chapter of the American Planning Association asking the city planners to eliminate the minimums (.pdf). Streetsblog actually wrote about this tendency to upzone without lifting parking minimums a year ago. Now, I don’t have any specific knowledge of Jamaica – I’ve only actually been to Queens once. But based on this study that we featured a few weeks ago, developers in NYC in general (and actually the study focuses on sites in Queens) only build as much parking as the zoning code mandates, implying that it is a binding constraint on development. So before we declare that zoning […]

Obama administration pushing dissolution of Fannie and Fredie

Big news out of Washington: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – which many (including me) think were at the heart of the financial collapse, and currently have some stake in the vast majority of post-crash mortgages – may be getting wound down soon. This NYT is reporting that the Obama administration may be releasing three plans at the end of the week, and the preferred (!) one is to shut down the two lenders entirely. These lines also stood out to me: Representative Scott Garrett, the New Jersey Republican who is chairman of the House subcommittee that deals with housing finance, on Monday told a mortgage conference in Florida that the government should leave the mortgage business. “I believe that, if there is to be any government assistance to homeownership, it should be limited to first-time homebuyers or rental housing,” Mr. Garrett said. Note that “rental housing” isn’t “homeownership” at all. Personally I think it’s a good idea to get the government out of encouraging homeownership entirely, on the grounds that homeowners are more likely to be in the perverse position of wanting the cost of housing – a basic expense for everyone – to go up, resulting in pervasive government interventions like anti-density zoning and blowing up the housing bubble. But even beyond this indirect sprawl promotion, they have inherent anti-density biases like their refusal to fund small mixed use projects.

When are user fees just redirected sales taxes?

Ben Ross at Greater Greater Washington has an excellent post about the pernicious habit of states (and maybe the federal government?) mislabeling sales taxes as user fees. Sorry for pulling such a long bit, but it’s good: Maryland is considering raising its gas tax. This long-overdue measure would allow some of the general revenues now subsidizing highways to go to the Purple Line, the Baltimore Red Line, and MARC expansion instead. This need has unfortunately gotten mixed up with a proposal, originating mostly from the highway lobby and its supporters, to put transportation money into a “lockbox.” The concept is to amend the state constitution to forbid transfers from the trust fund into the general fund. However, there’s a big hole in the bottom of the “lockbox.” Contrary to what some say, the money in the transportation trust fund mostly come from revenue sources that would have otherwise have gone into the state’s general fund, where it wouldn’t be locked. If I buy a bicycle in Maryland, I pay 6% sales tax and the money goes into the general fund where it pays for education, public safety, the governor’s salary, and other state expenses. Cars and gasoline are exempt from the sales tax. Instead, if I buy a car, I pay the same 6%. but it’s called “titling tax” and the money goes into a separate trust fund that is used only for transportation. It’s essentially the same when I buy gasoline, where the tax rate of 23½ cents a gallon comes to a little over 8% of the pretax price. […] The idea behind the lockbox amendment is that drivers pay for the roads they drive on. This idea is mistaken, but it’s widely held, and it’s an enormous obstacle to sensible transportation planning. The danger lurking in the […]

A bleg about vending in stations

Something that’s always bothered me about mass train stations in America is that very few take advantage of the commercial advantage in having access to huge numbers of semi-captive customers with nothing to do for a few minutes. As I’ve mentioned before, one of the key reasons that Japanese rail is profitable is that the mass transit companies internalize the positive real estate externalities by owning land in the vicinity. Since transit agencies in America are publicly owned and very inefficient as a result, getting them directly involved in real estate is probably not the best idea. But they should still try at least to maximize the real estate they already have – on their station platforms, both above ground and beneath. Washington, DC’s Metrorail system is the perfect example of a lost revenue opportunity. Because the stations were built relatively recently and with enormous government largesse, they are quite large compared to normal subway stations. Especially in crowded transfer stations like Metro Center and Gallery Place, there’s a ton of room for vendors to set up booths and sell things like coffee, food, and magazines. And in fact DC desperately needs an underground pedestrian pathway between the aforementioned stations to ease extreme crowding on the Red Line, which could be at least partially funded by selling off space in the new tunnel. (Ditto with one linking Farragut North and Farragut West.) DC currently doesn’t allow eating or drinking in its stations, but this would be a silly thing to let get in the way of funding for a system that desperately needs it. The metros in Paris and Bucharest both allow food to be sold underground, and neither seemed any more or less dirty than the DC Metro. Outside of DC, a lot of the regional rail stations in […]

Duany bashes LEED standards

Andrés Duany, leader of the New Urbanism movement, comes out against LEED standards: He said that high-density development in urban locations which entail less reliance on private cars should get a free pass on energy efficiency or energy generation standards.  “Don’t make apartment dwellers install solar power,” he said.  “They are doing their part just by living densely and driving less.” […] Duany also had choice words for government land use and building officials. In New Orleans, he said that government standards for rebuilding added costs that just about exactly offset the amount of assistance the government was going to provide, so “no one can rebuild.”

Virginia land use law: Marc Scribner from CEI responds

After I put up the post this weekend about a Virginia Tea Party group’s opposition to a state law forcing counties to upzone enough land for medium-density development, I sent an email to Marc Scribner at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian group, asking his opinion on the law. He was kind enough to give us his thoughts, and here they are: While I would like to see a lot more upzoning and would support state-wide legislation that would limit local exclusionary zoning (or ideally prohibit it!), subsection (1)(B) provision (6) seems problematic. Basically, legislatures should restrict exclusion, rather than force inclusion by establishing UDAs and specifying design and form aspects, if they are to pursue land-use liberalization at the state level. Also, the lack of a provision limiting property condemnations within UDAs could spur more eminent domain abuse, which has been a nasty side effect of poorly structured upzoning that results in things such as access to transit and new sanitation capacity being prioritized over property rights. David Alpert might not agree, but I consider the government robbing private property owners of their land to be a far greater offense than prohibiting multi-unit housing or mixed-use development, as much as I dislike these regulatory takings. (Although I believe Virginia has an interesting requirement that jurors in an eminent domain case be property owners.) The reason why one might see more ED abuse within upzoned areas is that going from less intense development to more intense generally calls for more public infrastructure investment (or worse, grandiose PPP projects). This is particularly true in more residential areas, as commercial and industrial zones typically have near-adequate or overbuilt sanitation facilities, etc., that can accommodate more growth. Not saying that dev is bad, but any time comprehensive redevelopment becomes more likely, people need […]

David Alpert calls out Virginia Tea Party group as land use statists

David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington has been on top of a story out of Virginia about a Virginia Tea Party group and its bizarre and seemingly anti-free market opposition to a state law forcing local governments to make room for dense growth. The law – which was passed a few years ago by Republicans, as David notes – included a few provisions, but the one in question, which a longtime Northern Virginia Republican is seeking to overturn, required each locality to designate an “urban development area” in which it would allow medium density development. It appears that the original plan was to have an urban growth boundary too, outside of which development would be much harder, but I’m not sure that was included in the version that passed. But whatever the rest of the law contained, Del. Robert G. Marshall and Virginia’s Campaign for Liberty are only opposing the provision that forces localities to provide upzoned land “sufficient to meet projected residential and commercial growth” for the next decade or two. I’ve read the bill (it’s relatively short), and the provision in question doesn’t even put a floor on density in the zoning area or cap the amount of parking allowed – all it does is force local governments to allow developers to build at higher densities. Here is, as far as I can tell, the strictest condition on the UDAs, which also have to allow mixed uses and smaller lot set-backs: The comprehensive plan of a locality having a population of 130,000 or more persons shall provide for urban development areas that are appropriate for development at a density on the developable acreage of at least eight single-family residences, 12 townhouses, or 24 apartments, condominium units, or cooperative units per acre, and an authorized floor area ratio of at least 0.8 […]

Links

1. A shameless story of rent control in NYC. Glad to see that the city is forcing developers to subsidize wealthy Manhattanites’ Eat, Pray, Love-like dreams of moving to Paris. 2. The travails of getting a bus lane on a busy LA street where “[m]ore people already travel by bus than by car along the route during peak hours.” 3. Here is what appears to be another example of bad zoning creating blight, and the city using said blight to seize the property via eminent domain and hand it over to favored developers. NYC zoning maps are shockingly difficult to read – can anybody tell me what is allowed to be built, as of right, in the area bounded by 125th and 127th Sts. and 2nd and 3rd Ave. in Manhattan? 4. NYC’s new zoning lite handbook. No code should be so complicated that a 168-page handbook can’t even contain a zoning map.

Links

1. Systemic Failure calls out the Bay Area for giving an award to a textbook example of greenwashing in urbanism: Ironically, this project was recently promoted on the SF-Streetsblog website by “New Urbanist” developer Peter Calthrope for its “highest level” of green technology. What does it say for the Bay Area environmental community, that such stupendously ugly, auto-oriented architecture can win “sustainable community of the year” awards? I love how vociferous and blunt Systemic Failure’s criticism is – it’s something that’s sorely missing in the overly self-congratulatory planning blogosphere. 2. LA rushes to get another giant hulking parking lot in before Jerry Brown turns off the “redevelopment” tap. 3. Interesting charts on the gas tax throughout history.

If highways push traffic onto local roads, why not toll them too?

Peter Gordon blogs about a paper he presented at the Transportation Research Board conference in DC: My friends and I just presented this paper at the Transportation Research Board meetings in Washington DC. We tested the effects of tolling Los Angeles’ freeways in the peak hours (we tested 10 cents and 30 cents per mile). It’s a simulation on a real network and many substitutions occur. As expected, peak-hour freeway speeds increase, some people switch to surface streets and that traffic slows, some switch to off-peak hours and some (very few) travel less. And politicians take in a lot of money! That’s for the 10-cent toll. The 30-cent toll overloads the surface streets. Many other options can be tested, including only tolling some of the freeways. Planners have voiced concern that tolling the freeways would overload surface streets. There is probably a “sweet spot” that can easily be found. We also plan to look for effects on freight travel as well as travel by income groups. He’s established that “very few” people lessen their travel. And if the the number of people who switch to off-peak hours is small compared to the number of people who move to surface streets (and judging from my very cursory perusal of the paper, it seems like this is the case), then tolling is just shifting the burden from highways to local roads. This could be a problem since local roads, unlike highways, are paid for almost entirely out of general revenue, not user fees. It seems like the rational thing to do at this point is to argue for tolling local surface streets as well, perhaps through a congestion charge. Maybe I missed it (like I said, I didn’t read the presentation paper thoroughly), but his talk of a “sweet spot” in the summary […]

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