New non-congregate shelter in for people experiencing homelessness opens in West End
The shelter, in a former George Washington University dormitory, is meant for families without children under 18, individuals who were matched to permanent housing but are waiting for the lease process, and people experiencing chronic homelessness. The semi-private, non-congregant setting allows couples and families to stay together, filling a gap in DC’s existing shelter network. The first residents moved in on November 15.

The coverage of course focuses on the procedural and financial steps needed to bring the new shelter into service. But the foundation is that better housing elsewhere was created for students, leaving this building vacant.

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The traditional argument for anti-jaywalking laws is that they protect pedestrians from themselves, by limiting their ability to walk in dangerous traffic conditions. If this argument made sense, we would have seen pedestrian traffic fatalities increase in less punitive states.

For example, if jaywalking laws were effective, California’s pedestrian death rate would have increased in 2023 (when jaywalking was legalized). Instead, the number of deaths decreased from 1208 to 1057, a 12 percent drop. (Relevant data for all states is here). Although pedestrian deaths decreased nationally, the national decrease was only about 5 percent (from 7737 to 7318).

On the other hand. the data from Nevada and Virginia is less encouraging. As noted above, jaywalking was decriminalized in those states in 2021, so the relevant time frame is 2021-23. During this period, pedestrian deaths increased quite modestly in Virginia (from 125 to 133) and more significantly in Nevada (from 84 to 109).

On balance, it does not seem that there is a strong trend in either direction in these three states- which (to me) supports my previously expressed view that Americans should be trusted to walk where they like rather than being harassed by the Nanny State.

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Delivery vehicles might come soon. Corporate fleet vehicles. And the big jump, of course, will be when they’re available as private vehicles. It’s possible that the costs are high enough that won’t happen, or won’t happen for several decades. Let’s assume it does. What comes next?

Preferences

1. Autonomous vehicles will vastly lower the opportunity cost of time spent driving.
   • Once the transition to an all or almost-all AV automobile fleet is complete, we will be able to redesign cars to be much more comfortable. In the ideal case, they’ll be like 1^st class airplane berths or better. Being “stuck in traffic” will just mean “I’m in my mobile office” or “I’m binge-watching the 2040s Lord of the Rings remakes.”
   • Imagine having a self-driving Winnebago – for the cost of electricity, we’ll be able to take vacations anywhere on the continent without stopping work. Imagine how I’m going to spend my summers when I can shift from Quebec to Minneapolis to Moab to San Diego every day or two!!!
2. Highways will be OK to great, because AVs will cut down on vehicle spacing at high speeds.
3. Downtown streets will be a disaster. There isn’t much vehicle spacing to reduce. And AVs will be more conservative about “creative”
4. But some people (and goods) will still have places to be. If they’re stuck in traffic with all the mobile-office-workers, mobile-movie-enjoyers, and mobile nappers, they’re going to incur just as much cost as people do today when they’re late.
5. This is a recipe for extremely high congestion welfare costs. In cities, for sure. But also in desirable areas during peak seasons. Imagine the roads into the Rockies in summer if Denver office workers can get their work done while driving to their evening picnic spot
   • In case you’re tempted to think I’m exaggerating, remember that all our experience with congestion comes from people whose eyes, hands, and feet must remain attuned to the traffic, and whose vehicles are designed to keep them in safe seats.
   • AVs will enable higher highway capacity, where following distance is a major constraint. But the gains at intersections will be much smaller, and AVs will be programmed to be more cautious than human drivers on streets with pedestrians, etc. At least some places, likely including most downtown streets, will be much more congested.

Policy

1. Obviously, the solution to this problem is road pricing, which can be quite sophisticated with AV. The traditional privacy concerns about segment-specific tolling are in the rearview mirror (there’s a metaphor with a terminal diagnosis) at the point that AV tech is in control.
2. The default attitude toward regulation has been to treat parked cars with more skepticism than moving cars. That made sense when a moving car implied a driver paying a substantial opportunity cost to occupy public space. Solve for the equilibrium if downtown streets are free but downtown parking is market priced.
3. The transition from driven vehicles to AVs deserves consideration but should be secondary to thinking about post-transition equilibrium.

Politics

1. Even when pricing has large, obvious benefits, voters resist it. We still can’t toll urban interstates even though 100% of experts think it’s a good idea in at least some cases. NYC’s kinda-sorta congestion pricing highlights how the bad politics of pricing intersect with the difficult technicalities of dynamically pricing traditional cars.
   • Congestion pricing for all cars, now, would be great, but it’s not realistic.
   • And many downtown streets that are OK now will collapse under the increase in driving that AVs will bring.
2. Voters will resist tolling AVs after they have AVs.
3. So the time to begin tolling AVs is now, when they have a handful of lobbyists but no grassroots.
4. The initial price can be small – the key is to institute the architecture and expectation that AVs pay to use congested roads.

Agenda

This is research that I’m thinking about with my more tech-savvy colleagues. It’s not urgent – mass ownership of AVs would take a decade or more even if they were available for individual ownership tomorrow. But it’s important.

Researchers need to model downtown traffic with AVs. We need to think about the correct scales, in time and geography, for dynamic pricing. And we need to convince policymakers that automated vehicles should pay to use congested roads.

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The housing crisis

For 21st century urbanists, the hardest thing to remember about cities in 1950 is how bad the housing stock was. Lowe hardly mentions it because it’s the one thing every reader knew: old housing was awful. One New Haven resident complains about rehabilitation because his cold-water flat costs only $50 a month (equivalent to about $500 in 2024). To find conditions remarkable, she has to go to the worst streets of a Black ghetto:

Mary White, her husband and seven children were shoe-horned into a two-bedroom alley house that had no heat, electricity or hot water. They shared a backyard privy and faucet with neighbors

p. 215 (third printing, a Feb. 1968 hardcover)

Or to Pittsburgh:

Street and office lights used to burn all day when rivers vapors rose and held the region’s soft coal smoke in suspension over the city, casting a midnight gloom of smog throughout the day. Smog would turn office workers’ collars gray by noon; coughing and colds were an unhealthy commonplace in Pittsburgh. Even in the suburbs, housewives had to wash curtains weekly to cleanse them of soot. Airline pilots had a particular dread of landing at the Pittsburgh field with its “ceiling of black ink.”

p. 112

To me, and other 21st century skeptics, she would surely say what she says of Pittsburgh: “One needed to know the city as it had been to fully appreciate the extent of the change.” The steelman (or better, steelcity) case for urban renewal might be that it only looks like the worst villain around because it obliterated greater monsters.

What is urban renewal?

This was urban renewal. The enactment of urban renewal [in 1954] as an expansion of Title I, coming so hard on the heels of the scarcely tried redevelopment program, caused even greater public confusion. Most people used the terms interchangeably, an error…

p. 34

What is urban renewal? It is a bundle of powers and funds that afford cities a uniquely versatile tool for bringing about many different kinds of planned changes and improvements in their blighted areas and for carrying out comprehensive development goals. While it is difficult enough to bring about these changes with renewal, such improvements would generally be impossible without it.

p. 560

Lowe opens her book with a narrow, technical understanding of the phrase “urban renewal”, and closes it with a capacious one. But the several case studies that compose most of the book’s considerable girth focus principally on the replacement of slum housing and the rebuilding of downtowns on modernist lines. Her final case, New Haven, is a single 150-page chapter that communicates the impossible weight of the task. Heroic mayor Richard C. Lee and his lieutenant Ed Logue threw everything at his city’s problems – a downtown highway, code enforcement, extensive residential rehabilitation, school investments, community programming. In Lowe’s judgment, New Haven is the true standout of the era. But she still worries that it’s unsustainable:

Will someone keep New Haven moving when Lee is no longer Mayor? Or will the city ride along on recent improvements until it sinks once more into decay…?

p. 546

Half a century on, Wikipedia has a short article about Mayor Lee. The pitiful section on his legacy notes that the downtown highway he built – the Oak Street Connector – is now named the Richard C. Lee Highway. But highways are a sidenote in Lowe’s narrative – there’s much more about the various approaches to replacing slum housing.

To eliminate this omnipresent evil

With the newly liberal Congress that was elected in 1936 and the Supreme Court’s broadened definition, in 1937, of the federal responsibility for the public welfare, the way appeared clear and the purpose justified for using federally collected income taxes to help financially disabled cities to eliminate this omnipresent evil.

p. 26

The new Congress responded to the consensus that cities needed “positive powers – especially eminent domain and public funds – to acquire and demolish slum buildings, as was being done in some European countries.” It passed the Housing Act of 1937, which established power and purse for demolishing slums and building public housing.

But this approach was too expensive. So Alvin Hansen and Guy Greer filled in the gap with the idea of “write-down” financing:

1. With federal funding, a city buys slum dwellings via eminent domain , relocates the residents, and clears the land.
2. The city offers the land for sale below market rate (the “write-down”)
3. Developers create new, better, less-dense housing on the site

The willful disregard of economic information inherent in this formula is stunning. Not only were the new buildings economically inferior to the old; they were economically inferior to vacant land at market rates. The urban economy was screaming its need for density, but planners infected with the Howard–Corbusier mindset wear deaf to its calls.

Making Title I Work

Hansen and Greer’s write-down became Title I of the Housing Act of 1949, although urban renewal work did not start in most cities until the Housing Act of 1954 made more funding available. One city – nay, one man – dominates the history of Title I.

[Robert] Moses created in New York the biggest Title I program in the country – one with more results by 1960 than all other cities combined.

p. 48

Moses already had experience with redevelopment; his 1949 Stuyvesant Town was a popular success (although “planners and architectural critics” condemned its high density) on a similar model.

But the greater reason New York got so much done so fast is that Moses rewrote the Hansen-Greer formula, daring Washington to withhold funding. The New York method was more efficient:

1. A developer tells Robert Moses which piece of land he wants.
2. Robert Moses buys it using eminent domain and sells it – uncleared and for much less – to the developer (the “write-down”).
3. The developer milks the slum for a while, relocates the residents (maybe), and builds new, less-dense housing.

In 1957, federal administrator Albert Cole threatened publicly “to cut New York off from all federal housing funds”; Moses called his bluff in days. (p 91).

Lowe’s 50-page chapter on Moses is of unique interest because it predates Robert Caro’s The Power Broker by six years. But her biography and evaluation of the man are largely the same. In light of 2024’s re-appreciation of Moses and present-day concerns with finding people who can Get Things Done, her chapter’s conclusion (headed Men to Run Programs) is prescient:

Can a city today attract the talent needed to meet the demands of the new programs? Mediocrity at the technical-managerial level and lack of effective leadership at the top are major urban problems of today.

p. 109

Gut the heart

What New Haven intended to do with federal aid under the Housing Act was to virtually gut the heart of its downtown – removing the crazy quilt of “taxpayers,” cobblers’ shops, gin mills and hundred-year-old half-empty lofts and unattractive buildings.

p. 432

Along with Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Lowe praises New Haven for having the boldness to reimagine its central business district (“A DARING CONCEPT”). But the thirty-page tale is one of debilitatingly slow fits and starts: finances are promised and lost, offers are made and retracted. In the end, even upgrading a slummy center into high-end office and hotel space cannot pencil out:

That New Haven’s downtown redevelopment actually went through seems to be a commentary on Roger Stevens’ unusual character… [If] Stevens had been a conventional developer or an ordinary man, he would surely have walked away from the project long ago (as his close advisors had counseled). Even with redevelopment aid, the project was not a market place transaction and could not be done through conventional financing mechanisms…

Where special financial reserves or guarantees were available, things got built.

p. 463

The more hopeful signs

Among the many virtues of extemporaneous reading is the chance to view the past as future. Lowe could hardly have picked a worse time to offer predictions about the future of cities. Just two months after my volume was printed, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination lit the powder keg that 1960s urbanists had only half-acknowledged.

But for our purposes, her timing is ideal. She tries to see a hopeful future, with urban renewal dogging the heels of the spreading slums and abating their evils with clean, public or affordable housing. But even in 1967, doubts have crept in. She worried about the lack of talent and commitment among mayors and staff. “Urban renewal”, tightly defined in the 1950s, has opened out to encompass almost any urban policy.

There are only inklings, glimmers of the post-1970 urban crisis. She writes about “juvenile delinquency”, not “crime.” Drugs barely appear; firearms not at all. She has no idea that landlords will soon set the match to their own buildings. In the strangest passage of the book, she sees the colors of the new and terrible dawn and praises it as hope:

Many landlords found it cheaper to vacate a building than to continue operating a slum… The boarded-up houses, and the growing vacancy rate in these neighborhoods (almost double [Philadelphia’s] average of 6 per cent for rental housing) were among the more hopeful signs in the blighted inner city. The impressive improvement in housing revealed by the 1960 census could be attributed in part to this “slum cleansing operation.” When the gray areas are cleared, as called for by the comprehensive plan, it is hoped that the costs, both in human and site acquisition terms, would be greatly reduced.

p. 360

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You can also see the talk I gave the same day:

Pro: When you speak to architects as a practitioner, they call it a “master class”, which is very flattering.

Cons: Don’t try to follow Alain Bertaud.

The post Master Classes appeared first on Market Urbanism.

Bengaluru has low building heights and the paper’s counterfactual depends on relaxing FSI/FAR from their current level to 2 (only 2!) around 500 meters of the metro line.

The paper finds

“The complementarity between TOD and the metro unlocks additional gains equivalent to about $64 million per year or one-half of annual operating costs of the metro system.”

Paper reference:
Chen, L., Hasan, R., Jiang, Y., & Parkhomenko, A. (2024). Faster, taller, better: Transit improvements and land use policies. Journal of Development Economics, 103322.

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Alice Wang showed the most convincing evidence I’ve read on net costs of urban highways, using Seattle data. Smartphone data reveals that people avoid trips that either cross or use a highway. She estimates that replacing highways with surface roads would increase welfare by a massive 9%. Most of the gain is from improved access to urban destinations. But the suburbs would be a bit worse off. (One weakness: she doesn’t reckon with capacity constraints, so she’s probably missing low on the traffic costs).

Interestingly, burying the highways has basically the same result. That’s because the suburbs’ loss is mostly a function of the redistribution of businesses.

Railroads and highways have equally large effects in terms of neighborhood fragmentation (Vikram Maheshri & Kenneth Whaley).

Can we integrate these types of barriers into spatial social science? Evan Mast has built a new neighborhood/district geography that usually lines up with highways, rails, and rivers. But the basis for his new geography isn’t trips or maps, it’s moves. I didn’t realize many people move within a neighborhood, but it’s apparently quite common.

Seth Chizeck won the student prize for research showing that free transit vouchers didn’t help outcomes for beneficiaries much.

Urbanites save more of their money than suburbanites with equal incomes and demographic profiles. Daniel Murphy showed that city dwellers spend more on housing and eating out, but so much less on durable goods, maintenance, and utilities that they end up with a higher rate of savings. One possible explanation is that suburbanites own more land, which is a form of savings. But that doesn’t explain why urban renters save more than similar suburban renters.

Murphy’s explanation is home size, which correlates with savings rates across countries…

…and across time:

I will confess I had no idea that U.S. density had grown so much from 2010-2020.

HISDAC-US is an impressive dataset. It provides an estimate of built-up density nationwide at a 250 meter grid from 1810-2015, based on Zillow’s ZTRAX records. The estimates are from work by Stefan Leyk & Johannes Uhl.

Texas counties that lost more soldiers in the Civil War had more urbanization from 1870-1900. (Phil Hoxie and Beatrice Lee).

Joshua Coven looks at the entry of institutional investors into Georgia’s housing market. They crowd out small investors, induce more construction, and decrease homeownership. The result is slightly higher prices, slightly lower rents, and more diversity in single-family neighborhoods.

In Colorado, water impact fees are a significant cost attached to every new home. Benji Edelstein showed how a shift from one-size-fits-all pricing to contextual pricing changed construction patterns. This research (not public yet) is well-timed: the Supreme Court’s Sheetz decision will make it hard to sustain flat pricing models when better data is readily available.

Raheem Chaudhry and Amanda Eng study children who grow up in NYCHA public housing – the largest and among the best-run in America. Children who move into NYCHA projects are more often than not moving from a worse neighborhood. And among children who live in NYCHA, those with more years are better off as adults.

Hector Blanco and Noémie Sportiche investigate Massachusetts’ “Chapter 40B” housing law, which allows mixed-income developments to bypass local zoning (after a tortuous process). Hector’s presentation interpreted the data in a YIMBY-friendly way: for most houses around most 40B sites, there is no measurable effect on prices or migration.

But you could flip it around: there is a large and significant loss of value for the immediate neighbors (up to 0.1 mile) of large 40B developments. And it makes renters, at least, more likely to move away.

By contrast, Joe Gyourko and Sean McCulloch reported a strong “Distaste for Density” using bordering municipalities (here’s an earlier version). Numerically, the distaste for neighbors’ density might be comparable to what Blanco and Sportiche found. But the authors framed it in the opposite way.

Each real estate listing belongs to one Multiple Listing Service (MLS) or another, sometimes with overlapping territory. When a sharing agreement between the Miami and Beaches MLS’s broke down, homes and buyers matched more slowly and prices fell. (Walter D’Lima presented this multi-author paper).

Rebecca Diamond’s keynote was a reminder that modeling choices matter. She thinks of permit process as a fixed cost that doesn’t vary with project size, an approach which yields predictably meh results.

Gordon Hanson’s keynote dealt with place-based policies. The most salient takeaway is that non-place-based policies, like Social Security and Medicaid, are more targeted to the poorest, neediest regions than the explicitly placed-based policies like tax incentives.

Urban economics is a rapidly growing discipline. Top students who wouldn’t have given it a thought twenty years ago are flooding into the discipline to take advantage of new data, powerful computers, and the gnarly-but-solvable public policy questions that 21st century cities present.

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