Matt Yglesias

Affordable Housing

Welcome to EYA’s new townhouse development at St. Paul’s College in Brookland:

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.

If You Build It, They Will Come, But Only If They’re Allowed to Build More Stuff

Dave Murphy considers the proposal to extend the Green Line out to Fort Meade. The idea has some compelling promise largely because “Fort Meade is the largest job center in the state of Maryland, and it is currently unserved by transit” so that could bring some considerable benefits. But of course Fort Meade’s also a bit far away from where the Green Line currently goes, so an important question becomes whether you can make the intermediate steps into anything useful:

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.

MPOs in Different Area Codes

Some time ago I was complaining that the “middle tier” of the life we actually lead—neither local nor national—happens not at the level of states, but at the level of metropolitan areas. But while we have robust state governments, we’ve got pretty rickety structures at the metro level. Mark Muro has some ideas for improving things that don’t require unrealistic constitutional changes:

For example, the nation possesses 380 metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) that are already empowered–notwithstanding their variable quality–to engage in long-range transportation planning. Therefore, wouldn’t one way to thrust U.S. metros farther into federalism mix be to expand the MPOs’ role and responsibilities to mandate, say, planning and program alignment across a broader array of federal and state programs? Likewise, hundreds of other increasingly robust “metro” regional councils and other entities are also active, ranging from scores of councils of government (COGs) and myriad economic development districts (EDDs) to the metro mayors’ caucuses in Chicago and Denver; the older suburbs coalitions in Kansas City and Cleveland and Milwaukee; and the scores of other regional economic, civic, philanthropic, or environmental initiatives now working on regional problems. Shouldn’t these too be sought out, utilized more by Washington and the states, and empowered? Sure they should: Washington and the states should each seek out and work with the existing retinue of metropolitan actors as core partners in investment and program delivery.

In addition, Washington and the states should go farther and seek to stimulate the emergence of new metropolitan alignments. Perhaps the best way to do this is to stimulate multi-jurisdictional regional collaboration, say through federal grant competitions that reward such activity. That will inevitably coalesce new middle-tier governance entities. So why not apply—as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development does in the Notification of Funding Availability for its Neighborhood Stabilization Program—clear preferences for collaborative efforts? For that matter, why shouldn’t Washington apply a modest preference for multi-jurisdictional collaboration to essentially all of its activities, including dozens of the nation’s scores of categorical, block, and other grant flows? Such a “regionalism steer” would evoke much more metropolitan or quasi-metropolitan governance activity in U.S. regions. Such modest but clear pay-offs for cross-boundary cooperation would go surprisingly far toward producing more active “middle-tier” governance in America.

Good ideas. Another thing that occurs to me is that we could probably use more formal mechanisms for collaboration between House members whose districts all share a metro area especially if, as is often the case, the metro area crosses state lines.

Planning in the Climate Bill

Elana Schor has a helpful roundup of a recent Brookings event on improving federal support for Metropolitan Planning Organizations and, even more important, improving the extent to which the federal relationship with MPOs actually supports good planning. This is an important element of dealing with the climate issue. The built environment evolves slowly over time so it’s difficult to get large short-term emissions reductions through better land use, but by the same token it’s absolutely essential to meeting long-term targets in an economically viable way.

Michael McKeever, executive director of the SACOG, and Peter McLaughlin, a commissioner of Minnesota’s Hennepin County, agreed that the upcoming congressional climate change bill is essential to achieving land use reform.

If the climate bill “does some fairly simple things and requires … high quality [MPO planning] to be done as a pre-condition of getting federal funds,” local development can become a more transparent and rational process, McKeever said.

Legislators, recognizing this, included language to that effect in the original Waxman-Markey bill. But it wound up getting stripped out. Now it’s back in the Kerry-Boxer draft, but the U.S. Senate is generally less friendly than the House to sound urban planning and land use policy so one should be nervous that it will be removed again. However, with these kind of relatively low-profile issues things like preference intensity make a great deal of difference. If Senators get word that their offices are being contacted by people who are interested in something as obscure as MPO planning, that would get noticed. Of course as a DC resident I’m not allowed to be represented in the governing bodies of the United States of America so I can’t contact anyone.

The Copenhagen Suburbs

Was out in the suburbs of Copenhagen today for a bit, and they look, well, a lot like American suburbs except with smaller-than-average houses. But if you go visit an American suburb with smaller-than-average houses—usually an older one—then you’ll very much have the right idea. What was quite different, however, was the transportation from the suburbs into the central city. Copenhagen’s suburbs are organized around the “finger plan” illustrated in the map on the right. Each finger is, as you would do in the United States, built around an arterial road. But the roads have fewer lanes than an American arterial would have. But running alongside them (or at least running alongside the one our bus was driving on) are very nice, very wide bike paths. And roughly parallel to the roadways are the S-Tog commuter rail lines.

Consequently, there are fewer people driving on the road than you would have in the US and there are more people biking and taking the train.

It’s worth noting that this sort of thing leaves overall automobile congestion neither better nor worse than an alternative strategy of fewer options and wider roads would. Insofar as you build road capacity, drivers will fill that capacity up. You get a choice of what level of automobile traffic you want to see the congestion at. But if you actually want uncrowded rush hour roads then you have basically only two choices. One is that you can build “road to nowhere” type projects where the economic rationale for infrastructure development is so poor that people don’t really want to drive on your shiny new highway. The other is that you can do congestion-pricing. But absent congestion-pricing, even the really admirable provision of alternative modes has limited impact. When valuable goods are given away for free, you get shortages. Copenhagen is apparently considering following Stockholm and Oslo and implementing a congestion fee, but they haven’t done it yet.

Still the moral of the story is, I think, pretty clear. When you build infrastructure to facilitate commuting from suburbs to central cities, lots of people will avail themselves of the opportunity to move to the new suburbs. But how they actually get to the central city depends on what kind of infrastructure you build. If you build giant highways, they’ll drive. If you build smaller roads and also some trains, then some people will drive and some will take the train.

For the sake of comparison, note that Copenhagen is a pretty small city. There are 521,000 people in the city proper and 1.8 million in the metro area. That would make it the 30th largest metro area in the United States, slightly bigger than the Las Vegas MSA and slightly smaller than the Kansas City MSA. All told, about 129 million Americans live in metropolitan areas that are bigger than metro Copenhagen. About a third of Danish people live in Greater Copenhagen, whereas over 40 percent of Americans live in metro areas that are bigger than Greater Copenhagen.

Life is Sweet in Arlington

Obviously, it’s crucial that we not build anymore walkable, transit-oriented communities:

While many metropolitan markets around the country are enduring steep increases in vacancies in their office and retail sectors, the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington is an oasis of stability — and even of prosperity.

ved by five Metro subway stops within four miles, the corridor continues to attract new tenants, buyers and developers in the face of the deepest recession since the Great Depression. “It’s really an anomaly, considering the tough economy we’ve been in since December 2007,” said Sigrid G. Zialcita, managing research director for Cushman & Wakefield, a global real estate services firm. [...]

While Wilson Boulevard, a main artery, helps define the corridor, the key element in its success has been the subway. Planners had wanted to place it in the median of Interstate 66, on a more northerly alignment. But Arlington officials fought to have it run underground in the corridor to spur development.

It costs money to build a proper grade-separated heavy rail line with closely-packed stations. A lot of money. And consequently, it takes time for the benefits to be fully reaped. But the benefits are large. Nobody walks around London or Paris or New York and says “it’s too bad they wasted all this money building subways.” And nobody walks the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor and says it’s too bad they didn’t build park-and-ride stations and surface tracks in a highway median.

Hafencity

One thing I saw in Hamburg that I thought was pretty cool was their massive HafenCity redevelopment project aimed at turning a really large obsolete waterfront district into a mixed-use urban center.

It’s hard to know for sure because a lot of it’s not done yet and obviously the global recession is going to slow things down, but it looks to be really well-executed with a good combination of uses, the creation of new infrastructure including a new metro line, etc.

The story behind the growth is interesting, too. Hamburg has been a port city for a long time, but for a while had come to be a somewhat peripheral player in European shipping, especially since Bremerhaven is the main German car export port. But with the collapse of Communism, Hamburg is suddenly centrally located in the new European map and is the main shipping hub for goods bound for the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, the Baltic area and to some extent beyond. Hamburg is also better-situated for shifting goods from ship to rail as opposed to from ship to truck, so it benefits from some growing concern about carbon emissions.

Consequently, the port had been having a real boom decade until the crisis and the ensuing collapse of trade hit. And doing such a large central city redevelopment will reduce the extent to which that just makes the city sprawl outward.

Small Cities

Sarcasm aside, the point I would make about Frieberg in Saxony (pictured below) is that it’s really a kind of place we barely have any of in the United States:

Freiberg, Germany (my photo, available under cc license)

It’s a town with only 42,000 inhabitants, no particularly giant buildings, and not really all that dense in the scheme of things. But it does have a built-up core with narrow streets, four- or five floor buildings, and a general lack of giant parking structures that together make for a pleasant dense walkable community. At the same time it offers this “urban” lifestyle, however, it has a lot of small towny features including being quiet and fairly traditional. I assume a healthy proportion of the population actually lives on the outskirts rather than in this part of town, but they can still drop in for a visit and with things being both small in general and bike- and pedestrian-oriented in the center, there don’t appear to be giant traffic jams or any huge problem driving if you’re making that kind of trip.

Obviously, path dependence is playing a role here. Freiberg involved hundreds of years worth of fixed investment before anyone had a car, so naturally it results in a nice community that’s not car dependent. But I really do think it’s a nice community that has a lot to offer that would appeal to people who don’t necessarily want to live in a “big city.” The closest analogue I can think of in the U.S. is certain college towns (or maybe places rich people go on vacation like Aspen or Bar Harbor) that people generally seem to deem pleasant.

Libertarianism in Suburbia

Ample parking and sexy trees (cc photo by pink fish 13)

A while back I noted that the kind of libertarians who one would expect to go into conniptions if Fairfax County, Virginia were to propose a stringent rent control law seem surprisingly blasé about the vast array of land use restrictions that infringe economic liberty in that county and most other American jurisdictions. Indeed, some libertarian economists at George Mason University go so far as to laud America’s large houses and plentiful parking specifically as evidence of the superiority of America’s free market economic policy, blissfully unaware that in the United States pervasive regulation requires the construction of bigger houses and more parking spaces than the market would provide.

To this, Bryan Caplan responded with a piece that I think basically proves my point as he grapples with the cognitive dissonance involved by tossing off the (admittedly accurate) fact that some elements of federal policy—for example, large-scale federal ownership of desolate land in the Western United States—place some curbs on sprawl. To this I mostly say what Ryan Avent said, but it’s worth emphasizing the extent to which Caplan is simply missing the point. The point is not about whether policy favors “suburbs” or “cities” but about the fact that the actually existing built environment in the United States—and especially those aspects of it constructed over the past thirty years—overwhelmingly reflect the influence of central planning.

It’s possible for a suburban locale to adopt a planning regime that favors high-density mixed use transit oriented development, and we see that in the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor of Arlington County and to a lesser extent on Arlington’s Blue Line corridor and near the Silver Spring and Bethesda Metro stations in Montgomery County. But those examples stand out because they’re relatively rare among recent construction. Much more typical is a planning regime, like the one that exists in Fairfax County, where in broad swathes of land it is illegal to build anything other than a detached single family home. The size of the yard that surrounds the detached single family home is typically set by central planners, as is the minimum number of parking spaces that the home must have. In lots where it’s legal to build multi-family dwellings the planners will have specified how tall the dwelligs may be, how far they must be set back from the street, and how many parking spaces they must have (in Fairfax, 1.6 spaces per unit). Where you can build retail outlets is decided by the planners, and they, too, are subjected to rules about maximum height, minimum setback, minimum parking, etc.

And Fairfax is not unique in this regard—cities and suburbs across America have regulations of this sort. The regulations vary, of course, and this is why not every place is identical. There are also portions of towns and cities that were built earlier, under different regulatory regimes that were more friendly toward density and mixing of uses. And of course in many suburban locales the regulations are extremely similar, which is part of the reason that a lot of America is a bit generic looking. You can like this or not, but what you can’t do is deny that these policy decisions around land use are substantially shaping the way life in America is lived. Insofar as people want to valorize that mode of life in order to stick it to hipsters, Europhiles, left-wing intellectuals or what have you, what you’re valorizing is a regulatory planning regime aimed at promoting a specific way of living and the interests of specific industries.

The Mixed Legacy of Jane Jacobs

MacDougal Street, New York City (cc photo by Jim Linwood)

Ed Glaeser, taking a break from writing things about high-speed rail that make me mad, has a pretty great book review in the New Republic that expresses ambivalent feelings about Jane Jacobs and her legacy that I share:

Jacobs did help to make public decisions more accountable, which is an incontrovertibly good thing. There is little to like in arbitrary public power—but at this point the pendulum has swung too far. Today it often feels as if every neighbor has veto rights over every new project, public or private. When Jacobs’s heirs argue for limits on eminent domain and expensive boondoggle projects, I stand with them. When they impose more and more restrictions on private owners building on their own land, I shake my head. Jacobs herself did not oppose only highways and urban renewal, but also far more benign private projects such as NYU’s library. Education is crucial to urban success. Surely a twelve-story university library would not have hurt Greenwich Village. [...]

The Death and Life of Great American Cities argues that at least one hundred homes per acre are necessary to support exciting stores and restaurants, but that two hundred homes per acre is a “danger mark.” After that point of roughly six-story buildings, Jacobs thought that neighborhoods risked sterile standardization. (The one public housing project that Jacobs blessed, at least initially, had only five stories.) But keeping great cities low means that far too few people can enjoy the benefits of city life. Jacobs herself had the strange idea that preventing new construction would keep cities affordable, but a single course in economics would have taught her the fallacy of that view. If booming demand collides against restricted supply, then prices will rise.

The best way to keep cities affordable is to allow private developers to build up and deliver space. Jacobs was right that high-rise public housing is a problem, as street crime is much more prevalent in high-rise, high-poverty neighborhoods. But in more prosperous, privately managed buildings, height is not a problem. If you love cities, as Jacobs certainly did, then presumably you should want the master builders to make them accessible to more people.

The key fact here (interestingly, a fact Glaeser seemed determined to ignore during his HSR analysis) is that the overall rate at which a metro area’s population grows has relatively little to do with land use decisions in any one neighborhood or municipality. If existing cities in a growing metro area don’t get denser, then the metro area just winds up getting sprawlier and the existing good neighborhoods wind up getting increasingly unaffordable. It’s understandable that incumbent homeowners in an already great neighborhood often take an “I’ve already got mine” attitude toward further development, but it’s also regrettable and not something to be encouraged.

Why Strip Malls Don’t Have Empty Storefronts

Strip mall, Vero Beach, Florida (cc photo by Sylvar)

Yesterday I wondered why, if the long length of commercial leases makes it hard for the market in urban retail storefronts to clear, you so rarely see vacant storefronts in strip malls. Now via Felix Salmon, I see a highly plausible explanation from Karl Smith:

The difference is that a mall has a single owner who internalizes all of the externalites associated with vacant storefronts (and trash and crime, etc). An ugly mall is a less popular mall and thus commands lower rents overall. Typically its worth for the mall owner to take a hit on one store if he can make it up in higher rents for the others. This, of course breaks down when demand for the whole mall declines.

And of course a mall owner can better internalize positive externalities as well. In general, the whole strip mall is operated as a unit. By the same token, this is why you see whole malls go totally dead which rarely happens on urban retail corridors even in depressed areas. It becomes more of an all-or-nothing thing.

Why Don’t Markets Clear in Urban Storefronts?

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.

Freedom, Rail, and Zoning

Ryan Avent wonders why libertarians hate trains. What I wonder is this. Here’s Tyler Cowen explaining why he doesn’t take the Metro:

It’s not about population density per se. It’s about how many independent, hard-to-connect nodes the system has and that is why high-speed rail on the whole works better in Europe or Japan than in many other locales. To give an example from a slightly different realm, I live right near the Metro in a high-density suburban area. Yet I don’t take the Metro to my Arlington office, which is about two minutes from a Metro stop. I’d rather do the 37-minute drive. Why? Because I stop at the supermarket and the public library on my way home at least half of the time or maybe I stop to eat at Thai Thai. If those conveniences were right next to my house I’d consider the Metro but they’re not.

That seems about right to me. But libertarians often act as if they think that this outcome is the result of consumer choice or a free market process. But ask yourself, why is it that there are no conveniences right next to Cowen’s house? Well, I don’t know exactly where he lives, but I believe it’s in Fairfax County which is governed by this exciting zoning ordinance. Fairfax County, in its infinite wisdom, allows for the creation of housing at various different levels of density in different areas. They’re differentiated by the number of permitted dwellings per acre—one, two, three, four, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty, or thirty per acre. Even within the thirty per acre area, buildings cannot be over “150 feet, subject to increase as may be permitted by the Board in accordance with the provisions of Sect. 9-607″ and there’s a requirement that “40% of the gross area shall be open space.” We also need to make sure to “Refer to Article 11 for off-street parking, loading and private street requirements.”

All multiple-family residential structures in the county must, per Article 11, provide “One and six-tenths (1.6) spaces per unit.” A detached single-family home needs “Two (2) spaces per unit for lots with frontage on a public street and three (3) spaces per unit for lots with frontage on a private street, provided that only one (1) such space must have convenient access to a street.” A bowling alley needs “Four (4) spaces per alley, plus one (1) space per employee, plus such additional
spaces as may be required herein for affiliated uses such as eating establishments” with the eating establishment rule being “One (1) space per four (4) seats plus one (1) space per two (2) employees where seating is at tables” and with different rules for counter service.

One could go on. But I don’t really understand why it is that this kind of thing doesn’t seem to bother libertarians very much. Bryan Caplan specifically cites America’s large houses and ample parking spaces as the benefits of our free market approach when they are, in fact, the product of systematic regulatory mandates. I think this illustrates the basic tribalism of a lot of our politics. If Fairfax County were considering some kind of hippie-inspired stringent rent control law, we’d be hearing no end of it from blogging George Mason University professors. But given a set of extremely severe land use regulations that happen to antagonize environmentalist and left-wing Europhilic bicycle commuters, suddenly mandatory minimum parking requirements become the essence of capitalism.

The Pentagon’s Parking Lot

I think it’s great that the newest Pentagon auxiliary structure will be the DOD’s greenest office building yet but if they really wanted to be environmentally conscious they wouldn’t have located it “a mere 7 miles down I-395 at Mark Center,” they would have put it right next to the Pentagon where currently a gigantic open-air parking lot is occupying some extremely valuable land:

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.

Rep Moran Wants Wider Streets

Virginia Congressman Jim Moran thinks the DC government should alter more of its policies to serve the interests of his constituents rather than the interests of the people who live here. And he has some specific ideas of how we can help out:

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.

Just Say No To Parkmania

Here’s a truly terrible idea from DCMetrocentric implying that it would be nice to see the currently undeveloped blank spot of land in downtown DC that used to contain a convention center turned into a park.

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.

The Walkability Premium

(cc photo by chego101)

Katharine Worth writes up a new study that used regression analysis to assess the relationship been home prices and the Walk Score of the neighborhood in which they’re located. The conclusion was that “[a]fter controlling for all of these other factors that are known to influence housing value, our study showed a positive correlation between walkability and housing prices in 13 of the 15 housing markets we studied.” In other words “there is a real and measurable pent up demand for homes in walkable neighborhoods.”

Some additional thoughts. One is that though Walk Score is a fun tool, the methodology is far from perfect, and you would almost certainly see a stronger walkability/value correlation if you had a better metric for walkability. Another is that car use is associated with a lot of currently underpriced negative externalities and obviously this would look different if those were priced properly. In a more speculative vein, it also strikes me that American history has left us with a weird situation in which our cities tend to be walkable in inverse proportion to the quality of their weather. Boston or Chicago in the winter are terrible places to walk a quarter of a mile and then wait for a bus. In a city with the climate of San Diego or Los Angeles, things would look different.

Open Streets

Dave Alpert has an effective rebuttal to commentators whose view of urban bicycling is dominated by the fact that cyclists sometimes violate the rules of the road. As he points out this is true for all modes of transportation, but nobody ever calls for getting all cars off our streets on the grounds that motorists frequently encroach into sidewalks or drive in the bus lane on 7th Street.

That said, I continue to think that the main culprit for the endless fighting over this point is actually an excess of rules. Here’s a photo of a street in Geneva that, like many streets in Geneva, just kind of sits there without a lot of lane striping and signs and rules. That’s not to say that it’s a locus of lawless anarchy—the main point, obviously, is just that you’re not supposed to run over anyone with your car or slam into them with your bike. And guess what? Nobody does. Just like in a park or a public plaza you don’t need to cordon the pedestrians off from one another with different yellow and white lines and yield signs and so forth. Human beings are actually perfectly capable of negotiating the “am I about to collide with someone?” issue without relying on explicit signage.

What those road markings are good for is creating a situation in which automobiles can go fast. Obviously, there’s a time and a place for that. Grade-separated highways exist in order to facilitate the fast driving of automobiles. A wide boulevard in a city can serve a similar purpose in a way that’s appropriate to an urban context. Here you’re going to need striped lanes, a median to separate the different directions of traffic, lights to indicate when to stop and when to go, etc. And the best way to accommodate cyclists in that context would be with separated bike lanes. But a typical side street in a residential area isn’t an appropriate venue for just trying to make cars go as fast as possible. These kind of streets would be more functional—and safer—as uncontrolled open streets shared between modes and with people expected to conduct themselves in a decent manner.

On a related note, check out this video:

That may be taking things too far in terms of a lack of explicit controls. But it shows that this sort of thing works better than people raised in a “traffic lights everywhere” environment tend to recognize.

Football Stadiums Belong in the Suburbs

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.

The Descent of the Blogosphere

Amusing A-1 article in the local paper, snapped by Spencer Ackerman as he and I checked out a local comic book slash record store:

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 New Urbanity

This is a point I’ve made casually before, but it seems Professor Arthur Nelson has a new paper spelling out in detail the implications of demographic change for the built environment. In particular, even if you assume no shift in underlying preferences regarding cities versus suburbs, and no pro-urbanism policy shifts, then the declining proportion of the population made up of families with children still implies a large shift back in the direction of urban infill.

Judged realistically, this should also open up possibilities for virtuous circles. Some people prefer to be surrounded by a lot of space, and others prefer the amenities associated with a denser urban environment, but nobody likes to live in a block with a vacant lot or around the corner from a broken-down shell of a former building. More people shifting into walkable urban neighborhoods allows those neighborhoods to capture more of what’s appealing about walkable urbanism.

A Road With Fewer Rules

Brighton, UK (wikimedia)

Whenever people start complaining about urban cyclists not following traffic rules, the typical response is to say that cyclists need more dedicated space on the road rather than awkwardly being shoved into street traffic.

But when I think about this, I’m always reminded of the fact that arguably we need fewer traffic rules. The basic idea of traffic rules—separated uses, painted lane markers, giant signs, etc.—is to make it safe for the drivers of cars to drive their cars very quickly. That’s an okay design principle for a highway, but its nearly-universal adoption as a design principle for urban roadways is arguably very misguided. If it were up to me, more city streets would follow Hans Monderman’s shared space principles and just be undifferentiated stretch on which cars, bikes, mopeds, pedestrians, etc. are all free to travel. The over-arching “rule” would be “don’t collide with anyone.”

After all, if you think about a car-free space—a park or pedestrian plaza of some some, say—there’s not a need for elaborate “traffic rules.” The people aren’t herded into lanes or strictly told where to walk. The convention is to stroll on the right side of the sidewalk or whatever, but people are free to be flexible as the situation dictates. The point is that you’re not supposed to collide with anyone, and that everyone needs to undertake the personal responsibility to pay attention to what’s going on.

Parks and Children

Jason Zengerle says I would like parks more if I had kids. I never find this to be a particularly useful way of talking about a policy issue. It used to be that when I criticized the home mortgage interest tax deduction, people would tell me I would feel differently if I had a mortgage. Well, today I have a mortgage and I don’t actually feel differently about the issue. I recognize that I now have a self-interest in not seeing a bad policy ended, but it’s still a bad policy. Rephrasing, then, perhaps it’s a “pro-family” measure to turn no-longer-used city properties into parks rather than into development.

If that’s true, then I think the case against building more parks in DC gets stronger. The District has been losing children for years, and shows every sign of continuing to do so. If the main purpose of parks is to be nice to children, then it’s strange to be adding parks while we’re losing kids. The whole reason the parcel is open in the first place is that DCPS has been closing schools to cope with the declining number of children.

That said, it’s far from clear to me that this analysis is actually correct. Developing the property would increase the supply of available housing. And cheaper housing is strongly pro-family, since people with kids obviously need more square feet per income-earner. Severely constrained housing supply encourages row houses to be used as “group houses”—households of unrelated individuals with three, four, five, or even six income earners—rather than as homes for families with children. Similarly, opening land to development increases the city’s tax revenue, thus increasing its capacity to provide public services. People like me don’t consume a great deal of public services but children, especially poor children, really benefit from the ability to provide generous services.

Again, none of this is to say that we should be trying to rid our cities of parks. But I do think this is something people ought to think a bit more critically about. Nobody wants to be “against the park,” because it sounds bad. But urban land is often extremely valuable, so you need to think seriously about using it in the most valuable possible ways. And part of that means making the most out of the parks we already have, making sure that real usable facilities exist and that they’re filled with people. A little patch of empty green space looks nice, but it’s a bad way to use a scarce resource.

How Many Parks Do You Need?

The District of Columbia has many, many, many fewer schoolchildren than it once did, so there’s been a trend toward closing DCPS facilities and trying to reuse the sites for something else. Office space for city agencies is a popular idea, but sometimes that doesn’t work out for various reasons. In that case, the tendency is for the local community to look fondly on various ideas to build parks instead. I suppose this is idiosyncratic of me, but I’m a bit of a park-skeptic. Obviously, a park is better than a collapsing abandoned school. And in my neighborhood there’s a bit of a “park versus parking lot” dispute in which case I’d clearly prefer the park. But as a general matter, I’d rather see this land put to use with buildings and stuff:

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.

When Paint Isn’t Enough

I took it as a great sign for Gabe Klein’s relatively new tenure as head of DC’s Department of Transportation when I saw that the street was being repainted at the weird intersection of 5th Street, I Street, and Massachusetts Avenue near where I live. Basically the idea was to give a bit of the street back to pedestrians in this growing, walkable urban neighborhood thus siding with the interests of most DC commuters and considerations of public health and environmental sustainability:

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.