News Roundup: July 15, 2013

Guerrilla lanes installed by Reasonably Polite Seattleites, before SDOT removal and replacement.

Why Cyclists Get Hit (Bike Delaware)

In one of the best, most concise posts on bike safety in recent memory, Drew Knox sums up the reasons drivers hit cyclists, often even when the cyclist is very visible. Relating the story of the Invisible Gorilla, he notes that people can easily miss things when they don't expect to see them. “When people devote their attention to a particular area or aspect of their visual world, they tend not to notice unexpected objects, even when those unexpected objects are salient, potentially important, and appear right where they are looking.” The major message here is two-fold: one, that additional attention-draining things like phones (hands-free or not) can further narrow the focus of drivers and make them less likely to notice a bicyclist nearby, and two, that our built environment and the culture of cycling that we build in our cities can increase safety by turning bicycles from unusual, unexpected objects into common, everyday, predictable road users.

Defining Clear Standards for Transit-Oriented Development (Transport Politic)

The ever-thorough Yonah Freemark tackles the subject of how we quantify the various qualities of TOD, looking at a new tool created by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP). Similar to the LEED scoring system, these new TOD standards seek to standardize our evaluation of new developments around transit, and whether they're achieving their goals of increased transit ridership and reduced car use, safe pedestrian and bicycle access, mixture of uses, density, etc. It's a welcome new tool, and Freemark's application of the scoring system to existing proposals seems to provide some valuable feedback on where projects are likely to succeed or fail, and in what ways.

An Effort to Gather the Best New Urban Policy Innovations in One Place (Atlantic Cities)

NYU's Wagner School of Public Service and the Center for an Urban Future have teamed up to put together a list of some of the most promising urban innovations taking place in cities around the world. As one of the report's lead authors notes, many of these urban innovations are multi-faceted, dependent upon coordination between municipal departments and/or non-profits. "The policies pair immigrant assistance with economic development or senior services with zoning and housing policy. What's plain to see is that innovation must happen across silos, it cannot be confined to traditional policy areas or approaches." In related news, Microsoft is joining the smart cities movement in a pretty big way, with the launch of a new initiative called CityNext. It'll be interesting to see what they come up with.

SDOT makes guerrilla-installed protected bike lane permanent (Seattle Bike Blog)

In local news, the "Reasonably Polite Seattleites" are vindicated in their guerrilla installation of some simple pylons, turning a bike lane into a protected bike lane: the city removed them shortly after their installation in April, but just announced that they'd gone back and made the change permanent. This is a model for municipal responsiveness and much more than many cities get. For that I grant them a non-refundable, non-redeemable Good Guy SDOT award. Congrats, guys!

News Roundup: July 8, 2013

Ferry passengers waiting in line on second day of BART strike, photo by Steve Rhodes.

What the BART Strike Means for the Regional Transit Agenda (SPUR)

SPUR, a San Francisco-based non-profit has an expansive post on the implications and lessons learned from the BART strike last week. They also take a moment to bemoan the inevitable harm that the strike will cause to transit's image in the area, which is warranted.Their big four takeaways are: 1) the need for redundancy; 2) the importance of communication in transportation; 3) the benefits of workplace flexibility; and 4) the value and role of complete communities.

More Cogent than I (Crossing the Lines)

Steve Stofka sees a growing awareness about the need for serious passenger rail safety regulation reform, both among urbanists and some broader organizations, like the libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute. I've written about the topic before, and the CEI writers sum up the issue well. Referring to the FRA's apparent protocol for evaluating train safety, they have this to say: 'It now asks, “Does this train fit our rules?” It should ask, “Is this train survivable in a crash?”'

The Missed Opportunity of Underspending During the Recession Will Haunt America for Years (Slate)

Though none of this is a surprise, and many commentators and bloggers have been writing about this for years, Yglesias reflects on our failure to take advantage of the economic recession for infrastructure spending. Back in 2008-2010 we had the opportunity to finance projects at very low interest rates, with lower contract costs, and at a time when putting people to work would have had the most benefit. Now, as the economy recovers and interest rates climb, the need for stimulus spending is less and the cost of projects is more. "So we underinvested when it was cheap, and now that it's possible to spend a bit more, that extra money is going to be eaten up by debt service obligations."

Car Ownership May Be Down in the U.S., But It’s Soaring Globally (Streetsblog)

Streetsblog brings some much-needed international context to the state of car ownership in the US. The New York Times wrote last week about "The End of Car Culture," but in many countries car culture is just beginning, and it's going to have disastrous impacts on the livability and efficiency of cities, as well as the environment. In virtually every developing country and most of the less wealthy developed nations car ownership is increasing at an incredible pace--in the case of China more than doubling in just four years--and millions more cars are built worldwide in each successive year.

The Side Effects of Property Taxes (Planetizen)

In response to a recent article by The Economist, Michael Lewyn tries to temper the pro-property tax message with a few warnings about possible negative effects of relying more heavily upon property taxes, particularly the potential for a more antagonistic environment for development. It's an interesting argument but I disagree with his conclusions, and you can find my comments below the article, as well as a response from Lewyn.

Sunday Dialogue: Cycling in the City (New York Times)

This is just another anti-bike share editorial with responses from readers, but I had to share it because the writer's response is just hilarious--Rabinowitz-esque, even. Complaining about the color scheme of the NYC Citi Bike stations and bicycles, he said: "I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To my eye they are the most disturbing clash of blue and gray since Gettysburg." Hahaha, brilliant!

Cities don't "aspire" to gentrification

In a recent article posted on New Geography, Aaron M. Renn asks what seems to be a fairly straightforward question: "Why Gentrification?" But unlike most writing on the subject, the question isn't why it happens or how to avoid it, but why cities aspire to it. This is the first sentence of his article:

The mostly commonly chosen means, or at least attempted means, of revitalizing central cities that have fallen on hard times is gentrification.

...What!?

This is perhaps the most egregious misunderstanding of the causes of gentrification that I've ever seen. According to this theory of gentrification, a city--any city, in any of its neighborhoods--could simply tear down a bunch of run-down homes or apartments and replace them with luxury towers, spacious retail and restaurant space, and some nice parks, and suddenly have an influx of affluent residents. It completely ignores the role of demand in driving redevelopment and gentrification, or, at best, gets the causal link between the two exactly backward.

In the real world, gentrification isn't the cause of demand, but the result of it. Cities, or specific neighborhoods within cities, become desirable for one reason or another, and eventually you have an increase in the number of people who are interested in living there. As the ratio of interested people to available housing units increases, competition between potential tenants increases and rents go up as a result. It's not a novel idea; it's exactly the same phenomenon seen in a "seller's market" for home sales, which is pretty noncontroversial.

If gentrification were as simple as providing upscale amenities, places like Detroit could just rebuild their cities and wait for the money to flow in. This never happens in practice, of course, because there's very little demand for living in Detroit.

When the demand does exist, as it does in successful, popular cities throughout the country, city leaders may respond in one of three ways. They can:

1. Attempt to reduce the ratio of potential/interested tenants to actual residents by changing zoning to allow for the construction of additional housing, either through infill development or increased building heights;
2. Do nothing, causing newer, more affluent residents to displace existing residents. This can either be due to the willingness of the new residents to pay higher rents, or through the more drastic action of purchasing, gutting, and upgrading existing buildings with fancy kitchens, spa bathtubs, etc.;
3. Attempt to reduce the ratio of potential/interested tenants to actual residents by deliberately changing the neighborhood to make it less desirable to wealthier residents. E.g., by reducing police coverage, not maintaining sidewalks and parks, discouraging businesses from opening in the neighborhood, etc.

Unsanctioned attempt at option #3. From griid.org.

Obviously, no one (sane) is going to be in favor of #3. And while many people claim to want to keep things the same, as in #2, the amount of authoritarian city regulation necessary to make such a desire reality would be completely oppressive. It would require that rents be strictly limited, even when old residents moved out willingly and were replaced by new ones, regardless of their income. And besides just forcing new development out somewhere else--probably to a more auto-dependent, less environmentally and economically efficient location--it would discourage building owners from maintaining any of their holdings beyond the bare legal minimum. I encourage you to think through amount and complexity of city control it would take to actually make this work effectively; to do so here would require another post entirely.

The question of gentrification, as most of us know, is not "why do cities pursue it?" but "how do we maximize its positive aspects and prevent or minimize the negative?" 

After all, contrary to Renn's assertions, cities don't have much incentive to gentrify. It's a terrible situation for the displaced residents--that isn't in question--but it's bad for cities as well. Displaced residents generally don't end up leaving and bothering some other city, they just end up in lower-quality homes, further away from work, school, and the social or medical services they might depend upon. Whatever those needs might be, they don't disappear just because the family moves a few miles away-- they just become less effective, and more costly to deliver. As even middle-income residents get pushed out of the middle of the city, increased prices push out beyond the city core, affecting everyone negatively. Except landowners, of course.

Reducing displacement is the challenge of gentrification, and thus far, no city has solved it in a completely satisfying way. That's not to say that some haven't been more successful than others though: even San Francisco, notorious for its out-of-this-world rents and home prices, is barely half the cost of Palo Alto ($835k vs $1.55m). At seven times the density, SF has done a much better job of facilitating growth than Palo Alto (although still a comparatively poor job), and this is certainly part of the reason it's not doing as poorly. But San Francisco also only grew by 30,000 people between 1950 and 2010; over that same time period Seattle, a considerably smaller city, increased its population by roughly 140,000. (Just for comparison, Palo Alto has increased in population by only about 10,000 in the past fifty years, although it's much smaller.) What Renn ignores, and what complicates the context of these statistics, is that demand differs between each of these cities, and responses will be, or should be, calibrated accordingly.

More expensive than it needs to be. From westinsf.com.

Affordable housing, i.e., income-restricted units, are also an option, but can't be successful in isolation. The greater the difference between the average regional rent and the price-controlled affordable housing rent, the greater the burden of subsidization placed on the city and its residents. It's an invaluable resource to those able to secure an affordable unit, but their construction must be accompanied by vigorous market-rate housing development. Otherwise cities end up with unsustainable levels of housing subsidy for little overall benefit, and a system in which only the very rich and very poor lucky enough to find a subsidized unit are able to live there--those in the middle, unable to meet the income-restriction requirements but also unable to afford market-rate rents, are left out in the cold.

I think avoiding bust-and-boom cycles of residential development is also important to limiting the ill effects of gentrification, but I'm going to save that for a later post. I'm certain there are some creative suggestions out there for possible solutions--keeping in mind that no one answer will completely solve the problem of gentrification--and I invite you to share your own ideas here in comments, on Reddit, or with me via email.

Seattle city council falls short on affordable housing, again

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South Lake Union concept art, from Studio 216.

As a part of the ongoing redevelopment wars going on in the South Lake Union neighorhood, Publicola recently wrote about yet another half-measure approved by the Seattle City Council, this time in regard to the fees developers pay for additional density. Publicola reports:

The city council, meeting as the special committee on South Lake Union, unanimously adopted a compromise incentive zoning plan for South Lake Union (for our extensive previous coverage, start here) this afternoon that would allow developers to build taller, denser buildings in the growing neighborhood in exchange for new, on-site affordable housing or payments into an affordable housing fund.  

The proposal the council committee adopted is most similar to a compromise proposed by council member Mike O'Brien that will require developers to pay $21.68 into an affordable housing and child care fund for every additional square foot of density above what's allowed under existing zoning rules. The proposal would increase the requirement, known as a "fee in lieu" of building affordable housing, annually according to the rate of inflation.

The mayor's proposal called for a fee of just $15.15 per additional square foot of density, a level that appeared much too low, given that "developers who've taken advantage of existing incentive zoning rules in South Lake Union and downtown have universally chosen to pay into the fund instead of building actual affordable housing." If the goal of the program is to incentivize construction of affordable housing, the $15.15 per square foot cost was clearly failing on that measure.

Councilmember Nick Licata proposed that we increase that fee to $96 per square foot, a level that effectively ensures any additional density results not in fees but in affordable, on-site apartments. This proposal was shot down, apparently because it was unrealistic that any developer would be willing to pay such a large amount.

My question is, why is that a problem? If the goal is for private developers to build more affordable housing--and they can build it more cheaply than the city, so it should be--it shouldn't matter if they always opt to build rather than pay the "fee in lieu". Assuming building affordable units in exchange additional building height/density is a profitable proposition for developers, it doesn't matter what the fee in lieu is set at. The fee should be set at a level that is less appealing than providing on-site affordable housing. It probably doesn't have to be $96 per square foot, but $21.68 is probably still far too low. And if developers are opting to not build additional density at all, then the incentive program has much more fundamental flaws than the fee in lieu amount.

This all goes back to the question of how committed the city council and mayor really are to providing affordable housing in Seattle. Last month the council passed up more than $10 million in funds for affordable housing in order to arbitrarily limit building heights in SLU to 160 feet, which will have the dual negative effects of reducing the number of affordable units and limiting the total available supply of housing in a fast-growing and highly desirable neighborhood. Now, working within the framework of those 160 foot heights, the council seems to have compromised with themselves yet again, to the benefit of no one, for weak-hearted incentive zoning rules as well.