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What favelas can teach us about America

Anthony Ling, an excellent Brazilian blogger who also happens to be an avowed market urbanism, gives us an interesting look at the politics and economics of low-income housing in Brazil: In Brazil there is a vast regulation defining what are the minimum requirements to have a building approved by local authorities. The most common example is probably the Building Codes set by each city, but specific details imposed by planning, environmental and building departments of each city are added to the equation. The recently created Performance Standard also follows this same path, being enforced nationally. The explanation given to establish this regulation is the legal guarantee that every citizen will have a minimum quality of living. However, those who study public policy understand that the passing of a law does not miraculously create high standard buildings accessible to all and, like many other laws, produces effects opposite to those desired. The lower standard building prohibition does just that: tough regulation prevents entrepreneurs from building accessible housing for the poor. This results in government spreading the idea that entrepreneurs think only about attending the high class, and transforms itself as the hero that will build millions of popular houses, as [Brazilian Pres. Dilma Rousseff] did with the Minha Casa, Minha Vida [My House, My Life] program. I think this has a very close parallel in modern American cities with inclusionary zoning and affordable housing mandates. In Brazil, the government creates a housing shortage by having unrealistical building safety standards (which ironically, as Anthony explains, encourage slums that are completely unregulated) and then swoops in and acts plays the savior with its own housing projects. In America, the government creates the shortage through sprawl-forcing zoning codes. But unlike Brazil’s public housing, our politicians instead use rent control (rebranded as “inclusionary zoning” or […]

Aaaand the bike lobby finally descends into self-parody…

Since I’ve spent the last couple of days pounding the O’Toole/Kotkin/Cox trifecta pretty hard, I figured it was time for a left-wing target: bike lanes. To be honest, I’ve always been a little annoyed with the bike wing of the urbanist lobby, but it was this article in Streetsblog, “How Ad Dollars Help Explain the Media’s Bike Backlash,” that pushed me over the edge. An excerpt: Now national media outlets have picked up the bike lane story, tucking it inside the parallel narrative of a trumped-up “war on cars”. In this weekend’s Wall Street Journal, humorist P.J. O’Rourke, who often waxes nostalgic about the masculinity of the lost muscle car culture, derides cyclists as antiquated relics relying on a dead technology, as silly children playing in the streets who somehow represent an existential threat to “innocent motorists” in two-ton vehicles, and, of course, as pawns in an Orwellian plot by the Department of Transportation to enslave us all. O’Rourke and Wall Street Journal prefer that most Americans are instead enslaved by auto lenders. O’Rourke’s piece cannot be seen as a simple appeal to libertarian readers of the conservative paper of record; it must also be seen as desperate bid to retain the love of the automakers, who keep the wheels of the presses rolling, and who are appropriately frightened of the prospect of a transportation system that gives more people more choices in getting around. Could it be that the bike lobby actually has alienated the rest of America (and even New York), playing into stereotypes (Stuff White People Like #61) of spandex-wearing, pasty-legged effete liberals who think that the bicycle is a reasonable tool for, say, intra-Brooklyn house moves? No, says Streetsblog – it must be some sort of advertiser-driven conspiracy. (Does The New Yorker even have an auto section? How many car […]

Is O’Toole right that California is too dense to matter?

Remember my response yesterday to Randal O’Toole’s Cato article on parking, when I said that I could easily write a three-part series? Not a joke! (Though I might spare you and leave the trilogy unfinished. Maybe.) Today, I’d like to take on O’Toole’s comments on California, which he argues is too dense and hostile to automobiles to say anything about the real America: While New York City is very dense, its suburbs are not, so it is not the densest, or even the second or third densest, urban area in America. Instead, that title goes to Los Angeles, followed by San Francisco-Oakland and San Jose—the locations of most of Dr. Shoup’s other examples. Thanks to urban-growth boundaries that are now mandatory for California cities, whatever happens there is hardly representative of much of the rest of America. He also said something similar in a comment he left on a Market Urbanism post last August about an empirical paper that found that a large portion of the parking in Los Angeles County (population: 10 million) was built because of minimum parking regulations: I’ve said it before, but Los Angeles is hardly typical of the rest of the U.S. It is the densest urban area in the country (and not just the city is dense). Beyond that, my more important point is that developers build parking lots everywhere, not just where there are parking minimums. My problem here is that O’Toole is using the literal definition of “density” – that is, average density. But this is just a shorthand for what really matters when you decide whether you need a car or not (and developers decide how much parking they need to build to maximize profits): walkability and access to mass transit. We often use “density” as shorthand for auto-orientedness, but it […]

Has Wendell Cox ever heard of India’s license raj?

Wendell Cox, in his ongoing crusade to prove that everyone hates cities, writes about the suburbanization of Mumbai at New Geography. After reviewing all the statistics, he concludes: Mumbai: Penultimate Density, Yet Representative: The core urban area (area of continuous urban development) of Mumbai represents approximately 80 percent of the larger metropolitan area population. Mumbai is the third most dense major urban area in the world at nearly 65,000 residents per square mile (25,000 per square kilometer), trailing Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Hong Kong. Yet even at this near penultimate density, Mumbai exhibits the general trends of dispersion and declining density that are occurring in urban areas around the world, from the most affluent to the least. In the two Mumbai city districts, as in other megacities, housing has become so expensive that population growth is being severely limited. Overall, the Mumbai larger metropolitan area may also be experiencing slower growth as smaller metropolitan areas outperform larger ones, a trend identified in a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute. Finally, the over-crowded, slum conditions that prevail for more than one-half of the city’s residents could be instrumental in driving growth to more the distant suburbs of Thane and Raigarh. He never comes out and says it explicitly, but the implication is clear: Market forces are driving people out of Mumbai. But with all this talk about overcrowded slums and high housing prices, Wendell Cox is missing the elephant in the room: land use regulation. Given rent control laws that would make Sheldon Silver blush and a fixed floor-area ratio of 1.33 for even the dense historical island core, how the hell does Wendell Cox expect Mumbai’s core to grow? India’s stifling regulations are legendary, but Cox seems to be floating on a cloud of car exhaust fumes, blissfully unaware of […]

Links

1. Maps of sprawl and gentrification in Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago, and Boston. At first the picture looks bleak for cities, but Jesus – even downtown Detroit is growing! (More here.) 2. A real, live Texan (just kidding – he lives in Austin) replies to O’Toole on parking. 3. Why aren’t (more) urbanists cheering on Jerry Brown’s attempt to kill sprawl-inducing California redevelopment agencies? (Streetsblog SF/LA, I’m looking at you!) 4. NY lawsuit alleges that LEED standards are meaningless, and Charlie at Old Urbanist takes the opportunity to review the case against America’s most popular “greenness” metric. 5. This is awesome: The DC Office of Zoning makes the code and all the overlays accessible on Google Maps. Is there any other city with anything like it?

If we’re in an urban renaissance, why are cities still losing population?

Despite the general feeling among urbanists that the city is making a comeback after half a century of neglect, I still read from a lot of suburbanists (a catch-all term I’m using to describe Joel Kotkin, Wendell Cox [see comments], etc.)—and even the mainstream media—that cities are still losing population. I don’t have a lot of patience for statistics, so it all becomes a sort of he said/she said argument to me, but here’re a few opinions from the pro-“cities are becoming more desirable” side. First, here’s Ryan Avent, who argues that looking at population stats is misleading without taking into account prices: But of course, population growth is an unreliable indicator of demand, because of the all important supply side of the market. Imagine two areas: Gotham and Pleasantville. Say the demand to live in Pleasantville increases a little while the demand to live in Gotham soars. And say that due to differences in land use restrictions, housing supply responds dramatically in Pleasantville and very little in Gotham. Then what we’ll observe in Pleasantville is a rapid increase in population and slower growth in prices, and what we’ll observe in Gotham is rapid growth in prices and slower growth in population. And this is exactly what we have observed in the real world. Suburbs have seen massive housing growth and rapid population growth, but prices in central cities have soared, even in many places where population numbers are level or falling. If no one wanted to live in central cities, prices for homes there would not rise. And indeed, several decades ago, prices for homes in big central cities were dropping. But that trend has clearly reversed. You can’t draw conclusions about demand shifts from population numbers alone. This is a very simple point, and yet its repeatedly ignored. […]

Downtown and the geometry of cities

Matt Yglesias and Lydia DePillis have been having an interesting discussion about the DC commercial real estate market that I have some thoughts on, so I thought I’d weigh in. I apologize for the length of this post, but I think it’s a really important point that shouldn’t be underestimated. Matt started by stating the following: Downtown DC is full. There’s basically no land left to build on, and you’re not allowed to build higher. If you make it a more attractive place to locate jobs, no additional jobs will be created because there’s noplace to put the jobs. The improved quality will show up as higher rent for landlords, and our rents are already the highest in the nation. If you relaxed the height limit, the high rents would spur new construction (=jobs) which would lead to lower rent per square foot which would make downtown, DC a more attractive employment destination. Lydia agreed that the height restriction should be lifted (I don’t want anyone to think that Lydia is an apologist for this – she’s definitely not, and if given total discretion over DC land use, I think all three of us would implement very similar policies), but argued that Matt is downplaying growth possibilities outside the core of DC’s downtown: But to say that “there’s noplace left to put jobs” is simplistic. Although many office projects stalled during the recession, they’re starting up again in a big way around the city, from Mount Vernon Square to Anacostia. On the longer term horizon, massive office capacity is planned for McMillan, L’Enfant Plaza, and the Capitol Riverfront. Recent changes in who gets what at Walter Reed – the District may now get all of the Georgia Avenue frontage – has Office of Planning director Harriet Tregoning thinking about “more ambitious […]

Links

1. China’s high-speed rail scandal. So much for Obama’s State of the Union shout-out. 2. Boston, Philadelphia, and DC are all moving towards parking reform – both of minimum off-street requirements (unfortunately to be replaced with maximums in most cases) and of underpriced curb parking – but NYC’s the laggard. Like I noted a few weeks ago, this could be sabotaging its recent upzonings. 3. One Democratic Assemblyman wants to hamstring the NYC subway with yet another ridiculously overbearing safety rule – literally forcing trains to come to a complete halt right before entering a station – adding significant time to existing commutes. 4. NYC’s FRESH initiative gives money to a politically-connected supermarket for a parking lot. Wait, isn’t car-owning food desert victim an oxymoron? 5. Downtown San Jose’s Diridon station – the most transit-accessible place in San Jose – is getting $10 billion worth of new rail. Zoning consultants were paid for a year, and came up with the following recommendation: “no proposed changes to current code.” Got that? $10 billion in rail investment in one of the most progressive places in America and there will be no new TOD allowed.

A bleg about vending in stations

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

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

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

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