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).**

RHD and low-density zoning are motivated by the same concern: fear of change in neighborhood character. Homeowners believe that new housing will change neighborhood character—and even if such housing does not have any tangible negative impact, this of course is the case. A neighborhood with ten houses per acre obviously looks and feels different than a neighborhood with one house per acre.

I suspect that racists similarly believe that an influx of blacks into their neighborhood will lead to crime, poor schools, and of course lower property prices—but even if they didn’t believe this, racists might believe that a neighborhood where they have to look at black faces on a regular basis has a different character from one where they don’t. Certainly, other forms of illegal discrimination affect neighborhood character: for example, a neighborhood full of Orthodox Jews has a very different character than an equally affluent neighborhood that does not, in that stores will be closed on the Jewish Sabbath and restaurants will comply with traditional Jewish dietary laws.

More importantly, both RHD and low-density zoning are rational for an individual neighborhood but perhaps irrational for a city, region or nation as a whole. A racist in the pre-Fair Housing era no doubt wanted to live in an all-white neighborhood, and even non-racist homeowners might have rationally favored RHD because they did not want to take a chance that integration would lead to unwelcome change. But the widespread adoption of fair housing legislation suggests that many whites did not welcome the nationwide results of rigid segregation.

Low-density zoning is more clearly rational for an individual neighborhood. After all, what homeowner would not like his home to be worth a little more, and what homeowner really wants his neighborhood to change (even in intangible ways)? But if no one liberalizes their zoning enough to accommodate new residents, rents explode, and a city’s prospective residents are either priced out of the city or forced to live on the streets.

So what? Why should we care about these similarities? It seems to me that if RHD and zoning have similar results, maybe they should be attacked with similar remedies. RHD was not eliminated by allowing neighborhoods to discriminate a tiny bit less than they had discriminated in the past or by requiring only a few neighborhoods to cease discrimination. Instead, Congress and state legislatures responded with a meat ax: the Fair Housing Act generally prohibits housing discrimination, and has only a few narrow exemptions. Maybe state legislatures in high-cost states should use a similar meat ax in addressing zoning.

*As opposed to commercial and industrial enterprises, or houses larger than the neighborhood norm.

**On the other hand, to the extent that higher home prices increase property tax revenue, and property tax revenue means better government services, poorer people (and thus blacks) may get a countervailing benefit from better government services—if the extra revenue goes to services that disproportionately benefit the poor (a very big IF).

(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

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.

Second, it seems to me that a few hundred units will have little effect upon overall vacancy rates, which in turn means that they will have little effect upon rents. A recent report by the Furman Center [pdf] (affiliated with New York University) lists rental vacancy rates of eleven cities (p.8). San Francisco has the lowest vacancy rate (2.5 percent) and the highest rent ($1491). Boston, New York and Los Angeles are in a virtual three-way tie for second lowest vacancy rate (between 3.4 and 3.5 percent). These three cities are numbers 3-5 in rents (p. 10). (Washington is no. 5 in vacancies but no. 2 in rents, perhaps because Washington is a more affluent city).* At the other end of the spectrum, the two cheapest cities, Houston and Dallas, were no. 10 and no. 9 in rental vacancies. In sum, there seems to be a pretty strong correlation between vacancy rates and rental rates. Since the law of supply and demand suggests that a small supply normally leads to high prices for any commodity, I suspect that this correlation indicates a causal relationship.

The Chronicle story states that “at least 350 entire properties listed on Airbnb …appear to be full-time vacation rentals, bolstering claims by activists that the services remove scarce housing from the city’s limited inventory.” So what would San Francisco’s vacancy rate be if these 350 Airbnb units were used for traditional year-to-year rentals instead of shorter tenancies? According to the Furman Center report, there are just over 236,000 rental units in San Francisco (p.40) which means that (assuming the 2.5 percent vacancy rate mentioned above) there are about 5900 rental vacancies. According to the Chronicle story, Airbnb takes 350 rental units off the traditional rental market by turning them into short-term tenancies. So if government compelled those owners to turn their units into year-to-year tenancies, there would perhaps be 6250 rental vacancies. So the rental vacancy rate would be…2.64 percent, still significantly lower than those paragons of affordability New York and Los Angeles. So if the effect of the 350 units upon vacancy rates is that small, it seems to me that their effect upon rents will be that small.

One broader point is what the entire discussion shows about the growth of government regulation of housing. Government uses zoning to artificially constrict the supply of housing (or, in politicianspeak, “protect neighborhoods from overdevelopment”). This in turn causes a housing shortage which leads to higher rents. The higher rents in turn lead to additional government regulation, such as rent control, inclusionary zoning, or (in the case of Airbnb) efforts to prevent property owners from shifting property from the traditional rental market from other markets. In sum, government regulation of housing feeds upon itself.

*The median household income for Washington’s renters was just over $46,000, about $5-6,000 higher than the comparable figures for Boston and New York.

(Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

Much has been written about gentrification and about the specter of poor people being displaced from cities — despite the fact that nearly every central city still has higher poverty rates than most of its suburbs.

But the City Observatory blog has an interesting post about one Atlanta suburb’s attempt to gentrify not through market forces, but by using public money to buy up and destroy an apartment complex dominated by low-income African-Americans.  In other words, the city’s goal isn’t gentrification that might result in displacement — it is displacement as a goal in itself, gentrification or no gentrification.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

by James A. Bacon

The American suburbs built since World War II have many deficiencies, not the least of which are expensive, fiscally unsustainable infrastructure and a proclivity toward traffic congestion. But the greatest drawback of all gets the least attention: the poverty of the public realm. Outside of shopping malls, there really is no public realm in the post-World War II suburbs. Streets are not designed for walking. There are no plazas. Parks are accessibly mainly by automobile. The only gathering places are found indoors — libraries, churches, fitness clubs and the like.

But tastes are changing, and a new generation of real estate developers understands that creating quality public spaces — particularly streets, sidewalks and parks — allows them to charge premium prices for their buildings. The key insight they have grasped is that humans are social creatures. Yes, people like their privacy of their homes, but they also enjoy being around other people. They like to walk. They like to watch other people. They like gathering in groups.

Developers in the Richmond region have gotten the message that there is a large unmet demand for “walkable urbanism,” places that make it easy, even delightful, for people to walk around. Walkability goes deeper than the utilitarian function of allowing people to substitute walk trips for car trips, thus reducing traffic congestion. People like walkability because it facilitates social interaction. Sadly, most efforts to build walkable communities in the Richmond suburbs have been underwhelming.

That’s why I’m paying close attention to the development of Libbie Mill-Midtown in Henrico County. Gumenick Properties may be paying keener attention to the quality of the public spaces they’re building in the 800-acre, $434 million project than has any other suburban developer in the history of the Richmond region. As a sign of how seriously Gumenick takes the public realm, the company has engaged the Project for Public Spaces, a non-profit organization launched by William Whyte, the pioneer who first studied the sociology of small public spaces from a scientific perspective.

Little of what Gumenick is doing is new — it’s just been forgotten. Company spokesman Ed Crews describes the project as “retro.” Libbie Mill-Midtown seeks to create “what the urban environment was a century ago,” before counties outlawed mixed-use zoning and developers designed communities largely around the car.

As I explained in a recent post (see “The Invisible Parking Garage“),  Gumenick is building a pedestrian-friendly community. The mixed-use  project is laid out in a street grid with wide sidewalks. Great attention is paid to defining the pedestrian street space and providing a variety of destinations within easy walking distance of apartments and town homes. Gumenick donated land for construction of a new Henrico County library, and plans call for lots of street-level space for restaurants, shops and local services.

Parking is only one dimension of the challenge. The landscape of the Richmond region is pocked with ugly sediment ponds installed to manage storm water. Occasionally, someone sticks some gazebos by them or turns them into something visually interesting like a man-made wetlands. But Gumenick is investing the resources to transform its storm water pond into the focal point of the entire development.

The rendering above is a conceptual sketch of what that lake might look like. The final design will depend upon the buildings constructed around it. But there will be trails, a fountain, plazas, an amphitheater and places where people can touch the water. One of the key insights learned from the Project for Public Spaces, says Crews, is not to fill in the public space with fixed benches and other objects. Instead, provide portable furniture that people can rearrange to accommodate the size of their small groups.

Shane Finnegan, vice president of construction, says the plaza will be built for flexibility in order to accommodate a wide range of activities. For instance, to accommodate tents for farmer’s markets and other events, the design calls for embedding hold-downs in the pavement. Alternatively, the community might bring in taco trucks and a marimba band. The programmatic element of bringing in events and concerts will be important in Libbie Mill-Midtown, as it is in downtown Richmond, Innsbrook and other areas. The difference is that in Libbie Mill, the physical space will be designed from the beginning with that programmatic element in mind.

“This won’t be built in a day,” cautions Crews. Indeed, the project is expected to take 10 years to complete, depending upon market conditions. There needs to be a critical mass of people living and working in the neighborhood for activity in the public spaces to take off.

Bacon’s bottom line: Gumenick is betting that investing in the public realm will pay off. I’d wager that the company has it right.

(Cross posted from Bacon’s Rebellion.)

 (Cross-posted from planetizen.com)

Some prosperous American cities have a housing supply problem: they have made zoning more and more restrictive over time, thus causing limited housing supply, thus causing escalating housing prices. And because some people fleeing high housing prices move to automobile-dependent suburbs or smaller cities, restrictive urban zoning means more suburbanites with more cars, creating more pollution everywhere.

So one might think that the logical solution is to build more housing in urban areas, especially in the costliest markets. Yet in a recent article, the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Inga Saffron wrote: “Density has to be relative to what already exists … so neighborhoods can step up density gradually.” In other words, don’t build too much stuff because…why? Most of her article seems devoted to the evils of tall buildings.

As far as I can tell, there are three myths underlying Saffron’s article.

Myth 1: “Beware! The high-rises are coming!” Saffron writes that some unnamed “hard-line” density proponents “assume there is only one way to achieve real density. They use density as a rallying cry to justify the construction of more and bigger high-rises, in both America’s thriving cities and its hollowed-out ones.”

This claim is a straw man; I don’t know of anyone who thinks that the “only” way to create more density is high-rises. Even in dense places such as Manhattan or San Francisco, huge increases in density could occur without skyscrapers. For example, San Francisco has many one- and two-story buildings. If most of those buildings were replaced by four-story buildings, San Francisco could be two or three times as dense, and yet still have no high-rises.

If Saffron was really opposed only to tall buildings, she might argue that cities should seek dramatic increases in density and population by allowing more mid-sized buildings. But her suggestion that only “gradual” increases in density are appropriate implies that she would not like this idea either—so I actually don’t understand what Saffron is trying to say. If she was just against high-rises, she’d be for large increases in density that didn’t involve high-rises. But if she is against all significant increases in density, then why is she devoting so much space to attacking high-rises?

Myth 2: “If high-rises don’t solve everything, they don’t solve anything.” Saffron correctly points out that South Florida has plenty of high-rises but is not particularly walkable. But all this shows is that high-rises alone do not create walkability.

To be walkable, a neighborhood must have the “3 Ds”: density, diversity (of land uses) and design (for pedestrians). There are parts of South Florida (most notably Miami Beach’s South Beach) where all these elements exist together.

But most of South Florida has at most one of these elements. In many areas, high-rises are only common within a few blocks of the water—so even dense high-rise blocks are islands of density in a low-density sea. Moreover, these high-rises are often separated by huge patches of parking or greenspace, thus reducing density. For example, go to Google Street View and look at 1340 A1A in Pompano Beach; you see will a few high and mid-rise buildings, but the blank spaces between the high-rises are one reason why the town only has 5080 people per square mile, far below the level generally necessary for good public transit service.

Moreover, Pompano Beach lacks diversity of land uses. The Walkscore of 1340 A1A is 28, indicating that there is almost nothing within walking distance of the high-rises.

Finally, a walkable area must be designed for pedestrians; streets must be narrow, and shops must be in front of the sidewalk rather than being set back behind a football field of parking. Much of South Florida, however, is dominated by multilane, high-speed stroads.

By contrast, a high-rise in a dense area designed around the pedestrian is likely to be pretty walkable. The buildings of Manhattan’s Upper West Side are taller than those of Pompano Beach, yet more people get by without cars than in Pompano Beach. Why? Because the overall density of the neighborhood is much higher. Non-high-rise spaces are used for low-rise buildings rather than for parking. The Upper West Side is also designed for pedestrians as well; buildings are behind sidewalks rather than parking lots, and I suspect that on average streets are narrower than in Florida, although some are still too wide to be truly safe for pedestrians.  Thus, the unwalkability of South Florida is not an argument against high-rises in San Francisco or New York.

In sum, high-rises are not sufficient for walkability. But that doesn’t mean that they are incompatible with walkability. All else being equal, high-rises should add to walkability by adding density—but even if this is the case, building height is only one of several important factors.

Myth #3: “Cities don’t have the infrastructure for more people.” Saffron writes that Hudson Yards (a new development in Midtown) is a failure* because “Midtown’s subway platforms and sidewalks are already oppressively crowded at rush hour.” This argument, even if persuasive, is completely irrelevant to height: new residents might mean more crowded subways whether they live in rowhouses or whether they live in high-rises. So I’m not sure I understand Saffron: is she really just against height, or is she against density?

Let us assume for the sake of argument that Saffron is really against new urban residents, because new people mean more crowded subways and sidewalks. But this argument is essentially a “beggar thy neighbor” argument: if people are excluded from cities because of fears about traffic (pedestrian or otherwise), they will go somewhere else and create traffic. If they move to suburbs, they will buy cars and use those cars to create traffic jams in the suburbs—and in the cities too if they drive to urban jobs.  And when they drive, they will create lots more pollution than if they were crowding the subways and sidewalks. Moreover, if the suburbs they move to are undeveloped, they will require costly, new infrastructure to service them, possibly imposing even higher costs on the public than new city residents.

*I note in passing that since Hudson Yards is so far west that it is (a) not very close to subways and (b) in the least crowded part of midtown Manhattan west of Ninth Avenue, Saffron’s claim, even if true, doesn’t really seem relevant to Hudson Yards.

 (Cross-posted from Planetizen.com)

Short Pump. Photo credit: Henrico Monthly

by James A. Bacon

The Short Pump area of Henrico County, the largest retail concentration in Central Virginia, is a fascinating test case for the proposition that it’s possible for state and local governments to build their way out of traffic gridlock. My verdict: Henrico has managed to beat the odds so far, but future prospects look bleak.

I focused on the transportation challenges of Short Pump in a cover story published this month in Henrico Monthly. A rural crossroads thirty years ago, Short Pump in Western Henrico County has exploded with development. Ranked by traffic counts, the stretch of West Broad between Interstate 64 and Pouncey Tract is the second busiest non-Interstate road in the entire Richmond region. Given the profusion of stop lights, it may be the most congested. With the Short Pump Town Center and other top-of-the-line retail, Short Pump is a location that Richmonders love to hate. In the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”

Henrico County planners and elected officials are acutely aware of the horrendous traffic conditions, and they have responded as suburban governments always have — by laying more asphalt. More than $150 million in state and local dollars have or will be spent between 2011 and 2017 to improve mobility in and around the area. For a while at least, the road projects seemed to be doing the job. After peaking at 69,000 vehicles per day in 2006, traffic counts along West Broad declined to 50,000 vpd by 2012. How much was due to the 2007 recession and how much due to Henrico’s road construction program isn’t clear. But there are indications the decline was only temporary. In 2013, the most recent year for which figures are available, the county spiked back up to 69,000.

Things could get worse. As Smart Growth advocates have long maintained, building or widening roads opens up new acreage for development and enables people to change their driving habits, leading to increased traffic — a phenomenon known as induced demand. Meanwhile, the Board of Supervisors has approved several new development projects that will push development further west toward the Goochland County line, generating even more traffic. That growth comes just as the burst of publicly funded road building is coming to an end. County plans do call for the construction of two roads parallel to West Broad, which could be built largely through developer proffers. The southern route, Three Chopt Road, shows real promise for diverting traffic. But the northern route, Tom Leonard Parkway, would run through Short Pump mall and would encounter expensive natural obstacles; it won’t be built any time soon, and it will be of limited utility if it is.

County officialdom also has awakened to the necessity of shifting land use patterns from the conventional suburban model (low density, segregated land uses, auto-centric design) to walkable urbanism (walkable, mixed-use development that encourages live-work-play). The more people walk to retail or entertainment destinations, the less they’re driving their cars. One major project, West Broad Village, utilized a new zoning construct — Urban Mixed Use — to build an island of walkability. That project has proved to be a commercial success. However, it has done little to curtail traffic congestion. The oasis is just too small, and there are too few destinations for residents to walk to. Cognizant of that shortcoming, county officials are insisting that new development provide pedestrian connectivity to neighboring projects.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that creating islands of walkability won’t bring about the lifestyle changes that need to occur in order to reduce the number of vehicle trips, and the new thinking comes too late to salvage what has been built over the past thirty years. Eventually, after enough time has passed and enough properties have been fully depreciated, developers might tear down and rebuild according to the UMU template. Until then, it’s hard to see the atrocious traffic conditions at Short Pump getting any better, and they may well get worse.