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Liberalizing Cities From The Ground Up
Is it even possible today to write a vigorous argument in favor of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s? I doubt it. Jeanne Lowe's 1967 "Cities in a Race with Time* is a sympathetic account of the urban renewal era in its own terms. How does it hold up?
1. Where’s Scott? Scott Beyer spent his second week in the Oklahoma City area, finding a place in the relatively wealthy northern college suburb of Edmond, OK. This week he wrote for Governing about New Orleans‘ music noise issue, and profiled a man in Forbes who escaped Cuba by raft for Miami. There are over 1.1 million Cuban immigrants in the United States, and even more than other immigrant groups, they have clustered, with over two-thirds living in greater Miami. What unites this group is not dislike of their home country, but the need to leave the Castro brothers’ Communist regime. 2. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Nolan Gray found another great Daniel Hertz article: Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere John Morris shared Donald Shoup‘s contribution to a Washington Post series on cities becoming less car-dependent (h/t Nolan Gray) John Morris also found a post at Medium calling for repeal of segregationist zoning policies Jeff Fong shared a short podcast interview with Alain Betaud Sandy Ikeda shared Bill Easterly‘s research on the largely unplanned emergence over 400 years of single block in Soho Mark Frasier congratulates Zach Caceras‘ work seeding local reforms at Startup Cities Adam Lang‘s ongoing frustration with urban renewal in his Philadelphia neighborhood which we previously covered 3. Elsewhere: New Geography reposted Nolan Gray’s recent article on Jane Jacob’s Hayekian approach William Fischel will be speaking Tuesday at NYU about his new paper: The Rise of the Homevoters: How OPEC and Earth Day Created Growth-Control Zoning that Derailed the Growth Machine Chris Hagan‘s WBEZ radio piece about population loss in Chicago‘s North Center neighborhood due to restrictive zoning Nick Zaiac wrote Maryland Is an Over-Regulated Disaster: Here’s How to Fix It and published a report at The Maryland Public Policy Institute Commutes in the U.S. are getting longer, reports the Washington Post’s Wonkblog. 4. Stephen […]
1. Shocker: The federal government is too incompetent to even sell its own buildings. Eh, oh well – it’s not like it holds most of that property in the city with the most expensive office space in America or anything. 2. Two State Senators from Queens are calling plans to toll the East River Bridges in exchange for relieving Long Island and Hudson Valley counties of the need to pay the MTA pay roll tax “nothing more than another tax on Middle Class families and small businesses.” First of all, it’s not a tax, it’s a user fee, but secondly, how many Middle Class (in caps, for christsake!) families are we supposed to believe really have to drive into Manhattan? 3. The FHA is loaning money to people with “less than stellar credit” to buy condos in New York City with only a 3.5% downpayment. In December I blogged an article claiming the federal government is shifting its subprime portfolio back to the FHA from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, whose implosion has cost taxpayers $150 billion. 4. Green roofs: Is there anything they can’t do? This report lists a whole slew of financial benefits, but if they’re such a great deal, why do developers need “significant public policy support” to install them? All the talk of creating jobs without even attempting to make a cost/benefit analysis is also disconcerting, but is typical of boosters of government programs. And are we really to believe that green roofs “reduce crime”? And if they really “improve property values for nearby buildings by 11 percent,” then why aren’t landlords falling over themselves offering to pay neighbors to install green roofs on their buildings? Seems like for such a supposedly huge benefit and relatively small number of beneficiaries, the collective action problem could be […]
Matt Yglesias and Lydia DePillis have been having an interesting discussion about the DC commercial real estate market that I have some thoughts on, so I thought I’d weigh in. I apologize for the length of this post, but I think it’s a really important point that shouldn’t be underestimated. Matt started by stating the following: Downtown DC is full. There’s basically no land left to build on, and you’re not allowed to build higher. If you make it a more attractive place to locate jobs, no additional jobs will be created because there’s noplace to put the jobs. The improved quality will show up as higher rent for landlords, and our rents are already the highest in the nation. If you relaxed the height limit, the high rents would spur new construction (=jobs) which would lead to lower rent per square foot which would make downtown, DC a more attractive employment destination. Lydia agreed that the height restriction should be lifted (I don’t want anyone to think that Lydia is an apologist for this – she’s definitely not, and if given total discretion over DC land use, I think all three of us would implement very similar policies), but argued that Matt is downplaying growth possibilities outside the core of DC’s downtown: But to say that “there’s noplace left to put jobs” is simplistic. Although many office projects stalled during the recession, they’re starting up again in a big way around the city, from Mount Vernon Square to Anacostia. On the longer term horizon, massive office capacity is planned for McMillan, L’Enfant Plaza, and the Capitol Riverfront. Recent changes in who gets what at Walter Reed – the District may now get all of the Georgia Avenue frontage – has Office of Planning director Harriet Tregoning thinking about “more ambitious […]
I’ve lived near a lot of schools in my life. Growing up on the Main Line I could walk to (at least?) five institutions of high learning, I went to school in Georgetown, and just a few weeks ago I’ve moved across the street from Gallaudet University in DC. And I’ve noticed a common thread among the schools: they make horrible land use decisions. I was inspired to write this by this post in Greater Greater Washington by Ken Archer about the housing situation at Georgetown, which is pretty bad. Though the university houses a lot of its students, it’s not great and a lot of people are forced out into the surrounding neighborhoods of Burleith and West Georgetown. The prices range from about $900/bedroom/month at the low end in Burleith to over $2000/bedroom/month in West Georgetown, and the campus housing could get as pricey as $2000/room/month without dedicated kitchens and bathrooms (!) for freshmen sharing dorms. Much of this is no doubt due to the neighbors’ refusal to allow affordable, dense housing in their communities for students, but at least half of the problem is universities simply making poor use of their existing space. GGW post does a good job of describing Georgetown’s failures. There is no shortage of short, architecturally-insignificant buildings on Georgetown’s campus that could be densified, and yet the university doesn’t take advantage of it. My first choices for infill projects would be New South and the awful concrete plaza next to Harbin, and I’m not sure many people would complain if the brutalist buildings were razed and replaced with something glassy and denser. And unlike, say, Villanova, there is no existing constituency of student drivers to cater to, so that can’t be it. And it’s not just Georgetown. In fact, likely due to the extreme […]
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 […]
Inclusionary zoning is a hot item among urban planners today, and is often seen as a solution to residential segregation and high housing costs. Exact implementations vary, but the general idea is that developers of multi-unit housing projects are encouraged to set aside a certain percentage of their units, generally ranging from 10-30%, but sometimes even more, as “affordable housing” units. In other words, some proportion of the units are under rent controls to the point where they must be rented (or sold) at a loss by the developer. Sometimes the schemes are voluntary and give developers density bonuses, sometimes developers can pay a fee instead of setting aside units. The exact proportion of units that must be set aside and loss developers take on each unit also varies. As you can imagine, I’m not in favor of this system, but it’s a complicated issue, so this is going to be a long article. Inclusionary zoning is a relatively new concept, first implemented in the 1970s, to combat the growing problem of residential segregation of classes and races, whose origins are interesting and, I think, germane to the conversation. I generally see two explanations given by proponents of IZ for why segregation and unaffordability arose in the first place: market forces and zoning (or, as they call it, exclusionary zoning). Quoteth a law review article: Affordable housing has always been a problem in the United States. Cities and towns originally engaged in forms of discrimination through exclusionary zoning to exclude low-income residents. Of course, this is only true if your history begins in 1930. But from the mid-18th century to the turn of the century, America underwent a tremendous urban population boom fueled by railed transit and a massive immigration wave from Europe, and the housing stock adjusted just fine […]
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, […]
1. Development blogger Roving Bandit criticizes UN-Habitat executive director Joan Clos for saying that Africa is “confronted with […] the challenge of preventing the formation of new slums.” I wonder if Clos thinks that the Lower East Side was born with yoga studios and Starbucks. 2. A kidney dialysis center in the Chestnut Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia wants to open in an abandoned industrial site, and when the City Council moved to overrule the local residents’ objections to the clinic staying open nine extra hours a week, they sued and called it an attack on democracy. The residents claim to want “peace and quiet,” which I guess you can’t get when you have people whose kidneys are failing all around you. Edit: Commenter Terry Nicol pointed me in the direction of this story earlier this year about a locally-owned Chestnut Hill grocery store that was threatened by a local resident for selling prepared food. 3. Yonah Freemark writes about Dallas’ new and extensive, but underperforming light rail network. Apparently the new lines were built along automobile corridors and bypass the densest parts of town entirely, and so the system functions more as a glorified park-and-ride rather than as an engine for infill growth. 4. Topher Matthews lays out his proposal for “performance parking” (i.e., charging market rates for street parking) in Georgetown. This is desperately needed in this very trendy and congested area – I remember one hairdresser on Wisconsin Ave. telling me about the convoluted game of hide-and-seek she played in order to park for free on the residential streets. Unfortunately, one DC Commissioner apparently believes that, even in one of DC’s most walkable neighborhoods, parking minimums are necessary: “This is an office building. There’s no Metro, people are going to drive.” 5. Apparently satellite photos show that the […]
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.
