Tag Archives: Unintended Consequences

Choice architecture and behavior change

CC image from sparktography.

In the DC urbanist blogosphere (or, David Alpert across multiple platforms), ‘choice’ is all the rage these days. GGW writes about DC Planning Director Harriet Tregoning being “pro-choice” on transportation; Alpert in the Post writing about housing choices and transportation options; and Alpert again talking about zoning and parking requirements on News 8.

And of course, who isn’t against choice? Richard Layman pushes back on the ‘choice’ rhetoric a bit, noting that maximizing choice alone isn’t sufficient for good policy, and then focusing on outcomes, noting that it’s about “making the right choices.”

My most recent Metro read was Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s Nudge, devoted to a lengthy discussion of the vital importance of ‘choice architecture’ in our lives (also mentioned in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow – in the reading list). Choice architecture is all about framing the decisions we make, usually with large impacts on the final outcomes.

In that vein, Layman’s critique of the narrative about choice is spot on – there’s a lot more to a successful policy outcome than just providing choice. However, Thaler and Sunstein might disagree a bit with Layman’s goal of getting people to make the “right choices.” They frame their goals as using choice architecture to nudge us into better outcomes, while still being free to make choices as we see fit – calling this ‘libertarian paternalism.’ Making the choice for someone would be straight-up paternalism.

I don’t want to speak for Layman (and this is almost certainly splitting hairs in terms of semantics), but I can see how his framing on transportation choice would not meet the libertarian threshold. That sense of having decisions made for you certainly explains some of the all-too-predictable ‘war on cars‘ backlash, no matter how misplaced it might be.

There is also the matter of rhetoric. While simply maximizing choices might not be a complete policy, it makes an effective argument. Implementing a good choice architecture is imperative, but is also rather in-the-weeds for common debate. Given how skewed our transportation system is towards framing auto use as the default, changing the choice architecture often is the policy change – people’s behavior will follow.

Examples of transportation nudges can range from how fringe benefits are offered to employers to how parking is leased/bought in apartment buildings. Decisions about the physical environment, such as how much parking to build, are more about broader development markets, as renters/buyers already factor the price/availability of parking into their decision making. Barring interference from something like minimum parking requirements in the zoning code, the choice is faced by developers, not end users.

The existence of such minimum parking requirements (as well as other aspects of land use regulation) is also an interesting look into choice architecture. I’ve often heard Chris Leinberger speak not just about doing the right thing with development, but also shifting our regulations so that doing the right thing is easy. So much development follows the path of least resistance. In terms of choice architecture, they opt for the default. Even if not speaking about the choices of individuals (but rather firms and corporations), the impact of choice architecture is enormous.

The parallel that comes to mind is David Schleicher’s emphasis on the process of land-use decision making, and how that impacts outcomes. Schleicher’s argument is that our procedures for land-use decision making provide multiple opportunities for (as an example) NIMBYs with concentrated, hyper-local interests to influence decisions over broader, city-wide interests. In essence, the procedures and process for this kind of decision-making is a kind of choice architecture – arguably, one with (in Richard Layman’s words) “sub-optimal” results. Opposed to the libertarian paternalism that aims to structure the choice architecture to achieve better outcomes, this architecture is not structured at all – there isn’t an architect.

Nonetheless, this is a complicated discussion – ‘libertarian paternalism’ and ‘choice architecture’ aren’t likely to be effective talking points in a community meeting. There’s a reason why opponents to some of these changes fall back on incendiary language (“war on cars,” etc), as that rhetoric is simple and accessible. The rhetoric of providing choice is just as simple (and, I would argue, more honest than the “war on cars”), even if the underlying policies must be more complex.

(EDIT: as I publish this post, Richard Layman writes another post on choice, also mentioning Thaler and Sunstein)

Parking requirements and unintended consequences

Surface parking in Minneapolis. CC image from Zach K.

Writing in MinnPost, Marlys Harris asks why (seemingly) nothing is getting done in Minneapolis. She comes up with three broad reasons: a negative attitude towards new development, economic justifications that don’t pencil out for new projects, and the impact of zoning and land use regulations – often unintended impacts or perverse outcomes. While all three are certainly factors, the real interesting implication is the interplay between them: as an example, regulations that dictate long and uncertain processes, enabling those opposed to new development to organize in opposition, thereby adding time and cost to a building project to the point where it’s no longer feasible.

In the comments, Max Musicant offers an example of these chain reactions on the regulatory side:

[T]he zoning code is very often in conflict with how multi-story buildings are actually built – which also drives the almost constant demand for variances. If one wants to build a multi-story building, you are required to provide an elevator. If you need an elevator, you need to build 4-6 stories to spread out the cost. If you are building that high, you will likely be required to build parking on-site. If you have to build parking on-site in an urban location, it will have to be underground – which is very expensive. All of this can be avoided only if 1) you build one story suburban style or 2) your price points are affordable only to the wealthy.

The parking requirements are particularly onerous. Oregon Public Broadcasting took note of parking-less apartment building projects in Portland back in August. New buildings are going up without off-street parking, taking advantage of a change in the zoning code that allows exemptions from parking requirements under certain conditions. While the article’s narrative focuses on the kinds of people who would live without a car or without a designated parking space, this cultural focus is misplaced – as Max Musicant noted later in his comment, these kind of walk-up apartment buildings without off-street parking were commonly constructed in American cities in the not-so-distant past.

The real takeaway from the OPB piece isn’t about the behavior of the tenants, but of the impact on the bottom line of the builders:

One of those developers is Dave Mullens with the Urban Development Group. He opened the Irvington Garden in a close-in Northeast Portland neighborhood last year. It’s 50 units with no parking places.

“The cost of parking would make building this type of project on this location unaffordable,” Mullens says.

Mullens calls the difference “tremendous.”

“Parking a site is the difference between a $750 apartment and a $1,200 apartment. Or, the difference between apartments and condos,” he says.

In other words, these kinds of regulations have severe costs. Taking Mullens’s price figure at face value, it’s not hard to see how removing a requirement like this would help market rate development target demand at lower price points. Likewise, it’s not hard to see how seemingly narrowly-focused and well-intentioned regulations can have much broader consequences when layered with other constraints.

Of course, these points are all on the micro scale of an individual project, but the macro scale also matters. The regulations have to allow the market to increase supply in order to meet demand – otherwise bad things happen. In the Washington Business Journal, Montgomery and Fairfax counties in metropolitan DC are concerned about housing becoming unaffordable even for those with six figure incomes.

It’s not until the end that simply relaxing zoning requirements to a) increase supply, or b) lower the cost of development (see the parking requirement discussion) is mentioned. The article does not mention option c), all of the above. Since there would still be a need for deeply affordable dwelling units, relaxing or eliminating parking requirements would be a good place to start in striking the balance between good, well-intentioned, and effective regulations and an efficient marketplace for new development.

What would land use regulatory reform look like?

Law Library. CC image from Janet Lindenmuth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Enhance the Flexibility of Parking Requirements

Change Environmental Review Thresholds

Encourage Home Entrepreneurship

Expand Options for Accessory Dwelling Units and Rental Incomes

Expand Allowance of Temporary Uses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The difficulty of unintended consequences – airlines, HSR, and deregulation

Pittsburgh International Airport - CC image from Fred

Philip Longman and Lina Khan make the case for re-regulating America’s airlines, claiming that deregulation is killing air travel and taking de-hubbed cities like St. Louis with it (hat tip to Matt Yglesias). The authors do indeed present compelling evidence that airline deregulation has indeed shifted the economic geography of many cities in the US – but as Matt Yglesias notes (channeling the aerotropolis thesis), in many cases this is merely an example of the air travel network’s ability to emphasize agglomeration economies:

They observe that… once the imposition of market competition caused some medium-sized midwestern cities to lose flights, the per flight cost of the remaining ones went up. That tends to produce a death spiral. Eventually the market reaches a new equilibrium with fewer, but more expensive flights. Except that equilibrium tends to drive businesses out of town. And once Chiquita leaves town, Cincinnati will have even fewer aviation opportunities which will further impair the business climate for the remaining large companies in the city.

This is a great concrete and usefully non-mystical illustration of agglomeration externalities.

Yglesias argues that fighting these agglomeration economies is counter-productive, but that’s not the only flaw in Longman and Khan’s thinking. Using the example of Pittsburgh, where the America West-US Air merger meant PIT losing hub status, they cite examples of the problems this represents for business travel:

K&L Gates, one of the country’s largest law firms, used to hold its firm-wide management meeting near its Pittsburgh headquarters, but after flying in and out of the city became too much trouble, the firm began hosting its meetings outside of New York City and Washington, D.C. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, the biggest employer in the region, reports that its researchers and physicians are increasingly choosing to drive to professional conferences whenever they can. Flying between Pittsburgh and New York or Washington can now easily take a whole day, since most flights have to route through Philadelphia or Charlotte. A recent check on Travelocity showed just two direct flights from Pittsburgh to D.C., each leaving shortly before six in the morning and costing (one week in advance) $498 each way, or approximately $2.62 per mile.

The problem is that Pittsburgh to New York and Pittsburgh to DC aren’t all that long as the crow flies. Longman and Khan explain why that’s problematic, thanks to those pesky laws of physics:

One reason this business model doesn’t work is that it’s at odds with the basic physics of flying. It requires a tremendous amount of energy just to get a plane in the air. If the plane lands just a short time later, it’s hard to earn the fares necessary to cover the cost. This means the per-mile cost to the airlines of short-haul service is always going to be much higher than that of long-haul service, regardless of how the industry is organized.

Indeed, part of the economic logic of the airline hub was to ferry passengers to the hub via loss leader (or, hopefully, less profitable) short-haul routes so that they can then use the more profitable long-haul services – transcontinental and international flights, and the like. The problem is that Longman and Khan can’t see beyond the end of the runway. We have a transportation technology that has a different economic calculus, one that works well for those shorter trips up to about 500 miles – high speed rail.

This isn’t to counteract Matt’s first point – just because HSR can make travel time competitive with air travel over such distances does not mean building it will be cost-effective, but the broader point is about the need to think beyond the modal silos. Current rail service from Pittsburgh to DC and New York isn’t time-competitive with flying, even with those connecting flights. But HSR could be. Indeed, given the current economics of the aviation industry, HSR ought to have a larger role in key corridors.

Indeed, Longman and Khan do consider rail in their article, but they pick out the history of railroad regulation instead:

By the 1880s, the fortunes of such major cities as Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Cincinnati rose and fell according to how various railroad financiers or “robber barons” combined and conspired to fix rates. Just as Americans scream today about the high cost of flying to a city like Cincinnati, where service is dominated by a single carrier, Americans of yesteryear faced impossible price discrimination when traveling or shipping to places dominated by a single railroad “trust” or “pool.”

This, more than any other factor, is what led previous generations of Americans to let go of the idea that government should have no role in regulating railroads and other emerging networked industries that were essential to the working of the economy as whole.

The problem with applying this logic to the current airline situation is that the railroads of the turn of the century didn’t just have a monopoly over a given town as the sole operator of service along the line, but they had a monopoly on the very technology that could offer such increases in mobility.

That technological mobility is no longer the case. The excellent Mark Reutter article The Lost Promise of the American Railroad (now behind a paywall) documents the many reasons for the decline of American rail, including new competing technologies (both air travel and cars taking away long distance travelers as well as commuters), outdated regulations (such as WWII era taxes meant to reduce unnecessary travel during the war – and were quite successful at doing so – that remained in place until the mid 1960s), direct subsidization of competitors by the government (see taxpayer funded highways and airports, in the face of largely privately financed and taxed rail assets), and differing regulatory regimes.

The regulations present a compelling story. The original regulations, as noted by Longman and Khan, were devised in an era before heavier-than-air human flight had even occurred – yet alone before the rise of commercial aviation. Yet, the regulations devised by the Interstate Commerce Commission (formed in 1887) were the basis for a portion of the blame for the decline of American rail less than a century later. Longman and Khan defend the need to regulate, despite these shortcomings:

To be sure, any regulatory regime can degenerate and wind up stifling competition, and the CAB of the late 1970s did become too procedure bound, ruled, as it came to be, by contending private lawyers rather than technocrats. It would have helped, too, if the country had not largely abandoned antitrust action after the Reagan administration. But even strong antitrust enforcement wouldn’t have helped that much, because airlines— just like railroads, waterworks, electrical utilities, and most other networked systems—require concentration both to achieve economies of scale and to enable the cross-subsidization between low- and high-cost service necessary to preserve their value as networks. And when it comes to such natural monopolies that are essential to the public, there is no equitable or efficient alternative to having the government regulate or coordinate entry, prices, and service levels—no matter how messy the process may be.

While this can be a compelling case for the need for regulation in the abstract, it doesn’t present a compelling case for the content of those regulations. How can these regulations possibly change to reflect changing economic realities, such as the rise of new technology?

Chris Bradford put forth an interesting idea regarding land use regulation: give all zoning codes an expiration date (a similar idea to the zoning budget). If the anti-trust and equity concerns are so great as to require this kind of regulation, requiring some sort of periodic review is an interesting idea for simulating some of the innovation and competition that a freer market might provide.

The extreme positions aren’t that illuminating. Likewise, merely promoting the idea of regulation in the abstract (without speaking to the content and effects of those regulations) isn’t helpful, either. The specifics matter. Regulation for the sake of regulation is pointless, and we must have mechanisms for continual re-evaluation of the regulations we do have to ensure they actually work towards our stated policy goals. All too often, this re-evaluation falls short.

This isn’t meant to be a broadside against regulation – far from it. There’s clearly a role for it. Instead, I ask for periodic review to ensure the regulations are helping achieve our objectives rather than hindering them. Likewise, the inevitable reality is that whatever regulations we impose now will have unforseen, unintended consequences.

Institutional hurdles to dense infill development

dc cranescape - CC image from yawper

A common theme is emerging among those thinking and writing about cities, from Ryan Avent to Ed Glaeser to Paul Krugman – our land use controls have stunted growth in our developed and productive areas – our cities. So, a simple fix would be to just allow more development, right? Glaeser makes the case that one American city, Chicago, has done a pretty good job of that, and as a result housing prices there are low relative to other large cities.

But for anyone who’s watched the intense battles over seemingly innocuous projects in our cities, it’s obvious that simply allowing more development isn’t that simple. No matter the reasonable arguments in favor of such development, opposition is often intense and emotional, and the institutional decision making processes favor delay and often unfavorable decisions in terms of increasing urban densities.

A few weeks ago, Austin Contrarian posted about a new draft paper from David Schleicher at George Mason. Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading and sharing some reactions to the paper in my del.icio.us sidebar feed (a workaround for my use of the sharing features of the new Google Reader). I’d like to compile some of those thoughts (and somewhat related posts) here. First, the abstract of Schleicher’s draft paper:

Generations of scholarship on the political economy of zoning have tried to explain a world in which tony suburbs run by effective homeowner lobbies use zoning to keep out development, but big cities allow relatively untrammeled growth because of the political influence of developers. Further, this literature has assumed that, while zoning restrictions can cause “micro-misallocations” inside a metropolitan region, they cannot increase housing prices throughout a region because some of the many local governments in a region will allow development. But these theories have been overtaken by events. Over the past few decades, land use restrictions have driven up housing prices in the nation’s richest and most productive regions, resulting in massive changes in where in America people live and reducing the growth rate of the economy. Further, as demand to live in them has increased, many of the nation’s biggest cities have become responsible for substantial limits on development. Although developers are, in fact, among the most important players in city politics, we have not seen enough growth in the housing supply in many cities to keep prices from skyrocketing.

This paper seeks explain these changes with a story about big city land use that places the legal regime governing land use decisions at its center. Using the tools of positive political theory, I argue that, in the absence of strong local political parties, land use law sets the voting order in local legislatures, determining policy from potentially cycling preferences. Specifically, these laws create a peculiar procedure, a form of seriatim decision-making in which the intense preferences of local residents opposed to re-zonings are privileged against more weakly-held citywide preferences for an increased housing supply. Without a party leadership to organize deals and whip votes, legislatures cannot easily make deals for generally-beneficial legislation stick. Legislators, who may have preferences for building everywhere to not building anywhere, but stronger preferences for stopping construction in their districts, “defect” as a matter of course and building is restricted everywhere. Further, the seriatim nature of local land use procedure results in a large number of “downzonings,” or reductions in the ability of landowners to build “as of right”, as big developers do not have an incentive to fight these changes. The cost of moving amendments through the land use process means that small developers cannot overcome the burdens imposed by downzonings, thus limiting incremental growth in the housing stock.

Finally, the paper argues that, as land use procedure is the problem, procedural reform may provide a solution. Land use and international trade have similarly situated interest groups. Trade policy was radically changed, from a highly protectionist regime to a largely free trade one, by the introduction of procedural reforms like the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, adjustment assistance, and “safeguards” measures. The paper proposes changes to land use procedures that mimic these reforms. These changes would structure voting order and deal-making in local legislatures in a way that would create support for increases in the urban housing supply.

Bold is mine.

In other words, the procedural causes of slow zoning approvals are systemic. It’s a similar argument to that in favor of the “zoning budget,” some procedural change to give the broad yet shallow interests in favor of development an equal say to the narrow and intense sentiments often in opposition.

Matt Yglesias takes Schleicher’s lead and looks at this in the political context of urban governance:

In other words, if U.S. cities had regularized party systems each city would probably have something like a “growth and development party” that pushed systematically for greater density. Its members and elected officials would, of course, have idiosyncratic interests and concerns that would sometimes cut across the main ideology. But the party leaders would be able to exercise discipline, the party activists and donors would push for consistency and ideological rigor, and it’d be off to the races. Instead, most big cities feature what really amounts to no-party government in which each elected official stands on his or her own and overwhelmingly caters to idiosyncratic local concerns rather than any kind of over-arching agenda. But different institutional processes could change this, and create a dynamic where growth, development, and density are more viable.

Richard Layman often speaks about the “growth machine” thesis of cities, but I don’t know that it accounts for the more procedural hurdles ‘regular’ infill development encounters, as opposed to big ticket projects.

At the Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger asks: should building taller should be easier?

But how do you grow denser if you can’t grow up? At a certain point – whether it’s in downtown Austin or near a suburban Boston transit station – communities will exhaust the real estate that exists below building height limits imposed years ago for safety, continuity or aesthetics. And then what? Will people let go of these rules?

Given DC’s height limit, Badger focuses on some examples of DC’s stunted growth and the practical implications of such a policy.

Ryan Avent chimes in at The Economist:

Part of the problem, I think, is that people view the built environment as primarily aesthetic in nature. Most of us live in one building and work in another, and almost every other structure in the city is essentially decoration for our lives; I’ve been in a lot of Washington buildings, but my primary interaction with the vast majority of Washington structures is a street-level view of their exterior. The nature of this interaction is such that we underappreciate the built environment as an input to production. It is clear, for instance, that people and machines are critical to the functioning of the economy. There would be huge concern if the government of a city declared that firms located within its boundaries could employ at most 30 workers using 15 computers. But the built environment is just as important a part of the production process; firms pay eye-popping rents for Midtown offices and Silicon Valley real estate because they anticipate getting a good return on their investment. In the same way that a firm which pays out millions in salary or to use a piece of capital equipment also anticipates getting a good return on that investment.

Indeed, the costs of limiting density (or of delay via uncertain procedural approvals) all impose costs that are often hidden, but nevertheless real. And, sometimes counter-intuitively, the feared externalities of dense development such as traffic never materialize:

“What I’ve found is that what people envision has nothing to do with the reality,” [Roger] Lewis says. “What they envision is ugly buildings, more traffic.”

This sounds counter-intuitive, but taller buildings that are part of a walkable, transit-oriented community can actually help ease congestion. And there’s no reason for these places to be ugly. Tall buildings that make the best neighbors don’t feel like tall buildings at street level. They’re wrapped there in lively retail, townhouse fronts or inviting public space.

The aesthetic concerns over height and density are indeed overblown – good street-level urban design and architecture at the human scales are far more important to building a quality environment than the overall height of buildings. Obviously, taste in styles is a matter of personal preference, but we have a strong enough catalog of what works in urban design to get the broad principles of those designs into new development projects.

Unfortunately, the structure of the regulations and ordinances seldom make quality development the path of least resistance for a developer – again highlighting a procedural, systemic argument.

Generational regulation and institutions

Two somewhat linked thoughts from the feed reader in the last week.

Neil Flanagan, on the generational shifts amongst environmentalists from the literal to the abstract:

My (undeveloped) conjecture is: the older generation sees environmental problems from an intuitive (fishkills & pesticide) perspective, whereas the later generations see the issue in terms of abstractions (%CO2 over 10,000 years). I think I can say that ecology is based on systems thinking. “Ecosystem,” after all, precisely refers to an interrelated organization. That complex activity can only be understood through abstractions that make consequences more intuitively threatening.

But the older generation seems to approach an environmental issue as perceptible, in that anyone can readily see the links and the loops and understand their consequences. You cut down a tree, and this directly harms the environment and limits one’s access to it. A particular, standing in for the general, is irrevocably lost. Building where there once was a grassy patch is paving over paradise, and a building that brings any cars to the neighborhood is causing pollution.

The primary enemies of the 1960s were intensely graphic horrors such as the burning Cuyahoga, broken bird eggs, and the disfiguration wrought by thalidomide. The problems were so obvious, you could see them with your eyes, and that his how we noticed in the first place. For the generation brought up during an era of global warming, the agents are more nefarious. How does one picture a rise of water over decades? How do you draw the cancer cluster caused by dioxins in an aquifer? You have to rely on the numbers.

This kind of paradigm shift obviously impacts the way we regulate our environments. We, as a society, structure our response (often via regulation) to how we’ve defined the problem.

Alon Levy on highways and cost control, and the role of a particular moment of time in shaping our regulations and institutions:

Second, it reminds us that many of the rules that are currently associated with government dysfunction were passed with opposite intent and effect back in the Progressive Era. Lowest-bid contracts were an effort to stamp out corruption; civil service exams were an effort to reduce patronage; teacher tenure was meant to make teachers politically independent; the initiative process was intended to give people more control over government. All of those efforts succeeded at the time, and took decades of social learning among the corrupt and incompetent to get around. Although programs built under these rules often turned out badly, such as the Interstate network, with its severe cost and schedule overruns, this was not due to the contractor collusion seen in the 1910s or today.

Combine the effects of unintended consequences, changing paradigms and a shifting understanding of the issues at hand, institutional momentum, and you can end up with the kind of slog we have.

There are questions of rigidity and enforceability to ensure that regulations have ‘teeth,’ but adaptability is also key. Defining the scope of the regulation is also a critical element. Frankly, aside from constant review and reevaluation, I’m not sure there’s any way to future proof these kinds of institutions.

Nightlife agglomerations & the corner bar

The Corner Bar, Divernon IL - CC image from Randy von Liski

A few booze-related items I thought I’d comment on:

The Hill is Home takes note of ANC 6B‘s seemingly preferred method to avoid “Adams Morganization” – a moratorium on all new liquor licenses. Nevermind that the trigger for this fear of Adams Morgan is Moby Dick House of Kebob – which makes me think those leveling this barb have neither visited Adams Morgan recently nor dined at Moby Dick.

Matt Yglesias notes that such efforts to control liquor licenses is fighting the natural tendencies urban economics, where things like to cluster. That’s what cities are, after all – clusters and agglomerations of people, firms, skills, capital, etc. Yglesias makes a great point about the appropriate scale of governance of these issues. While small, local groups (such as an ANC) might be affected by a new bar or restaurant, the practice of giving them veto power over things like liquor licenses has some severe implications:

The bigger question here is about levels of governance. Insofar as you empower residents of my building in DC to make the decision, we will attempt to regulate the food service establishments on our block so as to minimize late-night noise. After all, the service sector jobs lost in the process aren’t the jobs that we do while as homeowners we bear the losses of reduced property values on the block. And to simply disempower us, as a block, would be arbitrary and unfair. But empowering each and every block leads to highly inefficient outcomes with the bulk of the pain felt by low-income people and there’s no obvious reason of justice to think this kind of hyper-local empowerment is more legitimate than taking a broader view would be.

Ryan Avent adds on, noting that these kinds of restrictions and inefficiencies lead to poor outcomes for consumers:

That’s largely because it’s very difficult to open new bars. And the result is a pernicious feedback loop. With too few bars around, most good bars are typically crowded. This crowdedness alienates neighbors, and it also has a selecting effect on the types of people who choose to go to bars — those interested in a loud, rowdy environment, who will often tend to be loud and rowdy. This alienates neighbors even more, leading to tighter restrictions still and exacerbating the problem.

Sadly, this is the kind of dynamic that’s very difficult to change. No city council will pass the let-one-thousand-bars-bloom act, and neighbors can legitimately complain of any individual liquor license approval that it may lead to some crowded, noisy nights. It’s interesting how often these multiple equilibrium situations turn up in urban economics. In general, they seem to cry out for institutional innovation.

Avent specifically laments DC’s lack of the ol’ neighborhood corner bar. Having been born and raised in the boozy midwest, where the small, corner bar is an institution and people drink alcohol the way others drink water, I miss the corner bars, which aren’t as common as they could be in the District.

One of the problems is in the tools used to limit these licenses. As Avent and Yglesias note, the kinds of tools bandied about by ANCs lead to an inefficient marketplace. Instead of preventing Adams Morgan, something like a moratorium ends up ensuring a slippery slope towards “Adams Morganization” rather than preventing one.

On the broader issue of retail mix (ANC 6B’s stated reason to oppose new liquor licenses), the December issue of the Hill Rag had two contrasting pieces on the issue of retail on Barrack’s Row. The first discusses potential options – none of which seem palatable for actually encouraging retail. Regarding a moratorium, the impact is exactly what Avent describes:

One problem he cites is that it seems to be “too easy to become a bar or pub once you have the license.” So, even if there is a moratorium on new licenses, there is always the chance that existing licenses can morph from restaurants, which most neighborhoods don’t mind, to bars that operate later and attract different customers.

Another suggested tool is a zoning overlay district, but such a tool is a mismatch between the stated problem and solution. Zoning is best used to regulate the physical form and the use of buildings, broadly defined. Zoning can separate a retail use from a residential one, or an office use from light industry – but it is not an adept tool to parse out specific kinds of retail, or in differentiating between Moby Dick and Chateau Animeaux. The issue of bars and liquor licenses is more an issue of how those physical spaces are programmed. Zoning is not a good tool to control these kinds of issues, and these types of regulations often backfire.

Refreshingly, another article in the issue (about parking, no less) from Sharon Bosworth of Barracks Row Main Street gets at the real reason 8th St SE is more favorable to bars and restaurants instead of retail:

By mid 2009, The Wander Group, consultants who make saving America’s historic corridors their specialty, reported back to BRMS: our commercial corridor, specified by none other than Pierre L’Enfant in 1791, is today uniquely suited to businesses requiring small square footage because of the antique proportions of our buildings which are well protected in the Capitol Hill Historic District. Restaurants require small square footage and restaurant owners would always be on the hunt for charming, historic sites. Wander Group predicted more restaurateurs would find us, and so they did. Our tiny buildings are difficult (but not impossible) for most retail footprints, yet they work perfectly for restaurants.

In addition to those challenges, there’s the broader issues facing retail – online competition, fighting against the economies of scale for big box and chain retailers, etc.

Instead, we have an industry that works well in an urban setting and wants to cluster here. Here’s one vote in favor of more corner bars.

Skylines and Helipads

One thing that always struck me about LA – whether from browsing Google Maps or from Die Hard – is that there seemed to be a lot of helicopter landing pads on top of high rise buildings. Was this for movie filming opportunities, or perhaps thinking of helicopters as a means to bypass LA’s traffic? Curbed LA (via planetizen) has the answer – codes:

Remember “LA Law”’s opening shot, the close-up of an ’80s-era downtown? If the city looks a lot better today, one thing that hasn’t changed about downtown is its flat skyline. The boxy look of the city’s buildings isn’t due to lack of architectural creativity, but the result of a Los Angeles Fire Department code requiring helicopter landing pads on all tall buildings.

Architects and other interested parties are in favor of stripping the requirement in order to give designers more freedom in crafting a dramatic skyline for the city.

The helipad rule, mandated on all buildings 75 feet or higher, was born out of statewide fire codes that emerged in the 1970s, according to Stormes. Long Beach has the same rule, as do parts of Orange County. Los Angeles County also has a similar code. San Diego used to have the helipad rule, but dropped it, to the delight of architects in that city. (“Architecturally, it’s definitely enhanced the skyline,” says San Diego-based architect Joseph Martinez, of having the rule changed. His firm Martinez + Cutri Corporation Architects has put up five high-rises since the requirement was dropped.)

Fire safety experts believes LAFD’s history with the helipad is tied to its long-standing Air Operation division. Since 1962, the LAFD has maintained an aerial division; today, it has six helicopters, a far bigger fleet than most other cities. If the division is constantly busy—rescuing hikers from canyons, or fighting wildfires–the helicopters are rarely used to fight high-rise fires.

But the instances have been dramatic: In 1988, a fire tore through the 62-story First Interstate Bank Building (now the AON Building) downtown. Pilots in LAFD helicopters could see “a man waving frantically from a 50th-floor window,” according to a Los Angeles Times report, and were able to direct firefighters inside the tower to him (the man later died). Helicopters also delivered firefighters to the roof, and evacuated wounded people.

Laments about architectural creativity sound similar to complaints about DC’s height limit.

Part 2 continues here.

A matter of language – defining congestion and sprawl

CC - by Atwater Village Newbie

Ahh, the power of creeping bias in language (hat tip to Jarrett Walker):

Everyone at the City should strive to make the transportation systems operate as efficiently as possible. However, we must be careful how we use efficient because that word is frequently confused with the word faster. Typically, efficiency issues are raised when dealing with motor vehicles operating at slow speeds. The assumption is that if changes were made that increase the speeds of the motor vehicles, then efficiency rises. However, this assumption is highly debatable. For example, high motor vehicle speeds lead to urban sprawl, motor vehicle dependence, and high resource use (land, metal, rubber, etc) which reduces efficiency. Motor vehicles burn the least fuel at about 30 miles per hour; speeds above this result in inefficiencies. In urban areas, accelerating and decelerating from stopped conditions to high speeds results in inefficiencies when compared to slow and steady speeds. The there also are efficiency debates about people’s travel time and other issues as well. Therefore, be careful how you use the word efficient at the City. If you really mean faster then say faster. Do not assume that faster is necessarily more efficient. Similarly, if you mean slower, then say slower.

Of course, biased language can be very useful when advocating for a certain point of view. The real challenge is in sifting through biased language that poses as an objective statement.

Along those lines, Streetsblog notes how various congestion metrics, posing as an unbiased measure of the inadequacy of our transportation infrastructure, are actually misleading in terms of the impacts on our commutes and our land use choices. They look at a recent report from CEOs for Cities:

The key flaw is a measurement called the Travel Time Index. That’s the ratio of average travel times at peak hours to the average time if roads were freely flowing. In other words, the TTI measures how fast a given trip goes; it doesn’t measure whether that trip is long or short to begin with.

Relying on the TTI suggests that more sprawl and more highways solve congestion, when in fact it just makes commutes longer. Instead, suggests CEOs for Cities, more compact development is often the more effective — and more affordable — solution.

Take the Chicago and Charlotte metro areas. Chicagoland has the second worst TTI in the country, after Los Angeles. Charlotte is about average. But in fact, Chicago-area drivers spend more than 15 minutes less traveling each day, because the average trip is 5.5 miles shorter than in Charlotte. Charlotte only looks better because on average, its drivers travel closer to the hypothetical free-flowing speed.

The Streetsblog Network chimes in, as well:

The problem was, the analysis inevitably concluded — without fail! — that expanding a road would reduce air pollution.

That’s because the formula only accounted for short-term air quality impacts. Any given road project was likely to reduce congestion in the short-term and provide an immediate reduction in vehicle emissions. But the formula ignored long-term impacts of highway expansion — sprawl, longer commutes — which run directly counter to the cause of air quality.

City Block

a work in progress…