Category: Urbanism
Boosters’ Romanticism
One would expect that boosters of unbridled growth, such as Thomas Friedman, Richard Florida, Ed Glaeser, and countless proponents of urban growth would constantly look to the future and deprecate the past. They certainly deprecate attempts to recreate the past. But do they? Despite unabashed pro-Americanism, they crow about the fast growth of China. Glaeser looks back to an era of great infrastructure spending on water works in turn-of-the-century America. Infrastructurist and urbanophile bloggers look back to Daniel Burnham and early-20th century public works (though the Infrastructurist and Urbanophile themselves are very self-conscious and are more thoughtful in their boosterism).
Instead of writing about history as a series of epics, let us examine it with the same critical eye we examine the present. This means looking at historical paths not taken, much as we should examine alternatives for projects today; this also means looking at costs and benefits. In most cases, the inspirational projects of the past tend to not look very good under the microscope.
For a concrete example, consider the Interstate system. Examples of writings on infrastructure that take its greatness for granted are numerous, even on Streetsblog as far as job creation is concerned. But in reality, it was an epic disaster for most involved. The original 1954 estimate for the cost, enshrined in the 1956 act creating the network, was $25 billion; by 1958 it had already climbed to $40 billion, and the final cost was $114 billion. The construction required demolishing thousands of dwellings in each city the highways went through. Even burying the highways does not help: the scar of Boston’s Central Artery is still there despite the Big Dig, because amidst cost overruns they dropped the option of building above the tunnel.
The utter failure of the USA’s road-building program goes further back. As explained by Owen Gutfreund in his book 20th Century Sprawl, urban streets, on which it was illegal to spend gas tax money until the late 1930s, subsidized the early highways and rural roads; overall, roads only covered about half their capital costs through gas taxes. Tollways faced intense opposition from the AAA and the auto and tire industries. Instead an entire bureaucracy was created to ram roads through, paving the way to the large-scale neighborhood destruction of the 1950s. Tellingly, New York and San Francisco, the first two major cities to have freeway revolts, had a smaller population decline through 1980 than the other major non-Sunbelt cities, and are now the only two to have since surpassed their 1950 population peaks.
Transit investment in that era was no better. New York’s major project in the 1920s and 1930s was the construction of the IND, competing with the existing privately-run IRT and BMT networks. The new lines generally did not add transportation options. The Crosstown and Queens Boulevard Lines added service, but did not connect to existing IRT or BMT stops; to this day, the G train has no transfer to non-IND lines in Downtown Brooklyn, and only one, difficult transfer in Queens, which opened just a month ago. The remainder simply paralleled existing elevated or subway lines, which were subsequently torn down.
Part of it was the general opposition to elevated rail in that era, coupled with fascination with both subways and elevated highways. But only part: one IND line, the Sixth Avenue Line, required building new track alongside and later below the existing Hudson Tubes (now PATH), dooming previous plans to extend them to Grand Central for greater regional connectivity. On top of it, the difficulty of building next to an active subway created massive cost escalation, dooming future expansion plans that would add new service.
Although both of the above examples are from the middle of the 20th century, previous infrastructure investment was not much better. It’s a commonplace that New York’s first subway line was built in four years, versus ten for just one phase of Second Avenue Subway. It’s less widely known that ground broke on the subway in 1900 only after multiple decades of political bickering, route changes, and scandals; a short underground demonstration line using pneumatic tube technology had opened in 1869.
Even before then, Britain had undergone a pair of Railway Manias, one in the 1830s and one in the 1840s (thanks to Danny in the comments for the link). Relative to GDP, the latter mania dwarfed both the 1990s’ tech bubble and the 2000s’ housing bubble. Costs ran over estimates by a factor of 2 or more, and ridership underperformed estimates. Although by the end of the Victorian era the lines had surpassed the mid-19th century predictions and were profitable, the investment was too fast, and ruined many investors.
Nobody romanticizes the present, because its problems are apparent to all. Some people romanticize the future; those are the boosters, for whom every problem with growth has a simple solution. But even those can easily slip and romanticize the past, whose main actors have since become national heroes and whose main battles have turned into epic legends. Obama and Bloomberg are controversial; Eisenhower and LaGuardia are heroes.
Planned Cities
The back and forth between Steve and me about his proposed pedestrian-oriented city led me to think more about planned cities, as his is. Although it’s normal among urbanists (for example, Jane Jacobs) to contrast organic cities with planned cities, there are really two aspects of planned cities, one economic and one design-based.
A city can be planned in terms of its urban design. A master plan came in and created its street layout, which is in some way regular. For the purposes of this discussion, it does not matter whether it was planned according to the principles of the Enlightenment, the Garden City movement, or modernism; however, this city will typically have grander major boulevards than unplanned cities, because they are meant to be the focus of civic and state power. A city can also be planned in terms of its economy and location: it was built out of scratch, typically to serve as a new national capital. Those two aspects of planned cities are more or less independent, and criticisms of one do not always carry over to the other.
We can present this using the following table of examples:
| Economically Planned |
Economically Organic |
|
| Organic Design | London, Tokyo, Boston, Rome | |
| Planned, Enlightenment principles | Washington, Toronto, St. Petersburg | New York, Philadelphia, Paris, Chicago |
| Planned, Garden City | Kuala Lumpur | Tel Aviv (Old North) |
| Planned, modernist/postwar | Brasilia | Singapore, Mumbai (ex-slums), US Sunbelt, Tel Aviv (north of the Yarkon) |
There are several things one should note about the above table. First, there are no economically planned cities with organic design, at least none I’m aware of: a city that exists only because of a national master plan will also have a master plan dictating its urban form. The closest things to it are a preexisting organic city that became larger when the national capital was moved there, for example Rome or Bonn, and a planned city that had some spontaneous development before being subsumed by a master plan, for example St. Petersburg. In fact the reason I found Steve’s proposed city a little weird is that it tries to approximate the features of an unplanned city (very narrow streets) in a setting that is completely planned (the city is plopped in a new rural subdivision).
Second, economically unplanned cities usually have downtown districts with no urban planning, regardless of how the rest of the city looks. This is true in New York (Lower Manhattan), Tel Aviv (Jaffa, pre-1920s Hebrew neighborhoods such as Neve Tzedek), and Singapore (the older parts of the CBD, Chinatown, Little India). When a city has no pockets of unplanned areas, for example Paris, it’s often because the entire city was razed and rebuilt according to a master plan; this is equally true of planned parts of cities, which contain few hints of the areas that were razed to make room for them.
Third, many, though not all, problems that Jacobs and other traditional urbanists associate with planned cities are problems of economic planning and not urban planning. A good example is Jacobs’ attacks on the Garden City movement, in particular Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes, for hating traditional cities. Such an attack could be justified by looking at new suburban subdivisions as well as Kuala Lumpur, built from scratch to be the capital of Malaya.
In contrast, Jacobs’ criticism looks misplaced when one looks at Tel Aviv’s Old North, a dense and walkable neighborhood built entirely according to a master plan specified by Geddes. If you reread my criticisms of Tel Aviv, you’ll see that they are more about what more modern planners have done with it than the Old North’s basic urban form. The urban form is walkable, and the narrow streets are inherently less car-friendly than those of New York or Paris, but the traffic engineers have nonetheless optimized traffic for cars, and the national government rejected a subway in the 1960s for anti-urban nationalist reasons.
In other words, although the urban form of Steve’s Triangle City is likely to be similar to that of Rome, Tokyo, Kyoto, and other unplanned cities, its social and economic characteristics are not. They are more likely to be similar to those of Kuala Lumpur, Brasilia, Washington, and master-planned suburbs.
At the same time, some of the problems of modernism remain true in both planned and unplanned cities. Singapore’s projects and cul-de-sacs are as socially isolating as those of American suburbia. The arterials are not walkable, and the government’s response to huge pedestrian volumes at the intersection of Orchard and Paterson was to construct pedestrian underpasses. The same is true of the newer parts of North Tel Aviv, north of the Yarkon, though the high incomes there prevent the gang problems common in American projects.
Fourth and finally, it is rare but possible for a city built from scratch to become a true import-replacing city, depending on circumstance. Toronto did; although it was built from scratch as Upper Canada’s capital, safely away from the US border, it grew and became Ontario’s primate city, and eventually eclipsed Montreal as Canada’s largest city. The same is true for numerous cities built or designated as imperial capitals before industrialization, e.g. Beijing, Berlin. I cannot tell whether Kuala Lumpur has achieved the same feat, but its size suggests it has. Washington has not – its economy depends almost entirely on government. Master-planned suburbs practically never do.
Sprawl is Auto-Oriented
Steve Stofka has a post detailing his ideal new city, built on principles of high density through very narrow streets, and an interconnected, pedestrian-friendly grid. Its population is given as 30,000, and its area as about 2 square miles, or 5 square kilometers. Although it’s meant to illustrate urban design principles, in a similar matter to my description of my ideal urban arterial street, the proposed location in exurban South Jersey raises questions about why new subdivisions remain auto-oriented.
Let us zoom out and see the general location of this Triangle City. It is exurban; there’s no access except by narrow local roads. This means that residents would drive to all locations outside the town, forcing high car ownership and raising car use well beyond the ability of narrow, pedestrian-oriented streets to carry them. Such towns can be built along potential commuter rail lines, but most of the time the stations along these lines are already developed at vastly lower density than 6,000/km^2. This alone means that such new development would not look like the narrow-street neighborhoods of Tokyo, which have rapid transit to get people to the rest of the metropolis.
Even if a rail line were built, it would not do much to make such development less auto-oriented. A town of 30,000 is very far from self-sufficient; its residents will do much of their shopping outside, making car ownership even more attractive. Morningside Heights, a neighborhood of 33,000, is not self-sufficient either, but because it’s part of a contiguous urban fabric with rapid transit links to the rest of the city, it has low car ownership.
For a more reasonable take on why sprawl absolutely requires cars and long drives, here’s commenter JJJ writing on his blog about a proposed Fresno sprawlburb of 10,000 people:
A self-sufficient community? So much laughter. 2,800 homes may be able to support a supermarket, a CVS, a few nail salons and chinese take-out….but people want more. People want to shop at Target, Best Buy, Costco, etc, none of which will EVER locate in a community of that size (they require much larger customer bases). People want a Cinema and bowling alley. People want a large selection of restaurants.
So residents will have to drive for 30 minutes, through the only road, which is used by those heading to the lake for recreation, or passing through to the national parks. That means congestion.
And the future supermarket, library, pharmacy, elementary school etc? The people who will end up working there won’t move into an expensive rural suburb. They’re going to live in Fresno. And every single one of them will have to drive in that one road. The idea that the retirees will be so self-sufficient that they will be busing tables at a small chinese restaurant is hilarious.
In other words, in a society where most people are rich enough to own a car, building sprawling subdivisions makes car use inevitable. Transit-oriented development done right should start in the dense cities and expand outward slowly, making it feasible to do all of one’s errands on foot, by bike, or by public transit.
Meticulously planned subdivisions usually flop in terms of urban quality, but if one wants to build any, they should be surrounded by or adjacent to existing high-intensity urbanization. This is the reason for gentrification: such areas are almost never empty, and as a result the only way to create them is to displace existing neighborhoods, either organically (Williamsburg) or by fiat (Manhattanville).
Why Density Requires Height
Among modern urbanists, the universal consensus that the postwar urban form of towers in parks is bad gives way to fractious disagreements about which urban form to replace them with. The main battle lines are drawn between libertarians and such liberal sympathizers as Matt Yglesias who argue for removing zoning laws and building tall buildings on the model of Manhattan, and social liberals in the tradition of Christopher Alexander who argue for height limits and traditional pre-19th century urbanism. On the blogosphere, the most consistent advocate of the former is Market Urbanism, and the most consistent advocate of the latter is Old Urbanist.
The primary argument used by height limit proponents is aesthetic. Charlie of Old Urbanist quotes the following passage from Nathan Glazer’s book, From a Cause to a Style:
Wherever social scientists examine these issues, they find a taste that architects on the whole do not find it interesting to satisfy, a taste for the low-rise, the small scale, the unit that gives some privacy, some access to the ground, a small piece of land wholly under one’s control. I am not, of course, describing a universal taste, But for people raising children – and indeed many others – it is a near universal taste, if people have a choice. Nor is there any reason to think that is is necessary or desirable that people be educated against that taste and develop a taste for a larger or gargantuan scale…
A good rule of thumb is that one should dismiss every claim of a “near universal taste” that is not universal in the literal sense – and this one is not. I’m basing my impression on Charlie’s post and it could be that Glazer provides more justification for the universality of the desire for single-family owner-occupied housing, but outside the US, I just don’t see it. It’s not present in Tel Aviv, Paris, or any other city where the rich usually live in multi-story buildings, on their own volition. In Paris one at least has the consolation that people live in mid-rise buildings; Tel Aviv, where those mid-rise buildings are for the upper middle class while the rich live in modernist skyscrapers, has no such excuse. Even Manhattan is undergoing an upper-class baby boom, so even in the US families with children are no longer shunning the city.
In general, it’s easy to dismiss everything one does not like as going against a universal taste. All one needs is to point to universal acceptance in places where government regulations mandate one’s preference (for example, suburbia in most of the US) and, if one wants to be more self-conscious, then harangue about government regulations elsewhere mandating the opposite. In reality, the rich live where other rich people live, in gated communities, which can have any urban form; the middle class lives where the rest of the middle class lives; the poor live where housing is cheap. Even modernist projects can do: for middle-class examples, consider New York’s Co-op City and Stuyvesant Town.
In contrast, the primary argument used by height limit opponents is utilitarian: density requires height. This is obvious in central business districts, where the economics of agglomeration favor very large buildings, and vertical CBDs such as Midtown and Lower Manhattan and the Chicago Loop can attain very high densities. The footprint of the Empire State Building has a floor area ratio of 33, that of the Sears Willis Tower 37. It’s impossible to get anywhere this density without multiple tens of floors, even with buildings that rise vertically from the lot limit without tapering.
Unfortunately, this point is easy to miss, since the headline figure of density is residents per unit of area, and residential skyscrapers are rare. Skyscraper-ridden Manhattan and height-limited Paris have about the same residential density, but Manhattan’s skyscrapers are predominantly commercial. Aside from project towers, Manhattan’s residential urban form is mid-rise, with most buildings not exceeding 6-12 floors; this is similar to Paris.
Indeed, the last time I visited Paris I instantly felt at home, as if in a French-speaking Manhattan. The architectural styles are similar. The building height in Paris is the same as what I’m used to from living in Upper Manhattan. The street widths are on average similar, though Manhattan’s street widths are more uniform whereas Paris has many 10-meter-wide streets as well as many 40-meter-wide boulevards. Both places are the densest major clusters one can find in the developed world outside Hong Kong; this is about the limit one can get with mid-rise buildings flanking moderately wide streets.
To get higher density, one must build higher. Some parts of Manhattan do: the Upper East Side and Upper West Side have a fair number of buildings in the 20-30 story range, and although as Charlie computes only 1% of New York City’s residents live above the 19th floor, the proportion is much higher on the Upper East Side and Upper West Side, and becomes even higher if one relaxes the limit from 20 floors to 12, already well beyond the limit traditional urbanists and high-rise opponents accept (Christopher Alexander proposes 5 as the limit). Those are precisely the neighborhoods with the highest density in Manhattan. The census tracts where the residents are upper middle-class rather than rich – generally those in the north or east of the Upper East Side – have residential densities of about 50,000-75,000 per square kilometer. In contrast, the average in Manhattan and Paris is about 25,000, and the densest quarter of Paris has about 40,000.
I’m unconvinced they’re clearly inferior to densely packed mid-rise buildings; zoning boards and NIMBYs can be just as shrill toward narrow streets, without which small buildings limit density to suburban levels, as they are toward high-rises. And when demand is so great that even 40,000 people per km^2 at modern urban apartment sizes is not enough – a demand that’s familiar for office towers, but relatively new for residences – higher buildings become a necessity. They do not have to have 50 floors as Ed Glaeser proposes, but any limit lower than 20 is an unreasonable constraint in this case.
I’m not going to make an aesthetic or environmental argument here. People of means have had no trouble living with very narrow streets in Tokyo, or with very wide avenues and high-rises. But, please, do not pretend you can limit height without limiting density. There’s a point beyond which demand will exceed your height limit.
Why Transit Should be in the Fast Lane
Local buses tend to use the slow lane, which in North America means the rightmost lane; this is how they access the curb to pick up passengers. New York’s painted bus lanes on First and Second Avenues are to the right, with the buses slower than the cars both in perception and in actual practice.
Occasionally, transit uses the fast lane, especially if it’s BRT or a streetcar; for some of the access challenges of boarding not from the curb, see an old Human Transit thread on the subject. The issue of whether there should be sidewalk- or median-adjacent transit lanes came up in comments on Cap’n Transit’s blog. So let me explain why higher-grade transit than local buses, which means rail or BRT, should run in the median, with boarding from raised curbs either on the sides or in the center.
1. Service identity. This is probably the overarching concern, especially on the question of whether to have raised curbs or instead stop traffic in the slow lanes and have people cross to the bus from the sidewalk. ITDP’s magnum opus standards for full-fat BRT virtually take median running for granted, and only consider alternatives when the right-of-way is constrained. This is also mentioned as the highest grade of BRT in a conference paper examining BRT on city streets.
2. Fewer conflicts. Using pedestrian-friendly two-phase stoplights, it is impossible to eliminate turn conflicts, though in Delhi they found that median running (right lane in India) had fewer turn conflicts. In addition, it’s possible to eliminate conflicts with cars entering or exiting the parking lanes, as well as stopped cars left near the curbside lanes.
3. Median lanes are politically easier to physically separate, since separating them does not deprive cars of curbside access. If cars can physically violate transit lanes, they will, either accidentally or intentionally (my mother’s car’s GPS guidance routinely sends her along the tram-only lanes). As APTA mentions in its own standards for BRT,
One major advantage of a median busway is that there is typically no demand for other vehicles to stop in the center of the street for purposes such as parking or as a breakdown lane. As a result, there is a lot less reason for vehicles to want to occupy the center of the road and less resistance to creating a physical barrier separation between the busway and the adjacent general traffic lanes.
Point #3 is what killed the proposal for the 34th Street Transitway, which would have run two-way on one side of the street with one direction running contraflow. The NIMBYs on East 34th Street complained specifically about curbside access, using such language as “Delivery and service trucks… no longer have direct access to buildings and stores along stretches of 34th Street.” Most issues they raised involved curbside access or else bus noise adjacent to the street, both of which would have been solved by median lanes.
To add to what Steve Stofka is writing about grids, if I had to design a street from scratch, it would look a lot like a two-way version of a Manhattan avenue, with bus lanes in the middle. It would be 30 meters building to building, and about 20 curb to curb; this is enough space for two parking/loading lanes (2.5 meters) buffering pedestrians from moving traffic, two car travel lanes (3 meters), and two median bus lanes (3-3.5 meters), with room left for physical separation (measured in centimeters). Raised curbs for stations should add 3-4 meters, at the expense of either parking or sidewalk space once every few hundred meters; one advantage of trams, or buses with doors on both sides, is that they can use less space-consuming island stations.
Quick Note: Safe Streets, Safe Cities
Everyone should go read Jan Gehl’s post on Streetsblog about good urban design, excerpted from his book Cities for People. I have nothing to add, except to underline one part that’s often underrated among urbanists: the role of parked cars as buffer between moving cars and pedestrians or cyclists. Compare this photo with this photo, and ask yourself where the cyclist is better protected.
I generally tend to be very supportive of Manhattan’s design. The streets may be wider than elsewhere, but that translated mostly to increased pedestrian space. Manhattan’s 18-meter side streets have 1-2 driving lanes and a parking lane on each side; so do the 12-meter side streets in Tel Aviv, the difference being that in Tel Aviv cars park with two wheels on the sidewalk. As long as there’s an adequate street wall and the buildings are not set back from the street, it isn’t a real problem. As Gehl notes, there are many ways to make cities livable short of the ideal of Venice, in which cars begin where the city ends.
Urbanism, Gentrification, and Romanticism
Yonah is bringing up neoliberalism as one reason American cities, in his case study Detroit, are building new showcase light rail lines while at the same time neglecting bus service. Quoting a study showing the same in Chicago, he explains that this creates an uneasy tension between transit advocacy and development for the sake of the elite.
Actually, I am not surprised, not because of neoliberalism, but because of the trend toward new urban romanticism in gentrification. The best way to understand gentrification today – and the construction of greenfield light rail lines is every bit as connected to gentrification as highway construction was to suburbanization – as the mirror image of suburbanization from the middle of the 19th century onward. The political forces at play can be summarized in the following table:
| Suburbanization | Gentrification | |
| 1. Initial trends | Industrialization, rapid urbanization | Globalization, suburbanization |
| 2. Social problems | Overcrowding, slums, industrial pollution | Sprawl, fractured communities, car pollution |
| 3. Romanticized past | Preindustrial rural life | Traditional (19th-early 20th century) urbanism |
| 4. Proposed elite solution | Suburbs, cars, home ownership, separation of uses | Urban neighborhoods, transit, condos, mixed uses |
| 5. Solution for the existing urban form | Urban renewal: the city is turned into modernist towers and playgrounds for the suburbs | None yet identified, but proposals include demolition and ruralization, and redevelopment |
The best reference for the political forces – as opposed to the urban forces – is Nations and Nationalism, by Ernst Gellner. Gellner argues that modern nationalist culture, including urban romanticism for rural life, is an inevitable byproduct of industrialization. Industrialization leads to unprecedented mobility and a large increase in the size of the economic unit, from the village to the entire nation. This requires some measure of cultural uniformity, which the core imposes on the provinces often with great violence: in the 19th and early 20th century, France imposed Parisian French on provinces that spoke different languages, spanking schoolchildren who said a word in Occitan or Breton.
Although the resulting national culture is made in the cities, it has to romanticize peasants, who live in the vast majority of the nation’s territory. Gellner does not mention this, but in Israel, one can see even more: the most romanticized people are those living in or near disputed territories (for example, Sderot), since they form the basis for territorial claims.
The result of this romanticism is that although the elites live in the cities, most people living in the cities are ignored in favor of ruralism; this is still present today but in weaker form, in “Real America” epithets used by small towns against the cities.
Going back to transportation, this interacted with the real problems in rapidly industrializing cities, such as slums; those slums not only were and looked polluted, but also were hotbeds of cultures other than the national culture, for example immigrant enclaves in the US and cockney culture in London. The decision to build the subway in New York was not just about transportation, but also about transforming urbanites into proper Americans. Indeed, suburbanization happened in every developed country except Singapore and Hong Kong, which escaped this trend not because they are dense or incompatible with cars (as noted in Paul Barter’s thesis, Singapore wasn’t very dense in the 1960s and 70s), but because they are city-states and never had this rural nationalism.
Later, national highway systems (initially only for rural and intercity roads, not urban roads) built the nation, and helped people escape the cities for suburbs that were nothing like traditional rural areas. Part of this difference was fully intended: the urban reformers of the 19th century knew damn well that the rural areas had poor access to jobs, and wanted the suburbs to combine the best of both. But the larger part was not: the suburbs were never truly bucolic, could not offer truly bucolic life except to the very rich, and suffer from the same problems of traffic and social dependence (on homeowners’ associations rather than landlords) as the cities.
I contend that the exact same social trends are happening today, but with cities instead of rural areas. Urbanization happened sufficiently long ago that there’s an entire movement idealizing traditional cities. Real America is no longer just Hope and Crawford, but also Chicago’s South Side.
Under the new paradigm, People who railed against urban renewal, such as Jane Jacobs, become objects of romanticism by disaffected suburbanites, As Sharon Zukin notes in The Naked City, the authentic working-class culture of the West Village that Jacobs loved so much is long gone, but people still cling to its urban design and therefore the neighborhood is still in demand. The now-old working class is every bit an object of admiration today as the peasant class was in 1900.
The current trend for urban revitalization is easy to miss, since it’s only starting. It’s comparable to suburbanization in 1910, not 1955. But New York has had a building boom in the last 10 years, and has been growing faster than its suburbs since 1990 (see ACS data for 2009 here, and census data for 1990 and 2000 here). Since 2000 San Francisco has outgrown its suburbs as well, and in many less gentrified cities, such as Philadelphia, the core has had a population explosion even if the surrounding areas declined. What is more, the growing cores tend to be high-income, fueled by condos rather than low-income housing; this has happened in tandem with the suburbanization of poverty.
Since the current trend is as based on elite needs (in this case, globalization) as the previous trend of suburbanization, it’s not surprising that the infrastructure that comes with it is based on serving the elite: expensive airport connectors, development-oriented transit, bike lanes only for the rich, high-speed rail connecting revitalized urban centers, and generally deprecation of urban infrastructure used by existing residents who aren’t elite. Of course, it does not mean greenfield transit, airport connectors, bike lanes, and high-speed rail are not useful; transit advocates often support them independently of development potential. But it means that the elites like those projects independently of public benefits, and are thus likely to build boondoggles. Yonah himself has noted that,
Those who engage in [transit promotion] simultaneously argue for the social welfare benefits of providing affordable mobility for as many people as possible while also suggesting that good public transportation can play an essential role in city-building — essentially for the elite. After all, one of the primary arguments made for investing in new transit capital projects is that their long-term benefits include raising the property values of the land parcels near stations.
This creates an uneasy pro-transit coalition in many places where development and real estate interests align their lobbying with that of representatives of the poor to argue for the construction of new transit lines (usually rail), under the assumption that projects will benefit each group.
This produces an identity crisis for transit. For whom is it developed? Can its social mobility goals be reconciled with the interests of capitalists in the urban space?
There is not much to do about the trend for gentrification – like the trend for suburbanization, it can be partially managed, but not attacked. However, in the realm of transit, transit activists should be vigilant and prevent becoming useful idiots for developers and urban boosters. The elites can be powerful allies for change if they support the right kind, but it’s imperative to make sure they work for us instead of the reverse.
Update: a similar point was made six weeks ago by Linda Baker of Portland Urbanista, only she was more concise.
City Schools
In Tel Aviv, people may move to the suburbs for a variety of reasons – the impossibility of finding parking in the city and the high housing prices are two popular complaints – but not school quality. There are great public schools right in the city, including some non- or barely selective schools; the metro area-wide magnet classes for gifted children are located in the city and in some of its inner suburbs.
As one might expect, Tel Aviv is a high-income city: on a list of municipalities in Israel ranked by income, Tel Aviv is rated 8 out of 10 (higher is richer), where the only places rating 9 and 10 are a few exclusive gated communities and a single major suburb, Ramat HaSharon. Tel Aviv’s richer suburbs, to its north, are rated 8 as well; there is nothing to gain income-wise from moving, except perhaps that Tel Aviv is more diverse and has both super-rich areas and poorer areas while the suburbs are uniformly upper middle-class. As far as I can tell, it has always been the case – like France, Israel has a long history of housing the poor in the outskirts rather than in the inner city; this is not a recent case of gentrification.
Against this light, what Aaron Renn is writing about city schools is unsurprising. As American cities are getting relatively richer due to gentrification, their quality of public services, including schools, is improving, due to both more money and middle-class civic tradition. This process is incomplete and slow: because American cities’ recent history is of ghettoized squalor rather than gated opulence, many city schools are substandard and suffer from neglect, underfunding, and corruption, and this itself is a turnoff for prospective urban residents.
In effect, the areas that are already rich attract the rich and middle class; this should not surprise anyone. Corruption can be bought away with enough money, and underfunding is not an issue. New York’s suburbs lead the nation in school funding, which requires property taxes, and as a result, the six counties with the highest property taxes in the US are New York City suburbs; ironically, one of the reasons people move back to New York, which according to the ACS data is outgrowing the rest of its metro area, is that its property taxes are lower.
Urban activist Jonathan Kozol even wrote a book blaming discrepancies in school funding on inner-city school underperformance. His statistics, as of the early 2000s, showed about $11,000 per student in funding in New York, and $22,000 in its richest suburbs. Since then, Bloomberg has hiked school funding to nearly $18,000 per student, while the suburbs have not increased much, going up to $24,000 in Great Neck and $26,000 in Manhasset, two districts cited by Kozol for high spending.
Services are always good for the rich. In homogeneous high-income communities, there is no need for private security, private schools, and other excesses typical of the wealthy in poor areas. Instead, high housing prices act as a replacement for gates – and, incidentally restrictive zoning forcing housing prices up is a major component. Thus, public services are of high quality, even in areas that love nothing more than to yell at urban liberals for wasting money on schools.
Although the upper and middle classes are often still afraid to stay in the city with children past age six, this is declining. While the Israeli middle class can skip on the low-income suburbs and instead move to high-income ones, the American middle class can’t move into a city without dealing with poor people. When they do, it creates friction, as always happens when people suddenly have to deal with those who are different – for example, in New York, it involves separate schools, some good and some not, located in the same building.
The defining question for urban consensus governance is how to make sure the friction ends up resolving itself well, with good public services extending to regions that are not rich. Merely requiring integration of services does not solve much; the problem is more systemic. In Hawaii, the state’s status as a single school district led to school underperformance, and, as such conservative writers on urban issues as Michael Lewyn point out, school integration in American cities led the white middle class to escape to segregated suburbs and private schools, which offered a gated education experience. Clearly, changing governance boundaries without social change does not solve social problems much.
Urbanism and Restaurants (Hoisted from Comments)
There’s a brief but fascinating discussion on Market Urbanism between Scott Johnson (who comments here and on many other blogs as EngineerScotty) and Stephen Smith about the difference between formal eating in American suburbia and traditional cities.
My own experience is that, for all the supposed expense of New York, food here is remarkably cheap relative to the quality available. The quality of deli subs, which cost between $3 and $8 depending on size and how upscale the place wants to look, is much higher than the equivalent available on Subway. Similarly, the richer neighborhoods support many full-service supermarket chains, which tend to offer similar fare to Whole Foods but at lower prices. The expensive restaurants remain expensive, but there are plenty of good midscale ethnic restaurants offering comparable prices to and better food than their equivalents in smaller cities.
Part of this is that housing prices are to a large extent an opposing force to many other expenses (especially commuting – housing plus transportation cost as a percentage of income is nearly constant nationwide). Small and shared housing leads to a culture of eating out by itself, which encourages restaurants by itself. Even the non-touristy, but still upscale, parts of the French Riviera have a good restaurant scene, though for much higher prices than New York.
The cost of living in New York, or similar dense urban cores, depends on your lifestyle. If you feel like you must own a car, and believe in the suburban American ideal of nice, large homes, then the cost of living is brutal. The BLS and ACS estimates of New York’s living costs are not too bad – 36% higher than the national average according to the BLS (with rents 57% higher), or 28% higher for rent alone according to the ACS. But the corporate-focused ACCRA index thinks New York’s three largest boroughs range from 57% to 118% more expensive. Conversely, if you’re a student or a young couple or an immigrant or a poor person, your cost of living is much lower, because you don’t need a car.
Good cheap food is available wherever inequality is high within a small area; it means there’s disposable income to spend on food but workers’ wages are low. Singapore, the land of $2 food court lunches, is a good example. The US overall is a high-inequality country, but the suburbs tend to be homogeneous within their class. Within large cities, rich and poor live closer together, and, more importantly, the cost of living for the producers of midscale ethnic food is low (which means nominal wages don’t have to be as high) and so is the cost of living for many non-car-owning young couples and other consumers of midscale ethnic food. In this particular social class, New York is unusually rich.
The suburbs have different income and class dynamics, to say nothing of the fact that density is too low to support niche restaurants. Scott explains:
In much of US culture, there is an implicit expectation that “proper” members of society ought to be capable of hosting formal gatherings in their homes. I’m not discussing friends and family crowding around the kitchen table; I’m talking about formal occasions, including the hosting of business meetings, political events, and other occasions where professional acquaintances (as opposed to relatives and personal friends), are invited to the home, and served in a “professional” manner. (And likewise, many holidays such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, typically involve a feast at the end of the day; one which is by tradition prepared and served at home, and often involves a large number of guests). As a result of this, many US homes, especially the larger ones, have hundreds of square feet nominally dedicated to formal entertaining: our homes have things like “dining rooms” and “living rooms” and the ubiquitous 0.1 bath, all of which exist to permit a semi-public space in which the dirty laundry (literally, in some cases) of family life do not intrude (and likewise, where guests at formal gatherings can be contained, and kept out of the private parts of the home). These things are often redundant with other rooms in the house intended for the family’s own use–kitchen tables, “family rooms”, etc.–and contain redundant sets of furnishings (table and chairs, sofas, lighting). And our homes also come with oversized kitchens where large feasts can be prepared and large quantities of dishes can be cleaned and stored, should it be necessary. This cultural expectation even affects land use; it seems our suburban neighborhoods are designed to accommodate the possibility that on any given night, someone might have 10 or more car-driving guests at their home, all of whom need a place to park.
In many other cultures, the idea of formal entertainment in the home is considered ridiculous (at least unless one is extremely wealthy). If one needs to formally entertain clients or host large gatherings, one charters a restaurant for the purpose. This is especially true for gatherings outside family or social circles; inviting business clients into the home is considered highly inappropriate. (One other cultural difference–many other cultures have far less attachment to “home cooking” than is found in the US, and view professionally-prepared cuisine to be superior to that whipped up in a home kitchen. Of course, in many parts of the US, the local dining scene is limited to fast food, greasy spoon diners, and chain restaurants of dubious quality; in that environment, a home-cooked meal may well be the preferred gastronomic choice). In these cultures, there is no need for individual dwelling units to come equipped with miniature banquet facilities; which permits greater levels of density. And greater levels of density permit a more robust restaurant scene, that can handle the formal entertainment needs of the populace.
Stephen then adds:
That is indeed interesting, but I think that the culture is a result of the anti-density regulators rather than a cause. But that’s interesting what you say about restaurants – I never thought about it that way, but it’s definitely true that when I lived in Romania, only my stepdad’s very close business partners – basically, his close friends – would come into the house. In fact, though our apartment and late house were more than big enough to host people for formal dinners (as opposed to small family dinners), the only time I remember having people over was when my mom hosted an American Thanksgiving! I guess that’s proof that you need to develop the culture over a period of time, and that Europeans don’t just switch to the American way of hosting people when they get bigger apartments/houses.
What do you think – is it primarily an income dynamic, as I believe; an urban design and density dynamic, as Stephen believes; or a cultural question, as Scott believes?
Update: Stephen in the comments links to an article about a study showing that supermarket food is cheaper in New York than in the rest of the US as well. This has been my experience as well. Part of it is more competition, but another part comes from a method alluded to at the end of the article: since there are so many full-service supermarket chains, different stores discount different items at each time (that’s the circular the article mentions) as well as sell different items at slightly below average prices. It’s perfect price discrimination from the supermarkets’ perspective.
Development-Oriented Transit
Occasionally, people faced with very high transit construction costs propose value capture, where some of the increase in land value coming from transit access is directed to the transit agency. Yonah Freemark has just brought up this issue again, in the context of Toronto’s failure to find private investors willing to put money for its extravagant suburban subways in exchange for greater land value.
Despite the list of examples of value capture used to fund transit, the idea remains a poor one. Jarrett Walker gives a list of consequences of value capture, one good (it ties transit success to density) and two bad (it is bad at serving existing density, and at social justice).
In New York, Second Avenue Subway and the 7 Extension are both very expensive, but the 7 Extension is getting funded by value capture whereas to construct Second Avenue Subway, backroom deals by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver were required. If anything, Jarrett’s first bad consequence is understated: politicians prioritize projects they can find private support for, especially reformists, and ignore transit lines that merely have very high ridership potential. At worst, it encourages collusion with developers and therefore corruption.
Jarrett misses one additional problem: nobody expects developers who build near highways to contribute to highway construction costs, and until they do, to tax developments near transit is to give developers an incentive to build near highways. Transit agencies should either reform themselves to become profitable or seek a reliable source of tax subsidy, but they should not tax people who do the right thing and build compact, transit-oriented development.
There’s a common misconception that in Japan and Hong Kong, both famous for the integration of rail construction and development, development is used to subsidize transit. Reality is the other way around: in most cases, Japanese private railroads use development to raise transit ridership, and although the real estate dealings are often higher-margin, the rail transportation is profitable by itself without exception. The Hong Kong MTR, too, is profitable on transportation alone, but keeps engaging in development to raise profit margins and provide patronage for the trains.
Many cities do in fact follow the model of Hong Kong and the private railroads of Japan, but entirely in the public sector. They upzone around transit stations, reduce or eliminate parking minimums, and restrain or avoid expanding auto capacity. This was done intensively in Calgary and Vancouver, which in recent years have been North America’s leaders in both efficient transit construction and transit modal share increase.
Note that this is still to a large extent development-oriented transit, and still creates problems with politicians who overfocus on greenfield TOD, but not to the same extent as value capture. Vancouver is seriously planning a rapid transit line to UBC, the main neglected urban line, just later than it should have. In contrast, New York is sidelining future phases of Second Avenue Sagas entirely; even PlaNYC only incorporates the first two of four phases, which are too far advanced to ignore.
Toronto could not follow the positive example of Vancouver and Calgary; there was too much NIMBYism along the routes proposed. This same problem also plagued the proposal for land value capture. The problem is that Toronto’s bad government is so suburban-focused it really believes in building transit to low-density suburban regions, and at the same time in enhancing auto accessibility (Mayor Rob Ford demagogued about a war on cars in his campaign).
In this sense, land value capture, and in general development-oriented transit, should be viewed as a failure of consensus for good transit, regardless of whether this consensus allows transit to be profitable or to be stably subsidized. At its best, for example in the Vancouver suburbs, development-oriented transit is a political price to be paid for suburban support for high-ridership urban lines. More commonly, as frequently happens with value capture, it sidelines the high-ridership lines completely. And at its worst, as is happening with the 7 extension, it’s a transfer of wealth from the public to private developers in the hopes of future tax revenues.
Pedestrian Observations 
