Category: Urbanism
Pedestrian Observations from Central London
As I got off the Underground, I was greeted by a fenced roadway without easy crossings. I found the way around a roundabout and started to walk toward the hotel where I was to meet my family, on the wrong side of the street. Although traffic was relatively light and the street was not very wide by New York standards, a fenced median required me to cross at one crosswalk, a Z-crossing with beg buttons and different pedestrian signal phasing for the two halves of the road. About five minutes after I first emerged above ground in London on foot, I realized: this city hates pedestrians.
Of course, the 20 mph zones, the naked streets, and the streets that are officially neither 20 mph nor naked but so narrow they might as well be are not, by themselves, hateful toward pedestrians. They’re rather pleasant. Even when they have beg buttons, which is often, those buttons can be ignored, as they routinely are in Providence. Beyond them, there’s a class of streets of about the same width as Manhattan streets, for example Portobello, which are busy and pedestrian-scaled. The issue is that the wider ones, the main streets, have completely abandoned any attempt at catering to pedestrians; they’re run by road engineers rather than by urban designers.
The failure of London is not a matter of preferring cars to cities, as is the case in American cities. The London Underground is quite nice, though it’s more because it charges exorbitant fares (see page 45 here, and realize that the graph seems to use a depreciated pound:Euro exchange rate) than because it’s particularly well-run. The commuter rail system is treated like modern rapid transit and is treated with lavish investment. There is an extensive bike share system, but with substandard bike lanes that tend to disappear into bus stops. None of this comes from a deliberate attempt to destroy alternative transportation; it’s just an unintended consequence of modernist planning.
In the view of the modernist planner, pedestrians and cars should always be strictly separated with fences if necessary, all crosswalks must be signalized, and it should be impossible to have any spontaneous crossings, or spontaneous anything for that matter. Ideally, crossings should be in pedestrian underpasses or overpasses, to eliminate all conflict. There can be delineated zones for pedestrians – side streets or some busy pedestrian malls, such as Covent Garden – but those should be placed away from the main streets.
In contrast, New York and Paris do things differently. Streets are wider both on average and at the minimum. Parking is done on the street, providing a buffer from traffic that’s wide enough to make me feel protected but porous enough that I can cross when I want to. Sidewalks are wide, crosswalks are frequent and let pedestrians cross in just one cycle, and increasingly protected bike lanes are cannibalizing road space that used to belong to cars. Of course, London’s main streets are wide enough that they could look like the delightful mess that is First Avenue if TfL wanted to. At a few places, they do look like New York streets, such as the aforementioned Portobello Road, with parked cars on one side. But for the most part, London treats its main streets, where most activity is, as arterial roads for cars.
This contrast between New York and London’s style of planning is jarring. New York’s grids are meticulously planned, without much variation except in the parts of Brooklyn and Queens where two separate grids meet. London is nothing like that – its street network is famously labyrinthine, and walking there with one’s roaming function turned off in order to save money requires hopping from one public map to another. But on the level of the individual street, this situation is reversed: London’s streets are meticulously traffic-engineered, while New York’s avenues are chaotic. It’s true even on the level of stereotypical cabbie behavior: for one, London’s cab drivers tend to obey traffic laws.
More fundamentally, it shows just why car-centric planning is so incompatible with urbanism: it tries to impose order on something that resists it. According to Christopher Alexander and the rest of the traditional urbanists, I’m supposed to shun the mechanistic design of New York (or Paris, which is as planned) and gravitate toward the traditionalism of London. In reality, my reaction is the exact opposite – on the micro level, New York is much more emergent and chaotic, and, at the level that is relevant to a local who doesn’t feel the need to constantly look up, vastly more human-scaled. London may appear to succeed on grand urban design principles on a map and in diagrams, but on little things that matter, it fails. It may have little pockets of success, and enough activity on the streets that I’m willing to spend 3 minutes crossing them when necessary, but it has nothing on its peer Western megacities.
That is not to say I avoided walking around London. On the contrary, I explored Central London during what little time I had to ditch my family. But the streets were not particularly inviting, and at some points it felt more like an adventure than like an ordinary walking trip. This never happened to me in New York or Paris or the (very few) other cities I’ve found to be walkable.
Who’s Migrating to the Sunbelt?
It’s well-known that people have been moving from coastal US states to the Sunbelt for many years now. But who’s moving? Is it the upper middle class fleeing higher taxes or searching for cheaper houses, or perhaps the poor fleeing high costs of living? Put another way, is the above-average growth in per capita income in many Northeastern and West Coast metropolitan areas a matter of actual growth, or simply of pushing the poor out to the Sunbelt, whose per-capita income growth is often anemic?
All data in this post is courtesy of Aaron Renn’s Telestrian service, which cribs numbers from the IRS, Census Bureau, and other sources and presents them in a reasonably searchable manner. The IRS keeps track of intranational migration in the form of tax exemptions, which allows us to figure out the migration trends in terms of people (exemptions), households (returns), and income (adjusted gross income). This way we can figure out if the people moving out of a region are richer or poorer than the average. Although the IRS misses a lot of people and much income, it is still the best available source in the US for migration statistics. The more accurate American Community Survey tabulates very coarse migration statistics.
Observe also that the IRS data is given per year, which allows us to look at zoomed-in trends. For example, here is California’s migration with each state as well as the rest of the world from 2000 to 2009. Here is somewhat worse-presented data for New York State. It turns out that migration marginally increased California’s per capita income, and had practically no effect on New York’s; in other words, their growth is real, and doesn’t come from pushing the poor away.
More precisely, we have the following observations:
– In both California and New York, the difference in income between immigrants and emigrants is very small; immigrants are slightly richer in California, $27,098 vs. $26,209, and slightly poorer in New York, $29,876 vs. $30,810.
– Overall both immigrants and emigrants are slightly poorer than the statewide per capita income. However, the effect is very small: according to the IRS, California’s per capita income in 2009 was $28,569 and New York’s was $31,617. Were it not for migration – that is, if people had lived in 2009 where they’d lived in 2000 but still earned the same income – California’s per capita income would’ve been $28,243, i.e. 1% lower, and New York’s would’ve been $31,689, i.e. 0.1% higher.
– The richest migration occurs between high-cost coastal states, especially between New York and California, while migration between those states and the Sunbelt is much poorer.
– The poorest large group of immigrants in both states is international immigrants. In both cases they were about 9% of total immigrants, so they can’t have dominated the numbers too much. Thus Jane Jacobs’ story that great cities take in poor immigrants and churn out a middle class, considered on the state level, is only partially confirmed by this data.
– Emigration to the Sunbelt’s bubble states – from California to Arizona and Nevada and from New York to Florida – was predominantly a 2005-7 phenomenon, and decreased markedly after the bubble crashed.
– Emigration to other Sunbelt states was more of a mixed bag. Georgia and North Carolina, both partial bubble states, also look like partial bubble states in the migration numbers, with emigration from New York and California peaking in 2005-8, but less prominently than with the proper bubble states. Emigration from California to Texas looks like that to a bubble state, despite Texas’s strong economy through the recession; but emigration from New York to Texas and from both states to Colorado remains steady.
– The biggest difference between immigrants and emigrants is not income but household size – emigrating households were much bigger (1.95 vs. 1.7 in California), but still much smaller than the statewide average (2.23 according to the IRS, much lower than the actual average but comparable with the above numbers). This is only partially consistent with the explanation that those regions attract singles and DINKs and turn away families.
The story I started this investigation with is that New York and California predominantly turn away the middle class, which would be seen in middle-class emigration and low-income immigration; my recollection, coming from merely eyeballing the data, had been that immigrants were much poorer. This should be consistent with the breakdown of the cost of living in dense city regions: housing is unaffordable if your ideal of how to live is having a car and a single-family detached house that’s less than an hour away from work; if you’re flexible about car ownership and don’t mind small apartments, then New York and California are quite affordable.
But what we actually see is that both immigration and emigration between those states and the rest of the world is middle-class. The people moving to the Sunbelt really are being priced out. It’s hard to distinguish pricing out from cashing in on high housing prices, but the lower-income characteristic of this emigration suggests the former. The upshot is that policies reducing the cost of housing could stem this tide while at the same time having no effect on poverty and the need for social services. While it’s heinous to try to price out the poor, as the richer parts of the Bay Area and many other regions do, this is not what is being done here.
Let me close by linking without much comment to the same data for Texas. The IRS recorded a total income of $475,109,477 in 2009 and a total population of 19,235,926, i.e. a per capita income of $24,699. As in California, immigrants are a little poorer than emigrants and both are a little poorer than the average. Controlling for this effect as above would raise per capita income to $25,002, a 1.2% rise.
The Rail-Trail Scam
I recently learned that a writer for the Adirondack Explorer has the following proposal to create a new rail-trail: demolish a line that’s in use by a heritage railroad, pave it over, and convert it to a bicycle trail. The arguments in the piece are your standard hatchet job considering only the costs of rail and only the benefits of the alternative, and are downright uninteresting; what’s interesting is that this is just the culmination of the misuse of the original concept of rail-trails.
Originally, rail-trails were created to preserve railroads for future use. Their mandate includes “to preserve established railroad rights-of-way for future reactivation of rail service.” In reality, restoration almost never happens. The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy’s review of railbanking points to success that a full nine railbanked corridors have had rail service restored, out of 301. The rest have been paved over, and often have enough non-railroad users that any restoration would be politically difficult in practice; I suspect that this is why the Providence Foundation makes no mention of restoring service on the second, now-abandoned track between Providence and Woonsocket in its regional rail study.
Another problem with railbanking is that it focuses on what’s useful as a trail, and not on what would be useful as a railroad later. There are pleasant exceptions, such as the Milwaukee Railroad’s route in most of Washington State, but in Rhode Island, the rights-of-way that have been preserved are those that would be easiest and least expensive to rebuild from scratch: the line to Hartford through West Warwick and Coventry, the line from East Providence to Bristol, and the aforementioned second track to Woonsocket. In contrast, many major pieces of infrastructure were demolished. Downtown Providence’s connection to East Providence was cut and would require new urban viaducts to be restored, and it’s sheer luck that the bridge over the Blackstone estuary is still there. Newport’s only rail connection to the mainline was railbanked but removed, which means restoration would face fewer regulations than starting new service from scratch, but only after rebuilding a bridge from the island to the mainland.
This is not intentional, but it’s neglectful of the needs of any mode other than the car as regular transportation; even bikes only get the nod for recreational use. The document coming out of Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, Railbanking and Rail-Trails: a Legacy for the Future, makes this thinking clear, when one reads between the lines. Here are some touted benefits of rail-trails:
The USDA’s Dietary Guidelines recommend at least 60 minutes of daily exercise for children and teens and at least 30-60 minutes everyday for adults. Trails provide close, safe, traffic-free paths for walkers, joggers, inline skaters [and] cyclists. Rail-trails are also part of a nationwide initiative launched by Congressman James L. Oberstar (D.-Minn.) to create safe routes that will encourage school children to walk and bike to school.
The first sign of utter disregard for alternative transportation as everyday transportation is the touting of “traffic-free paths.” Segregation of different modes of travel into different rights-of-way is the thinking of the traffic engineer and the freeway builder, not of the urbanist. The second is the fact that, in practice, the placement of those trails follows ideal corridors for the needs of trains, not bicycles or pedestrians. One does not use a mode of transportation that averages 60 km/h and loses 2 minutes every time it stops the same way one uses a mode that averages 25 km/h and can stop where you want. You can look at the northern end of the aforementioned West Warwick trail on Streetsview or on satellite and judge for yourself how useful it is for a cyclist’s daily work trip; a train would just blast through at full speed.
There’s already an ideal place for pedestrians are cyclists: the streets. Those are the strange linear alignments used by cars and fronted by actual residences and jobs. Away from urban areas, those are the country roads that go through small towns. A policy that aimed at reducing car use and getting people to use more active transportation would impose walkability and bikability standards on streets, which are where the exact addresses people want to go to are. A policy that didn’t care would turn railroads into recreational trails and greenwash it by saying they’re usable by pedestrians and cyclists. And I think we all know which of the two the rail-trail scam is.
Consensus and Cities
Note: this is the first post in a series of 3-4 articles about consensus urbanism.
The dominant discourse on cities nowadays focuses on the role of visionary, top-down innovation. Some write about mayors who change paradigms, such as Michael Bloomberg and now Rahm Emanuel. Others write about entrepreneurs and the role of new technology, and invariably portray the change as groundbreaking and unforeseen by all except the dogged inventor. In contrast to this worldview, let me propose a view of urbanism based on political consensus among disparate interests, on forging agreement instead of trying to defeat everyone else.
The current trend toward livable cities, as seen in road diets and bike lane projects, is entirely top-driven. Bloomberg decided to make it his legacy, and Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan moves aggressively with little consultation with community interests except those that already agree with her. Rahm Emanuel, infamous for his combative style, followed suit. This caused livable streets advocates, led by Streetsblog, to often identify community consensus with NIMBYism and top-down change with improvement; it’s unavoidable on Streetsblog, though sometimes there are glimpses of support for a more consensus-based policy on other livable streets blogs.
In reality, in cities, there are too many interest groups for one to normally dominate: labor, the middle class, multiple kinds of business, organized religion – and in the exceptional cases, such as Singapore, it comes out of autocracy. This is especially true in the US, with its multi-ethnic cities, requiring delicate acts of ticket-balancing. This is easy to paper over in majoritarian political systems, as the US is, but the actual practice of politics in American cities is far from majoritarian. Liberal cities have become cities of primaries – one wins by assembling an ad hoc coalition that can win the Democratic primary. In general, cities have multiple interest groups, even independently of ethnicity: see for example Christof Spieler’s analysis of the 2009 Houston mayoral race. The reason this political process hasn’t led to a consensus-based decision making is that the electoral process – in particular, the authoritarian strong-mayor system – is anti-consensus.
And yet, a consensus-based agenda is possible. As one of the Streetsblog community members explained to me, the way to obtain community support for a project is to talk to all stakeholders in the neighborhood, and understand what their hidden hopes and fears are; it’s important to avoid any situation in which someone later complains “Nobody informed me about this.” Ordinary people are far less intransigent than they can appear in the papers. For example, along Queens Boulevard, the long-term residents are still reeling from plans to turn the street into an expressway, and therefore will support or oppose a livable streets proposal in part based on whether they perceive it as turning the street into more of a highway (closing cross-streets) or less of one (widening sidewalks).
A community so empowered with its own ideas about how to make itself pedestrian-friendlier will of course help if a top-down reformist politician wants to make the city more livable, but it can also convince an apathetic politician to champion its cause if it can demonstrate that this cause is popular. The same is true of many other public projects and contentious issues; support for many of them crosses ideological and partisan boundaries, both the normal national ones and the specific issue of machinists vs. reformists in American cities.
Consensus must be contrasted with its distant top-down cousin, outreach. Outreach is what a partisan or dominant side in a debate does to get the little fish on board. There’s almost no possibility of dialogue. In contrast, consensus implicitly assumes that all stakeholders own the decision, more or less equally even if one side began the push for it and in reality did most of the work. One can imagine a community board agreeing to a development plan put forth by a mayor, and then criticizing the mayor for it after it fails; one can’t imagine the same if the community board is the body that created the plan.
Film critic Pauline Kael, when asked to comment on why Nixon won the 1972 election, refused to comment, saying she couldn’t know because nobody she knew voted for him. (This has been misquoted in conservative circles as her saying that she couldn’t believe he could have won.) Kael’s contrition was unusual; most people are more than happy to generalize based on the few people they know who fit a type, or, even worse, based on stereotypes they’ve heard from others. It’s bad enough in a bipartisan world, but in city politics, the large number of different factions and worldviews is such that no one force can possibly know enough to govern for everyone.
Although the political process of any non-autocratic city forces some cooperation among groups, the practice can be authoritarian enough that many are completely unheard of in the halls of power. This is especially true of recent immigrants and others who have no long-term activist presence, or of racial minorities in cities with a majority race and racist politics. But even groups with some organization and voting power can be shut out by a Bloomberg, an Emanuel, or even a Villaraigosa. The result is that even policy that isn’t malevolent can be destructive; this is the sin of many postwar urban renewal programs, which didn’t have to accommodate the concerns of the neighborhoods they leveled and had no intention of listening to anyone they didn’t have to listen to.
The alternative is to embark on a process that’s slow, but more robust. It’s immune to changes in electoral fortunes, since swings from 52-48 to 48-52 don’t have such a huge impact on policy. The roads movement in the US got everything it wanted from the 1910s to the 1950s, from governing ideologies ranging from Hooverism to New Deal liberalism. It’s important to imitate this one aspect of the roads movement, and ensure as many groups as possible pull in the same direction.
There are always authoritarians-in-making, people who pay lip service to any consensual and democratic concept they need to be seen to support but in reality seek power for themselves and surround themselves with yes-men. Those we need to be watchful of, to make sure that they never have the power to cause permanent damage. Streetsblog has shown glimpses of holding the Bloomberg administration’s feet to the fire on issues on which the city has not been a positive force for livability – for example, the 1st/2nd Avenue bike lanes – but we need to do more than that, and ensure that even if an autocrat has power, we use him more than he uses us.
Switching from a fundamentally authoritarian booster mentality to consensus governance has no hope of getting us demolition of low-performing or city-splitting freeways, or Hong Kong-style traffic restraint, at least not until the far future. It will take a long time to overturn preexisting anti-urban biases – even longer than necessary, since it will be based on consultation with many groups that oppose gentrification and find what’s happening to American cities now a bad thing. It requires letting go of many proposals that are currently too expensive, and focusing on making the process friendlier to good transit and walkability and less so to boondoggles and pollution. It requires sitting down with people we may find abhorrent on other issues. Its saving grace is only that, in the medium and long runs, it works.
Pedestrian Observations from Barbados: Followup to Caribbean Car Ownership
The biggest criticism I’ve gotten in comments to Matt Yglesias’s link to my previous post was about my comparison of Puerto Rico’s car ownership with that of neighboring middle-income Caribbean nations. Multiple people claimed that Puerto Rico is much larger than the other countries and therefore needs cars, whereas in the rest of the countries people can walk everywhere. The correlation between size and car ownership is not statistically supported – whereas that with urban density is – but I’m going to instead narrate the pedestrian experience in Barbados to explain why positing such correlation doesn’t make sense. One commenter, Peter from the Block, writes:
Unless you are on a small island like Barbados or Antigua or Barbuda, in which case everything is close [enough to walk]!
My experience with Barbados comes from a week-long conference in Holetown last year. The conference was at the beginning of May, when the Sun came within two degrees of the zenith. The main road we’d use to get back and forth from the institute where we slept and the conference was held to the area where we could shop for food has little shade and even less tree coverage. The sidewalks are narrow, and there’s no real street wall: on the contrary, commercial buildings are fronted by parking lots. With the Sun directly overhead, the high asphalt coverage made for intense heat.
There was not much traffic by suburban American standards, but enough that it was still impossible to walk in the roadway, making the narrow sidewalks a problem whenever more than about 3 people walked together. In addition, the mall we used for food shopping is surrounded on all sides by parking, with a gas station on the side. My recollection of the people I saw in the area, including in the mall, is that they were mostly black, therefore majority-local (for while presumably there were some African-American tourists, most tourists would be white), but tourists comprised a disproportionate fraction.
For trips to other parts of the island, we got around with a tour bus rather than on foot. I tried at one point and failed to learn to use the local bus system and visit the main city, Bridgetown; walking would take far too long. The tour bus took us to a patch of rainforest and back, with a stopover at a beach; none of the points we passed in between looked especially dense, and few looked walkable.
Bear in mind, the above does not apply to Bridgetown. Purely from Google Maps tourism, it looks like a pedestrian-centric traditional city to me, of the kind that Charlie Gardner and Nathan Lewis would rave about. Presumably, car ownership is low because people in the cities can walk to their daily errands. But this is precisely the point I was making about the role of national policy in transportation mode choice: while Barbados’s size and national density are features of geography, the shape of its cities and its urban density are features of government policy.
Another thing one should note is that although walking to local errands was annoying, it was possible. This, again, is a feature of land use and transportation policy – probably inertia rather than a conscious choice, but still a different path from that taken by the US. Local travel is not that sensitive to national size and density.
Barbados is not Monaco. Its national population density, 660/km^2, is high by any global standard, but it’s not a high urban density. There are plenty of suburbs in New Jersey with several times that density where one could not walk to a supermarket. Under an American (or Malaysian) transportation policy, Barbados would’ve not only been pedestrian-hostile, but also sprawled like San Juan or Honolulu.
Where Did You Grow Up?
The last few weeks’ posts on Old Urbanist made me think about what urban forms people prefer, and how it’s affected by what they are familiar with. Rather than speculate on what people in my social circle prefer, I yield the stage to you. What type of urban environment did you grow up in, and/or influenced your thinking about cities the most? And what form of urban development do you find most desirable?
I’ll start: I grew up in the Old North of Tel Aviv, a dense (about 15,000/km^2) neighborhood whose residential stock is almost exclusively four-story Garden City apartment buildings. Buildings are not attached as rowhouses, but instead are set back a few meters from the edges of the lots; typical apartment size is 120 square meters. The neighborhood is upper middle class – indeed, North Tel Aviv is used as a metonym for latte liberalism – but is not uniformly so. Growing up, I knew plenty of people in the neighborhood who were middle middle class, a few who were working class, and a few who were outright rich. This somewhat distinguishes North Tel Aviv from some surrounding suburbs that are nominally equally rich but are more uniformly upper middle class. In the 1990s, it was also stable rather than gentrified; there were, and still are, people living in the same neighborhood, sometimes the same apartment, for multiple decades.
As a result, I never grew up with the association of detached houses with wealth. Hebrew even distinguishes words for houses in general (house/home) and words that denote wealth (villa, cottage) but has just one word normally for an apartment; English, which distinguishes an apartment or a tenement from a condo, is exactly the opposite. Having a car is important for social status in Israel, but the idea is to drive it a short distance to work, as my parents did. Driving 20 kilometers each way would be strange. At the same time, I took some measure of walkability for granted, making me uncomfortable with sections of the city that were built after the 1950s and were designed to automobile scale. I did not think of public transportation as a normal means of getting to work, unless one couldn’t afford a car, but it was nifty for getting to school.
The ideas about urbanism I’ve developed out of that experience, followed by Manhattan, are:
1. Street width should be close to building height; for the purposes of this discussion, street width is measured from building edge to building edge, and building height is the average height of the continuous street wall. A height:width ratio of about 1 or slightly higher is best. Below about 1/2, it’s too open; in Providence, where the ratio is about 0.6, measured from the top of buildings, I already walk in the middle of the roadway, as if the streets were naked. Above about 2, which exists on some streets in such pre-industrial cities as Florence, it feels like an alley. As a corollary, very narrow streets are suitable for low-traffic cities, whereas high-density places should look more like Manhattan.
2. Every normal neighborhood amenity should be reachable on foot, on streets that are designed to be used primarily by pedestrians. If you need to take mechanized transportation or cross a highway to get to the supermarket, there is something wrong with your neighborhood.
3. Bicycles are a form of private transportation.
4. Stoplight phasing is critical.
5. The street network should be porous. The closer to a regular grid, the better. The Old North has a grid of arterial streets, but the local streets terminate in T-shaped intersections, like this, and it’s not always possible to tell a local from an arterial street on sight; in addition, the grid is not really continued into other neighborhoods, making walking there confusing. I found Manhattan much more walkable than the Old North for this reason.
I will now exit the stage and make this an open mic.
Affordable Housing
A new post on Old Urbanist linking to prior posts about housing affordability, both on his own blog and on New World Economics. The theme is that various design standards – the two sites’ main scourge is streets wider than about 5-10 meters and in general excessive room for parking and front lawns – force the cost of construction up, making housing less affordable.
In reality, the first thing to note about high housing prices is that they exist everywhere: not just in new urbanist towns in the US, the type of development under discussion on the above blogs, but also in New York, and Paris, and Tokyo, and Tel Aviv, and Hong Kong, and London. In my matrix of different types of city planning, every row contains cities whose housing prices stretch the middle class to its limits. Often there’s significant homelessness, but most people have just enough to scrape by. The cities where housing prices are low compensate by either having very poor populations (inner-city Detroit) or requiring people to spend large quantities of money on driving (the Sunbelt): note how across US metro area, the total percentage of household income spent on housing and transportation is essentially constant.
Thus, as a first filter, the cities whose housing prices are low relative to incomes are very spread out and auto-oriented, exactly the opposite of any kind of urbanism other than suburbanism. As a second filter, Ed Glaeser notes that the high cost of housing in coastal cities comes from supply restrictions in the form of zoning, writing about Boston and about Manhattan as case studies.
First, what is clear about situations with unaffordable housing (really, barely-affordable) is that it is not due to high construction costs. Glaeser himself notes that construction of luxury apartments in Manhattan costs about $300 per ft^2, while the sales price per ft^2 is on average $600. In particular, parking requirements and other restrictions that effectively raise construction costs are not the primary agent to blame for high housing costs in general. An extra $20,000 for a parking spot is not going to make housing unaffordable, though it may influence developers’ decisions of what and where to build to maximize profits, in particular by making them abandon urban construction in favor of the suburbs. Glaeser blames persistently high housing prices on a regulatory tax, which forces developers to spend extra money on lobbying and preparing paperwork for permits.
Second, the primary determinant of housing prices is not capital costs, but the cost of the land underneath. An older post on Old Urbanist asks why real housing prices have increased since 1920; the answer is that a house is not a manufactured good, but primarily land, as is especially clear when one considers expensive, desirable cities.
Third, the worth of land is dependent on demand. Land on which a developer can build three apartments is worth three times as much as land on which a developer can build one apartment. That’s why on the level of the individual building, building higher does not reduce rents. Land supply only forms the limiting factor when there’s a regionwide desire to be in an area with a fixed land constraint, such as the national borders of Singapore or Monaco, or the physical extent of the New York City Subway or the walkable radius of Central Tel Aviv. In such cases, it could reduce prices to expand the available space for housing within the fixed constraint, via either increasing density or expanding the desirable area through transportation infrastructure or landfill. But otherwise, there’s not much point.
When high housing prices are genuinely the result of high capital cost, the result is different from that of high demand or a shortage of land. Consider North Tel Aviv, which mandates expensive whitewash on its traditional garden city buildings. When those buildings were first constructed in the 1930s, they were priced too steeply for the working class, leading the rising middle class to move in instead. Since the whitewash is also high-maintenance, apartments deteriorated, and the only buildings that maintain an aesthetic exterior cost much more to maintain and are only affordable to the rich. In effect, the result of high capital cost is worse physical stock, the opposite of what normally happens in Tokyo, New York, and other expensive cities.
Anti-gentrification activists often fight policies that make their areas more desirable; the above three points help explain why. Affordable housing to them is a bargain to richer people, and if they want to move in, they’ll be priced out. The only way to depress housing prices is to depress demand. One activist, a Harlem preacher with extreme right sympathies, even calls for a general economic boycott of his own neighborhood in order to cause an economic collapse and lower rents.
The inevitable conclusion, namely that it’s impossible to make housing persistently cheap without raising other costs or impoverishing people, does not mean that affordable housing issues are moot. First, the equity issue remains; although on average housing is just marginally affordable, to many people it is not affordable, and as a result, expensive cities engage in government intervention to prevent mass homelessness, even ultra-capitalist Singapore.
In addition, although expanding housing supply makes land more valuable and normally prevents prices from falling, it also create better housing in the process. Auto-oriented sprawl in the US has caused dwelling size to increase; upzoning and the construction of better transportation infrastructure in expensive cities would enable people to move from the periphery to the core – or, more precisely, people could stay where they are, but public transit could redefine regions from periphery to core.
For a toy model, suppose there are two kinds of development: regular suburbia and new urbanism, where new urbanism is more expensive. Constructing more new urbanism is going to reduce the price for both kinds of housing (new urbanism has an increase in supply, regular suburbia suffers from a subsequent decline in demand), while also shifting people from regular suburbia to new urbanism. Overall the average price of housing shouldn’t change, but the quality will increase.
In other words, on a national or regional level, affordable housing is never a problem; it may be a problem for poor people, but not in general, on average. Supply restrictions should show in low-quality housing, measured in terms of size, local walkability, aesthetics, and other factors that on the local level determine price.
Rent Control
Tel Aviv’s housing protest grows, and Saturday night tens of thousands of protesters descended on HaBima Square, demanding rent control. Although I have yet to see media heavyweights on the left echo those demands – instead, they view it in abstract terms of people power versus the state – they are clearly too important to ignore right now. There is already a response from the right and from (classical) liberals saying that it’s government’s fault and that the correct solution is deregulation of new construction.
However, since government intervention is ubiquitous in expensive cities, including several famous ones I have lived in, I’d like to talk about case studies of world cities. In most of the last ten and a half years, I lived in Singapore and New York. Both have extensive government regulation, despite the capitalist orientation of Singapore. However, this government involvement takes different forms, though some of consequences are similar.
In New York, there’s rent control, precisely what the Tel Aviv protesters are demanding. More precisely, there are two forms of rent regulation: rent control, and rent stabilization. Rent control is far stronger, requires the tenant to have continuously occupied the apartment since 1971, and only applies to 2% of rental units, mostly in Manhattan. Rent stabilization allows higher rents and merely limits the increase in rent every year to a few percent, and is far more common, applying to about half of rental units. Both figures come from the most recent housing survey, in 2008. There are also public housing programs, some for the poor and some for the middle class. In addition, the Inclusionary Housing Program encourages developers to set aside 20% of the units as affordable housing, by offering them a bonus in floor area ratio.
In Singapore, the main form of government involvement takes the form of subsidized public housing, called HDB estates after the housing development board. These are rented and sold to Singaporean citizens at a discount, and are home to 85% of Singaporeans. The mandatory savings accounts, which function similarly to social security programs except that people only get back what they paid in, with no redistribution of wealth, encourages home ownership by allowing people to use their accounts to buy housing. Thus home ownership is high, in contrast to the situation in other expensive cities, such as New York.
The important feature in both cases is that not everyone is eligible for reduced rent. In New York, rent stabilization disappears in certain cases if the tenant leaves (vacancy decontrol); in Singapore, HDB is not available to non-resident immigrants, who form 25% of the country’s population. This is also seen in other expensive cities, including Monaco, where the minority of residents who are citizens have access to highly subsidized public housing, and Hong Kong, where half the population receives housing subsidies.
The result is parallel markets. There’s an affordable market, and an unregulated market, which is much more expensive than it would be without government involvement since there is a restricted supply of market-rate housing. Effectively, in order to prevent mass homelessness, the government increases rent for unfavored groups – expats in Singapore, relative newcomers in New York – in order to reduce that of favored groups. Rich members of the unfavored groups, for example executive expats, can easily pay the higher rent. Poor members, for example recent immigrants from developing countries, pay the rent by living in overcrowded housing.
A more pernicious result, common in New York, is landlords’ recurrent attempts to move rental units from the controlled or stabilized market to the unregulated one; although rent control is rare, it is concentrated in desirable neighborhoods that once hosted many working-class artists, such as SoHo and the West Village. Since the path of least resistance is vacancy decontrol, landlords harass such tenants in any way possible.
Immigrants who speak little English are a favored target of harassment, since they often don’t know their rights, and since many of their neighborhoods, for examples Washington Heights and Alphabet City, are desirable for college students. In contrast, students are often a standard replacement, since they have more money due to parental support, and are transient and therefore don’t complain as much about maintenance. However, everyone who is stabilized or controlled can be at risk; many of the stories I have heard come out of the Village rather than Washington Heights. Community board members know countless instances of landlords who defer maintenance, install noisy or inefficient heating and refuse tenants’ suggestions for better options, turn off the electricity or the water at inopportune times, and even engage in outright fraud. An anti-gentrification activist from West Harlem told a Columbia student group of landlords who pretend not to have received rent checks from their tenants, and then use this as an excuse to evict them.
I do not know whether the same results exist in other expensive cities with extensive rent control, for example Paris; I would appreciate help from any reader who knows the situation there. However, I posit that at least some degree of the two above issues are universal to a regime in which part of the market is regulated and part is not.
Based on admittedly partial information, I’d recommend against rent control in Tel Aviv, and for other forms of reform, including some government intervention when necessary. The differences with other land-constrained cities, in which intervention is universal, can be summed as follows:
1. Tel Aviv, while dense, is not as land-constrained as Singapore, which is limited by national borders, or New York, which is limited by the available subway infrastructure; therefore, there’s less inherent market pressure on land prices.
2. Tel Aviv’s zoning code allows much less development, and can be reformed accordingly. The 1920s-era Geddes Plan, good for its time but now in need of change, mandates setbacks of 4 meters front and back and 3 meters of each side, roughly halving the buildable area of the 20*25 lots typical of the city, and limits height to 4 stories. In addition, the city makes dividing apartments into smaller units so difficult landlords have taken to doing it illegally
3. A big portion of the problem is low purchasing power among specific groups, namely students, who do not have access to free tuition as in many progressive European countries or loans as in the US. Thus it’s not just a housing problem, as already noted by some protesters.
In general, there’s a distinction between socialism and bureaucracy. Social-democratic programs can be delivered with remarkably little bureaucracy. The Soviet Union was both socialist and bureaucratic, but Scandinavia’s quality of government is much better, as seen in its stellar rankings on corruption indices. In contrast, many developing countries impose many hurdles on starting a business without appreciable socialism, for example India’s license raj. The difficulty of building affordable market-rate housing in many cities can be traced to bureaucracy in the form of an onerous permit process, a zoning code that requires so many variations that developers are at the mercy of politicians, and similar questions that boil down to political power.
The consequence is that the process of reform must target regulations that empower kvetching community board and city leaders to make landlords’ lives miserable. Good deregulation would make it easier to build and easier to build densely, and streamline the permit process. It would not try to inflict maximum damage on tenants. The reason I’d mistrust any deregulation coming out of the present government is that its recent record – for example, cutting funding to fire services in the years leading up to the Mount Carmel fire – is not one of trying to make government better, but of trying to make government so small and inefficient it can be drowned in a bathtub. It’s exactly this attempt to destroy public services and give handouts to politically connected entrepreneurs that people in Tel Aviv are really protesting.
Housing Protest Ongoing in Tel Aviv
Over the last week or so, protesters have been occupying HaBima Square in central Tel Aviv with tents, demanding cheaper housing. Prices in Israel have been rising sharply over the last ten years, especially urban housing prices, and new urban construction is predominantly luxury. Populist politicians are already visiting the tents, talking up their own record on marginally related issues.
Some right-wingers, who identify everything coming out of Tel Aviv as left-wing, which locally means a dovish elite, are instead yelling at the protesters to “move to the periphery,” where housing is cheap. Israel has the opposite city/suburb dynamic as the US: the city center is generally richer and more expensive than the suburbs, and the richer suburbs of Tel Aviv – typically those in its favored quarter to the north – are not called periphery any more than the Upper East Side is called an inner city.
The problem with such a dynamic is that the periphery has no access to jobs. The roads are congested (and the extra driving costs would eat up the entire difference in rent); public transportation doesn’t run on weekends for religious reasons and consists of buses, which are very slow, and commuter trains, which aren’t very frequent and do not get people to most city destinations.
The housing problem, as one may expect, is predominantly political. While Tel Aviv’s wealth and access to jobs make it unusually desirable, there has not been any concerned attempt to create livable secondary urban centers. This post explains in more detail the issues; while it’s in Hebrew, you can still look at the pictures – in short, despite reforms, zoning still encourages construction like that in the first photo (a “development town,” i.e. a housing project, with about the same connotations as in the US) and discourages that in the second photo (Sheinkin Street, a once-bohemian, now-gentrified commercial artery).
Although Tel Aviv’s car ownership is not very high – about 60% of households own a car – parking is mandated in most new developments. Existing parking facilities are overstretched; pricing parking is a political non-starter. And despite the high demand for non-luxury housing, city regulations make it difficult to build smaller apartments: according to the blog linked above, it is difficult to get approval for apartments under 120 square meters, or to subdivide large apartments.
As in New York and other cities with a housing shortage, the resulting land shortage is leading developers to concentrate on the luxury market. In the last decade, developers have built huge skyscrapers surrounded by empty land along and near Namir Road, a wide arterial throughfare that the government is trying to turn into the new CBD and that the first line of the Tel Aviv subway is planned to pass under. Due to the building height, the density of such developments is fairly high, but in reality not much higher than the surrounding neighborhoods. Akirov Towers have a density of about 125 apartments per hectare, counting to the midlines of the streets adjacent to the development; the residential parts of the Old North, built almost uniformly to the fourth floor, average about 250 residents per hectare, and my own calculations suggest about 100 apartments per hectare.
A cohort of reformers, from both left and right, propose better public transit as a solution. People would be able to live in the periphery and commute to city jobs. The main efforts in the region are new commuter lines and the subway. The subway has been proposed and canceled so many times that nobody I have talked to seems to believe it will ever open. The commuter lines are not electrified and run against a capacity constraint in central Tel Aviv, where there is room only for three tracks; in addition, the service level is far short of an S-Bahn or RER, and is on a par with the higher-grade lines in North America, for example the LIRR. Typically the people advocating for such issues, even in government, are secular and would favor operating public transportation on the Sabbath, but no action or serious legislation has emerged yet, despite a fair amount of grassroots activism.
Less commonly proposed is development in the gaps in urbanization. As is readily seen on Google Earth, there is empty space directly adjacent to the urban area both to the north and south of Tel Aviv, interposing between adjacent municipalities. I am told that there was a plan to develop the empty space to the north, but it was torpedoed by a local desire to keep the municipalities strictly separate. (For clarification, those are both wealthy favored quarter suburbs – I believe Herzliya and Ra’anana, but I no longer remember.)
Also not commonly mentioned is the issue of political will. The protesters do not view their cause as one strictly about housing. A commenter on another blog quotes the following text from one of the tents:
I’m not here because of housing prices. I see them as a symptom of a systemic problem – a country that loses its democratic character in favor of a corrupt system of government based on connections, lobbyists, and property owners….
After a few days here, I’m discovering amazing things. People are completely forgetting about the elements that usually divide them, share their opinions, and listen to each other. Housing prices look like a drop in a sea of inequities. The problem is systemic. The apartments are a symptom.
…
We are still in the initial phase, where everyone talks to his heart’s content – but this is how you build cross-sectional solidarity.
If we continue to deal only with housing, at best we’ll solve just one point, important as it is, and in a year we won’t be able to afford food or studies. I worry we’ll miss the Israeli Spring and settle for a few flowers in our vase.
The Israeli government is no stranger to rapid growth. The settlements’ population went up 50% between 1999 and 2006. In terms of urban-rural politics, Israel has still not gotten to the stage that cities are an object of romanticism, and keeps pouring money into contested regions in order to create facts on the ground. The era of Mapai, the predecessor of today’s Labor Party, saw disinvestment in cities in favor of kibbutzim and development towns in peripheral regions; today, there’s some investment in luxury towers in the newly-built CBDs, but the political system is still anti-urban, just with a different focus.
Tel Aviv’s housing prices are putting it between a rock and a hard place. The status quo is intolerable; so is massive urban renewal, raising density marginally and pricing out the middle class, which unlike in American cities has remained mostly intact. The political consensus, to the degree it exists, is not to do anything. Good urban design and laxer zoning rules could mitigate some of those problems, but they’re too politically unpalatable right now. So, unless they indeed settle for a symbolic reform, the protesters will stay.
Sunnyside Yards Redevelopment
Sunnyside Yards, lying along the LIRR Main Line immediately adjacent to the site of my proposed Sunnyside Junction, span about half a square mile (1.3 km^2) of mostly vacant land, with some big box retail with ample parking at its eastern margin. The short distance to Manhattan has already made Western Queens increasingly desirable (538’s Nate Silver called Sunnyside the third best neighborhood to live in in New York); the new rail junction would make this vacant land into prime real estate, making it feasible to sell air rights above the yards in a similar manner to how much of East Midtown was developed with air rights over the Grand Central tracks.
I would like to discuss how this should be done. This can be thought of as not just a particular Sunnyside question, but also my general ideas for how to do good transit-oriented development, and even more general ideas for how to develop new sites for dense urbanity.
First, the development would be mixed-use. This is because there’s both commercial and residential demand near Manhattan. More speculatively, this could cause the Long Island City secondary CBD to expand eastward, from Hunters Point and Queens Plaza toward the proposed station. In any case, the station should be expected to have high-intensity retail and office buildings immediately adjacent.
On the other hand, the development should be integrated into the existing neighborhoods on both sides of the yards, in terms of both street layout and development intensity. This is not the place to test out new ideas of urbanism; the streets should look as similar as possible to those of Sunnyside and Long Island City. Here is one way to map out streets: note the block size is similar to that of the surrounding areas. The same should be true of street width.
The best way to combine the two goals – retaining existing neighborhood context and allowing high-intensity commercial development near the station – is for the city to have progressively higher-intensity zoning proceeding from the margins to the station itself. Away from the immediate station area, medium-rise buildings such as those of Upper Manhattan (excluding projects) should suffice, and the city should not try to ram high-rise buildings against neighborhood opposition. This would also be friendly to small developers, turning this into the anti-Atlantic Yards. Needless to say, there should be no parking minimums, since the area would be dense and well-served by mass transit.
The overall density of such development could be compared to the mid-rise neighborhoods of Upper Manhattan, such as Morningside Heights and Washington Heights. Morningside Heights has 40,000 people per km^2, and so does Washington Heights when one makes sure to exclude its ample parkland. Morningside Heights has a lot of open space and many jobs, but it’s also higher-rise than Washington Heights (excluding the projects, again). Either could be taken as a basis of comparison, by which standards the 1.3 km^2 over the yards should support about 50,000 people.
Sunnyside would effectively get a second core, around the station, in addition to the existing core along Queens Boulevard. Although the development could spill over, raise rents, and produce gentrification, by itself it would not change the existing neighborhood much, which is fine as Sunnyside is pleasant as it is. Even the Queens Boulevard semi-highway works remarkably well there: the 7 el does not produce too much noise, and instead breaks the boulevard in half, making it look narrower and producing a good street wall for each of the boulevard’s halves.
Bear in mind that out of everything I have proposed in this blog’s history, I would peg this as the least likely to happen: the development I’m advocating spurns big monolithic development. Instead, the city would just map out streets, enact mild zoning restrictions to prevent the community from rejecting the plan for fear of Manhattanization, and perhaps attract a few anchor tenants and companies to build immediately next to the station. In contrast, the present process of redevelopment in New York is laden with collusion, with big developers getting land for megaprojects for less than it’s worth. The city would give a developer not only the yard land but also neighborhood blocks around it, which would be turned into a modernist urban renewal hell instead of a higher-intensity version of the same neighborhood.
My sliver of hope is that the extra transit service coming from the new junction station, and the fact that at the margins of the land the new development would look hardly different from the existing blocks, would reduce neighborhood opposition. Often the dominance of big developers in cities comes from neighborhood opposition to change, creating an arduous process of obtaining variances and schmoozing with city officials that small business cannot afford. I would peg the chances of neighborhood approval at low to moderate, the chances of such a plan happening in case of neighborhood approval at low, and the chances of such a plan happening in the absence of neighborhood approval at zero. What say you, Sunnyside-area bloggers?
Pedestrian Observations 