Riding through the system, looking out the back window of a Metro train:
Tag Archives: DC
More on the geometry of transportation: “Transport is mostly a real estate problem”
In June, the Urbanization Project at NYU’s Stern Center posted several graphics looking at the space devoted to transportation in our cities. As the author, Alain Bertaud, frames it, “transport is mostly a real estate problem.” That is, different transportation modes require different amounts of space to accomplish the same task.
Comparison of population/employee density and street area per person. Image from NYU Urbanization Project.
Each of the selected examples cluster around the diagonal blue line, representing an average of 25% of a city’s land devoted to streets.
Percent of land use devoted to buildings, streets, etc. Image from NYU Urbanization Project.
Two observations: the 25% pattern is remarkably consistent; as is the geometric relationship between modes of transport and the intensity of land use. The green horizontal lines show how much space a car uses at various speeds – the faster the car goes, the more space it requires. A parked car occupies 14 square meters, while one moving at 30 kph takes up 65 square meters.
The obvious corellation is between a city’s density and its type of transportation network. Cars take up a large amount of space relative to their capacity, and a transport system based on cars alone cannot support a great deal of density.
Alex Tabarrok frames this in terms of “the opportunity cost of streets.” While there is certianly an opportunity cost to various street uses, it’s worth noting that some space must be devoted for streets in order to access property. Charlie Gardner at Old Urbanist takes note that the role of streets is not solely about transportation:
In addition to their transportation function, streets can also be understood as a means of extracting value from underserved parcels of land. The street removes a certain amount of property from tax rolls in exchange for plugging the adjacent land in to the citywide transportation network. Access to the network, in turn, increases the value of the land for almost all uses. For the process to satisfy a cost/benefit analysis, the value added should exceed that lost to the area of the streets plus the cost of maintenance. (This implies rapidly diminishing returns for increasingly wide streets, and helps explain why, in the absence of mandated minimum widths, most streets are made to be fairly narrow.) For many of the gridded American cities of the 19th century, as I’ve written about before, planners failed to meet these objectives, although these decisions have long since been overshadowed by those of their 20th century successors.
Charlie also notes that many great, dense, walkable cities around the world devote about 25% of their land to streets, yet many American downtowns use a much higher percentage of their land to streets.
Some of those numbers might depend on the exact method of accounting. While Charlie’s estimate for downtown DC shows 43% of the land used for streets, DC’s comprehensive plan shows approximately 26% for the city as a whole:
Land Use Distribution in DC, from DC’s 2006 Comprehensive Plan.
The graphic doesn’t specify if the street figure refers to street right of way, or just the carriageway portion of the street, but not the ‘parking area.‘ Seattle’s planning documents also showa similar pattern: 26% of land city-wide used for streets, but also a higher percentage of downtown land devoted to streets.
Seattle land use distribution by neighborhood. Image from Seattle’s 2005 Comprehensive Plan.
The Seattle calculation looks at land devoted to right of way for streets, rather than just impervious surface.
Making better or different use of existing right of way is one thing; however, once that right of way is set, it is very difficult to change. Transportation networks awfully path dependent. Chris Bradford looks at Austin’s post-war planning and the abandonment of the street grid – path dependence in action:
Back then, “planning” chiefly meant “planning streets.” It’s a shame that planning lost that focus. The street grid that permeated Austin in 1940 is of course still with us, and forms the backbone for a number of quite livable neighborhoods.
So what happened? Developers building large, planned subdivisions (Allandale, Barton Hills) continued to add decent street networks after 1940. But the City itself appears to have gotten out of the grid-planning business not long after this map was made…
Collectively, these could and should have been platted into 40 or so city blocks. Instead, they remain two big blobs of land. The lack of connectivity funnels traffic onto South Lamar and Manchaca; impedes east-west mobility, dividing eastern and western neighborhoods; forces people to make circuitous trips to run even simple errands; and forecloses any sort of low-intensity, mixed-use development in the area. Then there’s the sheer loss of public space: South Austin should have a few more miles more of public, connected streets than it has today.
Once the street grid is set, it is very difficult to change.
“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.
Frager’s Hardware
Yesterday evening, Frager’s Hardware went up in flames in a four-alarm blaze. The iconic neighborhood institution has been in operation since 1920.
It’s the kind of neighborhood store many would love to have. At the same time, the store represents more than just a hardware store. While it can’t compete with the big box stores on price, it can offer a wider range of services and the local, personalized touch you won’t be able to find elsewhere. That kind of personal touch sells more than just hardware, it also sells t-shirts.
I happen to live nearby, and was able to snag a few photos from the roof.
6/5, 7:00 pm – full response underway:
6/5, 8:17 pm – more trucks and firefighters on the scene:
6/5, 10:59 pm – DCFD has the fire contained:
6/6, 8:34 am – daylight comes, the morning after:
6/6, 6:13 pm – traffic returns to Pennsylvania Ave, workers begin to board up the storefronts:
While the store appears to be a total loss, the owner vows to rebuild.
Perspective on pop-ups
Recently, everyone in DC has been hopping on the bandwagon to bash an extensive redevelopment of a 2-story rowhouse into a 5-story condominium. Headlines make liberal use of middle finger references, with photo angles to match the description.
In the comments of one PoPville post on the house, a representative from DC’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs confirms that yes, indeed, this egregious “middle finger to taste and scale” is allowed by right. From @DCRA’s comment:
We have reviewed the approved building plans for this project and found the following:
1. The property is not within a historic district or designated as a historic landmark; it is zoned as C-2-B and is within the ARTS Overlay zoning district.
2. The approved height of the building shown on the plans is 59 feet, five inches, which is within the 65-foot height limit applicable a C-2-B zone.
3. The three-foot projection at the front of the building was properly approved by both DDOT and DCRA, and it meets District Building Code requirements.
4. The structural supports of the project, including its foundation, were reviewed and verified as meeting District Building Code requirements.
5. Because the property is within the ARTS Overlay zoning district, it is granted additional density. The project’s Floor Area Ratio (FAR) was approved at 3.94, which is below the maximum FAR of 4.0.
While we understand some residents’ concerns with the project’s aesthetics, in a non-historic district, the District’s Building Codes and zoning regulations focus only on safety and density.
This sounds like a perfectly conforming structure, but one wouldn’t get that impression from the photos of it on PoPville. Dan Malouff at GGW and BeyondDC offered a defense of the project, complete with photos from a different angle, putting the building’s neighbors into context. In particular, there’s a six-story apartment building under construction three doors down.
I visited the site to add my own photo from yet another angle:
A different angle on the 11th and V development. Photo by author.
When you look at both of the new developments from the southwest corner of 11th and V, things look a bit different. Considering how extensive this zoning combination (C-2-B/ARTS) is in the area, this shouldn’t be a surprise:
DC zoning map of 11th and V and surrounding area.
As you walk down V and look back to the west, you get even more perspective of nearby buildings on both sides of the street of similar height and similar zoning allowances. What a difference a change in angle makes:
Looking west down V st, showing buildings of similar height along both sides of the street. Photo by author.
Dan makes the case that this small-scale, lot-by-lot redevelopment is a good thing. He cites the example of Amsterdam’s narrow houses built one by one. While I think the comparison might be a stretch, the point about flexible zoning allowing this kind of by-right redevelopment is a good one.
I would also note that by virtue of the C-class zoning, this stretch of V street is able to host a variety of building types and uses. Restaurants like Tacos el Chilangro wouldn’t be allowed to operate without it.
Here, grab a seat
Brookland Metro Station – photo by author.
While in the midst of repacing the old terra cotta tiles at the Brookland station (the most colorful of all Metro stations) with the newer concrete tiles for outdoor stations, Metro was kind enough to build some temporary wood benches for customers.
‘Snow’ links: finding the right level of regulation
Mush on my windowsill.
I’m sitting in DC, looking out a window at a mushy, mostly liquid ‘snow’ storm named after an obscure federal budgetary procedure. There’s a joke in there somewhere about failing to meet the hype. But instead, I’ll offer some links to articles of interest over the past few weeks.
Regulatory challenges. Slate blogger Matt Yglesias is buying a new house, and instead of selling his old condo, he plans on renting it out and turning it into an income property. He documents the bureaucratic red tape encountered in the process to make this business legal, highlighting the absurdity that drives people nuts about government bureaucracy – the fact that none of the hoops you must jump through seem to actually matter to the regulatory issue at hand:
The striking thing about all this isn’t so much that it was annoying—which it was—but that it had basically nothing to do with what the main purpose of landlord regulation should be—making sure I’m not luring tenants into some kind of unsafe situation. The part where the unit gets inspected to see if it’s up to code is a separate step. I was instructed to await a scheduling call that ought to take place sometime in the next 10 business days.
Yglesias notes that DC fares poorly on many metrics of regulatory efficiency and friendliness to entrepreneurs. Granted, those rankings all ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as they often fail to measure what really matters and instead focus on indicators not directly linked to entrepreneurship (there is also the matter of state-by-state rankings lumping in a city-state like DC into their metric – not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison).
The real issue, as Yglesias touches on in a later blog post, isn’t whether regulations are good or bad, but whether the regulations we have are effective and if they cover the right topics:
The way I would put this is that the American economy is simultaneously overregulated and underregulated. It is much too difficult to get business and occupational licenses; there are excessive restrictions on the wholesaling and retailing of alcoholic beverages; exclusionary zoning codes cripple the economy; and I’m sure there are more problems than I’m even aware of.
At the same time, it continues to be the case that even if you ignore climate change, there are huge problematic environmental externalities involved in the energy production and industrial sectors of the economy. And you shouldn’t ignore climate change! We are much too lax about what firms are allowed to dump into the air. On the financial side, too, it’s become clear that there are really big problems with bank supervision. The existence of bad rent-seeking rules around who’s allowed to cut hair is not a good justification for the absence of rules around banks’ ability to issue no-doc liar’s loans. The fact that it’s too much of a pain in the ass to get a building permit is not a good justification for making it easier to poison children’s brains with mercury. Now obviously all these rules are incredibly annoying. I am really glad, personally, that I don’t need to take any time or effort to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s new mercury emissions rules. But at the same time, it ought to be a pain in the ass to put extra mercury into the air. We don’t want too much mercury! We don’t want too much bank leverage!
The more ideological stance (regulation is bad!) might be easier to communicate; it might resonate with the public based on their experience at the local DMV. It’s a complicated reality, and our regulations not only need to reflect that, but also likely need periodic review and revision.
Regarding a common issue in the urban context, Matt writes:
“This city has too many restaurants to choose from” is not a real public policy problem—it’s only a problem for incumbent restaurateurs who don’t want to face competition.
This reflects some of the tension on liquor license moratoria in DC (see the discussion about IMBY DC). The contrasting position is that restaurants do indeed create some negative externalities that need to be addressed. The challenge for public policy is then in addressing the negatives without falling into the trap of mis-stating the problem.
Regulatory reform. Assuming we correctly state the problem, then what do we do to change things? DC is forming a task force to look at these issues. In some googling of related articles, I ran across an old op-ed from Helder Gil about a potential direction for regulatory reform, radical simplification:
One solution is the radical simplification of existing business laws and regulations. “Radical simplification” is the wholesale rethinking of a law’s original intent, its current actual effect and whether those two points still intersect in a way that advances public policy.
Consider the contrast to DC’s zoning regulation review process, and the power of the status quo bias. Even the terminology of ‘zones’ is no longer useful, Roger Lewis writes:
Let’s dump the word “zoning,” as in zoning ordinances that govern how land is developed and how buildings often are designed. Land-use regulation is still needed, but zoning increasingly has become a conceptually inappropriate term, an obsolete characterization of how we plan and shape growth.
I would go farther than Lewis and suggest that the terminology is not the only problem; the content of the regulations is also problematic. Lewis goes on to list numerous shortcomings of the existing regulatory framework – perhaps inadvertently making the case for radical simplification?
Beware non-governmental regulation. To be clear, these challenges are not solely governmental. The burden often falls on the government in protecting the public purpose, but governments are not the only entities with the common good in mind. Consider the home-owners association.
Last month, the Washington Post reported on an epic legal battle between a Fairfax County HOA and a member over a very minor size violation for a political sign. HOA representatives on a power trip sought to impose penalties for violating rules that were not expressly granted to the HOA in the association’s bylaws. The HOA lost the case, the resulting legal fees bankrupted the association, forcing it to pursue the sale of a privately-owned park area.
These kinds of battles are common – and often invoke words like ‘tyranny’. They highlight both challenges of regulation and also of governance. Clearly, the content of some regulations are an issue, but so is the process for changing or even just reviewing those regulations.
Perhaps HOAs are not strictly necessary for a grouping of semi-detached homes (as is the case in the Fairfax County example), but some level of common-area administration is necessary in multi-unit buildings, no matter how you slice it. The need for HOAs also raises the question about the role of home-ownership in multi-unit buildings and the regulatory environment that enables it (see Stephen Smith asking “why do condos even exist?” at Market Urbanism) – which, after all, is a relatively young and untested legal field.
Avis, Zipcar, and the spectrum of car-sharing services
Old Avis ad in Australia - CC image from Bidgee
Last week’s big transportation news: Avis purchased Zipcar for a cool $500 million. Reaction to the sale is all over the map, with some analysts praising the move and some hating it.
On the ‘pro’ side of the ledger – Felix Salmon:
The acquisition solves a number of problems with the Zipcar model. For one thing, it gives Zipcar easy access to the one thing it needs more than anything else: money. The car-rental business is at heart a financing business: you need to be able to finance the acquisition of new cars, efficiently dispose of them once they get too old and too used, and generally make profits by juggling enormous cashflows both coming in and going out. When you’re a small and risky company like Zipcar, that kind of fleet and cash management is much harder than when you’re a giant like Avis Budget.
The other big problem that Zipcar had was that it couldn’t meet demand at weekends: the company’s slogan is “wheels when you want them”, but in practice the cars tended to be sold out at precisely the times that members really wanted them. By merging with Avis, Zipcar gets to offer its members Avis cars when dedicated Zipcars are unavailable
On the ‘con’ side, pretty much anyone who hates the standard car-renting process – Sarah Lacy:
That’s how much I loathe Avis. As far as I’m concerned they only “try harder” to piss me off. And thanks to a tightly controlled oligopoly, the rest of the rental car world isn’t much better. There’s little innovation or even need to innovate, when a few players control the entire market.
People hate renting cars – myself included. The process stinks all around. Pricing is anything but transparent or simple; even with a reservation you must wait in line; employees are constantly pushing insurance packages of dubious value; you constantly feel like you’re about to get nickel and dimed for a small scratch or a gas tank that’s not quite full – the entire process feels kinda sleazy.
With that in mind, it’s easy to understand the angst of some users (see the concerns voiced in Ben Kabak’s post). From the ‘man on the street’ in this Dealbook summary of the sale: “Please don’t let them screw it up.”
So far, Zipcar is looking to reassure folks they won’t lose that innovative spirit, with the CEO expecting Zipcar to remain a standalone subsidiary, also while announcing plans to offer memberships to the service without the annual fee.
For me, however, Zipcar use is way down. My personal membership expired several years ago. I maintain an account so I can be a member of my employer’s business membership (and will use that service for business trips that require a car), but my personal use is almost non-existent. Conversely, I’ve been using Car2go‘s point-to-point carsharing far more frequently in DC (and I’m not the only one).
Car2go’s service isn’t an exact analogue for Zipcar, however. If you think of carsharing services as a spectrum, between traditional car rentals on one hand (longer terms, frequently used during travel) and short trips within the city on the other (as Car2go’s trips have more in common with taxi rides for DC users than car rentals), there is room for a whole host of products and services, each tailored for a different segment of the travel market.
The spectrum of car-based transport would look something like this:
- Car ownership
- Traditional car rental (home space; by the day)
- Zipcar-type car-sharing (home space; by the hour)
- Car2go-type car-sharing (point-to-point; by the minute)
- For-hire service (taxi, sedan services, etc; by the minute/mile)
Note: there are lots of other models out there, including ones where car owners can offer up their personal vehicle for rentals when they are not using it – sort of an Airbnb for cars.
Zipcar’s current model (where every car rental must begin and end at the same ‘home’ parking space) is more similar to the traditional rental car model, just dispersed to locations around the city, and with the details of the rental handled online and with standardized pricing. Lydia DePillis notes this might not be the cutting edge in carsharing services anymore, but offering a wide variety of useful vehicle types (including the Zipvan) is valuable.
The next evolution for a service like Zipcar would be to offer point-to-point car sharing (rumors hint that Zipcar is interested in this market as well). Fears of Avis turning Zipcar into something more Avis-like are valid, but the opposite could be just as valuable – airport car rentals with the ease of a Zipcar online reservation. Others are working on this very concept as I type.
Even without tailoring a business model to this market, there’s opportunity for disrupting the standard airport-car-rental-while-traveling model. On a recent trip from DC to San Diego, I found myself stuck at my downtown hotel, wanting to get to the beach without the burden of a large taxi fare – an Car2go’s all-electric San Diego fleet (and a membership that works across the country) was there to serve.
No need to deal with the hassle of renting car – my hotel had a free shuttle from the airport. On trips like this (where the beach trip is the only one I wanted a car for), why bother? Perhaps this is a place where a company like Avis can learn from car-sharing.
The Acela and economic geography
Acela - CC image from wiki
Last month, the New York Times Magazine featured a story on the “Empire of the in-between,” the places along the tracks traveled by Amtrak’s Acela Express. Decaying post-industrial landscapes, battered and half-abandoned residential neighborhoods, and so on. The train serves as a metaphor for the changing nature of the American economy:
But for most of the 180 or so years of the train line’s existence, the endpoints of this journey — New York and D.C. — were subordinate to the roaring engines of productivity in between. The real value in America was created in Newark’s machine shops and tanneries, Trenton’s rubber and metal plants, Chester’s shipyard, Baltimore’s steel mills. That’s where raw material was turned into valued products by hard-working people who made decent wages even if they didn’t have a lot of education. Generation after generation, and wave after wave of immigrants, found opportunity along the corridor. Washington collected the taxes and made the rules. Wall Street got a small commission for turning the nation’s savings into industrial investment. But nobody would have ever confused either as America’s driving force.
This model was flipped inside out as Wall Street and D.C. became central drivers, not secondary supports, of the nation’s economy.
While the general trajectory is correct, the idea that the emergence of Washington and New York as dominant centers isn’t quite correct. As the Economist points out, the real story is less about a nefarious capture of sectors of our economy, but the shifting nature of how our economies are structured:
Yet to pin the broad changes in the geography of the northeastern corridor (and similar shifts across the nation and rich world as a whole) on an explosion in rent-seeking is a mistake. The real story is more interesting: the economic role of the city itself has changed.
The Economist continues:
The difficulty this creates for the northeastern corridor is that this kind of clustering creates a demand for a different set of workers (and often a different infrastructure) than was necessary a century ago. Adjustment to this shift in labour demand has been taxing for major cities, but more importantly it has placed a great deal of stress on middle-income workers, whose talents are no longer needed. Cities continue to serve as engines of wealth-creation, but they are less effective as engines of broad economic mobility than they once were.
The article uses New York’s ports as an example. The state of the art for transportation has shifted away from breakbulk cargo and towards containers. New York remains one of the top ports in the United States, but the location of the bulk of the port activity shifted with the changing technology away from Manhattan’s waterfront and instead to container terminals. The same pattern could be said for the industrial assets along the Northeast Corridor tracks, where freight trains are now rare and high(ish) speed passenger rail is the prime cargo.
Still, even if not the best analysis of the economic geography of the corridor, the Times Magazine piece serves as a metaphor for the shifting nature of our economy. At the same time, however, you don’t want to overdo it, and conclude too much. Aaron Renn does just that when asking “is the Acela killing America?” by directly linking the finance industry’s influence over DC’s regulatory apparatus to the rise of the Acela.
Never mind the logical challenges of such a claim (the old Metroliners ran faster between DC and New York on the same tracks; the two cities have been linked by frequent air service for years as well), other industries have been able to curry favor with DC. Oil is one example; perhaps focusing on decisions like Exxon-Mobil’s location of substantial workforce presence in suburban DC (workers soon to be consolidated in Texas – such is the power of industrial agglomeration). However, I don’t see anyone claiming Big Oil’s favorable treatment from the federal government is solely attributable to flights between Houston and Dulles.
More on height limit trade-offs – listening skeptically, reaching resolution
London Skyline. CC image from Elliot Brown.
One dynamic that comes up in DC’s height limit debates is the tension between gains and losses, impacts on the city and benefits to it. New development can clearly add value, but the question is if that value is a mere ‘give-away to developers’ or if citizens (the eventual consumers of that real estate) benefit from robust markets for that product. Likewise, value-capture methods open doors to finance new infrastructure, while others worry about the ability of a city to handle the strain of new development.
This tension raises a couple of issues. Kaid Benfield talks about “softening urban density” in an NRDC article. (though, as Cap’n Transit notes, the same article was re-titled by Atlantic editors as “The case for listening to NIMBYs“) The core argument is the same. While development of the city has large, aggregate benefits, there are indeed local impacts, often perceived as negatives. Benfield discusses several ways to mitigate those negative impacts, ‘softening’ their effect.
While the outcomes of softening are well and good, the real battle is not about how to mitigate impacts of density, but whether it should be allowed at all. In that context, the process for addressing those impacts is important. As Cap’n Transit notes (using the Atlantic’s title for Benfield’s piece), there is a case for listening to NIMBYs – but with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Here’s the problem: NIMBYs lie. They don’t all lie, and they don’t lie all the time, but enough NIMBYs lie often enough that you can’t just take their word for things. They don’t just lie to other people, they lie to themselves. Of course, developers lie, too, and planners lie. We’re all people.
NIMBYs are also irrational. Just like developers and planners and crazy anonymous transit geeks. We’re all people.
Seriously, how many NIMBY Predictions of Doom have you heard? Things that made absolutely no sense? But when you looked in the person’s eyes as they stood at the mic in the community center, you knew that they really believed that removing two parking spaces would lead to gridlock, chaos and honking twenty-four hours a day. And then the two parking spaces were removed, and there was no increase in gridlock, chaos or honking, but the person has never admitted that they were wrong. Somebody, somewhere should make a catalog of these crazy predictions.
We should listen to NIMBYs, not because that’s how you get things done, but because they’re people. People deserve respect, and one of the best ways to show respect is by listening. But listening and acknowledgment do not necessarily mean acceptance or agreement. We need to listen skeptically.
I’ll go one step further: it’s not just about listening, but about having a process in place to address these impacts and assess the validity of these claims – a process to apply a skeptical eye and reach a resolution.
Over in London, architecture critic Rowan Moore is casting a skeptical eye on London’s growing skyline, decrying a shoddy process with (to his eye) substandard results.
Almost all forms of resistance, such as the statutory bodies that are supposed to guide the planning system, have been neutralised, leaving only little-heard neighbourhood groups to voice their protests. All of which, if these tall buildings were making the capital into a great metropolis of the 21st century, might be a cause for celebration. Towers can be beautiful, and part of the genius of London is its ability to change, but what we are getting now are mostly units of speculation stacked high, garnished with developers’ ego. They are invitations to tax evaders to park their cash in Britain.
Of all the arguments in favor of removing DC’s height limit, the idea that it somehow stifles good architecture is the one I find least compelling. I love skyscrapers, but I also love good urban design and a city as an organism, an economic cluster, that functions in a healthy way. The mere fact that some of London’s new towers might not be the most compelling designs doesn’t strike me as a reason not to build up, as many of DC’s stunted buildings aren’t compelling, either.
Some of the same arguments about the capacity to absorb such development also come up: ” It is doubtful, for example, whether Vauxhall is a major transport interchange of the kind that the London plan thinks is right for tall buildings, but it is becoming a mini Dubai nonetheless.” Moore does mention the prospect of capturing the value of new development to fund new infrastructure and London’s Community Infrastructure Levy to help fund Crossrail, but Moore remains skeptical:
It doesn’t help that boroughs such as Southwark and Lambeth are unlikely to be tough on new towers, as they can order developers to contribute “planning gain”, which is money to be spent on affordable housing elsewhere in their territory. Livingstone liked them for similar reasons, as well us for the special delight that skyscrapers seem to have for mayors. Johnson is likely to be influenced by the community infrastructure levy raised on new developments, which helps pay for the Crossrail project. Of course, affordable housing and public transport are good things to have, but thoughtless plunder of the city’s airspace is not the way to pay for them; by the same argument, we could build on parks or on the river.
Building on parks is veering into Cap’n Transit’s above-mentioned NIMBY prediction of doom for the removal of two parking spaces.
Just as there is a simple elegance to tying congestion pricing to transit funding, there is also a simple elegance in tying the value of a growing city into the infrastructure that supports it – and it need not be dismissed as “thoughtless plunder.” Instead, our processes should identify the impacts and seek to mitigate them rather than freeze a city in amber, never to be touched. Participants should shape the result, not veto it.
Aligning our institutions and legal mechanisms to that end is a challenge. The latest piece from George Mason’s Center for Regional Analysis on DC’s housing pinch looks at some of those problems. The existence of impact fees (in the abstract) does indeed add to the cost, but so long as those fees are addressing actual impacts, that shouldn’t be a major concern. The challenges of coordinating approval processes and dealing with local opposition, however, are tremendous obstacles. That is where the need to listen skeptically is quite clear.