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Tag inclusionary zoning

Weekend links

1. Lydia DePillis responds. I’m all for upzoning only(/mostly) poor neighborhoods if that’s all the extra density we can get (though here at Market Urbanism we’re kind of utopians – we don’t care much about political feasibility), but I’m not nearly as optimistic about inclusionary zoning as she is. At its worst it’s a tool for anti-growth suburbanites to kill new dense development while seeming like they care about the poor, and at it best it’s a misguided tax on developers of multifamily units that helps only those resourceful and connected enough to get themselves a rent controlled apartment, which is then subsidized by the neighbors who didn’t manage to get one. 2. Philadelphia eases up on the parking minimums, but parts of Center City and (all of??) Old City, both of which have incredible transit access, will still require 1 off-street space for every three units of new construction, which seems like a lot more than they have now. 3. Vancouver contemplates raising its height limits. Of course, all new towers will have to meet higher-than-LEED Gold standards – god forbid anyone should acknowledge that density is, in and of itself, good for the environment. 4. Jersey City looks like it will get its High Line, but the question now is, how much development will be allowed around it? 5. One NYC councilman wants to impose rent controls on commercial landlords. The “Small Business Survival Act,” he likes to call it. 6. Tysons Corner scores a huge new development with a 33-story tower and a “European styled esplanade” in front of the new Tysons Central Metro station, while the Lower East Side debates kinda sorta maybe thinking about developing seven acres of parking lots near the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge. 7. Hipster Runoff, the hipster blog of record, […]

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 […]

LI Dems to councilman: oppose density so we can get reelected

Earlier today I was reading this article about “cupcake moms” at the local PTA mobilizing online against TOD in Huntington Station, a hamlet in Long Island, and while it looked like your average suburban NIMBY story, this part of the Long Island Press story jumped out at me: [Supervisor] Petrone had reportedly wanted this revitalization project for the former urban renewal area as his legacy to the town, but he won’t get it now. Instead he was reportedly blindsided by Cuthbertson’s switch last Thursday. Sources told the Press that Cuthbertson withdrew his support because Huntington Democratic Party insiders wanted to take the housing issue off the table so Republicans couldn’t use it against the Democratic incumbents in the elections next year. Councilwoman Susan Berland, who had straddled the fence for months, finally came out against the AvalonBay proposal this summer. She wanted less density. I guess we can count this as a point in favor of Matt Yglesias’ suggestion to isolate local elections from party politics by making the races non-partisan. Another part of the story that I found interesting was all the people hearkening back to their childhoods and their parents’ motivations for moving out of NYC to Long Island and using these as excuses not to let developers build on this site. This is pretty ironic, considering that the development was to be built on a plot of land that was once occupied by housing that was razed in the 1950s in an urban renewal scheme. I’m a few months late to all this, but it was apparently an important battle in the broader war over land use in Long Island – so much so that there was a post mortem held by a Long Island smart growth group that Newsday covered here and here. The articles are, […]

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.

Darien, CT gets sued by the DOJ over inclusionary zoning

The New York Times has an interesting article about a Justice Department probe into Darien, CT’s local inclusionary zoning rules. Inclusionary zoning means essentially that multi-unit developments have to offer a portion of the project as “affordable housing,” which invariably means charging below-market rents. We here at Market Urbanism oppose it because it essentially acts as a tax on dense development that’s not levied on the sort of one-off developments that are usually large lot, detached houses, which discriminates against the very people that it purports to be helping. While the people who live in the units certainly benefit from the too-good-to-be-true rents, every other poor person loses out as their housing costs rise. But unfortunately, the DOJ doesn’t appear worried about inclusionary zoning generally, but rather is interested in the “priority populations” provision, which determines who gets the low-rent housing, which is in high demand because of the artificially low price. Currently the town favors current residents, which the Justice Department is right to find discriminatory, since the well-healed New York City suburb is overwhelmingly white. While I’m always glad to see inclusionary zoning challenged, the focus on the priority populations provision strikes me as a bit narrow-sighted – they should be concerned about inclusionary zoning itself reducing affordable development. And in fact, the New York Times seems to recognize this, as they quote a developer at length as she describes the difficult of developing anything affordable in Darien. Sorry for such a long quote, but it’s very interesting: Inclusionary zoning was one strategy for accomplishing that goal. The policy hasn’t been used yet, as no qualifying developments have been approved since it went into effect in May 2009. The federal inquiry came to light last month, when Christopher and Margaret Stefanoni, a local couple who have sought approvals […]

Friday links

1. Miller-McCune (what a bad name for a magazine) has an article about a possible VMT tax, and points out that more fuel-efficient vehicles will lead to less gas tax revenue. 2. Streetsblog has an extremely unflattering profile of Republican nominee for NY Governor Carl Paladino. He made a name for himself politically by detolling a major highway near where he was a real estate developer, and has continued to oppose new tolling projects throughout the state. He’s promising to cut the gas tax rate, and apparently once said, “It’s time we started looking at parking as a public service.” I should note that his Democratic opponent Andrew Cuomo ain’t no slouch when it comes to encouraging sprawl – Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice fingered his tenure as HUD Secretary as one of the “starting points for the mortgage meltdown.” 3. Paul Barter at Reinventing Parking has a guest post about parking reform in Bogotá that was concurrent with their much-vaunted TransMilenio BRT system, and he promises us more about it in the future. 4. Quoteth the Los Angeles Times: “At least 120 municipalities [in California] — nearly one in three with active redevelopment agencies — spent a combined $700 million in housing funds from 2000 to 2008 without constructing a single new unit, the newspaper’s analysis of state data shows. Nor did most of them add to the housing stock by rehabilitating existing units.” 5. Vancouver learns the hard way that luxury public housing is a bad idea. You could call it inclusionary zoning at its finest.

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 […]

Zoning blighted Manhattanville before Columbia did

Something that always annoyed me about discussions of the state of Manhattanville and Columbia’s blight study is the fact that they usually leave out restrictive zoning as the original sin. We’re certainly no fans of eminent domain or Columbia’s plans for the West Harlem neighborhood, and while people are right to point out that Columbia’s neighborhood acquisitions and plans are key drivers of the further decline of the neighborhood, it would be stretching the truth to say that the neighborhood’s blight is entirely Columbia’s fault. The fact is that even before Columbia descended upon the neighborhood, its zoning classification just wouldn’t allow it to be a nice place. What else would you expect from an area that’s zoned mostly for industrial and manufacturing uses and is inhabited mostly by storage companies and auto repair shops? And the neighborhood organizations themselves weren’t doing the best job selling the alternatives. While their plan included some upzonings, it also would have hobbled the area with the onerous restrictions that are all too common throughout the city. There was an emphasis on preservation of the status quo, with some light industry retained. Inclusionary zoning and community benefits agreements would have driven up the cost of development further. They also took the stance that parking in the area was “insufficient” and “inadequate,” and called for “affordable municipal parking.” Clearly not being familiar with the work of Donald Shoup, they argued that “limited parking cause[s] drivers to circle blocks looking for on-street parking.” Again, while we’re no fans of eminent domain or Columbia’s heavy-handed tactics, it’s important to remember how difficult it is to do things “the right way,” and how much time and money is necessary to get plots of land rezoned. NYU, which doesn’t have the blight excuse for its Lower Manhattan acquisitions, is […]

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