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Tag zoning

Links

1. A shameless story of rent control in NYC. Glad to see that the city is forcing developers to subsidize wealthy Manhattanites’ Eat, Pray, Love-like dreams of moving to Paris. 2. The travails of getting a bus lane on a busy LA street where “[m]ore people already travel by bus than by car along the route during peak hours.” 3. Here is what appears to be another example of bad zoning creating blight, and the city using said blight to seize the property via eminent domain and hand it over to favored developers. NYC zoning maps are shockingly difficult to read – can anybody tell me what is allowed to be built, as of right, in the area bounded by 125th and 127th Sts. and 2nd and 3rd Ave. in Manhattan? 4. NYC’s new zoning lite handbook. No code should be so complicated that a 168-page handbook can’t even contain a zoning map.

Calling your opponents “socialists” and “un-American” is as American as skyscrapers

It’s pretty amusing to me that liberals today are still whining about being called “socialists,” considering the charge is at least a century old. Here one example from Robert Fogelson’s excellent Downtown chapter on height restrictions around the turn of the century: The Post voiced especially strong objections to the argument that a height limit was necessary to prevent new buildings from undermining the profitability of old ones and to deter the business district from moving from one location to another. That was “Municipal Socialism,” it declared. The city had no more business regulating development than running a department store. Municipal authority was already encroaching on private enterprise in too many ways. “And if it be permitted to limit the economic development of the city it might as well buy the city outright and conduct it as a Socialist Elysium.” And here’s another example later in the chapter about comprehensive zoning, with an extra “un-American” mixed in there: In some cities, the efforts to impose height limits through zoning ran into strong resistance. Sometimes the resistance was fueled by the opposition to zoning, which, it was charged, was “unfair, undemocratic, and un-American.” It was unfair because it discriminated among property owners. As Horace Groskin, director of the Philadelphia Real Estate Board, declared: “By what right has a zoning commission to set itself up as the judge and distributer of property values? To take the value away from one property owner and give it to another, or not to give it to anyone but to destroy it entirely for the imaginary benefit of the community, strikes me as coming mighty close to Socialism.” And while I’m in the mood to fill posts with others’ work, here’s another good (unrelated) quote from market anarchist Kevin Carson, as a Christmas Eve bonus: As […]

This is how gentrification happens: Northwest DC and the height restriction

Lydia DePillis wrote the Washington City Paper’s cover story on the case for Congress overturning DC’s height limit, which should be very familiar to readers of this blog. It’s got some interesting history in it (DC’s height limit was apparently influenced by George Washington’s personal aesthetics, despite the fact that he never governed from the city), but the part that was really interesting to me was the part where she discusses what the new limitations should be. It’s not politically practical to advocate for lifting the limit without reservations, as we here would like, and there are the usual caveats and equivocations (“What if additional height were granted on a competitive basis, and awarded for the best design?”). But the part that really stood out to me was this graphic (click on the image and scroll to the bottom of the linked page to see a bigger version), outlining where Lydia thinks the height restrictions should be lifted: Anyone familiar with DC geography will notice that the area most insulated from change – Northwest DC – is the richest part of town, full of desirable white neighborhoods. The areas where DePillis advocates lifting the height limit – neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River figure prominently in the graphic – are far blacker and poorer than the rest of DC. Sure, there are pretty buildings in NW and a lot of ugly ones in Anacostia, but there are also beautiful homes off of Benning Road and shitty ones in Burleith. (Which, I should add, could desperately use some taller buildings, given its proximity to the perpetually housing-strapped Georgetown University and its rather ugly architecture compared to Georgetown proper.) This tactic of upzoning poor black neighborhoods while leaving white neighborhoods unchanged is very common, and I realize that Lydia is just trying […]

Seattle’s land use liberalization

It’s not often that I find a plan that I can wholeheartedly agree with, but this one from Seattle sounds damn near perfect, at least in terms of marginal change (my emphasis…apologies to Publicola for stealing their content!): 1. Instead of the current generic land-use standards, the new regulations include five different allowed housing types: Cottage housing (collections of small single-family-style houses), row houses (rows of units attached by a single wall), townhouses (attached units that occupy space from ground to roof), autocourt townhouses (townhouses that each have a private garage), and apartments. 2. The maximum allowable height would be increased from 25 to 30 feet (basically, from three to a potential four stories)—a change that prompted commenters like Eastlake gadfly Chris Leman to accuse the council of supporting “larger and taller condos… that are bulkier and …. really worse than the worst townhouses” because they would block views, make it impossible to plant trees, and displace low-income housing. 3. The size of new developments would be determined by floor-area ratio (the ratio of a building’s floor area to the lot on which it is built) rather than simple building footprint, allowing more flexibility in building size. 4. Row houses would not be subject to the same density limits as auto-oriented townhouses, allowing them to cover more of a lot. 5. The law also includes new design standards to improve the appearance of new low-rise buildings and make them fit better into neighborhoods; 6. The changes would reduce the setbacks required between housing and the street (and between low-rise townhouses or row houses and each other), allowing more development on a lot; 7. Require developers to provide space for garbage, recycling, and food waste bins for smaller buildings, making it easier for residents of small town houses and apartment buildings […]

A question and a link list

Hey guys, before I start this link list, I wanted to ask: Has anybody had trouble posting comments here with Disqus lately? Either you can’t post them, or once you do they disappear? I’ve gotten two complaints in the last few days, so if you’ve been experiencing any problems please don’t hesitate to let me know so I can try to get to the bottom of it. If you can’t post a comment, email me at smithsj[at]gmail[dot]com. 1. DC gets upzoned. Why the Washington City Paper chose to bury that behind items about “neighborhood branding” and “supporting the enactment of pending federal legislation to ensure that insurance reserves are held and invested in the U.S.” is beyond me. 2. DC has, unfortunately, also started to cap the number of cabs in the city. American politicians just can’t get enough of screwing over Somalis, I guess. 3. Jamaica, Queens gets downzoned. The Post tells us joyfully that the city is implementing the “innovative and critically important” FRESH initiative to deal with the area’s lack of supermarkets – which will be sorely needed now that the city is guaranteeing that there will be no new demand for food. 4. “Vertical parking lot” in Chicago, circa 1930. 5. Communism in America: Roosevelt Island. 6. Matt Yglesias and Megan McArdle discuss bars and clustering, but Ryan Advent has the best post in my opinion. 7. Chicago’s Metra boosts home values (duh). 8. India fails at urbanism. 9. One Tea Partier thinks that only property owners (read: homeowners) should be allowed to vote. “If you’re not a property owner, you know, I’m sorry but property owners have a little bit more of a vested interest in the community than non-property owners.”

Empirical evidence that anti-density zoning breeds racial segregation

With nothing quick to blog about and not being in the mood to write something long, I dug into the Google Scholar pool for some interesting empirical work, which is something this blog hasn’t featured in a while.  This paper shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but it’s interesting empirical work nonetheless (.pdf): The foregoing analysis suggests that patterns and processes of racial segregation in the post-civil rights American city are strongly affected by density zoning. At any point in time from 1990 to 2000, intermetropolitan variation in Black-White segregation and Black isolation was strongly predicted by a metropolitan area’s relative openness to housing construction, as embodied in maximum zoning rules—the greater the allowable density, the lower the level of racial segregation. Moreover, our instrumental variable analysis suggests that the causal arrow runs from regulation to segregation even if the reverse is also true. In keeping with these cross-sectional findings, we also found that the prospects for desegregation are greater in areas with more liberal density regulations. From 1980 to 2000, metropolitan areas that allowed higher density development moved more rapidly toward racial integration than their counterparts with strict density limitations, even after controlling for a battery of social, geographic, and economic characteristics and for potential reverse causality between segregation and zoning. Our confidence that anti-density zoning is a true source of segregation is increased by a recent working paper by Rothwell (2009b) that uses the same data and finds essentially the same results for levels of Asian and Hispanic segregation, and consistent with Pendall’s (2000) analysis, we do not find any consistent pattern emerging for other land-use regulations. In terms of underlying mechanisms, we argue that restrictive density zoning produces higher housing prices in White areas and limits opportunities for people with modest incomes to leave segregated areas, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Weekend links

Links, links, links! 1. The Washington City Paper has a great expose on street food in DC called “Inside D.C.’s Food-Truck Wars” with the subtitle “How some of Washington’s most powerful interests are trying to curb the city’s most popular new cuisine.” 2. Mary Newsom at the Charlotte Observer thinks it’s a bad thing that Charlotte allowed so much density around its wildly popular new light rail line because it’s driving up property values. The Overhead Wire says that this is natural when land is scarce, and that “if you built all the [proposed] lines at once, that pressure gets relieved five or six ways instead of one way.” This is to some extent true, but another solution to the scarcity of transit-oriented property is to allow more even development around the existing line by loosening zoning and parking rules. 3. Ryan Avent finds research that finds that congestion pricing in Stockholm, where citizens voted on the plan after a seven-month test period, became more popular after they experienced it. Then again, congestion pricing in New York and elsewhere depends not only on people living in the city, but also people living outside of it, who are much less likely to warm up to it. Also, it looks like Stockholm expanded transit (mostly bus) service along with congestion pricing. 4. The pilot private van initiative in NYC that we discussed earlier has been floundering, and Cap’n Transit has been all over it. Literally every post on the front page of his blog is about it. There seem to be many reasons for the vans’ failure, and I might write something on it in the future, but in the meantime read Cap’n Transit if you’re interested. 5. Philadelphia Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron praises recently-fired Philadelphia Housing Authority boss Carl Greene’s […]

Building what you can

by Stephen Smith BLDG blog has a cool post about a book by two architects about “minor development,” or small construction projects that don’t require planning permission – things like sheds, garages, and extensions. It talks about recent legal changes in Europe that have encouraged this sort of development, and has some neat pictures of the sort of small changes that can add a room or just extra space to existing houses. The article doesn’t mention it, but this immediately brings to mind laneway housing – basically converting garages into inhabitable buildings and sometimes building in existing parking spaces. Vancouver legalized laneway housing last year, and though you still need a $899 permit, you don’t have to file for a variance and the process seems streamlined (although curiously, the article says the units can “only [be] used as rental units”…does that mean you’re not allowed to tear down your garage and build extra space for yourself?). These are small sorts of infill allowances that aren’t going to radically alter a city like parking, zoning, or road reform could. But although we’d prefer complete property rights with the ability to build on (or not build on, or sell) as much of your land as you’d like, this is at least a step in the right direction.

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