Tag Archives: zoning

Managing on-street parking: zoning is not the way

Park sign. CC image from Pixel Jones.

We don’t manage our limited parking resources very well. However, that leaves us lots of room to improve our policies.

A recent Freakonomics podcast entitled ‘Parking is Hell’ provides a nice entry-level synopsis of the challenges involved in using market forces to better manage this valuable resource. The podcast features interviews with parking scholars, including Don Shoup. They address the fallacy of the idea of ‘free’ parking, the idea of using price to better allocate this resource, and the practical challenges to better management of on-street parking (such as the abuse of handicapped parking placards, as well as the rampant illegality in parking practice).

Despite the cold, hard logic behind the idea of performance parking, it’s not an easy political sell. Similar experiences with de-congestion road pricing in Stockholm show reluctance at first, and then broad support for the program once the benefits can be demonstrated, and revenues directed towards locally-controlled improvements. Still, no one likes the idea of someone proposing an increase to your daily costs in exchange for uncertain benefits.

That risk-aversion applies to parking, too – and perhaps explains a great deal of the reluctance to embrace a whole host of parking reforms, both for on-street parking management, but also for zoning code off-street parking requirements. The evidence for the ineffectiveness of these requirements in managing on-street parking is huge; the unintended consequences are large.

Zoning requirements won’t manage on-street parking for you. Consider this case from Boston, where air quality regulations capped the total supply of off-street parking garages, but the city fails to manage on-street parking effectively:

The steep costs at our garages mean that only the well-off and the truly desperate ever wind up parking in them. The rest of us find ourselves in a never-ending chase for metered street parking, which is an absolute steal. Because the price is absurdly low for such a rare commodity—there are around 8,000 metered spaces in Boston—drivers are willing to circle the block for as long as it takes to find an opening, like vultures in search of prey. The $10-an-hour difference between a garage and a metered spot in Boston gives “drivers a license to hunt,” says Mark Chase, a local parking consultant,“but it’s not a guarantee of a parking place.” The result, naturally, is congestion. Studies from around the country have shown that as much as 34 percent of all traffic in downtown areas involves drivers just looking for parking spaces.

Meanwhile, Boston has set aside a ton of spaces for resident-only parking in neighborhoods, and it charges nothing for the permits to use them. And what happens when it doesn’t cost anything to keep cars parked on the street? They stay there. Today more than 311,000 vehicles are registered in Boston, and more than 87,000 of them have residential parking permits. Each of those cars takes up around 160 square feet—the size of a street spot—of prime city real estate.“You have some of the most valuable land on earth, and you’re giving it away for free to cars,” says Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, and the author of The High Cost of Free Parking. “It’s preposterous.”

Enter a new development proposal, aiming to build car-free, promising not to rent to car owners and therefore not make Boston’s off-street parking problem even worse:

Paul Berkeley, president of the Allston Civic Association, said residents support Mariscal’s plan for an airy, green building, but said the no-car idea would not fly.

“It’s well-intentioned and it could be successful, but people felt that in that location there was too much of a risk of people having cars and just putting them in front of houses nearby,” he said.

So, they tried to reconfigure the development with 35 spaces for the 44 units. Even that is not enough to satisfy the zoning code, as the article notes that the current code requires an absurd two spaces per housing unit. Patrick Doyle notes that the real problem here is not with community skepticism about all the new residents being car-free, but with the absurdly low price for on-street parking. Such ignorance of the basics of supply and demand is not a recipe for good management.

Consider the opportunity costs. It’s not as if requiring parking only hits a developer in his/her pocketbook (though it does). Parking takes up a lot of space, and the geometric requirements for cars to circulate into a garage and have appropriate turning radii to get in and out often do not match up with the geometry of small urban lots ripe for infill development. In Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger writes about the same Boston development:

His proposal also highlights the hidden reality – true in cities everywhere – that our modern buildings largely take their first architectural cues from cars.

“When you remove the car component as the main design challenge,” Mariscal says, “your way of thinking about design is completely different. The possibilities that open for a more environmentally friendly and human design – they are endless.”

Furthermore, the kinds of older neighborhoods we love in our cities usually pre-date zoning requirements for parking. Their very existence is non-conforming. When you suddenly add a very different geometry to design around as a legal requirement (the car and associated parking), you fundamentally change the shape and design of the kind of buildings you build and of the city that will result.

Do your requirements actually make sense? It seems like a basic question to ask. However, lots of requirements exist because they were the default when a code was written, often without much in-depth consideration or any easy mechanism to regularly re-evaluate them.

Consider New Haven, CT. The City asked some out-of-town developers what it would take to make New Haven an attractive place for them to do business. In the vein of a dating game show, the city wanted to know what a developer’s ‘turn offs’ might be:

Demands for lots of parking ranked high on the turn-off list.

“You asked what is an automatic turn-off. … Market research shows [the amount of parking] needed is X. We flip open the zoning code and we find out the requirement in the zoning code is two times that,” replied Patrick Lee, co-founder of a Boston firm called Trinity Financial. “It is a lightning rod … Oftentimes we often just say, ‘That one is too, too hard.’ … When the zoning catches up with the market or gets close to it, we’ll come on back and have the conversation [about building]. Even if you’re doing surface parking, it eats up so much land it ends up being a cost-driver in your pro forma.”

This raises the question: why even require parking at all if the market is a) willing to forgo it, or b) willing to build it? Eliminate that problem, and you don’t have to worry about forcing your zoning to “catch up” to the market. At the very least, some mandatory periodic review of the requirements (in the same vein as the zoning budget idea, but for a specific provision of the code) would help ensure the requirements in place make sense.

None of this changes the need for rational management of on-street parking. Zoning requirements cannot do that for you.

‘Snow’ links: finding the right level of regulation

Mush on my windowsill.

I’m sitting in DC, looking out a window at a mushy, mostly liquid ‘snow’ storm named after an obscure federal budgetary procedure. There’s a joke in there somewhere about failing to meet the hype. But instead, I’ll offer some links to articles of interest over the past few weeks.

Regulatory challenges. Slate blogger Matt Yglesias is buying a new house, and instead of selling his old condo, he plans on renting it out and turning it into an income property. He documents the bureaucratic red tape encountered in the process to make this business legal, highlighting the absurdity that drives people nuts about government bureaucracy – the fact that none of the hoops you must jump through seem to actually matter to the regulatory issue at hand:

The striking thing about all this isn’t so much that it was annoying—which it was—but that it had basically nothing to do with what the main purpose of landlord regulation should be—making sure I’m not luring tenants into some kind of unsafe situation. The part where the unit gets inspected to see if it’s up to code is a separate step. I was instructed to await a scheduling call that ought to take place sometime in the next 10 business days.

Yglesias notes that DC fares poorly on many metrics of regulatory efficiency and friendliness to entrepreneurs. Granted, those rankings all ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as they often fail to measure what really matters and instead focus on indicators not directly linked to entrepreneurship (there is also the matter of state-by-state rankings lumping in a city-state like DC into their metric – not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison).

The real issue, as Yglesias touches on in a later blog post, isn’t whether regulations are good or bad, but whether the regulations we have are effective and if they cover the right topics:

The way I would put this is that the American economy is simultaneously overregulated and underregulated. It is much too difficult to get business and occupational licenses; there are excessive restrictions on the wholesaling and retailing of alcoholic beverages; exclusionary zoning codes cripple the economy; and I’m sure there are more problems than I’m even aware of.

At the same time, it continues to be the case that even if you ignore climate change, there are huge problematic environmental externalities involved in the energy production and industrial sectors of the economy. And you shouldn’t ignore climate change! We are much too lax about what firms are allowed to dump into the air. On the financial side, too, it’s become clear that there are really big problems with bank supervision. The existence of bad rent-seeking rules around who’s allowed to cut hair is not a good justification for the absence of rules around banks’ ability to issue no-doc liar’s loans. The fact that it’s too much of a pain in the ass to get a building permit is not a good justification for making it easier to poison children’s brains with mercury. Now obviously all these rules are incredibly annoying. I am really glad, personally, that I don’t need to take any time or effort to comply with the Environmental Protection Agency’s new mercury emissions rules. But at the same time, it ought to be a pain in the ass to put extra mercury into the air. We don’t want too much mercury! We don’t want too much bank leverage!

The more ideological stance (regulation is bad!) might be easier to communicate; it might resonate with the public based on their experience at the local DMV. It’s a complicated reality, and our regulations not only need to reflect that, but also likely need periodic review and revision.

Regarding a common issue in the urban context, Matt writes:

“This city has too many restaurants to choose from” is not a real public policy problem—it’s only a problem for incumbent restaurateurs who don’t want to face competition.

This reflects some of the tension on liquor license moratoria in DC (see the discussion about IMBY DC). The contrasting position is that restaurants do indeed create some negative externalities that need to be addressed. The challenge for public policy is then in addressing the negatives without falling into the trap of mis-stating the problem.

Regulatory reform. Assuming we correctly state the problem, then what do we do to change things? DC is forming a task force to look at these issues. In some googling of related articles, I ran across an old op-ed from Helder Gil about a potential direction for regulatory reform, radical simplification:

One solution is the radical simplification of existing business laws and regulations. “Radical simplification” is the wholesale rethinking of a law’s original intent, its current actual effect and whether those two points still intersect in a way that advances public policy.

Consider the contrast to DC’s zoning regulation review process, and the power of the status quo bias. Even the terminology of ‘zones’ is no longer useful, Roger Lewis writes:

Let’s dump the word “zoning,” as in zoning ordinances that govern how land is developed and how buildings often are designed. Land-use regulation is still needed, but zoning increasingly has become a conceptually inappropriate term, an obsolete characterization of how we plan and shape growth.

I would go farther than Lewis and suggest that the terminology is not the only problem; the content of the regulations is also problematic. Lewis goes on to list numerous shortcomings of the existing regulatory framework – perhaps inadvertently making the case for radical simplification?

Beware non-governmental regulation. To be clear, these challenges are not solely governmental. The burden often falls on the government in protecting the public purpose, but governments are not the only entities with the common good in mind. Consider the home-owners association.

Last month, the Washington Post reported on an epic legal battle between a Fairfax County HOA and a member over a very minor size violation for a political sign. HOA representatives on a power trip sought to impose penalties for violating rules that were not expressly granted to the HOA in the association’s bylaws. The HOA lost the case, the resulting legal fees bankrupted the association, forcing it to pursue the sale of a privately-owned park area.

These kinds of battles are common – and often invoke words like ‘tyranny’. They highlight both challenges of regulation and also of governance. Clearly, the content of some regulations are an issue, but so is the process for changing or even just reviewing those regulations.

Perhaps HOAs are not strictly necessary for a grouping of semi-detached homes (as is the case in the Fairfax County example), but some level of common-area administration is necessary in multi-unit buildings, no matter how you slice it. The need for HOAs also raises the question about the role of home-ownership in multi-unit buildings and the regulatory environment that enables it (see Stephen Smith asking “why do condos even exist?” at Market Urbanism) – which, after all, is a relatively young and untested legal field.

Middle class in Manhattan?

Manhattan. CC image from sakeeb.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But northern Brooklyn is not brownstone Brooklyn.

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

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

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

Density – the limitations of zoning

San Francisco. CC image from C1ssou

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Parking tradeoffs – on-street and off-street

Requiring developers to build off-street parking is expensive. That’s the key takeaway from a City of Portland study on the impacts of parking requirements on housing affordability. (This study was linked to in a previous post) To illustrate the point, the city looks at a hypothetical development and considers a number of different scenarios for providing parking to the building. The results show the trade-offs involved. The method of providing parking not only adds to the cost, but also limits the ability of a building to fully utilize a site.

For example, providing parking via an off-street surface lot is rather cheap to build, but has a high opportunity cost – that land used for parking cannot also be used for housing. The study keeps the land area and the zoning envelope constant: that is, the off-street parking must be provided on-site, and you can’t get a variance for extra building height. The trade-offs for this hypothetical development, then, are between cost (and the rent you’d have to charge to get a return on your investment) and in utilization of the site.

Assumed cost per parking spaces are as follows:

Surface $3,000
Podium/Structured (above ground) $20,000
Underground $55,000
Internal (Tuck Under or Sandwich) $20,000
Mechanical $45,000

Apply those options to a hypothetical development site, and you can see the trade-offs emerge. In every case, requiring parking means fewer units can be developed, and each of those units is more expensive to provide.

Requiring parking makes all of the apartments more expensive, but for different reasons. The surface parking is cheap, but the real reason the rent is high is due to the opportunity cost – the surface parking option only allows for the development of 30 units instead of a hypothetical max of 50.

Underground parking is also substantially more expensive in terms of rent, but also in terms of construction costs – the rent increase isn’t that much higher than the surface option (in spite of the $50k per space cost differential) due to the fact that underground parking allows for substantial utilization of the site. Even underground parking does not allow for full utilization, as the ramps to the garage take up space that could be used for housing in the no-parking scenario.

Requiring developers to add parking in all of these cases jacks up the rent they must charge to make these developments pencil out. The underground parking example is a 60-plus percent increase in the monthly rent – and it’s a dollar figure that probably ensures that a developer couldn’t just rent out unused parking spaces and break-even on the proposition. Instead, that cost gets passed through to the renter – both the cost of the space, as well as the opportunity cost of not building more housing.

The other thing to remember from this is that all of those options for how to park a building might not be allowed. Tuck-under parking might make sense (get a few spaces at a reasonable cost), but if the zoning code requires more than 0.25 spaces per unit (as it does in Downtown Brooklyn), that method would not be allowed by the zoning code. Podium parking is also reasonable, but that means you’re devoting the entire first floor to parking – meaning you can’t use it for housing units or retail or any of the other ground-floor uses that make for vibrant streetscapes.

Framing the issue. One other page on Portland’s website does a nice job of framing the issue of zoning code reform for on-site parking requirements. Instead of talk about reducing on-site parking requirements, we’re talking about places where parking is allowed, but not required. Soldiers on the automotive side of the “war on cars” (a phrase worthy of the scare quotes) will frequently frame this as removing parking. This kind of language is both more accurate about potential changes and less inflammatory in skirmishes of this “war.”

More on-street parking isn’t always a problem. One of the fears of these parking-free developments is that not all of those residents will be car-free. The Portland study shows this to be true – but it also shows that this isn’t really a problem. Even at the peak utilization of on-street spaces surrounding these new parking-free buildings, 25% of the spaces are still available (page 2 of this document), meaning that there shouldn’t be a problem for residents in finding an on-street space.

Even if on-street parking isn’t actually a problem yet in Portland (no matter how it is perceived), that can always change. When demand for that parking exceeds the supply, then you turn to parking management.

Managing on-street parking. If we’ve established that off-street parking requirements increase the cost of housing, and we know that not all residents of a parking-less building will also be car-less, then management of scarce on-street parking will be critical. The Portland Transport blog points to a proposal in Portland that has a nice structure.

The proposal would divide part of the city into essentially three kinds of areas:

Commercial areas: all on-street parking is metered. Anyone may park, but all must pay.
Residential areas: residents (with permits) are prioritized, non-residents can park for free, but must obey time limits (similar to DC”s current RPP framework).
Bordering areas: on streets adjacent to commercial areas, all spaces are metered but those with residential permits do not need to pay the meters.

Now, the devil is always in the details for things like permit zone sizes, cost of the permits, meter rates, etc. However, the basic structure does a nice job of shifting the emphasis on what kind of parking should be prioritized in certain areas.

Beyond management. One benefit of allowing more parking-free development would be to increase density in the area, thereby supporting more transit service and key destinations within walking distance. The more parking-free units there are, the easier it gets for residents to live car-free. Each of these represents a bit of the virtuous cycle.

Parking, misunderstood

CC image from Atomic Taco

Let’s take a trip up and down the Northeast Corridor and look at recent parking news. All three show some misunderstandings about parking, cities, and markets. Time for some Shoup reading assignments!

New York: Looking to discuss changes to the zoning code parking requirements in downtown Brooklyn, the New York Times comes down with a severe case of windshield-itis:

In traffic-clogged New York City, where parking spaces are coveted like the rarest of treasures, an excess of parking spaces might seem like an urban planner’s dream.

Yet city officials, developers and transit advocates say that in Downtown Brooklyn, there is this most unusual of parking problems: There is simply too much of it.

Admittedly, many urban planning principles seem counter-intuitive at first glance. When you add in the challenge of altering a regulatory status quo (such as modestly changing the zoning code, as is proposed in Brooklyn), the weight of conventional wisdom is enormous.

Still, it’s interesting to see a parking glut framed as an “urban planner’s dream.’ (particularly when compared against later articles from DC) It’s sure not my dream, either in terms of result (excess parking) or process (via the unintended consequences of regulation). Building parking is expensive, so we don’t want to build too much of it. Requiring us to build too much means that those costs just get passed along to the rest of us.

It’s worth noting that New York is not proposing to eliminate these requirements and rely on the market to determine how much parking to provide, they are merely reducing the requirement from mandating 40% of new units have spaces (in a neighborhood where only 22% of households own cars!) to 20%. Why not reduce it to zero?

Likewise, there are likely opportunities for new developments to make use of the excess parking already built. Hopefully, those kinds of arrangements would allow for new buildings to still be parking-free if the market so desires. Nevertheless, a reduction in the requirement is moving in the right direction.

Philadelphia: A few miles south on the NEC, Philadelphia might be backtracking on parking, rather than moving in the right direction. Philly has already altered their zoning code to eliminate parking requirements in the city’s dense rowhouse neighborhoods. Now, members of the city council want to roll those changes back. The council’s interference in a code change that’s only been in effect for a few months is troubling, as is the lack of reasoning. From the Inquirer’s article on the topic:

“Most developers wish that they didn’t have to get approvals from anybody,” says Clarke. “I have to be responsive to the needs of the residents. They don’t have enough parking.”

Perhaps this is where a dose of that counter-intuitive planning wisdom would be useful.

The reasoning put forth for changing the rules back is equally troubling, particularly given the Philadelphia Planning Commission’s charge in rewriting the zoning code: reduce the need to grant so many variances. Attempting to graft a comprehensive zoning ordinance onto a pre-existing (and pre-automobile) cityscape is bound to be a challenge no matter what; but pushing a code to require elements so geometrically opposed to the pre-code fabric is foolhardy. Such changes, often made in the name of providing more parking only end up inducing unintended consequences. From the Next American City article:

Gladstein said the bill’s proposed changes could set Philadelphia back on the path back to when the city issued more variances than nearly any other big city in America because of unrealistic demands in the zoning code.

“There are many instances in rowhome neighborhoods where you simply cannot provide parking by right because of factors like narrow lot lines,” she said. “We thought these changes would send too many cases to the zoning board.”

Gladstein also noted that lack of a parking requirement in the original code was intentional, as on-site parking, which often manifests itself as a front-loading garage, actually diminishes the supply of public parking spaces.

A code that doesn’t respect geometry, doesn’t reflect the city’s history, and achieve its stated goals is a bad code. Here’s to hoping those changes do not go into effect.

DC: In the District, the parking conversations aren’t focused on zoning (yet! – but they will be, and soon), but rather the management of on-street parking spaces. Policy changes take a different tack than in Philadelphia – instead of providing parking for residents via zoning code requirements, the city is strengthening on-street protections for residents with parking permits.

The reaction is all over the map – Ward 1 Councilmember says this is about a future that “discourages car ownership,” yet the goal of enhanced residential permit parking protections is about “striking a balance in favor of those who are residents with stickers who paid for them.” Did those residents pay enough for a scarce resource? If the price reflected the scarcity of spaces, would there be as much of a parking problem? And how does making on-street parking for residents easier discourage car ownership?

Other elements of the Post parking article talk about the difficulty of parking for non-residents visiting the city, as well as the city’s efforts to re-purpose some curb space away from parking and towards other uses (such as protected bicycle lanes) – but fall into the trap of equating all things parking together. Metered, permitted, for residents, for visitors, using curb space for parking or for other uses – these are all big differences, and conflating them all together is problematic, and increases the chances of misunderstanding.

DC height limit trade-offs, part 2

DC skyline. CC image from James Calder

Continuing on the discussion of DC’s height limit (and potential changes to it), I wanted to take note of a few more articles on the subject. George Mason law professor David Schleicher (he of land-use law and procedure fame) asks height limit proponents six basic questions, all of which more or less ask proponents to weigh the trade-offs – or explain why they think the trade-offs do not exist. The six questions:

Do you believe supply is important in determining prices in housing and office markets?
Why do you think development should be spread out?
What effect do you think limiting heights has on agglomeration, including the depth of local markets and information spillovers?
Why do you think D.C. will grow without going up?
Do you think D.C. would instantly become as tall as New York upon repeal?
How much is the D.C. aesthetic worth?

All good questions. So much of planning work is about discussing these trade-offs; an honest discussion of the costs is a prerequisite.

One comment on numbers 5 and 6: DC can indeed go taller while still maintaining the aesthetic of a ‘flat’ skyline, if that is something of value to residents (and therefore worth the cost). The height limit’s maximum and the flat nature of DC’s skyline are two separate things; if DC’s height limit were set at 200′, we could expect buildings to eventually fill that envelope with numerous buildings up against that limit, rather than form the wedding cake shape of many other American skylines.

Indeed, if that flat-ness is what we value, then we shouldn’t fear adjusting the heights upward – opportunities to shape the city will still exist.

I also wanted to highlight a comment in Kaid Benfield’s original Atlantic Cities piece from ArtR:

1) at current demand for jobs and housing DC has at least a 30 year supply of land to add over 200,000 more jobs and 169,000 people without changes to zoning or the height limit (DC Office of Planning).

I don’t doubt that this is true, but the question of how much land is available gets back to the old real estate cliche of location, location, location.

2) Density through high rise steel and concrete construction will not increase housing affordability. Hard costs alone are over $200/sf with soft cost, land and profit you are well over $400/sf and with even minimal parking you are over $500/sf, thats $500,000 for a small two bedroom. To the extent high-rises syphon off high-income households that might stabilize less costly forms of housing but I am skeptical.

Art is making two points: one about costs, and one about filtering within the market. In terms of costs, Art is absolutely right – relaxing the height limit will not magically lower construction costs. However, couple that reform with others (such as the aforementioned reduction in required off-street parking) as well as efforts to speed approvals and reduce the lead time required for building and we’re on to something (all potentially positive outcomes of DC’s zoning code review).

The point about filtering is trickier. Certainly, in the abstract, adding more supply should relieve pressure on older housing units to filter up to more expensive submarkets, but the key phrase in all such abstractions is “all else being equal.” All else is clearly not equal, and I can’t blame someone for skepticism on the ability for upzoning to make this happen – particularly when such changes to the zoning code happen on an ad-hoc, case-by-case basis.

3) There is a difference between capacity and supply. Raising the height limit may increase capacity but it does nothing for supply. Supply is a function of developers meeting demand and development stops the instant prices stop rising.

While this point is also true, the nature of the equilibrium depends on the other factors influencing cost. For example, take the examples from Portland, where the elimination of on-site parking requirements allows some development to pencil out a lower price point.

There’s also a point to be made here about location. If our goal is to add supply, the market might be able to support a lot more supply in more desirable locations. However, if most of the District’s developable capacity (in point 1 above) is not in those locations, then it will take something else to turn that capacity into new supply.

4) There is nothing to suggest that height alone will increase demand. In fact, too much capacity can increase uncertainty because you never sure how much your competitor can absorb. Denver learned this when they down zoned neighborhoods and they took off.

I hope no one takes away the idea that changing the height limit alone will lead to some magical change in DC’s built environment. Given the fact that zoning is usually an even greater constraint (and given the procedural challenges it can impose), it shouldn’t be seen as a panacea.

Bad reasons to support DC’s Height Act

DC Skyline. CC image from Ed Uthman.

DC’s lack of tall buildings is certainly one of it’s defining characteristics. Given our human tendencies to be loss averse, to embrace the status quo, it shouldn’t be a surprise that changing such a characteristic can be shocking to some.

I’ve written on the height limit before, as have many others. The most recent defense of the law comes from Kaid Benfield (both at the NRDC and Atlantic Cities). Kaid outlines some good qualitative reasons to embrace the limit – unfortunately, marred by some of the serious shortcomings and logical fallacies from his other arguments in support of the limit. I share Ryan Avent’s frustration with some of the manners of argument.

As an example, some of the arguments Kaid presents in favor of the height limit, and a brief response:

Actually, DC can grow under current law. In 1950, with the height restrictions fully in effect, the city’s population was 802,178. In 2011, its estimated population was 617,996. The truth is that we were a “shrinking city” until about a decade ago, and we are nowhere near full capacity today.

It is misleading to call DC a ‘shrinking city’ solely based on population, as that description misses several confounding variables. One is household size: it has been steadily decreasing over time (averaging 2.72 persons per hh in 1970, down to 2.16 in 2000), meaning fewer people occupy the same amount of space. Furthermore, DC has indeed grown – it has more housing units than it did when its population peaked, and it has more jobs, too (and thus more office space).

So, no – the fact that DC’s population is lower today than in 1950 does not suggest the city has excess capacity.

A lot of other things are going well under current law, too. As Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic, Washington is the richest and best-educated metro area in America, leading the nation in economic confidence.

I don’t know that being rich proves success. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence that areas like DC and SF are so rich because they are exclusive, and that high prices prevent the middle class from paying reasonable prices for housing. Ryan Avent has written on this extensively. Simply put, more wealth is not the sign of a healthy economy.

Building height has little to do with affordability. The argument that a limit on building height restricts housing supply and thus leads to higher prices is essentially the same argument made against Portland’s urban growth boundary. In both cases, it’s hogwash: if affordability were closely related to building height and density, New York City and San Francisco would be the two most affordable big cities in America.

This one is just absurd. No one is proposing increasing building heights in DC just for the sake of going taller; the entire reason to change them would be to remove a constraint to growth. The constraints to growth do indeed have costs. Portland’s UGB is also a constraint. Constraints do not need to be a negative if there are other means to allow growth; then they can shape that growth instead. But to imply that elevation alone is the key to affordability is absurd. Asserting those who would change the height limit believe such absurdity is beyond reason.

In any event, denser doesn’t necessarily mean taller. These numbers may surprise you: Barcelona is denser than New York City, housing 41,000 people per square mile compared to New York’s 27,000. Barcelona’s beautiful and thriving, mid-rise central district L’Eixample is denser than Manhattan, at 92,000 people per square mile compared to Manhattan’s 71,000. It does not have buildings taller than Washington’s. In D.C., we could increase density substantially by incrementally converting many aging one- and two-story buildings in commercial and mixed-use districts to a still-human three to five stories.

The comparison of DC to Paris drives me nuts. Paris is indeed dense, and mostly low-rise. However, Paris has little of the small-scale rowhouse and single family homes that populate DC’s neighborhoods – if DC were Paris, those areas would be built out with 5-7 story apartments.

Yes, DC could likely increase density to Parisian levels and remain beneath the limit; but people seldom note what would be required to make that happen, what the trade-offs would be. Would DC residents trade the complete redevelopment of its historic rowhouse neighborhoods for that to happen? Benfield does not discuss the trade-offs.

One of Ryan Avent’s chief frustrations is a failure by height limit proponents to acknowledge the costs of the policy. Ryan makes an estimate of those costs in his blog at The Economist:

Even simply taking the 22% figure, we’re left to conclude that the policy is extraordinarily costly. It represents a sigificant transfer of income from renters to homeowners. It represents a rise in the cost of business for all those operating in the area (which translates into more expensive government, as the impact of high housing costs on real wages forces the government to pay higher nominal salaries to attract qualified workers). And it captures the stultifying economic effect of crowding out in the Washington-area economy, as relatively location-sensitive activities (effectively, those not conducting business with the government) are driven out of the District into the suburbs or other metropolitan areas.

Regardless of what the actual cost is (and another Atlantic Cities piece quibbles with Ryan’s calculations), it is clear that the cost is substantial. And, as the case of the Portland urban growth boundary mentioned above notes, there can be good reasons to have these constraining policies in place. Avent continues:

There is a more practical case for limiting development, namely, that as Washington becomes more dense there will be negative spillovers accompanying the positive ones: more traffic, for instance, and more noise. Such costs aren’t negligible and often help explain NIMBY attitudes. Yet these shouldn’t dissuade Washington from making it easier to build. The net benefits of easier building should be large enough to help compensate losers and invest in projects to ameliorate negative effects.

Indeed, the discussion about DC’s height limit would be better off with a discussion of costs and trade-offs. Likewise, an acknowledgement of the fundamental truth about cities would help: the only constant is change.

Choice architecture and zoning

Parallel parking on-street. CC image from Eyton Z.

Following up on the previous post, two pieces showing the limits of the zoning code in structuring choice architectures in urban environments:

Parking. Zoning code provisions that require adding off-street parking seriously distort both the urban fabric as well as the decision-making of individuals using those buildings – and thus those parking spaces (some previous thoughts on this here and here). Portland has eliminated minimum parking requirements under certain circumstances (and has had this regulation on the books for many years – only recently have both developers and financiers been on the same page about parking-free development). Of course, a parking-free development is nothing new – huge swaths of our cities built before the imposition of such codes function just fine without the ‘benefit’ of such codes guiding their maturation.

The most recent news about these parking-free developments in Portland is that those living in the parking-free apartments are not car-free themselves:

But a city of Portland study released this week suggests that no-car households are the exception, not the rule, even in apartments that don’t provide parking. And those vehicles have to go somewhere.

…

But it also found that 73 percent of 116 apartment households surveyed have cars, and two-thirds park on the street. Only 36 percent use a car for a daily commute, meaning the rest store their cars on the street for much of the week.

Point being, rescinding parking requirements from zoning codes alone is not enough to change behavior. That doesn’t mean that changing parking requirements isn’t a good idea – it is. As the quote above also notes, very few of these residents use their cars for a daily commute. However, there is a limit to what zoning can do. Parking requirements in the zoning code are a crude form of parking management; rescinding those rules likely warrants better parking management programs.

Portland appears stuck in between market equilibria here: people complain about more parkers on the the street, but those people are only parking there because it’s cheap and available. Likewise, off-street spaces are available for rent, but many are unwilling to pay the price to do so:

But developers can’t count on tenants to pick up the tab, particularly when there is street parking easily available nearby.

“The market is the market,” Menashe said. “If the guy down the street has no parking and he’s able to get $800 a unit, that’s probably all we can get, too.”

Great news for the city, and for consumers who value market-rate affordability in their apartments. This suggests that a) the old requirement for parking was indeed too high, and b) moving some of those cars to the street hasn’t put too much strain on on-street parking.

Nonetheless, the lesson is that zoning can only do so much. Zoning is a blunt instrument, it can regulate form well. To the extent that use and form are tied together, it can regulate use. But you can’t dictate behavior with a zoning code – and trying to do so will likely bring unintended consequences.

The excellent Portland Transport blog takes note of these findings and asks: what policies would get you to go car-lite or car-free? Options within this realm – things like charging for on-street parking permits, encouraging car-sharing services, enabling additional dense development to thus provide more ‘stuff’ within a walkable distance, thereby reducing the need for car ownership, etc. Those kinds of policies are the ones to build into the choice architecture to reduce car use and ownership, and also to reduce the tension from good policy changes like the removal of minimum parking requirements.

Restaurants. Writing at Greater Greater Washington, Herb Caudill calls for the removal of a zoning restriction on restaurants in the Cleveland Park neighborhood of DC. The rule is a part of an overlay zoning district and limits restaurants from occupying more than 25% of the linear storefront footage in the area. The goal is to require a diversity of retail uses in the area. The effect, however, has been for a lot of longstanding vacancies as well as some rather odd tenants (such as a vacuum cleaner repair shop).

Here again, zoning can only do so much. Once you step outside the physical purview of what zoning is good at regulating, all bets are off. Zoning can require that buildings provide retail space, for example – but exactly what type of retail is a lot harder to regulate. Leaving aside the wisdom of even trying to regulate such a thing (rather than allowing the market some flexibility to operate), the goal of diverse retail uses is probably better met with other types of policies than changes to the zoning code.

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)

City Block

a work in progress…