Tag Archives: innovation

Buying into the urban ‘myth’

Williamsburg Bridge. CC image from Kev Gilmour

(Building off the previous post, in response to this Atlantic Cities piece)

If Feargus O’Sullivan isn’t really moving to a “suburb” as his article is entitled, but rather to a different urban neighborhood – then what’s the reasoning behind this?  O’Sullivan complains about  “hype” and “supposed edginess and creative ferment”, instead arguing that they are “increasingly as banal, antisocial and plain dull as any suburb.”

Maybe I’m reading too much into O’Sullivan’s piece – it’s one thing to be a lament over a supposedly cool place not living up to the hype, or for a personal experience in a place to fall short. Drawing conclusions beyond that seems dubious, but nevertheless interesting fodder for discussion.

So, is this really an indictment of urbanism, or just one of hype?  O’Sullivan’s complaint is focused on “fashionable” neighborhoods, and given the fact that O’Sullivan’s destination in the suburbs isn’t really all that suburban (or, rather, it’s quite urban under a reasonably broad understanding of the term).  This makes me want to discount the idea that it’s the city – rather, the critique seems to be focused about what’s cool.

Some quotes:

For all their reputation as hives of individuality, neighborhoods like my own city’s Broadway Market offer almost identical businesses to those you’d find in currently hip city neighborhoods anywhere.  While the base materials (streets and houses) may be different in, say, NYC’s Greenpoint, Berlin’s Neukölln, or Madrid’s Malasaña, the trappings of gentrification – expensive coffee and bike shops, junk sold at a premium as “vintage” and, soon after, bitterly resented chain outlets – make these places seem increasingly homogenous.

So, it’s about gentrification.

Even accepting this description of the problem seems to be setting up a straw man to be beaten down, however.  O’Sullivan claims “people are being asked to buy into an urban myth whose claims don’t always stand up to scrutiny.”  Are they really?  Are people really being asked to buy in to this?  Or perhaps, do they just want the basic characteristics presented by the physical urban environment?

As O’Sullivan delves into “the myth’s central tenets,” he cites the idea of creative people living near the heart of the city.  However, his definition of ‘creative’ is awfully narrow, limited to “starving artists, wannabe writers, thinkers, eccentrics, [and] aesthetes.”  But we know (through empirical evidence) that innovation and density are linked.  O’Sullivan admits this is a narrow definition (both of creativity and, previously, of urbanism), but points out that his myth holds out for “more exciting neighbours.”  This seems to be a critique not of the places O’Sullivan visits, but of the trendiness that colors his experience.

Indeed, what is the actual myth here? At Salon, Will Doig writes about Williamsburg, Brooklyn, asking: “Are urban bohemias, you know, so over?”   Doig notes”Pre-hipster Williamsburg was a neighborhood of working-class ethnic groups, crack dealers and violence — but also, crucially, post-industrial vacancy: boarded-up factories, weed-choked lots, an abandoned waterfront, train tracks to nowhere.” The answer draws on a similar line from an Atlantic piece by Benjamin Schwarz entitled Gentrification and its Discontents, noting similar critiques from other authors:

He doesn’t recognize that the SoHo he yearns for was precisely the product of that rapid industrial decline, which made economically available to artists and their hangers-on all those cool industrial spaces that in more industrially vibrant times would have been used by, well, industry.

Despite these lamentations about the change of the city (which Doig’s piece notes wouldn’ve been unthinkable for a city-dweller in the 1920s – particularly if one reads Robert Fogelson’s Downtown), Doig closes with this from the gentrifying ‘hood:

As the neighborhood begins to upscale in a way that fills Anasi with dismay, Napoleon opens Williamsburg’s first proper lounge and rides the crest of the transformation with purpose. His swanky club becomes a smash hit, and helps create a whole new scene on the sleepy south side. Moreover, it gives the young entrepreneur — a poor kid of color from a dangerous neighborhood — a chance at a life he might not have otherwise had.

Given the larger scale economic processes, it’s hard to understand what these writers are making a big deal out of, whether it’s a myth of urbanism or some sense of authenticity.  On one hand, O’Sullivan’s embrace of a less-cool neighborhood would seem to undermine the fears of a lost bohemia and instead embrace the idea of a large pent-up demand for urban living of all stripes, myth or not.

Urban density and innovation

CC image from Seth Waite

One more round on density – this time focusing on affordability via the tangentially related prospect of innovative and creative economies.

Richard Florida chimed in at The Atlantic Cities, asking this:

Stop and think for a moment: What kind of environments spur new innovation, start-ups and high-tech industries? Can you name one instance, one, of this sort of creative destruction occurring in high-rise office or residential towers, in skyscraper districts? The answer is no. High-rise districts typically house either corporate office functions or residences. During the post-war era, while they were building these towers for their corporate functions, large U.S. companies housed their research scientists in green, low-rise R&D campuses, where the scientists could interact more freely.

The backlash on Twitter was swift and merciless – with plenty of anecdotes of innovative, creative destruction going on in high rise office towers.  Timothy Lee at Forbes noted that Florida is probably a bit sloppy with his terminology here, equating a high rise with an expensive building.  Citing Jane Jacobs, he writes:

While Jacobs framed this principle as being about old buildings, it was really about cheap buildings. Young innovators need to keep their expenses down to maximize the time they can spend on their project and minimize time spent waiting tables. And when they start companies, they need to minimize their rent to maximize their chances of reaching profitability before they run out of money.

So Florida is right that innovators almost never start their careers in gleaming office towers. But it’s a mistake to conclude from that that an excess of skyscrapers makes a city bad for innovation. The innovators themselves won’t move into the skyscrapers, but the construction of more housing units places general downward pressure on rents. That allows innovators to move into the less swanky, more affordable, homes and offices that were abandoned by the people who do move into the skyscrapers.

That is, those older high rises will filter down to lower rents and therefore be attractive to startups and other innovative uses (see the case of Silicon Alley in New York – Florida mentions it as a ‘low rise’ example, but equating that to a Sunnyvale office park is quite a leap).  The actual form of the building doesn’t play nearly as much of a role as Florida would imply.  The jury is out on the role of the city form and urban design (though I have my guesses).

As mentioned above, Florida was a bit sloppy in what he considered a high rise, later commenting that 14-20 stories is fine, but taller heights might not work. Perhaps it’s my time in DC that’s shifted my perspective on tall buildings, but I would argue that 14-20 stories is plenty tall enough to be considered a high rise.  Regardless of my definition of a high rise, the question is then – what is tall enough, dense enough?  David Schleicher and Ryan Avent make the case that you can’t know that in advance.

Some more back and forth shifted the discussion to the tradeoffs inherent to density, but in DC that discussion of density can’t be considered in isolation of other constraints on development – the kind that see low rent buildings redeveloped rather than letting them filter down where innovation might take hold (given several other key ingredients).  The gleaming new corporate office tower reduce rent pressure on the older high rise office buildings, as well as smaller and shorter legacy structures.

It’s somewhat curious to see a discussion about the power of markets to foster innovation when talking about the massive constraints on real estate. The creative destruction of capitalism at its best in the idealized start-up office park Florida described, yet that physical outcome is anything but a free market outcome.  Timothy Lee makes the case that if the real estate markets were more free to operate, the Bay Area would have 4 million more people living there today. The Bay Area’s natural geography limits sprawl and favors density, as well – if given the chance to grow.

That, of course, is a big if. Matt Yglesias takes note of some dense residential construction proposed for Downtown San Jose – precisely the kind of place that you would expect to grow more densely if allowed:

The San Jose and San Francisco metropolitan areas are ground zero for the phenomenon of regulations that provide for an insufficient quantity of construction in America’s high-value areas, so I was somewhat surprised to read an article about the municipality of San Jose implementing an incentive program to encourage more residential investment in the city. Why are incentives needed? The incentives, however, all turn out to be nothing more than temporary relaxation of anti-development rules:

The incentive package includes a 50 percent break in construction taxes; a 50 percent reduction in fees that downtown residential developers must set aside for a park as a portion of their project costs; expedited reviews by the planning department staff and eliminating a city requirement for an expensive air container system for firefighters in high-rise buildings.

What you have here are an explicit tax on construction, a de facto tax on construction, a regulatory barrier to construction, and a second regulatory barrier to construction. The “incentives” are relief from those barriers if your projects breaks ground by 2013.

From Wired (cited in Timothy Lee’s piece above):

As an investor Hartz points to the usual signs of too much money-chasing deals. The billboards on highway 101 between San Francisco and Silicon Valley touting startups no one has heard of. The bus stop signs in tech-heavy locales like Mountain View and Palo Alto advertising scads of engineering jobs.

“Everyone is competing for the same people, going after the same real estate, the same support services,” Hartz says. “The natural resources of the startup world are getting scarcer and scarcer, and the cost is getting higher and higher. It’s all an outgrowth of an abundance of capital.”

Lee’s point (same as Yglesias’s) is that the constraints on some of those resources aren’t as natural as you might think.

Innovative re-use along the low road

Screencap from Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors

Assorted (and tangentially related) links:

1. Stephen Smith also digs into Eric Colbert (see my previous post here):

I’m not sure I agree with her parenthetical about DC’s “historic fabric” being “so strong already” – in fact, I’m hard-pressed to think of a newer city on the Northeast Corridor than Washington – but she’s definitely right that that’s what Washingtonians, even the not-so-native ones, think of their city. Of-right development – that is, building within the zoning code in a way that does not trigger a subjective review – is on the wane everywhere in America, but in DC it’s even rarer, and therefore personal relationships like the ones Eric Colbert has (“an ANC 2B commissioner, who had worked with Colbert on previous projects, introduced him with affection”) are even more important than usual when compared to good design.

A few points. A) I’m not sure why Stephen associates the strength of a city’s fabric with age – DC’s fabric has the advantage of being largely intact.  B) Stephen more explicitly states the same thesis – that Colbert’s architecture is ‘boring,’ and boring is, by association, bad design.  I would disagree that fabric is boring – on the contrary, fabric is essential. C) It’s a mistake to conflate the countable and objective measures of development (square footage, height, density, etc) with more subjective measures like ‘good design.’  Stephen conflates two key elements here – development by right, and design by right. The regulatory structures and processes that govern both are quite different.

2. Cities are all about context. Atlantic Cities discusses a review of San Francisco by John King, from iconic buildings to more mundane (boring?) elements of the urban fabric.

3. Mammoth links to another Atlantic piece, discussing “Low Road” buildings and their importance in urban economics, innovation, and entrepreneurship.

The startup lore says that many companies were founded in garages, attics, and warehouses. Once word got around, companies started copying the formula. They stuck stylized cube farms into faux warehouses and figured that would work. The coolness of these operations would help them look cool and retain employees. Keep scaling that idea up and you get Apple’s ultrahip mega headquarters, which is part spaceship and part Apple Store.

But as Stewart Brand argued in his pathbreaking essay, “‘Nobody Cares What You Do in There’: The Low Road,” it’s not hip buildings that foster creativity but crappy ones.

“Low Road buildings are low-visibility, low-rent, no-style, high-turnover,” Brand wrote. “Most of the world’s work is done in Low Road buildings, and even in rich societies the most inventive creativity, especially youthful creativity, will be found in Low Road buildings taking full advantage of the license to try things.”

Being on the low road isn’t exactly the same as being a part of the fabric – the price point and the prominence don’t always correlate – but the concept is somewhat similar.  These spaces are easy to adapt and reuse. Not just easy, but cheap.

4. Where Stewart Brand discusses the space of innovation, Ryan Avent has another (follow-up) piece on the geography of innovation:

I think that the authors have basically gotten the state of innovation right: we are approaching a critical point at which impressive progress in information technology becomes explosive progress. And I think that the authors are right that the extent to which we are able to take advantage of these technological developments will hinge on how successful America’s tinkerers are at experimenting with new business models and turning them into new businesses. But I also think that there is a critical geographic component to that process of experimentation and entrepreneurship and, as I wrote in my book, I think we are systematically constraining the operation of that component.

High housing costs constitute a substantial regulatory tax burden on residence in many high productivity areas. These are the places where the tinkerers are having their ongoing innovative conversation. But if the tinkerers are driven away, the conversation loses depth and breadth, and we lose many of the combinations that might go on to be the next big company — the next big employer. That, to me, is a very worrying idea.

5. When considering both the versatility of space as well as the institutional and infrastructural momentum (as well as touching on the importance of information technology), Mammoth also links to a short documentary of the infrastructure of the internet: Bundled, Buried, and Behind Closed Doors: