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Mandates that fall only on multifamily development

So I’m reading a PlanPhilly article about a proposal to mandate half-baths on the ground level and front doors without steps for new residential units (“visitability,” they call it), and while I don’t think that it’s a bright idea to begin with, this part struck me as particularly dumb, albeit very common (my emphasis): There have been victories. Any homes that are built with money from the City’s Housing Trust Fund – money generated by fees charged for recording deeds – must be visitable. But, Salandra said, while bills that would have required all new housing to be visitable have been introduced to city council, they have gone nowhere. The visitability task force is trying anew. Klein said that they submitted comments about the proposed new zoning code, asking for a change that any development of 10 houses or more require at least half to be visitable. Unfortunately, I think that this restriction is just what they need to get this passed. Many burdens – some inscribed in law, but many wrung out in ad hoc negotiations between developers and local governments – are levied only on developers of more than a few units, which almost by definition includes everyone who builds dense housing. In some cases the cut-off is necessary due to the nature of concessions (what do affordable housing mandates mean to someone building a single house for themselves?), but this is definitely not the case here. If this is such a great idea, then why not enact it across the board? The reason is obviously that it’s easier to foist restrictions on developers, who only have one vote each, than it is to go after the mighty suburban bloc. And while few voters know much about what they’re voting for anyway, the number of apartment-dwellers who see their […]

The mirage of revealed preferences

I often hear from libertarian-inclined defenders of the suburban status quo that the fact that American is so overwhelmingly suburban is proof that it’s what Americans want. Economists call this “revealed preference,” but it could also be understood as voting with your feet and wallet. People have made the decision to live in the suburbs, so there must be something they like about it. Randal O’Toole of Cato and Wendell Cox of Demographia have both made versions of this argument, as has Jesse Walker back when he was at CEI. Though some liberals take issue with the idea that markets reflect preferences better than democracy, for the most part people understand that there’s wisdom in consumer choices. There is, however, one catch to using revealed preferences: the market has to actually be a market. That is, it has to be free of regulation and subsidies that push consumers too much one way or the other. So, for example, you cannot use consumers’ “revealed” preference for high-fructose corn syrup to argue that Americans prefer it over sugar, because the government massively subsidizes corn and imposes tariffs and quotas on sugar. Now of course, America has a mixed economy, with an arcane structure of rules and regulations undergirding a capitalist system, so no sector is going to be entirely free of interference.  Although people like O’Toole are adamant in their stated opposition to parking minimums and mandatory low density zoning, they believe that density-forbidding regulations are mostly benign and unnecessary, since most Americans wouldn’t really want to live more densely than they do now.  By this logic, even if restrictions on density were loosened, developers wouldn’t change their ways and America’s deeply suburban land use and transportation patterns would endure. At the end of the day, whether not we can use “revealed […]

Hard Truths About Why Conservatives and Libertarians Hate Urbanism

It’s no secret that conservatives and libertarians don’t have very warm feelings towards urbanism. But with their emphasis on upzoning and reducing parking minimums, shouldn’t new urbanism and smart growth have at least some libertarian constituency? And given that local roads are paid for almost entirely out of general funds – that is to say, local roads are a blatant example of socialist redistribution – you’d think that there would be people on the free market right advocating raising the gas tax and tolling highways. But alas, no such luck. Michele Bachmann thinks roads shouldn’t count as earmarks, Carl Paladino’s never met a road he didn’t want to detoll, and Mother Jones managed to cobble together a whole article’s full of “We don’t need none of that smart growth communism”-style rhetoric coming from the Tea Party. Now, it could just be that there are just too many suburban Republican voters whose homes, lives, and culture are invested in sprawl for any politician to oppose it. But that doesn’t explain the lack of support from libertarian think-tanks and magazines, who, by virtue of their complete lack of political viability, don’t have to worry about politics and getting re-elected in the suburbs. Cato and the Reason Foundation still toe the “war on drivers” line, with Randal O’Toole denying that any developers even want to build less parking than current minimums require. So why don’t conservatives and libertarians have more compunction about sprawl? I believe the problem is more the messengers than the message. Despite the free market aspects of modern-day urbanism, smart growth and new urbanism are not libertarian movements. Urban planning is dominated by liberals, and it shows – few even seem aware of the capitalist roots of their plans. The private corporations that built America’s great cities and mass transit […]

Quote of the day

From Matt Yglesias: I never like to visit a place without checking out its local parking regulations. Whoa, and I thought I was bad! (He is, of course, talking about minimum parking requirements for developers, not day-to-day rules for people looking to park their cars.) If you’re feeling particularly optimistic today and feel like you need to correct that, take a look at his comments section. I posted this there as well, but I think it bears repeating: “It’s always amusing to me how [Yglesias’ commenters] seem to value ideological purity (i.e., opposing anything that moves anything towards the free market) over what are otherwise traditional progressive goals (helping the environment, reversing sprawl, revitalizing cities).” My favorite part is when someone calls him a “glibertarian.”

Sobyanin’s horrific plan for Moscow

It’s been a few months since longtime Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov was fired, so I figured it would be a good time to check in on the city. In spite of Moscow’s infamous traffic and “perversely-sloped” population density gradient, the former mayor’s plan to build 100 km of new metro tracks and over 350 km of new railroad tracks was rejected just a few weeks before his ouster as too expensive. So now that the new mayor, Segrey Sobyanin, has announced his plan to untangle Moscow’s Gordian knot of traffic, how does it measure up? Well, put quite simply, it’s probably the worst urban plan I’ve seen since Paul Rudolph’s plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Increasing the amount of parking by building large lots on the outskirts of town seems to be the most prominent proposal. Like the author of this Bloomberg article which claims that parking spaces in the city “meet 30 percent of needed capacity,” Muscovites don’t seem to recognize that all cars obviously already have places to park, and that increasing the amount of parking is only going to increase the ease of owning a car, and hence the amount of people who choose to do so. Russian urban planners seem to be stuck in the 1950s, too – here is the president of the national planners’ guild claiming that Moscow needs to more than double the surface area it dedicates to roads. The plan also seems to operate under the assumption that public transportation is the problem – their promises to expand mass transit ring hollow when they’re also contemplating banning trolleybuses from the city center and banning the private fleets of jitneys, known as marshrutki, which provide higher quality and more expensive service than the city’s decrepit buses. Some of the elements of the […]

Premium link list

Recently I’ve been delaying posting a few things because I wanted to wait till I had more time to cover them, but I’m realizing that I’ll probably have new things to write about on the 15th (which is when regular posting will hopefully resume), so have at it – your first ever premium link list: 1. The Bowles-Simpson Plan is out (but apparently it’s not the final plan that will be presented to Obama), and it looks like a great deal for market urbanism.  Their “Zero Plan” is a broad base, low rate approach that eliminates all tax deductions and credits, including not only the mortgage-interest rate deduction that we’ve discussed earlier, but also the tax break that businesses get for providing employees with parking that Shoup criticized a few weeks ago.  (By the way, that first linked TPM article is by far the most comprehensive and concise outline of the plan that I’ve seen in the media so far.) 2. Cap’n Transit gives an overview of his local community group’s proposal for eliminating parking minimums in a politically-palatable way. Spoiler: it involves everybody’s favorite transit maps – frequency maps! People involved in DC’s recent moves towards parking reform should especially take note, since the success of their plan depends on the definition of “good transit service.” 3. Reinventing Parking has a post on illegal parking extortion in developing countries.  In India and Bangladesh, which Paul Barter discusses, the problem is parking contractors illegally raising prices.  In Bucharest, though, where I used to live, the “extortionists” were much less organized, usually gypsy street kids, who didn’t do much to stop you from parking, don’t actually provide protection for the car, and probably aren’t going to do anything to your car but guilt trip you if you don’t pay them.  In either […]

Links, links, links!

1. An bill that would replace New Jersey’s court-mandated patchwork of inclusionary zoning programs with a more uniform 10% affordable housing mandate has left advanced through its Assembly committee after passing the NJ Senate, though Chris Christie promised to veto it. 2. Last month I reported that Obama’s deficit commission may recommend paring back the mortgage-interest tax deduction. Well, the official plan is now out, and – good news! – it looks like completely doing away with the deduction is on the table. 3. The New Yorker reports on a Cooper Union exhibit that models what the area around the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway connecting the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg Bridge would have looked like if Jane Jacobs had lost and Robert Moses had won. 4. Even with $100 million in cash and hundreds of millions in tax-exempt bonds, Bronx Parking, which operates Yankee Stadium’s perennially under-used parking garage, still can’t turn a profit.

Another week, another consolation link list

Another week without posts (from me, at least), another giant consolation link list! I’ve got a lot of them piling up and probably won’t be back to regular posting for a few more days, so I’ll try to spread them out over a few posts. 1. Wendell Cox’s Demographia came out with its 2010 Demographic Residential Land & Regulation Cost Index and finds, surprise surprise!, that sprawling Sunbelt and Southern cities have both the least regulated housing markets the most affordable housing. Bill Fulton finds a few faults with the study, including its tendency to lump all land use regulation (whether pro-sprawl or pro-density) together. What surprises me more, though, is that the report seems to only take into account “new detached housing,” and yet its conclusions are being reported as being applicable to “housing” writ large. I didn’t read it in detail, but I don’t see any evidence that multifamily residences or the right to build densely and without parking were even considered. 2. Slum (re)development will probably be one of the biggest urbanism stories of the century, and Mumbai seems to be making some fateful decisions. I’m having trouble finding comparisons of how different countries are doing it, but I suspect the most successful, attractive, livable developments will be the ones where local squatters are given property rights and are allowed to control the pace of redevelopment. Anything else is likely to breed popular resentment and will probably result in a lot of glitzy megaprojects built by political insiders that aren’t well-integrated into the surrounding city. 3. The NYT has a story on a “split” among environmentalists over density, although it seems like the pro-density camp is clearly winning, at least institutionally within the environmentalist movement.  I think a more interesting story is how people who are first […]

Your consolation link list

Apologies to everyone for the light posting – over the next few weeks I may be a bit busy with job and internship applications (any suggestions for work or job offers would be very much appreciated!), but hopefully I’ll still be able to put up a few posts a week. But for now, all you get is this mammoth link dump: 1. Vancouver’s laneway housing program (which we discussed earlier) has been off to a brisk start, and though planners are looking to liberalize sewer rules, they’re also considering only allowing one-story houses as-of-right, and limiting the amount of new laneway houses per block. 2. Former Market Urbanism contributer Sandy Ikeda writes about the urban origins of liberty at the Freeman. 3. The Dukakis Center has released a report suggesting that the gentrification caused by new light rail lines might cause driving to increase, defeating the purpose of TOD. Megan McArdle has also been discussing gentrification. Hopefully I’ll write something about this and gentrification more generally soon, but I wanted to post this in case I don’t get around to it. Any thoughts from the commenters on why this is and how it can be avoided? 4. North Korea “declare[s] war” on its version of the jitney, the “servi-cha.” 5. LA is the only big city in America whose fire department mandates that all skyscrapers have flat roofs so as to allow helicopters to land, but this may be changing (Curbed, parts 1 and 2). 6. Disabled riders file a class-action lawsuit against NYC’s MTA “for not spending a federally mandated 20% of [subway] station rehabilitation budgets on improvements like elevators and ramps.” The ADA’s impact on mass transit and urbanism is something that I’d eventually like to discuss more in depth, but I haven’t seen much research or even many […]

Matt Yglesias’ proposal for reforming DC’s ANC’s

At the risk of turning Market Urbanism into Reblogging Matt Yglesias, here’s another interesting post from the blogosphere’s most famous market urbanist about reforming DC’s Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC) system. After discussing a recent decision by an ANC incumbent to deny Five Guys permission to open up a sidewalk cafe in an otherwise barren area until they pay up for “other community initiatives,” he claims that the problem isn’t necessarily shortsightedness vis-à-vis development, but rather “an error of institutional design”: Advisory Neighborhood Commissions don’t have very much power or very much responsibility. But they do have a lot of power over liquor licenses, sidewalk cafes, and zoning variances. ANC members, however, have views on things other than liquor licenses, sidewalk cafes, and zoning variances. So the most reasonable way for them to achieve a diverse set of policy goals is to adopt a very stringent attitude toward liquor licenses and sidewalk cafes, and to support very restrictive zoning rules that increase the value of variances, and then to trade permission to do business for other kinds of favors. If a fixed portion of retail sales taxes raised in a given ANC were put into a neighborhood fund controlled by the commissioners, then I bet commissioners would suddenly be less interested in swaps of these sorts and more interested in attracting businesses to their area. But instead we’ve set up ANCs in a way that encourages them to be systematically biased against just saying “yes” to local retailers. Practical politics are not my forte, but this sounds like it could be a good idea. If it would work, I like the idea of essentially standardizing the community bribe and having it be paid in fungible money rather than less efficient in-kind donations (more parking, inclusionary zoning, etc.).  I would suppose that […]

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