Category Archives: Urban design

What Robert Moses Got Right (and Kansas City Gets Wrong)

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by Michael Lewyn

Robert Moses is most famous (or perhaps infamous) for paving over large chunks of New York City with highways. But he also built and rehabilitated thousands of acres of parks and playgrounds; and in this area his contribution to the city was more unambiguously positive.

Moses believed parks should be used not just for leisurely contemplation but for active recreation; for example, he added eighteen playgrounds to Central Park alone. Moses also commonly added ballfields, tennis courts and other sports-oriented spaces to city parks.

By contrast, Kansas City has many chunks of lawn that include no active uses whatsoever; some of them don’t even include benches to sit on. These grasslands (see here for an example) waste lawn that could be used for housing or commerce, artificially reducing city density and value without creating any compensating value.

(Cross-posted at cnu.org)

How to lead a walking tour

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by Michael Lewyn

On Sunday May 3, I led my first Jane’s Walk. Jane’s Walk (named after Jane Jacobs) is an international movement of walking tours, usually held in the first week of May. In case some of you are thinking of getting involved next year, I am writing to show how you can lead a walk without an enormous amount of research.

I chose to lead a walk in Brookside, my current neighborhood in Kansas City, Missouri, (\where I am finishing up a one-year visitorship at the University of Missouri at Kansas City’s school of law. Since I haven’t lived in Kansas City long enough to be an expert on neighborhood history, I chose to focus on Brookside as an example of a streetcar suburb—that is, a neighborhood, usually built between 1900 and 1930, that is more walkable than postwar suburbia but not quite as dense as urban parts of New York or Chicago. I hoped to show how Brookside differs both from more downtowns and from sprawling suburbs.

I began in the neighborhood’s richest residential blocks; I pointed out one major difference between these blocks and newer suburbs. Brookside has a grid of short, interconnected streets; north-south streets are about 400 feet long, one-third the length of some suburban streets. (East-west streets are somewhat longer). As a result, pedestrians have many different options, and can reach a residential street without having to walk out of their way or spend unnecessary time on a busier street. Continue reading →

What Density-Phobia Gets Wrong

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by Michael Lewyn

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.” Continue reading →

High-Rises and Streetlife

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One common argument against tall residential buildings is that high-rises reduce a neighborhood’s livability by reducing its streetlife. For example, a few months ago I read a blog post claiming that “people who live in the high floors of a high-rise are less likely to leave their homes.” I have lived in elevator buildings for the past couple of years, and can verify from personal experience that high-rise residents leave their homes for the same reasons that homeowners do: to go to work, to get groceries, and to perform all the other little functions that are necessary for a normal life. To be sure, a few people do work at home and get groceries delivered, but the overwhelming majority of people need to leave their homes on a regular basis, whether they live in a single-family house, a small multifamily building, or a high-rise.

Moreover, this argument doesn’t seem to be supported by what I have actually seen with my own eyes. New York City neighborhoods like Times Square and the Upper West Side certainly have plenty of elevator buildings, but these places have far more street life than many low-density suburbs or quiet rowhouse neighborhoods. Why? Because even if a few shut-ins are less likely to go outside than in a low-rise neighborhood, any negative results of this phenomenon are outweighed by the positive effects of density. So many people live, work and play near Times Square that its streets are far busier than those of a less dense rowhouse area such as Washington’s Capitol Hill (or even of higher-density rowhouse areas such as New York’s West Village). By contrast, my current neighborhood in Kansas City is not particularly lively—but my block (dominated by a 10-story building) seems no more lifeless than the street a block away dominated by three-story buildings, or the single-family home blocks west of my building.

In fact, high-rises may sometimes increase street life by increasing the popularity of city life and thereby increasing urban density. The “streetlife” argument against urban high-rises assumes that people who don’t live in high-rises would be happy to live in low-rise apartment buildings. In other words, it assumes that consumer preferences are: (1) highrises, (2) lowrises, and (3) suburbia. But some consumers may prefer (1) highrises, (2) suburbia, (3) lowrises, because they are only willing to live in the city if they can get the amenities that come with (1) for example, doormen to enhance security (which are more common in high-rises than in smaller buildings) or elevators to reduce stress on aging knees and hips. In turn, these consumers are more likely to walk on city streets than if they lived in suburbia, thus increasing urban streetlife. And if they are business owners or executives, they are more likely to place their businesses in the city than if they lived in suburbia, thus causing even more people to walk on city streets. Continue reading →

Do Tall Buildings Attract Rich Foreigners?

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I was discussing Washington, D.C.’s height limits with some acquaintances on Twitter; one of them suggested that allowing taller buildings might turn Washington into a “global city”, which in turn would cause foreigners to surge into Washington and drive up real estate prices (as has arguably been the case in parts of Vancouver and New York).

This argument seems to be to be based on two assumptions that are at best unprovable:

1.  Washington is just attractive enough to attract foreign demand if height limits are lifted. Since I don’t know of any evidence of a surge in foreign investment in the Washington suburbs (which lack height limits) this seems hard to believe.

It could be argued that the blocks near Congress or the White House are so prestigious that they have an attraction that the District of Columbia’s more urban suburbs lack. Even if this was true, it seems to me that (a) this is not true of most of the District, and (b) if it was true, the District’s townhouses and existing stock of mid-rise buildings would be just as attractive to the rich foreigners as high-rises.

2.   Rich foreigners will only invest in urban high-rise condos (as opposed to other types of buildings). This argument could be true in theory, but I don’t see any evidence that this is the case. In fact, at least some low-rise areas are attractive to foreign buyers; for example, 41 percent of trulia.com searches in Los Angeles’s suburban Bel Air district come from foreigners, as opposed to 13 percent of searches in Los Angeles generally. Thus, it seems to me that if a well-off area lacks foreign demand absent high-rises, high-rises will not create such demand.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)

Atlas Sprawled

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Libertarians dream of a laissez-faire capitalist nation, one with minimal government regulation and lots of entrepreneurs. There are many reasons why this goal is difficult to achieve; however, one reason is inherent in capitalism itself. As soon as a business gets large enough to have some spare cash, it might use that spare cash to obtain favors from government.

Of course, I am not the first person to discover this. For example, the plot of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged focuses less on the evils of the welfare state than on the efforts of a well-connected steel company (Orren Boyle’s Associated Steel) to use government to squash competition from Rearden Steel.

Peter Norton’s book Fighting Traffic shows how automobile-oriented street rules are at least partially a result of similar special interest manipulation. In the early 1920s, auto sales suffered because of urban traffic congestion and bad public relations related to the death toll from automobiles running over pedestrians. The auto industry and related groups such as road-builders and tire companies (or as Norton calls these groups, “motordom”) responded in three ways.

First, motordom hijacked the safety issue by blaming the victim. Car companies claimed that pedestrian deaths were the result of something called “jaywalking” (i.e., pedestrians using the streets as they had always used them, rather than waiting for automobile traffic to take its turn). In addition to financing a public relations campaign against jaywalking, motordom encouraged cities to enact anti-jaywalking ordinances.

Second, motordom lobbied government to reconstruct American streets in ways that favored fast car traffic, and even created its own “experts” to lobby city officials. A Los Angeles auto club hired Miller McClintock, a Harvard graduate student, as a consultant. Before being hired by the car lobby, McClintock wrote that widening streets would merely attract more traffic. After going on the motordom payroll, McClintock endorsed wider streets and fining jaywalkers. Car companies then hired McClintock to establish a foundation that taught engineers how to design cities for cars. The motordom-subsidized engineers then went to work in cities throughout the country, creating the sort of streets that infest cities today: wide streets where traffic flows at speeds fatal to pedestrians. Continue reading →

Beauty and Boredom in Kansas City

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Every so often, I walk forty-five minutes to work rather than taking a bus. My walk takes me through Kansas City’s Brookside neighborhood, an area full of distinguished-looking old houses on gridded streets with sidewalks. Sounds great, right?

Yet my walk is missing something: variety. Once I leave the commercial area a couple of blocks from my apartment, I see almost nothing but single-family homes until I get to work. One lesson of my walk is that even if an area is incredibly well-designed, it gets boring without diversity of uses.

(Cross-posted from cnu.org)