Monthly Archives: August 2015

Walkability No Guarantee of Healthy Housing Market

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This graph shows how the midsized cities (excluding Arlington) with Top 10 walkability rankings score in WalletHub’s latest ranking of cities with the healthiest real estate markets. Sad to say: High walkability seems to be correlated with moribund real estate economies. The cities are (from left to right): Jersey City, Newark, Hialeah, Buffalo, Rochester, St. Paul, Cincinnati, Richmond and Madison. (Click for more legible image.)

This graph shows how the midsized cities (excluding Arlington) with Top 10 walkability rankings score in WalletHub’s latest ranking of cities with the healthiest real estate markets. Sad to say: High walkability seems to be correlated with moribund real estate economies. The cities are (from left to right): Jersey City, Newark, Hialeah, Buffalo, Rochester, St. Paul, Cincinnati, Richmond and Madison. (Click for more legible image.)

There is an interesting juxtaposition of news items today. Redfin, the real estate brokerage website, has published a list of the Top 10 most walkable midsized cities in the country. Arlington County (a highly urbanized county) scored third and Richmond scored ninth, based on their Walk Score rankings.

Arlington won kudos for its Ballston-Virginia square neighborhood, where residents can walk to an average of 13 restaurant, bars or coffee shops within five minutes. While the Washington metropolitan area is notorious for its traffic, many Arlington residents live car-free, opting to get around on foot, bike and public transportation.

Richmond earned recognition for the revitalization of neighborhoods surrounding downtown, including Jackson Ward, Shockoe Bottom, Monroe Ward, the riverfront and Manchester. The Fan and Carytown neighborhoods to the west of downtown also stood out for their walkability.

To many urban theorists, walkability is a critical determinant of a community’s livability, ranking close behind the cost of real estate, the quality of schools and the level of taxes in what people take into account when deciding where to live. But it’s no guarantee of prosperity or rising real estate values…. which brings us to the other news item. Continue reading →

Kotkin and the “Assault on Suburbia”

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by Michael Lewyn

A recent article by Joel Kotkin tries to stir up a stew of resentment about alleged “attacks on suburbia”.  Kotkin’s article is in black; my comments to the article are in gray.

COUNTERING PROGRESSIVES’ ASSAULT ON SUBURBIA

BY JOEL KOTKIN – July 10, 2015

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly FOUR IN FIVE HOME BUYERS prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently.

Theoretically, the suburbs should be the dominant politically force in America. Some 44 million Americans live in the core cities of America’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million Americans live in the suburbs. In other words, NEARLY THREE-QUARTERS of metropolitan Americans live in suburbs.

THIS IS BASED ON WENDELL COX’S DEFINITIONS OF CITIES AND SUBURBS, WHICH MIGHT NOT BE YOURS AND MINE.  BY HIS DEFINITION, MOST CORE CITIES (EXCEPT FOR THE MOST DENSE ONES) ARE “SUBURBS.”

Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. DENSITY is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.

DENSITY CAN MEAN MORE SUBURBAN HOUSING, NOT LESS.  FOR EXAMPLE, IF A SUBURB REDUCES ITS MINIMUM LOT SIZE REQUIREMENTS SO THAT YOU CAN BUILD 10 HOMES PER ACRE INSTEAD OF ONE, THAT’S MORE SUBURBAN HOMES.  Continue reading →

The Failure of Preservation

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by Michael Lewyn

In an excellent blog post, Reuben Duarte explained that many big-city zoning disputes involve a conflict of visions: a “preservation camp” favors preserving neighborhood character at all costs, while an “affordability camp” favors construction of new housing in order to make the city more affordable.

Duarte write that the preservation camp’s interests “hover around preventing evictions of tenants in long-held residences, but also includes the topics of traffic (“this neighborhood can’t support more development, because, traffic!”), parking (replace “traffic” with “parking”), and neighborhood character (“building is too tall or too dense!” “Views!”).”

It seems to me that to the extent government uses preservation as a reason to exclude new housing, arguments based on “neighborhood character” fail on their own terms: either because limiting housing supply itself changes neighborhood character, or because it forces less exclusionary places to change their character.

Zoning restrictions designed to limit traffic create the second problem. For example, suppose a city freezes a neighborhood’s housing supply in order to limit traffic and parking. Other things being equal, fewer households mean fewer cars. So at first glance, this policy has no losers. But if a city or region is adding households, those new households have to go somewhere. And if they don’t go to your neighborhood, they go to another neighborhood, adding cars (and thus traffic/parking problems) to that neighborhood. Continue reading →

Not Racist- But Similar to Racism

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by Michael Lewyn

Is zoning racist? After a committee designed to study Seattle’s zoning codes suggested some significant reforms to the city’s code, Mayor Ed Murray said: “In Seattle, we’re also dealing with a pretty horrific history of zoning based on race, and there’s residue of that still in place.” Even if this remark is factually true, it doesn’t mean that today’s zoning is racist: low-density zoning exists in black neighborhoods as well as white ones, and opposition to changing such zoning crosses color lines.

But it seems to me that even though zoning is not consistently or intentionally racist, zoning is similar to racist housing discrimination (or “RHD” for short) in a few ways. Both involve a politically influential dominant class (in one case, whites generally; in the other case, homeowners of all colors) who have the votes to impose their will on the political process. In both situations, the dominators use their political power to exclude someone else from its neighborhood; racists usually seek to exclude blacks, while pro-zoning homeowners usually seek to exclude new residents regardless of color (to the extent that zoning is designed to exclude housing smaller or more compact than the status quo, such as smaller houses or multifamily dwellings).*

Both RHD and low-density zoning do, on balance, exclude blacks more than whites—though of course RHD does so much more consistently. One purpose of zoning is to raise housing prices (or, as courts and homeowners euphemistically say, “values”). And higher housing prices mean higher rents, which means that everyone has to pay more for less. If you don’t have any money, you are obviously going to suffer more from that policy than someone who has plenty of money, since the difference between having a small apartment and sleeping on the street is a bit more significant than the difference between having a 8000-square-foot mansion and a 12,000-square-foot mansion. And since blacks tend to have less money than whites, on balance blacks are going to suffer a little more than whites from these policies, just as they are going to suffer more from any tax imposed without ability to pay (for example, an increase in bus fares).** Continue reading →

Airbnb and Affordable Housing, Part 2

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by Michael Lewyn

A few months ago, I blogged about the impact of Airbnb on rents for traditional month-to-month or year-to-year tenancies. I suggested that this impact was pretty minimal, reasoning as follows: even in a large city such as Los Angeles, Airbnb units are less than 1 percent of all rental units. So even if every single Airbnb unit would (in the absence of Airbnb) otherwise be part of the traditional rental market, Airbnb is unlikely to increase rents in that market.

The comments (and a recent San Francisco Chronicle story) raised an interesting response to my theory: what matters isn’t the percentage of all rental units, but the percentage of all rental vacancies or all new housing units. In the words of the Chronicle story: “where a typical year sees just 2,000 new units added, a few hundred units off the market makes a significant dent.”

But as I thought about the argument, I was less and less persuaded by it. Here’s why: first, the number of vacancies is limited to new housing units. San Francisco has just over 236,000 rental housing units. The units other than the new units are not owned by their current owners or occupants forever: rather, they shift around from occupied to unoccupied as tenants move, and as owner-occupants become landlords or vice versa. So the number of units vacant at any given point in time is a bit higher than the 2000 figure, and the number of units that become vacant at some point over the next year or two will be higher still. Continue reading →

The Democratization of Data

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Map showing green coverage in Tysons. Image credit: UVa Today.

Map showing density of green coverage in Tysons. Image credit: UVa Today.

Andrew Mondschein, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, is studying how the redevelopment of Tysons affects the pedestrian experience. The first step is collecting data. Accordingly, he is dispatching students equipped with sensors, wearable cameras and smartphone apps to monitor temperature, light levels, green cover, noise pollution and carbon monoxide emissions in ever nook and cranny of the what he calls the “archetypal American edge city.”

The goal of Fairfax County planners is to transform the autocentric mix of offices, shopping malls and plate-of-spaghetti road network from the epitome of suburban sprawl into a smart-growth poster of mixed-use development and pedestrian-friendly streets.

tysons_illumination

Map showing intensity of illumination.

“Tysons Corner is on the forefront of transforming suburban places into more urban places and all that entails,” says Mondscheinin an article published in UVa Today. “For city and urban planners, it is exciting, because if we densify suburbs we could reduce driving and emissions, provide more housing and make transit, walking and biking easier and more pleasant – hopefully improving public and environmental health. The Tysons Corner project embodies all of these wonderful goals.” Continue reading →