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Links: “At least they’re being honest” edition

1. NY Governor Cuomo promises the “most aggressive” strengthening of the state’s (read: NYC’s) rent laws. 2. Bronx <3 parking: “This community wants a moratorium on any more building until we get a parking lot.” “We don’t want any bigger buildings and we want parking space for everyone.” 3. Do people realize that “I don’t mind modernist architecture” and “All new buildings must have decorative cornices and intricate brickwork” are fundamentally incompatible statements? 4. Witold Rybczynski on density. Nothing you haven’t already heard a million times before, but, Witold Rybczynski! 5. DC’s zoning code finally allows building owners to enclose the once-encouraged outdoor arcades.

The Little-Known History of “Light and Air”

“Light and air” is a very common excuse that people give for why we must have basic zoning laws, and while nowadays a lot of people mean it simply in an aesthetic sense – another way of saying “I like to be able to look out a window and not see another skyscraper 50 feet away” (though for some reason when said interaction happens on the second or third floor, it’s okay?) – the origins of it are very interesting, and I believe crucial to understanding today’s urban plans. Of course, the ideas that turn-of-the-century planners had about disease and density turned out to be totally incorrect – privacy and being able to look out a window is nice, but the lack thereof is not a great health risk. As Robert Fogelson writes on pages 125-26 of Downtown: Skyscrapers were also a serious menace to public health, advocates of height limits charged. As early as the mid 1880s, they said that tall office buildings were turning the streets below into dark, damp, and gloomy canyons. During the winter they blocked the sun, leaving the cold streets even colder. During the summer, wrote American Architect and Building News, they acted as “storehouses of heat,” driving up the temperature after sunset, making the once cool and refreshing nights unbearable. The skyscrapers also shrouded the nearby buildings in darkness, forcing the office workers to rely on artificial light – which, it was believed, put a strain on the eyes. Worst of all, the skyscrapers deprived both the streets below and the adjacent buildings of fresh air and sunlight. To Americans who still held that disease was a product of the “miasma,” the noxious vapors that permeated the cities, the lack of fresh air was bad enough. To Americans who believed in the new […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

A reader comment on census data

Sorry for the light (/lack of) posting. Hopefully that’ll change soon. In the meantime, here’s a reader comment from a post a few weeks ago on whether or not dense areas are gaining population: I worked for the US Census Bureau in Central Los Angeles last year. Census Bureau management hired about 70% of authorized staffing, failed to distribute census materials in a timely manner or in accordance with published manuals, failed to hire sufficient numbers of foreign-language speakers sufficient to conduct canvassing effectively, and yet demanded that Census results be generated just as quickly in poor, high-density neighborhoods with large numbers of non-English speakers as in affluent suburban neighborhoods. And we wonder why Census numbers show relatively small amounts of growth in cities? I don’t have time to go really in depth with this, but this is a very common criticism of census figures. Here’s an About.com piece about undercounting in Brooklyn for the 2010 census. They identify three undercounted groups: immigrants, Hasids, and people who just recently moved into flashy new high-rises. Considering that these are exactly the three groups you’d imagine to be growing the fastest, this may mean there was considerable undercounting.

Alon Levy on Downtown Brooklyn

In my last post about the geometry of cities and the importance of downtowns, it looks like I understated the extent to which Downtown Brooklyn was built up during New York’s market-driven boom during the turn-of-the-century. Quoteth commenter Alon Levy: I think you are essentially correct, but there’s one historical fact you get wrong: when the NYC subway was built, Downtown Brooklyn was a very large CBD, in fact larger than today relative to Manhattan. Nobody seriously expected people to live in the Bronx and work in Brooklyn, but people did expect Brooklynites to work in Downtown Brooklyn, taking advantage of the large network of trolleys and els. The subway was built around Downtown Brooklyn and not just Manhattan. The lines all go through Downtown Brooklyn, with the exception of the L. In addition, the BRT built a few loops going from Downtown Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan and then back to Brooklyn, which have since been rerouted as Midtown eclipsed Brooklyn as a job center. Nowadays, the problem of traveling from a community to one side of the primary CBD to one on the opposite side is acute, on both transit and highways. As a result, the poorest slice of suburbs will usually be the one on the opposite side of the favored quarter and the dominant edge cities; in Washington, this means PG County, which is opposite Tyson’s Corner and poorer than the white-majority DC suburbs. My guess about Downtown Brooklyn – both then and now – is that its jobs were probably not as prestigious or high-paying as those in Lower and Midtown Manhattan, and probably contained a lot of department stores. The reason for the “lesser” jobs would be that if you were trying to attract the best talent, you’d want to pull from the widest range […]

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 […]

Ed Glaeser on New York City, development as preservation, and more

Ed Glaeser has a sprawling feature story in The Atlantic about skyscrapers that’s full of urbanist history and themes that I’ve been meaning to blog about for a few days now. It’s a great article, with a lot of New York history in it, but I wanted to highlight a few bits. The part I liked most was where Glaeser talks about what I’ve called development as preservation and others have called adaptive reuse – the idea that making use of existing developed land is the best way to preserve historic buildings, although Glaeser also points out that it’s useful for preserving open land like parks, too: In 2006, the developer Aby Rosen proposed putting a glass tower of more than 20 stories atop the old Sotheby Parke-Bernet building at 980 Madison Avenue, in the Upper East Side Historic District. Rosen and his Pritzker Prize–winning architect, Lord Norman Foster, wanted to erect the tower above the original building, much as the MetLife Building (formerly the Pan Am Building) rises above Grand Central Terminal. The building was not itself landmarked, but well-connected neighbors didn’t like the idea of more height, and they complained to the commission. Tom Wolfe, who has written brilliantly about the caprices of both New York City and the real-estate industry, wrote a 3,500-word op-ed in The New York Times warning the landmarks commission against approving the project. Wolfe & Company won. In response to his critics in the 980 Madison Avenue case, of whom I was one, Wolfe was quoted in The Village Voice as saying: To take [Glaeser’s] theory to its logical conclusion would be to develop Central Park … When you consider the thousands and thousands of people who could be housed in Central Park if they would only allow them to build it up, boy, the problem is […]

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