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Empirical evidence that anti-density zoning breeds racial segregation

With nothing quick to blog about and not being in the mood to write something long, I dug into the Google Scholar pool for some interesting empirical work, which is something this blog hasn’t featured in a while.  This paper shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but it’s interesting empirical work nonetheless (.pdf): The foregoing analysis suggests that patterns and processes of racial segregation in the post-civil rights American city are strongly affected by density zoning. At any point in time from 1990 to 2000, intermetropolitan variation in Black-White segregation and Black isolation was strongly predicted by a metropolitan area’s relative openness to housing construction, as embodied in maximum zoning rules—the greater the allowable density, the lower the level of racial segregation. Moreover, our instrumental variable analysis suggests that the causal arrow runs from regulation to segregation even if the reverse is also true. In keeping with these cross-sectional findings, we also found that the prospects for desegregation are greater in areas with more liberal density regulations. From 1980 to 2000, metropolitan areas that allowed higher density development moved more rapidly toward racial integration than their counterparts with strict density limitations, even after controlling for a battery of social, geographic, and economic characteristics and for potential reverse causality between segregation and zoning. Our confidence that anti-density zoning is a true source of segregation is increased by a recent working paper by Rothwell (2009b) that uses the same data and finds essentially the same results for levels of Asian and Hispanic segregation, and consistent with Pendall’s (2000) analysis, we do not find any consistent pattern emerging for other land-use regulations. In terms of underlying mechanisms, we argue that restrictive density zoning produces higher housing prices in White areas and limits opportunities for people with modest incomes to leave segregated areas, […]

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 […]

A handful of tall buildings being allowed on Paris’ outskirts

I’m sure this is a copyright violation, but this blog isn’t very big and hopefully the AFP will appreciate the free translation. There were so many interesting things in this article about Paris’ first experiment in over 30 years with tall buildings, and American sources make the plan sound a lot more expansive that it really is, so I figured I’d just translate the whole thing. All measurements in metric; multiply meters by 3 and sq. meters by 10 to get rough approximations of their feet equivalents. Paris will soon welcome towers and tall buildings after an historic green light from elected officials, modifying a city code that dates back to 1977, relegating them however to the outskirts of the capital. The Council of Paris voted on Tuesday in favor of removing the height cap of the Local Urban Plan (PLU), which since 1977 has limited heights to 37 meters. There are, however, already a few taller buildings dating back from before the PLU, such as the Montparnasse Tower (210 meters). Called “historic,” this lifting of the height limit means that residential towers of up to 50 meters and office towers of up to 180 meters could sprout in specific neighborhoods of the capital. The municipal council revised the city code for the Masséna-Bruneseau area in the 13th arrondissement (in the southeast of paris), which will be the first neighborhood to welcome tall buildings. In this undeveloped area, at the heart of the Left Bank development zone (130 hectares), Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist Party deputy for urbanism, explained: “We have an ambitious economic development plan, with commercial space, hotels, and office space on the order of 100,000 sq. meters, with the possibility of four sites for buildings that could rise up to 180 meters.” Hidalgo even showed a full session […]

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 […]

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 […]

This is why DC can’t have nice things

With the District of Columbia’s height restriction entering its 100th year, Lydia DePillis from the Washington City Paper explains why downtown DC is all superblocks with so little natural light: While reading about the new Safeway-anchored residential development just approved in Wheaton, all I could think was: Why can’t we get these kinds of buildings in the District? It’s a 17-story, 486-unit, 195-foot-tall apartment complex that will add density and vibrance to the suburb’s delightfully diverse and quirky town center. But it won’t look like the superblocks that proliferate within the D.C. diamond, which are the way they are because developers must ask their architects to pack as much square footage under the 130-foot height limit as possible to make the deal work financially. Since Wheaton is not bound by such restrictions, this development can achieve a kind of light, airy quality with towers on each corner and quite a bit of open space in the middle of the block. That also creates higher-quality living spaces for apartment dwellers, many more of whom will be able to have natural light. The NYT also points out that “[b]ecause they cannot build up, developers have pushed out, helping gentrify less affluent parts of the city.” And as I’ve noted before, Matt Yglesias has blamed DC’s higher-than-Manhattan office rents on the height cap. Confusingly enough, the height restriction is enshrined in federal law and is thus in Congress’ hands – so the question is, do legislators just not give a shit because none of them are elected by DC residents, or do they actually have an active interest in the status quo?

The economics of redevelopment and the shape of socialist cities

Earlier today I read an article by Daniel Garst about Bejing’s awkward population distribution that reminded me of a journal article about the general shape of socialist cities that I read a while back. Garst talks about Beijing being a “circus tent” when it comes to density, with population density increasing as you travel away from the city center, in contrast to the “pyramid” style of most cities, with high densities in the center and lower densities around the periphery (see chart for a visual representation). This immediately made me think of an article by Alain Bertraud and Bertrand Renaud called “Socialist Cities without Land Markets,” where they describe exactly this phenomenon, and explain it as a failure of administrative urban planning. Here’s an excerpt: As their economy and their population grow, cities expand through the progressive addition of concentric rings, similar to the growth of trees in successive seasons. New rings are added to the periphery as the city grows. With each ring, land use reflects the combined effects of demography, technology, and the economy at the time when the ring was developed. Wile this organic incremental growth is common to all cities, in a market city changing land prices exert their pressure simultaneously in all areas of the city, not just at the periphery. Land prices exert a powerful influence to recycle already developed land in the inner rings when the type and intensity of the existing use is too different from the land’s optimum economic use. Thus, changing land values bring a built-in urban dynamism as ceaseless variations in land prices put a constant pressure on the current uses of land and trigger changes to new activities and/or densities. Under the administrative-command economy, the absence of land prices eliminated the main incentive to redevelop built-up areas by […]

When will New Jersey reverse its sprawling ways?

by Stephen Smith New Jersey has always been an odd state – it’s the most densely populated of the fifty, and yet it lies just outside of the core of both of its metro areas (Philadelphia and New York). North Jersey does have a formidable number of mid-sized cities, but the biggest – Newark – is a posterchild for urban neglect, and New Jersey’s urban areas play a tepid second fiddle to their much larger counterparts across the Delaware and the Hudson. New Jersey’s appeal lies undeniably in its suburbs, which are connected by a network of government-built roads and enabled by anti-density development rules. Despite New Jersey’s predilection for sprawl, the New York Times reports that the state may literally be running out of horizontal space. A Rutgers study claims that around the middle of the 21st century New Jersey will become the first state to develop all its unprotected land development trends remain unchanged. The NYT article then claims that denser redevelopment is on the rise and cites a few of anecdotes as evidence, but frankly I’m not convinced that the state is very reform-minded when it comes to its density-limiting regulations. Even among the examples given by the Times we see the limits of reform: a 217-unit luxury rental apartment building near the Morristown NJ Transit station – an area that was supposedly rezoned as a “Transit Village Core” a decade ago – was only allowed to go forward after the developer agreed to build 722 new parking spaces. On a more general level, New Jersey’s experiment with zoning reform in the ’70s and ’80s has been severely disappointing in terms of liberalization. Researcher James Mitchell used decisions handed down around the same time by both the Pennsylvania and New Jersey Supreme Courts to compare the effects on […]

A comment on NYU’s proposed superblocks

Benjamin Hemric left an interesting comment about my remark about NYU’s expansion plans in Greenwich Village. First of all, I should admit that I was lazy and got NYU’s plans totally wrong – they are going to add towers to the three that I. M. Pei already built, not tear them down, and they’re going to be in a similar style. But more importantly, Hemric sees NYU’s towers-in-the-park plan as anti-density fallout (emphasis mine): […] I’d like to say that I support more intense development of the NYU sites, but disagree with NYU’s current plans, which put the planned added density in an anti-city, tower-in-the-park form. It appears to me that NYU has developed this tower-in-the park approach, in large part so it seems to me, because it believes it will eventually help win over community opponents and government officials. So, in other words, this bad plan seems to me to be a result, to a large extent, of NYU trying to cater to anti-development community activists (although these activists are still up in arms about it) and government officials. I think a more market-oriented approach (one where a municipality takes care of its basic duties and needs and where private developers take care of their own needs), similar to what existed in cities prior to the urban “renewal” era, would likely produce a much better, more urbane plan. So I think that, to a large extent, it is the visible hand of “planning” that is mis-guiding this project and that more reliance on an invisible hand of the marketplace approach, where developers try to maximize their benefits and where municipalities focus only on limited “legitimate” (in my opinion) duties, like providing streets and parks, protecting landmarks, etc., would produce a much better result (here and elsewhere). […] Under its […]

More links!

Why didn’t I catch onto this whole linking thing earlier? Are these link lists boring for you guys? 1. Human Transit has a great post on “density” and all the different ways to measure it, with a cool picture of sprawling apartment buildings that illustrates why transit use in the Las Vegas metro area is so low, despite the fact that it’s actually slightly denser than the Vancouver metro area (?!). 2. Rich old white Manhattanites against BRT lanes. 3. Privately-paid rent-a-cops gaining traction in Oakland. 4. Longtime Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov has been fired, which some hope will make things easier on property developers in one of the world’s most expensive real estate markets (“[Current] city policy practically rules out private land ownership and forces developers to lease plots under “investment contracts” that often give a share to the city”). Most, however, are girded for a multi-year transition while new palms are greased. 5. Damon Root at Reason magazine explains why Columbia’s Manhattanville eminent domain takings are illegal even post-Kelo.

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