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1. The fact that we even have to have a debate over whether residential development should be allowed in Midtown, where new residents will have perhaps a smaller impact on transportation infrastucture than anywhere else in the country (they can either walk to work or do a reverse train commute), is pretty pathetic. 2. The plan for San Jose’s Diridion Station is is so loaded down with boondoggles and bad ideas that it’s hard to keep track of them all. As if a stadium and HSR station weren’t bad enough it’s also getting a neo-Euclidean zoning plan (business and R&D park to the north, entertainment, retail, and office space by the station, and residential and retail to the south), “adequate parking,” and what looks to me like probably too much parkland. One panelist from the Greenbelt Alliance said it was necessary for the plan to include “parks, trails and public plazas.” But given that it looks like we’re only really talking about an area that’s a dozen or two blocks in size, is all that really necessary? 3. Second Avenue Subway on Bloomberg’s transit failures. Looks like my bike lane rabble-rousing is spreading… 4. More union shenanigans: Unsuck DC Metro uncovers with a FOIA request $2.4 million paid out in the last five years “in grievance back pay for work never done.” Some of it is paid out in petty seniority squabbles, some in more reprehensible cases, including to people who have literally killed, assaulted, and stolen on the job. Also, if you’re interested in how exactly unions suck the lifeblood out of American mass transit, Unsuck’s three–part series on the DC Metro’s escalator problems is an excellent case study. 5. Highway interchange transit-oriented development. Not a joke. Courtesy of the Overhead Wire.

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

Affordable Housing for the Rich and the Failure of Zoning Bonuses

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

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

Links

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

Links

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

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 […]

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.

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