Category: Urbanism
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?
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.
