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Links: Transit worker wages, farmers markets, parking, and beyond!

1. Austin Contrarian comes out in favor of a Republican proposal to lower bus drivers’ wages. I wish more liberal urbanists (i.e., urbanists) would comment on issues like these. I don’t see (m)any of them vociferously defending transit labor unions, but I also don’t see them criticizing them for making transit more costly and inefficient. 2. While NYC has a program that opens farmers markets in rich neighborhoods, regulations make it too difficult for private citizens to start their own markets, without government assistance, in parks and other open spaces in neighborhoods that could actually use them. 3. LA considers devolving some control over parking policy to neighborhood groups. Most of the powers that they’d give them appear to be liberalizing (reduce minimums, allow off-site parking to count), but it’d also give them the power to raise parking minimums. Can anyone who knows a bit more about LA tell me if this is, on net, a good idea? My gut says no – at least in my experience, the more local the power, the more likely people are to use it to stop dense development. 4. Apparently New York City maintains a dog run in Tribeca. Should the city really be subsidizing the laziness of incredibly wealthy dog owners in lower Manhattan? Regular parks at least increase land values nearby (well, at least in theory), but given that this one appears to be made of concrete and is covered in dog poop, I have a feeling that most of the neighbors wouldn’t miss it. 5. Lydia DePillis has a profile of DC-area real estate consultant/VIP Stephen Fuller. 6. Cap’n Transit on how regulation aimed at making buses safer could end up making us less safe.

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.

New York City links

There are a couple of NYC-related links that I’ve been saving up, so here they are: 1. Stephen Goldsmith, former mayor of Indiannapolis and NYC’s new deputy mayor, appears to be interested in privatizing New York City’s parking meters in order to balance the city’s budget. We’re more interested in the extent to which it will raise parking prices closer to a market rate, but wary of the city locking in parking policy and therefore not being able to experiment with more radical reforms down the road. 2. Bruce Ratner’s new Lower Manhattan apartment building, designed by Frank Gehry, with studios starting at $3,000/mo., is receiving an affordable housing tax abatement. 3. Comptroller John Liu’s task force on “what the city can and should demand from developers of publicly subsidized projects” has collapsed in a series of public resignations and dissensions. Fortunately, it looks like a potentially lethal beast has been slain: In a letter to the task force co-chairs, four dissenters wrote that the task force’s recommendations would create “additional red tape and bureaucracy and ultimately waste taxpayer funds on a new set of city-funded consultants.” “In today’s increasingly competitive environment, a proposal like this would make New York a more difficult place to do business and to build,” the four dissenting task force members wrote in a letter reviewed by the Journal. 4. The Gotham Gazette discusses the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which should ring a bell for anyone interested in NYC real estate. The article claims that it’s the most significant planning entity in New York City, and that its rise has come on the back of inclusionary zoning and public-private initiatives. A lot of this is includes affordable housing mandates (usually about 20%) within otherwise private buildings, which the Gotham Gazette says are included in most […]

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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