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Environmentalism vs. density, federal style

Coatesville is a town about 45 miles east of Philadelphia, and they want to refurbish their train station and build some transit-oriented development around it. The town really took off around the turn of the last century with the Lukens Steel Company, and because the train line was the town’s primary link to the outside world, development was concentrated around the station. But I guess being the epicenter of a century-old town doesn’t excuse you from the wrath of the mighty environmental review: If PennDOT and other stakeholders can settle on a plan and deal with some environmental issues at the site, Fauver hopes the state will begin the federally mandated environmental assessment process in March or April, which will take about a year. In contrast to locally-imposed environmental reviews, this time it’s the feds who are asking for it, probably since the station is served by Amtrak. In other words, it’s not something that greenfield McMansion developers on the outskirts of town have to endure. A federal twist on the familiar environmentalism vs. density theme.

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 […]

More urban planning mismeasurement

Apparently I’m not the only one thinking about urban mismeasurement, because the planning blogosphere is lighting up with examples. In addition to my critique of per passenger-mile measurements and the aforelinked critique of average density (and the great follow-up post here), I’ve noticed two other discussions about mismeasurement in urban planning: 1. A report funded by the Rockefeller Foundation criticizes the standard measures of congestion used by the Texas Transportation Institute’s “industry standard” Urban Mobility Report. It cites the Travel Time Index in particular, or the ratio of average peak travel times to non-peak travel times (it’s unclear but I believe they’re only talking about cars), as being particular pro-sprawl, in that it rewards cities where it’s hard to get around to begin with. While measuring total time spent in peak hour traffic, apparently dense metro areas like Chicago, Portland, and Sacramento have the lowest peak travel times, with Nashville holding up the rear with the longest average time spent in rush-hour traffic. 2. Angie Schmitt at Streetsblog gives an excellent example of both mismeasurement and environmentalism vs. density: This summer I worked in the air quality division of the metropolitan planning agency in Northeast Ohio — known as NOACA. NOACA is the local agency responsible for disbursing federal highway dollars. To a certain extent, its actions are governed by a series of federal directives. While I was at NOACA, we hired an “air quality planner” whose main responsibility was to perform an analysis mandated by the feds to measure the air quality impacts of every proposed road project. The problem was, the analysis inevitably concluded — without fail! — that expanding a road would reduce air pollution. That’s because the formula only accounted for short-term air quality impacts. Any given road project was likely to reduce congestion in the […]

Environmentalism vs. density

Recently I was reading an article about the death-by-delay of an upzoning proposal near a train station in Boston because the property might have been “considered ‘priority habitat’ for rare species, including the eastern box turtle,” and I thought about all the times I’ve heard of opponents of density hiding behind environmentalism. Ed Glaeser has written about how Bay Area environmentalists’ opposition to development and California courts’ institution of onerous environmental reviews have encouraged sprawl, and last year we learned that the Northeast Corridor was denied HSR stimulus money because of the lengthy multi-state environmental review necessary. A few minutes of Googling reveals that stormwater mitigation rules, intended to minimize the amount of polluted runoff entering the watershed, have also been accused of favoring sprawling, greenfield development over infill and denser redevelopment. Existing structures are generally grandfathered in, but any redevelopment apparently must meet the new rules, even if it has no more impervious surface than the building it seeks to replace. Density bonuses for “green” building techniques also strike me as a bit backwards, considering that density is “green” in its own right. I can’t find any quantitative research on how much of a problem these supposedly pro-environment rules really are, and I don’t have the practical experience of a developer or a planner, but perhaps some commenters will chime in with their knowledge or come up with other instances of environmentalism taking precedence over density.

Urbanization driving reforestation to outpace deforestation?

by Stephen Smith While most people associate cities with pollution and the material and ecological excess of late capitalism, I’ve long believed that urbanization has the potential to be a great environmental savior. The NYT has a fascinating article that confirms what I said about cities attracting people who would otherwise live more environmentally profligate lives: the amount of total rain forest is likely growing, due to the reforestation of towns and villages abandoned by people in Latin America and Asia who are moving to cities. Elisabeth Rosenthal, the article’s author, explains the reasons that people are abandoning land at a growing pace: In Latin America and Asia, birthrates have dropped drastically; most people have two or three children. New jobs tied to global industry, as well as improved transportation, are luring a rural population to fast-growing cities. Better farming techniques and access to seed and fertilizer mean that marginal lands are no longer farmed because it takes fewer farmers to feed a growing population. By some estimates, these demographic and technological shifts mean that forests are growing back far faster than they’re being cut down: These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest – an iconic environmental cause – may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster. There are two problems, though, with the new forests: they aren’t “old growth” forests, and they aren’t necessarily able to support many endangered species. The first part – the fact […]

Redistribution

Discussing Ithaca, New York’s plan to increase permitted density and reduce parking minimums, I can dig what Matthew Yglesias says : The distributive impact of parking minimums is to redistribute income from people who don’t own cars to people who do own cars—not to shift income from poor to rich. A rich family will probably have at least one car for every family member who’s at least 16 years old. A family of more modest means will probably own fewer vehicles. More generally, while I’m obviously not a hard-core free marketers, it does make sense to consider a free market position our default position. Mandating the construction of extra parking doesn’t reduce harmful environmental externalities. Rather, it generates them. It doesn’t help the neediest members of society, it makes it more difficult for them to afford housing. It doesn’t correct important information deficits—people are perfectly capable of asking whether or not a house they’re considering buying or renting comes with a reserved parking space. — Update: here’s a follow up.

Conservatives and Urbanism

Matthew Yglesias – Straight Talk on Gasoline on drilling and how conservative deviation from free-market principles has hurt the environment: Meanwhile, take something like the accessory dwellings issue. Here you have a bunch of regulations that make it illegal for people to live more densely. Illegal, in other words, to build the kind of communities where the gas price issue wouldn’t hurt so much. But there’s a movement afoot to change things. Similarly with minimum parking rules — regulations that interfere with the operation of the free market in such a way as to make it more difficult for people to live energy efficient lives. And again, there are people trying to change this. These things are regulatory barriers to solving our energy problems every bit as much as the ban on offshore drilling is. And conservatives are against regulation, right? Except the anti-drilling regulation is good for the environment and for coastal economies whereas anti-urbanist regulation is economically inefficient and environmentally destructive. Naturally, conservatives have chosen to aim all of their fire at anti-drilling regulations. And that’s the sort of thing that makes the conservative movement hard to take seriously — it’s an organized defense of existing power and privilege that now and again adopts principled rhetorical modes of various kinds but basically can’t be moved to act unless some lobbyists pay them too. Similar arguments could describe progressives too, but that (and drilling for oil) is a topic for other blogs… I agree about the inconsistent anti-market sentiments of conservatives when it comes to urbanism. Conservatives tend to embrace socialism when they can abuse government to create barriers that exclude others from their communities, but not when others benefit from socialism. (Public schools, free parking, government roads, exclusionary zoning, community centers, etc…) They are just fighting over different […]

Urban[ism] Legend: Density is Bad for the Environment

This is a topic I want to cover more thoroughly, but for now I present a one hour documentary video on green buildings for you leisurely viewing. I came across the snagfilms website from a recent Wall Street Journal article. Most of the documentary videos lean towards “progressive” tastes, but hopefully they’ll add some free-market content such as Friedman’s “Free To Choose” videos. Through quick browsing, this video seemed to be the only one that had relevance to Market Urbanism. I think it does a decent job dispelling the Urbanism Legend that high density is bad for the environment. However, some of the commenters seem to fall for the myth that further government intervention will somehow solve the problem. They all seem to forget that progressive government meddling in transportation and land use has done much to cause the problems of sprawl and auto-dependency that modern progressives are now trying to fight with more intervention. [Watching it a second time, I wanted to point something out. One commenter stated that European and Japanese developers plan for a 50 year life-cycle of buildings, while in the US only 12 months. This is absolutely false. Developers usually use a 10-year discounted cash flow model, but still incorporate a sale value of the property based on projected incomes in the 11th year. That sale value could be calculated on the cash flow of the next 10 years and so, on, but they usually use a more simple calculation for the 10th year sale. They could use 50 year models, but they wouldn’t give much better information than the standard 10-year model. European developers use the same methods as the US. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to decieve you.]

Should Government Own Wilderness?

I found a link to a great article at FreeColorado.com. It doesn’t apply to urbanism specifically, but conceptually deals with privatization of publicly owned land. Free Colorado – Should Government Own Wilderness? The original article was from Grand Junction Free Press – Armstrong Column: Should the government own, manage wilderness? here’s a few quotes I enjoyed: Just how far do we want to push our free-market agenda? The short answer is all the way. A free market means that people’s rights to control their resources and associate with others voluntarily, so long as they don’t violate the rights of others, are consistently protected. It means that the initiation of force is outlawed. The alternative is coercion: taking people’s resources by force and and threatening them with jail for not doing what you want. We refuse to sanction the mixed economy, the current blend of some liberty and some socialist controls. We advocate liberty, all the time, without exception. Politically, of course, it’s usually easier to stop the government takeover of something new (such as a recreation facility) than to restore a government-controlled entity to the free market. Even though there’s no reason whatever for the national government to run trains or deliver the mail, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) and the United States Post Office have resisted market reforms. Trains and mail remain largely socialized industries. It seems that organizations like the Sierra Club complain most loudly about federal wilderness management. Therefore, we suggest simply giving many federal lands to the Sierra Club or similar groups. We’re confident they would do a good job managing the land, and they’d be more open to charging fees for use and even drilling to pay for land management. The rest could be transferred to a privatized Forest Service or sold, with the […]

Socialist Cities

So, you think the planners in your area are taking something a little too far? Be glad you aren’t in Venezuela… I wish I could link to the article by Michael Mehaffy in The Urban Land Institute’s May edition of Urban Land titled “Venezuela’s New Socialist Cities”, but ULI doesn’t provide the online edition to non-members. However, I have been able to find some related articles online, which I can share with you. Development of Caminos de Los Indios, the first of five “Socialist Cities” has begun south of Caracas. In his 2007 inaugural speech, Hugo Chavez said, “We need to a system of cities based on federations, federal regions. We need to build communal cities, Socialist Cities.” “Economic power needs to be transfered to these local bodies (“councils of popular power”) – so that we can work toward the communal and social state and move away from capitalism.” The concept is tauted by the government as a way of empowering locals and creating sustainable places for the 1/2 million residents. In Nov 17, 2007’s Washington Post, Ramón Carrizales, Venezuela’s housing minister is quoted “A city that’s self-sustainable, that respects the environment, that uses clean technologies, that is mostly for use by the people, with lots of walking paths, parks, sports areas, museums and schools within walking distance.” However, many environmentalists are appalled, since these cities will be build in the wilderness, requiring roads and infrastructure to these newly deforested locations. Not only that, many rural residents will be forced to resettle into the “Socialist Cities.” The history of these sort of projects are dismal. From the Washington Post article Chávez’s ‘Socialist City’ Rises: “The majority of socialist cities that were built in socialist countries failed,” said Maria Josefina Weitz, an urban planner in Caracas. “When you create something by […]

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