Category: Urbanism

2026-08-31

The Country is the Natural Unit of Policy Analysis

This post is to explain why comparative policy analysis must start with sovereign states, rather than their subnational entities. This includes urbanism, despite the anti-national orientation of some urbanists. In particular, all of the following claims that I routinely have to deal with are incorrect:

The claim by Americans that the US must actually be compared with the EU, and its states with EU member states, on matters of economic and social performance.
The more fundamental claim by Americans that American states, subcultures, ethnic groups, and other subdivisions are so different from one another that they have to be compared with European nation-states and the US writ large is too diverse to be so compared.
The claim by urbanists that metropolitan areas are a more natural unit of analysis than states, for example the transnational Blue Banana as opposed to the EU member states (and UK) that it overlaps.

Policy and politics

Politics in virtually all first-world democracies is nationalized. Political parties are nationally unified, and the president (if executive) or prime minister is a well-known national figure. Regional politicians can have special features relevant to their region, for example big city mayors tend to be more cosmopolitan than is the norm for their parties but are still understood to represent the party and its governance. Even in countries with a split between national and provincial parties, like Canada, there is enough overlap that one can talk about the Doug Ford faction of the Conservatives and about the factions Pierre Poilievre is appealing to even though Ford runs Ontario and isn’t a federal politician.

None of this exists across national boundaries. The EU has EU-wide party umbrellas so that one can identify green parties, social democratic parties, right-liberal parties, Christian democratic parties, various flavors of extreme right parties, and so on, but it’s almost unheard of to attack a party in national politics based on what another party in the same umbrella group in a different member state. Even on fundamental issues, parties that coordinate closely may differ: there’s an umbrella group of agrarian Nordic parties, whose Norwegian member is strongly against joining the EU and whose Swedish and Finnish members are not particularly euroskeptical within the Union (its Danish member is the main center-right party and supports joining the euro).

Different enacted policies can be used as a mirror with which one judges one’s own country’s politics. Thus, in Sweden, people extensively look at what other Nordic countries do and try to learn lessons, or, more often, pick and choose examples to justify their preconceptions of what Sweden should do. Finnish education was very popular in Sweden in the 2010s as an aspirational comparison. In Finland, the Green Party, Vihr, looked at the shutdown of nuclear power in Germany without adequate renewable replacement, and decided against backing a similar policy for Finland; the party supports maintaining the nuclear plants for now. But it would be unthinkable in Finnish politics to attack Vihr for a policy backed by the German Greens, or even by the Swedish Greens, Mp; for example, Mp voted against joining NATO, but this has not led to any attacks on Vihr, which voted in favor and which is in support of rearmament to deter Russia.

Within countries, this is completely different. CDU cuts ads attacking the governance of Berlin under all-left coalitions for national consumption. Most people on the German center-left speak with disdain of the Lower Saxony gang, the SPD elite leadership drawn from the state with ties to heavy industry, general political inertia, and a pro-Russia foreign policy (Schröder was mayor of Hanover before he became chancellor, and other 2000s-10s SPD elites from the state were warm to Russia). In the United States, moderate Democrats across the country find themselves having to denounce Zohran Mamdani, who is not in national politics and doesn’t so far have much of a path to go into national politics.

What the state does

The OECD Fiscal Decentralisation Database shows the proportions of taxation and spending at each level of government. Some states are atypically centralized, for example the United Kingdom. Others are atypically decentralized, for example Australia or the United States. But even in the United States, taxation and spending are majority-federal, and the biggest state spending program is typically Medicaid, heavily federally regulated in law and politics.

Meanwhile, at the EU level, the share of the budget is so small it might as well not exist. The social insurance, health care, and military spending that dominate spending are entirely at the member state level, or even devolved further. (Nordic health care is managed at a regional level and not at the state level; Finland has 21 well-being regions for health and welfare.) The EU has a very large role to play in the sort of regulations nobody notices and are not subject to mass politics, for example coordinating health insurance and education reciprocity between member states, or coordinating rail rolling stock regulations so that the national homologation processes are mostly the same and the same trains that run in Germany can run in France and vice versa.

Not for nothing, the infrastructure system shows some hard borders. Within EU member states, intercity rail can be fast and convenient. Most major provincial cities in France are connected to Paris by TGVs averaging more than 200 km/h end-to-end. German trains are slower, but the national network has tight integration as far as can be pursued on such a complex system, and further investment aims to tighten this integration, to enable somewhat higher average speeds. None of that exists across borders. The only cross-border all-high-speed system in the EU, from Paris north to Brussels and thence Holland, is beset by high fares, designed for business travelers only, nothing like the more popular model used by SNCF domestically; the most recent data I have seen has international TGVs and Eurostar averaging twice the fares per passenger-km of domestic TGVs. States build high-speed railways and run trains on them; the EU passes passenger rights regulations to deal with some cross-border frictions.

In the United States, it’s hard to exactly compare the situation, since the only trains that we would consider bad but barely passable are the Northeast Corridor and a few branches; the other trains might as well not exist. But the trains that do exist do not meaningfully respect state boundaries, because American geography developed as a single polity and not as 13 or 50. Even state-subsidized corridor trains on Amtrak are often cross-border, such as the Michigan trains to Chicago, or the Illinois-subsidized trains to St. Louis. The highway network, meanwhile, operates on a single national standard, and so does the freight rail network, without the labor frictions seen at some intra-EU borders that frustrate the use of rail freight at long distances.

Economic and social outcomes

Because politics is national and most services are provided directly or indirectly at the national level, the economy is national as well. This can also be seen in economic growth. Megaregions are invisible in it, and national growth matters more than anything. For sure, there can be trends within a country, with relative decline or growth in various regions, but these don’t really align with any story of globalized megaregions. In Germany, one can see the convergence of East Germany to West German living standards, but otherwise, megaregions like the Blue Banana are irrelevant – Hamburg, firmly West German and yet outside the Blue Banana, doesn’t behave differently from German metropolitan areas in the Blue Banana like Frankfurt. And in Italy, the economic stagnation from the 1990s to 2020 affected both the North and the South – there was no further divergence as the Blue Banana model might have predicted.

The same can be said of social outcomes. I’ve repeatedly made Americans on social media angry by pointing out that the United States has low life expectancy. They keep retorting that actually the problem is drag from the Deep South, and New York and California are doing fine, with life expectancy about two years more than the national average. And yet, life expectancy about two years more than the national average is rather common in rich regions with selective migration, even in European countries with even access to health care, like France and Spain.

Culture and migration

People in a particular country or region are immersed in its media and learn in detail about its differences. When researching the Swedish case, I kept finding these intra-Nordic comparisons that focused on differences in road funding details between Sweden and Norway, differences that from outside Scandinavia are invisible (in fact, the construction cost history of Sweden, Norway, and Finland is largely the same, with Denmark being only somewhat different).

This can lead to a kind of insularity, in which people are too aware of their own country’s internal diversity and insufficiently aware of others’. Thus Americans can recite details of how different regions or ethnic groups in the country behave, and even pronounce certain cities European, cities that lack pretty basic aspects of common European culture (say, association football). This is where the mentality among Americans that the interregional cultural differences in the US are more comparable to differences between rather than within European countries comes from. They are only vaguely aware of German stereotypes involving Bavaria, a state that views itself as so special that it’s had separate political parties since 1918, or of England-Scotland and Wallonia-Flanders differences that are in some cases greater than interstate differences in the US (the American education system is broadly the same regardless of state; England and Scotland don’t even have the same length of undergraduate education).

The United States, after all, is a country with extensive internal migration. The Census Bureau’s 2024 estimate has 15.7% of people resident in the United States born abroad or in Puerto Rico, and 43% born outside the state they live in. Among adults, a slight majority, 51%, were born outside the state they live in. Immigration numbers in Europe look rather like the immigration numbers to the United States, and not at all like the interstate migration numbers within the United States. EU mobility is rising but still so far from intra-US mobility that the comparison is silly.

This is why, in mass transit, the United States has a national class of planners, consultants, agency managers, and staff. Managers move between major systems easily, and planners in California are expected to be aware of what is happening on the East Coast (in the other direction, it’s less expected, because of core-periphery dynamics). The assumptions made in Seattle, Los Angeles, Boston, and Washington are broadly the same. The assumptions made in New York have a few idiosyncracies coming from New York feeling special, but they’re still within the same constellation of what people think is obvious elsewhere in the United States, and overall the differences aren’t larger than those between German cities or between French ones.

Those assumptions not only are different in Europe, but are different between countries: the British, French, and German ways of building rapid transit are different, and there isn’t even a unified Nordic way but rather different paradigms in different Nordic capitals (and yet the costs and procurement systems are the same). This cascades down to the level of activism: German environmental advocates are sour on U-Bahn expansion, viewing it as part of a cars-and-trains paradigm and preferring trams; in contrast, anti-subway activism in green politics is uncommon outside the German-speaking world.

At most, one can say the United States is comparable in its internal diversity to the combination of Germany and Austria, in some aspects. One cannot compare it to Europe writ large, nor can one compare its states to EU member states rather than to subnational divisions like German Länder. Americans in their solipsism try to convince themselves there is no need to study the rest of the world in detail, but merely to collapse it into macroregions like Europe or Latin America, and to analogize entire nations with their diasporas in the United States. But it’s not meaningfully possible to understand the world at this scale – macroregions are real but analysis of policy, including transportation but also the usual economic and social topics, has to be down at the level of sovereign states first with no illusion that a province in a large country is comparable to a smaller country.

2026-07-14

Corridor Zoning is not Transit-Oriented Development

Corridor zoning is a style of development, in which major arterial streets are zoned for high residential and commercial density, while side streets remain zoned for low density, sometimes even for single-family housing. Yesterday, a discussion on social media brought up transit-oriented development, so I’d like to explain why corridor zoning is not TOD, in intent or function.

For reference, here’s Yonge Street in Toronto:

And here’s Cambie, in Vancouver:

Both streets have subways running underneath them. Both streets – Yonge far more clearly than Cambie – are characterized by continuous high-density development along the corridor, only extending a block out from it. This is billed as protecting single-family neighborhoods from apartments while also providing opportunities for housing growth; Toronto has fairly YIMBY and Vancouver has very YIMBY housing growth rates, with housing shunted to such corridors and to redevelopable nonresidential sites like Marine Landing. In the United States, corridor zoning can also be found in Seattle, which has nearly the fastest apartment growth rate per capita in the country.

And this is not TOD. The reason is simple: TOD doesn’t care about corridors but about the underlying transit, which is a subway, not a bus stopping every block. From the perspective of a transit user, the walk from the Canada Line 300 meters north-south along Cambie is the same as the walk 300 meters diagonally along Cambie, King Edward, and side streets. Good TOD is therefore measured in terms of walk radius from the station.

Take the following example. TOD zoning might allow a floor area ratio of 3. This is roughly the floor area ratio of the central residential neighborhoods of Berlin, or the inner suburbs of Paris, or much of Upper Manhattan and inner Brooklyn. It can be realized with a six-story building, a common maximum height for North American woodframe construction, using half of a 30 meter deep lot. If these are built 500 meters from a train station, using the taxicab metric, then the resulting 0.5 km^2 area can host around 500,000*0.6*3/45 = 20,000 people at 45 m^2/person with the lots occupying 60% of the area and the streets 40%. This is a cluster that can support a few neighborhood-scale commercial functions, probably at or right next to the station.

The main benefit of corridors is not residential, but commercial. A residential gap in an otherwise commercial corridor will absolutely reduce spontaneity. But continuous commercial development is not achieved through corridor zoning – to the contrary, if the TOD density of FAR 3 can extend sufficiently far from the station, then that density can naturally be developed exclusively away from the corridor, while the corridor itself has the demand for one- and two-story commercial buildings, which can take some residential floors above them in theory but not in practice due to different development needs and different profitability rates. But that’s not corridor zoning – rather, it’s pre-automobile urban development styles, which had isotropic density across an entire neighborhood.

I don’t expect a TOD regime to produce Kreuzberg and Neukölln above. But I do expect it to produce considerable quantities of housing designed around train stations, and if those are modern stations then it’s likely they’re fairly far apart with low-density gaps between high-density pods (but, as much as possible, no residential gaps in commercial corridors). This is not really what’s going on with Canadian corridor zoning, because people can walk in multiple directions, and the explicit purpose of corridor zoning is to concentrate both air pollution and the perceived social pollution of apartment dwellers in quarantine zones that single-family homeowners can avoid. Good TOD practices will therefore drop corridor zoning, and allow much higher density within a radius of several blocks from streets like Yonge, even if it means some single-family homeowners will have to share blocks with mid- and high-rise apartment buildings.

2026-02-26

There’s no Such Thing as Overtourism

A post by Michael Sweeney on Bluesky asking which cities have overtourism got me thinking about the concept. People in the thread named tourist hotspots like Venice or New Orleans or Las Vegas; the normally excellent Max Dubler said, “Venice is certainly too far gone (it’s basically a theme park these days).” In truth, people are thinking about the concept exactly backward. The biggest global tourist draws are also cities with plenty of other economic activity, like London and Paris. If a region has only tourism then it often has social problems associated with being too reliant on one low-wage industry, but then the comparison should be to regions that also don’t have tourism at all, and then it looks less bad.

Which places have the most tourism?

The most consistent on tourism count international travelers. Euromonitor periodically publishes rankings; the latest has Bangkok at #1 in the world, with 30 million arrivals in 2025. The rest of the top 10 are Hong Kong, London, Macau, Istanbul, Dubai, Mecca, Antalya, Paris, and Kuala Lumpur. Of the top 10, seven are large cities in their own right, one is a religious pilgrimage site, and only two have a tourism-dominant economy (Macau, Antalya).

In general, those dominant cities also outshine smaller places within the same country. France is #1 globally, with 102 million international arrivals; Ile-de-France is about even with its share of the national population. But then the UK only has 42 million, of which 23 million are to London. Antalya essentially splits Turkey’s tourism visits with Istanbul: Turkey has 61 million visits, with Istanbul taking 20 million of those and Antalya 19 million. Domestic tourism is harder to measure but follows the same pattern, with very large volumes to major cities like New York (not in the global top 10 by international arrivals because crossing a European border is counted but not crossing a US state line). San Francisco long had tourism as its largest industry, before tech overtook it this century.

Going down the list of cities by size, we start seeing ones like Barcelona, mentioned by Max in the same thread. But Barcelona, too, is not a purely tourist region, but also an industrial hub and one of the larger metropolitan areas in Europe; Catalonia has a partnership with Lombardy, Rhône-Alpes, and Baden-Württemberg, Four Motors for Europe, as these regions have extensive car manufacturing. Its industry is less famous than London and Paris’s in-your-face capital city wealth and (like all heavy manufacturing) does not agglomerate in city center, so tourists who visit Barcelona are less likely to see it than tourists who visit cities dominated by professional services, but it’s there and overall Catalonia remains an economic co-capital of Spain with the Community of Madrid.

It’s not a coincidence that tourism trips to cities usually involve cities with large non-tourist economies. The high-end shopping, the museums, the cultural attractions, and the famous squares of London, Paris, and New York were all built by local civil society, with the wealth that those cities generated from their broad economies, the first two due to their roles as dominant capitals, the last due to its industrial and professional services wealth. Going a few rungs down the wealth rankings, even countercultural centers are first built for locals, before tourists hear about them; Berghain and Kitkat exist because Berlin has had a large exhibitionist counterculture.

And in no case is there any real displacement. Places that develop tourism because their internal institutions are successful with foreigners – like the cultural attractions in every large city, or the historic and modern vistas, or the shopping – are still large cities with internal economies. Berghain and Kitkat are swarming with tourists, but beyond local disdain that something has become cringe, this isn’t displacing Berliners, who have plenty of clubs to go to with equally dodgy consent practices. At higher levels of prestige, museums are hardly displacing locals – New Yorkers go to the Met for regular outings if they want, and the place is crowded but not so crowded that city residents can’t get in.

What about places with only tourism?

There is still the issue of the truly tourism-dominated economies, the ones that aren’t just large cities that became famous among tourists. Antalya is the biggest one, globally; others are Orlando, Las Vegas, Hawaii, much of the Caribbean, Cancún, Phuket, various Greek islands, and Alicante. Venice and Nice are both very touristy, and can be put into this category as well, but caution is advised as both have industrial economies in their metropolitan areas away from the visited historic or coastal cores.

In some cases, this represents a transition from another economic activity. Venice was a shipbuilding and trading city that just never participated in the modern Industrial Revolution; people visit the Renaissance core. Phuket produced tin and rubber before it became a tourist economy. In other cases, the place owes its entire economic existence to tourism, like the Riviera, Las Vegas, or Florida, with various attempts to diversify not always succeeding.

Usually complaints about overtourism boil down to finding such places tacky. But economically, the locals aren’t necessarily hurting. Phuket had the highest human development index in Thailand earlier this century (it no longer does, which I think is corona-related), and is still one of the wealthiest provinces per capita. Florida is not the highest-opportunity part of the US, but other parts of the South without the same volume of tourism are worse.

Michael compares this situation with resource curse, the theory that natural resource wealth is negative for overall development. But the usual indicator for the resource curse, natural resources as a percentage of GDP, bakes in not just resource abundance but also poverty of the rest of the economy. After all, the US has plenty of resource wealth, which let it develop with lower land and energy prices and attract immigrants until it became a large industrial and tech economy, not really dependent on its farmland or oil wealth. It just isn’t seen as a high share of GDP because the rest of the economy has caught up. It’s the same with tourism: the regions that look bad because they’re dominated by tourism don’t have an overtourism problem but a problem with not enough economy in general.

2025-09-15

Transit-Oriented Development and Rail Capacity

Hayden Clarkin, inspired by the ongoing YIMBYTown conference in New Haven, asks me about rail capacity on transit-oriented development, in a way that reminds me of Donald Shoup’s critique of trip generation tables from the 2000s, before he became an urbanist superstar. The prompt was,

Is it possible to measure or estimate the train capacity of a transit line? Ie: How do I find the capacity of the New Haven line based on daily train trips, etc? Trying to see how much housing can be built on existing rail lines without the need for adding more trains

To be clear, Hayden was not talking about the capacity of the line but about that of trains. So adding peak service beyond what exists and is programmed (with projects like Penn Station Access) is not part of the prompt. The answer is that,

There isn’t really a single number (this is a trip generation question).
Moreover, under the assumption of status quo service on commuter rail, development near stations would not be transit-oriented.

Trip generation refers to the formula connecting the expected car trips generated by new development. It, and its sibling parking generation, is used in transportation planning and zoning throughout the United States, to limit development based on what existing and planned highway capacity can carry. Shoup’s paper explains how the trip and parking generation formulas are fictional, fitting a linear curve between the size of new development and the induced number of car trips and parked cars out of extremely low correlations, sometimes with an R^2 of less than 0.1, in one case with a negative correlation between trip generation and development size.

I encourage urbanists and transportation advocates and analysts to read Shoup’s original paper. It’s this insight that led him to examine parking requirements in zoning codes more carefully, leading to his book The High Cost of Free Parking and then many years of advocacy for looser parking requirements.

I bring all of this up because Hayden is essentially asking a trip generation question but on trains, and the answer there cannot be any more definitive than for cars. It’s not really possible to control what proportion of residents of new housing in a suburb near a New York commuter rail stop will be taking the train. Under current commuter rail service, we should expect the overwhelming majority of new residents who work in Manhattan to take the train, and the overwhelming majority of new residents who work anywhere else to drive (essentially the only exception is short trips on commuter rail, for example people taking the train from suburbs past Stamford to Stamford; those are free from the point of view of train capacity). This is comparable mode choice to that in the trip and parking generation tables, driven by an assumption of no alternative to driving, which is correct in nearly all of the United States. However, figuring out the proportion of new residents who would be commuting to Manhattan and thus taking the train is a hard exercise, for all of the following reasons:

The great majority of suburbanites do not work in the city. For example, in the Western Connecticut and Greater Bridgeport Planning Regions, more or less coterminous with Fairfield County, 59.5% of residents work within one of these two regions, and only 7.4% work in Manhattan as of 2022 (and far fewer work in the Outer Boroughs – the highest number, in Queens, is 0.7%). This means that every new housing unit in the suburbs, even if it is guaranteed the occupant works in Manhattan, generates demand for more destinations within the suburb, such as retail and schools.
The decision of a city commuter to move to the suburbs is not driven by high city housing prices. The suburbs of New York are collectively more expensive to live in than the city, and usually the ones with good commuter rail service are more expensive than other suburbs. Rather, the decision is driven by preference for the suburbs. This means that it’s hard to control where the occupant of new suburban housing will work purely through TOD design characteristics such as proximity to the station, streets with sidewalks, or multifamily housing.
Among public transportation users, what time of day they go to work isn’t controllable. Most likely they’d commute at rush hour, because commuter rail is marginally usable off-peak, but it’s not guaranteed, and just figuring the proportion of new users who’d be working in Manhattan at rush hour is another complication.

All of the above factors also conspire to ensure that, under the status quo commuter rail service assumption, TOD in the suburbs is impossible except perhaps ones adjacent to the city. In a suburb like Westport, everyone is rich enough to afford one car per adult, and adding more housing near the station won’t lower prices by enough to change that. The quality of service for any trip other than a rush hour trip to Manhattan ranges from low to unusable, and so the new residents would be driving everywhere except their Manhattan job, even if they got housing in a multifamily building within walking distance of the train station.

This is a frustrating answer, so perhaps it’s better to ask what could be modified to ensure that TOD in the suburbs of New York became possible. For this, I believe two changes are required:

Improvements in commuter rail scheduling to appeal to the growing majority of off-peak commuters as well as to non-commute trips. I’ve written about this repeatedly as part of ETA but also the high-speed rail project for the Transit Costs Project.
Town center development near the train station to colocate local service functions there, including retail, a doctor’s office and similar services, a library, and a school, with the residential TOD located behind these functions.

The point of commercial and local service TOD is to concentrate destinations near the train station. This permits trip chaining by transit, where today it is only viable by car in those suburbs. This also encourages running more connecting bus service to the train station, initially on the strength of low-income retail workers who can’t afford a car, but then as bus-rail connections improve also for bus-rail commuters. The average income of a bus rider would remain well below that of a driver, but better service with timed connections to the train would mean the ridership would comprise a broader section of the working class rather than just the poor. Similarly, people who don’t drive on ideological or personal disability grounds could live in a certain degree of comfort in the residential TOD and walk, and this would improve service quality so that others who can drive but sometimes choose not to could live a similar lifestyle.

But even in this scenario of stronger TOD, it’s not really possible to control train capacity through zoning. We should expect this scenario to lead to much higher ridership without straining capacity, since capacity is determined by the peak and the above outline leads to a community with much higher off-peak rail usage for work and non-work trips, with a much lower share of its ridership occurring at rush hour (New York commuter rail is 67-69%, the SNCF part of the RER and Transilien are about 46%, due to frequency and TOD quality). But we still have no good way of controlling the modal choice, which is driven by personal decisions depending on local conditions of the suburb, and by office growth in the city versus in the suburbs.

2025-06-08

Meme Weeding: Embodied Carbon

The greenhouse gases emitted by the production of concrete, called embodied carbon, are occasionally used as a green-NIMBY argument against building new things. A Berlin Green spokesperson coauthored a study opposing U-Bahn construction on the grounds that the concrete used in construction would raise emissions. More recently, I’ve seen American opponents of transit-oriented development in Manhattan, of all places, talk about the high embodied carbon of new high-rise buildings. Katja Diehl calls for a moratorium on new buildings on anti-concrete grounds, and a petition for the EU to shift regulations to be against new buildings and in favor of reuse on embodied carbon grounds got written up favorably by Kate Wagner in the Nation. Against all of this, I’ve found some numbers on the actual emissions involved in concrete production for new buildings, and they are so low as to be insignificant, 1.5 orders of magnitude less than transportation emissions. A decarbonization strategy should largely ignore embodied carbon concerns and embrace pro-growth sentiments: big buildings, big subway systems, big cities.

What is embodied carbon?

Embodied (sometimes called embedded) carbon is the carbon content emitted by the production of materials. The production of concrete emits greenhouses gases, mainly through two mechanisms: the chemical process used to produce cement emits CO2 by itself, and the energy used for production adds to the emissions of the electric grid.

What are the embodied carbon emissions of new buildings?

The embodied carbon content of concrete depends heavily on the local electricity grid as well as on the required strength of the material, with stronger requirements leading to higher emissions. The Climate Group commissioned a report on this in the British context, finding a wide range, but the average is around 250 kg of CO2-equivalent per m^3 of concrete, the 75th percentile is about 300, and the upper bound is 450. This is a cradle-to-gate figure, taking into account the existing conditions of the carbon intensivity of where concrete is produced and of the logistics system for getting it to the construction site. This is already with some reductions from a previous baseline (EC100; the UK average is around EC60), and further reductions are possible, through decarbonizing the logistics and production; the goal of the report is not to bury the concept of embodied carbon as I do but to propose ways to reduce construction industry emissions.

The question is now how to convert cubic meters of concrete into square meters of built-up area. I have not seen European figures for this, but I did find a 2012 report by the Building and Construction Authority. In Singapore, the sustainability index used is the concrete usage index (CUI), measured in meters (cubic meters per square meter). The example projects given in the study, all around 15 years old, have a CUI of 0.4-0.5 m, and it was pointed out to me on social media that in Toronto the average is 0.55 m.

250 kg/m^3 times 0.4 m equals 0.1 t-CO2 per m^2 of built-up area. A 100 m^2 apartment thus has an embodied carbon content of around 10 t-CO2. This is relative to a baseline in which there is already some concern for reducing construction emissions, both the CUI and the carbon content of concrete per m^3, but this is largely without techniques like mass timber or infra-lightweight concrete (ILC). In Singapore the techniques highlighted in the BCA report are fully compatible with the city’s high-rise character, and the example building with gold but not platinum certification has 25 stories.

Should we worry about construction emissions?

No.

An aggressively YIMBY construction schedule, say with 10 dwellings built annually per 1,000 people, say averaging 100 m^2, emits around 0.1 t/capita annually: 0.1 t/m^2 * 100 m^2/unit * 0.01 unit/capita. All figures have ranges (and if anything, 100 is high for the places that build this much urban infill housing), but factor-of-1.5 ranges don’t erase an order of magnitude analysis. The emissions produced by construction, even if it were raised to some of the highest per capita rates found in the developed world – in fact higher rates than any national average I know of – would be about two orders of magnitude lower than present-day first-world emissions. They’d be 1.5 orders of magnitude lower than transportation emissions; in Germany, transport is 22% of national emissions and rising, as all other sources are in decline whereas transport is flat.

There’s a lot of confusion about this because some studies talk about buildings in general providing a high share of emissions. The Bloomberg-era PlaNYC spoke of buildings as the top source of emissions in New York, and likewise the Nation cites WeForum saying buildings are 37% of global emissions, citing a UN report that includes buildings’ operating emissions (its topline figure is 10 Gt in operating emissions, which is 27% of global emissions in 2022). But the construction emissions are insignificantly low. This means that aggressive replacement of older buildings by newer, more energy-efficient ones is an unmixed blessing, exactly the opposite of the conclusion of the green movement.

Instead of worrying about a source of emissions measured per capita in the tens of kilograms per year rather than in the tons, environmental advocates need to prioritize the most important source of greenhouse gases. The largest in developed countries is transportation, with electricity production usually coming second, always falling over the years while transport remains flat. In cold countries, heating is a significant source of emissions as well, to be reduced through building large, energy-efficient apartment buildings and through heat pump installation.

Regulations on new construction’s embodied carbon are likely a net negative for the environment. The most significant social policy concerning housing as far as environmental impact is concerned is to encourage people to live in urban apartment buildings near train stations. Any regulation that makes this harder – for example, making demolitions of small buildings to make room for big ones harder, or demanding that new buildings meet embodied carbon standards – makes this goal harder. This can be understandable occasionally if the goal of the regulation is not environmental, for example labor regulations for construction workers. It is not understandable if the goal is environmental, as the concern over embodied carbon is. People are entitled to their opinion that small is beautiful as a matter of aesthetic judgment, but they are not entitled to alternative facts that small is environmentally friendly.

2025-02-21

YIMBY First, Building Reform Second

Last night I asked the American building reform advocates on Bluesky about different layouts and why developers don’t build them. I got different answers from different advocates about why the layout I’d just mocked of family-size apartments with two staircases isn’t being built in the US, some about regulations, but Mike Eliason said what I was most afraid of hearing: it’s doable but it’s more profitable to build small apartments. My conclusion from this is that while American and Canadian building regulations remain a problem and need to be realigned with European and Asian norms, they are a secondary issue, the primary one remaining how much housing is permitted to be built in the first place. Developers will keep building the most profitable apartment forms until they run out of the most profitable tenants.

The mockup

The following mockup has a scale of 1 meter = 20 pixels, so the building is overall 18 meters by 30. This is a point access block rather than a double-loaded corridor (see definitions here), but it also has two staircases, emanating from the central access block. Each floor has four apartments, each with three bedrooms and two bathrooms, the ellipses in the image denoting bathtubs. The windows are top and bottom, but not left and right; these are single-aspect apartments, not corner apartments.

On Bluesky, I said the floorplate efficiency is 94%; this comes from assuming the step width and landing length are 1.1 meters each, a metrization of the International Building Code’s 44″, but to get to 94% assumes the staircase walls are included in the 1.1 meter width, so either it’s actually 90 cm width or, counting wall thickness, the efficiency is only 92.5%. The IBC allows 90 cm steps in buildings with an occupancy limit of up to 50, which this building would satisfy in practice at six stories (a three-bedroom apartment marketed to a middle-class clientele averages closer to two than four occupants due to empty nests, divorces, guest rooms, and home offices) but not as a legal limit. Regardless, 92.5% is average by the standards of European point access blocks, whose efficiency is reduced because the apartments are smaller, and very good by those of American double-loaded corridors.

Now, to be clear, this is still illegal in many American jurisdictions, as Alfred Twu pointed out in @-replies. The building mockup above has two means of egress, but the typical American code also requires minimum separation between the two staircases’ access points. This is an entirely useless addition – the main fire safety benefits of two staircases are that a single fire can’t interpose between residents and the stairs if the two staircases are at opposite ends of the building, but that’s not legally required (quarter-point staircases are routine), and that the fire department can vent smoke through one staircase while keeping the other safe, which does not require separation. Nonetheless, this is not the primary reason this isn’t getting built even where it is legal, for example in jurisdictions that permit scissor stairs or have a smaller minimum distance between the two staircases, like Canada.

I was hoping the answer I’d get would be about elevator costs. The elevator in the mockup is European, 1.6*1.75 meters in exterior dimensions; American codes require bigger elevators, which is by itself a second-order issue, but then installation costs rise to the point that developers prefer long buildings on corridors for the lower ratio of elevators to apartments. But nobody mentioned that as a reason.

The rent issue

Mike Eliason responded to my question about why buildings like the above mockup aren’t being built by talking about market conditions. The above building, with 540 m^2 of built-up area per floor, can host four three-bedroom apartments, each around 127 m^2, or it can host 16 studios, each around 29 m^2. In Seattle, the studio can rent for $1,500/month; the three-bedroom will struggle to earn the proportionate $6,000/month.

It’s worth unpacking what causes these market conditions. The three-bedroom is marketed to a family with children. The children do not earn money, and, until they reach kindergarten age, cost thousands of dollars a month each in daycare fees; if they don’t go to daycare then it means the family only has one income, which means it definitely can’t afford to compete for building space with four singles who’d take four studios, or it has parents in the immediate vicinity, which is rare in a large, internally mobile country. The family has options to outbid the four singles, but they’re limited and require the family to be rather wealthy – two incomes are obligatory, at high enough levels to be able to take the hit from taxes and daycare; the family would also need to be wedded to living in the city, since the suburbs’ housing is designed entirely for families, whereas the singles take a serious hit to living standards from suburbanizing (they’d have to get housemates). In effect, the broad middle and lower middle classes could afford the studios as singles, but only the uppermost reaches of the middle class can pay $6,000/month for the three-bedroom.

In economic statistics, imputation of living standards for different household sizes takes this degressivity of income – $6,000/month for a family of four is a struggle, $1,500/month for a single is affordable on the average US wage – and uses a hedonic adjustment for household sizes. example by taking the square root of household size as the number of true consumption units. To INSEE, a family of four has 2.1 equivalent consumption units; elsewhere, it’s a square root, so it has 2 consumption units. A rental system that maintains a 4:1 ratio has no way for the family to compete.

The upshot is that the developers need to run out of the tenants who can most easily afford rent before they build for the rest. Normally it’s treated as a matter of distribution of units among different social classes, but here it’s a matter of the physical size of the unit. This is why YIMBY first is so important: eventually developers will run out of singles and then have to build for families.

2025-01-20

Building for Wealth, and Point Access Blocks

The biggest housing activism push in North America right now has moved on from YIMBYism to housing reforms to allow single-stair mid-rise buildings, called point access blocks. My off-hand reference to this last post ended up being the main issue debated in comments; this compounds a post by Matt Yglesias from November that I’ve been meaning to respond to, since he starts working off of some examples of double-stair buildings on corridors in an even older post of mine about the Kowloon Walled City in My Backward (KWCIMBY) meme. I strongly respect the main point access block activists pushing the issue, like Stephen Smith, so I’d like to revisit the KWCIMBY post and explain what I’m doing there, while also pushing back against some of the more iffy claims portraying point access blocks as not just more efficient but also inherently better for families. In short, both forms of housing are generally easier to build in a more affluent society with higher expectations, and some of the comparisons come from that.

What are the point access block and double-loaded corridor?

An apartment building can arrange its apartments on each floor in one of these ways. The KWCIMBY post assumes double-loaded corridors, as in the diagram below:

In each of these buildings, there are two staircases, as required by American and Canadian law; the first building has scissor stairs, forbidden in most of the US but allowed in New York, whereas the second separates the two staircases into opposite sides of the corridor. Apartments are on both sides of the corridor, with one aspect of windows except the corner units, hence the term double-loaded.

This building form is practically unheard of in European apartment buildings. Only one staircase is required per building, so architects instead slice the buildings into thinner pieces, with one staircase and an elevator and apartments radiating from the common area, called a point access block:

Each of the four access points has an elevator and a staircase; the first example has four apartments per floor, with one aspect per unit, whereas the second has two, with two aspects, both north and south. The result is more elevators and staircases per net floor area, but less corridor area; the floorplate efficiency is notably higher, 92.5% in the first case and 94% in the second case, compared with 89.5% in the first case of the double-loaded corridor and 86.67% in the second. This is one of the reasons Stephen is so focused on elevator costs.

All four buildings are 20 meters by 80, except the last, which is 14 by 80. 20 meter wide residential buildings are more or less unheard of in Central Europe – I see a few that are 18, in what look like higher-income neighborhoods to me. In contrast, 14 is standard in Central Europe, with some buildings looking like the above diagram, and others, almost always older ones, having wings that are still around 14 meters wide but end up with an area-to-external-width ratio of 8-9 meters, rather like a 16-18 meter wide building without wings. In practice, on a 100*100 block, we’d never have two buildings looking like an equal sign but rather an enclosed rectangle, with or without wings.

What about the single-loaded corridor?

A third housing typology puts all apartments on a corridor, but only in one direction. The corridor is then in the open air, and apartments have windows on both sides, to the corridor and in the opposite direction. I lived in such a place for a year in Berlin. This is not unheard of, but still rare. The width of such buildings is limited by the need for apartments to stretch all the way, limiting them to at most 14 meters and usually less.

The resulting floorplate efficiency is low, which turns this into a question of how much cheaper it is to build an external corridor than an internal one. When I asked on Bluesky, I was given ranges for the answer, from an external corridor being 25-50% cheaper to its being if anything more expensive. Temporary worker housing tends to use this form because it is built to lower standards, in which the external corridor is just some barred steel without protection from the elements above, which should reduce the cost of the corridor. This form still exists in permanent housing, with concrete corridors that offer protection from rain, but it’s less common than the other two.

Point access blocks and families

The biggest selling points of the point access block are that it has better floor plate efficiency and that it permits units with multiple aspects to allow for cross-ventilation and for strategic placement of rooms (living room facing the street, bedrooms facing the quieter internal courtyard of the euroblock). This is bundled with other issues, at the same time:

In Europe, buildings are almost never built out of wood, and if they are, it’s usually mass timber. This means that the cost of construction is proportional to floor area, largely linear in the number of floors for a given footprint. North American construction uses light wood on a concrete podium, sharply limiting height to six to seven stories, hence the preference for thicker buildings to increase floor area. In turn, light wood is less safe in fires – but those codes don’t exempt concrete buildings from the two staircase requirement.
The double-loaded corridor has units so deep that bedrooms come with their own bathrooms and walk-in closets. Absent these, the maximum usable depth of a bedroom is about 6 meters. Bathrooms cost more to build per square meter than bedrooms and living rooms, which drives up construction costs.
The double-loaded corridor makes it easier to build units with fewer bedrooms – it’s just a matter of how much corridor width the apartment takes, so costs are linear in the floor area of units. The point access block instead prefers larger units, in square meters, since larger apartments have higher floorplate efficiency, and it’s routine to build a cheaper three-bedroom, one-bathroom unit.

The last two points have been used by some urbanists, especially more conservative ones, to argue that the point access block is inherently family-friendlier. The argument made by Mike Eliason (who’s not at all conservative) is that Seattle, where he’s based, builds multifamily housing rapidly but all of it is studios and one- and two-bedroom units, on the expectation that families with children should eventually move to the suburbs.

More conservative people even relate that with low urban American birthrates, which always comes off as strange to me given how low European birthrates are. The one developed country with above-replacement birthrates, Israel, doesn’t use any of these forms, but instead has independent buildings, some mid-rise and some tall – and there’s consensus among European and American urbanists that tall buildings are bad for families. At any rate, the Israeli sociologists I read on the subject, like Sergio Della Pergola, attribute Israeli birthrate exceptionalism to other issues than built form, just as Singapore’s Paulin Tay Straughan attributes the very low birthrates in rich Asia to other issues.

The difficulty of relating the issue of housing forms with that of apartment sizes is that housing a family requires a lot of apartment space to go to people who are not working, because they are children. If housing is expensive due to high construction costs, restrictions on building, or both, then housing will be built for the rich, which means not just high-income earners, but also households with a high income per person, which are almost always ones without children. A developer building a double-loaded corridor making a choice between a one-bedroom, say 6*9 meters, and a three-bedroom, say 12*9 meters, will choose the former if two independent households can outbid a family. This is getting to the point that in urban America, it’s normal for unmarried adults to live with housemates, because there are a lot more three- than one-bedroom apartments in cities that don’t build much housing, like New York or Boston.

The family could outbid the single person, but not in all circumstances. A two-income family can do well, and the working adults are likely to be older than the single person and thus higher earners. A landlord of a fixed apartment choosing who to rent to would also prefer the family to the group of three to four housemates – the family is more stable, divorce being far less common than housemates leaving with little prior notice. But not all families have two earners (and the social conservatives who are most anxious about family housing tend toward one income, not two), or two middle-class earners, and so far American developers haven’t yet run out of demand for single people and childless couples to build for.

Point access blocks and wealth

In a way, the point access block has benefits that aren’t yet unlocked in Europe. Higher wealth is spent on, among other things, bigger dwellings. The double-loaded corridor in a way bakes in assumptions of private bathrooms, essentially spending income on higher-cost elements. But it’s possible to do the same with a point access block. The point access block ends up more efficient when apartments are bigger, because it’s limited by number of units per floor, and the bigger the units, the smaller the proportion of the unrentable common areas.

Speaking of common areas, higher wealth doesn’t necessarily demand of them. If the expectation is that people should have a washing machine and a drier at home rather than in a common area, then the demand for such an area shrinks. Trash rooms take up more space, but then higher wealth, as opposed to higher inequality, means not just that the demand for trash rooms is higher but also that the supply of workers to staff them is scarcer, and at the end of the day people can just haul trash bags to a collection point in the courtyard or a side room on the ground floor. Trash chutes are an innovation that doesn’t take up common space (for one, they can be installed in-unit, especially if there are only two units per floor anyway). High-end condo amenities like private gyms are usually provided at the scale of an entire building rather than a floor, and a complex of interconnected buildings is likely to have just one either way.

In the examples I posted above, in a way I baked in a wealth assumption, in that the option with two units per access point assumes those units average 132 m^2, which is very high for Europe; the norm for high-end buildings here is three units, with slightly lower combined floor area than 264 m^2, and the same or a hair higher circulation area to allow for a third door, with the smaller apartment usually only having one aspect of exposure. A 132 m^2 unit, in effect 10*14 with slight recessing at one end, would generously have four bedrooms, likely configured as three actual bedrooms and a private office or guest room. The intended users would be families of means, but then again new housing tends to be built for this class, and over time, growth and abundance make the standards that today mark middle-class wealth more widespread across classes. The working class once didn’t have indoor plumbing.

2025-01-10

Quick Note: the Experience of Train Stations

I was at a ReThink event about Penn Station the other day; it didn’t talk about through-running but about Penn Station redesign, as Richard Cameron presented options for rebuilding the station in-place, of course without expansion a block to the south. The presentation was interesting, and I have no strong opinions about the architecture, certainly no objection. But something said in there, I forget if by Richard or one of the other presenters, irked me: the presenter was complaining about the Penn Station rebuild of the 1960s saying that the station makes people feel irritated, whereas European train stations are grand and make people feel like they stepped through a gateway into the country. And that part lost me, because my experience of train stations in Europe is rather utilitarian, and so is the experience of rail riders here who I speak with. In fact, in a key way – namely, connections to the subway – I do not see a difference between those stations and Penn Station as it exists today, as an entirely subterranean complex without natural light.

Case in point: three weeks ago, I was visiting Rome for 2.5 days. I wrote about the train trip, which was rather slow as long sections have not been upgraded to high-speed rail standards, but not about the stations. Now that I saw the ReThink presentation, it’s worthwhile talking about the stations – Berlin, Munich, Rome. (I also connected at Verona and Bolzano but these are small stations in small cities.)

Roma Termini, in particular, is supposed to be a gateway station, exactly the kind in a European capital that Americans are supposed to love. Except, I didn’t get to experience any of the façade, because my ultimate destination was not within walking distance, so I connected to the metro, entirely indoors and underground. Lines A and B meet at Termini, and I spent far longer between when I got off the Frecciarossa and when I got on the subway navigating the passageways to this station than getting to appreciate any grandeur. Most of the other people in my car didn’t even do that, but rather hopped off one station before, at the more utilitarian Tiburtina, saving themselves the slow terminal approach and connecting more directly to Line B.

Berlin and Munich, which I’m more familiar with, are rather utilitarian. These are large complexes, in which it’s well-known that passengers can take some time getting from one set of platforms to another. They are also extensively daylit, and Berlin in particular has good sight lines for a five-level cruciform station, but their purpose isn’t to make people feel at ease; in fact most users scramble for a connection to the U- and S-Bahn, where form entirely follows function.

This experience also generalizes to the Parisian stations I’ve used. Gare de l’Est looked nice, in the one minute I spent there between getting off the Métro and getting on my train to Saarbrücken; I appreciated how fast this was, especially since I had booked a nonrefundable day trip and showed up at the station four minutes before my train departed, but I wouldn’t say any of this experience put me at ease. At none of these stations did the architectural details matter very much, and at none of them did the main entrance matter at all, because like virtually everyone else in Paris, I got there by Métro. Berlin Hauptbahnhof, at least, is modern enough that it understands this and doesn’t try to build the entrances as a cathedral to the power and wealth of the institution that built it.

Rather, what I think makes Americans feel differently about Europe is that when they’re here, they’re on vacation. The train stations make them feel relaxed, because they’re on vacation and relaxing anyway. The architecture puts them at ease, because they’re on vacation and have time to stop and admire the details. The walkable cities are pleasant, because they’re on vacation and their goal is to find things they don’t get at home to buy or eat or photograph; this way, I see American urbanists extoll the walkability of small towns with farmers’ markets even when those towns have rather American modal splits and the local residents do all of their shopping at hypermarkets. Europeans can be pretty solipsistic, but I at least don’t see people here talk about some aspect of Florida or Las Vegas is inherently psychologically relaxing.

This matters, because there are real advantages to European rail and urban planning. These aren’t just operational; for example, Stephen Smith and Mike Eliason have more or less singlehandedly imported single-stair point access blocks into American policy discussion. In rail planning, I wish the agencies using Penn Station came to Berlin and saw how a 21st-century major city station looks. But none of this can come from trying to psychologically project one’s own vacation experience. Europe is a place of production and not just consumption, and it’s critical to see what this production looks like from the inside.

2024-12-24

Public Transportation and Crime are not About Each Other

Noah Smith is trying to make public transportation and YIMBYism about crime, and I don’t think he succeeds. In short, he says that transit cities and higher housing growth levels would be more publicly acceptable if American central cities were more sensitive to conservative concerns about crime. In effect, he is making public transportation investment not a matter of frequency or network design or reliability or good maintenance or transit priority on streets or low construction costs or any of the other technocratic issues that distinguish the Seouls and Zurichs and Stockholms of the world from the Los Angeleses (which, to give credit, he acknowledges are important), but about crime, conceived as a culture war issue about more police and more police visibility. And in this, he ends up ignoring both the literature on this and what makes good government tick in parts of the developed world that are not the United States.

Now, Noah is a pundit, who’s more pro-transit than the average in his milieu. He’s not the reason American cities are poorly governed or the separate suite of reasons American public transit is so bad and isn’t improving. He writes as a way of trying to engage conservative NIMBYs, I just don’t think he succeeds – and the way he fails is for many of the same reasons American public transit managers fails. Chief of those is American triumphalism, of the kind that will retweet a viral tweet that pretends Europe has no biotech or advanced physics and that uses the expression “europoor” unironically in a flamewar. People who fail to recognize how Europe and East Asia work are not going to be able to learn what works here and how to adapt it; I’m less familiar with Asian discourse, but Noah’s description of Europe is unrecognizable. Even the basic thesis about urbanism and crime isn’t correct in a global perspective. This leads to serious problems in diagnosing how European cities got to have the housing and transportation policies that they do; the solutions are, by the black-and-white polarization of American politics, best thought of as a blue-and-orange spectrum, starting with lack of local empowerment and inattention to neighborhood-scale stereotypes

Cities and crime

The American association between high crime rates and deurbanization is not at all normal. Globally, it’s the exact opposite; Gaviria-Goldwyn-Galarza-Angel find that high risk of violence leads to higher urban density, because of the effect of safety in numbers. Simon Gaviria roots this in the history of his own country, Colombia. In Latin America, crime rates are infamously high. Noah’s post compares the American homicide rate with a selection of European and Asian countries, topping at 6.8/100,000 in Russia (US: 5.8), but in Colombia it is 25.7, and in the 1990s it ranged between 60 and 85. People can’t suburbanize the way they have in the United States, even with a GDP per capita in line with that of midcentury America, because, in a sufficiently high-crime environment, driving to work means taking the risk of being carjacked at an intersection.

Now, public transportation in Latin America is not especially good, not by European or East Asian standards. Most cities haven’t built much recently; Mexico City deserves especial demerits, but Brazil has been flagging as well, and Argentina has no money for anything. Chile and the Dominican Republic are both expanding metros, Santiago doing so rather rapidly, and both have the same order of magnitude of homicide as the US (Chile: 4.5, Dominican Republic: 11.5), rather than that of Colombia or Brazil or Mexico. But this still does not make high crime a relevant factor in deurbanization.

Now, in the history of the United States, people do associate postwar suburbanization with high crime rates. While the crime rate rose rapidly in the 1960s, and remained high until the 1990s, there was little transportation risk. The stereotype of poverty-induced social disorder as seen from a car in an American city, at least in the 1990s and 2000s, was a panhandler coming to the car at a traffic jam with a squeegee, washing it, and expecting payment; jacking was (and still is) more or less unheard of. The stereotype was, safety on the road and in the suburbs, danger in the city. But that is a feature of relatively moderate crime rates. Indeed, the destruction of American public transit in the middle of the 20th century and the suburbanization of the middle class and aspirants both came before the increase in crime rates; two thirds of the fall in New York subway ridership from its twin peaks in 1930 and 1946 to its nadir in 1982 had occurred by 1960, on the eve of the explosion in the city’s homicide rate.

And to be clear, this is a matter of stereotypes, more than reality. New York is one of the safest large cities in the United States (4.7/100,000 in 2023). San Francisco is even safer: in 2024 through December 10th, the pro-rated homicide rate was 4.3. Texan urbanists outside Austin (4.7) have to contend with higher homicide rates: 15.7 in Dallas, 12.8 in Houston, 8.4 in San Antonio, all averaged over the first six months of 2024 and pro-rated. But Dallas and Houston are perceived as far safer than New York. This can’t exactly be racism – these two cities are nearly as black as New York and considerably more Hispanic. But whatever is causing the stereotype needs to be separated from the reality; the Texan rail advocates I talk to on social media don’t treat crime as a major obstacle for finding more money for public transit, and instead cite car culture, low perceived value of rail, and high costs, and if that’s not a problem there, it shouldn’t be in New York or San Francisco.

Stereotypes in Paris

Noah talks about how Europe succeeded in curbing crime rates – and to again give credit, recognizes that New York is safe – and says that this is driving greater acceptance of public transportation and housing growth here.

Except, this isn’t quite right. I don’t have comparable surveys asking people if they find Paris safe, but I do have access to French discourse at hand, and it does not at all say “Paris is safe, people who think crime is a problem there are idiots,” except maybe when an American is in the room and then the point is to pull rank on the American.

In Paris, in French, there are lists of sensitive city quarters, and there are arrondissements that are more fashionable than others. The 18th, 19th, and 20th are usually negatively stereotyped, if less so than the adjacent department, Seine-Saint-Denis, which is extremely negatively stereotyped. The 13th is negatively stereotyped, but this is likely to be missed by Americans – the population there is disproportionately Asian, and negative stereotypes of Asians by white people are worse in France than in the United States. Belleville, straddling the 10th/11th/19th/20th boundary, was listed as a sensitive quarter when I lived just outside its limits and went in frequently to buy tahini – and at the time, I saw either British or American media, I forget which, list these quarters as no-go zones.

Now, these are residential areas. The center of Paris is well to the west of these. But Paris has a low job density gradient within city limits between commercial areas (like the 1st or the 8th) and residential ones, and the Ministry of the Interior, for example, is located in the 20th, close to Nation. People commute to these neighborhoods, usually by the Métro or RER. Nation, at the 11th/12th/20th boundary, is a mixed zone, with features that connote middle-class consumption (like the farmer’s market) and others that connote poverty (like a Resto du Cœur; see citywide map here). The sort of people in France who see a black or Arab person on the street and immediately panic find the area dangerous, including at one point the minister of the interior himself, who professed to being shocked at seeing ethnic food at the supermarket.

And none of this matters to public transportation investment, or to housing. In a country where people treat the entire department of Seine-Saint-Denis as a no-go zone except for football games at the Stade de France, where the RER B has such a negative reputation for passing through this area that two different airport connectors are planned to parallel it, Grand Paris Express is still planned to make stops in Seine-Saint-Denis, and connect it better with the rest of the region, including the wealthy suburbs around La Défense. This was a bipartisan decision – there were differences between the Socialists’ and the Gaullists’ ideas of what exactly to build, but there was core agreement on a circumferential line through the inner suburbs, and it is considered a social policy to connect working-class suburbia with jobs.

Stereotypes and local empowerment

The stereotypes of crime in parts of the Paris region do not affect urban rail investment plans. Where they do matter is at the level that doesn’t matter: the local one. Anne Hidalgo is a committed leftist (and NIMBY), but centrist and center-right politicians in the region have long wanted an urban renewal project around Gare du Nord, which they consider a poor area, not because it’s especially poor, but because it’s where the commuter trains from Seine-Saint-Denis go and thus young black and Arab men congregate there, and the station’s facilities could genuinely use some modernization. Occasionally the negative stereotypes of the station even get to British media. But whether Paris engages in a wholesale renewal project around the station to make it more upscale is not going to matter in the grand scheme of things to either its public transport ridership or its overall level of housing production.

The difference between Paris and New York or San Francisco is not that it has lower crime, although its homicide rate is certainly lower. It’s that it doesn’t derail its social policy discourse by turning technocratic issues into culture wars. Paris has unstaffed sanisettes; in a handful of areas there’s drug use, seen as used syringes. San Francisco, like Paris, has a handful of areas with drugs in its sanisettes, but the moral panic got to the point that the city decided to staff all sanisettes 24/7, with two attendants at night. Paris’s 435 sanisettes cost 11 million € a year to operate, 25,300€ per unit; San Francisco’s annual operating costs are on the order of $1 million per unit because of staffing.

This isn’t because of crime, because San Francisco is not sufficiently more dangerous than Paris to explain this, or even the perceptions thereof. The difference is that European governance is, across the board, better than American governance at disempowering local actors, who are driven by stereotypes. Anne Hidalgo doesn’t want to build housing in significant quantities, but does want to build some public housing in rich neighborhoods to own the libs (French definition of libs), and she’s the mayor and the residents of the 16th are not; Ile-de-France writ large wants to do more transit-oriented development, and so it builds some, even with some local grumbling about how redeveloping a disused factory brings gentrification.

And the way forward is to build institutions that bypass and disempower those local actors. People almost never stay within a neighborhood, but the small minority who do are overly empowered in the system of councilmanic prerogative that governs American cities. This does not involve treating their perception as if it is based in reality; this does involve passing preemption laws at the level where democratic politics is possible, such as the state, and doing much more than the weak bills California allows.

Ideology and reform

I think Noah is uncomfortable with American YIMBY praxis, because the rhetoric in a place like New York or California aims at the median Democrat in the state, to activate liberal political ideology as a substitute for the failures of non-ideological localism. This ideology is not especially radical, but does violate maxims that liberal pundits who specifically pitch to a conservative audience have learned to follow, like the taboo on calling people racist. The mainstream of political YIMBY advocacy has, I think, chosen better, understanding that at the end of the day, an upzoning bill in a safely blue state passes without Republican votes, and cutting deals with state Democratic actors, which can be localist (like exempting certain NIMBY suburbs with low transit-oriented development value) or more left-wing (like bundling with some left-wing elements, like Oregon’s introduction of weak rent controls).

And in a way, this is also how YIMBYism and public transportation investment work here, politically. As of late, social democratic parties have leaned on YIMBYism as a reason for non-pensioners to vote for them, calling for more housing permits; Olaf Scholz even called for redeveloping Tempelhofer Feld. Because it lives within a party, rather than among people who try to acknowledge culture war paranoias, the policy is clear, and sometimes can even be enacted – Germany would have built more housing if interest rates hadn’t simultaneously risen for unrelated reasons (namely, the combination of inflation and the Ukraine war). In France, it was a bipartisan effort in the sense that there wasn’t much daylight between the center-left and the center-right on the need for more housing in Ile-de-France, but the enactment did not involve the sort of horse trading that Noah envisions. This is not too different from infrastructure investments with bipartisan support elsewhere, such as the Madrid Metro, or Crossrail.

I think it’s telling that the greatest successes in the United States have not been in the most liberal places, but in swing states with liberal governance but competitive elections, like Minnesota. The barrier is not that the cities have crime or are negatively stereotyped (suburbanites around Minneapolis have plenty of those against the city), but that safe states have developed such a democratic deficit that they can’t govern. I’m fairly certain Noah is aware of this (Matt Yglesias certainly is). It just implies that this really is about seizing control of state government through ideological persuasion – in other words, reminding the Democrats of safely blue states that they are Democrats – and not about telling people way to the right of the median in these states that they are valid. We don’t do that here and American YIMBYs don’t need to do it on their side of the Pond.

2024-10-07

Taxes are not About Urbanism

I caused a ruckus on social media when I pointed out that a Venn diagram commonly posted on Strong Towns and by American urbanists in general about taxes, services, and urbanism, is completely false:

The truth is that the overwhelming majority of taxes and services are about things that don’t meaningfully depend on local density. The overwhelming majority of those services are not even locally provided. In the United States, in 2022, taxes split as 67.5% federal, 19.1% state, 13.4% local. In Germany, in theory the division is similar, but in practice 95% of taxes are levied federally, but a portion are distributed to the states by formula.

Most of what all of this goes to is welfare programs. La Protection Sociale en France et en Europe puts the proportion of GDP going to social protection at 32% in France, 29% in Germany, and 27% Union-wide, all as of 2022. This includes programs whose recipients loudly insist that they are not welfare, including old age pensions and health care, comprising 82% of the above total. Government spending ranges around 50% of GDP here; France ranks first in the OECD, at 58%, so that its share of government spending going to social protection, slightly more than half, is if anything a little less than the European average. In the United States, these programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, income security) comprise two-thirds of non-interest federal spending, and one third of state and local spending. A couple additional percent – more in the United States than in Europe with one notable exception – is the military plus veteran-specific welfare in the US. None of this has anything to do with how much urban sprawl there is, or how municipal finances are structured.

Local taxes in the United States mostly go to schools. Education expenses are a combination of teacher and administrator salaries and facilities spending; these are not about density. Entire comparative tomes have been written about education funding, none touching density, because it doesn’t matter; for example, the OECD’s Education at a Glance database goes into per-student spending, teacher salaries, administrator salaries, student-teacher ratios, the public-private school division, the vocational-academic track division, graduation rates, the earnings advantages of graduates at various levels, and correlations with civic participation. The most notable features of the United States are high educational segregation, and low teacher salaries compared with the average for university-educated workers. This is not an urbanist issue; American urbanist activists have been spending generations avoiding talking about school segregation, to the point that the activists who do talk about education from any angle are more or less disjoint from the ones who talk about recognizably urbanist issue. The Venn diagram above is a good example of this: instead of talking about curricular rigor or teachers or segregation or how schools are funded, urbanists prefer to pretend reducing urban sprawl is the solution (not mentioned: any of the problems internal to, say, New York City public schools).

Once we get to items that do depend on what urbanists care about, it’s at the bottom of the list of budgetary priorities. Transportation costs are a small share of GDP; in the US, an extreme case in road costs, they’re 2% of federal spending and 5.6% of subnational spending, which averages out to somewhat more than 3% of GDP. German federal investment in roads is around 0.25% of GDP, and federal investment in rail is similar but planned to be double that in 2026-27. I haven’t seen more recent numbers, but in 2018, public transport finances across Germany amounted to 14.248 billion € in costs and 7.363 billion € in fare revenue; the difference, about 7 billion €, was 0.2% of 2018 GDP, covering about 16% of work trips Germany-wide.

So, yes, reduced sprawl would reduce the required spending on roads, but it’s not going to be especially visible in tax bills, which are dominated by other things. The biggest drivers of the cost of private transportation are the costs of buying, maintaining, and fueling the car. Those drive American spending on transportation to 17% of household spending, of which 8.3% are not cars, and buying the car and fuel for it are two thirds of the rest (that is, 10.3% of household spending). This is high per capita and per GDP; it is also not what urbanists who try to calculate operating ratios for roads talk about – the problem with private transportation is not the public cost of the roads, but the private cost to households.

Then there’s policing. Strong Towns has a particular infamy on the subject – Chuck Marohn essentially canceled himself among anyone concerned with civil rights when, during the initial Black Lives Matter protests in 2014, his take was about the lack of placemaking in suburbs like Ferguson, requiring people to protest in the middle of roads. On social media, multiple people insisted to me that higher density permits higher-quality (?) or lower-cost policing; at least as far as police brutality goes, the pattern is that it happens 1-2 orders of magnitude more in the US than in the rest of the developed world, and that in the US, it happens to black people about three times more than to white people, and it happens less in the Northeast than elsewhere, even in blacker-than-average places like Buffalo or Philadelphia. Urban departments are probably somewhat more professional than rural sheriffs’ departments, but this probably isn’t really a matter of suburban sprawl development but jurisdiction size, and is also not at all what the Venn diagram is trying to say. “Big central cities that have dense cores and can annex suburbs end up having very high police spending but get more professional departments out of this” is nowhere in the Venn diagram. It is not implied in it. It is directly opposed to what Strong Towns says about municipal finances, which is about long-term budgeting for municipalities with given borders and not about the desirability of delocalizing decisionmaking.

It’s always tempting to try to turn one’s issue into an omnicause. High taxes and poor services? Sprawl. Police violence? Sprawl. Schools? Sprawl. High housing costs? Sprawl. Government corruption? Sprawl. It creates an illusion of seriousness, of solving systemic social problems, while really only droning about one peripheral issue. It creates an illusion of outside-the-box solutions, while really ignoring real tradeoffs, in this case between taxes and government services. And it creates an illusion of solidarity and alliance between different advocacy groups, while really giving activists for one cause permission structure to bring up their pet cause no matter how unimportant it is in the moment.

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