Tag Archives: Density

Shifting DC’s mode share – Sustainable DC’s complimentary policies of population growth and increasing non-auto transportation

Last month, the Washington Post’s Dr. Gridlock column profiled DC’s various new transportation investments might change transportation in the District. However, Dr. Gridlock used some odd phrasing to frame the city’s varied goals:

“In the Sustainable D.C. plan we released earlier this year,” the mayor said at the crosswalk event, “we set an aggressive-but-realistic goal of increasing the use of public transit, biking and walking to comprise 75 percent of all commuter trips in the District in the next 20 years.”

In other words, Gray told me afterward, the future of city travel is about sharing routes safely. Look for more bus routes, streetcars, bike lanes and devices such as the pedestrian signal, which can make walking safer and more popular without infringing on people’s ability to drive autos.

But for any city, getting three of four commuter trips done without cars is a major shift in people’s behavior. Why set the target so high?

“We’re looking at adding 250,000 people over 20 years,” Gray said. “If everyone drives, that’s unsustainable.”

Is the Sustainable DC goal really setting the bar ‘so high?’

First things first, the Mayor is absolutely right: adding 250,000 new residents would not be sustainable if everyone drove. The good news, however, is that adding that many new people to the city is entirely complimentary to increasing the use of non-auto transport modes. There is no ‘if,’ those 250,000 new residents will not all drive.

What about that goal of 75% of trips by non-auto modes (with 25% of trips by bike or on foot)? First, let’s consider where we are today. On Page 80 of the full plan document:

The data is commute mode share from the 2010 Census for DC. That is, residents of DC who work (and therefore commute to work). The usual limitations apply; this data is for commute trips only, it only counts the primary mode for the commute (if I walk to a bikeshare staiton, bike to a Metro station, then ride a train, and walk to work – you wouldn’t know it from these stats), and it only applies to DC residents, not to all commuters into DC.

Looking at that 2010 data, the goal is a strong one, but hardly unreachable. Contrary to Dr. Gridlock’s focus on commuters from outside the city, basing the data on DC residents shows how close to the goal we already are. If you look at the 75% goal through the lens of the region (where 15.4% commute via transit), it indeed looks like a high bar. From the view of the city, however, the non-auto share keeps growing.

Not only are non-auto modes growing in their share of the commute, but the city is growing in population. Given DC’s fixed boundaries (no annexation of our neighboring states here), any growth in population, by definition, means an increase in DC’s population density. This growth is complimentary to the goals of increasing use of non-auto modes. Infill development, focused around transit, and built with walkability in mind all adds up to a city where non-auto modes are easier for more trips; therefore they are the ones used by the public.

As a point of comparison (with the caveat that some of the statistics might not be exact apples-to-apples comparisons) to other places and other commutes. In Paris, France: 60% walking, 27% transit, 4% bike, 7% by car. Note that this appears to be all trips, not just commute trips. Also note that 60% of Parisians do not own a car. Add in the macro-level trends concerning the drop in vehicle-miles traveled, particularly among younger Americans.

For American cities, compare the state of the DC’s non-auto mode share to other American cities in the 2012 State of Downtown report from the Downtown Business Improvement District:

The difference between DC residents commuting and people commuting to DC is significant, but not as large as the difference between DC and the region as a whole – such are the benefits of ruling out most of the auto-dominant suburb-to-suburb commutes.

Likewise, the total non-auto share for DC residents stands at 55%. Getting to 75% is a good target, but certainly not unreasonable given the starting point. Brooklyn, for example, currently has a 75% non-auto mode share (60.8 transit; 8.7 walk, 3.9 work from home, 2.1 other = 75.5%).

Making up that 20-point gap is realistic; adding 250,000 new residents is similarly realistic. These goals are complimentary to one another.

Middle class in Manhattan?

Manhattan. CC image from sakeeb.

Breaking news! Last week, the New York Times reported that it is expensive to live in Manhattan. The Times frames the question through the lens of the middle class, asking what the definition means in the context of they city’s densest borough.

In a city like New York, where everything is superlative, who exactly is middle class? What kind of salary are we talking about? Where does a middle-class person live? And could the relentless rise in real estate prices push the middle class to extinction?

There’s lots of discussion in the article about incomes in New York, as well as the high cost of living – particularly for housing. The article notes that the New York, urban context makes the traditional symbols of the American Dream (e.g. home ownership) less applicable, and most of the text is spent searching for some other indicator of middle-class-ness. Matt Yglesias notes that such a search for a single metric isn’t always useful. Likewise, it’s not as if this is a new topic in New York, or even for the Times.

There’s lots of discussion about housing costs and the demand for living in a place like Manhattan, but not a single word about housing supply. I understand the author is looking to explore the perception of what constitutes the middle class, but a word about the supply of housing is warranted. Even a short mention of the constraints to supply would be a worthwhile addition to these kinds of articles.

David Schleicher’s twitter response asked that same question, and provided a link to Glaeser, Gyourko, and Saks’ work on regulatory constraints to housing supply in New York. From the paper’s abstract:

Home building is a highly competitive industry with almost no natural barriers to entry, yet prices in Manhattan currently appear to be more than twice their supply costs. We argue that land use restrictions are the natural explanation of this gap. We also present evidence consistent with our hypothesis that regulation is constraining the supply of housing so that increased demand leads to much higher prices, not many more units, in a number of other high price housing markets across the country.

As noted, Manhattan certainly isn’t the only place with these kinds of constraints. Another recent article focuses on San Francisco, this one from tech writer Farhad Manjoo. Manjoo makes the case that San Francisco needs to grow in the face of tremendous demand for urban living. More importantly, he argues that opponents to growth, those who fear how growth might change the things they love about San Francisco, need to get over themselves.

Don’t look good fortune in the mouth. Yes, growth will bring some problems. But they’re not nearly as bad as the problems you’ll find in decline (ask Detroit). Instead of complaining or blocking growth, San Francisco’s old-guard would do better to propose ways to ease the city’s transition into its digital future. This doesn’t mean opposing newcomers. It means recognizing a new reality, that San Francisco needs to become much larger and more accommodating place than it is. And it means adopting polices that will make that reality a pretty good one.

In particular, for San Francisco, adopting that reality means one thing above all: It needs to build more buildings.

As an example of the fear of change, Manjoo links to this article by David Talbot, blaming the influx of tech workers to the city for forcing things to change – forcing the city to battle for its own soul.

One point that Talbot ignores is that obstructing the physical change in the city (e.g. blocking development) will not save the idealized city he loves. In fact, it might even accelerate the process of gentrification.  Some level of change is inevitable. Fighting any kind of change to the physical environment might even accelerate changes to the city’s socioeconomic environment.

While the overall thrust of Manjoo’s policiy is correct, it’s not hard to see why many fear for the loss of San Francisco’s soul. Manjoo laments that the city has not built more densely, and implies that old Victorian houses are the culprit: “this city is defined by, and reveres, its famous Victorian houses” he writes.  “Those houses are very pretty. They’re also very inefficient. Collectively, they take up a lot of space, but don’t house very many people.”

The truth is that San Francisco could add a great deal of new housing supply without touching those houses that are worthy of preservation. Consider this thought experiment from Keep Houston Houston for transit improvements and upzoning in the Sunset District:

All of this in one neighborhood, and without straying from the basic SF vernacular architecture of low/mid-rise, wood-framed buildings. Apply this same rubric to the rest of the city, allow towers in a few places, you could easily accommodate 200,000 more people.

Likewise, Stephen Smith makes the case for dramatic upzoning in large parts of Brooklyn, but not on the borough’s brownstone blocks:

In some neighborhoods, this sort of conservative zoning makes sense. The tree-lined blocks of Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope, for example, thick with brownstones and pre-war apartment houses, are urban treasures worth preserving.

But northern Brooklyn is not brownstone Brooklyn.

We’ve seen the same thing in DC (and seen the impacts of zoning). And we’ve also seen anecdotes of what adding new supply can do to downmarket properties, thanks to the process of filtering.

Each of these strategies at least hold the promise of keeping the market rate housing prices within reach for the middle class. Obviously, the dynamics of these markets are quite complex, and the nature of neighborhood change is not well-understood (not in a way we can forecast, anyway) and the housing market for a given metro area is larger than any one jurisdiction, but the macro signs are quite clear. Given the constraints to supply in the Zoned Zone, removing these regulatory constraints on the market’s ability to add supply seems like an obvious prerequisite to a change in policy.

To Charles Marohn’s concerns about density, and those that fear for San Francisco’s soul: will this new development ensure a quality place? No, probably not. But allowing this kind of growth is a necessary-but-not-sufficient condition.

Density – the limitations of zoning

San Francisco. CC image from C1ssou

A few days ago, Charles Marohn posted “It’s so much more than density” on his Strong Towns blog.  In it, Charles pushes back against the idea that density is good, arguing that the reality of great places is more complex. Marohn’s conclusion is spot on, but throughout his post he creates several strawmen arguments, some of which rubbed me the wrong way:

Equating planners with zoners: Charles styles this as “planners zoners.” In this world, all planners love zoning, and love the available tools that zoning offers. In my professional experience, this is rarely the case.

I’m not sure why planners zoners are generally so keen on density, but they are, to the point where it often comes across as an obsession. I have a theory. I think a lot of planners zoners yearn to be spatial planners. They go to school to build great places. They get out into the real world and are given this ridiculously blunt instrument — zoning — and are frustrated that they can’t wield it to create Paris. Few stop to ask what zoning regulations were used to create Paris (hint: there weren’t any). Density, especially when given as a bonus for attainment of certain performance objectives, is the closest thing a modern planner zoner gets to their professional roots. We all suffer the consequences.

Perhaps it’s the personalization of this that bugs me, because the analysis of the systems is spot-on. Zoning is a blunt instrument at best, but many of my fellow planners (not merely zoners) do indeed ask about Paris. They understand the limitations of zoning. They are also constrained within the system. They make use of the tools available.

The most realisitic path to change is from within, usually via a zoning re-write like currently underway in DC, or recently completed in Philadelphia. Wholesale repeal of zoning codes seems unrealistic. Even Houston, without Euclidian use zoning still bears many of zoning’s ills through other regulations, such as parking requirements. Change in the regulatory environment is likely to be incremental.

Still, these professionals must contend with pressures on them from various stakeholders. In Philly, the city council is trying to un-do many of the recent changes. In DC, many of the bad practices Marohn decries (using the mindset of zoning as incentive rather than allowance)  are urged by residents, not by planners.

Location matters: Regarding the desirability of density, there needs to be a distinction between using bonus density as an incentive and merely allowing greater density and letting the market supply it organically. Part of this confusion might stem from your frame of reference. During the rise of the housing bubble, Paul Krugman made note of America’s two distinct housing markets:

When it comes to housing, however, the United States is really two countries, Flatland and the Zoned Zone.

In Flatland, which occupies the middle of the country, it’s easy to build houses. When the demand for houses rises, Flatland metropolitan areas, which don’t really have traditional downtowns, just sprawl some more. As a result, housing prices are basically determined by the cost of construction. In Flatland, a housing bubble can’t even get started.

But in the Zoned Zone, which lies along the coasts, a combination of high population density and land-use restrictions – hence “zoned” – makes it hard to build new houses. So when people become willing to spend more on houses, say because of a fall in mortgage rates, some houses get built, but the prices of existing houses also go up.

For those of us in the Zoned Zone, simply allowing for more growth (and density) will produce different results than a similar regulatort adjustment in Flatland.  Anecdotes of these constraints in expensive cities abound: consider recent articles from Brooklyn and San Francisco, among others.

Marohn  notes that density does not cause productivity in places; density is a byproduct of productive (and valuable) places:

A strong town — a productive place — is generally of a higher density than an unproductive place. That financial productivity, however, is not caused by the density. There is a correlation — as productivity goes up, so does density — but one does not cause the other.

Leaving aside the question of correlation vs. causation, nothing in Marohn’s post takes the context of the place and pent-up market demand into account. Two planners talking about the desirability of density could use the same argument, but the location of the planner (Flatland or the Zoned Zone) dramatically changes the impact of that argument. In Flatland, where supply is not constrained, density not supported by the market must be shaped via some sort of regulation. However, urbanists advocating for density in the Zoned Zone are often just asking to remove the constraints that make density illegal.

With that in mind, attacking planners for pushing density without considering their context and market conditions (and the nature of the intervention) can confuse the issue. There’s no doubt that incentives can backfire – zoning is a blunt tool, after all. But that’s not always the motivation when arguing in favor of more density.

Perceptions of density often miss the mark: Marohn also cites the example of urban renewal as a failure of the fetishizing of density. I’m not sure that this narrative holds up to the history, however – at least as it applies to the density of urban renewal projects. As I’ve written before, perceptions of density are often well off from the reality.

This isn’t to endorse either the process or product of urban renewal, but the goals of those projects were often aimed at reducing density and overcrowding.

Beware unintendend consequences: As I noted at the top of this post, I don’t disagree with Marohn’s conclusion at all:

Ultimately, the notion that we can solve the problems that we face in our cities by simply increasing the density requirement in our zoning codes is not just naive, it is dead wrong. Density is an expected byproduct of a successful place, not the implement by which we create one. Building a Strong Towns is a complex undertaking, one that defies a professional silo or a simple solution.

More on Marohn’s follow-up, Density Redux, to follow…

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.

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.

Density links – process and constraints

Zoning notice from Burlington, VT - CC image from Don Shall

The ‘right’ density: In the process of putting this post together, I missed Ryan Avent’s piece in The Economist, mentioning some of the broader consequences of land use regulation constraints.  It’s a great summary of some of the key issues regarding density, constraints to growth, levels of governance, and our regulatory processes.    The genesis for the discussion is Facebook’s ability to spark a boom in Silicon Valley following their IPO.  Avent documents the constraints to this (and any other development) and the macroeconomic implications.

Avent leaves a footnote about what the ‘right’ level of density is, offering another criticism of Richard Florida’s recent piece on the subject. Avent writes:

Some urbanists claim that it’s important to cultivate the “right” density to boost innovative activity, and that tall buildings aren’t compatible with this. See this recent Richard Florida piece as an example. This strikes me as mistaken on multiple levels. I have very little confidence in the ability of planners to understand what a particular density is accomplishing and whether the “interactions facilitated” by shorter buildings either exist or are large enough to offset the higher real-estate and labour costs to which they contribute. It does not appear that technology companies have had trouble colonising central San Francisco or New York, despite the significantly greater verticality of those places relative to, say, Mountain View. And space is mostly fungible. Even if we assume that tech companies prefer short buildings while professional firms and households are happy in tall ones, the failure to provide ample supply for the latter uses will crowd out some of the former. That is, maybe the construction of lots of new residential and office highrises in San Francisco doesn’t attract a single tech firm to the new towers. The new construction will nonetheless place substantial downward pressure on rents, attracting lots of new people to the region and making it easier to start a business.

The focus on the ‘right’ density for innovation seems quite far-fetched and unsupported by evidence.  Some planners will indeed offer all sorts of reasons to limit heights of buildings, but facilitating greater innovation is not usually the stated reason.

Michael Lewyn offers a line-by-line takedown of a similar line of thinking from Ed McMahon (linked previously here). Well worth a read, despite the use of all caps.

Planning and process:  There are two competing issues that Avent touches on, however.  One is the content of the land use regulations, their substance and their scope.  That is, the kind of stuff they allow and disallow.   The other is the process of making these land use decisions.

Over the weekend, the New York Times featured a profile of New York’s planning chief, Amanda Burden.  A few things jump out: under Burden’s leadership, the planning department has substantially upzoned many areas of the city:

Since 2002, when she was appointed to head City Planning, she has overseen the wholesale rezoning of the city, with 115 rezoning plans covering more than 10,300 blocks; by the end of her administration, the department is expected to have rezoned about 40 percent of New York, an unprecedented number.

However, while the content of the regulations has increased, the process has not gotten simpler:

But that attention to detail has also received criticism. Ms. Burden’s belief in contextual zoning, for example, under which new developments in a neighborhood are required to be in the height and style of surrounding structures, leads to “profoundly conservative building,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, a senior fellow at the Regional Plan Associationand director of its Center for Urban Innovation. “New York’s greatness as the dominant skyscraper city of the 20th century was the result of bold building, but the local zeitgeist has switched from big and bold to keeping everything small, nondescript and similar to everything else in the neighborhood.”

It has also become common under Ms. Burden’s leadership for developers and their architects to have to negotiate their designs with City Planning. “Development has become a game of second-guessing,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin said. “What will Amanda think of my project? What will I need to compromise on?

“There really doesn’t seem to be any true as-of-right development anymore,” she added, referring to the ability to build without obtaining permits or other approvals.

This strikes me as one of the fundamental tensions of urban development.  Much of it will follow the path of least resistance, building what is allowed by right due to the easier process. Chris Leinberger always made a point to emphasize how reform must make doing the right thing also the easy thing.  This is more about making the bad approach just as hard as the right approach.

In an ideal world, it would be best to make doing the right thing the easy thing; the by-right thing for developers.  You could reduce the constraint of the code’s substance while also reducing the procedural barriers to building – the timeline for approval in New York is significant:

FOR developers, the clock is ticking. Though the Bloomberg administration won’t leave office for 19 months, most projects that require rezoning or other Planning Department approval can take at least 18 months to get through the process. And the administration’s overall friendliness to development means that most builders with projects on the drawing board are scurrying to get them passed before the term’s end, rather than face the uncertainty of the next administration.

However, I’m curious if there is an absolute tradeoff between content and process.  Richard Layman advocates for precisely that – the reduction of by-right allowances with the goal of improving development outcomes.  I’m not sold that the tradeoff is absolute, however – that the only way to improve outcomes is to increase the control of the process over development.  Instead, the bar for by-right development should be higher, but without extra procedural hurdles.

Nonetheless, I am interested in seeing where exactly the borders between those tradeoffs are.  There’s also the question of personality and uncertainty – what does the rush to get approvals before Burden leaves office say about the longevity and sustainability of that regulatory mechanism? Does it become completely reliant on the people in a given office?

Open questions, all – I’m uncertain about the nature of those tradeoffs.

The wrong relationships: Echoing Richard Florida’s points about density and skyscrapers being nothing but ‘vertical cul-de-sacs’, the blog Walkable DFW unloads a lot of reasons to hate skyscrapers, none of which stand up to a closer reading.

An example.  Increased density has diminishing returns for efficient transportation:  this is true for transit ridership, but that’s because once you get to high levels of density, you don’t need transit at all – you just walk. Accessibility wins over mobility.

There are lots of other problematic statements, including some cherrypicked density datapoints from Barcelona and New York, but one in particular caught my eye: “stretching buildings upwards has the same effect as stretching them outwards.” That is, he claims building up is just as inefficient as sprawl:

I often lament living on the 19th floor.  I often walk to work.  But I still experience rush hour:  waiting for the elevators before and after typical work hours (often as much as 10 minutes if a few of the elevators are down, which invariably some always are).

I only bring this up for a chance to link to this excellent 2008 New Yorker piece on the secret lives of elevators. It would seem that this blogger’s building is under-elevated – though I would posit that’s not a particularly good reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

 

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.

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.

Density helps provide public benefits

Ryan Avent, writing at Architect Magazine, takes a look at the recently floated idea of putting a Redskins practice facility at Reservation 13 in DC.  One of the reasons for the backlash against the idea was the opportunity cost of a metro-adjacent, develop-able site (a scarce enough commodity in DC) lying fallow for the purposes of football practices. Regardless of the merits of that particular idea, Avent notes that denser development all around creates more capacity for these kinds of public goods.

Consciously, in the case of urbanists opposed to the practice facility, or unconsciously, as is likely to be true of nearby residents, opponents are expressing an awareness of the importance of density to urban life. To make Reservation 13 come alive, there must be people there—enough of them to support local businesses such as coffee shops and corner stores. With sufficient critical mass, the neighborhood might support restaurants, bars, and shops, which could then draw residents from other corners of the city. A healthy density helps integrate a neighborhood into the broader city, which then reinforces that neighborhood’s local amenities. Were more than half of the parcel dedicated to a relatively stultifying land use, critical density might fall out of reach.

Lurking within this compelling argument, however, is an unjustified assumption. On its own, the use of 33 acres for football need not reduce the parcel’s density. Development proposed for the remaining land could simply be made taller. In the 2003 master plan, the city recommends building heights of two stories on the western, neighborhood-facing side of the property, rising to 10 stories on the waterfront side (the property slopes downward toward the water). In practice, the only thing preventing Washington from having its cake and eating it too is a devotion to short buildings.

Not only in terms of opportunity costs for limited parcels of land, there’s also the matter of revenue.  Constraints on development limit the ability to ask for public amenities, ranging from new infrastructure to affordable housing via inclusionary zoning.  There’s only so much juice that can be squeezed from the orange.

Indeed, the core urban logic of density is taking root (“Height in this city isn’t about height. It’s about density,” Hickok said). While a great deal of the discussion has focused on changing the height limit, there’s a lot of potential capacity between the more restrictive zoning and the federal height limit. Avent continues:

Indeed, the scarcity of land that has so energized residents to question the mayor’s efforts is entirely a product of the District’s laws and regulations. The neighborhoods just west of Reservation 13, like much of the city’s residential land, are zoned R-4. This allows for matter-of-right development of single-family homes on lots with minimum specified widths and maximum specified heights. If Washington wanted to do so, it could substantially increase the available developable area. A zoning area that doubled the District’s population density—essentially creating an entire second city on top of the first—would be achievable without so much as questioning the city’s statutory height limit—and leaving the District at less than a third of the population density of Manhattan.

Utilizing modest-in-appearance, yet substantial increases in density amongst DC’s residential areas (mentioned here), we could greatly increase the effective overall density of the District.  But those small interventions (alley dwellings, english basements, etc) won’t produce that ‘second city’ that Avent discuses.  That would require more intense development.

Writing in Crosscut, Ed McMahon discusses some of those forms:

Julie Campoli and Alex MacLean’s book Visualizing Density vividly illustrates that we can achieve tremendous density without high-rises. They point out that before elevators were invented, two- to four- story “walk-ups” were common in cities and towns throughout America. Constructing a block of these type of buildings could achieve a density of anywhere from 20 to 80 units an acre.

Mid-rise buildings ranging from 5 to 12 stories can create even higher density neighborhoods in urban settings, where buildings cover most of the block. Campoli and McLean point to Seattle where mid-rise buildings achieve densities ranging from 50 to 100 units per acre, extraordinarily high by U.S. standards.

The challenge, however, is meshing that modestly tall kind of density (respectful of the federal height limit) with the current structures on the ground.  It would require large scale redevelopment of already extant neighborhoods.  Indeed, some of those structures that DC does have are threatened by the lure of development potential. This manse on K St is one of the last of its kind.

The irony is that the constraint on height (and thus density) in DC is one of the key reasons legacy lowrise structures are under such development pressure.

Google Streetview - Northeast corner of 6th Ave and 38th St

A quick stroll around Midtown Manhattan will reveal lots of really tall buildings, both old and new.  But there are also lots of small and short structures mixed in – since development pressures have the ability to go up (not that New York is free of development constraints – see Ed Glaeser), they don’t have to knock down all smaller structures as a matter of course.

Google Streetview - Southwest corner of 6th Ave and 38th St

The takeaway is about tradeoffs – preserving structures like the remaining manse on K St is a constraint.  It can be a workable constraint, depending on what other constraints are also in place.  But the combinations of affordable housing, historic preservation, a flat skyline, shorter buildings and smaller scale development might not be feasible together.

McMahon’s larger point is one of context – simply plopping a skyscraper down amidst a sea of shorter buildings is a recipe for another Tour Montparnasse.  But context is relative and probably speaks more to the pace and evolution of the change than to the nature of the change itself.  Likewise, additional height might be the very thing that helps preserve the small-lot fabric of a place while still providing a release valve for growth, as it has in many locations in Manhattan.

Avent concludes with a cautionary note about the costs of these preferences:

What the battle over Reservation 13 makes clear, however, is that Washington’s height aversion crowds out attractive amenities—a football facility in this case; parks or museums in others; willing would-be residents, artists, entrepreneurs, and taxpayers in many, many others. It has a substantial cost, in other words.

As mentioned above, this is really a discussion about trade-offs.  Paris is often mentioned as a fellow flatly-skylined city with far greater density than the District today. But would DC residents really embrace the intensity of redevelopment required to turn rowhouse neighborhoods into 5-6 story walk-up neighborhoods?  If not that particular trade-off, then what other trade-offs are on the table?

Should be an interesting conversation.

Thoughts on changing DC’s height limit

With both city leaders and members of Congress discussing alterations to DC’s height limit, I think there are a few things worth highlighting.  These are just some thoughts on what I think are the core issues here, and how DC might proceed.

Why do this?  The compelling reason must be economic, and the reasoning behind this change will need to be carefully communicated to the public at large.  A limitation like this involves a number of trade-offs, and must be understood just as the costs of other zoning restrictions need to be understood.

There ought to be a campaign that both illustrates the benefits of density, but also the costs of restricting development – both in terms of opportunity costs of limiting agglomeration economies, but also of the general costs that raise rents and prices for all sorts of real estate in the region. (see many previous posts from Ryan Avent – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, among many others)

At the same time, changing the height limit won’t be a panacea.  The real estate market in DC is regional, other local governments will need to pull their weight as well.

Reverse the question: why shouldn’t we do this?  Taking a page from the concept of shifting the procedural burden of land use regulation, perhaps the question needs to be flipped on height limit proponents – if not up, where will the city grow?  Will commercial areas encroach into residential ones?  What about the costs of pushing development further out into the region?  What about the costs of rising rents?

The height limit is not zoning.  It’s worth remembering that most of the District is regulated to maximum densities well below the maximum envelope of the height limit.  Likewise, these areas represent some of the best opportunities for cost-effective, small scale infill development: the “missing middle” of housing densities.

 It is important not to get too caught up in the density numbers when thinking about these types. Due to the small footprint of the building types and the fact that they are usually mixed with a variety of building types, even on an individual block, the perceived density is usually quite lower–they do not look like dense buildings.

There are many opportunities for this kind of infill development in DC, whether on alley lots or via the conversion of English Basements and other additions of multiple units into otherwise single-family zones.  Smaller scale multi-unit buildings can also be designed as to be visually indistinguishable from neighboring single-family homes.  This kind of development ought to be allowed across the board (and DC is moving in this direction), an example of incremental changes to the regulatory environment.

That said, those kinds of developments won’t impact the height limit.  In DC’s largely residential areas, I doubt a taller limit would have much effect.  Conversely, raising the height limit without increasing the allowed density brings little economic benefit.

“Vistas” and “views” are overrated.  Atrios said it.  Most of the ‘views’ people talk about when discussing DC’s tourist-caliber photo shots are enhanced by tall buildings, not the other way around.  The buildings frame the views down street corridors.   Most of the people are not viewing things from the stereotypical aerial shot, but rather from street level.

Instead, what people seem to be concerned about is about the city’s skyline becoming a vista in and of itself, distracting from monuments and memorials.   I don’t think this is of concern, as skylines can be manipulated just as easily as other physical elements of the city.  Likewise, any alteration of DC’s height limit is not likely to suddenly trigger a free-for-all of skyscraper construction, but rather a slow climb to a new, higher equilibrium.  The overall impression from afar would still be that of a ‘flat’ skyline, the monuments and memorials would get their respect while the rest of the city would have room to grow.

The “Monumental Core” and “Downtown” are not synonyms.   The reported initial conversations on height involve minor changes in the already-tall areas, and transit-oriented height districts elsewhere. Matt Yglesias:

 They seem to be contemplating two different ideas, either or both of which could be implemented. One is to tinker at the margins with the restrictions on downtown structures to allow an additional floor or two of leasable office space. The other is to allow for substantially taller buildings in a few outlying areas, with the thinking being that if we can have tall buildings right across the Potomac in Arlington County there’s no reason peripheral parts of D.C. shouldn’t have them too.

The idea of protecting the monumental core from the intrusion of tall buildings is a worthy urban design cause, but also largely a strawman.   The NCPC’s Monumental Core Framework Plan is discussing this area in blue, while the broader ‘downtown’ is represented in brown/tan, showing the area of DC’s Center City Action Agenda.

 While adding some buffer around the White House, the larger point is that downtown already has most of the city’s tall buildings.  Furthermore, if we’re talking about adding a modest increase in heights allowed in DC (something along the lines of allowing buildings to be twice as tall as the streets they front on, rather than the current limit of street width + 20 feet), then views like this and this within the monumental core will look exactly the same in all of the tourist photos.

Always remember – the reason to do this is to add density, and perceptions of density (such as equating it with height) are often inaccurate.

There will be a plan. Lydia DePillis wisely notes that any change would need a plan, and not just open the door to willy-nilly skyscraper development.  In the event that this comes to pass, I’d expect both a detailed map and accompanying restrictions to protect the vistas we do have, as well as a strong urban design component.   Potential options could be altering the existing formula (what if the limit were 2x of street width?  Or street width + 75 feet instead of 20?) and could easily introduce mandatory setbacks at certain heights to avoid urban canyon effects (think along the lines of a less-tall version of New York’s 1916 zoning code building envelope).

Such a plan could also identify areas for truly tall buildings, DC’s own version of La Defense or Canary Wharf.  Doing so should be part of a conscious urban design, rather than the isolation of the Tour Montparnasse.

Added density provides opportunities to finance new infrastructure.  What better way to link transportation and land use than to fund new transportation infrastructure via tax revenues from new development?