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Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

Demolishing Detroit

The Detroit Free Press ran a story this week called “With so much space, so few options – Detroit’s vast vacant lots are a burden” highlighting the sheer scale of the vacant land problem in Detroit. As they note:

If vacant lots were painted red, an aerial view of Detroit would look like a bad case of the measles. There is so much empty land today within Detroit’s 139 square miles — land slowly returning to nature with no buildings — the city of Paris could fit inside. If all that land were gathered into football fields, Detroit could host 25,000 simultaneous games.

In recent years there have been ten times more demolition permits as construction permits, as this Free Press graphic shows:

h/t Chicagoist

Bonus Data Graphic: Real Time Wind Map

If you haven’t seen it already, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg have put out a very cool real time wind map that shows the current winds streaking across the United States. Here’s a still of what it looks like. Click through to check it out.

h/t Likecool

Thursday, March 29th, 2012

The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy

My latest blog post is online over at New Geography. It is called “The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy.” In it, I look at how the relentless expansion of the US federal government and the “spiky world” forces of globalizations are revamping the urban hierarchy of the top tier cities in the United States. While not a definitive view, it seems that New York is going from strength to strength, while Washington, DC emerges as America’s new “Second City.” This has been to the detriment of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston. It’s controversial to be sure, but I hope you’ll enjoy it. Comments definitely encouraged on this one.

Update: Richard Florida has more to say on this topic over at The Atlantic Cities..

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

NYC Energy Use Infographic

The Guardian data blog is running a very cool interactive infographic of energy use by block in New York City. Apparently it originated at the Modi Research Group at Columbia University. Here’s a non-interactive screen shot to whet your appetite:

Sunday, February 26th, 2012

The Return of the Monkish Virtues

The era of the 100 watt incandescent light bulb came to an end in America on January 1st. Lower wattages will soon join them in a phaseout over time. As I noted previously, this will mean factory shutdowns in the United States and the migration of the light bulb manufacturing industry to China. The most common replacement type bulbs, compact fluorescents, are not “instant on,” generally fail to provide a proper light spectrum, contain poisonous mercury, and burn out sooner than advertised. CFL boosters claim none of these are real problems and that CFLs are a slam dunk for benefit/cost reasons, but the cold reality is that despite significant promotion, they never received widespread consumer adoption voluntarily. Given how eagerly consumers slurp up even bona fide more expensive products like Apple computers when they are perceived to be superior, I’m inclined to think the consumers are on to something. I’ve tried out CFLs myself and thought they basically sucked.

The supposed rationale for imposing an inferior product that did not receive the desired traction in the the marketplace is to prevent climate change. I went searching to try to find exactly what the impact of light bulbs on greenhouse gas emissions was and have found it quite difficult to obtain. The various sites touting CFLs all note the high output of CO2 from electricity generation generally, how much CO2 changing this or that bulb will save, etc, but as for what a wholesale elimination of light bulbs would achieve, that’s harder to find.

According to the EPA, residential electricity accounted for 784.6 million metric tons of CO2 in 2009, or 11.8% of total US human greenhouse gas emissions. How much of that is from light bulbs? It’s not broken out in the EPA’s report (even the detailed version), but I’ll attempt an estimate of aggregate CO2 savings. (If someone has a direct link to this information, please let me know).

The Guardian reported that an Australian incandescent ban would save that country 800K tons of CO2 emitted per year and a UK ban would save 2-3 million tons. It also reported that China could save 48 million tons per year by banning incandescents.

The US is bigger than Australia and the UK, but similarly advanced developmentally. China is a bigger emitter than the US, has far more people, is less advanced developmentally, and is a bigger user of coal for electricity generation. However, all three countries project similar per capita emissions reductions from incandescent elimination. If the US savings were at the upper end of their range, it would have CO2 savings of around 15 million tons a year. That’s only 0.2% of total US greenhouse gas emissions. Even if the US saved the same 48 million tons as China, it’s only 0.7%. I’d be skeptical of anyone claiming the US would save a lot more CO2 per capita than these. Some maybe, a lot, no.

In short, swapping out incandescent light bulbs is not going to be a major contributor to solving the problem of climate change. I’m not aware of anyone claiming it is. So why pass a law that is unpopular in many quarters and cram CFLs and other type of bulbs consumers haven’t chosen to buy on their own down their throats? It seems to be a purely provocative move of a mostly symbolic nature with little real substance that is sure to only harden opposition to the real changes we need to make to actually make material reductions in GHG emissions. (One might say the same of other items like mandatory recycling or banning plastic grocery bags).

The answer is that the symbolism is the substance.

The sad reality is that rather than make policy cases based on benefit/cost or other technical considerations, for political or personal reasons sustainability advocates have decided to model their cause on the template of religion. In it we have an Edenic state of nature in a fallen state because of man’s sin (pollution) for which we will experience a coming apocalyptic judgement (damage from climate change). Thus avoiding the consequences becomes fundamentally a problem of sin management. The proposed sin management solution is again taken from traditional Christianity: confession and repentance, followed by penance, restoration to right standing with God (nature), and committing to a holier life.

There are two basic problems with this. The first is that while the religion template taps in to a deep psychological vein in the human spirit – some have suggested humanity may even carry a so-called “God gene” – most people already have a religion and aren’t likely to convert to a new one without a major outreach effort.

But more importantly, the notion of penance, and perhaps of asceticism more generally, has never sold with the public, even in more religious eras. David Hume (a vigorous religious skeptic it should be noted) referred to the values resulting from this lifestyle as the “monkish virtues” and noted that they have “everywhere rejected by men of sense.” Or as Carol Coletta put it more recently, people don’t want to be told to “eat their spinach.”

It strikes me that while perhaps environmentalists don’t really want to force a particular lifestyle on people, there is a fundamental desire to see people engage in some sort of public penance for our environmental sins. I believe this to be the root logic underlying a lot of feel-good (or perhaps more accurately, “feel-bad”) initiatives like getting rid of incandescent light bulbs. It is a form of penance and embrace of the monkish virtues.

I can’t help but notice that even Christianity itself has moved away from promoting the monkish virtues. While things humility are of course still preached and expected to be modeled, modern Christianity mostly rejects the notion of an ascetic life. Most Evangelical churches actually preach that God wants humans to be happy. The idea is of a God who wants us to be unselfish, but not unhappy. A not insignificant number of churches actually preach the so-called “prosperity gospel” in which God will provide earthly blessings to His followers. In the Catholic tradition, monasticism itself has been in decline for some time. (I liken the reports of upticks in interest in joining monasteries as similar to the perennial “return of the suit” articles in fashion magazines).

Whether these theological points are accurate or not is beside the point of this article. They appear to be attractional. For example, well-known prosperity gospel preacher Joel Osteen runs the largest church in the United States, with over 40,000 attending weekly.

What might the environmental movement have looked like based on a different template? I’ll refer again to the work of Bruce Mau. If you’ve ever seen him present on this topic, he likes to start by noting that if we brought the entire world up to US standards of living, it would take four Earth’s worth of resources given our current technologies and approaches to make it happen. He thinks that’s a good thing, because the patent impossibility of that “takes that option off the table.” He then goes on to talk about all the super-cool new stuff we are going to have to invent and scale up to address the challenges of the future. If you haven’t, I might suggest getting his book Massive Change, which I reviewed a while back. It’s difficult to come away from one of Mau’s books or lectures without being excited about the possibilities of the future.

I don’t think Mau has any different view of the fundamentals of climate change than your typical orthodox environmentalist. But his approaches to solutions (which are admittedly not always short term practical action plans) and the sales job on them is very different. As a designer, he knows he needs to create something that’s aspirational and attractional in order to get people to want it. It’s a shame too few people have followed that lead.

The monkish virtues are just never going to sell. Perhaps you can get a room full of the sustainability in-crowd to buy into it, or even focus on top level political success as with the bulb ban. But ultimately I think this is self-defeating.

In the short term I’d suggest ending any efforts to impose direct consumer mandates. I don’t think that’s where the money is, so to speak, in GHG reductions. Instead, let’s focus on the producer side of the equation in ways that are largely transparent to consumers and don’t involve significant costs. More fuel efficient vehicles might be one. Replacing coal with natural gas is another possibility. (The EPA report I linked earlier cited this as a big contributor the decline in GHG emissions in recent years). New technologies are clearly needed and should perhaps be invested in even though as we know this will lead to many failures along the way.

As the financial crisis in Greece and elsewhere shows, people rarely confront structural problems, no matter how serious, until the crisis actually comes. At least if “austerity” (a monkish virtue if ever there was one) is the major part of the proposed solution.

If an environmental equivalent of austerity is required to save the planet, then I’m afraid we should prepare for the deluge. I personally don’t think we’re at that point, given that we’ve had huge gains in energy efficiency for many decades now while our lifestyles have actually improved. More of that, not the promotion of monkish solutions like CFL lightbulbs, is what it will really take to drive further environmental improvements.

PS: If you don’t think people are really promoting or embracing monkish lifestyles in support of environmentalism, read this article from the Guardian about people giving up on daily showers. Or think about the people trying to completely go “off the grid.” Even if CFLs don’t fit for you, clearly there are plenty of examples. I pick CFLs because they are an institutionalization of monkish virtues, not just the passion of the small minority, which has always been the case.

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012

Vancouver: An Olympic Urbanist Preview by Jarrett Walker

Most of you probably know by now that I’m a huge fan of Jarrett Walker and his blog Human Transit. He’s a professional transit planner who is doing the best, independent minded writing on transit for a general audience of anyone I know.

I’m pleased to report that Jarrett has distilled some of his wisdom into a new book called, conveniently enough, Human Transit. I highly recommend this for a clear exposition of the various issues involved in transit development. Jarrett isn’t pushing a position, he’s helping to educate communities so they can make their own decisions about what’s right for them.

If you’d like, you can read the introduction online free. Check out also the table of contents and check out the dates on his book tour.

In the meantime, here’s a piece Jarrett wrote on his blog in advance of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver back in 2010. I hope you enjoy it. Aaron.

 

Over the next two weeks, we'll see a lot of Vancouver, one of the most remarkable achievements in 20th Century urbanism. If you're going to promote transit anywhere, especially in North America or Australasia, it's an important city to know about. 

What's special about Vancouver?  It's a new dense city, in North America. 

Vancouver is the closest North America has come to building a substantial high-density city — not just employment but residential — pretty much from scratch, entirely since World War II.  I noted in an earlier post that low-car North American cities are usually old cities, because they rely on a development pattern that just didn't happen after the advent of the car.   In 1945 Vancouver was nothing much: a hard-working port for natural resource exports, with just a few buildings even ten stories high.

But look at it now.

Such sudden eruptions of residential density are common enough in Asia, but North American cities rarely allow them on such a scale.  There are many explanations for how Vancouver did it, but at its core Vancouver had a fortunate confluence of the three essentials:

• Natural constraints that limited sprawl even in the pro-sprawl late 20th century.
• Economic energy, especially in the boom years of the 1990s and early 2000s.
• Planning and civic leadership.

Depending on your point of view, you can treat any of these terms as dominant.  Planners and civic leaders like to think it was their work that made the difference.  Economists can point to the huge influx of investment made possible by the city's unique positioning.  Geographers can emphasize how easy it is to avoid sprawl when you have so little buildable land.  I think they're all right.

The natural constraints jump out at you on the map.  Like many East Asian megacities, greater Vancouver has very little space.  It's hemmed in by waterways to the west, the US border to the south, and a massive wall of mountains immediately to the north.  Greater Vancouver can only sprawl eastward, into the narrow Fraser Valley, but this valley is also British Columbia's best agricultural land. 

The conflict between sprawl and agriculture, of course, was the impetus of Oregon's famous 1972 land use laws.  But flat land around Portland is still fairly abundant compared to the tiny ledge where Vancouver lies.  This may be part of why Portland never built to Vancouver densities, nor achieved Vancouver's intensity of transit and low levels of car dependence.

(Significantly, too, Vancouver has no urban freeways, just a disconnected network linking some of its suburbs.  Traffic in Vancouver is, in my experience, exactly as bad as it is in Los Angeles.  Neither city ever achieves true "gridlock," because at a certain level of congestion people just stop driving.  In a dense city, there will always be exactly as much congestion as you make room for.  If you want less congestion than that, you want congestion pricing, and I expect Vancouver will get there soon.)

Natural constraints also drove economic energy because Vancouver's site is so unique.  As Canada's only Pacific city, Vancouver is the natural focus of Canada's interactions with Asia, as well as the only peer for the West Coast cities of the US.  All that uniqueness can be intimidating. Although its crossroads location and soaring skyline suggest a big city, Greater Vancouver is only 2.1 million people.  Visitors expecting a major city are sometimes surprised that the cultural institutions are not what you'd expect in Toronto or Sydney or Los Angeles, and have to be reminded that Vancouver isn't a big city — just a very dense city in a unique and spectacular place.  

There's also the uniqueness of its climate.  Along with parts of adjacent Vancouver Island, Vancouver forms what we might call the Canadian Riviera: the only part of Canada that spends most of winter above the freezing mark.  Vancouver is thus the focal point for all the tropical longings of a frigid nation, a dynamic expressed not just in the absurdly abundant planting of the one palm tree hardy enough to grow there (the furry Chinese WIndmill Palm, Trachycarpus fortunei) but also in styles of beach-front architecture and design that recall Miami or LA.

But it's not Miami or LA.  Vancouver's winter is like that of adjacent Seattle, but gloomer and wetter.

The one Vancouver winter that I've endured included not just 29 consecutive days of rain but also a heavy ceiling of gray cloud that lasted for months.  This photo is of a nice winter day; most days the clouds were much lower.

Summer Olympics in Vancouver would have been a safer bet, because summer is three months of perfect sunny days and endless sensuous evenings.  But Vancouver is lucky.   For just the two weeks that the 2006 Winter Olympics were running in Torino, Vancouver's skies were brilliantly clear and cold, and the same happened just last week.  So I won't be surprised if the world sees a similar miracle in the weeks to come.

But this is a transit blog …

A city as dense as Vancouver needs a lot of transit.  There are at least four interesting transit-related stories that I hope I have time to explore over the next two weeks:

• Skytrain is North America's most extensive network of driverless metro technology, and a powerful focal point for highrise development along most of its length.  It's also a huge viaduct, mostly open underneath, and not always pleasant to walk under.  I worked on several projects to improve and redevelop blighted station areas, and I'll talk about some of these.  There's also an interesting debate about whether to build one more Skytrain corridor across the inner city, or try something else, like light rail.

• Granville Mall downtown is an important shopping and entertainment street that also tries to function as the main "transit mall" for the trolleybus network that covers most of the inner city.  I worked on a plan for the mall in 2006 as well, at the same time as I was working on the more ambitious downtown transit plans of Minneapolis.  The mall has been torn up for the last two years while the new Canada Line subway was built under it.  It's just re-opened, though the buses haven't been put back there yet.  As always with Granville Mall, there are lots of opinions about what should happen next.

•  The micro-ferries on False Creek are an interesting example of extremely low-cost waterborne transit, probably the lowest unit costs imaginable in the developed world.  They're fun to ride, and the waterway they use is pretty calm for the most part.  I've often wondered why this model didn't catch on more widely in river cities.
• Finally, Vancouver is also an example of really good transit geography.  If you were trying to design a city that would not just use transit but also use transit resources efficiently, you couldn't do much better than the City of Vancouver.  I'll explore this issue a bit in another post.

I hope you enjoy whatever glimpses of Vancouver you see on television in the next two weeks, if you're not lucky and hardy enough to be there in person.  Like San Francisco and Seattle, its natural setting is so spectacular that even people who live there sometimes stop and stare as though seeing it for the first time.  The uniqueness of the site is one aspect of Vancouver's achievement that not all cities can replicate.

But many cities are in places that are different but equally special.  Just around the Pacific, I think of Seattle, San Diego, Honolulu, Auckland, Brisbane and Sydney as all equally blessed with unique and spectacular sites where people already want to be.   If that specialness is recognized and valued in your culture, then Vancouver outcomes are possible.  All you need is the leadership, the economic activity, and above all the relentless aggressive intention to make it happen.  The result can be a great city, and a remarkably sustainable one.

This post originally appeared in Human Transit on February 12, 2010.

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

How Demolition Came to Mean Stabilization by Rob Pitingolo

[ Since I know the bulk of my readers have no interest in a bridge project in Louisville, I'm also running a full slate of regular articles this week, making this perhaps the biggest week ever at the Urbanophile.

This one is a follow-up to the 60 Minutes segment on demolitions in Cleveland by urbanist blogger Rob Pitingolo - Aaron. ]

Yesterday’s lead story on 60 Minutes was about vacancy and abandonment in Cleveland. This is an issue that hits close to home for me.

I started studying the problem in 2008. Back then the pressing question was how to target HUD money to strategically knock down blighted houses. The amount of money that HUD had to distribute wasn’t nearly enough to take down all the vacant and abandoned houses, so using it wisely was key, and it still is.

I want to emphasize that even though 60 minutes may have opened a lot of eyes to demolition in Cleveland, it’s not something that’s new. The idea of knocking down houses as the means to saving neighborhoods may seem counter-intuitive, but it’s been the prevailing strategy for several years now. Detroit has been following a similar strategy as well.

I do want to add something to the 60 Minutes analysis – a piece of the story that I don’t always feel gets told. Foreclosures may have fueled vacancy in Cleveland, but foreclosure is not the only reason why it’s such a big problem.

When homes go into foreclosure, they should get taken by banks and sold at auction for the price they’re worth, allowing investors to pick them up and rehabilitate, or allowing new buyers to own a home for a price they can afford. But banks themselves are walking away from these homes, because they’re literally worth zero dollars. When you look at it at the scale of the metro area, you realize that there is a big glut of housing supply on the market that’s driving down prices across the board, and in these extreme cases, all the way down to zero.

Believe it or not, the house I lived in before I moved to DC went through foreclosure. In 2008, the bank holding the delinquent mortgage sold it for $23,500 to an owner who rehabbed it, and then sold it the following spring for $96,000 (these numbers are all public record, in case you were curious). This is what should happen in a healthy market. Foreclosure shouldn’t necessarily mean vacancy, but too often in Cleveland, it does.

The Cleveland metro area is made up of the five counties around Cleveland – Cuyahoga, Lake, Geauga, Lorain and Medina. Between 2000 and 2010, two important but divergent trends emerged:

• The population of the Cleveland metro area fell roughly 3 percent.
• The number of housing units in the 4 counties excluding Cuyahoga grew more than 13 percent.

In other words, homes kept getting built between 2000 and 2010, even as people were fleeing the metro area. And most of these new houses were getting built in the suburban fringe counties. If you want to understand why there’s an oversupply of housing in the Cleveland area, look no further than these counties.

The fact that there were more houses but fewer potential buyers created an imbalance. When houses started to go vacant, no potential buyers stepped up because there were no potential buyers out there. If there had been potential buyers, houses might have gone through the process that my former house did. Many instead became vacant, because folks looking to buy a house had plenty of areas to look, and the weakest neighborhoods were obviously the first to go rotten.

But there’s more. Now that the bulldozers are starting to demolish houses and even entire blocks in the name of stabilization, it’s creating a metro area where tons of vacant undeveloped land is being created in the urban core, while developers are simultaneously building on greenfields in the fringe counties. Slowly but surely, it’s creating a “donut hole” that will make the entire metro area weaker.

Getting urban neighborhoods stabilized should rightly be the top priority, and Cleveland has decided that demolition is the best way to accomplish it. Unfortunately, years or sprawl and overbuilding, fueled by a foreclosure crisis, has created this reality. Further sprawl isn’t going to make the situation on the ground any better.

This post originally appeared in Extraordinary Observations on December 19, 2011.

Wednesday, January 4th, 2012

This Is Sprawl, Pittsburgh Edition

It can be difficult to identify exactly what sprawl is sometimes. Many cities are experiencing strong suburban expansion, but are also growing regional population as well. When you are adding nearly a million and a half people a decade like Houston is, it’s very likely your urban footprint is going to grow.

But there are some cities in America whose regional population has been flat (perhaps with some ups and downs in between) since 1950. This lets us examine sprawl in its pure form – an increase in urban footprint with no increase in population. Chuck Banas previously showed us this at work in Buffalo. Now Don Carter has done the same thing for Pittsburgh. In his recent TEDxPittsburgh talk, he put up the graphic below which struck me right away:

That’s a staggering increase in the urban footprint for no increase in population. The population ups and downs clearly nowhere came close to this footprint increase. While certainly not the only factor at work, clearly in many places this is part of the reason why we are broke. As Chuck Banas put it, “Same number of people, three times as much stuff.” – to pay for and maintain forever. No wonder some places are in such bad fiscal shape.

If you don’t remember Chuck’s Buffalo map, here it is again to refresh your memory:

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

Indy to Repurpose Stadium Seats at Bus Stops

[ You may remember an older post of mine about how an independent urbanist group in Indianapolis called People for Urban Progress undertook a super-cool recycling operation for the roof the of the now demolished Hoosier Dome. Well, they've done it again. PUP has partnered with Indianapolis Fabrications and Ecolaborative to re-purpose the seating from the now closed Bush Stadium minor league ballpark for bus stop seating and other purposes. This might seem inferior for places that have honest to goodness bus shelters. But in Indianapolis there is very little in the way of furnishings at bus stops, so this is an upgrade. Kevin Kaster of Urban Indy provides this update. If you are interested in seeing more pictures and learning more about what PUP is up to, check out their Facebook page - Aaron. ]

The first Bush Stadium seats have been installed at the corner of Alabama and Vermont Streets. The official unveiling was took place at 10:00, and I was fortunate enough to be invited to attend the event. I chatted with Michael and Jessica Bricker from People for Urban Progress, as well as Bryan Luellen, Annette Darrow, Jessica Mitchell’, and Samantha Cross from IndyGo in the hopes of finding out some more information about the project.

Urban Indy: How did this opportunity happen?

Michael Bricker: Ryan Fitzpatrick and his brother Kevin (from organization called Ecolaborative) were working with the Bush Stadium reuse people and came up to us with the idea for salvaging the seats. We also had an intern named Ryan Gallagher, whose college thesis was based on increasing bus ridership, and he believed that increasing amenities would help towards that goal. Basically, our organization was the facilitator that brought these two ideas together.

UI: Which bus stops are next in line?

MB: College and Alabama is the pilot. There are 4 other bus stops proposed. They will be at 10th and College, 86th and the Monon, Broad Ripple and Carrollton, and Fall Creek and Meridian. After that, other organizations can sponsor their own bus stops through the PUP Stop program.

UI: Is there funding in place for maintenance?

Bryan Luellen: IndyGo will maintain them. It is possible that they might become part of the adopt-a-stop program. But the seats are pretty sturdy, and they are designed to be outside, so they will not need much maintenance.

UI: Has anyone else done this?

MB: Not that we know of. Other stadium seats may be in the private domain, but these are the first to be re-purposed for public use that we know of.

UI: How did you get the city to buy off on the project?

MB: It was pretty easy, actually. We worked with Develop Indy and the developer of the Stadium. Develop Indy helped us quickly secure access to the stadium and the seats. We have to get them out of the stadium by March 2nd.

BL: Also, IndyGo pursued a license from the city to place the bench in a public Right-of-Way.

Indianapolis Transit Expansion Proposal

This week Indianapolis business leaders also unveiled a $1.3B proposal for a major transit expansion, including doubling the footprint of the local bus system and building a commuter rail line. This faces many hurdles in getting through the state legislature and then a referendum. We’ll see if this fares any better than most transit proposals in similar sized Midwestern cities, most of which have failed. Urban Indy has the story. Here’s a map of the proposed system:

Thanks so much to Kevin Kastner and Urban Indy for this contribution.

Tuesday, October 18th, 2011

A Beginning Agenda for Making Smart Growth Legal by Kaid Benfield

[ Kaid Benfield is Director of Sustainable Communities for the Natural Resources Defense Council. He also writes what I consider the best blog out there by anyone who is institutionally affiliated. I'd encourage you to check it out. And more institutions who want to do social media well should learn from Kaid's example.

I'd like to preface this article with an editorial comment that I'll stress is mine, not Kaid's. I sometimes get grief for saying that we are drowning in regulation in this country and it is killing our ability to get things done. But I'm more and more seeing writings from even clear liberals who increasingly see that this regulation doesn't just stop bad stuff, it stops the good stuff too. Here Kaid explains how smart growth is actually illegal in most places. Reading the news we also hear about things like organic raw milk farms in Wisconsin getting shut down or how Occupy Charlotte protestors can't bring in port-a-potties (a basic sanitary measure) because it is against code. And of course try to build a transit line and see how long it takes to clear the review. Hopefully at some point we'll see some sort of bi-partisan consensus around dialing back at least the worst of this regulatory insanity - Aaron. ]

When then-governor Parris Glendening announced a key portion of what was to become Maryland’s path-breaking land use legislation in the 1990s, he stood in the historic district of Annapolis, where Maryland’s State House is located.  He told the crowd that the best parts of downtown Annapolis – a picturesque, highly walkable and much-loved collection of 17th- and 18th-century homes, apartments, shops, civic and church buildings, restaurants and small offices just above the city’s harbor – could not have been built in the late 20th century. 

Modern zoning and building codes wouldn’t allow it.  There are too many uses mixed together, insufficient setbacks from the street, not enough parking, stairways that don’t meet modern building codes, streets too narrow, and so on.  The implication was clear:  there is something very wrong with a system of laws that has deviated so far from our intrinsic instincts that it has, perhaps unwittingly but nevertheless effectively, outlawed the very things that have made Maryland’s state capital so popular with residents and visitors.

This blog is replete with great examples of more recent development that attempts to recapture some of the attributes that make historic districts so loved.  We are pleased to celebrate these new examples of sustainability, places that make walking a viable option for going about one’s life, that shrink the footprint of development, conserving land and infrastructure.

But, in almost every case, those exemplary new developments have required special exceptions from the building and zoning codes in effect in their municipalities.  This has basically made sustainability much harder to build than sprawl, when our regulatory system should be doing just the opposite.

This brings me to a simple set of recommendations by “a roundtable of interested parties” constituted in Seattle.  My friend Chuck Wolfe is a member of that roundtable, and he has very helpfully summarized the group’s key findings in a post on the Seattle blog Crosscut.  (Chuck also writes his own blog MyUrbanist, and we are both writers in The Sustainable Cities Collective.)  The recommendations are not radical but, rather, all grounded in pragmatism and, if I may say so, common sense:

Encourage home entrepreneurship.  Home-based businesses should be freely allowed so long as impacts to surrounding properties are minimized.  I have to note that I am writing this blog from my home right now (it’s 10.30pm); I have no idea whether that is technically legal or not.  The large government agency where my wife works has such an aggressive telecommuting program that some 80 percent of agency employees now work from their residences most of the time.  It’s time for our laws to catch up with reality, save the transportation energy and congestion associated with commuting, and allow people to work and serve customers from home again, as we did routinely for centuries.

Concentrate street-level commercial uses in pedestrian zones.  On this issue, Seattle’s current law is actually more progressive than most:  street-level commercial uses have been required for some time in larger new buildings.  The roundtable, working from experience, is recommending that the requirement become more nuanced and be made applicable primarily to buildings in designated pedestrian zones, not uniformly applied outside of those areas as well. 

Enhance the flexibility of parking requirements.  “As Seattle’s transit service improves, demand for on-site parking will shrink. This recommendation will allow the market to determine how much parking should be provided in locations within one quarter mile of good transit service (generally, those with at least 15 minute headways). It eliminates minimum parking requirements for residential or non-residential uses in such locations.”  Personally, I might apply a nuanced approach here as well, with perhaps some limited minimum requirements for larger buildings that abut single-family residential areas.  There doesn’t need to be an all-or-nothing approach, and we want neighbors to feel comfortable with nearby intensification where it makes sense.

Allow small commercial uses in multifamily zones.  This should be a no-brainer; bring back the corner store, please.  The recommendation in Seattle is to allow small corner stores in two- and three-story multifamily zones in certain designated districts; the city already allows them in “mid-rise” and high-rise districts. 

Expand options for accessory dwelling units.  I believe accessory units – garage and basement apartments, “granny flats” and the like – should be allowed most everywhere.  They allow a bit more density with very little change to the look and feel of a neighborhood.  In this case, the roundtable is recommending expansion of Seattle’s excellent “backyard cottages” concept.

Allow mobile food vending and similar temporary uses.  Another no-brainer.  Food trucks and farmers’ markets are springing up everywhere in America.  And it’s not exactly a radical idea: ever hear of the Good Humor man?  But it some places it is restricted, common sense notwithstanding.  (Reminds me of the recent local case in suburban DC where a kids’ lemonade stand set up outside the US Open Golf Tournament was shut down by the authorities.  Jeez.)  In Seattle, the roundtable would allow vending carts on private property where other commercial uses are permitted and extend the permitted days and hours of farmers markets.  Sounds like a baby step to me, but at least it’s in the right direction..

Change state environmental law to obviate redundant review of projects.  “The Roundtable recommended that the city take advantage of opportunities to streamline and combine SEPA review with other aspects of regulatory review for proposed residential and mixed-use projects in designated growth centers, such as urban centers and light rail station areas.”  This one may be controversial with some of my environmental colleagues and partners, but the angel can be in the details – if, for example, the impacts of area plans have been reviewed, review of the same issues may not need to be repeated for projects that conform to those plans, especially in places where we have determined that growth should occur and where mitigation is built into the project.  I don’t pretend to know the specifics of applicable city and state law in Seattle and how the recommendations would modify it, but I do think some degree of relaxation can be appropriate in designated growth centers, when the proposed project conforms to the desired types of growth as articulated in earlier legal documents.

As noted earlier in the post, these are hardly radical proposals.  As my title suggests, they represent “beginning” steps.  The real stunner is that our laws have become so contorted and restrictive that they are needed.  The roundtable has done the citizens of Seattle a service by undertaking their study and making the recommendations, and Chuck as done us all a favor by spreading the word.

Note: Hover over photos for image credits.

Editorial Note: For more information about what’s going on in Seattle, see:

Seattle Starts Making Sustainability Legal
Seattle Government Regulatory Reform

This post originally appeared in The Switchboard on July 27, 2011. Reprinted with permission of the author.

Thursday, September 29th, 2011

Replay: Planning and Free Market Density

I read articles out on the net with the general theme of claiming that a cabal of planners is conspiring to force us all to move back into overcrowded tenements in order to recognize their dream of reurbanizing America. There’s no doubt that plenty of progressives write about how people ought to more or less be forced back into the city and would gladly do it if they had the power. And I’m sure in some places there are planning rules designed to achieve this effect, like urban growth boundaries. But if you ask me, the practical reality in most of the United States is exactly the opposite situation. Virtually every piece of planning regulation I see acts to discourage urbanization and especially to reduce densities below market demand.

If you want people to live more densely, no nefarious planning rules are necessary. In fact, simply remove a lot of the ones we have and American cities would get much more dense in a hurry. The free market wants more density.

If you look at zoning laws across America, almost all of them specify maximum densities, such as residential units per dwelling acre, that put a cap on buildout. Additionally, there are a host of other planning regulations such as minimum parking requirements, setback requirements, etc. that have the same effect. And don’t get me started on historic districts.

The truth of this proposition can easily be verified by simply showing up at your nearest neighborhood meeting or planning hearing when ever a new development is proposed. Almost inevitably, the developer wants to put in a certain number of units, and the neighbors think it is too many. Frequently, developers are forced to scale back their projects in the face of objections.

And this isn’t just in the suburbs. Nor just in smaller cities. This affects even larger and nominally very progressive cities too. Chicago, for example, has down zoned extensively in the city. Neighbors complained about densification, such as by replacing two story, two unit buildings with four story, three unit buildings, and got large tracts of popular neighborhoods down zoned. In a previous era tony Lincoln Park saw the development of many high rise apartment buildings, including ones on neighborhood commercial thoroughfares like Clark St. It seems unlikely these will be permitted again. Minimum parking requirements have turned much of the city into strip mall nation.

Consider even ultra-progressive Toronto. A recent proposal for a 42 story high rise condo building with no parking was recommended for a “No” vote by planning staff. The staff was actually overruled on this one – so far. But again, it seems the planners are on the pro-car, not anti-car side here.

Bigger cities can survive this perhaps. But smaller cities are often devastated by it. For example, an anti-density mindset in Indianapolis has rendered most of the central city, even those areas nominally revitalized, sterile. Many neighborhoods have tidy rows of well kept and attractive single family homes, just like you would find in any Indiana small town, but few pedestrians and few businesses that survive without relying on suburban patrons or commuters. The reduction in density forced on developers has also led to much of the downtown housing stock being unaffordable by local standards since each unit has to carry a lot more land value.

Developers are in business to make money. They obviously have some reason to believe that the market will absorb more density and less parking. They certainly aren’t proposing things out of any purely altruistic motives. Now, certainly some of the initial proposals might be something the development company itself never had an intention to build, all the better to give away in the form of concessions as the planning gauntlet ballet plays itself out. But there is no doubt in my mind we would frequently see greater density if we only allowed the market to operate. No heavy handed planning required.

This post originally appeared on September 29, 2009.

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