Market Urbanism – Page 92 – Liberalizing Cities From The Ground Up

New York City links

There are a couple of NYC-related links that I’ve been saving up, so here they are: 1. Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indiannapolis and NYC’s new deputy mayor, appears to be interested in privatizing New York City’s parking meters in order to balance the city’s budget. We’re more interested in the extent to which it will raise parking prices closer to a market rate, but wary of the city locking in parking policy and therefore not being able to experiment with more radical reforms down the road. 2. Bruce Ratner’s new Lower Manhattan apartment building, designed by Frank Gehry, with studios starting at $3,000/mo., is receiving an affordable housing tax abatement. 3. Comptroller John Liu’s task force on “what the city can and should demand from developers of publicly subsidized projects” has collapsed in a series of public resignations and dissensions. Fortunately, it looks like a potentially lethal beast has been slain: In a letter to the task force co-chairs, four dissenters wrote that the task force’s recommendations would create “additional red tape and bureaucracy and ultimately waste taxpayer funds on a new set of city-funded consultants.” “In today’s increasingly competitive environment, a proposal like this would make New York a more difficult place to do business and to build,” the four dissenting task force members wrote in a letter reviewed by the Journal. 4. The Gotham Gazette discusses the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which should ring a bell for anyone interested in NYC real estate. The article claims that it’s the most significant planning entity in New York City, and that its rise has come on the back of inclusionary zoning and public-private initiatives. A lot of this is includes affordable housing mandates (usually about 20%) within otherwise private buildings, which the Gotham Gazette says are included in most […]

Zoning blighted Manhattanville before Columbia did

Something that always annoyed me about discussions of the state of Manhattanville and Columbia’s blight study is the fact that they usually leave out restrictive zoning as the original sin. We’re certainly no fans of eminent domain or Columbia’s plans for the West Harlem neighborhood, and while people are right to point out that Columbia’s neighborhood acquisitions and plans are key drivers of the further decline of the neighborhood, it would be stretching the truth to say that the neighborhood’s blight is entirely Columbia’s fault. The fact is that even before Columbia descended upon the neighborhood, its zoning classification just wouldn’t allow it to be a nice place. What else would you expect from an area that’s zoned mostly for industrial and manufacturing uses and is inhabited mostly by storage companies and auto repair shops? And the neighborhood organizations themselves weren’t doing the best job selling the alternatives. While their plan included some upzonings, it also would have hobbled the area with the onerous restrictions that are all too common throughout the city. There was an emphasis on preservation of the status quo, with some light industry retained. Inclusionary zoning and community benefits agreements would have driven up the cost of development further. They also took the stance that parking in the area was “insufficient” and “inadequate,” and called for “affordable municipal parking.” Clearly not being familiar with the work of Donald Shoup, they argued that “limited parking cause[s] drivers to circle blocks looking for on-street parking.” Again, while we’re no fans of eminent domain or Columbia’s heavy-handed tactics, it’s important to remember how difficult it is to do things “the right way,” and how much time and money is necessary to get plots of land rezoned. NYU, which doesn’t have the blight excuse for its Lower Manhattan acquisitions, is […]

Stephen Smith
October 6, 2010
planning Zoning
3

More urban planning mismeasurement

Apparently I’m not the only one thinking about urban mismeasurement, because the planning blogosphere is lighting up with examples. In addition to my critique of per passenger-mile measurements and the aforelinked critique of average density (and the great follow-up post here), I’ve noticed two other discussions about mismeasurement in urban planning: 1. A report funded by the Rockefeller Foundation criticizes the standard measures of congestion used by the Texas Transportation Institute’s “industry standard” Urban Mobility Report. It cites the Travel Time Index in particular, or the ratio of average peak travel times to non-peak travel times (it’s unclear but I believe they’re only talking about cars), as being particular pro-sprawl, in that it rewards cities where it’s hard to get around to begin with. While measuring total time spent in peak hour traffic, apparently dense metro areas like Chicago, Portland, and Sacramento have the lowest peak travel times, with Nashville holding up the rear with the longest average time spent in rush-hour traffic. 2. Angie Schmitt at Streetsblog gives an excellent example of both mismeasurement and environmentalism vs. density: This summer I worked in the air quality division of the metropolitan planning agency in Northeast Ohio — known as NOACA. NOACA is the local agency responsible for disbursing federal highway dollars. To a certain extent, its actions are governed by a series of federal directives. While I was at NOACA, we hired an “air quality planner” whose main responsibility was to perform an analysis mandated by the feds to measure the air quality impacts of every proposed road project. The problem was, the analysis inevitably concluded — without fail! — that expanding a road would reduce air pollution. That’s because the formula only accounted for short-term air quality impacts. Any given road project was likely to reduce congestion in the […]

Stephen Smith
October 3, 2010
Uncategorized
1

The folly of measuring transportation costs per passenger-mile

When comparing costs of various modes of transit, units measured “per passenger-mile” are very common. It makes sense intuitively – people take trips of varying length, and longer trips are more expensive than shorter trips, so the desire to standardize and compare makes us want to simply divide the trips by their length and call it even. Both supporters and opponents of light rail use per passenger-mile costs and subsidies to justify their positions, the government keeps tabs on them, and Randal O’Toole at the Cato Institute has even used carbon emissions per passenger-mile to claim that cars are more environmentally friendly than rail. The problem with measure at the rate of distance traveled is that the purpose of transit is not to travel long distances – these are not pleasure travelers trying to get as far from home as possible, but rather commuters trying to get to wherever their jobs and schools are located. But the distance to this “somewhere” is not a variable to be held constant – it actually varies with population and job density, which is highly correlated with mode of transit. Places with train lines generally have and allow for denser development and thus less distance between your house and your workplace or school – the difference in average commute distance between urban and exurban areas could be as much as an order of magnitude. Measuring costs in terms of total costs per person and not per passenger-mile makes intuitive sense when you think about it in terms of personal finances. If you lived in Brooklyn and your office moved from Manhattan to somewhere out in suburban Long Island and your transit expenses rose from $89/month for a Metrocard to $300/month for the cost of the car plus insurance, gas, and upkeep, it would be […]

Stephen Smith
September 30, 2010
Uncategorized
9

Environmentalism vs. density

Recently I was reading an article about the death-by-delay of an upzoning proposal near a train station in Boston because the property might have been “considered ‘priority habitat’ for rare species, including the eastern box turtle,” and I thought about all the times I’ve heard of opponents of density hiding behind environmentalism. Ed Glaeser has written about how Bay Area environmentalists’ opposition to development and California courts’ institution of onerous environmental reviews have encouraged sprawl, and last year we learned that the Northeast Corridor was denied HSR stimulus money because of the lengthy multi-state environmental review necessary. A few minutes of Googling reveals that stormwater mitigation rules, intended to minimize the amount of polluted runoff entering the watershed, have also been accused of favoring sprawling, greenfield development over infill and denser redevelopment. Existing structures are generally grandfathered in, but any redevelopment apparently must meet the new rules, even if it has no more impervious surface than the building it seeks to replace. Density bonuses for “green” building techniques also strike me as a bit backwards, considering that density is “green” in its own right. I can’t find any quantitative research on how much of a problem these supposedly pro-environment rules really are, and I don’t have the practical experience of a developer or a planner, but perhaps some commenters will chime in with their knowledge or come up with other instances of environmentalism taking precedence over density.

Stephen Smith
September 27, 2010
Uncategorized
15

Weekend links

Links, links, links! 1. The Washington City Paper has a great expose on street food in DC called “Inside D.C.’s Food-Truck Wars” with the subtitle “How some of Washington’s most powerful interests are trying to curb the city’s most popular new cuisine.” 2. Mary Newsom at the Charlotte Observer thinks it’s a bad thing that Charlotte allowed so much density around its wildly popular new light rail line because it’s driving up property values. The Overhead Wire says that this is natural when land is scarce, and that “if you built all the [proposed] lines at once, that pressure gets relieved five or six ways instead of one way.” This is to some extent true, but another solution to the scarcity of transit-oriented property is to allow more even development around the existing line by loosening zoning and parking rules. 3. Ryan Avent finds research that finds that congestion pricing in Stockholm, where citizens voted on the plan after a seven-month test period, became more popular after they experienced it. Then again, congestion pricing in New York and elsewhere depends not only on people living in the city, but also people living outside of it, who are much less likely to warm up to it. Also, it looks like Stockholm expanded transit (mostly bus) service along with congestion pricing. 4. The pilot private van initiative in NYC that we discussed earlier has been floundering, and Cap’n Transit has been all over it. Literally every post on the front page of his blog is about it. There seem to be many reasons for the vans’ failure, and I might write something on it in the future, but in the meantime read Cap’n Transit if you’re interested. 5. Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron praises recently-fired Philadelphia Housing Authority boss Carl Greene’s […]

Stephen Smith
September 25, 2010
Uncategorized
2

The Great American Streetcar Myth

by Stephen Smith Among liberals in the planning profession today, the story of the Great American Streetcar Conspiracy is widely known. There are more nuanced variants, but it goes something like this: Streetcars were once plentiful and efficient, but then along came a bunch of car and oil companies like General Motors and Standard Oil, and they bought up all the streetcar companies, tore out their tracks and replaced the routes with buses, and ultimately set America on its present path to motorized suburban hell. Although the story dates back to a 1950 court conviction and was retold by academics and government employees throughout the ’60s and ’70s, the theory leapt into the public consciousness in 1988 with both a 60 Minutes piece and a fictionalized account in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. Even today it resonates with liberals – The Atlantic casually mentions it as the reason America abandoned mass transit, The Nation wrote a whole article about it a few years ago, Fast Food Nation discusses it, and in the last week I’ve seen two references to the theory in the planning blogosphere. Though the story has embedded itself in the liberal worldview, it has little basis in reality. A cursory look at transportation history shows that motorization was already well underway by the time National City Lines – the holding company backed by GM, Firestone Tire, and Standard Oil, among others – started buying up transit companies in 1938. Other factors, often championed by progressives, had already driven the industry into decline and it was really only a matter of time before buses took over. Although General Motors and other car-centric companies were certainly lobbying the government in their favor, the progressive tendency to vilify private transit companies had already turned the public against streetcars, and […]

Stephen Smith
September 23, 2010
history infrastructure Logistics & Transportation Transportation
67

Building what you can

by Stephen Smith BLDG blog has a cool post about a book by two architects about “minor development,” or small construction projects that don’t require planning permission – things like sheds, garages, and extensions. It talks about recent legal changes in Europe that have encouraged this sort of development, and has some neat pictures of the sort of small changes that can add a room or just extra space to existing houses. The article doesn’t mention it, but this immediately brings to mind laneway housing – basically converting garages into inhabitable buildings and sometimes building in existing parking spaces. Vancouver legalized laneway housing last year, and though you still need a $899 permit, you don’t have to file for a variance and the process seems streamlined (although curiously, the article says the units can “only [be] used as rental units”…does that mean you’re not allowed to tear down your garage and build extra space for yourself?). These are small sorts of infill allowances that aren’t going to radically alter a city like parking, zoning, or road reform could. But although we’d prefer complete property rights with the ability to build on (or not build on, or sell) as much of your land as you’d like, this is at least a step in the right direction.

Stephen Smith
September 22, 2010
Uncategorized
2

A comment on rolling stock protectionism

by Stephen Smith In response to an article I posted yesterday about protectionism in public transit procurement, frequent commenter Alon Levy left this great comment about the history of rolling stock procurement in the US: What happened in the 1970s was that the rolling stock market shrank, leaving American transit agencies with just a few US vendors. St. Louis and Pullman were fully protected by Buy American. As such, New York City Transit had no choice but to buy trains from them; the trains turned out to be defective, leading to breach of contract lawsuits that bankrupted both companies. Since then, NYCT has bought from foreign companies, following Buy America to the letter but not to the spirit. The first order after the St. Louis and Pullman disasters was imported from Kobe, as Reagan cut all federal funding, and went without a hitch. Subsequent orders required the vendors to establish US plants, but often only the final assembly is done in the US. In the most recent order, the car shells were made in Brazil. Buy America does the opposite of leveling the playing field for foreign firms. It favors big players, which can land big contracts and establish US plants. The same is true for the regulatory structure: the various globally unique [Federal Railroad Administration] rules benefit companies that are big enough to be able to modify trains for the American market. Just recently, Caltrain’s request for an FRA waiver involved consultation with just the largest companies in the industry. There are a lot of smaller manufacturers that are shut out of the US market; they don’t have the capital to establish new overseas factories or pay lobbyists to write rules in their favor. Those include Switzerland’s Stadler, Spain’s CAF, the Czech Republic’s Skoda, all Chinese firms, and all […]

Stephen Smith
September 18, 2010
Uncategorized
5

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