Tag Archives: zoning

Parking is in the news: the trend of cities rolling back zoning requirements for off-street parking

CC image from Peter Rosbjerg

CC image from Peter Rosbjerg

It’s hard to miss the discussion these days about parking, from sources as varied as Grist and the Wall Street Journal. Some links and brief discussion:

Each article highlights the challenges parking presents in an urban environment, and the additional challenges of inflexible rules requiring it. Matt Yglesias makes the case for the straight-up removal of all parking requirements as the simplest option, rather than the selective reductions in certain districts or reductions in the numerical requirement itself. He writes (quoting extensively):

First on a concrete level, this is a form of compromise that really fails in its goal of de-mobilizing opposition. If you are a street parker and your priority in parking policy is to defend your access to cheap street parking, then any reduction in parking mandates should spark opposition. Watering the reform down doesn’t lead to any genuine reconciliation of interests. What you need to do is recognize that street parkers have a real reason for wanting to keep mandates in place and find a way to buy them off. I think what I propose at the end of the column would do that. But once you’ve managed to configure reform as a win-win, then you should go whole hog.

The second is that gradualism, by focusing reform on the places that are most indisputably well-served by transit and pedestrianism, actually denudes parking reform of its main promise—transforming neighborhoods. If you imagine a neighborhood that doesn’t have great bus frequency or amazing neighborhood-serving retail and add some housing with less than one parking space per adult, then you’re going to get the additional customers that would be the basis for more frequent buses or new stores. Why would anyone in a neighborhood like that want a unit with no parking space? Why would a couple want a unit with just one space? Probably most people wouldn’t. But some non-zero quantity of people would do it for the main reason people everywhere put up with sub-optimal housing situations—to save money. But those initial people with fewer cars than adults become the customers for the services—whether that’s carshare or the bus or a walking distance store—that make the neighborhood more attractive down the road.

The way things work right now is that parking minimums risk destroying existing walkable neighborhoods through the reverse dynamic where subsidized car ownership leads to excessive car ownership leads to further auto-oriented development. Selective liberalization of parking rules can break that vicious cycle, which is nice, but only citywide liberalization drives the virtuous process forward.

The partial reductions in requirements are certainly due to political opposition to the idea. Even in places like Portland that had no requirements in some areas of the city have since re-instated limited requirements, ostensibly due to political pressure. However, while removing the offending language is unlikely to win any supporters, keeping it in might rile up even more opposition due to the inherent asymmetry to the procedures of changing regulations such as zoning codes.

On the merits of policy, removing the requirements would be a simple solution. Given that there is no ‘right’ answer to the number of spaces that should be required given the diversity of market segments a developer might build for, and given that in many cases, the ‘right’ number of spaces for a site and market segment could be zero, selecting any one number as the requirement (and getting it ‘right’) is an impossible task – unless that number is zero.

 

Development and the path of least resistance

A quick link that builds on a couple of themes I’ve written about here – development following the path of least resistance, and the need for cities and urban areas to grow in the face of demand for additional development in those places.

Winchester, MA - aerial image from Google Maps

Winchester, MA – aerial image from Google Maps

Zoning makes Massachusetts housing expensive – from the Boston Globe editorial board

Outside of Boston, developers often run into the challenges of regulatory requirements on new development, while city officials come to terms with the fact that the regulatory path of least resistance does not lead to the city’s desired outcomes.

Tidy downtown Winchester, just 20 minutes by train from North Station, should be a prime target for new development. According to one recent study, Greater Boston may need 19,000 new housing units every year just to keep pace with demand. And Winchester would welcome new residents: Town Manager Richard Howard says downtown restaurants and stores are eager to see new residential development on the city-owned lots, and that a planned upgrade to the commuter rail station next year could bring new vitality to downtown. The style of transit-oriented housing would also fall in line with the state’s environmental goals, which call for concentrating residential and commercial development near rail stations.

The obstacle, though, is the state’s dysfunctional ’70s-era zoning code, which sets the parameters for how individual cities and towns plan for development — and, in practice, sets up complex permitting rules and creates numerous opportunities for litigation. The process of securing approval to build new housing in downtown Winchester is so onerous, Howard says, that developers simply won’t bother. And in suburban towns where anti-development sentiment is stronger, the path is even steeper.

The end result? Most development follows the path of least resistance, and the path of least resistance leads to sub-optimal outcomes:

What it amounts to is the worst of all worlds. Sensible, smart-growth housing plans often languish, while single-family homes proliferate on large lots in sprawling suburban subdivisions — one of the few types of housing that can be easily built in Massachusetts under current law. State officials rightly fear that the housing market dynamics squeeze middle-class families so much that they’re endangering the state’s economic health. It also ensures that much of the growth that does occur is unplanned, expensive, and environmentally harmful.

Matching the functional outcomes of a host of complex regulatory processes to a planning vision is difficult, but necessary. It’s also not enough to look at incentives for particular planning goals. Instead, one must look at the entire development process. One must understand the tensions within real estate investment, between city-building and financial performance, how those tensions impact the decision-making of developers, and how the regulatory process creates a choice architecture for those developers.

Parking: often ugly, expensive

CC image from Joe Shlabotnik

CC image from Joe Shlabotnik

A few items on parking, and zoning requirements to provide it.

A case study of absurd and pernicious parking rules – from Grist (as part of a series)

Alan Durning documents many of the absurdities of zoning code requirements for off-street parking, focusing his own experience in Seattle. Durning does not own a car and wanted to renovate his existing attached garage into extra space in his house, but such alterations would not comply with the zoning code. Worse, the curb cut for his one-car garage meant one less on-street space.

A parking minimum of two (or more) is even worse public policy. Like a one-space minimum, a two-car minimum sometimes yields no net spaces: Many builders planning two-car garages install double-wide driveways, which block two on-street spaces. Worse, as I’ll argue in subsequent articles, off-street mandates tend to glut the market for parking spaces and trigger a chain of cause and effect that ensures massive subsidies to driving. Whatever the number, furthermore, required off-street spaces dramatically push up the minimum cost of building a house. Curb cuts, driveways, and parking spaces cost thousands of dollars. The requirements also result in more pavement getting poured, armoring our watersheds and increasing the quantity of polluted runoff reaching our streams.

In demonstrating the opportunity costs of parking, Durning compiles a laundry list of potential uses for his garage, other than automobile storage.

Ugly by law – from the Sightline Institute (also part of a series)

In the second installment of the series, Alyse Nelson documents the visual impacts of parking and parking requirements. The series also includes several examples of buildings erected prior to on-site parking requirements and those built after, demonstrating the impact of such demanding requirements.

Before parking minimums, buildings in Cascadia could be built to the property line because parking wasn’t a constraint. Now, developers must contend with building heights, setbacks for buildings, and parking regulations—all of which make it harder to develop affordable housing projects. This is especially true at medium densities and lower building heights because it’s harder to make parking garages or underground parking pencil for these smaller projects.

The economic argument is important. The space required to meet the requirements is both expensive to build and requires space to be used for parking, rather than the demanded use. Both of these factors serve to drive up the cost of urban development, but also make infill development difficult and more expensive. Meeting parking requirements in a greenfield site is not the greatest challenge, but meeting suburban-style requirements on an infill development site surrounded by existing buildings on all sides is difficult.

The parking garage, in practice – from Old Urbanist (also part of a series)

Charlie Gardner highlights several examples of garage parking used in practice around the world, providing a set of case studies for how developers deal with the spatial challenges of providing parking.

Outside of Toronto, a residential development features a fairly dense cluster of townhouses built atop of a common-use underground parking garage. Another typology is the ‘Texas Doughnut,’ featuring multi-family development wrapped around a shared-use above-ground parking garage:

This is of course the notorious “Texas Doughnut,” a mid-rise residential liner wrapped around interior structured parking.  The product of on-site parking requirements and building codes which permit cheaper wood framing for lower-rise buildings, these structures have proliferated throughout the Sunbelt, though they can be found, with less frequency, outside that geographic range. To the extent these cities are experiencing urbanization near their centers (hello, Dallas), this is the form that urbanism frequently takes, for better or worse.

Despite the prominence of the parking facilities and the transportation mode choices that suggests, note that many residents are required to walk non-trivial distances to reach their vehicles. In some cases, the walk may actually exceed three minutes for some residents.

In debates about parking in urban areas, pricing and availability tend to garner the majority of the attention, with proximity only a secondary concern (although many complaints about these first two issues implicitly involve proximity). Similarly, attempts to reduce reliance on the car through parking reform have tended to focus on eliminating or reducing parking maximums or establishing a market pricing mechanism for parking spaces, rather than considering the location of the vehicle itself.

It should be common sense, though, that in an otherwise reasonably walkable area with some transit options, the further the car is from one’s residence, the less use that car is likely to receive, since transportation is above all a matter of immediate convenience.
Charlie’s third installment discusses the challenges of building a municipal parking garage to boost a retail district, when all of the focus is on a handful of on-street spaces:
Washington Street itself offers only 22 spaces, in comparison to the over 1,000 public garage spaces in close proximity, plus many hundreds more in public and private surface lots. Although these spaces only supply a tiny fraction of the total, by their conspicuousness they play an outsized role, inducing many motorists to circle the block several times in hopes of winning the parking lottery, rather than simply proceeding to one of the garages.
The desire of merchants to compete with suburban shopping malls (easy, plentiful, cheap), contrasted with the spatial constraints of streetscapes planned well before the rise of the automobile results in “a parking policy at war with itself,”

“Hyperdensity” and providing cities the room to grow

CC image from Alan Grinberg

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Housing demand and the regulatory path of least resistance: Seattle and microapartments

Seattle Space Needle. Photo by author.

The feature piece in The Stranger last month delved deeply into Seattle’s trend of micro-apartments. Dominic Holden offers an in-depth look at not just the development trends, but the politics of the policy and planning conversation around development in an expanding city.

A few things popped out:

Room for rent: The article describes Seattle’s micro-apartments like this:

But inside each town house, the developer was building up to eight tiny units (about 150 to 250 square feet each, roughly the size of a carport) to be rented out separately. The tenants would each have a private bathroom and kitchenette, with a sink and microwave, but they would share one full kitchen for every eight residents. The rent would be cheap—starting at $500 a month, including all utilities and Wi-Fi—making this essentially affordable housing in the heart of the city.

If that sounds familiar, it should – it’s a situation similar to what already happens in big cities – renting a room in a group house. For a fraction of cost of a studio or 1-bedroom apartment, you can instead rent a room in a shared house. Considering that comparison, there is clearly a market for these kinds of spaces, and it’s not exactly new.

It ain’t much, but it’s home: While the rise of micro apartments is in the news in Seattle, it’s not a new thing for cities. Single-room occupancy (SRO) apartments have a long history in cities. The Blues Brothers highlighted this housing typology in their 1980 homage to the city of Chicago (“how often does the train go by?” – “so often you won’t even notice it.”).

Chicago’s WBEZ documented the dwindling numbers of SROs in the city, noting how this particular form of affordable housing has served a different market of individuals than the kinds of tenants mentioned in Seattle:

The Chateau is among the city’s shrinking pool of single-room occupancy hotels (map below), which offer an important housing option for people with low- and fixed-incomes. SROs also serve clients with troubled credit or criminal histories. The North Side has long been an SRO hub, but in recent years many such buildings have been purchased by developers and closed, only to reopen as more expensive housing — often beyond the means of prior tenants. Some SRO residents and community organizers worry the Chateau Hotel might be the next building in this trend.

The key difference is in the level of maintenance, and thus the target market. Nonetheless, it’s not hard to see how micro-apartments like likes in Chicago or the new construction in Seattle would appeal to a number of potential markets. None other than The Stranger’s own Dan Savage makes note that he lived in an SRO when first moving to Seattle, and “I wasn’t sketchy then, I’m not sketchy now.”

As a part of re-evaluating the SRO’s sketchy reputation, Next City focused on the role this type of housing can have in the future of our cities.

Meeting housing demand: As Holden notes, a dynamic and expanding city like Seattle needs room to grow, and needs opportunities for a wide range of incomes. He also makes note of the only sure-fire way American cities have to meet growing demand post-WWII – sprawl. “Accommodating our growing population by shipping workers into the low-density sprawl of the exurbs is not the way a city should operate.”

This isn’t unique to Seattle. Other cities (including New York and DC) are struggling to meet the demand for housing, and are considering micro apartments as one potential solution.

The politics of neighborhood opposition: Holden’s Stranger article offers a fascinating dive into the politics of those opposed to these projects. Holden examines the stated objections to these projects (which include everything but the kitchen sink – or, in the case of complaints about shared kitchens, why not bring it up?) and finds most opponents to be “dramatically exaggerating”  the impacts. “Tick through the neighborhood groups’ complaints,” he writes, “and they don’t add up to a logical argument.”

The two issues in opposition that Holden deems to have legs deal with a tax break loophole for these developments and an exemption from the city’s normal design review process (more on this later). The principal objection is that the apartments count as many units for the purposes of a tax break, but few units to avoid the threshold for additional design review scrutiny.

Holden’s article goes into substantial detail about his interactions with some of the individuals and groups in opposition, highlighting a kind of fanaticism. Even without the crazy elements, the strength of the opposition and relative lack of proponents involved in the discussion shows the kind of game theory challenge for urban development regulations – opposition is strong, but only in a narrow segment of the population; support is broad, but few individuals feel the need to organize in favor of developments like micro apartments. The existing legal procedures favor the organized, and therefore give organized groups leverage in discussions.

The limits of design review: While a procedural loophole exempts micro-apartments in Seattle from design review (and Holden flags this as a legitimate complaint from opponents), there are limits to what such reviews can accomplish. Holden notes that such reviews in Seattle are largely administrative. He also ferrets out the intentions of those pushing for design review: “What public reviews will do is give activists a chance to obstruct microhousing by quibbling with the appearance.”

Holden understands the importance of process, and the cost it can impose on any new development. Since developers must (at a minimum) cover their costs to even entertain a proposed project, any increase in procedural time and costs means those costs must eventually be baked into the cost of the final product.

If the city pursues design and environmental reviews—which could improve the aesthetics and aren’t inherently flawed processes—they should be administrative reviews. They should be conducted by city staff who notify the public but limit input to letters in writing. They shouldn’t involve neighborhood meetings that are easily sidetracked, shouldn’t require multiple revisions to the architecture, and shouldn’t allow appeals.

If the public is allowed to obstruct these projects—and their arguments thus far have been specious—the results will be predictable: Every time developers must redesign the buildings to satisfy the neighbors, every time the project is delayed for further review, every time a spurious appeal is filed, the more it costs to build that project. And that has one predictable outcome: It will make them more expensive to rent, i.e., fewer people will be able to afford them. In other words, whether deliberate or not, the effect of neighborhood advocacy and its input on development projects will make living in these places more expensive and push out workers with less money. That would seem like a terrible mistake—unless pushing out poor people is the actual goal.

Development following the path of least resistance: Given the increasing costs of compliance with the regulations and procedures, it’s not hard to understand why so much real estate development seeks to follow the path of least resistance.

Leaving aside the question of whether micro-apartments are a worthy policy for cities to pursue (as opposed to other expansions of zoning allowances), it does show the catch-22 inherent in things like design review: the additional regulatory review is required because the outcome those reviews shape is a desirable policy goal – but the very cost of the review makes achieving those desired outcomes less likely.

The ideal would be a case where the desired outcome is prioritized, given the path of least resistance. Holden’s discussion of keeping reviews administrative and not subject to lengthy public hearings and appeals is an example. I suspect that (with the exception of some special cases), changing the outcomes from the path of least resistance cannot be accomplished through de-regulation alone.

However, the larger question looms in the background: what agreement is there about the most desired outcomes?

 

Development costs and housing affordability

Vancouver towers along False Creek. Photo by author.

Two competing narratives often emerge when talking about policy responses to housing costs. One asserts that lowering the costs of construction and development will allow those savings to be passed on to eventual users of the real estate; the other asserts that markets set prices, and lowering the cost of development would yield pure profit to developers who will charge what the market will bear. So, which is it? The Vancouver Sun has a series of articles on housing affordability in Vancouver, BC. One of these articles focuses on development impact fees(among other causes) and their role in affordability. The two basic narratives are on display:

“The significant cost premiums of building new homes in Vancouver, compared to Surrey, leads to two observable results,” said Anne McMullin, president and CEO of the Urban Development Institute. “Either the increased costs will inevitably be passed on to homebuyers or the viability of building new market housing will be suppressed. Regardless, the end game is a more unaffordable and less socially sustainable city.”

She says the most obvious way to address affordability is to look at the costs and supply of housing.

“Costs affect supply — if it’s too expensive to build, you’re going to limit the supply. But we still have the demand. There’s always going to be a demand — there are buyers who can afford it.”

But Brian Jackson, the City of Vancouver’s general manager of planning, says market demand drives the price of housing much more than the costs of development.

“If we took $1,000 off the cost of the CACs or we took $1,000 off the cost of the DCLs,” Jackson said, referring to two types of city development fees, “is the developer going to take $1,000 off the cost of selling the house? I don’t think they would – they’re going to get the highest price that they could.”

These two narratives aren’t necessarily at odds with one another. In the short run, a small decrease in development fees (thereby lowering the cost of development) wouldn’t likely lower costs. However, the total fee amounts per unit in Vancouver are substantial – on the order of $76,000 per unit, according to the Sun’s figures. That’s roughly equivalent to the cost of an underground parking space. If you were to remove the fees, would developers merely pocket the difference as extra profit? Recall research on the liberalization of parking space requirements in Los Angeles: removal of these requirements lowered the cost of development in Downtown LA, but the results were not merely additional profit for developers. Instead, the lower development costs allowed developers the flexibility to build for a wider variety of sub-markets and price points.

Instead of the high-cost regulations forcing them to build Cadillacs, lower costs allow them to build a wider variety of products to meet a wider range of price points. If the costs are too high, developers have little choice but to aim for the luxury submarkets.

Markets do indeed set prices; and in the short term, developers won’t necessarily lower their prices. However, the markets are deeper and more complex in the longer run and allowing flexibility to build to those submarkets will produce a wider range of products, not just catering to the luxury set. As that housing ages, it can filter to lower-priced submarkets. Filtering isn’t a set policy so much as it is a description of  how housing markets work.

Note that some of these Vancouver fees might only apply to units in re-zoned developments. However, that raises the question of if there is enough by-right development capacity not just within a city or political jurisdiction, but in areas with demand for market-rate development. Also note that in many places, by-right development is increasingly rare, subject to negotiation and incentives as a part of the approvals process. A profile of New York’s Amanda Burden in last year’s New York Times noted that “there really doesn’t seem to be any true as-of-right development anymore.”

Those development fees aren’t just collected for fun, however. They’re paying for something. However, as is the case with parking, is collecting these fees the best way to accomplish the goals? Over at Human Transit, Jarrett Walker notes some of the perverse incentives baked into development fees, and the unintended consequences therein. Jarrett cites this post from the Pembina Institute, looking at the often-perverse incentives packaged into these fees:

Developers continue to build in sprawling greenfields because it is often cheaper and easier than building developments in walkable, transit-oriented neighbourhoods. Lack of supply means homebuyers are priced out of these locations and are literally “driven” to the urban and suburban fringes, where long and stressful auto commutes are required — and this only leads to more congestion.

Building transit is only one half of the solution. Toronto also needs to make sure we get the right mix of development in the right places to support and use transit infrastructure. Perhaps this current process of examining revenue tools will create an opportunity to do so.

As noted previously, a great deal of development will follow the path of least resistance. These kinds of fees might provide an easy way to fund new infrastructure, but they also add to the overall cost of development. Other tools for capturing that value and channeling it to the needed projects might offer fewer unintended consequences. One such unintended consequence is to push development into outlying areas, or force development to only serve the luxury submarket.

Prescriptive urbanism vs. market urbanism – the tension between demand for more housing and the desire to curate great cities

San Francisco skyline w/ crane. CC image from Omar Omar

Tales from two cities:

San Francisco: From Ilan Greenberg in The New Republic – San Francisco’s Gentrification Problem isn’t Gentrification. Greenberg compares the public debate (often writen, and discussed previously here) in San Francisco compared to more the more familiar narrative in other cities.

Here, the debate is dominated by fierce new champions of the anti-gentrification cause who aren’t concerned so much about the truly poor being forced from—or tempted out of—their neighborhoods. In their view, the victims of gentrification are also affluent, just less so than the people moving in. And the consequences are supposedly catastrophic not only to these relatively well-off people who are living amidst people even more well-off, but a mortal threat to nothing less than the rebel soul of San Francisco.

While the conversation may not fall into the same narrative as other cities, that doesn’t make it more useful. Greenberg notes that the San Francisco conversation can “suck the air out of a reality-based conversation” about affordability.

Greenberg spoke with Peter Cohen, a San Francisco housing advocate:

Sitting in the worn lobby of a hotel patrolled by security guards near Twitter’s new corporate headquarters, and armed with documents showing statistics on skyrocketing rents and rising tenant evictions, Cohen came to talk about disenfranchised people struggling to keep financially afloat and about the legal intricacies of deed-restricted affordable housing. He said he expects to have an uphill climb to reach new residents obsessed with buzzy restaurants and city officials in thrall to new tech business interests, but now also struggles to be heard over the din of middle-class residents moaning about the “gentrification” of their neighborhoods—residents who themselves may have been gentrifiers, or more likely followed in gentrifiers’ footsteps.

Greenberg writes of this narrative as if it were inevitable: “The compact city has a long history of clubby NIMBYism and knee-jerk preservationist politics that torpedoes even the most sensible development projects.” In addition to the outright opposition, fees and a long approvals process increases barriers to new housing supply in the city.

Some opposition to new development is that it makes the city dull. This isn’t the first time such arugments have come up. Inga Saffron, also writing in The New Republic made the same case that gentrifcation brings monotony. Writing specifically of San Francisco, Charles Hubert decries the “homogenization” of the city.

Part of the challenge is that rebuffing that monotony probably requires more development to meet the demand, not less. It’s a somewhat counter-intuitive proposition. Another challenge is the notion that cities do not (or should not) change, when history says otherwise.

Brooklyn: San Francisco’s experience is not to say that fears of monotonous development aren’t somewhat warranted. Unleashing the market alone won’t solve all urban ills. The Wall Street Journal looks at the results of one of New York City’s rezonings, ten years later, with some detrimental effects on 4th Avenue in Brooklyn:

But the Planning Department lacked such foresight in 2003 when it rezoned the noisy avenue to take advantage of the demand for apartments spilling over Park Slope to the east and Boerum Hill and Gowanus to the west. Focused primarily on residential development, it didn’t require developers to incorporate ground-level commercial businesses into their plans, and allowed them to cut sidewalks along Fourth Avenue for entrances to ground-level garages.

Developers got the message. With the re-zoning coinciding with the real-estate boom, they put up more than a dozen apartment towers, many of them cheap looking and with no retail at the street level, effectively killing off the avenue’s vibrancy for blocks at a time.

The city finally got wise and passed another zoning change last year, correcting some of these mistakes.

The shortcomings on 4th Avenue show the tension between market urbanism and proscriptive/prescriptive urbanism (and both words probably apply) but it also shows the power of incentives and how development tends to follow the path of least resistance. But it’s not like this outcome is solely a product of the market.

Some of the architects responsible for middle-brow architecture along Fourth Avenue are surprisingly candid about the other cause: They pass the buck to the developers who hired them and the pressure they faced to cut costs at the expense of aesthetics.

“I try to do my best for my clients and try to get them as big a building as possible,” says Henry Radusky, a partner with Bricolage Architecture and Designs LLC, which has built nine buildings along Fourth Avenue in the last decade.

One of Mr. Radusky’s buildings was 586 President St., one of three buildings on the same two-block stretch of the avenue that contribute to its canyon of mediocrity look. Another is the Novo Park Slope, at Fourth Avenue and 5th Street, a pallid, prison-like structure with parking and a medical facility at ground level that towers menacingly over its next-door neighbors.

That parking, of course, is the product of prescriptive regulation. Market pressures might impact some design choices, but the relative impact of those decisions (compared against higher quality materials or prioritizing retail uses on the ground floor) likely pales in comparison to the cost and spatial needs of parking.

Back in San Francisco, Peter Cohen is looking for ways to mesh the market and prescriptive elements together:

Even housing advocates like Cohen concede a hard ideological approach loses hearts and minds. “I also understand that we have a changed disposition toward cities. How can you find a sweet spot between these two forces—how do you bring in this creative class, but also make sure that people who toiled in the weeds are not simply squeezed out? How can you sort it without just saying that the market will take care of everyone, when obviously it won’t?”

Perspective on pop-ups

Recently, everyone in DC has been hopping on the bandwagon to bash an extensive redevelopment of a 2-story rowhouse into a 5-story condominium. Headlines make liberal use of middle finger references, with photo angles to match the description.

In the comments of one PoPville post on the house, a representative from DC’s Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs confirms that yes, indeed, this egregious “middle finger to taste and scale” is allowed by right. From @DCRA’s comment:

We have reviewed the approved building plans for this project and found the following:

1. The property is not within a historic district or designated as a historic landmark; it is zoned as C-2-B and is within the ARTS Overlay zoning district.

2. The approved height of the building shown on the plans is 59 feet, five inches, which is within the 65-foot height limit applicable a C-2-B zone.

3. The three-foot projection at the front of the building was properly approved by both DDOT and DCRA, and it meets District Building Code requirements.

4. The structural supports of the project, including its foundation, were reviewed and verified as meeting District Building Code requirements.

5. Because the property is within the ARTS Overlay zoning district, it is granted additional density. The project’s Floor Area Ratio (FAR) was approved at 3.94, which is below the maximum FAR of 4.0.

While we understand some residents’ concerns with the project’s aesthetics, in a non-historic district, the District’s Building Codes and zoning regulations focus only on safety and density.

This sounds like a perfectly conforming structure, but one wouldn’t get that impression from the photos of it on PoPville. Dan Malouff at GGW and BeyondDC offered a defense of the project, complete with photos from a different angle, putting the building’s neighbors into context. In particular, there’s a six-story apartment building under construction three doors down.

I visited the site to add my own photo from yet another angle:

A different angle on the 11th and V development. Photo by author.

When you look at both of the new developments from the southwest corner of 11th and V, things look a bit different. Considering how extensive this zoning combination (C-2-B/ARTS) is in the area, this shouldn’t be a surprise:

DC zoning map of 11th and V and surrounding area.

As you walk down V and look back to the west, you get even more perspective of nearby buildings on both sides of the street of similar height and similar zoning allowances. What a difference a change in angle makes:

Looking west down V st, showing buildings of similar height along both sides of the street. Photo by author. 

Dan makes the case that this small-scale, lot-by-lot redevelopment is a good thing. He cites the example of Amsterdam’s narrow houses built one by one. While I think the comparison might be a stretch, the point about flexible zoning allowing this kind of by-right redevelopment is a good one.

I would also note that by virtue of the C-class zoning, this stretch of V street is able to host a variety of building types and uses. Restaurants like Tacos el Chilangro wouldn’t be allowed to operate without it.

What would happen without parking requirements? Part 2 – Process

CC image from Joe Philipson

Following up on the previous post…

Matt Yglesias links to Michael Manville’s paper, also highlighting the dual areas of inflexibility with zoning parking requirements: that the requirement is fixed at a level above market demand, and that the parking must be provided on site. On top of the rules themselves, the additional process required to earn flexibility from the requirements adds substantial time and cost to any applicant seeking flexibility.

Matt highlights a piece from Aaron Wiener in the City Paper’s Housing Complex column that demonstrates the real-world impact of these requirements, not just for real estate developers but also for entrepreneurs looking to open a business in an under-served neighborhood:

It’s a challenge that’s playing out across the city, with some developers opting to apply for exemptions from the parking minimums, which are usually granted, while others are discouraged from undertaking projects. But it’s a particularly acute problem in Anacostia, where retail is sorely needed and the market is still sufficiently unproven that developers are reluctant to take risks on ventures that could lose money. A requirement to build parking or apply for a variance adds an extra expense that can scare would-be retailers away—particularly when there’s not even space on site for parking, a common scenario in the historic neighborhood.

The documented example of the former H St Playhouse (looking to move to Anacostia) is a contrast to the flexibility in LA, where the adaptive reuse ordinance allows for developers to provide parking off-site. In Anacostia, the theater has control of the required spaces, but those spaces are not located on the exact same property. One could argue that the law mandating parking is misguided, but even when a business seeks to address the spirit of that law, it gets stuck on the letter of the law.

Some flexibility from the rules can be granted, but that requires a great deal of additional costly process for the applicant. So much real estate development simply follows the path of least resistance, meaning that cities should ensure that the path of least resistance leads to the city’s desired outcomes. More from Wiener:

“The city gave $200,000 in a grant to renovate [the Playhouse space],” saysDuane Gautier, CEO of the nonprofit ARCH Development Corporation, referring to funding last summer from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities; ARCH also provided a $50,000 interest-free loan to the Playhouse. “So basically one part of the city government is hurting the other part of the city government who wants this done quickly. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

A change like LA’s ARO is a strong step in that direction. Similarly, DC’s pending zoning code re-write is also a step in the right direction. The process spelled out by law matters a great deal and has tremendous impacts on the outcome (the kind of ‘seriatim decision making’ highlighted by David Schleicher).

I’m also reminded of another good DC parking article from previous Housing Complex writer Lydia DePillis one year ago, containing many anecdotes from developers with underutilized parking and/or experiences where the parking requirements forced them to reduce a development in size or abandon it completely.

 

What would happen without parking requirements?

Downtown Los Angeles. CC image from Nadia Kovacs.

The paper of the day, from Michael Manville: “Parking requirements as a barrier to housing development: regulation and reform in Los Angeles”

Abstract: Using a partial deregulation of residential parking in downtown Los Angeles, I examine the impact of minimum parking requirements on housing development. I find that when parking requirements are removed, developers provide more housing and less parking, and also that developers provide different types of housing: housing in older buildings, in previously disinvested areas, and housing marketed toward non-drivers. This latter category of housing tends to sell for less than housing with parking spaces. The research also highlights the importance of removing not just quantity mandates but locational mandates as well. Developers in dense inner cities are often willing to provide parking, but ordinances that require parking to be on the same site as housing can be prohibitively expensive.

Background: Los Angeles had a lot of underutilized office buildings that were not competitive in the office market any longer. The city passed an adaptive reuse ordinance to encourage the re-use of these buildings by offering flexibility on zoning requirements, including use and parking.

The paper shows how developers for these conversions, given flexibility from the code by right, to build less parking than would otherwise be required (new construction in the area is still subject to the parking requirements of the code).  But, unlike the cases in Portland, all of the developers still provided some parking – this is Los Angeles after all (and yet another case for letting the market prevail based on local and regional conditions).

The second key area of flexibility is in parking location – developers wishing to re-use properties downtown could provide parking for tenants off-site, often allowing for shared use parking in under-utilized office garages nearby. Traditional requirements not only arbitrarily set the level of parking to be built, but also demand it be provided on site, even if off-site options may be more feasible and cost-effective.

In terms of the housing stock, this code flexibility allowed developers more flexibility in their target market. Those targeting the higher end provided more parking, but the lack of a hard requirement allows devleopers flexibility in which markets they target.  Parking has a great market value, of course, so the units built with fewer or no parking spaces would rent for a lower price, allowing the market to create a wider range of products.

The end result is more housing, a wider range of housing price points, a smaller supply of off-street parking spaces, and re-use of under-utilized buildings.

While this paper focuses on LA’s adaptive re-use ordinance, the same pricinples apply to zoning and parking requirements in general.