Because there are no market signals that could identify the best and highest use of street space, it is the role of urban planners to allocate the use of street space between different users and to design boundaries between them where needed.

This article appeared originally in Caos Planejadoand is reprinted here with the publisher’s permission.

As a city expands, planners and surveyors divide its area between private lots and public spaces. Architects, hired by the owners of private lots, design the buildings erected on each one. Lot owners’ taste, budget, and practical considerations shape the design of private buildings. However, land use regulations might restrict the use and shape of the final construction. Over time, changes in consumer demand, building technology, and land prices will require modifications or even the demolition of the original building, which will be replaced by a new one that responds better to current conditions.

This constant land recycling of private lots is a feature of market economies and the motor of urban land use efficiency. Unfortunately, current land use regulations, particularly zoning, tend to slow down this Schumpeterian creative destruction. A paper written by William Easterly, a professor at New York University, monitored the land use change on a Manhattan street over four centuries. The paper shows the unpredictability and necessity of constant land use changes in private urban lots.

In contrast with private lots, public spaces, which include the area occupied by streets, parks, and natural protected areas like beaches, riverbanks, and lakes, rarely change; they are not exposed to market price signals. So, when a city expands, how are the streets designed, and by whom?

On the American continent, little remains of pre-Columbian urban street design. The European colonists’ first task when creating a new town was to separate private lots from public spaces reserved for streets and plazas. Many of these original designs survive to this day. As cities expanded, private developers or municipalities created new roads.

Once fixed by the original surveyors, the city’s roads’ dimensions and patterns seldom change. Consider the design of streets in Manhattan, a borough well known for constantly demolishing and rebuilding ever-taller structures. The pattern and width of streets in the downtown Wall Street area remain identical to what they were at the time of the early seventeenth-century Dutch colony. Even the name, Wall Street, has not changed. The introduction of new, wide avenues, carved by Baron Haussman out of Paris’s medieval districts, is one of the few exceptions to the overwhelming endurance of existing street patterns. Most streets in our cities are fossils dating from the time when surveyors designed the neighborhoods.

Once they have been created, we must accept that streets’ widths and patterns are practically permanent. The areas of streets being fixed, their use has to be rationed. Because supply is inelastic, demand must be managed.

The primary purpose of streets is to allow the movement of people and goods between private lots. But in a large city, there are many ways of moving. Pedestrians, bicycles, scooters, buses, motorcycles, private cars, and cars for hire all contend for the same space. Street space could also be planted with trees. In addition, streets must have room for streetlights, electricity and telecommunication cables, and street and circulation signs. People also use the streets to rest, walk, and exercise. All these conflicting uses occupy precious space that cannot be expanded.

Because there are no market signals that could identify the best and highest use of street space, it is the role of urban planners to allocate the use of street space between different users and to design boundaries between them where needed.

With few exceptions, urban planners have neglected this critical design and regulating role. For instance, on New York City streets, more than two-thirds of the curb space is allocated for permanent parking free of charge. This neglect in the design and regulation of street space contrasts with the complex regulations that planners have applied to private lots. It is time for urban planners to switch their regulatory and design preoccupation away from private lot users and to concentrate on the design and regulation of the scarce space occupied by streets.

The use of private lots should be driven by consumer demand. Land use should emerge from a grassroot process creating an emerging order. By contrast, public spaces are not submitted to price signals that can make their use adapt to evolving demand. The separation of public space between different users is therefore by necessity a top-down design process under the entire responsibility of urban planners.

The post Urban Planners Overregulate Private Lots but Neglect the Design and Regulation of Public Spaces appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Cities have always invited us to be constantly on the move. We move around to get to work, go shopping, meet friends, attend a concert, visit an art exhibition, and take advantage of all the many activities that a metropolis offers.

This post appeared originally in Caos Planejado and is reprinted here with the publisher’s permission.

Cities have always invited us to be constantly on the move. We move around to get to work, go shopping, meet friends, attend a concert, visit an art exhibition, and take advantage of all the many activities that a metropolis offers.

However, since the pandemic, technology has made it possible to live a whole life in the city without leaving our homes. Many people can work full-time remotely, connecting online to attend meetings and get information. They can have their food delivered to their home, meet friends online, and have their preferred entertainment streamed to a device while sitting on their couch. They can exercise on a stationary bike, guided by a coach on their screen.

This online life can be wholly planned, and, like anything fully programmed in advance, it soon becomes tedious and inefficient, similar at the personal level to the Gosplan, or State Planning Committee, that guided the planned economy of the Soviet Union. The pleasing randomness, long provided by active city life, is missing.

Randomness makes city life exciting and productive, and how we design cities can multiply or reduce the chances of serendipitous encounters of people and ideas. Creativity and innovation, two of the most desirable traits of metropolitan environments, depend on unplanned meetings between people of different skills, tastes, and backgrounds.

In cities, most trips, even if they involve a car, bus, or subway, start and end with walking. As we move through a city at a walking pace, we collect unexpected visual information about the areas we cross. Simply traversing the pavement exposes a pedestrian to unexpected, diverse inputs. Jane Jacobs described this process in her 1961 classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, writing, “The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.”

Let’s look at how urban designers can increase the acquisition of random information by multiplying chance encounters.

Cities are divided between two fundamentally different areas: streets and private lots. Planners and engineers design streets, while households and firms design what is built on private lots. Planners, through land use regulations, often severely constrain the design of private lots.

Private commercial establishments where people usually meet, like cafés, bars, restaurants, cinemas, theaters, clubs, and churches, are essential to the creativity of cities. The openness of commercial establishments toward the street is the best way to transmit information on what they have to offer. This is why cafés and restaurants with outdoor seating are so attractive. Municipalities should allow cafés and restaurants to expand into the public space when the width of the sidewalk permits it.

Active frontages—streets lined with colorful entrances, windows, cafés, and shops—give people reasons to stop and engage, leading to more chance encounters. Conversely, blank walls or inactive street frontages (often found around large, single-use buildings like parking garages or warehouses) can discourage pedestrian activity and social interaction.

City dwellers usually love walking through an open-air market, because the display of goods for sale maximizes the amount of random information they encounter. Food markets’ variety of colors and fragrances provides visitors with unfamiliar, stimulating sensations. Establishments that cannot be open on the streets, like concert halls, theaters, and department stores, can still provide information to pedestrians through posters and elaborately designed shop windows.

Urban planners can follow a few rules to increase the richness of information collected by pedestrians.

1. Do not segregate commercial or cultural use from residential use through zoning regulations. Do not restrict commercial establishments to a single use. For instance, a gym or a bookstore should be allowed to open a bar or a restaurant on its premises, because a city benefits by maximizing chance encounters.
2. Do not oblige businesses to have parking lots between the sidewalk and the building. Walking along a parking lot impoverishes the information collected. While private, off-street parking is often indispensable, the parking should be underground or in the back of the building, not in front.
3. Do not impose setbacks in residential streets on the ground floor. The setbacks often need to be protected by monotonous fences.

The Corbusier-inspired “towers in the park,” the high-rise, single-use slabs surrounded by green space, are the ultimate urban design sin. This layout sanitizes streets from random information, because sidewalks are too distant from buildings to provide information to pedestrians. Randomness enriches urban life and ought to be fostered at every opportunity.

The post In Praise of Randomness appeared first on Market Urbanism.

A concerted research effort has brought minimum lot sizes into focus as a key element in city zoning reform. Boise is looking at significant reforms. Auburn, Maine, and Helena, Montana, did away with minimums in some zones. And even state legislatures are putting a toe in the water: Bills enabling smaller lots have been introduced [in 2023] in Arizona, Massachusetts, Montana, New York, Texas, Vermont, and Washington. The bipartisan appeal of minimum lot size reform is reflected in Washington HB 1245, a lot-split bill carried by Rep. Andy Barkis (R-Chehalis). It passed the Democratic-dominated House of Representatives by a vote of 94-2 and has moved on to the Senate.

City officials and legislators are, reasonably, going to have questions about the likely effects of minimum lot size reductions. Fortunately, one major American city has offered a laboratory for the political, economic, and planning questions that have to be answered to unlock the promise of minimum lot size reforms.

Problem, we have a Houston

Houston’s reduced minimum lot sizes from 5,000 to 1,400 square feet in 1998 (for the city’s central area) and 2013 (for outer areas). This reform is one of the most notable of our times – and thus has been studied in depth. For a summary treatment, see Emily Hamilton’s 2023 case study.

To bring all the existing scholarship into one place, I’ve compiled this annotated bibliography covering the academic papers and some less-formal but informative articles that have studied Houston’s lot size reform. Please inform me of anything I’m missing – I’ll add it.

Political economy of Houston’s reform

M. Nolan Gray & Adam Millsap (2020). Subdividing the Unzoned City: An Analysis of the Causes and Effects of Houston’s 1998 Subdivision Reform. Journal of Planning Education and Reform.

Jake Wegmann (2020). Bayou City Townhouse Boom: Does Houston Have Something to Teach Us About Pro-Climate Urban Transformation? Platform,
The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture.

NuNu Chang (2018). Planning the Houston Way, Part II: Special Minimum Lot Size. Rice Design Alliance.

Jake Wegmann, Aabiya Noman Baqai, and Josh Conrad (2023). Here Come the Tall Skinny Houses: Assessing Single-Family to Townhouse Redevelopment in Houston, 2007–2020. Cityscape.

Big ideas

• HOA deed restrictions & opt-out options enabled the broad reform of Houston’s lot-size mandates.
• The reform slowed gentrification in low-income neighborhoods, concentrating rather in middle-income neighborhoods.
• Builders took advantage of reform to build “Houston townhouses”, which are not attached to neighboring houses and are usually 3 stories tall with a “tuck-under” garage.
• Normal fee simple ownership is a key to townhouse success. Nobody wanted condo-ownership townhouses.
• Wegmann and co-authors argue from tax data that relatively few Houston townhouses replaced single-family homes. But Dobbels and Takavalov (below) claim that 59% of townhouses are on old single family lots. This contradiction remains to be resolved.

Discussion

• Shane Phillips, Mike Manville, and M. Nolan Gray on the UCLA Housing Voice Podcast.
• Max Masuda-Farkas in The Regulatory Review.
• M. Nolan Gray and Jessica McBirney at the Mercatus Center.
• Salim Furth at Market Urbanism.

History and geography of Houston townhomes

Stephen Fox (2000). The Houston Townhouse. Cite: The Architecture and Design Magazine of Houston.

John Park, Luis Guajardo, Kyle Shelton, Steve Sherman, and William Fulton (2021). Re-Taking Stock: Understanding How Trends in the Housing Stock and Gentrification are connected in Houston and Harris County. Kinder Institute for Urban Research, Rice University.

Big ideas

• The unique “detached townhouse” is a new concept, probably owing to the 1999 regulatory reform.
  • As of 2000, Fox makes no mention of detached townhomes.
  • In 2005, Houston had about 12,000 detached townhomes and 31,000 attached townhomes.
  • From 2005 to 2018, Houston added 34,000 detached townhomes against 5,000 attached townhomes.
• Detached townhomes are common in inner neighborhoods undergoing redevelopment; greenfield development is almost entirely traditional single family and large-scale multifamily.
• Construction and demolition are more frequent in affluent and already-gentrified core neighborhoods than gentrifying ones, as shown in Figure 4.

Discussion

• Jake Wegmann at Urban Edge (Kinder Institute)
• Luis Guajardo at Urban Edge (Kinder Institute)

Who benefits from small lots?

Mike Mei (2022). House Size and Household Size: The Distributional Effects of the Minimum Lot Size Regulation. Working paper.

Gregory Dobbels and Suren Tavakalov (2023). Not in My Back Yard: The Local Political Economy of Residential Land-Use Regulations. Working paper.

Big ideas

• From Mei:
  • Small lots result in smaller houses. The average new house size in Houston declined by 10 to 15 percent when small lots were legalized.
  • A simplified model shows that smaller, lower-income families and those who have not yet bought a house are big winners. Most existing homeowners took small losses (See Figure 15).
  • The lot size reform was equivalent to a one-time gift of $18,000 to every Houston household living in a single-family home (the model doesn’t incorporate apartment dwellers). That adds up to about $8 billion.

• From Dobbels & Tavakalov:
  • If the authors’ “revealed preference” approach is correct, most incumbent homeowners dislike added density on their block. They estimate that the subdivision of 2 old houses into 4 townhouses creates a $6,900 amenity cost for each other house on a block.
  • But incumbents value the profitable sale opportunity even more. The typical homeowner comes out about $2,300 ahead.
  • 16% of eligible blocks took the “special minimum lot size” opt-out and kept the old 5,000 square foot minimum. The opt outs were more likely affluent and white.

Discussion

• Salim Furth at Market Urbanism

Yard space isn’t highly valued

Salim Furth (2021). Foundations and Microfoundations: Building Houses on Regulated Land. Mercatus Center Working Paper.

M. Nolan Gray and Salim Furth (2019). Do Minimum-Lot-Size Regulations Limit Housing Supply in Texas? Mercatus Center Research Paper.

Big ideas

• Houston area homebuyers are happy to pay more for bigger houses – but they don’t place much value on larger yards.
• In suburbs of Dallas and Austin with large minimum lot sizes, most house lots are built very close to the minimum lot size (or below it via various exceptions). See Figure 4.
  • But in Pearland, with many small lots available in nearby Houston, suburbanites are happy to buy larger-than-mandated lots.

Discussion

• Nolan Gray at Strong Towns.
• Nolan Gray and Salim Furth in the Austin American-Statesman.

Did Lot Size Reform Change Property Values?

Joseph Shortell (2022). The Effect of a Minimum Lot Size Reduction on Residential Property Values: The Case of Houston. Universitat de Barcelona master’s thesis.

Emily Hamilton (2024) addresses the same question by comparing land price growth in areas where minimum lot sizes were lowered in 2013 to areas where it had been lowered in 1999.

Big ideas

• In theory, lowering lot size mandates ought to raise the price of land while lowering the price of existing structures.
• Comparing Houston lots (which benefited from reform) to those outside the city, Shortell finds that the price of land definitely rose and the price of existing structures may have fallen (but the evidence is less clear).
• With an all-city sample, however, Hamilton finds that minimum lot size reform had either no effect or a negative effect on assessed land values.

Discussion

Nobody has critiqued or dissected Shortell (2022) yet. It is an excellent master’s thesis, but readers should bear in mind that it is student work and has not undergone peer review. Given the disagreement between these two papers – which both rely on assessment data – more research may be needed.

• Florian Martin in Houston Business Journal covers the unaffordability of larger lots.

How does small lot development handle stormwater?

Samuel Brody, Russell Blessing, Antonia Sebastian & Philip Bedient (2012). Examining the impact of land use/land cover characteristics on flood losses. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management.

Big ideas

• The authors examined the Clear Creek watershed, in Houston’s southeastern suburbs. It’s not directly a study of Houston small-lot development, though.
• They found a mixed relationship between impervious cover and flood losses. An area surrounded by “medium” coverage development (50 to 79 percent covered) fared best, even better than one surrounded by “developed open space” (0 to 20 percent).
  • The authors guess this is because denser development is usually accompanied by better infrastructure.
  • The worst-performing category was “low” coverage (20 to 49 percent).

Discussion

• Houston planners have noted that impact fees from small-lot infill development have helped fund stormwater improvements and sidewalks. Houston incentivizes shared courtyards in part because they handle stormwater better. Further research is needed on the fiscal consequences of small lot reform.
• Phil Magness offers a quick history of Houston flooding.
• Nolan Gray notes the irrelevance of zoning to flood damage.

The post Resources for Reformers: Houston’s minimum lot sizes appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Our results demonstrate that the places that contribute most to mixing by economic class are not civic spaces like churches or schools, but large, affordable chain restaurants and stores. Insofar as policy makers seek to increase exposure between different classes, they should pay attention to the role of firms in shaping class mixing.

It is not necessarily surprising that chain restaurants tend to be places where people of all classes mix. The very design of these restaurants is meant to appeal to the widest audience possible. Behold your local Cheesecake Factory. It is usually found in suburban shopping centers where land is cheap, such that the Factories are large and capable of holding all large numbers of customers. And of course, The Factory’s famously tome-like menu, which has everything from hamburgers to orange chicken to shrimp scampi, betrays the chain’s intention to serve as many different walks of life as possible.

But it is also worth considering that chains, even if they are designed to appeal to the largest audience possible, might be playing an outsized role in class integration. Research from City Observatory argues that chains tend to proliferate in more car-dependent cities. It is not entirely obvious why this is the case, but some theories suggest themselves. The typical car-dependent shopping center relies on “anchor stores,” well-known brands that can attract a sufficiently large enough pool of customers. Small, unknown businesses are at a distinct disadvantage in these spaces. Thus, to the extent that the typical American is driving to the Kroeger or Starbucks down the street, as opposed to stopping by the bodega or coffee shop at the corner, then it should come as no surprise that rich and poor are more likely to rub shoulders at chains.

Density zoning also limits the opportunities that rich and poor have for coming into contact. By excluding multi-family development in many neighborhoods, the less affluent are often de facto excluded from living in the same subdivisions as the more affluent. The sorts of neighborhoods in which rich and poor would have ample opportunity to bump into each other at local haunts interwoven into the fabric of the neighborhood simply don’t exist in much of America.

But it is worth considering how much “rubbing” is really occurring at these spots. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs explains how many people in her neighborhood in the West Village would leave their keys at the local deli:

In our family, for example, when a friend wants to use our place while we are away for a weekend or everyone happens to be out during the day… we tell such a friend that he can pick up the key at the delicatessen across the street. Joe Cornacchia, who keeps the delicatessen usually has a dozen or so keys at a time for handing out like this. He has a special drawer for them.

By contemporary standards, this is a shocking degree of trust that these acquaintances are placing in the deli owner. I would be shocked to learn that any similar arrangements exist at a chain establishment. Nor do I believe that rich and poor (or even people from the same classes) are sharing local gossip or getting to know each other at the Cheesecake Factory. At most, the shoulder rubbing is probably limited to the literal bumping of shoulders as one family enters and the other exits the Factory.

It would be interesting to where the rich and poor rub shoulders in locales with more options beyond chains, or in locales with less restrictive zoning. My hunch would be that we would see relatively more socializing among classes, and richer linkages at that, in cities with more density and more options beyond chains.

The post Rubbing Shoulders: Maybe appeared first on Market Urbanism.

But what’s important to recall – especially for those of us under, uh, 41 – is that pedestrianized streets aren’t a new concept coming into style, they’re an old one that’s been in a three-decade decline. Samantha Matuke, Stephan Schmidt, and Wenzheng Li tracked the rise and decline of the pedestrian mall up to the onset of the pandemic. Even in the urbanizing 2000s and 2010s, 14 pedestrian malls were “demalled” against 4 streets that were pedestrianized:

In a 1977 handbook promoting pedestrianization, Roberto Brambilla and Gianni Longo admit that some of the earliest “successes” had already failed:

In Pomona, California, the first year [1962] the mall received nationwide press coverage as a successful model of urban revitalization; there was a 40 percent increase in sales. But the mall was slowly abandoned by its patrons, and now, after fifteen years of operation, it is almost totally deserted.

A Handbook for Pedestrian Action, Roberto Brambilla and Gianni Longo, p. 25

One obvious reason for the failure of many other pedestrianized streets is that they were too little, too late. The pedestrian mall was one of several strategies against the overwhelming ebb tide of retail from downtowns in the postwar era. They weren’t seen as alternatives to driving, but destinations for drivers, who could park in the new, convenient downtown lots that replaced dangerous, defunct factories.

A minority of the postwar-era malls survived. The predictors of survival are sort of obvious in hindsight: tourism, sunny weather, and lots of college students, among other things.

Some of the streets which were “malled” and “demalled” have rebounded nicely in the 2000s. The slideshow below shows Sioux Falls’ Phillips Avenue in 1905, 1934, c. 1975, and 2015.

The saddest case might be Baltimore’s Old Town Mall, pedestrianized in 1968. Since it’s still legally closed to cars, it’s not reckoned among Matuke et al’s “failures”. As in many other failures, this commercial strip was already in bad shape in the 1960s. Subsidies and buzz around pedestrianization gave it a short-term fillip, but the downward trend took hold again quickly.

This time is different, maybe

Pedestrian mall advocacy today is somewhat different, although the death of retail everywhere today echoes the 1950s downtowns. Perhaps most obvious is the change in commercial uses: today’s pedestrian malls are anchored by the patios of eateries and drinkeries. Those seem a more natural pairing with outdoor space than shopping. (Even better are playgrounds, which are still absent from most pedestrian malls).

The valence of cars in cities has also flipped from asset to liability. If you’re aiming to reduce car space in cities anyway, busy social strips are obvious places to start.

What does “failure” mean?

A pedestrian mall with low traffic is considered a failure. But we don’t normally hold a road (or sidewalk) to that standard. And if stores or homes sit vacant on a normal street, we rarely blame the infrastructure. If you want, you can see this as a car-centric conspiracy. But I think it’s more reasonable to admit that pedestrian malls are pitched as commercial and social spaces, a potentially delightful blend of public and private space with benefits to all. When that fails, like any commercial concept, it needs to be rolled up.

But – like other commercial failures – this need not be a big deal. Restaurants fail without fail. Social commerce may be more fragile than other forms, because it can go into a downward spiral.

Why not leave a street pedestrianized even if it’s a commercial and social failure? In most cases, there are real costs to the closure, either to traffic circulation or accessibility and deliveries for whatever businesses (or homes) remain. In addition, abandoned pedestrian spaces frequently feel unsafe. Finally, there are cases – like Baltimore’s Old Town Mall – which can remain pedestrian-only even in failure, because there’s nothing better to do with the space.

Failure can be fine

The long, slow, recent death of the postwar pedestrian mall is a solid reason for city bureaucrats and merchants to be skeptical of eager proposals. For every photo of a vibrant throng on a pedestrian street, they can produce one of failed stores or empty pavement.

A notable improvement of the COVID-era street conversions over the 1960s and 70s pedestrian malls is their physical simplicity. Most use simple barriers and moveable street furniture, sometimes paint, to transform what is otherwise the same span of asphalt. This allows regular, small changes. If, like a restaurant, avenue du Mont-Royal fails in five or ten years, it will have been a success – and the barriers can come back down.

The post Pedestrianized streets usually fail – and that’s OK appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Final update: the Milwaukee River Greenway is hereby declared the Best Urban Path in the United States! Sadly, it’s among those that I haven’t yet visited, a situation I’ll need to rectify. I’ve invited a few Greenway partisans to write a guest post about what makes it the best urban path in America – stay tuned.

This month, I’m running a Twitter contest to identify the best urban paths in the U.S. As American urbanists usually do, I’m grabbing one global concept and then ignoring anything of real substance I might learn from other countries. This is a World Cup of American urban paths.

After receiving nominations and doing my own research, I randomized a 52-nominee bracket. The contest will begin with two “play-ins” and then proceed with 48 nominees in 8 groups.

Each group contains one nominee in each category:

• Top-seeded nominees
• Waterfronts
• Rail trails
• Local flavor
• Greenways
• Long rides

The group stage will be a 5-game round robin of Twitter polls. Make sure to show up and vote for your team in Games 2 through 5 even if it loses Game 1 – this isn’t march madness.

Matches will last at least 20 hours of Twitter voting. Head-to-head matchup and then total margin of victory will be a tiebreaker if needed to determine group rankings.

Two nominees from each group will advance. Those 16 nominees will form a World Cup-style bracket. Two teams that advance from the same group will not meet again until the Final.

Play-ins

The first play in is a simple head-to-head matchup between Washington DC rail trails: the Capital Crescent versus the Metropolitan Branch Trail. The winner will be the Group F Rail Trail. (Northern Virginia’s W&OD Trail has already punched its ticket in the “Long Rides” category).

The “Underdog Play-in” will be a two-round bracket among four nominees on the bubble:

• Chehalis Western Trail (Olympia)
• East Bay Bike Path (Providence)
• Markell Trail (Wilmington DE)
• Decker’s Creek Trail (Morgantown WV)

Bonus contest

How many of the paths have you been on? My Twitter follower who reports the most wins Fan of the Year. Honor system, people.

Groups

In the World Cup, the home team gets a slot alongside the seven top seeds. The home team here is the Anacostia River Trails (Maryland), which anchors a light-hitting Group A:

Group B features the tournament’s top seed. For my money, a great urban path is not just well-engineered and equally popular with cyclists, dog walkers, joggers, and children, but also generates commerce and mixes commuting, recreation, tourism, and becomes a destination in itself. Our top seeded path has reoriented neighborhoods around itself and become a political touchstone in its city. A couple other amazing paths were drawn in, making this a clear “Group of Death.”

Group C is anchored by one of the most iconic places in the U.S. Formally it’s “Ocean Front Walk”, it encompasses the Venice Beach boardwalk, passes the Santa Monica pier, and extends south to Torrance State Beach.

San Antonio’s River Walk (conceived 1929, born 1946) is the grandfather of many of the other spaces in this tourney, but have any equaled it? I visited it at age 10 — it was utterly captivating. The River Walk highlights Group D:

The luck of the =RAND() put New York’s High Line up against its brassy imitator, Chicago’s 606 for an elevated urban way battle in Group E:

Group F is a mismatch between 3 major metros and 3 small cities:

Like many of the nominees, Group G‘s top seed blurs the line between path and park. And Detroit’s Dequindre Cut emerged from the nominations on the short list of urban paths I most want to visit:

Our final sextet is chaotic good. Charlotte Rail Trail is a top-seeded nominee on the strength of @taylorrule’s tweet:

Charlotte’s rail trail transformed South End from a bunch of warehouses in 2008 into several miles of transit oriented development with tons of amenities and mixed uses. One of the fastest growing neighborhoods in the US, now home to 12K+ people

Besides a surprising top seed, Group H drew the Hudson River Greenway – on the Manhattan side – against the Hudson River Waterfront Walkway – side-eyeing it from Jersey. But I’d be voting for the Clear Creek Trail, where I walked upstream again and again this summer, just to float back down again.

Results!

In addition to Twitter, I’ll post results here as they come in.

Play-in results:

• Metropolitan Branch Trail won the DC Rail Trail spot
• Chehalis Western Trail won the Underdog Play-in

Group stage results

11/14 game notes: tight game in Group C; Oakland held on for the win. Group D cheeseheads showed up with over 100 votes for Milwaukee River Greenway – suddenly a path to watch!

11/15 notes: Group G looks like it might be the most interesting, with a draw and two close matches in the first round.

11/16 notes: In a major upset, the BeltLine got trounced by the Schuylkill River Trail.

11/17 notes: low turnout leads to our first shutout, the Atlantic City Boardwalk won 6-0 over the Swamp Rabbit Trail.

Thanksgiving week notes: A set of matches posted Tuesday garnered lots of attention – another set posted Friday got the lowest turnout so far. Both had 2 days. Going into the final matches, just 5 paths have won all their matches – including both of Wisconsin’s entries.

11/28 notes: The Capital Area Greenway somehow achieves 3 draws in 5 matches, proof that this really is a World Cup bracket.

11/29 notes: Group F ends in a Condorcet triangle, a 3-way tie in which each team beat one of the other top 3. It was decided by average score, with a margin of just 0.08 points between Chicago’s 606 and Madison’s Capital City State Trail.

Group A:

• Anacostia River Trails 68, Springwater Corridor 32
• San Diego Embarcadero 70, Scioto Mile 30
• Midtown Greenway 83, Jordan River Trail 17
• Anacostia River Trails 75, SD Embarcadero 25
• Midtown Greenway 62, Springwater Corridor 38
• Scioto Mile 50, Jordan River Trail 50
• Anacostia River Trails 82, Scioto Mile 18
• Jordan River Trail 88, Springwater Corridor 12
• San Diego Embarcadero 67, Midtown Greenway 33
• Midtown Greenway 78, Anacostia River Trails 22
• Springwater Corridor 60, Scioto Mile 40
• Jordan River Trail 59, San Diego Embarcadero 41
• Anacostia River Trails 62, Jordan River Trail 38
• Springwater Corridor 50, Embarcadero 50
• Scioto Mile 100, Midtown Greenway 0

Anacostia River Trails: 12 pts
Midtown Greenway: 9 pts
Jordan River Trail: 7 pts
San Diego Embarcadero: 7 pts
Springwater Corridor: 4 pts
Scioto Mile: 4 pts

Group B:

• BeltLine 72, Burke-Gilman 28
• Schuylkill River Trail 59, Cliff Walk 41
• Cherry Creek Regional Trail 73, Capital Area Greenway 27
• Schuylkill River Trail 73, BeltLine 27
• Burke-Gilman Trail 50, Capital Area Greenway 50
• Cherry Creek Trail 71, Cliff Walk 29
• BeltLine 89, Cliff Walk 11
• Cherry Creek Trail 67, Burke-Gilman Trail 33
• Schuylkill River Trail 50, Capital Area Greenway 50
• BeltLine 64, Capital Area Greenway 36
• Burke-Gilman Trail 82, Cliff Walk 18
• Schuylkill River Trail 58, Cherry Creek Regional Trail 42
• BeltLine 58, Cherry Creek Regional Trail 42
• Burke-Gilman Trail 54, Schuylkill River Trail 46
• Cliff Walk 50, Capital Area Greenway 50

BeltLine: 12 pts
Schuylkill River Trail: 10 pts
Cherry Creek Regional Trail: 9 pts
Burke-Gilman Trail: 7 pts
Capital Area Greenway: 3 pts
Cliff Walk: 1 pt

Group C:

• The Strand 71, Katy Trail 29
• Lake Merritt Loop Trail 52, Butler Hike & Bike Trail 48
• W&OD Trail 74, Boise River Greenbelt 26
• The Strand 88, Butler Hike & Bike Trail 12
• Katy Trail 56, Boise River Greenbelt 44
• Lake Merritt Loop Trail 76, W&OD Trail 24
• The Strand 86, Lake Merritt Loop Trail 14
• W&OD Trail 83, Katy Trail 17
• Butler Hike & Bike Trail 50, Boise River Greenbelt 50
• The Strand 60, Boise River Greenbelt 40
• Lake Merritt Loop Trail 75, Katy Trail 25
• W&OD Trail 53, Butler Hike & Bike Trail 47
• The Strand 71, W&OD Trail 29
• Butler Hike & Bike Trail 57, Katy Trail 43
• Lake Merritt Loop Trail 79, Boise River Greenbelt 21

The Strand: 15 pts
Lake Merritt Loop Trail: 12 pts
W&OD Trail: 9 pts
Butler Hike & Bike Trail: 4 pts
Katy Trail: 3 pts
Boise River Greenbelt: 1 pt

Group D:

• River Walk 65, Minuteman Commuter Bikeway 35
• Genesee Riverway Trail 74, Chehalis Western Trail 26
• Milwaukee River Greenway 95, Jedediah Smith Memorial Trail 5
• River Walk 62, Genesee Riverway Trail 38
• Milwaukee River Greenway 85, Minuteman Commuter Bikeway 15
• Chehalis Western Trail 64, Jedediah Smith Trail 36
• River Walk 75, Chehalis Western Trail 25
• Minuteman Commuter Bikeway 100, Jedediah Smith Trail 0
• Milwaukee River Greenway 55, Genesee Riverway Trail 45
• Milwaukee River Greenway 64, River Walk 36
• Minuteman Commuter Bikeway 58, Chehalis Western Trail 42
• Jedediah Smith Trail 67, River Walk 33
• Minuteman Commuter Bikeway 69, Genesee Riverway Trail 31
• Milwaukee River Greenway 80, Chehalis Western Trail 20

Milwaukee River Greenway: 15 pts
River Walk: 9 pts (advances via head-to-head win in game 1)
Minuteman Commuter Bikeway: 9 pts
Genesee Riverway Trail: 6 pts
Chehalis Western Trail: 3 pts
Jedediah Smith Trail: 3 pts

Group E:

• The 606 62, High Line 38
• Miami Beach Boardwalk 78, Las Vegas Strip 22
• Capital City Trail 89, Shelby Bottoms Greenway 11
• High Line 89, Miami Beach Boardwalk 11
• The 606 78, Shelby Bottoms Greenway 22
• Capital City Trail 67, Las Vegas Strip 33
• High Line 89, Las Vegas Strip 11
• Capital City Trail 74, The 606 26
• Miami Beach Boardwalk 57, Shelby Bottoms Greenway 43
• High Line 88, Shelby Bottoms Greenway 12
• The 606 67, Las Vegas Strip 33
• Capital City Trail 80, Miami Beach Boardwalk 20
• High Line 78, Capital City Trail 22
• The 606 100, Miami Beach Boardwalk 0
• Shelby Bottoms Greenway 67, Las Vegas Strip 33

High Line: 12 pts (avg score = 76.4)
The 606: 12 pts (avg score = 66.46)
Capital City State Trail: 12 pts (avg score = 66.38)
Miami Beach Boardwalk: 6 pts
Shelby Bottoms Greenway: 3 pts
Las Vegas Strip: 0 pts

Group F:

• Metropolitan Branch Trail 71, Embarcadero 29
• Lakefront Trail 69, Atlantic City Boardwalk 31
• Lafitte Greenway 68, Swamp Rabbit Trail 32
• Embarcadero 50, Lakefront Trail 50
• Metropolitan Branch Trail 78, Lafitte Greenway 22
• Boardwalk 100, Swamp Rabbit Trail 0
• Embarcadero 62, Boardwalk 38
• Metropolitan Branch Trail 80, Swamp Rabbit Trail 20
• Lakefront Trail 90, Lafitte Greenway 10
• Lafitte Greenway 67, Embarcadero 33
• Metropolitan Branch Trail 77, Boardwalk 23
• Lakefront Trail 86, Swamp Rabbit Trail 14
• Embarcadero 67, Swamp Rabbit Trail 33
• Metropolitan Branch Trail 73, Lakefront Trail 27
• Boardwalk 62, Lafitte Greenway 38

Met Branch Trail: 15 pts
Lakefront Trail: 10 pts
Embarcadero: 7 pts
Lafitte Greenway: 6 pts
Boardwalk: 6 pts
Swamp Rabbit Trail: 0 pts

Group G:

• Charles River Esplanade 59, Dequindre Cut 41
• Canal Walk 52, Waterfront Promenade 48
• Buffalo Bayou 50, Paseo del Bosque 50
• Charles River Esplanade 79, Canal Walk 21
• Buffalo Bayou 60, Dequindre Cut 40
• Waterfront Promenade 60, Paseo del Bosque 40
• Charles River Esplanade 83, Waterfront Promenade 17
• Dequindre Cut 60, Paseo del Bosque 40
• Canal Walk 50, Buffalo Bayou 50
• Charles River Esplanade 71, Buffalo Bayou 29
• Waterfront Promenade 75, Dequindre Cut 25
• Canal Walk 100, Paseo del Bosque 0
• Charles River Esplanade 88, Paseo del Bosque 12
• Canal Walk 53, Dequindre Cut 47
• Waterfront Promenade 58, Buffalo Bayou 42

Esplanade: 15 pts
Canal Walk: 10 pts
Waterfront Promenade: 9 pts
Buffalo Bayou: 5 pts
Dequindre Cut: 3 pts
Paseo del Bosque: 1 pt

Group H:

• Charlotte Rail Trail 62, Monon Trail 38
• Hudson Waterfront Walkway 93, Clear Creek Trail 7
• Hudson River Greenway 75, Towpath Trail 25
• Charlotte Rail Trail 90, Hudson Waterfront Walkway 10
• Monon Trail 56, Hudson River Greenway 44
• Towpath Trail 57, Clear Creek Trail 43
• Charlotte Rail Trail 70, Clear Creek Trail 30
• Monon Trail 50, Towpath Trail 50
• Hudson Waterfront Walkway 70, Hudson River Greenway 30
• Hudson River Greenway 57, Charlotte Rail Trail 43
• Monon Trail 50, Clear Creek Trail 50
• Hudson Waterfront Walkway 75, Towpath Trail 25
• Charlotte Rail Trail 75, Towpath Trail 25
• Hudson Waterfront Walkway 75, Monon Trail 25
• Hudson River Greenway 100, Clear Creek Trail 0

Charlotte Rail Trail: 12 pts
Hudson Waterfront Walkway: 12 pts
Hudson River Greenway: 9 pts
Monon Trail: 5 pts
Towpath Trail: 4 pts
Clear Creek Trail: 1 pt

The post Urban Paths “World” Cup appeared first on Market Urbanism.

American (and European) YIMBYs point to Tokyo as an icon and model – proof that nationalized zoning and a laissez faire building culture can protect affordability even when demand is very strong. But this body of work is over-reliant on a classic 2014 Urban Kchoze blog post. As the YIMBY movement matures, it’s time to go deep – books deep – into the fascinating details of Japan’s land use institutions.

Essentials

As with any complex social phenomenon, we are tempted to essentialize Japanese zoning. It works because it’s top-down. It works because Douglas MacArthur imposed strong property rights. It works because of Japanese traditions of impermanence. (If you’re a planner rather than a YIMBY, replace “it works” with “it’s broken”).

Sometimes – often – essential simplifications are useful. And there’s no type of book more boring than the one that promises to tell you how “everything you know about X is wrong,” and then proceeds to offer a bunch of minor caveats to the basically-correct narrative you already knew. Thankfully, this isn’t that kind of book.

Instead, what you come away with is an appreciation for how wrong each of these narratives is: Japanese land use is a delicately-balanced synthesis of centralized and scattered power. If you take away an essential story or lesson, it should be the contingency of outcomes. It works because the central planners were powerful enough to preempt local government but not powerful enough to sideline landowners. It works because local governments encouraged modernization but never had enough funding to execute urban renewal. It works because otherwise strong property rights coexisted along with Land Readjustment. It works because the postwar US and Japanese authorities did not fully enforce their own edicts. It works because of the mini-kaihatsu loophole.

It works because a very specific sequence of institutions rose and declined over a very eventful century, and none of them had the time, power, or money to fully execute its vision.

In the next sections I will draw four notable episodes or themes from the text. This is not a synoptic review – the closest you’ll get to a full narrative is the “it works” section above.

The MacArthur Myth

First off, let’s go all Harry Truman on Douglas MacArthur. One of those essential stories is that the postwar U.S.-written constitution imposed strong property rights. This isn’t just incomplete-wrong, it’s wrong-wrong.

As Tsuru (1993) carefully explains…the American draft of the article on land rights was strongly resisted by the Japanese government. The original Article 28 in MacArthur’s draft read, “The ultimate fee to the land and to all natural resources reposes in the State as the collective representative of the people.”

Wait, what? “Reposes in the state”? Did the Soviets get there first?

This approach of the MacArthur draft was eventually replaced by the following wording suggested by the Japanese side which is now Article 29 of the Japanese constitution: “The right to own or to hold property is inviolable. Property rights shall be defined by law, in conformity with the public welfare…” Tsuru (1993:27) suggests that this wording is basically identical to the old Article 27 of the Meiji constitution, and is much more conservative in its protection of the rights of landowners and its weak conception of the public interest than the initial American draft.

Sorensen, p. 156.

Inviolable!

Land Readjustment

A country with inviolable property rights wouldn’t let a two-thirds majority of landowners force the minority to give up their land for a joint development scheme, would it?

¯\_(?)_/¯

I told you it was a delicately balanced synthesis.

The basic structure of LR is that two-thirds of owners representing two-thirds of land can vote to pool a specified area of land, overriding holdouts. Public ways and land are then laid out and the remaining land is redivided among the original property owners.

Planned growth in Japan has relied on Land Readjustment (LR) to an extraordinary degree. With no need for up-front funding and landowner votes as a check on bad ideas, LR may well be superior to eminent domain or land assembly for laying out new neighborhoods.

Sorensen characterizes suburban Japan as a patchwork of planned spaces, where LR succeeded, and “sprawl”, where uncoordinated rural development preceded planning via loopholes and political meddling.

Mini-kaihatsu, here and there

One American myth of Japanese land use is that national bureaucrats keep local planners on a leash, preventing them from zoning more strictly. Where that’s correct, it’s almost accidentally so. National bureaucrats, in Sorensen’s telling, have consistently pushed for greater regulation. But when prefectures had the choice of setting a key regulatory threshold at 500 or 1,000 square meters, “only a few” took the stricter option (p. 236).

That 1,000 square meter threshold became the “mini-kaihatsu loophole”. In rural fringe areas, a development below 1,000 square meters did not need development permission.

A typical mini-kaihatsu development consists of 12 houses fronting on a narrow 4 metre lane running at right angles from an existing road.

Sorensen, p. 238

A common size for rice paddies was, “conveniently”, one tan, or 992 square meters.

Here’s a picture of a typical mini-kaihatsu:

Oops, wrong photo. That’s Houston. Here are some Japanese examples from Google:

The concept is the same, and it’s no coincidence that both arise in places with light regulation, strong demand, and little public streets funding. As I wrote about Houston:

Houstonians achieve privacy by orienting many new townhouses onto a share courtyard-driveway, sometimes gated, which creates an intermediate space between the private home and the public street…
The courtyard-driveways also provide a shared play space, as evidenced by frequent basketball hoops. Despite what Jane Jacobs may have told you, city streets are not viable play spaces for 21st-century children. But cul-de-sacs can be. Houston’s courtyard-and-grid model may be the ideal blend, unlocking the connectivity of a city while delivering the secure sociability of a cul-de-sac to a large share of homes.

Ancient alleys

Cul-de-sac alleyways played an important role in pre-modern urban Japan. Sorensen calls them “back-alley nagaya” (shacks or tenements) and notes that the “landowner would often manage and live above a shop fronting the street,” while their employees, or poor artisans lived in the rear areas accessed by a narrow covered lane.”

Other authors have put a more romantic gloss on the alleys. Jinnai Hidenobu says that “designs displayed a sensitivity to what Maki Fumihiko has called ‘hidden depth'”.

[New] groups of urban dwellers, such as factory workers and low-wage white-collar workers, also made their homes in the backstreets. At the entrance to the alley, a wooden wicket was placed, clearly demarcating the main street (public) from the backstreet (semi-public) spaces… In such backstreets, not only could landlords and tenants form a trusting relationship, but tenants themselves lived with one another on the most neighborly terms.

…In Edo, it was in such micro-spaces that a certain degree of self-government took shape; it was in these same back alleys that the foundation of stable society was laid.

Jinnai, Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology, pp. 124-125.

Jordan Sand’s Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects includes a chapter on how alley exploration and appreciation helped form one neighborhood’s identity in 1980s Tokyo.

Most recently, Almazan and Studiolab’s Emergent Tokyo profiles Tsukishima, a modern neighborhood “famous for its narrow roji alleyways.”

[Roji] are often used almost as an extension of the domestic space. As in so many Tokyo neighborhoods, in Tsukishima one sees subtle transitions along the spectrum of public to private space rather than a hard division between the two.

Almazan & Studiolab, p. 172

American urbanists generally hate cul-de-sacs, which prevent connectivity. But residents, especially those with children, love them. And even New Urbanists have re-invented them, calling them “cottage courts.” The “Houston mini-kaihatsu” is a proven economic model for an urban form too universal to be dismissed.

The planner’s gaze

It isn’t just alleys that Sorensen judges more harshly than other writers do. In fact, he has a hard time finding anything good to say about Japan’s land use.

Sorensen’s virtue is his stolid Canadian insistence on presenting facts clearly and with a minimum of emotion. As a reader, one senses that Sorensen’s prejudices seep into the text against his will. (And one trembles to think what unreadable diatribes would have been produced by someone with his sensibilities but not his restraint).

A key example comes on pp. 222-223, where Sorensen nets up the effects of Japan’s zoning code, which allows very mixed uses. He has a long paragraph noting the positive effects – but the words are all in others’ mouths. He cites Jane Jacobs, Jinnai, and six others who point out “very positive consequences of Japan’s radically inclusive approach to land use zoning.” In the next two paragraphs, however, he provides the counterpoint – in his own voice, with only one citation.

It is hard not to feel that Sorensen is favorably disposed toward anything planned and skeptical, if not hostile, to anything unplanned. To Sorensen, “sprawl” denotes unplanned, “haphazard” growth (p. 326). Planned growth, at the same densities, in the same areas, is not sprawl. The same bias pervades his (otherwise excellent!) 2001 article, Building Suburbs in Japan.

He rarely defends his planner’s-eye view. He doesn’t holistically compare planned to unplanned areas and find the latter lacking. Nor does he define key metrics of urban success (e.g. pollution levels, commute times, and housing costs). Instead, he seems to have an intuitive desire to see plans made and brought to fruition, regardless of the merits.

In an era when Tokyo stands as “humanity’s greatest urban achievement,” the institutions that created it deserve a little more credit. But even if Sorensen doesn’t like them, he reports their workings faithfully – and that makes his book a must-read for Tokyophile market urbanists.

The post Book Review: The Making of Urban Japan appeared first on Market Urbanism.

The essay was a typical of the “anti-anti-NIMBY” genre: he hastens to admit that California’s really has a housing crisis. He even agrees that more homes are needed. But he dismisses the YIMBY movement with a lazy strawman argument (laughably implying that Los Angeles is a “market-built” city), and moves on to an idea with natural appeal to someone who was born in an English new town: new cities.

Like most would-be central planners, Robinson confines his thoughts almost entirely to appearance: architecture, parks, moderate density, and picture-window transit. He evinces no curiosity about the economics or demographics of a new city (where will demand come from? who will subsidize the obviously uneconomical transit?). In his previous essay in praise of garden cities, he distinguishes garden cities from “suburbs” on aesthetic grounds – but the economics are identical. His insistence on perfect design (“everything built in the ‘50s and ‘60s was ugly… contemporary architecture is almost universally unpleasant to look at”) allows him to distance himself from any modern, real-world place.

Because he doesn’t engage with the economics or demographics – the things that make a city a city – it’s hard to know what he’s really proposing. If he wants to build another Davis, California…sure, why not? If he just wants to start a new career as a neotrad architect, God bless him.

But California really could use some new cities – and we need to think about them in primarily economic terms.

Type 1: the Upgrade City

The type of new city that California most obviously needs is what I’ll call an “upgrade city” – a large, dynamic urban place that emerges from not-quite-urban previous conditions. You could call these “edge cities”, but in California’s polycentric urban geography, that’s not the most helpful term.

Think instead of San Jose: in 1950, it had 1/8 the population of San Francisco; by 1990, it had surpassed the city by the bay. Most of that was suburban-style growth, but in the process downtown San Jose grew into a true urban core, although still undersized relative to its economic muscle. Tyson’s, Virginia and Stamford, Connecticut are other good examples.

Allowing (through zoning) and encouraging (through infrastructure) serious urbanization in a handful of not-quite-urban places is part of the solution to California’s housing, commuting, and economic growth challenges. These “new cities” should be in places that, due to decades of planning, have large suburban hinterlands without a corresponding core: the Inland Empire, the San Fernando Valley, Contra Costa County, Irvine, and the Coachella Valley are all good candidates.

Transit has limited value in Upgrade Cities, given their surroundings. But they can benefit from cycling and walking due to these cities’ smaller size and California’s gentle weather.

It’s useful to recall how little land a major urban core needs. San Francisco’s core is, generously, 10 square miles. The transit-rich core of Portland, Oregon, fits inside 5 square miles.

Type 2: Suburbia

I won’t belabor this point, because it’s so obvious: California needs suburban growth. There’s no cheaper or better-proven way to add housing fast than via greenfield construction. You can call it “sprawl” if you want. But modern Southwestern suburbs are far denser than the older East Coast vintage and typically offer a variety of housing types.

Dublin is leading the way here, in terms of aesthetics as well as a high rate of growth. It has ambitious old-world architecture to go with pleasing streetscapes and curving parkways. Although Dublin checks many of Robinson’s boxes, one doubts that he would actually like the place. It’s too…real.

Type 3: Little Paradises

Morro Bay is a small piece of paradise: perfect weather, mountains and beaches within a few miles, no traffic and no hurry. Unlike any major city, Morro Bay is built around amenities rather than economics.

Places like Morro Bay attract a disproportionate number of retirees and work-from-anywhere folks. And it just so happens that those are two of the fastest-growing demographic groups in America.

If land use regulations were relaxed, Morro Bay could easily quadruple in population. That’s a good idea. But allowing new Morro Bays to form would unlock even more value. The California Coastal Commission and other regulators have been very strict, understanding (correctly) that every inch of the Central Coast would become condos if it were allowed.

A good approach would be to allow a few planned cities, built around existing small towns or new retirement villages. The new cities would take some demand pressure off existing ones, like Morro Bay and Eureka, and value capture could offset the localized environmental harm.

Little paradises are closest in spirit to Robinson’s proposal: self-contained towns, far enough from a major city that commuting is unrealistic, and pitched to people rich enough to pay for high-quality buildout. However, they’re also the least important.

Type 4: Corporate/Booster Cities

From 1870 to 1960, enthusiastic local boosters and corporate empire builders led many American cities. Corporations had a sense of civic responsibility that was matched by their civic influence. For example, George Eastman created or endowed by alma mater and many of Rochester’s other institutions. Even after Kodak’s bankruptcy, those institutions continue to enrich the culture and create jobs.

There are costs as well as benefits to allowing a big corporation to call the shots in a small city. But it may be better than the alternative: purely transactional relationships between city and absentee employer.

Like much of middle America, non-coastal California should welcome the rare ambitious CEO who wants to leave a legacy in urban design and local institutions. Perhaps it’s fanciful to think that any 21st-century executive could think far enough ahead to initiate such a relationship — but if such a leader exists in America today, Silicon Valley seems like the likeliest place to find him.

Appendix: Is YIMBY enough?

Among Robinson’s premises is that upzoning will either be insufficient to make a real dent in housing affordability or require a politically impossible (and aesthetically undesirable) amount of density. Some quick math puts the problem in context.

First, let’s define the approximate scale of the problem. There are different ways to measure a “housing deficit”; none of them is precise or satisfactory. My preference is to use a demand curve: as you add to hypothetical supply, you slide down the curve to some acceptable rent level.

According to the American Community Survey (via IPUMS), average pre-pandemic rent in California was $1,432 for a 4-room apartment. The rest of the U.S. averaged $956. How much housing supply would it take to get California rent low enough that it’s just 25% higher than the rest of the U.S. instead of 50% higher?

(All the caveats apply: California isn’t a single market, there are differences in age, quality, and amenities of apartments, rental and owned housing aren’t tightly linked, etc. This is unsaved-spreadsheet math, the kind that people used to do on the backs of envelopes).

If the price elasticity of demand is -0.67 (my go-to estimate), then it takes a 3 percent increase in the housing stock to achieve a 2 percent decrease in rent.

So to halve the gap between California rent and rest-of-the-U.S. rent, California needs a 37.5% increase in housing stock. That’s certainly achievable in many neighborhoods via moderate upzoning, and does not require skyscrapers everywhere, as Robinson seems to think. If a block of 20 single-family homes becomes a block of 17 single-family homes, two fourplexes, one duplex, and one ADU, you’ve got your 37.5%. But this type of change takes a very long time and it does not necessarily create the type of urban environment that is in such high demand.

New cities could not realistically amount to even a 10% addition to California’s housing stock. While they will never be a first-tier strategy for meeting housing demand, they can be part of the silver shotgun.

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