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Links

1. A report on (Western) European parking policies. Abstract of the abstract: Big on charging market rates for on-street parking, but also big on capping private developer’s ability to build parking. I’d be interested to see an analysis like this done to see if the caps are actually set lower than the market equilibrium. Streetsblog also has a good summary. 2. It’s unfortunate that this developer chose to express himself in such an unsympathetic way (someone should teach him the meaning of the word “corruption,” in particular), but his analysis of NYC’s recent property tax assessment hikes is consistent with what we’ve seen before: people who live in apartments are taxed at higher rates than people who live in single-family homes. 3. Urbanists are trying to change Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and HUD’s policies of not funding small mixed use projects. From what I understand, the GSEs’ role in financing American mortgages has actually increased in the wake of the financial crisis, so the federal bias against mixed use may actually be stronger than it was before the recession. 4. Washington, DC may speed through zoning changes that require parking to not be out front. I’m not sure, but I think that DC currently has some laws mandating that it be out front, which means this would be yet another example of zoning codes going from density-forbidding to density-forcing without any intermediate stop. 5. Remember yesterday when I said that Gallaudet was a bigger drag on its neighborhood than the industrial-looking blight nearby? DC lawmakers may try to one-up Gallaudet by replacing the buildings with a soccer stadium.

Long weekend links

1. The NYT utterly humiliates itself with a story on how difficult it is for a kid straight outta college from “a prominent Portuguese banking family” to rent a $2,500/mo. studio in a Chelsea coop for less than 12 months. Sounds like the perfect posterchild for Sheldon Silver’s rent control plans. 2. What does it cost in bribes to get an 11-story hotel built in Park Slope? $9,850 to Marty Markowitz and 400-space public garage. The developer called the garage a “magnificent cake,” and Irene Lo Re of the Fifth Ave. BID says, “We can’t turn our backs on 400 spaces.” The commenters are throwing a lot of scorn at the developer for the garage, but it looks to me like it’s the fault of Irene Lo Re and the parking-obsessed neighbors. 3. Vancouver considers easing up on “social housing requirement” for developer (for the first time ever?!) if they’ll give the city a few parcels of land. 4. New (again) California Governor Jerry Brown proposes elimination of redevelopment agencies.

Midnight link list

1. “Gen Y/Millennials” want density. Ha! Sucks for them. 2. Mini-bleg: Does anyone know what “building regulations” are preventing this proposed Jackson Heights building from having windows on one side? 3. Southwest DC, before and after highways/urban renewal, in pictures. 4. Overplanning in China. 5. Palm Beach County wants to allow private developers to build along West Palm Beach’s train line and bus stops, but Mayor Lois Frankel wants a sports stadium. 6. St. Louis got money from Obama’s stimulus to hire consulting firms to upzone the city’s dense neighborhoods.

Hump day list

Because for the first time since May, I have a hump day. Which is why all you get is a list. 1. Traditionally, the NYC-dominated New York State Assembly’s whacky rent control impulses have been tempered by the suburban/upstate-dominated Senate, but the NYT says that they may have struck a deal, with the Assembly winning the following: About one million apartments in the city’s five boroughs, roughly half of all rental units, are covered by the existing laws, which sharply limit landlords’ ability to raise rents and keep many apartments, particularly in Manhattan, renting at well below market value. Currently, apartments become deregulated when the rent reaches $2,000 and total household income of the tenants is at least $175,000 annually for two years. [Assembly speaker Sheldon] Silver said he would like not only to preserve those protections, but also to expand them, by raising the income and rent thresholds. “You want to preserve people making $210,000, $225,000 a year, living where they’re living,” Mr. Silver said. Uh, maybe you want to preserve that… 2. A good article from the NYT about Brooklyn’s new skyline. I’m impressed that they held off until the last page to quote a naysaying politician: Robert Perris, the district manager of Community Board 2, which represents the area, said the benefits of residences along Flatbush Avenue were clear. But, he added, so are the benefits of a strong commercial district — and strengthening the commercial district was one of the chief goals of the rezoning. When residential buildings are erected in commercial zones, he said, their lots are lost for commercial purposes. It also would have been nice to have a sentence or two more more detail in this fairly long article about the 2004 “rezoning,” though. 3. This study found that parking adds 10% to […]

Newsflash: there’s no supply and demand in a centrally-planned market

The NYT has an absolutely boneheaded article about the shortage of taxicabs in Manhattan during the evening rush-hour. They blame rising Manhattan rents and cabbies’ schedules, but the statists at the New York Times don’t see the obvious glaring issue: controlled prices and a taxicab cartel! They cite it as an “apparent violation of the laws of supply and demand,” without recognizing that for supply and demand to work, you need drivers to be able to charge their own prices and enter markets at will. Aside from that supply and demand bit, I’d say the second stupidest quote comes from David Yassky, leader of the cabbies’ cartel: Mr. Yassky said the city “should be circumspect about substituting its judgment for the judgment of business people.” Hmm, that’s odd, because last I checked, Yassky was in charge of a state organ devoted to protecting incumbent taxi drivers from the judgment of business people.

Friday link list

Expect a lot more of these… 1. Beijing tries to relieve congestion by…building a quarter-million parking new spaces and 125 miles of new downtown streets?! But don’t worry – bike sharing! 2. Seattle inches closer to a Shoupian on-street parking policy, and Austin ponders charging for on-street parking after dark and on Saturdays. My favorite comment from the Seattle story is this one: “Get rid of the illegal aliens and we will have LOTS of room to park! And plenty money! Sanctuary idiots!” I guess that was one positive aspect of the Holocaust: more parking! (Oops, did I just Godwin this blog?) 3. East (a.k.a. Spanish) Harlem wants to develop its transit-accessible parking lots and fill them with “low- and middle-income residents” to aid in its “struggl[e] to maintain its affordable housing stock,” but of course “they want to prevent the construction of large apartment towers.” Sorry, East Harlem – you can’t have your cake and eat it too. 4. As if we needed any more evidence that diverting police officers for voluntary bag searches in the DC Metro was an absurd idea. 5. A Green candidate for London mayor has proposed expanding the area that the congestion charge covers, build tiers in, and raise prices to the point where entering the innermost part of London would cost drivers £50/day (!!). As long as we don’t end up on the right-hand side of the Laffer curve – that is, as long as the city can raise more revenue at £50/day than it could at any lower price – I think this would be a step in the direction of market urbanism, since it would emulate the behavior of a profit-seeking road firm. (One way of testing that is to raise the charge gradually and to stop once total revenue starts […]

Preservationists hyperventilate over extra story in Chelsea

About a month ago I put a post where I discussed how overzealous historical preservationists were halting necessary incremental development, and in the long run guaranteeing that the buildings will have to be completely razed if cities are ever to regain a modicum of economic rationality. I mentioned the case of a building in Chelsea whose top story was added illegally (or so the city claims – the details are murky) and will now be torn down, and I was surprised to see that the NYT devoted a whole article to it in yesterday’s. What’s interesting to me is all the hyperbolic statements that preservationists are making, especially considering that the building’s supposed significance (it was home to an abolitionist who helped slaves escape) has little to nothing to do with its architecture: “It’s just come to this desperate situation,” said Fern Luskin, an architectural historian who lives on the block and has taken up the cause of protecting the historic integrity of the building, a Greek Revival house at 339 West 29th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. “It’s like taking a serrated knife and lopping off our history,” she said of the addition. “It will permanently disfigure the evidence of what happened there.” Of course, except for the cornice at the top, there’s no “lopping off” going on here – it was an addition, for Christ’s sake! And this I guess is why it’s so urgent to preserve the roof, which no one but the maintenance man will ever even see: The Gibbonses, abolitionists before the Civil War, used the house as a meeting place, where they helped escaping slaves en route to Canada. “They were like the Schindler of their day, taking such a chance, harboring slaves that were running for their lives,” said Ms. Luskin, referring […]

Elevated rail vs. road, and…monorails?

I started reading Fogelson’s Downtown with the intention of learning more about elevated trains, and though I’ve been slightly disappointed in that regard (more to come on that after I finish and attempt a more comprehensive review), he does include a lot of interesting history. I’m posting this more so that I remember it, but the first paragraph offers an interesting rejoinder to those who say that els could never be viable because of the blight factor, and the Second Avenue elevated line makes a cameo towards the end: In view of the longstanding and deep-seated opposition to elevated railways, the construction of elevated highways is more than a little puzzling. This opposition has grown so vociferous that by the 1920s most Americans had come to believe that elevated railways should never have been built in the first place. Despite assurances by several leading engineers that it was possible to build els that were quiet, clean, and attractive (and would not reduce property values), they remained convinced that under no circumstances should any more be constructed. The cities should not only stop building elevated railways, many Americans insisted; they should start demolishing them. This idea, which had surfaced in the first two decades of the century, caught on in the 1920s, especially in New York and Boston. In favor of it were abutting businessmen and property owners, who believed that the removal of the els would improve trade and raise values. Allied with them were public officials (among them Julius Miller, borough president of Manhattan and chief advocate of the West Side Elevated Highway), who thought the demolition of the els would foster economic development; traffic experts (including New York City Police Commissioner Enright, another advocate of elevated highways), who assumed that the removal of the elevated structures would facilitate […]

New Years link list

Behold, your first link list of 2011! 1. The automobile may officially in decline (very good article!). 2. Interesting parallels between China and its HSR intellectual property disputes and post-WWII Japan and Korea. More here. 3. Fred Barnes writes a stupid article for the Weekly Standard (“The road to hell is paved with bike baths”), and Jarrett Walker responds with a treatise on “coercion” (“We are the libertarians!”). 4. I forget that although rent control has been thoroughly discredited in the real world, NYC developers are still grappling with it. Vornado and another developer had to shell out tens of millions to break the rent control grip on a Central Park South building they bought, with 15 rent controlled tenants receiving payouts of around $1.5 million each. 5. Vancouver is loosening its grip on the street food market, while Stephen Goldberg is trying to create a one-stop shop for getting NYC restaurant permits/licenses/certificates/inspections. 6. The market-defying schemes that liberals come up with would be amusing if they weren’t so horrifying. Read here as they puzzle over why excess luxury condos built in NYC during the boom couldn’t easily be used as affordable housing (Vancouver redux), and watch out for the part on the third page where an organization called “Right to the City” advocates “using eminent domain to seize vacant residential buildings and turn them into affordable housing.” 7. Niagara Falls’ decades-long megaproject failures. The article ends on a positive note, citing federal money for a new train station and grants for a wine bar and a concert hall, but I wonder if anyone in Niagara Falls ever bothered trying to loosen up the parking restrictions and maybe upzone a few blocks.

Downtown Brooklyn’s $2 million affordable apartments (correction)

Inclusionary zoning is a bad enough idea, but at least it doesn’t cost taxpayers anything directly. But New York State’s Housing Finance Agency is taking the worst of both worlds – affordable housing mandates and public subsidies – and plopping them down in new luxury construction in the heart of Downtown Brooklyn. Behold, some of the most expensive “affordable housing” in all five boroughs (at least, let’s hope it’s the most expensive!): • 388 Bridge Street Apartments, between Willoughby and Fulton streets in Downtown Brooklyn, a 234-unit, brand new 49-story multifamily rental apartment building controlled by the estate of Stanley Stahl, which received $94.6 million in financing. Forty-seven of the units will be set aside for tenants with household incomes up to $39,600 for a family of four. • 25 Washington St., between Plymouth and Water streets in DUMBO, a 106-unit, eight-story multifamily rental apartment being converted by Two Trees Management Co., which received $22.2 million in financing. Twenty-one of the units will be set aside for tenants with household incomes up to $39,600 for a family of four. • 29 Flatbush Ave., at Nevins Street in Downtown Brooklyn, a 333-unit, brand new 44-story multifamily apartment building controlled by The Dermot Company, which received $99 million in financing. Sixty-seven of the units will be set aside for tenants with household incomes up to $39,600 for a family of four. That comes out to a little over $2 million per subsidized apartment in the first tower, $1 million in the second, and almost $1.5 million in the third. And that’s not even counting the rent that the future impoverished (because, let’s face it, if you earn less than $40k for a family of four in NYC, you’re impoverished) tenants will have to pay. That’s $215 million spent (see correction) so that […]

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