Adam Fink writes up the news in DC politics, but the issue I’d like to point to is our voting system:

This is the first public polling I’ve seen on the race. Clarus Research Group (which is actually run by a former George Washington University professor of mine) has a poll out showing Mayor Adrian Fenty, who is up for re-election in 2010, at 43%/49% approval/disapproval and 34%/53% re-elect/someone else numbers. It also shows him losing 41%-37% to the DC Council chairman, Vincent Gray, but leading in a four-way race with Gray and two other DC Councilmembers. None of those potential opponents have announced. In DC, the Democratic nominee is expected to easily win, so the September primary is the ballgame.

This is one of the lamentable consequences that results when big cities decide to hold partisan elections for municipal offices. The vast majority of DC residents are registered Democrats, but there are Republicans and Independents in this city and in effect their voices don’t count in the mayor’s race. In national elections, partisanship helps clarify issues and agendas and enhance accountability by giving people a crude-but-fairly-accurate shorthand way of knowing what Candidate X is all about. But this doesn’t hold for municipal elections—the key issues in DC government have very little to do with the main subjects that separate Democrats and Republicans on national issues.

Many American cities have a much more sensible system, with an all-party primary that leads to a run-off between the top two vote-getters even if (as is generally the case) but of the top two contenders are Democrats. I don’t think that method is ideal, but it makes a lot more sense than the system used in DC, NYC, and other cities with partisan elections where you either get de facto disenfranchisement of large swathes of the population or else things like Michael Bloomberg’s kinda sorta pretending to be a Republican because it gives him advantageous access to the GOP ballot line.

The 237 single-family units will be built on approximately half of the 20 acres, abutting the Trinity and Catholic campuses along 5th and 6th Streets NE. The townhouses will range in sizes from 14 to 18 feet wide and including between 1,400 and 2,100 s.f., selling between $450,000 and $550,000, with 28 units set aside as affordable housing.

Sounds nice. But my question with this sort of thing is always wouldn’t we do more to make housing affordable if instead of building 209 expensive townhouses plus 28 “affordable” ones we just allowed for taller buildings and had more units? It can’t be that construction costs here are running between $450,000 and $550,000—a big premium is being paid for the land and the permission to build. But where land is expensive, it ought to be used intensively. That makes economic sense, and it makes environmental sense.

As Ryan Avent says, Metro expansion is great, especially when it’s done properly, but you can’t just keep adding new branches in the suburbs:

One final point: Metro is a network. When a new extension is built, the additional connectivity increases the value of all the other nodes on the system. But while that increase in value is significant, it’s not nearly as great as the benefit conferred on people located along the extension, who suddenly have easy access to the whole of the system. And meanwhile, the usage generated by the extension does generate some direct and indirect costs on other users.

These costs are increasingly borne by users in the core of the system, where growth in the number of trains and passengers have led to crowded conditions on platforms and back-ups during peak periods. To some extent, this can be addressed by increasing peak fares, but given the obvious value of Metro, the growth in the system’s spokes, and the fact that the District is better suited than almost anywhere else in the metro area to handle increased density, it seems clear that new core capacity is needed (as well as a new river crossing over or under the Potomac).

Probably the best way to add capacity would be to construct the proposed “separated blue line” through downtown. Among the other virtues of that plan, it would have an immediate and obvious benefit to many people in Virginia, as well as improving the performance of the overall system, thus broadening its potential constituency. The Brown Line idea shown here also has a lot of merit and would, I believe, be less hideously expensive. But either of these proposals would cost a lot of money—there’s no cheap way to build heavy rail beneath an existing city. That said, the benefits would be enormous, both to the areas directly served and in terms of the enhanced value to the rest of the network. The completion of the Green Line has already had a completely transformational effect on swathes of the city.

Here I think the key thing to keep in mind is that when you’re talking about new heavy rail construction, the potential benefits can be quite large but you have to decide if you actually want to seize them. This is the area around one of the proposed stations:

If you added a Metro station there, would the local area permit the surrounding quarter mile or so developed as a fairly dense walkable community? Or would people hear about proposals to build on the green space and up-zone the built-up area and decide that would lead to too much traffic? Maybe instead they’ll want to just turn the undeveloped patch into another parking lot. That’d be no good. And the existing land use patterns around Maryland’s Green Line stations don’t inspire a ton of confidence.

But now comes the word that bus drivers are engaged in some kind of protest against recent concerns about the safety of their driving methods that involves S9 drivers refusing to pass S1/S2/S4 buses as the local buses make their stops. Obviously stopping and waiting at all the local stops completely defeats the purpose of creating an express bus alternative.

Assuming this dispute can get resolved, the next step for the S-buses should be to find portions of 16th Street where it makes sense to create well-enforced bus only lanes by taking lanes away from private automobiles or parking.

When it comes to urban transportation, path dependency issues are everywhere. The more car-dependent people are the more political support there’ll be for car-promoting policies. Conversely, the more there retail and job opportunities are already accessible through non-automotive means, the more realistic it is for new residents to get by without a car, or for a family to get by with only one. And one interesting thing about the District of Columbia is that according to the Census Bureau we’re nearly fifty-fifty in terms of commuting patterns.

The city is also poised for further development and population growth in the years to come. So a crucial question is what form will that development take? If an outdated zoning code and short-sighted neighborhood groups force all new development to include vast swathes of parking, the city stands a good chance of “tipping” into a car-dependent pattern over time. Alternatively, if we create a situation in which new residents own cars if and only if they’re inclined to pay the true cost of owning and storing a vehicle, the city could achieve a clear majority for people who commute through non-automotive means. If that happens, the political context will exist for policies that clearly prioritize moving people over moving automobiles—things like dedicated bus lanes, separated bike paths, and traffic light timing schemes that take into account pedestrian safety and convenience. If that happens, it’s likely to be self-reinforcing.

With policy tilted more in favor of ease of transit, walking, and cycling more people will decide against relying on a car for day-to-day use. And that will create a bigger market for things like Zipcar and walking-accessible neighborhood retail. Most American cities are so firmly in the car-dependency camp that it’s a bit hard to know how you might get from here to there. But DC is right in the middle, and stands a good chance of evolving over the next couple of decades into a solid urbanist model, though it could also turn into a major missed opportunity.

Outgoing Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau

Lying at the intersection of two bad aspects of American governance—partisan elections for local offices in essentially one-party jurisdictions, and the overabundance of elected officials—comes today’s New York City primary:

Tuesday is primary day in New York City, but don’t feel bad if it slipped your mind. As few as one in six enrolled Democrats are expected to vote, despite competitive races for two citywide offices. [...] The most consequential contest is the three-way race to succeed Robert M. Morgenthau, who has served as Manhattan district attorney since 1975. Because no Republican is running, the winner on Tuesday is all but assured to be the next district attorney. [...]

Voters have been inundated by television and printed advertisements from the four Democrats seeking to succeed Mr. Thompson as comptroller and the five vying to succeed Betsy Gotbaum, who is not seeking re-election as public advocate. If no candidate garners at least 40 percent of the vote in those races, a runoff between the top two finishers will be held on Sept. 29. [...]

Nearly 3.2 million Democrats are eligible to vote on Tuesday, but the turnout “will be low, possibly the lowest in recent memory,” said Prof. John H. Mollenkopf of the City University Graduate Center.

The purpose of having elected officials, as opposed to a self-perpetuating oligarchy like China, ought to be to enhance accountability. But elections only work as an effective accountability mechanism if we can reasonably expect the voters to monitor the elected officials and have some understanding of what they’re responsible for. A resident of New York City is responsible for electing a mayor, a city comptroller, a district attorney, a city council member, a borough president, two state legislators, a member of the U.S. congress, two U.S. senators, a governor, an attorney-general, and a state comptroller along with various judges. It seems to me that very few people actually know the name of all the different people who hold those offices, which I think we can take as a sign that they’re not monitoring their performance. It would make more sense to just eliminate some of this stuff (unicameral state legislatures would work fine, the “borough” level of government is obsolete) and make some of the offices appointed.

Meanwhile, having partisan elections in a place like New York City (or Washington, DC) manages to semi-disenfranchise the city’s registered Republicans while basically obscuring the issues at stake in the elections. I’m a big defender of partisanship against David Broder style whining. But that’s because partisanship at the federal level is a useful tool for clarifying policy issues and generating a measure of coherence and accountability to legislative operations. That’s because the parties are coherently organized around the main issues in national politics. The issues in local politics are pretty different. It might make the most sense to just have different parties at the national and local levels (like how Canada’s provincial parties are different from the federal ones) but barring that it would make sense for New York and DC to do what many other cities have already done and just shift to non-partisan elections.

SE-SW Freeway, Washington DC (cc photo by dbking)

One of the great mistakes this country made decades ago was to seriously damage a large number of American cities by cutting freeways through existing neighborhoods. How much damage? A 2006 paper by Nathaniel Baum-Snow gives this answer (via Ryan Avent):

Between 1950 and 1990, the aggregate population of central cities in the United States declined by 17 percent despite population growth of 72 percent in metropolitan areas as a whole. This paper assesses the extent to which the construction of new limited access highways has contributed to central city population decline. Using planned portions of the interstate highway system as a source of exogenous variation, empirical estimates indicate that one new highway passing through a central city reduces its population by about 18 percent. Estimates imply that aggregate central city population would have grown by about 8 percent had the interstate highway system not been built.

I wouldn’t say that we shouldn’t have built highways—it’s more that we shouldn’t run highways smack through existing cities or made circumventing existing cities such a priority of the highway system. Connecting one metro area to another with limited access highways makes perfect sense—slicing a city into pieces with limited access highways does not. And when considering these estimates you need to recall that it wasn’t free to build these highways, you could have made alternative infrastructure investments in rail or buses or even just nicer-looking boulevards.

Vacant storefront on 1300 block of U Street; good place for a Wendy's? (cc photo by NCinDC)

One of the enduring mysteries of urban life is the prevalence of vacant storefronts. This is understandable in a truly depressed area where the whole local economy has broken down. But if you take someplace like U Street in Washington DC where there are tons of thriving businesses, it seems bizarre that there are also lots of vacant storefronts. Surely there’s something, at some rent, that could make a profit. And surely some rent would be better than no rent. But as Justin Fox writes, the markets seem not to clear even in super-prosperous areas like Broadway on the Upper West Side.

His theory, also endorsed by Felix Salmon is that the culprit is unduly long lease lengths:

If prevailing leases are low, or tenants hard to find, the developer will quite rationally choose to keep the property empty. Leasing at a low rate will lock in a loss, while keeping the property empty has significant option value: at some point in the future, rents might well rise, and the developer can at that point lock in a profit instead. This is why successful property developers generally need very deep pockets: anybody who needs immediate cashflow, in the form of rent today, is in an invidious bargaining position and is likely to lose out over the long term.

I buy this, but only to an extent. If you look at suburban strip malls, the same long lease dynamic applies, but widespread strip mall vacancies are normally a sign of specific economic distress. The current recession has less to a lot of them, but in normal economic times you tend not to see this. Instead, even depressed areas reach a low-rent equilibrium. Possibly this is because strip mall property is less speculative in nature than urban property. But I think the specifically urban nature of the problem probably has something to do with the level of regulatory uncertainty surrounding new retail endeavors in most American cities combined with the reluctance of many neighborhoods to play host to the sort of “uncool” national retail chains that could better manage the risks involved.

If you replaced all those lots with office buildings featuring underground parking garages, it would still be possible for DOD personnel inclined to drive to do so. But, obviously, parking would be expensive and many people would choose instead to avail themselves of the conveniently located Pentagon Metro Station. To cope with the increased demand you would also want to beef up the frequency with which the bus lines that serve the Pentagon arrive, and possibly even launch a new line or two. The environmental benefits of that kind of arrangement would be considerable.

Generally one substantial problem we have in the national capital area is that the federal government, being the federal government, faces no real financial pressure to use its space in an efficient way. Congress maintains a lot of open air parking lots in the vicinity of the Hill that a private company would almost certainly turn over to developers. That would add jobs and houses to a dense, walkable, very transit-accessible area. But of course the members of congress and their staff couldn’t personally pocket the money thereby earned, so they have no real incentive to do so.

As Virginia works to add hot lanes to I-95 and 395, Virginia Congressman Jim Moran says HOT lanes wont end the rush hour congestion if the District doesn’t do its part.

“Once they get to D.C. it stops, so what D.C. should do is widen 14th Street Bridge, widen 14th Street and get some of the revenue that’s coming from these HOT lanes,” he said. “We’ve suggested it time and time again and they just won’t listen, let alone act on it.”

Maybe DC doesn’t want to widen 14th Street because it’s an urban street with buildings on both sides:

Instead of demolishing the city to make the streets wider, the sensible thing to do would be to have a toll on the bridges from Virginia or a congestion charge for entering the central city. Alternatively or in addition, downtown parking could be taxed more heavily. That would leave a less-congested drive for those who place a high priority on speedy private motor vehicle access to the central business district. And the funds could be used to enhance the metro area’s existing transit options.

And of course this isn’t an idiosyncratic feature of our 14th Street. Severe traffic congestion problems tend to emerge in areas where we’ve already gone and built a lot of stuff. Attempting to ameliorate them by building more lanes would require demolishing the stuff. But the congestion is problematic primarily because access to the stuff is valuable. If you just leveled the whole city, traffic jams would abate (and there’d be plenty of parking!) but there’d be no city left.

It’s maddening to see this large parcel of vacant land standing basically vacant as a surface parking lot. But the location is already very close to Franklin Square which is a park (and not doing much of anyone much good) and also to the quasi-park of Mount Vernon Square. What ought to go on the site is exactly what’s planned to go there—buildings! Full of people and stuff!

What I think the inability to get something built there actually does is illustrate Keynes point about the irrationality of major investment decisions. If you take a deep breath and think about the long view, obviously there will be a market for office buildings in the middle of downtown Washington. Every other office building in downtown Washington has worked as an investment, there just don’t happen to be any office buildings on this particular patch of land yet. It should be a no-brainer. But when leveraged bets on highly speculative real estate investments cause a giant global banking panic, suddenly financing dries up for even really banal ideas like “there shouldn’t be a vacant lot surrounded by huge, busy office buildings in a very expensive city.”

Note that this would have been a better example for my anti-park crankier than the example I actually used.

There is absolutely no good reason I can think of to try to tempt the Washington Redskins to move to some kind of new stadium located inside the District of Columbia. I love football, I love DC, and I love urbanism. But the NFL season only has 16 games. Eight of those games are on the road. That means you’re talking about a facility that’s going to be without an audience on over 95 percent of possible days. That means the facility can’t possibly be anchoring a neighborhood. On the overwhelming majority of occasions you’re talking about a giant empty space.

A baseball stadium or a basketball/hockey arena are used frequently enough to be perfectly viable elements of an urban neighborhood. Nevertheless, the tendency is for governments to subsidize their construction to a degree that goes far beyond what can be justified. But a football stadium just doesn’t work, it’s a hugely inefficient use of land, and thus ought to be exactly where FedEx Field currently is—a pretty peripheral area in the suburbs. Urban land should be used intensively, and the only way for a football stadium to be an intensive land use is to be one of those combo football/baseball stadiums that have fallen out of fashion and nobody wants to use.

The ideal thing for DC to do with the space currently occupied by RFK Stadium and RFK-affiliated parking lots is to put up lots of buildings where people can live and shop and some kind of park for them to enjoy. It’s land near a metro station and would make a nice fairly dense mixed use community that brought some extra amenities to the surrounding neighborhood.

But one way or another, this sort of regulatory mandate really doesn’t seem to be the best possible way to achieve the goal of making housing more affordable. Suppose that instead we:

— Reduced or eliminated rules mandating the construction of parking as part of new developments.

— Permitted the construction of taller structures.

— Relaxed maximum lot occupancy rules.

— Permitted the construction of smaller apartments.

That, it seems to me, would increase the supply of housing units in the city. That ought to, ceteris paribus, reduce the market price of housing thus rendering housing more affordable. It would also generate additional tax revenue and some of the revenue could be spent on subsidies for struggling families to help them afford housing. Last, it would increase the proportion of the metro area’s residents who live in the District of Columbia as opposed to the suburbs, which would be good for the environment. Adding an additional inclusionary zoning regulation on top of existing supply constraints, by contrast, seems likely to further constrain supply. Amidst a real construction boom, it’s true, these rules would result in the creation of new affordable units. But absent such a boom it simply discourages new development, meaning the city will have more vacant lots, more surface parking lots, more abandoned structures, and fewer housing units than it otherwise might.

It’s interesting how locally prevailing rents structure the retail environment. I find it very difficult to imagine that any store in Washington, DC could possibly stock the extensive collection of back issues that they have at Eide’s. Storing old comic books is very space intensive and the inventory’s just not going to turn over that rapidly. In a high-income, supply-constrained environment like Washington, it doesn’t work. And that, in turn, is a reminder that while high property values are often a symptom of prosperity, they’re not a cause of it. High rents reduce the number of viable businesses which, in turn, reduces the availability of jobs. A metropolitan area with high incomes and high rents would do well to try to reduce the number of supply constraints and open up new opportunities for business.

The future of the former Gage-Eckington school

It seems to me that human beings have some kind of psychological tick that leads them to overestimate the amount of time they’re going to want to spend engaged in outdoor recreating. It’s one thing if you live in California, where the weather’s nice all of the time, but here in the Northeast how much use do we really get out of parks? People don’t go to the park at night, or during the winter, or when it’s raining. Compare that to, say, an apartment building with some retail on the ground floor. People go to stores all the time. Obviously, that’s not to say that an ideal city would have zero parkland—parks are nice. But it’s not clear to me that we’re suffering from a park shortage. And in environmental terms, it’s much better for the planet to construct additional housing units in already-urbanized areas than to pack a bit more green space in the city and have more people living in sprawling exurbs.

Part of the issue I that I think there’s not enough “in it” for the local community to allow development as opposed to park creation. An elected official doesn’t want to be in the position of giving land to insidious developers instead of using it for public purposes like a park. But perhaps the lion’s share of the revenue from the auction of a city-owned facility could be given directly to a local community association. That could be spent on improving the public spaces that already exist in the area or dealing with whatever other local issues seem pressing. It does seem to me that DC and other cities suffer from more a problem of quality in our public spaces—too much basically empty, unprogrammable land—rather than a lack of quantity.

Five bedrooms, four-and-a-half baths, brick-and-stone exterior, built 1968. Real estate photos show sunny kitchen, big entertaining spaces, pleasant yard, lots of bookshelves, one wall-mounted deer head.

I suppose it’s an interesting sign of the times in the United States that Rove believes a house he paid $799,000 for in 2001 ought to fetch $1.585 million in 2009. Here’s the Case-Shiller index for the Washington, DC metro area:

The price increase Rove is looking for is larger than the average one across the metro area. Of course some people’s houses should experience a higher-than-average price increase if, for example, the neighborhood in which it’s located has become objectively more desirable. When I first moved to town I rented a basement apartment in a nice townhouse on Harvard Street between 13th and 14th. That’s a much better place to live in 2009 than it was in 2003, and even in 2003 it was a much better place to live than it was back in 1998 when the owner originally bought it. But I don’t really think you could make that kind of claim for Kent where the Rove house is. That’s a nice upscale neighborhood, but it’s always been a nice upscale neighborhood.

Violent crime has plummeted in the Washington area and in major cities across the country, a trend criminologists describe as baffling and unexpected. The District, New York and Los Angeles are on track for fewer killings this year than in any other year in at least four decades. Boston, San Francisco, Minneapolis and other cities are also seeing notable reductions in homicides.

In his excellent forthcoming book on crime Mark Kleiman makes the point that it’s much easier for a law enforcement system to be effective when there’s relatively little crime. With few people committing offenses, it’s pretty easy to monitor crime hotspots and to deploy swift and effective punishment. And because it’s pretty easy to capture offenders and punishment for offenses is likely to be swift and effective, people tend to be deterred from committing crimes. Which makes enforcement easier which makes crime decline which makes enforcement easier and on and on and on.

In other words, there’s at least some reason to expect that the past 15 years’ worth of success at better controlling crime in many of America’s major cities will just have a lot of momentum that can carry us forward even through unfavorable labor market conditions.

Unfortunately, as our intrepid neighborhood blogger points out, the main response of motorists to the change has been to keep driving across the new striped road surface even though I’m pretty sure every adult Americans understands that those stripes mean “don’t drive here.”

Fortunately, there is a short-term solution to this problem. So-called “quick curbs” like the one recently installed to improve pedestrian safety at the “death star” intersection at 15th Street, Florida Avenue, and W Street. Quick curbing around our intersection could take DDOT’s reasonable plan and give it some efficacy.

(Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority photo)

For reasons that have never been clear to me, if you want to take a cab from “Washington” (actually about seventeen million miles from the city) Dulles International Airport you not only need to pay an exorbitant fare, you need to specifically pay the fare to a Washington Flyer Taxi. You can’t just take a regular taxi that charges a special Dulles fare. It needs to be a specific kind of taxi. As Steve Offutt observes this has weird and undesirable consequences:

According to the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, Washington Flyer taxis provide 2,500 to 3,000 rides per day from the airport, but only provide 300 to 350 rides to the airport. That means more than 85% of taxis return empty. It’s probably a fair assumption that a similar number of people arrive at the airport by taxi as leave, so that means that more than 2,000 local cabs drop passengers at Dulles and then drive back empty. [...]

The current situation benefits virtually no one, with the possible exception of the cab company owners, since monopolies are always a good deal for the businesses that have them. Eliminating the Washington Flyer taxi service will not change the fares paid by airport patrons: the same number of people will still be flying in and out of Dulles. Drivers, though, will save millions of dollars and thousands of hours of wasted time. It’s likely this will reduce the need for as many drivers and taxis, but taxicab drivers as a whole will collect just as much in fares while saving millions of dollars on operating costs. Reducing this waste will also reduce the pressure to raise fares on customers while introducing competition may result in better service, too.

So, yeah, this is dumb. When the current contract expires they should change things. This is hardly the most pressing issue of social justice in America (the fare is so expensive that I assume the only people taking these cabs are people able to expense the trip to an employer or client) but it’s good to get the little public policy issues right as well as the big ones. Meanwhile, one of these days the Dulles Metro extension will get built.