Tag Archives: econourbanists

Zoning restrictions on housing supply catch the White House’s eye

In case you were wondering, the White House grounds are technically unzoned – as is a lot of federal property in DC. Screenshot from the DC online zoning map.

Zoning has been on the national stage in the past few weeks, starting with this paper (just hovering on a link to whitehouse.gov is good to see) based on remarks delivered to the Urban Institute on Nov 20 from Jason Furman, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors:

In today’s remarks, I will focus on how excessive or unnecessary land use or zoning regulations have consequences that go beyond the housing market to impede mobility and thus contribute to rising inequality and declining productivity growth.

For more in-depth commentary, I’d recommend the following:

Joe Cortright at City Observatory: “these observations show the pervasive and powerful effects of what we’ve called the nation’s shortage of cities.”
Matt Yglesias at Vox: “for younger people, for renters, and for the overall cause of social and geographical mobility it’s a disaster.”
Gillian White at the Atlantic: Rent seeking “often means that changing zoning laws or other supply-constricting regulations is in the hands of those who stand to collect on those economic rents in the first place, which can make change slow and difficult, if it happens at all.”
Paul Krugman at the New York Times: “Rising demand for urban living by the elite could be met largely by increasing supply. There’s still room to build, even in New York, especially upward.”

I had two immediate reactions to the paper: first, it’s great to see the White House recognize the importance of issues like this. Getting an issue like this on the national stage, linking it to a salient national political issue such as inequality is important. Getting someone like Paul Krugman to devote his NYT column to the subject is great to see (note that Paul Krugman is no stranger to urban economics: he won the Nobel Prize for his work on economic geography and agglomeration economies).

Second, given the scale and importance of the issue, the list of administration actions is underwhelming. Affirmatively working towards fair housing, offering incentives to localities to loosen zoning, and HUD’s program to lessen lending risk for multifamily housing development are all good ideas, but seem small in comparison to the scale of the issue.

It’s hard to say if there’s more that could be done administratively at the Federal level. In the absence of additional legislation, it’s hard to make the case for federal interference in an ostensibly local issue like zoning (no matter the national interest). Perhaps there are additional tools available that build on new rulemaking enabled by existing fair housing laws (perhaps involving litigation in the courts as well) in the same vein as New Jersey’s Mount Laurel doctrine.

Even with the national scope of housing supply constraints and their clear impact on the national economy, Pete Saunders at Corner Side Yard is quick to point out that housing demand is far more varied across the US. This presents yet another issue in raising housing supply as a national issue – it’s not a uniformly national issue. Relaxing the restrictions on housing supply only matter in the face of demand pressure – and many markets in the US don’t have the kind of demand to drive up housing costs in the first place.

Updating the reading list – January 2014

CC image from carnagenyc.

Reading and writing about Vishaan Chakrabarti’s A Country of Cities reminded me that I need to add a few titles to the reading list. I’ve read several of these in the past year but since I haven’t been the most diligent in updating the list, there are also several that I’ve read (and written about) a while ago – such as John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay’s Aerotropolis.

It’s a rather wide range, including a whole string of economics-influenced books. Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow specifically mentioned Nassim Taleb’s The Black Swan, which lead to reading his other books, which lead to reading Thaler and Sunstein’s Nudge, and so on.

Here are the additions, presented in no particular order. As always, I’m open to suggestions for books to add and/or books to read.

Zoned Out: Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land-Use – Jonathan Levine (2006)

A concise re-framing of the debate about market outcomes in planning and development. Levine disputes the idea that sprawl is a free market outcome, but rather a product of regulation. Arguments in favor of more traditional urban growth often needs to prove that it won’t increase traffic (as one example) to justify alterations to the rules that demand auto-centric development. Levine argues because of myth of free-market sprawl is just that, reforms to allow more urban development should be framed as market-friendly and as improving consumer choice. Doing so shifts the default option for urban development.

Levine was one of my graduate school professors at the University of Michigan.

Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in Markets – Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2001)

The first installment of Taleb’s trilogy starts with the premise that humans are oblivious (thanks to our cognitive biases) to the role of randomness in our lives and that we make mistakes about the causality of events all the time. Given the assumptions about causality baked into numerous decision-making points as a part of the city planning process, as well as role of randomness in any sort of complex system (like a city), this is an excellent read to better understand the limits of our own understanding.

The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable – Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2007)

The second book in Taleb’s series discusses the impacts of improbable events. A Black Swan is a surprise event with a large impact, and one that can be rationalized after the fact. Taleb posits that these unexpected changes (events, by definition, that we cannot predict) are tremendously consequential. One of the more interesting arguments for cities is the narrative fallacy, where we use stories to explain things, even if the explanation is wrong.

Taleb’s tone is often openly antagonistic towards establishment figures (more so than in his first book, Fooled by Randomness). You can find an excerpt from the book introducing the concept here.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2012)

Taleb’s third and most recent book builds off of the previous two, not just to find random events of large significance, but things that gain from that chaos. The mythical version would be the Hydra; cut off one head, and it grows two more. It is a different concept from resiliency, because the disorder must actually make the subject stronger. The idea can apply to some cities and urban economies, where creative destruction makes the end result stronger.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness – Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008)

Lays out the way we make decisions and the powerful implications of default options on the eventual outcomes. Thaler and Sunstein call this a ‘choice architecture.’ Implications about choice architecture for cities are numerous, both in terms of individual behavior (such as travel mode choice) as well as the firm level such as zoning codes and development decisions (and the unintended consequences therein).

Sunstein also wrote about his government service in the Obama administration, applying these principles of choice architecture and libertarian paternalism to government, but Nudge is by far the more interesting book. Wikipedia’s summary provides a good synopsis of book’s argument.

The Signal and the Noise – Nate Silver (2012)

This book from the popular election-prediction, baseball statistician, poker player and quant analysis guru talks about all different kinds of prediction across all sorts of fields (macroeconomics, meteorology, elections, baseball, global warming, and geology) and the relative successes and failures of each. Some fare better than others, some express more confidence in their predictions than others (and that doesn’t necessarily correlate with their accuracy), and some are complete failures.

Given the outsized role of prediction in planning for the future, understanding the limits of those predictions is key in shaping policies and plans. Don Shoup’s takedown of the pseudo-science of parking minimum requires in The High Cost of Free Parking hits on the same themes of the lack of accuracy and precision; some blog discussion on those topics here and here.

The Warmth of Other Suns – Isabel Wilkerson (2010)

A history of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern industrial cities and California. Told through the eyes of three individuals who left the South to establish new lives outside of the direct influence of Jim Crow, it tells the story of a key part of urban history in the US. For more, read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s initial reactions to the book.

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty – Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson (2012)

This isn’t a book about cities per se, but it does speak to economies and governance and with lessons for cities, not just nations. The authors posit that the main difference between prosperous societies and impoverished ones is the development of inclusive political and economic institutions, spreading power across the society instead of extractive institutions controlled by a few. The critique is that the book short changes other environmental factors such as geography.

Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next – John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay (2011)

A story about globalization and the power of agglomeration economies in urban development, told through the lens of a boom in air travel around the world. The description about the value of air travel is persuasive, but Kasarda’s prescription for additional aerotropoli is a tad formulaic. Nevertheless, Lindsay’s description of how air travel enables agglomeration and helps concentrate economic activity is an important story.

Discussed in the blog here and here; also see the aerotropolis tag.

“Hyperdensity” and providing cities the room to grow

CC image from Alan Grinberg

The first thing crossing my mind when reading Vishann Chakrabarti’s piece in Design Observer (Building Hyperdensity and Civic Delight) was: what the hell is ‘hyperdensity?’ Thankfully, Chakrabarti answers that question in the first paragraph: “density sufficient to support subways.”

The second thing to cross my mind was why he would frame a reasonable kind of urbanism – transit-supportive density – in such extreme terms? Chakrabarti is a principal at SHoP Architects and a professor at Columbia. Hearing someone in that position praise the very real benefits of density isn’t surprising, though the framing of the issue as ‘hyper’-anything seems naive in the face of neighborhood opposition to even minor changes like the allowance of accessory dwelling units.

Contrast Chakrabarti’s position to that of Brent Toderian. Toderian, formerly the chief planner in Vancouver, BC, is a veteran of many contentious civic battles over development and density. His calling card is to focus on mitigating any possible downside of density, re-branding the ideal as ‘density done well.’ Leaving aside any substantive differences between Toderian and Chakrabarti, the difference in framing is significant. Both praise the benefits of density for an urban economy, for climate change, and for city life; both agree that dense environments demand good design to address the challenges that density can present. Yet, Toderian emphasizes that it can be ‘done well’ (implying that it currently isn’t done well) while Chakrabarti emphasizes the need for more density (implying that we don’t currently have – or allow – enough of it).

Chakrabarti isn’t satisfied with the small-scale focus from current planners, and embraces the general focus of the econourbanists:

Today the global economy demands that we embrace large buildings not just for housing but also for many modern office functions; yet many planning professionals remain fixated on smaller-scale development. They tend to ignore that height limitations have held back the Parisian economy in comparison to the forward-looking redevelopment of London, both at Canary Wharf and within its city center, which is now marked by a series of glistening and respectful new towers by Norman Foster, Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano. There is, in fact, a marked correlation between those European cities that have allowed skyscrapers and those that have successful economies.

Chakrabarti also mentions the challenges of building denser cities in today’s regulatory environment of zoning codes and lengthy reviews, risk-aversion from incumbent residents and landowners, and the feasibility of adding new infill development into established neighborhoods without fundamentally altering their character.

Perhaps the single most compelling reason to act is the growing challenges of affordability. This Wall Street Journal article highlights the challenges in New York, quoting Professor Chakrabarti extensively:

In the coming decades, New York could confront a problem many cities would love to have: too many people and nowhere to put them.

The city is expected to add one million more residents by 2040, but there likely won’t be room for hundreds of thousands of them unless a small city of new housing is built, according to a report by a Columbia University think tank.

“What surprised me most was the scale of the problem,” Mr. Chakrabarti said. “It’s a clarion call that we don’t have enough housing.”

At the same time, plenty of other publications about affordability challenges in cities around the world do not even mention the restrictions on and challenges to add housing supply. At the same time, the fact that many American cities used to have more people residing in the same area will lead them to believe that the city can accomodate more people without exanding the city’s building stock. The reality is that those older population figures included larger household sizes and fail to account for housing stock lost to commercial development from expanding downtowns. Payton Chung looks into these claims for DC:

These conditions were common in District homes at the time. The 1950 census found 14.1% of the District’s 224,142 occupied housing units to be overcrowded (with >1 person per room). By 2011, that figure had fallen two-thirds, to 4.7% (an increase from 3.3% in 2008) — a figure lower than the 5.3% of homes that were extremely overcrowded (>1.5 occupants per room) in 1950.

On average, every apartment and house in DC had one more person living inside — households were 50.2% larger! In 1950, 3.2 people occupied each dwelling unit (for non-whites, it was 4.0). In 2007-2011, the number of persons per household had fallen to 2.13, while the number of housing units had grown to 298,902.

As the city gets reacquainted with the notion of population growth, and begins to plan for a much larger population within the same boundaries, we’ll have to have a realistic conversation about household sizes and housing production. A change of just 0.09 persons per household means the difference between planning for 103,860 units or 140,515 units.* In either case, though, that is one heck of a lot of construction for a city of 68 square miles, of which 10.5 are parks and 7 are underwater. It works out to 2,000-3,000 additional units per square mile — as simple as building a platform and plop 5 DUA suburbia across it, or as complicated as infilling a contentious, built-up city. (More the latter than the former, I suspect.)

That problem can’t be solved with just a few new mega-development sites absorbing all of the demand for urban growth. It requires existing neighborhoods to help absorb some of that demand.

At the same time, Chakrabarti is well aware of the regulatory challenges to merely allowing the market to add density to an already-established city:

At Columbia University, my students and I have been working on a concept I call “cap and trade zoning,” which would allow the free flow of air rights within an urban district, with an understanding that the overall amount of developable area would be capped in relation to proximity to mass transit. This would result in hyperdensity, to be sure, but would also create a “high-low” city of diverse heights, uses and ages. This concept would strengthen small businesses by permitting owners to sell their air rights, while allowing development to occur on nearby lots. Critics may argue that this approach would result in unpredictable development with varying building scales, to which I would reply “Hip hip hooray!” Much of what passes as good planning today is known as “contextual zoning,” a mechanism through which new architecture is tamed into mediocrity by mimicking a false understanding of the scale and aesthetics of existing neighborhoods. Too often this process allows a lowest-common-denominator mentality to trump the wonders of the unpredictable city. Half a century ago, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs relentlessly critiqued the planner’s urge for control; her critique is no less pertinent today.

The concept is good, but what remains to be seen is if it could pass the political test – and if it could adjust the regulatory process (not just the regulatory content) that governs urban development decision-making. Perhaps the first test of the political viability of ‘hyperdensity’ will be if the name helps advance the needed regulatory reforms.

Shaping Silicon Valley

Roosevelt Island Tram - CC image from The Eyes of New York

A couple of items that came across the internet about technology, innovation, the economy, and urban form:

Tech & the City

Nancy Scola pens a long piece in Next American City about the future of the technology industry in the city. The piece looks at how policy can shape an industry cluster – or not. New York’s tech university on Roosevelt Island is a key piece of the puzzle in helping shape an industry within a city:

Fortunately, by the late 2000s, the tech sector was on an upswing. Venture capitalists were nosing around the city. Talk of a “Silicon Alley 2.0” was in the air. Start-ups were starting up in DUMBO. But, says Pinsky, when the city held hundreds of conversations on economic development with everyone from academics to business leaders to community groups, they came to the realization that while there was, in raw terms, a good amount of applied science activity afoot, New York City’s economy is a huge one. There simply wasn’t the critical mass needed to create the sort of idea sharing and hopping from company to company that helped spread innovation in Silicon Valley. They concluded that there was a dearth of trained technologists able to do the heavy lifting.

Now, far be it from me to dissuade an investment in education – but there’s a concern about focusing too closely on chasing a specific sector rather than setting the rules and conditions to be ripe for innovation:

So what worries her? It’s the way government is getting involved. Along with Stanford, Silicon Valley had a mess of government contracts in the 1950s, particularly in the fields of naval research and aerospace. “Silicon Valley was never a purpose-built science city,” says O’Mara. “Dwight Eisenhower didn’t say ‘We’re going to build a tech capital on the west coast.’” Sure, there was a ton of money injected into the region. But there were few strings attached. It was pure profit that went to building out iconic tech companies like Hewlett-Packard and Xerox PARC. “In a way, it was a happy accident,” says O’Mara. “Part of my skepticism about this whole enterprise is a belief that government can have this great market impact. In the case of technology, it’s just a little more slippery and unpredictable.”

One common theme is the rejection of the idea that the strip-mall office park of Silicon Valley is critical to the kind of technological innovation seen there – that linkage of form and innovation is spurious:

Cities have, of course, made a comeback in recent decades, and much modern thinking — O’Mara points to Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From — “really emphasizes the urbanity of innovation,” with the accidental encounters and collision of ideas that are the product of density seen as creative fodder.

The Boston area’s high-tech corridor that grew along Route 128 pioneered what became known as the East Coast model: Giant firms that did everything in-house. But in New York, real estate costs alone might encourage that tech firms stay small, says O’Mara, in keeping with “the other industries that have been in New York for so long that have a similar small-scale communitarian [culture] — the creative industries, fashion, media…” In that way, even a tiny start-up can be part of something bigger: An industry, an economy, a city.

Speaking of the building that will house your enterprise…

A couple of items on Facebook’s planned Frank Gehry HQ. First, from Allison Arieff in the NYT:

The choice of Gehry might have been “game-changing” — to use the parlance of the start-up community — two decades ago. Today, it’s a safe bet, representing Facebook’s true transition from rogue start-up to the establishment (no matter how strenuously they might dispute that designation).

Writing at the New Republic, Lydia DePillis (she’s back) sounds off similarly:

That’s a frustrating response. As shrouded in moss as it might be, the 10-acre campus is fundamentally no different from the tech parks of old: Single-use, completely isolated, and shamefully wasteful of the kind of space that commands such a premium on the other end of the Bay. The designs highlight the accommodations they’ve made for pedestrian and bike access—like an underground tunnel to its other campus across the highway!—but only glancingly mention the subterranean lake of parking, with 1504 spots for a projected 2800 employees (that’s a really high ratio, even for a suburban office). The horizontal layout might comport with Mark Zuckerberg’s conception of a social universe in which relationships exist independently of any physical reality. But from a practical standpoint, it ignores one of the most important qualities of a creative place: Density, activity, and exposure to the ferment of ideas.

Arieff notes that the designer and the client both want to foster the kind of interaction and proximity that comes naturally in cities – taking note of the fact that Facebook has no offices for anyone, regardless of rank – but something is still missing:

But so very unlike a city, the New Urban-ish campus is populated not by folks from different walks of life but solely by Facebook employees. For all the talk in startup circles of “serendipitous interaction,” it’s not the sort celebrated by Jane Jacobs. There may be a place to get a latte there but there is no Third Place, those accessible anchors of community life like bars, farmer’s markets or barber shops that help foster civic engagement and interaction with both regulars and new faces. Yes, it’s stating the obvious, but Facebook workers interact with other Facebook workers. There’s next to nil outside influence to be found on a corporate campus. Indeed, many tech employees (Facebook’s and others) have observed that many of their most meaningful encounters occur not at work but while waiting on city streets for the now-ubiquitous corporate shuttles from San Francisco that take them south to Silicon Valley.

Now, it’s tricky to separate some of the urban planning issues (transportation access, urban design) from the interior design ones (office layouts, use of internal space) from the economic geography issues (Silicon Valley is dense, even if filled with stereotypical office parks). That said, the themes are interesting to track. Add in the region-wide issues of housing costs and other drags on the local economy, and things can get murky quickly.

It’s not like the denizens of Silicon Valley are happy with the built environment…

Two pieces in San Jose’s MetroActive (the intro, the full piece) lament the lack of urbanism and the impact it has on innovation in San Jose. The author, Michael Malone, talks about San Jose’s inability to embrace the values of Silicon Valley while similarly stumbling in creating a big, authentic city:

And there is one more thing I would expect our elected leaders to know something about: Entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship built Silicon Valley; entrepreneurship is the source of this valley’s economic power; entrepreneurship is this valley’s only hope of a prosperous future. San Jose claims to be the capital of Silicon Valley—and Silicon Valley is the world’s capital of entrepreneurship . . . so why is it that the leaders of this city appear to have no real understanding of entrepreneurship?: Who does it. How it happens. And what it needs to survive.

I know they don’t understand because their actions tell me so. Here are three truths about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs:

1. The big fancy buildings and famous company names don’t matter. The future is in the hands of men and women working on business plans in Denny’s and Starbucks.

2. Entrepreneurs don’t need support. They need benign neglect.

3. You can’t pick winners in advance. There are too many variables. Winners pick themselves.

Compare that with the approaches debated in New York.

Instead, you give the start-ups cheap office or warehouse space, tax breaks and the fastest broadband you can deliver. Then you get the hell out of the way and trust them to do the rest. Ninety percent of them will fail, but that last 10 percent will change the world—and the fortunes of the city of San Jose.

“Giving” cheap office space might not need an actual subsidy – and it likely speaks to a broader policy change that follows on the work of the Econourbanists.

What do we mean by ‘density’?

Greenwich Village - CC image from lumierefl

A few more thoughts on recent discussions of density. Better Cities and Towns offers a summary of Richard Florida’s recent speech (video is corrupted, unfortunately – it gets very choppy 1/3 the way through) at CNU. The twitter summary: quality of place trumps density.

Like previous discussions on the topic, I can’t help but argue semantics. Quality of place is no doubt extremely important – but I would argue it doesn’t trump density at all. Rather, density is a somewhat independent variable. Density is an abstraction, it is merely the concept of how much stuff is in a given space. For many discussions, whether on innovation or affordability or vitality, I would present density as the necessary-but-not-sufficient condition that makes it all work. With that in mind, framing some other factor as one that ‘trumps’ (which I read as if I were playing cards: outranks, surpasses) density seems wrong.

Don’t conflate density and design: From the Better Cities and Towns summary:

One of the false statements is that density and skyscrapers are the key ingredients to urban vitality and innovation. “This rush to density, this idea that density creates economic growth,” is wrong, he said. “It’s the creation of real, walkable urban environments that stir the human spirit. Skyscraper communities are vertical suburbs, where it is lonely at the top. The kind of density we want is a ‘Jane Jacobs density.’”

What is the ‘Jane Jacobs density’? Is it that of her home in Death and Life, the West Village? If so, it’s worth remembering that the West Village is very dense. The 2010 Census (easily accessed with the New York Times’ handy mapping tool) shows the West Village census tracts with population densities in the range of 80,000-100,000 people per sq. mile.

My good friend Mike Lydon linked to a review of sorts of Miami’s Brickell neighborhood, noting many of the urban design deficiencies of the place. Craig Chester writes:

Now, I enjoy Brickell primarily because I can walk for nearly all of my basic human needs – groceries, a barber, a slice of pizza etc. It’s also well-served by MetroRail and Metro Mover, both accessible from my doorstep. It’s a rare Miami neighborhood in that regard. But increasingly, I find myself questioning if Brickell is a “walkable environment that stirs the human spirit” or merely just a semi-walkable streetscape in the shadows of impersonal towers functioning as suburbs in the sky.

First, some context. Brickell’s density from the 2010 Census tops out at 77,000 people per sq. mile in one census tract – surrounded by tracts with much lower population densities. The max there, in other words, is lower than that of the West Village – and the West Village is bordered by residential areas with even greater population densities.

Chester continues with a number of critiques on the urban design of the area – how the buildings interact with the streets, how the retail spaces are arranged, how the neighborhood makes use of the transportation systems, and so on. The descriptions are all fascinating, but I don’t see density as the primary (or even secondary) culprit in any of Chester’s critiques.

I increasingly find myself leaving Brickell on my bicycle in search of more authentic urban experiences found elsewhere in the city. Actually, I need to leave Brickell just to go to a bookstore or bicycle shop….

….usually found in “Jane Jacobs” density.

I’ve not visited the area so I can’t speak to the accuracy of Chester’s critique in person, but I have no reason to doubt the descriptions of the place. However, I think the conclusion is all wrong (echoed by the language Florida uses), and sets up a false dichotomy (and therefore a false tradeoff) between density and place. Searching for a place with ‘Jane Jacobs’ qualities is one thing, but extrapolating that to some magic ‘Jane Jacobs density’ isn’t well supported.

Don’t conflate density and the ‘human scale.’ Another tidbit from the Better Cities and Towns summary of Florida’s speech:

The urban/suburban debate is likewise false, he said. “Great communities and great neighborhoods pretty much look the same,” he said. They are human-scale, include a mix of uses, and are close to transit. “These are the kind of things that people desire, and it is not just in the urban core that you find them,” he said.

I fully agree that the urban/suburban distinction is mostly useless, but the relentless focus on the human scale is another one of those turns of phrase that can be easily misconstrued. While there’s some relation to the absolute scale (building heights, etc), the tradeoffs between human scaled look and feel of a place (e.g. design) and the absolute mass of stuff (e.g. density) are not absolute – as sometimes implied. There’s plenty of room to go up, to be more dense, without sacrificing the human scale – the key is in how you do it.

Density (eventually) requires height, but height does not prevent place. Alon Levy has made the point about the need for height to achieve density at some point. While there’s a tremendous opportunity for the ‘missing middle‘ in most places, many others have market conditions that already demand more space. It’s also useful to remember that density is just an abstraction of stuff/area – the kinds of stuff you’re measuring can vary. Tall Manhattan and short Paris are both very dense, but that’s because the tall stuff isn’t captured in the metric of population density:

Unfortunately, this point is easy to miss, since the headline figure of density is residents per unit of area, and residential skyscrapers are rare. Skyscraper-ridden Manhattan and height-limited Paris have about the same residential density, but Manhattan’s skyscrapers are predominantly commercial. Aside from project towers, Manhattan’s residential urban form is mid-rise, with most buildings not exceeding 6-12 floors; this is similar to Paris.

So, yes, we must build up at some point:

To get higher density, one must build higher. Some parts of Manhattan do: the Upper East Side and Upper West Side have a fair number of buildings in the 20-30 story range, and although as Charlie computes only 1% of New York City’s residents live above the 19th floor, the proportion is much higher on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, and becomes even higher if one relaxes the limit from 20 floors to 12, already well beyond the limit traditional urbanists and high-rise opponents accept (Christopher Alexander proposes 5 as the limit).

Height does not prevent place – human scaled urban design can work in incredibly dense places with tall buildings, because the key elements to the human experience is what goes on at street level. New Yorkers don’t look up at their skyscrapers because it’s not a natural position for a human. Our HDTV screens mimic our own physiology – wide, peripheral vision with limited vertical views. Develop the first 5 or so stories well, provide some setbacks for the taller portions above that, and you’ll do just fine for creating a sense of place at a human scale. Adherence to this scale need not be absolute.

Beware statements of universality. It’s interesting to see one kind of density (even if people are really arguing for place, not density) pushed out as the ‘right’ level of density. There’s a big difference between observing various geometric rules of an environment and pushing one’s taste, via observation, as if it were the rule.

The argument about the “Jane Jacobs density” is a great example. West Village densities would represent a tremendous increase in most places around the US – just not in New York. New York is the exceptional case. Achieving Greenwich Village densities in other cities might be a tremendous increase – likewise, maintaining Greenwich Village densities in New York’s context (given the market conditions, etc) is likely a severe constraint on supply (see Ed Glaeser).

So, what makes the ‘Jane Jacobs density’ the right density? How can anyone even pretend to know what that would be, without considering the context, the market conditions, the baseline of development, etc? One element of Ryan Avent’s The Gated City that I admire was his steadfast refusal to state which level of density is ‘correct’ or ‘right’ or ‘good,’ but rather to focus on the process that cities go about changing their densities (and how that process is currently constrained by things like zoning codes).

Likewise, Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City focused on the market aspects of density, as far as density and overall supply are related. So long as the cost of new stuff (housing, offices, etc) is fairly even with the cost of construction, then you’ve got a fairly efficient market. This could be a step towards defining what the ‘right’ density is, but of course that answer is going to provide a different number in every situation.

Constraints to affordability

'Truth' - CC image from Kellan

A few items on affordability and development:

Short term vs. long term: Matt Yglesias asks why we’re not building more multi-unit buildings in the face of tremendous demand, and the answer is (broadly speaking) financing:

Karl Smith, citing me, blames anti-density land use rules. Naturally I would like everyone to buy my book and it would certainly be convenient if my pet long-term issue were also the solution to our short-term problems. But I’m actually not sure it’s true. My reason for doubting it is that the construction undershooting doesn’t seem notably concentrated in the supply-constrained markets. What’s more, every time I speak to people who are involved in the development game, they assure me that the short-term constraint on big developments is financing. People have more or less shovel-ready infill projects and they need a loan. Some evidence for this is provided by the fact that there’ve been a curious volume of large 100% equity projects undertaken recently. What people say is that there’s too much liquidity risk to go into big things.

Financing is indeed a critical element. Many of those shovel-ready projects are good ones, but the bar is much higher now than it was. This represents a short-term constraint. Another factor is the considerable lag time involved in putting together complex development projects. That said, this doesn’t mean the long-term regulatory constraints aren’t a factor – particularly procedural ones.

Supplying affordability: Lydia DePillis takes a look at DCFPI’s most recent report, and asks why housing affordability advocates don’t do more to expand the supply of housing overall?

The DCFPI report makes mention of the fact that housing in Washington is constrained by our height limits. It doesn’t take that logic one step further to point out that there are lots of areas where D.C. limits its own capacity to build through low-density zoning.

It’s true, affordable housing people were the driving force behind inclusionary zoning, and smart growth advocates are getting to agitate more forcefully for the city to require developers who want public land to incorporate affordable housing into their proposals. But many developers avoid the public land process altogether, preferring not to deal with all the delays and frustrations. And affordable housing shouldn’t be all about setting prices artificially low—it’s also about letting builders build the amount of housing this city needs.

One option would be to look at the missing middle of density. Regardless, the overall supply needs to expand in the face of DC’s growing population and intense demand.

Demand and that other thing I can’t remember: Chuch Thies doesn’t seem to think there’s actually a housing price problem in DC:

The District of Columbia, for example, is a desirable place to live. Unlike in many parts of the country, there are job opportunities in our region. Many of the positions pay a good wage. A robust job market attracts new residents. In turn, the demand for housing increases. Prices go up.

Simple economics.

Perhaps a little too simple. Simple economics would also allow for an increase in supply in the face of such demand.

But taxpayers should not be asked to spend a dime on affordable housing for young, single residents without children. There are plenty of market rate solutions to their housing concerns. They come in the form of suburbs, group homes, roommates and sacrifices.

Or, you know, we could build more housing.

Affordable for whom? RU Seriousing Me is making more maps – this one focusing on affordability, noting that affordability is relative to one’s income:

I’ll echo Lydia DePillis‘ call to affordable housing advocates to pay attention to the effect that excessive land use regulations have on housing costs. Relaxing building height restrictions and eliminating barriers to the construction of housing is a good way to make housing more affordable across the board, even though chances are, the free market will never produce housing in DC that its many impoverished residents can afford, which is why DCFPI’s recommendations to increase subsidies for low-income housing production and homeownership are also valid.

Squeezing out the entry-level middle: The Post gets in on the action, too:

Many of the outer suburbs still have plenty of houses in the lower price ranges. But less-expensive homes are very hard to find closer to central D.C.: 68 percent of homes offered for less than $350,000 are located in the outer suburbs beyond Montgomery County, Arlington and Alexandria. In the District, Redfin counts only 862 listings for less than $350,000.

Don’t forget bad regulations that drive up costs: Such as those that demand the provision of parking on-site, like this development in Brooklyn. The cost aspect is bad enough, but the impact on urban design is truly awful.

What would land use regulatory reform look like?

Law Library. CC image from Janet Lindenmuth

Via the always interesting Land Use Law Professors blog, I came across this summary from interfluidity (written by Steve Waldman) of the main points of Avent, Glaeser, and Yglesias. Dubbed the econourbanists, Waldman summarizes their arguments:

In a nutshell, the econourbanists’ case is pretty simple: Cities are really important, as engines of the broad economy via industrial clustering, as enablers of efficiency-enhancing specialization and trade, as sources of customers to whom each of us might sell services. Contrary to many predictions, technological change seems to be making human density more rather than less important to prosperity in the developed world… The value of human work is increasingly in collaborative information production and direct personal services, all of which benefit from the proximity of diverse multitudes. Unfortunately, in the United States at least, actual patterns of demographic change have involved people moving away from high density, high productivity cities and towards the suburbanized sunbelt, where the weather is nice and the housing is cheap. This “moving to stagnation”, in Avent’s memorable phrase, constitutes a macroeconomic problem whose microeconomic cause can be found in regulatory barriers that keep dense and productive cities prohibitively expensive for most people to live in. It is not that people are “voting with their feet” because they dislike New York living. If people didn’t want to live in New York, housing would be cheap there. It isn’t cheap. Housing costs are stratospheric, despite the chilly winters. People are voting with their pocketbooks when they flee to the sun. (“The rent is too damned high!”) Exurban refugees would rush back, and our general prosperity would increase, if the clear demand for high-density urban living could be met with an inexpensive supply of housing and transportation. The technology to provide inexpensive, high quality urban housing is readily available. If “the market” were not frustrated by regulatory barriers and “NIMBY” politics, profit-seeking housing developers would build to sell into expensive markets, and this problem would solve itself.

Waldman, however, is skeptical of how effective these solutions would be:

One should always be careful of claims that problems could be solved if only we “let the market do its work”. I don’t mean to go all PoMo, but to the degree that there exists an institution we might refer to as “the market”, it is doing its work and it is not doing the work Ygesias and Avent ask of it.

Far be it from me to play down the role of unintended consequences. However, what would ‘letting the market do its work’ actually look like? Letting the market work isn’t a binary choice, either – our housing and real estate markets “work” now in one fashion under a certain regulatory regime, and they would continue to do so in a changed regulatory environment – perhaps with wild changes in outcomes, or perhaps not.

The most likely outcomes, however, would be via incremental changes to the regulatory process – not fundamental ones. In The Atlantic Cities, Charles Wolfe discusses proposed land use reforms in Seattle, such as:

Allow Small Commercial Uses in Multifamily Zones and Bring Back the Corner Store

Concentrate Street-Level Commercial Uses in Core Pedestrian Zones Near Transit and Allow Residential, Live-Work or Commercial Uses in Other Areas Based on Market Demand

Enhance the Flexibility of Parking Requirements

Change Environmental Review Thresholds

Encourage Home Entrepreneurship

Expand Options for Accessory Dwelling Units and Rental Incomes

Expand Allowance of Temporary Uses

These are the kinds of reforms that stand realistic chances of approval. They are marginal changes, tweaks to regulations that loosen some aspects and tighten others. Allowing small-scale commercial uses and home entrepreneurship in residential zones is a minor change in the allowed uses; legalizing accessory dwelling units is a minor change to allowed unit densities (and not necessarily a change in built space); adjusting thresholds for environmental review is a matter of process.

Waldman argues that the “thicket” of zoning and process is a de facto property right for a landowner, ensuring controlled change under certain parameters for the surrounding land – and that changing these de facto rights is not easy, nor should it be:

If we reform away urban zoning restrictions, are we going to invalidate the restrictive covenants of suburban developments? Affluent urban property owners would have almost certainly evolved institutions that perform the functions of community associations if they were not able to rely upon the good offices of municipal government for the same. If restrictions on higher-density development are illegitimate, then should the state refuse to enforce such restrictions when they are embedded in private contracts? Perhaps the answer is an enthuastic “Yes!” After all, over the last 60 years, the state intervened very nobly to eliminate a “property right” enshrined in restrictive covenants and designed to exclude people of certain races from their neighborhoods. Three-thousand cheers for that! But state refusal to enforce previously legal contracts sounds a lot less like “letting the market work” and a lot more like deliberate government action.

This passage raises two issues. First, as seen in the Seattle example, no reformer is realistically proposing to reform away all zoning restrictions. Indeed, many of the proposed solutions actually involve changing the processes involved in making those decisions (and adjusting them over time) to allow for more incremental changes over time.

In other cases, legitimate concerns are often mis-matched with the available regulatory tools. Zoning can easily regulate form, and more broadly, use – but is it the proper mechanism to regulate the locations of yoga studios (bonus points for headline puns)? Historic preservation processes can easily be co-opted out of a broader desire for some kind of design review, as another example.

Second, the idea of some ideal, free-market outcome is misplaced. There’s no doubt that the forms of our cities are shaped by all kinds of regulation and legal structure. Rather than pushing the result of reform as a move towards some free(r) market ideal, I think these attempts at reform instead reflect a growing understanding of how markets work and how market forces can be used in public policy (see Chris Bradford on the role of economics education in urban planning and other public policy professions).

Likewise, the move towards using market forces to better allocate scarce parking resources in San Francisco is perfectly valid, if not economically pure. At Market Urbanism, Emily Washington summarizes this disconnect:

He points out that assigning prices to spots is not equivalent to allowing a market to determine a price. For a real price to emerge capital (the parking space) cannot be state-owned.

Sandy points out that the “shortage” of parking arises because no one owns street parking, so the appropriate incentives are not in place for someone to charge an equilibrium price for parking. While the San Francisco program may be a step in the right direction, he explains that “more intervention usually doesn’t solve the problems that were themselves the result of a prior intervention.” In this case, the city is trying to set a price for something that it could instead auction off to eliminate the original intervention.

I’d reject that view. As ‘Danny’ notes in the comments, the government can be (and is) an economic actor. The goal with SF Park isn’t to “eliminate the original intervention,” but rather to better manage on-street parking. The goal is inherently about incremental change, and that’s what any realistic regulatory reform will also look like.

City Block

a work in progress…