Old Urbanist

Common Garage Parking, In Practice

2012-03-09T14:34:00.001-05:00

In the comments to the previous post, Nicolas Derome linked to an interesting residential development outside Toronto (very close to a major planned DPZ project) which appears to have adopted the garage-parking-under-square approach. Google's streetview has covers this development, allowing you to explore it on your own, but in the aerial view below the essential elements are all visible:

The two large, curving ramps in the center square lead down to the garage. Throughout the development, stairways lead from sidewalks directly into the garage area. There is no above-ground garage parking (with all the aesthetic and space-saving benefits which flow from from that), although there are a handful of on-street spaces. Streets are 30 feet from curb to curb in most places, although one street, designated as an emergency access lane, is only 14 feet with no sidewalk.

The design is very much Garden City, resembling a somewhat denser Radburn (or any one of dozens of low-rise American public housing projects) with segregated paths for automobile and pedestrian traffic. In the absence of any use but residential, there is no pretense of urbanism here. Without places to walk to, the advantage gained by stowing the cars underground is not exploited.

Could a similar design be adapted to traditional urbanism? I've shown the example of Bastia, or a larger city such as Mannheim, or Savannah, but in each case the underlying theme is simply moving the built elements closer together, whether in a grid or in a more organic layout:

Would any attempt to integrate garage ramps into a dense urban environment fall victim to "overblown traffic engineering and design codes," as Marc mentions in the earlier comments? It is difficult to imagine anything as modest and and sensitive as the Bastia and Mannheim examples being allowed in the United States, but this Canadian development shows at least that it can be an economically viable design approach.

Dealing with a Downtown Parking Overload

2012-03-02T18:49:00.001-05:00

Austin Contrarian's Chris Bradford, who has closely examined parking in and around Austin's downtown, wrote back in December that sometimes parking regulations don't matter. Even where parking minimums are low or absent, location is central and transit is accessible, developers may still pile on the parking to accommodate high levels of car ownership among affluent tenants and owners or lack of walkable options in a neighborhood that is in the early stages of development.

This creates a challenge for the emergence of pedestrian-centric neighborhoods in formerly underpopulated or undeveloped areas, since the first new residents to arrive in such a location will necessarily be somewhat isolated and dependent on car travel for a wide range of needs, even where transit is adequate. Once ample, cheap and convenient parking is in place, the habit will be difficult to break. Maximum parking standards, or requirements that parking be placed underground or "lined" by other buildings, may not always be feasible and, in any event, address only part of the problem.

What if, instead of reacting to the parking supply provided by developers, cities anticipated demand and acted to provide a reasonable amount of supply in a manner that minimizes the adverse impact of parking structures on an increasingly walkable area? As an example, at right is an image of a city square in Bastia, Corsica. Surrounding the square is urbanism of the hyper-dense Genoese variety (Genoa governed the island for around 400 years), with apartments rising straight up from very narrow streets. The square has been excavated for a major municipal parking lot, the unobtrusive entrance to which is visible in the image. In this case, the city long predated the garage, but why not proceed in the reverse order?

Adaptation of old city squares to host parking is very common throughout Europe, and has made occasional appearances in the United States as well. Savannah's centuries-old Ellis Square, over which a parking structure was built in the 1950s, was recently reconstructed with an underground parking garage. Nashville's Public Square, which I mentioned last week, now has a multi-story garage beneath it topped by an award-winning green roof.

In most cases, these parking facilities are intended to cater to commuters or shoppers, but there is no reason they couldn't serve permanent residents as well. Combined with maximum or underground parking requirements, a city taking this approach could potentially strike a balance between a walkable and dense urbanism with high-quality public spaces and a reasonable opportunity for car storage.

A significant hurdle would be overcoming the tendency for public parking authorities to underprice parking. Taking the approach advocated by Donald Shoup, the purpose of such a garage would not be to guarantee a space to all – an impossibility, if high density is a goal – but to establish a price that leaves at least one space available at all times.

The intended goal would be a car-lite environment in which parking is permitted only to the extent of providing residents the limited option of a parking space that is neither cheap nor perfectly convenient, but which has a minimal effect on an otherwise pedestrian-centric urban environment. Would a plan like this work in practice? Would investors shy away? Would the return on investment from a more intensively built downtown, relieved of the cost burden of expensive parking structures that occupy valuable real estate, outweigh the cost of the garages? There are a lot of questions here, but there must be a better alternative to the parking-heavy urban infill currently appearing in many downtown areas.

A Modest Proposal for Zoning in Tennessee

2012-02-28T15:34:00.001-05:00

Just a week after I wrote about Nashville's new downtown zoning ordinance, news has come in that Tennessee's General Assembly is considering a law that would have a dramatic impact on zoning at the city and county levels. Among proposed changes that would strengthen protections for non-conforming uses is this brief provision:

"No private property shall be rezoned by any local government without the express written consent of the property owner or owners." (S.B. 1272.)

The bill's prospects are uncertain, but it has Nashville's city government worried enough to issue a recent memorandum noting that the law "would essentially prohibit any large or overlay zoning (including a county-wide conprehensive rezoning) unless all property owners agree."

That may be an understatement. The practical difficulties in obtaining written consent from more than a handful of owners would probably put an end to almost all rezonings, not only those of large areas. Selective rezoning would be a certain path to lawsuits and allegations of favoritism and spot zoning. To the extent that any rezoning would be possible, it would be far easier in exurban greenfield sites than in built-up areas.

It would be interesting to see how Tennessee courts would react to this law were is enacted. An Arizona law similarly requiring landowner consent for downzonings was struck down by an Arizona Court of Appeals in 2002, which wrote:

"[T]he [law] affirmatively grants property owners the ability to prevent counties from initiating downzoning of the owners' property ... , thereby effectively delegating to those property owners the downzoning authority that formerly reposed in counties. However, it is a well established theory that a legislature may not delegate its authority to private persons over whom the legislature has no supervision or control." McLoughlin Realty, Inc. v. Pima County (2002).

The court also noted that "a county's planning power is not merely ancillary to its ability to rezone; the two powers are interdependent. Only with the authority to rezone property can a county effectively make the extensive planning determinations required of it." In effect, the zoning power, deprived of the authority to rezone, is no power at all. The legislature can withdraw it altogether, the court held, but it cannot delegate it to private citizens. (Arizona has since adopted a new consent law, § 11-814, which has not yet, as far as I can tell, been challenged in court).

Oddly, the idea of selectively or fully repealing zoning – a perfectly legal course of action – seems not to have gained any traction even in such ostensibly pro-property rights states as Arizona or Tennessee. Arizona's libertarian-supported Proposition 207 focused on declines in property value resulting from rezonings, while avoiding the broader point that it is zoning itself that serves as the greatest suppressant of
both property values and the free use of land.

Why is this alternative (not that I am necessarily advocating it) so infrequently raised by property rights advocates? Do libertarian principles perhaps yield to a strong personal preference for low-density, use-segregated single-family zoning and fears of change? Are restrictive covenants, in spite of the example of Houston, seen as an inadequate stand-in? And why cast the language of these statutes in terms of landowner objections to city rezonings, rather than granting owners the right to obtain rezonings on their own terms?

I'm not sure of the answers to any of these questions, but regardless of the motivation, the approach pursued by Tennessee and Arizona lawmakers threatens to bring about the worst of both worlds: a system that has all the rigidity of Euclidean zoning but none of the adaptability.

Related posts:
Did Zoning Ever Preserve Property Values?

Friday Read: Lewis Mumford on Narrow Streets, Wide Streets, and the Car

2012-02-24T07:30:00.000-05:00

Several months ago, I excerpted a few passages from Jane Jacobs' work addressing street width. As it turns out, one of her great antagonists had even more to say on the topic: not Robert Moses, but Lewis Mumford, whose scornfully-titled rebuttal to The Death and Life of Great American Cities came only a year after the publication of his own magnum opus, The City in History.

Mumford's own views on urbanism didn't fit neatly into any single category of his day, or ours. While he abhorred the industrialized city, he was also a vocal opponent of sprawl; in the heyday of highway building, he singled out the interstates as the destroyers of cities; he wrote admiringly of the medieval town, yet the garden city forms he advocated bore little resemblance to 13th century Bruges or Siena. His concern with congestion was in many ways a relic of the 19th century, yet his opposition to the effects of the car anticipated the 21st. His idealized conception of small town America, meanwhile, foreshadowed the rise of the New Urbanism in the early 1990s.

Still, like Jacobs, Mumford was a perceptive observer of the urban form, and even in a book covering some 5,000 years of urban history, few details eluded him. On the functional benefits of narrow streets, both in northern and southern climates, using what we might today call "original green" techniques:

"Not by accident did the medieval townsman, seeking protection against winter wind, avoid creating such cruel wind tunnels as the broad, straight street. The very narrowness of medieval streets made their outdoor activities more comfortable in winter. But likewise, in the south, the narrow street with broad overhangs protected the pedestrian against both rain and the sun's direct glare." p. 308

In response to Corbusier's derogatory reference to emergent street plans as the product of "donkey paths":

"Those who refer to the winding streets of such a town as mere tracings of the cowpath do not realize that the cow's habit of following contours usually produces a more economical and sensible layout on hilly sites than any inflexible system of straight streets." p. 301

Following a discussion of the relative space allotted for public buildings and streets in L'Enfant's plan for Washington D.C., and observing the "absurd" ratio between the two, he noted:

"The other fact that redeemed L'Enfant's original plan, though it did not add to its beauty, was the filling up of the overload of wide streets with sufficient wheeled traffic to justify their existence: this came in only with the motor car. Though motor traffic has now caught up with the plan, clogging the most extravagant arteries, and hiding the verdure behind a wall of parked cars, Washington has proved a classic testing station for the question of whether a city dedicated wholeheartedly to traffic could sufficiently survive for any other purposes." p. 408

In the case of Washington, it was a test which was cut short when, some years later, the city cancelled the majority of its ambitious plans for a downtown freeway network and instead began the construction of Metro.

Finally, Mumford was one of the few writers of his time to note the "heroic materialist" aesthetic underlying the design of the streets of 19th century American cities:

"Even where overcrowding of the land did not exist – for example in many of the smaller towns of midland America – the broad street or avenue was valued as a symbol of progress: so that it was laid out with an amplitude that bore no functional relation to its present or its potential use. . . ." p. 427

Ultimately, Mumford's keen eye for urban details and his appreciation of the medieval city did not translate into a direct advocacy for anything resembling medieval urban form, which he apparently considered excessively dense. Still, the derided superblock, the setting for dozens of the garden-style housing projects that Mumford advocated, was with its approach toward the car perhaps more sensitively designed than the current historical narrative would have it. Of all Mumford's observations, it is his identification of the car, or rather the prioritization the needs of the car in urban planning decisions, as the greatest long-term threat to the health of the city, that seems to resonate most strongly today.

Related posts:
Jane Jacobs on Narrow Streets

Parking Minimums, Most Zoning Left Out of Nashville's New Downtown Code

2012-02-21T15:18:00.001-05:00

Having lived for three years in Nashville and developed a fondness for the place, I was glad to see the city get some coverage in a recent post by Kaid Benfield on the city's plans for developing a regional transportation network. In addition to its plans for the region, Nashville has revamped its zoning code, adopting in 2010 what is in substance, if not in name, a form-based code for its downtown. The changes are some of the most promising I've seen in any code revision for a major American city, including the repeal of most of use-based zoning limitations and the elimination of all parking minimums within the downtown area. It's a long overdue change for a downtown with a particularly tragic 20th century planning history.

From the BIG Map Blog

An 1860s view, at right, shows a city built densely along the Cumberland River, with the city hall and courthouse placed in the center of a large square (the Public Square). The state capitol building sits on the point of highest elevation, just north of the main commercial area. The grid was less rigorous here than in some cities, with a variation in street widths and an allowance for adaptation which permitted the emergence of alleys and narrow streets along and across blocks, resulting in a fine-grained urban fabric. Even as early as this era, however, a trend toward a city of detached single-family homes is clearly evident. The path of the railway line, meanwhile, anticipates the subsequent blighted industrial belt and inner ring of Interstate 40.

The Public Square circa 1890.

Nashville was one of the first cities to pounce on urban renewal funds following the Housing Act of 1949, acting swiftly to draw up plans for clearing large swathes of the city (clearance work around the capital had been ongoing since the 1930s). The Public Square, seen as decrepit and impeding downtown business retention, was obliterated: the courthouse and town hall were torn down, and the buildings surrounding it razed. Along its margins, a new bridge carried six lanes of traffic into a widened Union Street. An intricate network of alleys was neglected or abandoned, leaving Printer's Alley, a one-block stretch of shared space traditional urbanism, as a reminder of the past. Poor residential neighborhoods surrounding the downtown were cleared en masse and rezoned for industry in a vain attempt to retain the city's manufacturing base.

In the desolate landscape resulting from this policy lies opportunity for Nashville and for other cities in similar situations, since the same land which was cleared has remained largely fallow in the intervening decades, leaving it a blank slate largely unencumbered by NIMBY opposition. The image below shows the area, Sulphur Dell, immediately to the west of the downtown (west is up) where lately a few apartments and townhouses have begin to sprout amid vast areas of surface parking:

The piecemeal development occurring prior to 2010 has not necessarily come together to create a compelling urban environment, as setbacks and parking requirements have combined to result in fragmented development with little sense of spatial enclosure.

The new code explicitly acknowledges these shortcomings, noting that "while residential development has thrived in recent years, the creation and enhancement of urban neighborhoods is still a goal." In line with this, some of the most significant changes in the code include:

The entire elimination of parking minimums, without the imposition of maximums (p. 80; Market Urbanists take note). This shames the much-touted Miami 21 code, which has retained high minimums.
A de facto abolition of Euclidean zoning. Although a use chart is presented in hyper-detailed Euclidean format, virtually all uses, except for heavy industrial and some automotive businesses, are allowed, essentially creating a "general urban" zone along the lines of those found in Paris (p. 57-58).
Abolishing most setback requirements, and instead requiring that buildings occupy at least certain proportions of their street-facing frontage.
The establishment of height limits, with bonuses for incorporating certain features, including LEED certification, open space, certain types of parking (underground or above ground but "lined") and affordable ("workforce") housing.

The first three of these are remarkable achievements in contemporary planning and zoning, representing a reversal of almost 100 years of planning policy and a liberation of basic property rights long held hostage by the city. The height limits – anathema to some, I know – may help cut down on the high-rise land speculation that is rampant and impairs development throughout the downtown (paired with a land value tax, the benefits would be greater still). Even so, there are elements here that either undermine the stated objectives of the code or could be strengthened:

Height bonuses: most are well-intentioned but counterproductive. A bonus for public "open space" reflects a suburban aesthetic and incentivizes the tower-in-the-park form, contrary to the stated goals of the new code. A bonus for certain types of parking would appear to incentivize parking, even if the code does not require it. If there are no parking minimums, why not provide a height bonus for little, or no parking? Or only underground parking? The height bonus program seems to be an abdication of basic planning responsibilities for public space and transportation.
Streets and blocks: to its credit, the code addresses this issue, proposing a handful of new streets to improve connectivity in certain areas. As can be seen in the above image, however, the existing street network is, in places, grossly inadequate, with overly wide blocks and insufficient north-south streets. The urbanization of this area, if it is to be effective, will require the opening of many new streets to bring blocks down to mangeable, pedestrian-friendly dimensions. Existing plans are too tentative. Narrower streets would have an important role to play here.

Despite these drawbacks, Nashville's new code for downtown is a remarkable achievement, and ought to serve as a model for cities like it, or for any cities, for that matter. Expanding it beyond the downtown area would be a major next step, but the selective loosening of regulatory constraints in that one location may encourage a beneficial funneling of real estate investment into long neglected central areas.

Related links:
The Nashville Civic Design Center, which is staffed by some dedicated urbanists, has spent years working on plans for downtown neighborhoods, and has a wealth of articles, photos and plans on its website for those interested.

Greening the DC Zoning Code?

2012-02-13T19:01:00.000-05:00

The newly released draft of Washington DC's zoning code, as reported by Greater Greater Washington, contains promising changes, including reduced parking requirements and the allowance, after a decades-long ban, of homes on alleys. Also new to the code is the proposed "Green Area Ratio," a regulation that is molded on similar laws found in European cities such as Berlin and Malmo. A version of the same idea, the so-called "Green Factor," has already been implemented in Seattle, where it has drawn praise and some criticism.

The basic idea of the GAR is this: in order to address a perceived imbalance of paved/built to green space in urban areas, the zoning code must mandate dedicating a certain proportion of each lot to landscaping or permeable surfaces.

According to its proponents, the GAR will push buildings to better treat stormwater, improve air quality and reduce urban "heat islands." However, the draft regulations do not appear to contain any standards to determine whether landscaping elements actually aid in stormwater retention or treatment. Nor is there information about whether the estimated benefits are large enough to matter regionally or city-wide.

Existing research also raises potential concerns that nobody will monitor the environmental performance of these features once built. George Washington University professor Melissa Keeley, whose work the draft documents cite, sounds a cautionary note about "policy deficits and the lack of adequate outcome monitoring" in her 2011 study of Berlin's green ratio.

Some of the benefits seem questionable, like the statistic that "1,000 square feet of green roof can supply 110 people with oxygen." While this is beneficial, that the carbon monoxide-emitting motor vehicle creates much more pollution in urban areas than the lack of landscaped surface.

Berlin's air quality, which some sources estimate is the cleanest in Europe, largely owes its success to car restriction zones and policies that encourage traveling by foot, bicycle and mass transit. Cities are unlikely to substantially improve air quality without confronting the role of the car.

Additionally, GAR does not appear to distinguish between non-green ground coverage. An asphalt-covered surface parking and a 10-story apartment building with no parking and which covers its entire lot both receive a GAR of zero. On the other hand, it appears that the same apartment building with a 160-car garage but with a green roof could earn a high GAR.

The most notable element of the GAR is, perhaps, what it does not include. Single-family homes receive a special exemption from the proposed regulations because, the hearing report states:

Implementing this standard would impose an undue financial and logistical burden upon homeowners. Properties with one-family dwellings typically maintain higher standards of landscaping and retain more green area.

Imposing expensive mandates on multifamily housing while exempting single-family homes from regulation creates a perverse outcome in which dense, space-efficient housing suffers penalties for being environmentally unfriendly, while low-density homes occupying a small portion of their lot enjoy rewards for "retaining more green area." While the GAR is compatible with high density urbanism, regulations which apply differently to various densities can make some types of housing more expensive, especially small apartment buildings.

The proponents of the New Urbanism, meanwhile, have been working to address stormwater management from an unapologetically pro-urban perspective, recently engaging the EPA in a discussion over existing stormwater standards that may inadvertently penalize density and enourage sprawling development. Laurence Aurbach's article Dense and Beautiful Stormwater Management discusses these issues in depth, suggesting that planners and regulators accept density as a best management practice for stormwater.

Ultimately, certain landscape elements, green roofs and other innovations may have an important role to play in Washington, but residents deserve to learn more about the long-term costs and benefits of such a large scale, mandatory and relatively untested regulation before adopting it as part of the zoning overhaul.

In old cities, the highest art is often maximizing visible greenery while minimizing GAR. That creates streetscapes of intense greenery at low cost. The tools of this approach are not swales and rain gardens, as useful as these may be, but window boxes, hanging pots, climbing vines and clay urns:

Flickr/Ela2007

Eguisheim, Alsace

Taipei, Taiwan.

Flickr/Joanna_Young

Cagliari, Sardinia.

Tuesday Zoning/Takings Litigation Update

2012-02-07T17:32:00.000-05:00

The amount of zoning and takings litigation winding its way through the American judicial system at any given moment is immense, but the first few weeks of the year have yielded some interesting decisions:

Usurping Legislative Power in Virginia. In Virginia, the state Supreme Court has struck down a longstanding arrangement in Albemarle County in which the planning commission, rather than the Board of Zoning Appeals, had been awarding waivers from the zoning code. In the case, brought by an aggrieved landowner who also happens to be a University of Virginia law professor, former magistrate judge and current court reporter for the Virginia Supreme Court, the court applied Dillon's rule in concluding that the state had never expressly authorized local planning boards to override zoning ordinances. Based on the county's reaction, the decision seems to highlight the extent to which local governments are dependent on waivers, variances, zoning modifications and special use permits in administering highly restrictive and inflexible zoning codes (Sinclair v. Cingular).

Anti-student Zoning in Philadelphia. The Yorktown neighborhood of Philadelphia, immediately adjacent to Temple University, prevailed upon the city to create a special Yorktown Overlay in which "student housing" would no longer be permitted in its single-family zones, notwithstanding that these zones generally permit at least at least three unrelated persons to live together in a single residence. Local property owners challenged the overlay after requests to lease to students were denied by the city, alleging that the law deprived them of their property rights under the 5th and 14th amendments. The Zoning Board upheld the overlay on the ground that students "tend to create traffic, parking and noise problems which derogate from the quality of life of families in the neighborhood," and here, the commonwealth court affirms. This is the first time that I am aware of that a city has taken the bold step of barring a certain class of persons, by name, from a neighborhood (at least since the era of racial zoning). In the past, towns and neighborhoods, more circumspect about their motives, have generally tinkered with unrelated persons limits to achieve similar ends with respect to student renters. The owners apparently intend to appeal. (SFH Properties v. Zoning Board of Adjustment of Philadelphia).

Challenging Findings of "Blight." Citing property rights principles, the Texas Supreme Court held that an administrative board's finding that a property was a public nuisance did not entitle the city of Dallas to automatically prevail in a takings action brought by the owner of a home demolished by the city. Sadly, it has not been since 1921's Spann v. City of Dallas, a true property rights encomium, that these same principles have appeared in a zoning context. (Dallas v. Stewart).

Related posts:
Spann v. City of Dallas is not available for a direct link, unfortunately, but I have excerpted portions of it in Ever Since Euclid.

Narrow Streets and NYC: The Problem, or the Solution?

2012-02-04T19:52:00.000-05:00

After an earlier post on the spaces in between blocks, I'd like to circle back to consider one of the enduring oddities of New York's particular history with streets, apartments, and the spaces behind them: that being, that the harder the city tried to banish narrow streets, or, more specifically, narrow spaces between buildings, the more they seemd to proliferate.

I've mentioned before that a primary reason that the New York state legislature mandated streets of no less than 50 feet for the city's 1811 plan, and barred the opening of new streets without its consent, was, according to surveyor John Randel Jr., to "[avoid] the frequent error of laying out short, narrow, and crooked streets, with alleys and courts, endangering extensive conflagrations, confined air, unclean streets, &c."

Randel's remarks indicate that he was not only concerned with streets, but with courtyards and other non-street spaces that happened to be narrow or enclosed. Through a long series of unintended and unforeseen consequences, which I won't repeat here, the result of this focus on avoiding narrow "alleys and courts" was the familiar New York tenement, seen at right in its mid-block "dumbbell" form (source here), in which only one in seven of the rooms opened onto the wide fronting street. The remainder opened onto a tiny airshaft or looked out over a 10-20' gap between tenements. Put another way, 11% of the building perimeter faced the street, another 11% faced the rear court, while 78% faced interior light shafts.

The conspicuous failure of the city's dwellings to match the aspirations of the 1879 Tenement House Act eventually resulted in an abandonment of the dumbbell form and the adoption of much larger and more elaborate apartment plans following the Tenement House Act of 1901. A typical block of "new law" apartments in the Bronx is shown below, governed by a complex set of rules which required courtyards and prescribed minimum widths for these courtyard spaces that ranged from six to 24 feet, with the intent to provide each room with a window opening onto a reasonably large outdoor space:

Again, the city appears to have avoided the opening of any dreaded narrow streets, but if we consider this arrangement of structures closely, it is possible to see how the majority of rooms (around 70%) open onto spaces ranging from 10' to 24' wide – very much within the range Nathan Lewis has defined for his "really narrow streets." (Confirm on Google Earth if you'd like.) The network of courts and air shafts even resembles a street network, but no attempt has been made to use it or adapt it for that purpose.

With the new law tenements, New York had come full circle after nearly a century. The desire to eliminate courts and narrow streets, without an understanding for the reason they had come into being again and again in the traditional cities of the world, had led, unintentionally, to pre-law tenements, old law tenements and at last to the new, where narrow streets, courts and alleys – the very things which the initial 1811 plan had sought to abolish – were effectively re-introduced as the central design feature.

By employing this semi-traditional format of mid-rise apartments on very narrow courts and alleys, and without dedicated parking, but with hypertrophic, automobile-scaled streets, areas built according to "new law" regulations achieved extraordinary densities. Inwood and Washington Heights, built almost entirely along these lines, have an average density of 130,000 per square mile with very few buildings over six stories. To put this in perspective, only two other American cities (as of 1990) in the have even one census tract greater than the average density of these neighborhoods.

The failure to let the alleys serve as public rights-of-way, however, saps the vitality of these places by inflating block dimensions and impairing connectivity, while the omnipresent wide automobile thoroughfares detract from the pedestrian experience, as they do elsewhere in the city. The presence of a few parks is offset by the complete absence of public squares. A traditional city format, by contrast, addresses these shortcomings while permitting the same intensity of development.

The heyday of the new law tenement was brief, lasting only though the 1920s, after which the ascendant tower-in-the-park design philosophy dispensed with urbanism altogether in a single-minded pursuit of open space, light and air. Still, the fact that, despite a century's worth of effort against them, courtyards and narrow ways returned as the solution to New York's early 20th century housing problems serves as one illustration of the enduring functional virtues of narrow streets.

Related post: Blocks of New York

Friday Read: Mixed-Income Housing, Prussian-Style

2012-01-27T19:30:00.007-05:00

In the response to Wednesday's post, commenter Marc mentioned the example of the Mietskaserne (roughly, "tenement"), the mid-rise courtyard apartment blocks that were built in the tens of thousands throughout central Europe during the 19th century. Europe's answer to the tenements of the Lower East Side, the designers of these apartment buildings attempted to accommodate density with a degree of open space and residential with commercial and industrial uses. Notably, they even aspired to integrate the wealthy with the poor and middle-class, all within the same buildings or cluster or buildings.

The Berlin city planner James Hobrecht, who played the role of Pierre L'Enfant, Andrew Haswell Green and Frederick Law Olmsted all rolled into one, had already distinguished himself from his counterparts in Washington and New York by incorporating existing roads into his plan, rather than blotting them out under an orthogonal grid. His approach toward residential development, also, represented a quite different approach from the consensus emerging in mid-19th century London and New York, as this study describes:

"In a 1868 publication Hobrecht reveals his position on housing. He describes a situation in English cities where wealthy inhabitants would live in their villas in West-end districts. They would be completely separated - spatially and socially - from workers. Hobrecht rejects the English model with its strict spatial separation of classes on the scale of districts. Instead he illustrates the Berlin model, in which Mietskasernen play a crucial role. He describes the Mietskaserne as a multi-storey building with the following structure
of dwelling units and respective rent prices:
Floor IV: 3 units à 100 Taler
Floor III: 2 units à 150 Taler
Floor II: 3 units à 200 Taler
Floor I: 1 unit à 500 Taler
Ground floor: 2 units à 200 Taler
Basement or rear building: units à 50 Taler"

The study criticizes this arrangement for potentially exploiting the poor for rent, in substandard accommodations, and under the watchful eyes of the agents of the building owners and the wealthy residents on the étage noble, yet it's not clear, based on the facts given, whether the fourth floor or basement apartments actually paid for themselves (although it's said that the poorest residents often failed to pay their rent altogether). Were the wealthier residents effectively subsidizing those in the basement and fourth floor? Hobrecht's discussion of how he envisioned the residents living together, moreover, sounds like it was excerpted directly from The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Berlin Mietskaserne.

As for the quality of the accommodations, Hobrecht's plans do concede a measure of comfort for the sake of affordability, a tradeoff which appears to reflect a market-based and realistic approach to affordable housing that contrasts with the garden city idealism of English and American planners. Even so, certain pseudo-utilitarian fetishes of the day do make an appearance: an obsession with light and air, for one, excessively wide streets, and a requirement that courtyards be large enough for a fireman's wagon to make a u-turn. Use-based zoning was absent, however, at least initially, with the buildings serving as residences, small-business incubators and manufactories all in one.

The study contrasts the positive and negative views of these apartments as being simultaneously "palaces" and "prisons", but even this dualistic interpretation contrasts with the almost uniformly negative appraisal of the tenements of Manhattan (although the tenants' own views probably differed from those of the most vocal critics). Marc, in his comment, speculates that the design and quality of these dwellings may have played a role in the divergent attitudes of 19th century continental Europeans and Americans toward high-density living. At the very least, this shows one alternative approach to planning, and to an integration of uses and incomes, that still has relevance for today's planners.

City Blocks: The Spaces In Between

2012-01-25T10:49:00.001-05:00

A reader recently emailed me with an interesting question:

"While I have a good sense of the design elements of the narrow street and attached housing for the front, I don't see much of what the back looks like. Is it better to only have windows on one side and have a separate residence with another shared wall, This seems the most effective but do people want sunlight from both sides? Are they using private backyards, an alley, or both together? ... Are there shared courtyards and should these have grass? Isn't that similar to 'green space'.

The story of what has taken place in the spaces between blocks is an unexplored chapter of urban history. Every now and then particular episodes have been covered, with writers generally critiquing the process by which open space in block interiors yielded to new buildings.

Lewis Mumford in The City in History described, with disapproval, the process by which rear yards in medieval cities were filled in with houses and apartments as urbanization intensified in the late middle ages. Haussman has been criticized for permitting landlords to construct "airless and crowded tenements" behind the elegant street facades of new Parisian apartment buildings. Others have lamented Barcelona's failure to maintain the interior of blocks in the Eixample as green space. Even the modest concept of the mid-block laneway house has become a subject of controversy.

The process of block subdivision, infill and densification isn't an aberration, however, but instead represents the basic engine of urbanization in all times and places, at least where the process is not stunted or halted entirely by regulation. It is more noticeable when it occurs in the context of an idealized plan, such as Haussman's for Paris or Cerda's for Barcelona, but the same process is at work in thousands of other less noteworthy cities.

A 1615 drawing of Paris shows the process well: the blocks outside the old city walls, to the left, are thinly lined with rowhouses backing onto ample gardens, while inside the wall, blocks once similar have been carved into much smaller pieces by narrow streets until, at farthest right, interior garden space has almost vanished.

To return to the question that was posed, what is happening to the interior of the blocks during this process? In the unplanned city, the process of subdivision generally proceeded until an optimal ratio was struck between streets and accessible block space. Driving the process is the principle of maximization of land value, where a new street was justifiable only to the extent it increased adjacent land values in excess of the space lost to right of way, bearing in mind that ground floor, street-front rents are almost invariably command rents much higher than those on any other floor.

The result, in almost all cases, was a proliferation of small, or at least narrow blocks, generally not much more than 150 feet wide, and frequently a lot narrower. The image below of Bordeaux shows the end result of this process, with the block partially outlined in yellow, for scale, measuring 115' by 380':

With blocks of this width, few apartments are entirely buried within block interiors, lacking street-facing windows or exits, while light shafts admit sunshine to inward-facing rooms. There are no rear alleys and no yards, yet most apartments do receive natural light from at least two directions. Larger blocks frequently incorporate interior courtyards.

The same pattern can be imitated by planners, as in the case of Taipei, with the outlined block, one of the largest in this neighborhood, measuring only 75' by 200', with a small space left between back-to-back apartments. Streets are generally about 16' wide, with wider arterials at intervals. The amount of street frontage within a five-minute walk of this block must be phenomenal, providing a resident with access to many dozens of businesses steps away from his front door.

Due land value gradients, block size in the unplanned city generally shrinks toward the center. With planned cities, the opposite pattern is often seen, due to a tendency for grid-makers to overscale city blocks at the outset. leaving too much space too far from the street grid (a decision compensated for, in some places, by the introduction of alleys). Mexico City and Salt Lake City were laid out centuries apart, but in both cases a clear transition toward much smaller blocks is evident beyond the original gridiron as the economic picture came into clearer focus and the benefits of narrower blocks became more evident: in Salt Lake City (below right), from 720' to 380' square blocks, and in Mexico City from blocks 270' wide to 120' wide:

The dimensions for the Mexico City blocks closely approach those which Nathan Lewis has proposed in his writings: see How To Make a Pile of Dough with the Traditional City 5: The New New Suburbanism (scroll to the end for diagrams). Blocks of this width can accommodate almost any type of structure with little wasted space: single-family homes with modest yards in Tokyo, rowhouses with small rear courts in Philadelphia, large apartment buildings in Barcelona. Even skyscrapers are entirely possible. At 200' feet and above, however, the width of the narrowest blocks in most American grids, even the largest townhouses struggle to fill up the space.

Ultimately, the question of what is going on between blocks depends in large degree on the size and shape of the blocks themselves, and that is a topic on which the experience of cities from around the world have a lot to teach us.

Related post:
Blocks of New York

Other discussions:
Why are Blocks that Size?
The Variety of American Grids

Friday Read: New York's Early Height Laws

2012-01-20T17:14:00.000-05:00

In the past I've written about the effects of the design of New York's grid plan and particularly its division of blocks into lots of 25' by 100', dimensions that were, in the mid-19th century, incompatible with the construction of well-lit or ventilated apartment buildings. A 2003 paper published by the Cato Journal echoes these observations, but focuses on a less well-remembered aspect of New York's planning history: the building height act of 1885.

Although this law was overshadowed by the Tenement House Act of 1901 and even more so by the Zoning Resolution of 1916, the 1885 act established a precedent on building heights that would persist until the 1961 amendments to the New York zoning code and beyond. The law, simple enough, capped building heights at 70 feet on narrower streets and 80 feet on the wide avenues – limits comparable to those found in European cities of the time – yet, unlike the laws of those cities, the New York ordinance only restricted residential buildings, leaving commercial structures, and hotels, unregulated.

The effects of this selective restriction are described:

"First, economic rents accrued immediately to owners of existing tall residential buildings due to the restriction of potential competition from the new buildings that would not now be built. …

"Second, developers of apartment buildings found themselves unable to compete with commercial-building interests for Manhattan building lots offering appeal either as residential or commercial sites. Prior to 1885, large apartment buildings had been constructed that not only competed with contemporary office buildings in their ground coverage but exceeded them in height. This era now ended. …

"Finally, height restrictions helped prop up the tenement system by inhibiting the development of the tall apartment building as an indirect— and over time a direct—competitor. By preventing the development of tall residential buildings in Manhattan, height restrictions derailed a natural market process that would have lowered rents and increased quality beginning with the middle-class portion of the tenement market."

Although the law did not impose Euclidean zoning on the city, in effect the law zoned all buildings over the height limit as commercial, since these could no longer be converted to residential use. In doing so, it anticipated the explicit zoning by use in the 1916 act.

The law also had long term implications for the arrangement of jobs and residences. The observation that apartment buildings taller and larger than office buildings were beginning to appear in the city makes sense when we consider that office buildings have many more workers, per square foot, than apartment buildings have residents. To fill the new office towers by pedestrian traffic would have required an even greater number of nearby residential towers. With these prohibited, it would fall to mass transit to link the increasingly tall office buildings of lower Manhattan and Midtown with the residents of the six and seven story residential buildings spreading northwards up the island.

The strict height limits of the 1885 law were moderated somewhat in 1897, when New York moved to permit residential buildings of up to 12 stories on all streets. This arrangement quickly gave way, in 1901, to the familiar "1 and 1/2" height formula, which restricted apartment buildings to the width of the adjacent street plus 50 percent. It was this limit which was incorporated into the 1916 zoning resolution for residential areas, and which persisted for the most part until 1961, severely depressing the market for apartment construction in the city – with the exception of the avenues, where the formula yielded buildings of profitable dimensions (the claim of New York's planning department that the 1916 code could have accommodated 55 million seems questionable to say the least).

Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that the city's ultimate remedy for the so-called tenement problem – the form of the tenements and their persistence a direct consequence of city planning decisions dating back to 1811 – was to demolish tenement areas and replace them with high-rise apartments of the sort that the city had barred the private sector from building in the critical years from 1885 to 1930. As New York reexamines its zoning code, will the city pause to consider its 200 years of planning history candidly and critically to see what lessons might be learned?

Related posts:
Blocks of New York
Living Space, Working Space and Centralization
Height Limits: The Forgotten Debates

Friday Read: Affordable Housing, Filtered, not Subsidized

2012-01-13T16:50:00.005-05:00

Despite the enormous amount of attention that has been given to the subject of affordable housing in the recent past, and the wide array of programs and initiatives in response, including low income housing tax credits, inclusionary zoning and voucher programs, to name a few, there's been relatively little formal study made of filtering, the process in which housing gradually declines in relative price, and in rental value, as it ages. To fill this gap, economist Stuart Rosenthal has released a new paper in which he concludes that filtering, more so than many place-based subsidized housing programs, can provide a viable long-term source of low cost housing.

Using data from the American Housing Survey, and examining the income of owners and renters at various points in time, Rosenthal constructed charts showing the change in inflation-adjusted incomes of residents for homes of ages ranging from one to 86 years:

Based on the observed rates of downward filtering, which range from .5 percent per year for owner-occupied housing to 2.5 percent per year for rental housing, Rosenthal concluded that "policy makers should take seriously the market’s ability to generate lower income housing, and especially in the rental sector of the

market." The study noted that differential rates of filtering by city and state also have implications for the efficient apportionment of federal housing money.

An interesting finding was that homes over 50 years old showed an increase in owner or renter income, even though the survivorship effect was controlled for by following individual houses over time. Rosenthal hypothesized that older homes may have intrinsic structural qualities that make them more desirable to buyers.

That hypothesis tracks my own finding which I discussed here, suggesting that the process of filtering, at least for initially high-income older neighborhoods, was a temporary result of rapid suburban dispersal in the 1940-1970 time period, and since that time has been steadily reversed. On the other hand, some persistently disfavored quarters have remained poor throughout the 1940-2000 time period, showing little evidence of further decline or imminent gentrification.

Is filtering, then, partially an artifact of a temporary and unsustainable process of suburbanization, with gentrification representing a reversion to a pattern determined more by centrality of location and quality of housing stock or urban environment rather than size or newness of the home? What that trend holds for the future of market-driven affordable housing is not entirely clear, although dire prognostications of coming suburban slums have appeared repeatedly in recent years.

One could hope that increased demand for existing urban neighborhoods might at least translate into a process of steady upgrading and intensification of urban areas, yet the opposite seems to have occurred in most places, with residents holding fast to exclusionary zoning measures designed to impede new construction or conversion to higher value uses, even to the extent of zoning out larger single family homes. The ultimate antidote to urbanism and densification, zoning, remains strong even nearing its 100th birthday.

Exploring "The Greatest Grid"

2011-12-31T23:04:00.005-05:00

The new exhibit "The Greatest Grid" at the Museum of the City of New York is well worth a visit for anyone with even a passing interest in urban planning or the history of the city. An accompanying exhibit of speculative urban designs, however, provides evidence that the heroic materialist ideal has been slow to loosen its grasp over the minds of some practitioners in the fields of architecture and urban planning.

Simeon DeWitt's 1794 plan for Albany:
large blocks and wide streets.

Before featuring a few of these, though, a few words on the main exhibit. Despite curator Hillary Ballon's evident admiration of New York's grid plan, the exhibit is evenhanded in its presentation, quoting liberally from critics such as Clement Clarke Moore (who famously quipped that the commissioners were "men who would have cut down the seven hills of Rome.")* Not only the early 19th century era, but the entire subsequent century of growth and change is covered. The featured historic maps and photos of the city are beautiful and fascinating.

There are also copies of the plans of other cities of the era, including L'Enfant's plan for Washington D.C. and (later commissioner) Simeon DeWitt's 1794 plan for a northern extension of Albany, which shows the same grid of oversized blocks and uniformly wide streets that would reappear a thousand times in the settlements of the following century. The web of narrow streets and small blocks by the waterfront, a legacy of Dutch administration, was, as in New York, not eradicated, but evidently was not seen as an object of any interest, except as an example of a characteristics to be avoided.

Of particular interest to me were the photos of the shantytown settlements that occupied large parts of Manhattan through the end of the 19th century. One interesting fact from the exhibit: Jacob Riis, the famous social reformer, opposed the eviction of shantytown inhabitants and the demolition of their dwellings, arguing that the self-built homes of the squatters provided accommodations superior to, and more affordable than, the tenements of the Lower East Side.

The partner exhibit, "The Unfinished Grid: Design Speculations for Manhattan", is interesting for somewhat different reasons: not so much for introducing viable design proposals for the city, but for shedding light on the imaginations of contemporarary architects and planners. The proposals on display seem to draw from three basic sources of inspiration:

Heroic Materialism. This term, which I'm borrowing from Nathan Lewis (who in turn borrowed it from Kenneth Clark), describes an aesthetic preference for monumental scale and the image, as much as the reality, of technology and engineering prowess. Nathan dates it to approximately 1780, although it has Baroque antecedents and yet truly came into its own only around 1900, when Western imaginations were already trending toward urban gigantism. It grew in influence in the 1920s and 1930s, with the ideas of Corbusier and other Modernists, and remained the dominant force in theoretical urban thinking at least through the 1960s (the suburban reality on the ground notwithstanding).
"Green" Urbanism. Although this line of thinking was anticipated by the Broadacre City of Frank Lloyd Wright and the garden city movement, the current incarnation emphasizes an integration of natural forms, and especially agriculture, into urban areas, as well as sustainable building practices, without necessarily disparaging density. Still, there is a degree of overlap with heroic materialism: "green" practices often rely on high-tech, rather than traditional technologies, while the tower-in-the-park form advocated by the Modernists, heroic materialist in scale, also reflects garden city influences. Green projects can also be incremental, as below, but share a distinct focus that differentiates them.
Incremental Urbanism. Only two of the eight featured projects reflected this approach, which seeks to make more modest and gradual changes to the urban fabric, observing the city as it stands, reinforcing those qualities already found to be beneficial while addressing perceived shortcomings. It is by far the most "Jacobsian" of the three, but also the least flashy, and least likely to lend itself to dramatic illustrations or other flights of visual fancy.

On to the exhibits:

Heroic Materialism: At left, giant skyscrapers dwarf the Empire State Building in a plan that called for zoning limits to be rescinded for all lots facing on north-south avenues (and presumed that developers would respond with towers obviously inspired by the Emerald City). At right is an architect's idea of some vast megastructure looming over the northern end of Central Park, with father and young son enjoying the park underneath projecting towers.

What about building 40-story towers on landfill sunk into the 50-foot deep waters of the Hudson river? Cruise ships thread channels between buildings.

From a Green Urbanism perspective, why not tear up 71st street and replant it with wheat? At least the streets would be car-free under this proposal, and the view is human-scaled and at street level. More fundamentally, this proposal does recognize that the vast amount of Manhattan given over to wide surface streets represents a greatly under-exploited urban resource.

Tesselated housing in the sky -- they can't be serious, right?

Finally, 6 1/4 Avenue, by Ksestudio, which proposes opening a new 40-foot wide street between and parallel to 6th and 7th Avenues that, according to the designers, "activates the depth of the base of the New York tower by multiplying the public perimeter of the block." Simple and elegant, simultaneously addressing the excessive width of the midtown blocks and the lack of additional north-south routes while greatly adding to the amount of accessible street frontage. Feasible? Maybe, maybe not, but the method is thoughtfully incremental. No flashy graphics were included, just clear and concise figure-ground drawings.

That's all I have for 2011. See you in the new year!

*Stephen Smith has recently covered some other critiques of the plan here.

Downtown is for People

2011-12-30T14:56:00.003-05:00

"It has sometimes been urged that this [low residential density in American cities] is largely the result of the development of the electric street railway in America, but the causal connection is not apparent. . . . It should rather be said that the American penchant for dwelling in cottage homes instead of business blocks after the fashion of Europe is the cause, and the trolley car the effect." -Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century (1899).

"By the end of the [nineteenth] century, if not earlier, downtown was synonomous with the business district virtually everywhere in urban America. ... As well as a new word, "downtown" was, as Webster's noted, an American word. It was virtually unknown in England and other Western European countries. Well into the early twentieth century English travel writers thought it necessary to explain the meaning of "down town" to their readers. ... American reporters and public officials routinely refer to "downtown" in cities all over the world, but the word does not have much meaning outside the United States. For downtown was not only an American word, it was also a uniquely American place." -Robert Fogelson, Downtown, Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (2001).

The "penchant for dwelling in cottage homes":
"Sprawl" circa 1900, Rochester, NY.

As the excerpt from Adna Ferrin Weber's book shows, the study of suburban growth in America goes back much further than 2001's Suburban Nation, 1993's The Geography of Nowhere or 1985's Crabgrass Frontier. A distinctively American pattern of low-density residential expansion in single-family detached homes was starting to be noticed by writers as early as the late 1800s. Nearly 150 years earlier, a perceptive observer might have noted the significant differences between the small towns of Europe and those of North America, differences which portended the dominance of the "cottage home" in the United States, and Canada, in the centuries to come.

As Robert Fogelson points out, however, the existence of a small central district devoted to business and commerce was perceived as normative, rather than as a distinctively American feature. Even today, of the hundreds or thousands of extant books and studies critiquing the form of American cities, the majority focus on suburban sprawl, with fewer specifically addressing downtown areas, much less critically.*

More typically, the 19th century commercial downtown is set up as an object of nostalgic admiration in spite of its generally unimpressive 20th century track record. The reasons for its decline, whether absolute or relative, are not usually attributed to anything inherent in its conception or layout, but in the damaging acts done to it: among them freeway construction, urban renewal, street widening, and a rash of anti-urban regulations ranging from parking minimums to setback requirements. If downtown died, the cause was malpractice based on a faulty diagnosis, not any underlying illness.

Could it have been, though, that downtown was doomed to decline or stagnation from the start, at least in the form envisioned by 19th and early 20th century Americans? The fundamental problem was this: for a large and growing city, continued high-density commercial growth in the center and omnipresent low-density residential growth elsewhere were ultimately incompatible. Incompatible, because low-density growth required rapid outward expansion, and that same expansion carried increasingly large proportions of the urban population beyond a reasonable travel distance from the center, at least before the arrival of the automobile.

The story of downtown, as Fogelson tells it, is of increasingly desperate attempts by downtown merchants to fight the effects of this trend without sacrificing their monopoly on commercial space. It was ultimately a losing battle, however, since the very transportation devices perceived by the commercial interests as great centralizers – the omnibus, the streetcar, and at last the automobile – were perhaps, as Weber observed, only symptoms of an epic decentralization.

Each device, moreover, led inexorably to its successor: the omnibus and railroad carried the wealthy to outlying mansions, whose dispersal created a built-in market for speedier streetcar service; the streetcar suburbs, in turn, with their low-density and segregated uses, created a built-in market for the automobile.

Transportation, in this view, was in the United States** often a lagging indicator of land use changes driven partly by personal preference, partly by increasing wealth, and partly by the sheer growth of urban populations and the arrival of heavy industry. The auto, at last, shattered the monopoly of fixed-route transportation lines and, by connection, the monopoly of downtown itself.

The tendency, at this point, is to fault the automobile for the decline of downtown, as though a different approach to transportation policy in the critical years from 1890-1930 might have altered urban trajectories. But this seems unlikely. Fogelson describes how large and wealthy cities like Detroit and Cleveland did launch major, but ultimately failed, efforts to construct subways in the 1920s. It could be said that Detroit was a city built around the automobile before the automobile existed. Low-density, use-segregated, single-family detached homes on wide streets lent themselves to motorized personal transport much more than mass transit. And once the car had arrived, why not simply move the department store, the supermarket, and even the workplace itself closer to one's residence?

Downtown commercial interests, however, were convinced that downtown's problem was not its form and land use patterns, but in its lack of accessibility to shoppers and commuters. The suburban preference, rightly or wrongly, was taken for granted in most places. Once cars began to proliferate in the 1920s, the response was not, in most cases, to entice suburbanites with visions of urban living, but to either make valiant attempts at mass transit systems or, more often, to turn over large swathes of the downtown to the car. As Norman Garrick and Chris McCahill have shown, this policy sometimes (as in the case of Hartford) resulted in an absolute decline in downtown jobs, indirectly assisting the ongoing decentralization of business.

Jane Jacobs knew better. In the early days of urban renewal, and only two years after the passage of the Highway Act of 1956, she proclaimed in Fortune magazine that "Downtown is for People," by which she meant not only commuters and shoppers, but residents as well. For decades her advice went unheeded, but it's still one of the best rallying cries out there for rethinking the American downtown.

*For just a small sampling, see Sprawl: A Compact History; Streetcar Suburbs; Crabgrass Frontier; Bourgeois Utopias; Suburban Nation; Building Suburbia; Geography of Nowhere. Books focusing on downtown are much rarer: Fogelson's work and Alison Isenberg's Downtown America are the only general, book-length treatments I'm aware of, setting aside Death and Life, but if anyone knows of others I'd be glad to learn.

**Kenneth Jackson in Crabgrass Frontier describes how streetcars were generally much slower to catch on, and ridership lower, in European and Japanese cities, even though these were denser than the great majority of American cities.

Roosevelt Island and Insular Urbanism

2011-12-22T12:33:00.005-05:00

Stephen Smith and Cap'n Transit have been discussing the recent news that Cornell University-Technion-Israel Institute of Technology's graduate school of applied sciences will be constructed on New York City's Roosevelt Island, a 147-acre sliver of land set squarely in the middle of the East River.

Although Stephen's article questions the wisdom of subsidizing physical expansion of the technology sector in poor and middle-class neighborhoods, both he and the Cap'n also critique the proposed design of the new campus (below), which Stephen has called "quasi-Corbusian:"

The proposed plan, from the Cornell website.

Citing Nathan Lewis, Cap'n instead suggests a traditionally urban form incorporating "really narrow streets" for the new campus. As it turns out, there are abundant examples of traditional urbanism on small or narrow islands that might serve as models, as pre-industrial cities often formed on or around mid-river islands for reasons of security or ease of transportation.

Here for instance is Paris' Île Saint-Louis, a 27-acre island only slightly narrower than Roosevelt Island. Although no high rises are present, population density here is approximately 60,000 per square mile, with room to spare for modest but well-defined park space and a river promenade no more than one minute's walk away for any resident.

This is Chioggia, a canal town on the southern end of the Venetian lagoon which, although charming in its own right, is completely overshadowed by its famous northern neighbor. I visited this town several years ago, and in spite of the extremely high ground coverage of buildings, there was no sense of claustrophobia. The need for park space is reduced when the waterfront is so readily accessible.

Rhoda Island, adjoining central Cairo, has an evident early or mid-20th century plan in the garden city manner, with relatively wide streets on a modified grid. Still, as virtually all buildings are mid-rise apartments, population density is very high. The Nile is no more than 500 feet away from any building.

For contrast, scroll back up to the proposed campus and compare the arrangements of space, the density of the built form, and the networks for pedestrian circulation. Although the site claims that the primary building will be "the largest net-zero energy building in the eastern United States," there is nothing particularly green in underusing high-value urban land adjacent to mass transit.

The Cornell plan, rather than being a departure from current planning practice on the island, actually continues an ongoing trend away from more traditional forms. The history of post-1950 urban development on Roosevelt Island is a interesting story in itself (for more see here and here), but at least at the outset, in the late 1960s and 1970s, planners conceived of a car-free haven densely built up with apartments. In spite of rather dismal architecture, the result (at right) was strikingly urban, and moreover achieved a sense of place through 1) keeping the street fairly narrow; 2) curving the street, creating visual enclosure; 3) slightly varying the angle at which buildings face the street to create gentle variations in right-of-way width; and 4) incorporating traditional city elements such as the covered arcade, at right. The result, in spite of the architecture, is quite good, and it is probably no coincidence that the wikipedia page for the island features this very same perspective.

More recent developments have abandoned this approach, however. Monolithic new apartment buildings to the south are placed in the middle of broad expanses of grass lawn in an approach far more reminiscent of 1960s tower-in-the-park urbanism than is the case for the older buildings to the north. Rather than defining the street, these apartments are objects floating loosely in space, unrelated to each other or to the topography of the island. An aerial view shows the extremely low footprint of these buildings – an extravagant use of land even by the standards of 1960s public housing – and their lack of engagement with the waterfront across the street. Further, does this plan leave any room for future infill or expansion? Most unbuilt land appears spoken for as roadway or dedicated park space.

If, on the other hand, builders and planners wish to provide a traditional urban environment, there are a multitude of successful examples waiting to serve as inspiration. If not on a narrow island, with mass transit access, adjacent to Manhattan, then where?

Friday Read: Allan Jacobs on Urban Design

2011-12-16T07:00:00.023-05:00

Allan Jacobs' Great Streets is an urbanist classic, combining a planner's eye for the details of the urban form with an appreciation for the aesthetics of traditional urbanism. The influence of the book is apparent in many of the posts I've authored since this blog began one year ago. Rather than excerpting from that book, however, today's post features an earlier essay by Jacobs and Donald Appleyard, Toward an Urban Design Manifesto, which in the early 1980s laid out the authors' attempt at formulating basic principles for what they termed a "livable urban environment."

The underlying idea is that of moving away from the typically American notion of dense urbanism, in the form of a high-rise downtown, as the exclusive realm of business and commerce, and instead considering ways to construct a dense urban environment that is appealing as a place to live, rather than simply to work or to shop. The late 19th and early 20th century American city, as impressive as its downtown appears to us in old drawings and photos today, utterly failed at this task for the most part. In spite of notable successes in New York and Boston, cities which had traditions of dense residential living predating the industrial revolution, most places failed to offer a compelling vision for apartment or very high-density single family living to middle class families.

The principles the authors set out thirty years ago lay the foundation for thinking about what conditions are required for a sound urban environment:

"There are five physical characteristics that must be present if there is to be a positive response to the goals and values we believe are central to urban life. ... All five must be present, not just one or two. There are other physical characteristics that are important, but these five are essential: livable streets and neighborhoods; some minimum density of residential development as well as land use; an integration of activities -- living, working, shopping -- in some reasonable proximity to each other; a manmade environment that defines public space (as opposed to buildings that, for the most part, sit in space); and many, many separate buildings with complex arrangements and relationships."

Still, the authors warn, "the quest for livability, if pursued obsessively, can destroy the urban qualities we seek to achieve." Excessive street width in the name of safety and sunlight; excessive green space in the name of health and recreation; excessive setbacks for noise and privacy; all these, the authors note, can undermine the density and enclosure essential to maintaining an environment that is both dense and appealing. A minimum density, the authors surmised, was 15 units per acre, a figure squarely in the middle of the range Jane Jacobs derisively termed a "semisuburb," (Death and Life, p. 273), though in the prologue Jacobs suggests that that figure ought to have been set higher.

These points may seem obvious or elementary from today's standpoint, but the observation that cities fundamentally must work to provide an appealing environment for residential living remains a primary challenge for American cities today.

We Are the 25%: Looking at Street Area Percentages and Surface Parking

2011-12-12T14:38:00.009-05:00

Several months ago I posted a chart in which I calculated the proportion of land given over to buildable space, right-of-ways and park space for each of 22 cities, or city neighborhoods. In response, one commenter suggested that I perform the same exercise with off-street parking included as a separate category. Although the work of Chris McCahill, which I featured last week, does just this for a number of cities, another commenter directed me to this thread at Skyscraper Page, where a number of people have mapped surface parking lots for several American cities. I'd like to feature three of those here (which I've further edited to show parking structures and park space), while adding one of my own. No guarantee of perfect accuracy is given. Red shows surface parking, yellow shows above-ground parking garages, and green shows park space:

Original work: photoLith

Houston, TX

Surface parking: 21.3%

Garage parking: 3.7%

Street area (including sidewalks): 39.7%

Total area for rights-of-way plus off-street parking: 64.7%

Park space: 2.6% (1.1% exluding Discovery Green)

Original work: photoLith

Little Rock, AR

Surface parking: 26.5%

Garage parking: 2.7%

Street area (including sidewalks): 32.0%

Total area for rights-of-way plus off-street parking: 61.2%

Park space: 0.0%

Milwaukee, WI

Surface parking: 11.5%

Garage parking: 3.8%

Street area (including sidewalks): 38.8%

Total area for rights-of-way plus off-street parking: 54.1%

Park space: 1.5%

Original work: Cirrus

Washington, DC

Surface parking: 1.1%*

Garage parking: 0.0%

Street area (including sidewalks): 43.3%

Total area for rights-of-way plus off-street parking: 44.4%

Park space: 2.53% (5.00% including Ellipse)

*Much of this is the large lot to the east scheduled for redevelopment as CityCenter

Although these numbers are interesting enough on their own, I bring them up to emphasize the importance of the street grid in determining the balance of buildable to non-buildable land. Even the difference in unbuilt area between the downtowns most dominated by surface lots, and those most built out, as is the case for Houston and Washington, is no greater than the difference between Washington and the European cities with the most generous street allotments – the Paris of Haussmann, with its broad boulevards, imperial Vienna of the 19th century, and Barcelona's Eixample, all of which devote around 25 percent of their area to streets.

It is difficult to imagine a justification for much exceeding the 25 percent figure. Many cities of similar size and far larger than those just mentioned make do with less, including Tokyo, Mexico City and Buenos Aires, while accommodating extensive mass transit systems. The traditional city of narrow streets and small squares, typified by towns of medieval plan, find ten or fifteen percent perfectly adequate.

In addition to their transportation function, streets can also be understood as a means of extracting value from underserved parcels of land. The street removes a certain amount of property from tax rolls in exchange for plugging the adjacent land in to the citywide transportation network. Access to the network, in turn, increases the value of the land for almost all uses. For the process to satisfy a cost/benefit analysis, the value added should exceed that lost to the area of the streets plus the cost of maintenance. (This implies rapidly diminishing returns for increasingly wide streets, and helps explain why, in the absence of mandated minimum widths, most streets are made to be fairly narrow.) For many of the gridded American cities of the 19th century, as I've written about before, planners failed to meet these objectives, although these decisions have long since been overshadowed by those of their 20th century successors.

30-foot street in Montreal (Flickr/dumbo65).

The result, most notably in Portland, which devoted over 40 percent of its initial grid to streets, was simply to reduce the maintenance budget to zero, and to leave the streets a sea of mud. This in turn resulted in a street network that was unsuited to any form of transportation, but particularly to walking (the late 19th century American city, despite the claims of some, was not a pedestrian's paradise). For Portland to have attained the 25 percent figure would have required streets of 30 feet rather than 60. At that average width, it is likelier that paving would have been within the financial reach of the city of that era.

Still, it is difficult to conceive of a more wasteful pattern than modern Houston's, where redundant wide streets, and their associated infrastructure, are paved and maintained to serve dozens of vacant parcels. Each new office tower, meanwhile, spawns hundreds of acres of tract housing on the city's periphery, as lots a few blocks away sit vacant on high-rise speculation.

The one blessing in disguise of the form of a city like Houston or Little Rock is that it can allow planners a relatively free hand to reshape the existing street network. Houston has in fact taken some halting steps in favor of more pedestrian-friendly streets, and planners like Christof Spieler have in mind truly urban visions for building out the remainder of the downtown. It would be disappointing to say the least if these downtowns are eventually rebuilt and revitalized without rethinking the street plan itself.

A Defense of the Grid

Density on the Ground

Friday Read: Parking – In the Long Run

2011-12-09T12:18:00.002-05:00

One of the things I most enjoy writing about on this blog are the nuts and bolts of built urbanism: square footage counts, ratios of building coverage to open spaces, measures of urban connectivity and so forth. Thankfully, I've discovered that there's a community out there that enjoys reading and learning about these subjects too. Although it's not glamorous work, often involving careful study of aerial maps, census figures and property records, it is an essential element in understanding the successes and failures of urban environments. In comparison to some other trendier areas of urban study, it can get short shrift.

UConn's Chris McCahill enjoys researching many of the same things. In a recent study which has been picked up at The Atlantic Cities and at Felix Salmon's blog, among other places (unfortunately not freely available on the web), McCahill and Professor Norman Garrick examined three New England cities – New Haven, Hartford and Cambridge – and attempted to track the change in downtown parking over a period of 50 years, using historic aerial photos as a guide. The results of this meticulous study were contrasted with the change in population and employment in these same cities, with an eye toward testing the hypothesis that increased access to parking is correlated with commercial and residential real estate development.

Courtesy of Chris McCahill

The results are shown at right. New Haven and Hartford, whose post-1950 urban renewal efforts were aggressive even by the standards of the day, lost both jobs and residents as parking increased. Cambridge, on the other hand, which in 1981 lowered minimum parking requirements while imposing maximums, stemmed a population decline while substantially increasing the number of in-city jobs, all without making drastic interventions to the urban fabric.

A reasonable critique of the data might be to suggest that parking is only a consequence, rather than a driver, of urban prosperity. As the industrial fortunes of New Haven and Hartford withered, built form may have given way to so-called "taxpayers," vacant lots held to reduce property tax burdens pending an upswing in the market for commercial real estate.

McCahill and Garrick's findings, however, suggest that increased parking in New Haven and Hartford was the result of conscious policy decisions. Mayor Biagio DiLieto in the early 1980s boasted that New Haven had more parking than any other Connecticut city, according to the study, affirming a commitment to “maintaining and improving parking facilities for workers, shoppers, and visitors in the downtown area.” Anyone who is familiar with Douglas Rae's City: Urbanism and Its End, can attest to how strongly the New Haven planners of the era (particularly during the mayorship of Richard Lee) believed the success of downtown to hinge on its accessibility to suburban motorists. Not only surface parking but garage parking as well surged during this era.

A particularly surprising finding of the study is that despite their planners' focus on downtown as a setting for office buildings, rather than residences, New Haven and Hartford both suffered declines in employment from 1960 to 2000. This occurred in spite of the fact that, in the mid-1950s, Hartford was still a largely mid-rise city built along a 300-year-old, semi-emergent street network, while the city of today is notable for a dramatic skyline of tall office buildings. Again, the aerial view may hold a clue: a comparison of views from the 1950s and the 1990s provided by McCahill (see slides 6-9) shows that tall buildings at Hartford's core may have at best only compensated for the loss of hundreds of other low and mid-rise structures to renewal schemes. Cambridge, on the other hand, which has a modest skyline and few tall buildings, has dramatically increased in-city employment during the past 30 years, even as its resident population grew.

Additionally, the study shows that per capita car ownership has increased faster in Cambridge than New Haven and Hartford, yet car use is less. These figures are in large part due to much greater growth in incomes in Cambridge than in Hartford and New Haven in combination with an increased focus on non-automobile modes of transportation. Has the focus on building spaces for working and living, rather than parking, and walking and biking, rather than driving, also resulted in an urban environment more appealing to middle-class and wealthy residents?

As the authors summarize their findings:

"This study reveals a need to reassess the impacts of the demand-driven approaches to parking provision that are conventional in most U.S. cities, including New Haven and Hartford. A more balanced approach to parking provision, like the approach taken in Cambridge, would address real parking demands in a way that acknowledges that excess parking contributes to increases in automobile use, which in turn exacerbate parking issues."

The damaging effects of minimum parking requirements have been widely reported, but this is one of the first studies to take a very long term look at their effects in the context of trends in other urban activities.

Living Space, Working Space and Centralization

2011-12-02T07:00:00.005-05:00

Reading Alon Levy's recent post on transit and employment centralization started me thinking about the urban consumption of space, at home and at work. Does an office district, during working hours, contain an even denser concentration of people than its tall buildings might outwardly suggest? And what implications might this have for commutes, and for proximity of homes to workplaces?

Census figures tell us that Manhattan, which Alon discusses, has 2.30 million jobs and 1.59 million residents. What we want to know here, however, is how much space each person occupies, on average, both at home and at work. This requires determining the total amount of residential and non-residential square footage in Manhattan.

For commercial space, the task is easy, as the New York Property Tax Report catalogs it by gross square footage, showing a total of 591.6 million square feet of office and other non- residential space. Residential property poses more of a challenge, since the Report only lists the number of housing units, rather than the total square footage of residential space. What we do know, from 2010 Census Data, ACS information and real estate records, is 1) the total number of housing units in Manhattan; 2) the distribution of these housing units among studios, 1 BRs, 2BRs, etc., and 3) the average square footage of each type of unit sold over the past several years.

In combination, these three factors permit a rough estimate of the total square footage of residential space on Manhattan: 975.3 million square feet (representing the average apartment of 1151 square feet multiplied by 847,090 total residential units). Adding so-called "non-yield" space – including a building's hallways, lobbies and utility rooms, estimated at between 15 and 30 percent of an apartment building in colder climates – results in a gross residential area of 1.258 billion square feet. To find the square footage per person, all that remains is to adjust for vacant offices and apartments, again using census data:

These figures show the gross square footage per person, per building, with non-yield space included in the equation. Private apartment space per person would be considerably less – 553 square feet. (For anyone curious, the numbers also permit calculating an approximate floor area ratio for all of Manhattan: 1,850 m.s.f./640 m.s.f = 2.89 FAR).

What significance do these numbers have for the distribution of offices and residences in a city? They do suggest the difficulty of achieving high proportions of commutes by foot or bike in a city dominated by a compact central business district of office towers, as a single tower will require more than triple its total square footage (in fact, more than that, as population figures include non-working age persons) in residential space to achieve a 1:1 match of living to working space on a per person basis. Yet, even in Manhattan, residential space is overwhelmingly mid-rise. The very dense Upper East Side can supply only a fraction of the workers, within walking or biking distance, needed to fill the office buildings of Midtown. At its best, it will be a transit city; far more often, in the United States, it will be a car-dependent city.

As urban living becomes increasingly desirable, however, this balance can shift. Conversions of Class B or C office buildings into condos can swiftly change the resident/employment ratio, as has happened in lower Manhattan. Could the same ever happen in Midtown? A little employment decentralization, after all, might not be such a terrible thing.

Street Narrowing, circa 1200 A.D.

2011-11-28T07:00:00.011-05:00

Back in April, I ventured a few ideas on the topic of street narrowing, a remedy I'd suggested for certain overscaled urban streets. Although modern examples of narrowing (here meaning physically building into the right-of-way) are quite rare, the process was commonplace several hundred years ago, according to this account of medieval Bologna, which apparently was more accommodating of student housing needs than many 21st century American cities:

"....every street is lined with arcades, or portici. The original ones date from the 12th century, when the comune, faced with a housing shortage compounded by the presence of 2,000 university students, allowed rooms to be built on to existing buildings over the streets. Over time, the Bolognesi became attached to them and the shelter they provided from the weather."

Arcades on a Bologna arterial street.

This solution was elegant, essentially representing a sale of air rights over the existing street. Residential space was in the aggregate expanded considerably, while pedestrians gained a network of covered passageways providing a shield from bad weather. Remarkably, in the centuries since, it appears that few if any stores have expanded to fill the covered space beneath the arcades.

This concept was not limited to Bologna, as many other European cities underwent a similar transformation around the same time. Even the remains of Roman cities show the same process at work.

Could this process be applicable to cities of the present day, as one of several potential approaches to right-of-way narrowing? Although many of New York's office buildings constructed since the adoption of the 1961 zoning resolution did adopt arcade-like features in satisfaction of density bonus incentives, these were never constucted over sidewalks, and sometimes were separated from the walk entirely, rendering them useless as a source of shelter for those on foot. One can imagine a very different streetscape in the process of emerging had the code rewrite, instead of encouraging setbacks and plazas, offered for sale sidewalk air rights on the same terms as Bologna of the 1100s.

Related posts:
Are Narrow Streets a Realistic Objective?
Thinking Small: The Narrow Streets Movement
Josh Mahar's great article on street narrowing at CityTank: Reversing Haussman

Jane Jacobs on Narrow Streets

2011-11-22T16:03:00.000-05:00

It's the rare observation about urbanism which one won't find already made, or anticipated, somewhere in the writings of Jane Jacobs. It's no surprise, therefore, to find that Jacobs was also one of the first writers to make a case for the functional benefits of narrow streets.* Like many of her arguments, this one was based on first-person observation of real-life examples:

"Narrow streets, if they are not too narrow (like many of Boston's) and are not choked with cars, can also cheer a walker by giving him a continual choice of this side of the street or that, and twice as much to see. The differences are something anyone can try out for himself by walking a selection of downtown streets.

This does not mean all downtown streets should be narrow and short. Variety is wanted in this respect too. But it does mean that narrow streets or reasonably wide alleys have unique value that revitalizers of downtown ought to use to the hilt instead of wasting. It also means that if pedestrian and automobile traffic is separated out on different streets, planners would do better to choose the narrower streets for pedestrians, rather than the most wide and impressive. Where monotonously wide and long streets are turned over to exclusive pedestrian use, they are going to be a problem."

-Downtown is for People (1958)

I'm not sure if we ever learned which Boston streets Jacobs considered too narrow (surely not Acorn Street!), or if that was an opinion she later changed, but the arguments stand nonetheless. One concrete example is also provided:

Maiden Lane/vision63

"The real potential is in the street, and there are far more opportunities for exploiting it than are realized. Consider, for example, Maiden Lane, an odd two-block-long, narrow, back-door alley in San Francisco. Starting with nothing more remarkable than the dirty, neglected back sides of department stores and nondescript buildings, a group of merchants made this alley into one of the finest shopping streets in America. Maiden Lane has trees along its sidewalks, redwood benches to invite the sightseer or window shopper or buyer to linger, sidewalks of colored paving, sidewalk umbrellas when the sun gets hot. All the merchants do things differently: some put out tables with their wares, some hang out window boxes and grow vines. All the buildings, old and new, look individual; the most celebrated is an expanse of tan brick with a curved doorway, by architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The pedestrian's welfare is supreme; during the rush of the day, he has the street. Maiden Lane is an oasis with an irresistible sense of intimacy, cheerfulness, and spontaneity. It is one of San Francisco's most powerful downtown magnets.

Downtown can't be remade into a bunch of Maiden Lanes; and it would be insufferably quaint if it were. But the potential illustrated can be realized by any city and in its own particular way."

-Downtown is for People

Now, Maiden Lane is an example of the "old urbanizing" of the 19th century speculative grid: the process in which large grid blocks along wide streets were subdivided by lanes of more human, and less wasteful, dimensions. It was a process which occurred in nearly all cities of that era and plan, but nowhere more notably than in Melbourne. Still, as you can see, Maiden Lane is not a "really narrow street," in Nathan Lewis' terminology, but of a width that is comparable to the major commercial thoroughfares of late medieval and Renaissance-era cities. It is only narrow by comparison to the typical urban street laid out by the 19th century grid-makers (and in fact Jacobs' article mentions only American examples).

Jacobs later made additional observations implicitly supportive of narrow streets in car-free contexts:

"Paving which merged roadbed and sidewalk would probably induce more pedestrian use of roadbed space .... However, that is apparently only part of the answer. In suburban shopping centers where "streets" are wide but thoroughly pedestrian and without curbs, people stay to the sides also except where something interesting to see has been deliberately placed out in the "street." It takes tremendous numbers of pedestrians to populate the whole width of the roadbed, even in scatterings. The only times pedestrians seem to use, or want to use, a street roadbed in this fashion are in cases of extraordinary floods of pedestrians, as in the Wall Street district or the Boston financial area when the offices let out .... In more ordinary circumstances, people are attracted to the sides, I think, because that is where it is most interesting."

-The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 452-53

Jacobs was not the only urban thinker of this era appreciative of narrow streets (Bernard Rudofsky and Kevin Lynch had similar things to say, using more frequent reference to foreign examples), yet Jacobs stood out for looking past aesthetics to grasp the universal logic of urban form and human behavior that made places like Maiden Lane work so well.

*Raymond Unwin in 1909's Town Planning In Practice made several references to the aesthetic merits of narrow streets in medieval towns, and even criticized the minimum street width ordinances of his day, but did not dwell on these streets' urban functionality (and, ultimately, did not take literal inspiration from them in his own designs, indicating that he did perhaps see them as functionally obsolete).

Vancouver Update: The Apartment House Cometh

2011-11-21T14:07:00.004-05:00

"When [planner Harland] Bartholomew asked what abuses he should consider in the [Vancouver] interim zoning by-law of 1927 he was preparing, the chairman replied that 'the only serious abuse . . . is the intrusion of undesirable apartment houses into residential districts . . . .'" -from Zoning and the single-family landscape: large new houses and neighbourhood change in Vancouver

A few weeks back I brought up Robert Fogelson's finding in Bourgeois Nightmares that restrictive covenants (and later zoning regulations) were fundamentally intended to prevent speculative increases in land value, rather than, as one might assume, to guard against value declines (it's an idea I've also discussed here). A story out of Vancouver, about an upzoning of a formerly single-family residential area along an arterial street now served by rapid transit, shows how this same concern – and specifically an equation of value increases with perceived neighborhood decline – are still very much alive today:

"Six months after Vancouver City Council approved a plan to transform the Cambie Street corridor, homes in the area have nearly tripled in value and some residents fear development will ruin the neighbourhood. ... last month a block of 10 homes along Cambie Street near 41st Avenue sold for $3.4 million each — nearly three times their previously assessed value."

Although the article quotes one homeowner who is dismayed at this turn of events, it appears most are content to take the developers' money without complaint – and why not, since the city has in effect handed each of them a winning lottery ticket, the proceeds of which are derived from public investment in the new rapid transit line. There seems to be a shared understanding among residents, however, that the changes afoot along this corridor will "ruin" the neighborhood, a refrain that has been heard a thousand times in American and Canadian cities since the late 19th century.

A primary purpose of the Vancouver zoning code, as shown by the introductory quote, was after all to enshrine in law the anti-urban prejudices of progressive planners and well-to-do homeowners in the face of the increasing desirability of apartment living for Vancouver residents (the fear of an "intrusion" was no doubt motivated by visibly growing demand for apartments). The zoning map, largely unchanged in its important features since the 1920s, still carries out this mission, barring apartment housing from around 70 percent of the city area. In the face of this suppression of supply, any rezoning of a formerly single-family detached area for mid-rise multifamily housing is bound to result in especially steep increases in land value, with or without adjoining transit.

Rather than causing a re-examination of land use policy, the soaring home values evident in the city seem to have resulted in the blame falling on foreign buyers, and especially Chinese buyers. The chain of causation may be backwards, however: rather than it being wealthy buyers who are bidding up property prices, is it possible that wealthy foreigners are simply among the few who are able to buy into Vancouver's already supply-constrained market?

The Zoning and the single-family landscape paper, although almost 20 years old, summarizes the situation best:

"The research concludes that Vancouver addressed symptoms of the problem but not its cause: a zoning practice that continues to exclude the less affluent from single-family zones. Vancouver needs to espouse a more inclusionary zoning schedule that adopts the compact land use and mixed tenures typical before zoning and preserves the traditions of local residents. Otherwise, the zoning changes may preserve single- family areas for affluent immigrants as the Vancouver market aligns itself with the global market."

h/t Market Urbanism for the article.

Related post: Vancouver and the Zoning Straitjacket

Thursday Old Urbanism: Western Hemisphere Edition

2011-11-17T16:41:00.002-05:00

On a gray November afternoon for those of us in the northeastern United States, a few colorful images from New World cities of non-Anglophone origin:

Buenos Aires

Flickr/Pedro Angelini

Campeche

Flickr/H. Silenus

Rio De Janeiro (favela)

Flickr/Robert Blackie

Havana

Paraty

Quebec City

Queretaro

Sucre

Willemstad

Quito

Ever Since Euclid

2011-11-15T17:39:00.006-05:00

Euclid v. Ambler is one of the best known cases in American land use law. Entire books have been written on that pivotal 1926 decision, and enough law review articles to fill several more volumes. The attention is deserved: in the simplest possible terms, the case marks the dividing point between dueling conceptions of property rights, one being my right to do what I want with my property and the other being my right to tell you what to do with your property.

Although their arguments have been largely forgotten, several state and federal judges of the 1920s wielded natural rights principles to strike down early zoning ordinances. One of these was none other than the district court judge in the Euclid case, David Courtney Westenhaver:

"The argument supporting this [zoning] ordinance proceeds, it seems to me, both on a mistaken view of what is property and of what is police power. Property, generally speaking, defendant's counsel concede, is protected against a taking without compensation, by the guaranties of the Ohio and United States Constitutions. But their view seems to be that so long as the owner remains clothed with the legal title thereto and is not ousted from the physical possession thereof, his property is not taken, no matter to what extent his right to use it is invaded or destroyed or its present or prospective value is depreciated. This is an erroneous view. The right to property, as used in the Constitution, has no such limited meaning. As has often been said is substance by the Supreme Court: 'There can be no conception of property aside from its control and use, and upon its use depends its value.'" -Ambler Realty Co. v. Village of Euclid, Ohio, 297 F. 307 D.C.Ohio (1924).

The logic is straightforward and simple. If, as Westenhaver stated, property "includes the right to acquire, use, and dispose of it," then the removal of one of these valuable rights – for instance, the right to use land for industry – was a taking requiring compensation. To hold otherwise would be analogous to concluding that a thief does not commit robbery so long as he leaves a few dollars in his victim's wallet. And after all, states had long ago abolished the archaic fee tail, which removed an an owner's right to sell his property, for public policy reasons. Was the right to freely use property any less important than the right to sell it?

Unlike Justice Sutherland, the author of the Euclid opinion, Westenhaver was thoroughly unconvinced by the arguments of the Progressive planners that the zoning law was an enlightened regulation justifiable in terms of health, safety and the public welfare:

"The plain truth is that the true object of the ordinance in question is to place all the property in an undeveloped area of 16 square miles in a strait-jacket. The purpose to be accomplished is really to regulate the mode of living of persons who may hereafter inhabit it. In the last analysis, the result to be accomplished is to classify the population and segregate them according to their income or situation in life."

Chief Justice Phillips of the Texas Supreme Court reached the same conclusion in 1921, with regard to a zoning ordinance which prohibited commercial uses in a district except with the approval of a three quarters majority vote of area residents:

"This feature [majority approval] of the ordinance, in our opinion, reveals its true purpose. It reveals with reasonable clearness that its object is not to protect the public health, safety or welfare from any threatening injury from a store, but to satisfy a sentiment against the mere presence of a store in a residence part of the City. ... But it is not the law of this land that a man may be deprived of the lawful use of his property because his tastes are not in accord with those of his neighbors. The law is that he may use it as he chooses, regardless of their tastes, if in its use he does not harm them." -Spann v. City of Dallas, 111 Tex. 350, 235 S.W. 513 (1921).

Baseless prejudice against commercial activity, Phillips held, or against those of lesser means, was not a sufficient justification for a taking of property rights without compensation, any more than baseless racial prejudice was sufficient justification for the race-based zoning laws struck down in 1917 by the Supreme Court in Buchanan v. Warley.

This entire line of reasoning was invalidated by Euclid, which held that, in essence, the right to use one's property for lawful purposes was not a property interest within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment at all, and which permitted the regulatory regime we take for granted today. The Supreme Court's takings jurisprudence since that time, constrained by this holding, has come to reflect an outlook on property rights that one legal scholar has called "schizophrenic" (p. 1650). A few libertarian-minded scholars, notably Richard Epstein, have been attempting to revive a version of this older jurisprudence, but there's no substitute for examining the original arguments that were pitted against each other in the early 1920s, and for making one's own judgments. Where do you, the reader, come down in this debate?

Related posts:
Did Zoning Ever Conserve Property Values?
The Zoning Paradox

A Walk Through Occupied NY

2011-11-11T07:00:00.021-05:00

Update 11/15: As you've read by now, the settlement shown here was removed last night by the NYPD at the order of the mayor, who was quoted only a week ago stating his lack of objection to the new, higher quality tents that had begun arriving (see end of post). Since the protestors apparently are barred from setting up new tents, it looks as though this will be the first and last post on this intriguing subject.

With the Washington Post running an article on the "do-it-yourself urbanism" of Occupy D.C.'s encampment, and Steve Stofka observing the emergent patterns evident in Occupy Philadelphia, I decided yesterday to hop on the Lexington Avenue Line down to the Fulton Street stop, just a block or so away from Zuccotti Park, the site of Occupy Wall Street, to see this nearly two-month old settlement up close. I wasn't alone: a number of foreign tourists, maps and cameras in hand, were also gathered around what has apparently become a major attraction of Lower Manhattan.

Although some earlier photos I'd seen gave the impression of a scattering of tents, tables and ad-hoc meeting places, the park has evolved quickly into a very dense settlement with almost every square foot put to use, a consequence, in part, of the limited space within the granite-walled boundaries of the park, an infill process mimicking the growth of cities within medieval fortifications:

The path at right is the "Main Street" of the settlement, now lined with a mix of the tables of various groups and organizations, from anarchists to pacifists, as well as a large cafeteria, a library, and even some retailers with large, walk-in tents:

The path is generally six feet wide, broadening to eight or so in places. No one brings in so much as a bike. The "residential" streets, running off this central way, are even narrower, some a couple feet wide, others leaving just enough space to step between the tents:

The police, as far as I could tell, stayed out of the settlement entirely, keeping to the sidewalks around the periphery. Nor has there been a sign, at least since last month, of any imminent plans for eviction from either the city or the owner of the park (which is by law required to be open to the public round the clock). The official stance, it is rumored, is to wait for winter cold to disperse the protestors.

This assumes that the settlement has no capacity to adapt or improve from the current mish-mash of tarps and L.L. Bean summer camping tents – but is this place more analogous to a Soweto or a Rocinha? I didn't distinctly notice it during my walkthrough, but the photos show the evidence: look closely at the top left of the first photo and you'll notice a pair of large green tents, the first of many scheduled to arrive shortly, and which have been cleared with the city:

"[The OWS members'] newest plan to install 27 military-grade tents designed to stave off freezing temperatures and precipitation, which they began to bring to reality Tuesday, is kosher with the city, Bloomberg said during a Q&A session after an unrelated press conference in Hell's Kitchen Monday."

For a supposedly rudderless movement, "OWS" seems to have set things in rapid motion at Zuccotti Park, although there would be some irony in the settlement coming to outwardly resemble a military barracks. I'll need to check back in a week or two to see how things have changed, but by the looks of things no one's going anywhere anytime soon.

One last thing: population density. As best I can tell, for this settlement, it is approximately 150,000 per square mile.

Nathan Lewis on "Stuff that Works," and New Narrow Streets Advocates

2011-11-07T15:44:00.000-05:00

Nathan's latest, Let's Take a Traditional City Break 5: Stuff that Works, is now available on his site; In it he features a new development in Burlington, Ontario, mentioned here by commenter Nicolas, which has adopted a genuinely traditionalist design format. Nathan also mentions a promising new site, SmallStreets.org, which as far as I know is the only narrow streets advocacy organization out there. Is the movement gaining steam? Nathan's writings are cited as an inspiration for its creators, but they've very kindly linked to this blog as well. Check them out – there's a lot of great material on there so far, and I'm sure more will continue to be added.

Umbrian street at right.

Park Economics

2011-11-02T16:29:00.000-04:00

What's an urban park worth to a city? The question is straightforward, but despite the attention lavished on parks in the urban design literature, the economics of parks – their measurable costs and benefits – have received less attention. Although "the science of city park economics is still in its infancy," according to the Trust for Public Land, a number of studies over the past decade have helped establish a consensus on a few key points.

Attempts to determine the value added by parks date at least back to the 1860s, when Frederick Law Olmsted attempted to calculate the increase in Manhattan real estate values generated by the creation of Central Park. That the park increased the value of the land adjacent to it was obvious, but Olmsted might have considered several other key questions, such as:

Even if a park increases values, do those increases outweigh the the value that would have been gained from leaving the land available for development?
Alternatively, could the same or approximately similar increases in value be achieved with a reduction in park acreage (and thus an increase in developable land)?
Are values better served by a small number of large parks or many small parks, bearing in mind that many small parks are more expensive to maintain than a few large ones?
Do certain types of park programming and design increase values more than others?

A growing literature has begun to provide answers to these questions. The Trust for Public Land has put together an accounting of the potential benefits of parkland, which, however, does not consider the countervailing costs of maintenance and land lost to development. Other writers have made more questionable arguments. Among these is the one that revenue-positive parks are an economically desirable option in comparison to money-losing single use residential development, a point which is not so much in favor of parks as it is an illustration of the financial unsustainability of contemporary development patterns.

One of the best resources on the topic is a 2001 MIT Department of Architecture thesis, which was guided by several urbanist eminences including Andrés Duany and Eran Ben-Joseph. Although I'd encourage you to check out this paper on your own, some of the author's most important findings include:

Homes adjacent to parkland receive a 22% price premium, but the premium rapidly drops off for properties beyond 600 feet from the park.
Large parks do confer greater premiums than small parks, but the premium is small compared to the effect of being close to a small park.
Smaller lots place a higher value on park proximity than large lots.

In light of these findings, the author recommends a series of small parks, rather than a handful of large parks, as the property value benefits of the former will typically exceed the maintenance savings of the latter.

The intended use of a park also has a large impact on the effect the park will have on surrounding properties, according to the Trust for Public Land. Space devoted exclusively to athletics, for instance, may actually harm adjacent property values; open space designed as a wildlife corridor or for stormwater runoff can also be a disamenity where an unlit and forested area is perceived to pose safety issues. Large parks may also suffer from safety issues resulting from lack of use. Certain common purposes for open space, therefore, may not coincide with the objective of improving surrounding property values.

None of this, I think, would come as a surprise to Jane Jacobs, who through personal observation and study reached many of the same conclusions:

"Conventionally, neighbourhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider city parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred upon them. This is more nearly in accord with reality, for people do confer use on parks and make them successes – or else withhold use and doom parks to rejection and failure."

Even more to the point:

"City districts with relatively large amounts of generalized park ... seldom develop intense community focus on a park and intense love for it. ... Parks intensely used in generalized public-yard fashion tend to have four elements in their design which I shall call intricacy, centering, sun and enclosure."

Jacobs, in Death and Life of Great American Cities, was reacting the common tendency of planners in her era to dedicate excessive amounts of land for open space, such that the space became an obvious disamenity, and a liability, rather than a benefit. Planning decisions about parks are going to revolve around more than the mathematical calculations of a developer, but having the tools to think about parks in a more objective way can aid in the creation of parks that are both successful and financially beneficial.

Friday Read: Fogelson on Restrictive Covenants

2011-10-28T07:00:00.041-04:00

Although Robert Fogelson's Downtown: Its Rise and Fall is his best known work, the 2005 follow-up Bourgeois Nightmares, the title a play on Robert Fishman's 1989 book, is a quick read which provides, so far as I know, the only book-length history of restrictive covenants in the United States.

Although race restrictions seem to be the focus of most studies in this area, Fogelson looks at other aspects of this history as well, examining how courts reacted to the imposition of use-based restrictions in the late 1800s, and how the public's conception of property rights came to be transformed over this period in ways which have remained more or less unchanged down to the present day.

One of the more interesting points I thought was Fogelson's explanation — as I've argued here before in the context of zoning —that the main purpose of the restrictions was not to increase property values, but ultimately to constrain them:

"The suburbanites were confident that most people would refuse to sell to an African- or Asian-American or other "undesirable" person even if offered a very high price. ... But the suburbanites were far from confident that most people would turn down a good offer from a desirable person, a well-to-do white Christian like themselves, who intended to use the property for an undesirable purpose. They were afraid that most people who owned a corner lot would sell to a builder who wanted to erect an apartment house (or, even worse, open a store, saloon or gas station) and was ready to offer five or ten times what the lot was worth as the site for a single family home. ... They were afraid that was what most people would do because they knew that if they found themselves in the same position that was what they would do." p. 143.

The early 20th century restricted suburb was, as Fogelson shows, the result of a process of elimination as much as it was a positive vision: an elimination of "undesirables," a group which could comprise over 95% of the population, an elimination of commercial uses, of attached houses, of multi-family residential buildings, of houses too close the front property line, or too close to the sides, of houses that were too big, or too small, or too ugly, or too cheap, an elimination of fences, of farm animals, and even of household pets. Above all, there was a fear of market forces, and an inability to conceive of change and urbanization in anything other than apocalyptic terms.

From the residents' perspective, the scenario that Fogelson describes was essentially perceived as a market failure. Although the seller might reap a windfall, the thinking went, the remaining residents believed that the arrival of a saloon heralded the beginning of the end of their way of life, and would send homeowners stampeding for the exits. That this was a self-fulfilling prophecy didn't render its effects any less real.

Although Fogelson observes that it was often fear that gave rise to these restrictive covenants, it's worth noting that their existence was not necessarily incompatible with a dense residential environment. Boston's Back Bay, as Fogelson describes, was deliberately planned as an urban domain for the well-to-do, and was subject to numerous use-based restrictions from the outset. Giving up a degree of urban flexibility in order to retain, at fairly high density, high-income residents who might otherwise have fled to the suburbs apparently seemed a reasonable trade to Boston's Public Land Commissioners.

In spite of this success, the Back Bay, as a literal infill project, was unusual in that it provided a blank slate close to the city center. In general, late 19th and early 20th century America produced very few examples of compelling urban environments for the wealthy. The Back Bay was one. New York's Upper East Side was another. Apart from those, and a handful of others, there was little to curb the flight of large numbers moneyed citizens out of cities and into restricted suburban communities. A belated realization of the harm done to cities by this emigration occurred decades later and played into urban renewal schemes for the demolition of downtown working class neighborhoods, but that part of the story is beyond the scope of Fogelson's book.

At some point I'll have some additional thoughts on Fogelson's magnum opus, Downtown, but if you've been through that one and haven't yet discovered Bourgeois Nightmares, it’s a quick read that's worth your time.

A Hope VI Gallery

2011-10-24T07:00:00.005-04:00

In the comments to last Monday's post, several commenters suggested that the example I'd chosen, J. Henry Hale Homes in Nashville, was not representative of the design quality of many Hope VI projects. For the sake of balance, I've put together a series of aerial and street-level images of each of several projects chosen from a variety of locations. Rather than editorializing, I present them accompanied by a short statement from their planners or from other relevant sources to let you judge for yourself the merits or shortcomings of each of the projects (click on the images to enlarge):

Bedford Hills Apartments, Pittsburgh

"Through the community-driven design process, the planners learned of the residents’ interest in maintaining the look of the existing housing stock. It was important that the new units fit in the context of the neighborhood. Consequently, the design team spent much of its time in the surrounding neighborhood documenting existing housing types and architectural styles. ... Each rowhouse, including the rental townhouse flat units, has a front door that opens up onto the street, providing residents a sense of ownership and a direct connection to the community. ... Resident surface parking lots, accessible by driveways, were situated in the rear of the housing units. Small setbacks of the houses enabled the planners to incorporate landscaping into the plan." -Project Summary

Broadway Overlook, Baltimore

"The final master plan for the Broadway Overlook was more human in scale than the former Broadway Homes and oriented to pedestrians instead of automobiles. Parking is either on-street or in the rear of the units. Not all of the units have dedicated parking, but the steep topography of the site made it possible to place some of the resident parking beneath the new units, to be accessed from the rear. Although the master plan worked with the existing street grid, it incorporated two new streets to facilitate greater density. These streets were designed to be one-way with on-street parking to help buffer pedestrians from direct traffic flow, therefore making it a more pleasant and safe streetcrossing experience. Like the surrounding community, the townhomes borrow from the Federal and Italianate architectural styles and consist of single-family and two-family dwellings that range in height from two to four stories." -Project Summary

Centennial Place, Atlanta

"Over 900 families live in new garden apartments and townhomes. Some families make a few thousand dollars a year and some make more than $150,000. But you won’t know which by looking at their housing units. They live side by side in an attractive neighborhood of tree-lined streets. Two swimming pools and a fitness center in the development, and a new YMCA nearby, provide recreational opportunities. New commercial development is underway – being built with private investment." -Development Description

Flag House Courts, Baltimore

"Torti Gallas and Partners responded to the special challenges of this revitalization project with sensitive solutions. Rental, homeownership, and live-work units are designed with a consistent esthetic treatment that dissolves the stereotypes surrounding public housing. Housing density is reduced, allowing the introduction of planned open spaces. Blighted structures are demolished to create a rejuvenated environment. Safety and security are intrinsically planned into the neighborhood, and units are designed so that living areas face streets and public spaces. Creative plans fit comfortable units within the existing narrow lot widths." -Project Summary

High Point, Seattle

"By the end of the decade, High Point will have nearly 1,700 new affordable and market-rate units across its 120 acres. Most homes will have private yards and porches. They will sit on safe streets with controlled traffic, and will show great variety in architecture, with character and styles on each block. ... To maintain the green, garden-like feel, the plan designated over 20 acres of land for parks, open spaces, and playgrounds. A four-acre, central park will be at the heart of the community. Another park features a large pond and a jogging trail, and several other community and pocket parks are scattered throughout High Point. Even planting strips along streets will be greener and wider than elsewhere in Seattle. The plan triples the number of previously existing trees." -Redevelopment Plan

Martin Luther King Plaza, Philadelphia

"Significantly, new housing is equally divided between on-site reconstruction and off-site renovation and infill. Long term sustainability of the reconstructed project will be assured by eliminating blight and creating stability in the broader community.

One key to the on-site master plan is the creation of a new residential square founded in the tradition of neighborhood-making established by William Penn, founder of Philadelphia. This new open space will be a focus for the broader Hawthorne neighborhood and will marry new and renovated housing, retail with residential above, and a host of local institutions, including a new daycare and community center, a local church and an existing elementary school. The architecture of the new units includes a diverse set of types modeled on traditional patterns of Philadelphia neighborhoods." -Project Summary

Mechanicsville Commons, Knoxville

Existing houses in the neighborhood reflect the architectural styles that were popular in that era, primarily Victorian cottages and Craftsman bungalows. The house designs created for Mechanicsville Commons and for infill in the adjacent neighborhood respect these architectural traditions, incorporating elements from them – deep front porches, Victorian fretwork, and Craftsman brackets – to enrich the facades. The houses are painted in rich colors that give distinct personality to each house and create a lively streetscape. -Architect's Summary "As a minimum requirement, all new residential structures should have seeded lawns around the entire house and foundation plantings along their front facades. Landscape plantings and treatment help to define the mood for the residence as well as that of the entire neighborhood. ... In addition to the general landscape guidelines, one small ornamental tree shall be planted in the front yard; a minimum of one large ornamental or canopy tree shall be planted elsewhere on the lot." -Design Guidelines

New Columbia, Portland

The vision for New Columbia was to create a vibrant new neighborhood with a mix of housing types affordable to people at all income levels. New Columbia includes the following features: A mix of residents, representing a variety of cultures, age groups, and income levels; A community-friendly design, with front porches, parks and public spaces; A new street grid that provides easy circulation within New Columbia and connects the community to the rest of the Portsmouth neighborhood; A Main Street that offers a variety of recreational, cultural and educational opportunities both for New Columbia residents and the surrounding neighborhood. -New Columbia website

"A sustainable stormwater management system retains 98 percent of stormwater onsite, treating and infiltrating water into the ground, avoiding piping overflows into local waterways. The system includes 101 pocket swales (or as residents call them, “rain gardens”), 31 flow-through planter boxes, and 40 public infiltration dry wells." -New Columbia website

"Portland doesn't really have food deserts ... . But it has patches such as New Columbia, a community of 3,000 mostly low-income residents where people must travel long distances to get to groceries." -Portland Tribune, March 10, 2011

North Beach Place, San Francisco

"North Beach Place is one of the largest mixed income, mixed-use complexes in California, comprising a 341-unit development; 20,000 square feet of commercial space, including 3,000 square feet of incubator space for resident entrepreneurs; and a childcare/community center. Located in San Francisco’s popular North Beach area, with proximity to both transportation and employment, this complex is a model for transit-oriented urban infill developments. ..." -Builder's Summary

"PGA’s green roof concept allows for underground parking, street-level shops and 341 apartments interwoven with inviting outdoor spaces, including courtyards, gardens, seating areas and six childrens’ play areas, all designed to enhance urban life. PGA was also responsible for the design of surrounding urban streetscapes." -Landscape Architect Summary

Renaissance Place at Grand, St. Louis

The developer's website does not describe the design approach. However, this project recently won LEED-ND certification:

"Renaissance Place at Grand neighborhood was recently Certified in the U.S. Green Building Council LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) Pilot program. Renaissance Place received outstanding LEED-ND scores in the areas of “Smart Location & Linkages” and “Neighborhood Pattern & Design” rising from its connections to amenities in the surrounding community—a variety of retail stores, cultural institutions, schools and recreational options—all accessible within a ½ mile walking distance or convenient Metro transit lines. Renaissance Place also met its “Green Construction and Technology” targets by using environmentally sensitive construction techniques and by ensuring that brownfield contamination, storm water runoff and pollution from construction activities were significantly reduced or completely abated. The site also avoided environmental disruptions by using pre-existing water and wastewater infrastructure, restoring the historic street grid and using a dense design that helps to minimize unnecessary land use."

Debating Height in Washington Heights

2011-10-20T17:59:00.005-04:00

The New York Times recently ran a story on a developer's ongoing efforts to construct several high-rise apartment buildings in the characteristically mid-rise Washington Heights neighborhood. While much of the article focuses on concerns about gentrification, the zoning angle is equally noteworthy:

"Local residents call the neighborhood the Heights because of its steep terrain and riverside bluffs, not because it has vertigo-inducing buildings.

So a developer’s plan to build four apartment towers ranging from 23 to 39 stories tall has set off alarms in Washington Heights, where buildings typically run 6 to 10 stories. Some residents have protested that the proposed towers, with a total of more than 800 apartments, would darken the sky and introduce more residents than the area’s schools and subways could accommodate.

Last month, the local community board unanimously rejected a proposal for the four towers, which would have required a zoning change by the city, and it urged the developer, Quadriad Realty Partners, to return with a scaled-down blueprint for shorter buildings at the site, at Broadway and 190th Street. ... Despite the community board’s opposition, the developer said it planned to apply to the city’s Planning Commission for a zoning modification in the next few weeks. But if the change is not granted, the firm says it will then build two stouter, market-rate buildings, 28 and 24 stories tall, which it has the legal right to do under existing zoning."

Below is an image of a typical area of this neighborhood, showing an abundance of "new law" apartment buildings with an approximate ground coverage of only around 55 percent, accounting for streets (40 percent) and space between buildings (5 percent). Even so, the neighborhood is very dense: approximately 130,000 people per square mile, according to the 2000 census.

My question is: what exactly is the purpose of New York's zoning law here? Do height limits (or FAR limits, as they may be) in the neighborhood reflect a judgment as to adequate light and air, and to population density? If so, there can be no justification for bargaining with the developer to raise them, any more than it would have made sense to bargain over the setbacks in the 1916 Zoning Resolution. If the city is open to negotiation, on the other hand, is the limit simply an arbitrary cap designed to trigger review by the planning commission? And how does the possibility of negotiation affect land values and development?

In an article from 18 years ago, but still relevant today, Peter Salins writes:

"All these changes [to New York's zoning code] have moved the city increasingly toward a regime of discretionary review, in which city planners must review and approve the way a developer uses the options and exceptions that have been added to the original code. Much of this discretion is used to grant developers zoning concessions in exchange for specific public amenities: not just plazas and arcades, but expensive benefits such as subway improvements, theaters, and low-cost housing. This “zoning for sale” is a game only a handful of well-funded developers, flanked by costly lobbyists, lawyers, and expediters, can play. The benefits to the city are questionable: There is no economic test of the costs or benefits of such trade-offs, and the practice distorts the price of land by encouraging speculation based on the possibility of negotiating zoning concessions at some later date. Moreover, for the city to make such trades suggests that the supposedly critical goals of zoning are not really important, since they can be waived for a price.

The quest to custom-tailor land-use regulations is an endless one. Even as the zoning ordinance has grown increasingly complex, it can never quite custom-tailor enough, so planners must give themselves discretion to approve or reject particular projects on a case-by-case basis. Zoning, which was meant to foster orderly and predictable development, has instead become a chaotic, capricious process that deters the development and renewal of the city."

The point being made here is that if investment is desired, consistency and predictability are virtues. One of the potential purposes of height limits, in an age where skyscrapers are a technological possibility, is as a check against speculation in land. For the limits to serve that purpose, they must be absolute, and not subject to waiver or variance, or else they risk becoming a cause of speculation themselves. Endowing community boards with discretionary veto power adds further complexity and uncertainty to the process.

If the neighborhood believes that ten stories is appropriate, then every proposal for a tall building is doomed to follow the same convoluted process of community hearings, disapprovals, appeals, further hearings, etc., all to end back at the "as of right" allowance, and all squandering a great deal of time, money and goodwill. Those who wish to avoid controversy by constructing a ten-story building, on the other hand, will find many holdout buyers pricing their parcels for much taller buildings, and development will stall.

On his blog, Alon Levy has recently been advocating a consensus-based approach to planning. If the Washington Heights neighborhood collectively supports new mid-rise development, could a straightforward height restriction, along the lines supported by the community, be a preferable, and achievable, substitute for the current system? Libertarian-leaning urbanists are fond of criticizing height limits, but such a limit, in this case, could hardly be more unfriendly to new development than the system that the Times and Salins describe.

Related posts: Can New York Build Its Way Up to Affordability?

Hope VI and Public Housing: The More Things Change...

2011-10-17T08:00:00.033-04:00

Stephen Smith has posted a perceptive article critiquing the design of contemporary public housing projects. The story of public housing over the last 20 years is largely the story of the Hope VI program, which was adopted by Congress in the early 1990s to provide a source of federal funding for rehabilitating, and even more so demolishing and rebuilding, distressed public housing. Accompanying the new funding initiative was a new design philosophy: HUD secretary Henry Cisneros embraced the principles of the Charter of the New Urbanism the mid 1990s, reflecting a change in course from the tower-in-the-park design principles which had prevailed for many decades.

This was not an empty gesture, as a vaguely New Urbanist design approach came to be reflected in dozens of Hope VI projects built over the ensuing fifteen years. But just how new was this approach, really? A close examination of justifications given for the projects themselves reveals certain overriding concerns, which for those familiar with the history of urban planning in the 20th century may seem familiar, but which have little do with New Urbanist principles.

A concrete example might help illustrate the point. The project I'm most familiar with is the recent Hope VI redevelopment of Nashville's J. Henry Hale Homes, a project that was typical of the low-rise public housing constructed in Nashville during the 1950s. Although the original project was demolished around 2006, Google earth shows it as it existed before:

The buildings shown are all two-story structures. The planning principles at work in creating such a development were perhaps not as careless and insensitive as they're sometimes made out to be:

"...[W]ith houses and gardens in compact groups ... there can be playgrounds for different age-groups and parks and perhaps even a community center, instead of dead chasms between houses and acres of unnecessary pavement in streets, sidewalks and alleys. The whole neighborhood may be just one super-block, which means complete play safety for the children and clean, quiet green surroundings and outlook for all the houses. For access to the houses there may be small dead-end streets. Garages and parking spaces are conveniently located at the nearby street-front. The house itself, shallow and never more than two rooms deep, has sun in every room and far more real privacy than an 'individual' house on a narrow lot." -Catherine Bauer, A Citizen's Guide to Public Housing (1940).

This is hardly traditional urbanism, but there is a clear acknowledgement here of the problems of welcoming the automobile into the heart of a residential environment, as well as a backlash against the repetitive, amenity-poor process of speculative lot subdivision that had characterized the seven decades or so preceding 1940. The development relegates the handful of parking lots in groups to the fringes of the development, or to dead-end access ways. The few auto streets are quite narrow and naturally control speed with T-intersections and sharp turns. Far more numerous are the narrow pedestrian paths linking the housing units to the streets and to the two large park areas within the project. Overall, it is a pedestrian-focused environment, with a balance of built space, streets and park space reminiscent of a college campus.

For reasons that have been hotly debated, this project, like many others, quickly degenerated into a focal point for crime and poverty. Was it the fault of its design? Nashville's director of the Metro Development and Housing Agency, Phil Ryan, thinks so:

“Part of the problem with public housing in the U.S. is overly dense housing that’s unappealing and unattractive,” Ryan explained. “The extreme density has created a bad environment for people. ... We think a beautiful mixed-income neighborhood is a net gain for low-income people versus an overly dense, traditional 60-year-old housing development,” Ryan said.

Does this sound at all familiar to the claims of the early 20th century Progressive housing reformers? It's a position Jacob Riis would have applauded, and which Lewis Mumford might have endorsed. The key elements might be summarized as environmental determinism, or belief that one's built surroundings influence social behavior, and out of that thinking a belief that decongestion, or a dispersal of population, is the best means of positively influencing behavior -- among a certain segment of the population anyways. (At least, the Nashville planners, to my knowledge, have never criticized nearby high-end condominium developments for being "overly dense.") These are not mere idle words, on this project (see below) or others, as a net loss of housing units is characteristic of the entire Hope VI program.

In any event, here is the new project, developed with $20 million in federal Hope VI funding:

A comparison of the projects reveals the following changes:

Is $20 million dollars for a loss of 255 housing units a good use of taxpayer money, one could ask, even if the new units are of higher quality? Long-term maintenance liabilities have presumably increased as well, with the total paved surface increasing from 7% to 30% to serve less than half the number of units. And of the new street grid, that presumably New Urbanist-inspired addition? Does this automobile connectivity serve any purpose in the absence of the mixed uses that New Urbanism advocates but which are absent here, or have Catherine Bauer's "acres of unnecessary pavement" simply reappeared?

The streets have been dramatically widened, flattened and straightened, as well, which has necessitated the placement of speed bumps throughout the project:

And although an article touting the project refers to it as "a neighborhood with real front and backyards, green space and duplex homes," not only has green space been reduced and identifiable parks nearly eliminated, the homes do not, in fact, have backyards:

Front yards do exist, though, with thoughtfully-located utility boxes. Brick is reserved only for the facades, or rather parts of the facades:

I'll let the reader compare the design and aesthetics of these homes to those of the nearby Andrew Jackson Courts, public housing built some 15 years before the original J. Henry Hale homes:

With this design-focused analysis I won't delve into the city's motives, why it might have wanted to dramatically reduce density in existing public housing projects, or whether the city planners truthfully believed their own pronouncements on density. The project did "succeed" at largely replacing the population in the project, and there is evidence that tenant management, one the key elements of the relative success of New York's public housing, is now given greater attention.

From a planning perspective, though, is it possible to argue that this new design approach is always an improvement over the public housing of the 1950s? Even some of the most sensitively-designed developments replacing notorious projects, such as the redevelopment of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, show a similar emphasis on wide streets, low building footprints, large parking areas and residual "green space." Perhaps the design philosophy underlying these redevelopments has not changed quite as much as one might think.

Measuring Connectivity, part II

2011-10-14T09:15:00.001-04:00

In the previous post, I mentioned the concept of metric reach which is being developed by John Peponis and his students (including commenter Patrick!) in Atlanta. What I didn't say was why I thought this particular measurement so useful for measuring connectivity. Again, consider the reinforcing virtues of density, mixed uses and accessibility:

"Well functioning cities can ... be thought of as 'movement economies'. By this it is meant that the reciprocal effects of space and movement on each other ... and the multiplier effects on both that arise from patterns of land use and building densities, which are themselves influenced by the space-movement relation, that give cities their characteristic structures, and give rise to the sense that everything is working together to create the special kinds of well-being and excitement that we associate with cities at their best." Bill Hillier, Space is the Machine, p. 113-14.

Or, as put more bluntly by the early 20th century economist Paul Nystrom:

"The greater the number of people, other things being equal, who live near, who come to, or who pass by a certain location, the more valuable that location is." Paul Nystrom, The Economics of Retailing, p. 189.

As Hillier alludes to, the overall effectiveness and efficiency of urbanism can be expressed as a multiple of density, land use and movement.* For a person either living or visiting a city, is there a higher purpose of its streets than providing access to the greatest possible number of attractions over the shortest possible distance? This is essentially the basis behind the Walkscore website, and it is what metric reach simply and elegantly tries to show us: a city's overall potential for providing the greatest range of nearby options from each point in the urban street network.

One study examining this measure in the context of walking to transit stations in Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta has shown its usefulness in predicting pedestrian behavior:

"When multivariate regressions are run ... street connectivity [based on metric reach] is found to be a rather significant predictor of ridership levels in all three catchment areas when controlling for population density and transit station measures. However, the best results are obtained for the 0.5 mile range. This supports the findings of various studies which suggest that within short distances people will walk to transit regardless of local street connectivity ... . In other words, people residing within 0.25 mile distance from a station are inclined to use transit irrespective of the street connectivity levels of the station area. Higher correlation coefficients within the 0.5 mile buffer suggest that the decision to walk a slightly longer but still very manageable distance is strongly affected by the density of street connections." The Effects of Street Configuration on Transit Ridership, Ozbil, Peponis and Bafna (2009).

Since the area between .25 and .5 miles from a given point contains three times the total area as the space within .25 miles, this is an important insight for TOD at the very least, and for thinking about walkability in general.

Even reach, as great a tool as it is, does not capture the whole picture. Steve Stofka on his blog draws attention to what he has termed "traversal amenities," which represents the ease and comfort in walking a given distance. This is not a subjective point: a line drawn down the midpoint of a street cannot tell us its width, or its traffic conditions, or any of the other factors which may affect as simple a decision as crossing from one side to another. Disincentives to crossing a street, however, may reduce a pedestrian's range of movement options, effectively limiting metric reach (Walkscore, which Steve notes does not take into account these factors, has acknowledged this limitation).

Ultimately, measuring pedestrian connectivity, and putting a number to it, is a difficult task given the fine-grained and spontaneous nature of pedestrian accessibility and movement, and the ease with which it can be disrupted by vehicular traffic or other obstacles. As it is, the most intricate feats of "pedestrian engineering" currently take place in indoor, self-contained or controlled environments, such as malls, stadiums and cruise ships rather than in urban planning, but Peponis and his students, through their efforts, are developing one way of thinking that may help change that.

Next and last in the series: a quick look at navigability, or, finding your way around.

*See also Modeling street connectivity, pedestrian movement and land-use according to standard GIS street network representations: A Comparative Study, p. 1.

Measuring Connectivity, part I

2011-10-10T06:00:00.043-04:00

The subject of street connectivity is one which gets to the heart of what is and is not good urbanism. It formed the basis for one of Jane Jacobs' most memorable discussions in The Death and Life of Great American Cities when she singled out New York's 800-foot blocks for particular criticism. Two decades later, Professor Bill Hillier developed the analytical method for spatial patterns known as space syntax, an approach which promised an objective means of ascertaining the intelligibility and effectiveness of street networks. The area has become a fruitful field of study, while an abundance of free software tools have put spatial network analysis within the reach of the humble blogger.

What is connectivity, then, and why is it so important? It is not a secret that the purpose served by streets is, among other things, to provide a public means of accessing the built environment. It is just as evident that a public way adds value to the adjacent land. A city therefore exists in tension between the value of land for buildings, which encourages a maximization of the built footprint, and the value added by streets, which by their nature diminish that same footprint.

The value conferred by the streets themselves, however, depends upon their accessibility to the public, not merely in a legal sense, but in terms of proximity and navigability. A shop at the end of a long, dead-end street benefits from that street far less than the shop at an intersection benefits from its adjacent streets. In general, then, a city as a whole will have an economic incentive to maximize continuous streets and minimize cul-de-sacs, except in rare cases. Connectivity, in this sense, describes to the extent to which various points within a given area are linked by the street network, just as density can describe the intensity of the built environment.

Academics and planners, in the field of space syntax and outside it, have developed numerous different approaches aimed at measuring this elusive quality. Among these are:

Intersection density (the classic measure often used to contrast between gridded patterns and late 20th century suburbia).
Link-node ratio.
Connected node ratio.
Distance between origins and destinations.
Average block sizes.
Block density.
Block face lengths.
Street density (street area).
Metric and directional "reach."

(For a summary of many of these, see here).

The newest of these, metric reach, is a concept introduced by Georgia Tech's John Peponis just a few years ago. The concept is defined as:

"[T]he aggregate street length that is accessible from the mid-point of each road segment within a metric radius of actual movement. ... Distances are measured along street center lines ... Reach, therefore, is a measure of street density. Implicitly, it is a measure of urban potential: the greater the average [reach value] of an area the greater the interface between the public streets and private properties, the greater the the likely number of properties that are within range, the greater the likely number of potential destinations or land uses." (Peponis et al. 2007).

To illustrate the method, consider the central areas of two cities of roughly equal population: Omaha, Nebraska (at left, of course), and Malaga, Spain. A single point is selected from which are drawn all possible routes that could be covered in a 900 foot walk:

As it turns out, a person in Omaha can, within 900 feet, access 13,800 linear feet of block fronts (several of which happen to consist of parking lots), while the pedestrian in Malaga, in the same walking range, can access just under 25,000 feet. And despite this, Malaga has a considerably higher ratio of built area to street area, thanks to streets which are, overall, much narrower than in Omaha. Malaga obtains both higher density and connectivity, at least by this single data point and using this particular method.

What predictive power does this measure have for pedestrian and economic activity? I'll discuss that in the next post.

Related reading: Laurence Aurbach has a fantastic series on connectivity which I highly recommend.

Note on Gentrification and Preservation

2011-10-03T12:08:00.001-04:00

There have been several great pieces on the dynamics of gentrification over the past several days. Market Urbanism's Stephen Smith, who is now writing at Forbes, observes how permitting more development in desirable areas will help "soften the blow of gentrification." Alon Levy theorizes about the causes of central city revitalization. Emily Washington, in response, considers the time preferences of the upper and middle-classes. At the City Paper, Lydia DePillis discusses the relationship between historic preservation and gentrification, among other things.

In DePillis' article, in particular, there is this observation linking preservation and neighborhood revitalization:

"The thing is, preserving distinguished architecture and well-constructed neighborhoods can be one of the best ways for real estate to hold its value. Places that look like they were once prosperous send a message that they could be again."

However, one can argue that it is well-constructed buildings and distinguished architecture which attracts gentrifiers long before historic districts are contemplated. The following chart was put together some years ago for a project looking at four southern cities (Nashville, Atlanta, Memphis and Savannah) in which all census tracts in 1940 were grouped into quartiles based on housing value in that year. The tracts were then revisited in the 1970 and 2000 census years, keeping the groupings the same (the numbers show quartile housing value divided by the median housing value for the city in a given census year):

The pattern over time distinctly shows the operation of residential "filtering" from 1940 to 1970, as homes in wealthier neighborhoods came to be occuped by those from poorer neighborhoods, and an almost mirror-image reversal of this trend from 1970 to 2000 (intervening census years show that the turning point is in fact around 1970). The middle class was simply returning to the same homes that their parents' generation had abandoned some twenty to thirty years before. In 1970, moreover, one could purchase a home built by, say, an upper middle-class family of the 1920s, for what was essentially a 50 percent discount – a house that went for four times the price of those in the poorest quartile in 1940 was, in 1970, selling for only twice that, even though these were in most cases the very same houses.

This is different result than some other studies (see e.g. Old Homes, Externalities, and Poor Neighborhoods: A Model of Urban Decline and Renewal) which find that neighborhoods should cycle over time as housing stock ages, deteriorates and ultimately becomes ripe for redevelopment. Yet the poorest two quartiles have not cycled at all in 60 years, while the housing in the first quartile was not actually redeveloped, but only renovated by new buyers (that is, its age was an amenity, perhaps the primary amenity, rather than a liability). The hidden factor is the quality of the housing stock, which overwhelms the effects of aging and deterioration.

This can help explain the perceived attitudes of preservationists toward neighborhood change that DePillis discusses in her article. It also suggests an explanation for the suburbanization of those with low incomes: as the better urban housing is gentrified, the former occupants may have two choices: move back into impoverished central city neighborhoods or move out into the aging suburban housing vacated by the gentrifiers or those moving to newer suburban houses. If costs are roughly comparable, the decision is easy.

This type of gentrification is different from the the arrival of residents back into a formely commercial or industrial urban core, where the pattern is much more analagous to greenfield development (as Alon mentions in his post). This is occurring simultaneously with gentrification of existing neighborhoods in Nashville and other cities, but takes a very different form.

Related Posts: A Preservationist's Dilemma

What About Houston?

2011-09-29T19:26:00.006-04:00

In the comments to recent posts, Chris Bradford and Cambias have cited Houston as a counter-example of a city without zoning which has developed a highly centralized, high rise-dominated downtown in spite of the fact that no zoning boundaries nor any physical obstacles constrain the horizontal growth of the central business district. So why then has a small forest of skyscrapers grown so closely together?

A few quick thoughts and observations:

First, Houston's downtown, contrary to appearances, isn't that dense. The Floor Area Ratio of the 1.53 square mile downtown area, which contains numerous skyscrapers and over four million square meters of office, retail and residential space, is only about 1.07, much less than large areas of central Paris. It seems improbable, but it's what I got with the numbers I could locate.
Second, what has been the effect of Houston's vast freeway network on land values in the CBD in the post-1950s era? A map of the network resembles a giant dartboard centered on the downtown, with the inner loop drawn tightly around a very small area:

Consider also what the technological possibility of super-tall buildings has on land values within this targeted area. As the blog NeoHouston observes in in a similar transit-oriented context:

"As has been widely discussed, redevelopment around transit stations has been less widespread in Houston than in other cities, and much of this is because of the work of speculators. While this issue is not unique to Houston, it is compounded by the lack of development regulations. Essentially, every speculator is pricing their land for the construction of a skyscraper, when the market may only be suited for low-rise. Redevelopment activity is significantly impaired when there is this disconnect between the realistic development potential of a property and the astronomical price expectations of speculators."

If every downtown Houston landowner prices his land for a 60-story office tower, development, one might think, would likewise be impaired. Even if very high demand exists for office space, few developers have the resources in time or money to purchase the land and construct such a tower. And history shows that building one can be a risky venture, as economic conditions may have changed greatly during the years from planning to completion. In any event, whether or not this explanation has any validity, in spite of a roaring economy in the 1970s through the early 1980s, and again in the 1990s to today, much of Houston's downtown remains covered by surface parking lots. Mid rise development, however, has flourished in the area just outside the loop (see last page).

In fact, building coverage today is far less than it was in 1912 when the below drawing was made (adapted from the excellent Big Map Blog), showing a mid-rise city punctuated by occasional tall buildings, a format which persisted for the most part into the 1950s:

So how much can Houston tell us about development patterns in the absence of zoning? Even if it disproves the idea that a zoning-free city will tend to develop in a more horizontal pattern (not that I necessarily agree that it does), might Houston have benefited overall from a modest height limit? What other factors might have contributed to this pattern?

***Note: Regarding Houston's zoning, please see Christof's comment below on Houston's downtown exemption from municipal parking requirements. Here is a link to a map of Houston's downtown tunnel system.

Height Limits: The Forgotten Debates

2011-09-26T16:08:00.001-04:00

Robert Fogelson's Downtown: It's Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 has a fascinating chapter devoted entirely to the early 20th century debates over height limits in American cities. The arguments of the opposing sides as late as the 1920s bear an uncanny similarity to some of the recent back-and-forth between Ed Glaeser and Michael Mehaffy. Although many of the arguments of those in favor of limits at the time have since been debunked (that skyscrapers were more fire-prone, for instance), the most important point of contention, by far, was based not on a difference of opinion, but on a consensus:

"On one point both sides agreed. If a height limit [in St. Louis, a representative case] as low as 125 feet was imposed, the business district would spread out. So much the better, argued some. In the interest of increasing property values, a St. Louis real estate agent claimed, 'It is better to have lower buildings scattered over 15 or 20 blocks than to have a few big buildings in half a dozen blocks.' Not so, responded others. If downtown St. Louis was spread over a wider territory, it would make it harder to do business in the city. The more compact the business district, the better."

And in New York: "[A height limit proposed in 1908] failed for another, more baffling reason. As the Real Estate Record pointed out, a height limit would have spread the business district 'over a much larger area,' and thus would have raised property values everywhere in Manhattan except on or near lower Broadway and Fifth Avenue, where most of the skyscrapers were erected."

It appears that some agreement existed that a height limit would produce a net increase in citywide property values, and further that this increase would be equitably spread among a large number of property owners, a compelling point which was met by the argument that the agglomeration effects of high density, in concentration, outweighed this loss in values. The argument of the pro-limit faction, however, necessarily depended on the absence of zoning, for with height limits imposed, the resultant economic benefits could only flow if the business district were permitted unencumbered horizontal expansion into existing non-commercial areas.

In the 1920s, however, the prevailing model of height limits with no zoning was swiftly replaced by a new model of zoning and height limits, except in the existing business core. The exception was Washington, D.C., which retained relatively low height limits while zoning itself into a corner – a sure recipe for space shortages and inflated rents down the line (it also did not help that L'Enfant's city plan, with its extravagantly wide streets, left Washington with less downtown buildable area than almost any other large American city).

So which side of the debate was right? Was there a right answer at all? It is difficult to know, since there is no large North American city with a meaningful height limit but no zoning that can serve as a point of comparison (European examples are abundant, however). In a sense the full urban vision of those who advocated for limits is more distant than ever, for not only has the pro-height and agglomeration viewpoint (as presented in its undiluted essence in Triumph of the City) continued to assert itself, but even the historical preservationists whom Glaeser takes to task frequently advocate against horizontal densification, as the lower-density neighborhoods encircling many a central business district frequently happen to be filled with a city's most notable architecture, or most vocal homeowners. Still, the economic claims of the pro-limit real estate men of the 1920s should in theory be no less valid today than they were at the time, and remain available as a potential, but long-dormant, counter-argument to the economics of the agglomerationists.

The Zoning Paradox

2011-09-23T15:23:00.000-04:00

At the new website The Atlantic Cities, Ryan Avent has published an adapted portion of his new book in which he makes a common sense, but infrequently raised, observation about the economic effects of zoning laws:

"People tend to have a proprietary feeling about their neighborhoods, particularly when they have large sums of money on the line thanks to their investment in their home. This feeling leaves urban property rights in a gray area. Residents are remarkably willing to dictate to private property owners what can and can't be done with their land. They're willing to approve restrictive zoning rules and lobby against permitting in ways that dramatically reduce potential land value, without ever dreaming of compensating owners and would-be developers."

If zoning reduces land values, however, how is it that zoning has been convincingly shown, by Ed Glaeser among others, that zoning contributes to inflated housing costs? The answer, what I'm referring to as the zoning paradox, is simply stated: zoning increases the per unit cost of housing, while decreasing underlying land values.* I've alluded to this before in an earlier post, but let me illustrate with a real life example to demonstrate this seemingly counterintuitive point. You may be able to find an example in your own town or city that will work out in similar fashion.

Here's an image from near my old neighborhood in Nashville, the Music Row area, where what had long been a single-family residential area was rezoned decades ago for a mix of office, residential and commercial space in the area to the west of the alley running between the two streets shown (this was in reaction to the arrival of the city's famous music recording industry into the area). Given its mix of uses, the rezoned area does not enjoy the typical "protections" of Euclidean zoning, while the single family area is strictly limited to single-family and duplex residential. Since protection from the externalities generated by incompatible uses is commonly mentioned as an economic benefit of zoning, this factor should, in theory, weight the scales on the side of the single-family area.

If we look at the appraised value of one of the houses on the rezoned side -- a house of similar characteristics to those in the single family area, having been built for that purpose in the 1920s -- we find a per acre land value of $1,786,000. On the opposite side of the block, where duplex residential zoning applies, land values are only $294,000 per acre! In fact we can go further and note that the combined value of the single family home and the land on the residential side is only half the value of the land alone on the rezoned side of the block. The net effect, therefore, is to lower overall property values. The property tax benefits to the city of more permissive zoning seem clear.

It's worth noting that these values are derived from an allowance of as much as 80 units per acre on the mixed-use side (a genuinely urban density), while the duplex zoning on the residential side permits slightly less than 12 units per acre. Yet with this greater intensity of development, per unit costs fall considerably for new construction (although the price per square foot may actually rise**). By contrast, on the residential side, even though land values are low by comparison, a developer purchasing an existing home must build a very large and expensive house to justify a tear-down. Since the market for very large homes is saturated by the imposition of minimum lot sizes and other low-density regulations throughout the city, however, this means that little redevelopment will occur, even though this neighborhood is only a mile and a half from the downtown. Existing houses stagger on, while development is displaced elsewhere.

Overall, the effect of these density and use-limiting restrictions seems to be to concentrate financial benefits in the hands of incumbent homeowners (by inflating the values of homes), while impoverishing the city as a whole (by substantially devaluing the property tax base while increasing the cost of both rentals and new home purchases).

One last point: simply because permissive zoning increases land values, does it necessarily follow that eliminating some or all density-related restrictions -- minimum lot sizes, height limits, etc. -- will provide a net economic benefit to the city? I'd suggest Michael Lewyn's work as a good starting point on that issue, but in a follow-up post I'll venture a couple more thoughts on the topic.

Related posts: Did Zoning Ever Conserve Property Values?

*See On the effects of minimum-lot-size zoning, S. Bucovetsky. This paper deals with minimum lot sizes only, but logically the same analysis should apply to other restrictions, such as FAR ratios and other density and use limitations.
**The higher per square foot prices paid in certain instances that I was able to identify suggest that buyers, at least in this market, are willing to give up large amounts of square footage in exchange for a reasonable price -- to the extent of taking a apartment 60% smaller than a new duplex home for a price only 30% less. This could indicate an undersupply of mid- and small-sized apartments in this area (almost certainly true) or that the marginal value of each additional square foot above, say, 1200 sq. ft. is quite low for the type of buyers who are looking in the area.

Vancouver and the Zoning Straitjacket

2011-09-19T06:00:00.011-04:00

Edit 9/20: Added links to Vancouver planner Larry Beasley's comments on tall buildings and DC's Height Act from last year, revealing at the very least an ambivalent attitude toward skyscrapers.

As a follow up to last Monday's post, I'd like to take a bit of a historical excursion to illustrate the effect that zoning has had on Vancouver's downtown commercial district, using that city only as a representative example of many dozens of others throughout North America. The hypothesis that skyscrapers are a necessary adaptation to artificial constraints on commercial space depends upon a showing that space has, in fact, been delineated by legal means, rather than by market forces.

As a starting point, consider this 1898 view of Vancouver, drawn some years after the arrival of the Canadian Pacific Railway that kicked off an accelerating urban expansion. The city population was only around 26,000 at this point, only slightly greater than nearby Victoria. The commercial heart of the still-unzoned city is outlined in red, and occupies somewhere around 10 to 15 percent of the intensively built urban area:

In the decades following the drawing of this city view, Vancouver's population exploded, topping 100,000 by 1911 and reaching 246,000 in 1931. Notably, in 1927, Vancouver adopted its first Euclidean zoning ordinance, which for the first time designated the single-family residential districts that today cover over 70 percent of the city proper. A 1930s-era aerial view of the downtown (the opposite direction from the previous image) shows what had happened to the central commercial district in the intervening 30 years, again, with the commercial areas outlined in red:

The area containing most commercial activity has expanded by about 6.5 times since 1898 as compared to a population growth of 9.5 times (the industrial areas have grown at a far more rapid rate). There are virtually no high-rise buildings at this point, although the technology to build them had been in existence for at least 30 years. That large commercial buildings had replaced many hundreds of earlier freestanding residential homes is evident by comparing the two images. The pattern of growth is that of a horizontal expansion of a mid-rise urban fabric punctuated by the occasional taller building, rather than a vertical concentration of space near the waterfront.

Eighty years later, the population of the city had more than doubled to 640,000 in a metro area of 2.3 million, representing a metro area increase of 7.8 times, yet the downtown office area had increased by only 1.3 times since the early 1930s. The contemporaneous aerial image below shows the progression from 1898 to 1930 to the present day, with the solid red area representing the 1898 downtown, the outlined red area the 1930 downtown, based on a 1930 zoning map, while the green outline shows expansions of the business district since then, based on a current zoning map and the aerial view:

Vancouver's zoning map confirms this, showing the downtown district as the small purplish-shaded area in the middle of the top half of the map (a separate height-limited zone covers Eastside, an area that was nearly demolished for highway construction in the 1960s). A handful of retail subcenters to the south, marked in red, contribute some additional land, although their zone's description states an intent to "limit[] the amount of office space." A vast trainyard, zoned industrial (light blue), blocks expansion to the east; the West End, zoned residential, blocks it to the west, with more residential to the south, although with some limited potential for expansion in the False Creek area:

And just how flexible has the zoning code been to changing needs over the last 80 years? Compare the above to the 1930 plan drawn up by prolific American planning consultant Harland Bartholomew, who was bluntly given his task by city leaders for whom the moral virtues of the single-family detached home needed no explanation (p. 60: "When Bartholomew asked what abuses he should consider in the interim zoning by-law of 1927 he was preparing, the chairman replied that 'the only serious abuse . . . is the intrusion of undesirable apartment houses into residential districts'"):

If the two maps are compared closely, it is possible to see how, overall, there has been virtually no change in the important boundaries. The combined office/industrial area is nearly identical in both 1930 and in the present map. At most, commercial and residential uses have succeeded small areas of industry in the downtown and parts south (Bartholomew's most obvious miscalulation -- the presence of excessive amounts of waterfront industrial separating homes from the business district -- was actually the plan's greatest asset, as it inadvertently would permit this limited succession of uses). The single-family areas remain well "protected" against the encroachment of higher value uses in line with the intent of the 1920s planners.

Deprived of space for horizontal expansion, the story of Vancouver's office districts since the 1950s, when construction resumed after a 20-year hiatus, is one of leapfrogging edge cities and debates over height limits. Having spread its population across the entire Burrard Peninsula in detached homes ever since the arrival of the streetcars in the 1890s, Vancouver had little land remaining within the city boundaries for large new commercial subcenters, except that now a residential straitjacket held the downtown within strict boundaries. Residential NIMBY-ism, as acute in Vancouver as in any American city, fought tooth and nail against even modest efforts at residential densification, much less expansion of the growing office sector. The pressure cooker shakes and rattles:

"Vancouver’s rapidly accelerating growth and limited building space is forcing planners, builders and community groups to reexamine current height restrictions. Vancouver’s old height restrictions capped downtown buildings at 450 feet, but under new regulations those guidelines have been relaxed up to 650 feet." 10/27/2007

More controversially, the city earlier this year floated plans to relax height limits in the Eastside area, one of the few remaining large-scale area of the 1920s-era downtown that has not been eradicated by high-rises. The proposed change has drawn very reasonable criticism from several quarters (see here and here), yet none that address the fundamental problem: that there is nowhere near enough land available to business uses in Vancouver.

Moreover, the zoning-driven shortage of homes has for some time been increasing demand for high-rise residential towers in the downtown, one of the few places such dense "infill" can be built. With much commercial space having taken flight to the edge cities of Burnaby, Richmond and Surrey, it appears the undersupplied residential may even be capable of outbidding undersupplied commercial in Vancouver's downtown. The long term implications of this trend for the city are apparently of concern to Vancouver's city government.

Now one can certainly make a case that high rises and edge cities might have multiplied in Vancouver regardless of zoning constraints -- the emergence of a large subsidiary center in Burnaby during an auto era seems predictable given the area's freeway configuration -- but as we see in other cities of the world, where zoning imposes few use-based constraints, mid-rise construction proliferates, with only a handful of scattered towers (Latin American and Japanese cities afford numerous examples). Ed Glaeser has written frequently on the effect of zoning on housing costs while extolling skyscrapers -- perhaps a new study could shed light on the link between all three.

Please note, again, that this post is not intended as a specific critique of Vancouver, as the analysis is probably applicable to dozens or hundreds of other cities in North America which fell into zoning's grasp in the 1920s. The city is arguably one of the best-run of its size, having avoided many of the poor decisions made by American cities. The generally applicable nature of the observations here is the important thing.

Vancouver's own planners hesitant to endorse tall buildings: Vancouver planner Larry Beasley last year praised Washington DC's Height Act, and is critical of the idea that height is necessary for economic vitality

Further reading: Zoning and the single-family landscape: large new houses and neighbourhood change in Vancouver (discussing Vancouver's zoning history generally and the city's extraordinary micromanagement of residential zoning in particular).

Nice historic photos of the city over time: http://aaronwolf.blogspot.com/2011/08/vancouver-over-100-years-of-photographs.html

The Densest (Urban) Environment in the World

2011-09-15T19:15:00.005-04:00

"Central Park" on the ship.

No, not the Upper East Side, nor Hong Kong, nor even Dharavi, but the new cruise ship Allure of the Seas. At 1187 feet long, and having capacity for nearly 9,000 passengers and crew members, the population density of the ship, when at capacity, can effectively exceed 1.2 million per square mile. This is well in excess of Dharavi's 800,000.*

Lest one think the urban comparison is overstated, the urban qualities of the ship, easily visible in its design, are emphasized in its promotional materials:

"Longer than New York City's famed Chrysler building, the Allure of the Seas is so big, that it has "neighborhoods" like Central Park, Royal Promenade and Boardwalk. Like a city at sea, each "neighborhood" has its own unique "personality" along with numerous attractions that everyone onboard can enjoy..."

The New York Times noted the same quality:

"After we ate at the Chops Grille the next night, with its Chicago stockyards theme, and another day at Sorrento’s pizzeria, with photos of Manhattan, I began to see that the Allure is an urban ship, a celebration of cities, a 24-hour dream of lights and movement and the power of being in the center."

The cruise ship arguably represents the ultimate glorification of the public realm at the expense of the private, with living quarters, for most passengers, cramped in comparison to those of the cheapest hotel lodgings on land. It is also the ultimate pedestrian-centric environment, reliant entirely on foot transportation. And yet, the ship is a highly desirable "getaway" for Americans from across the country.

In spite of these typically urban, and traditionalist urban, qualities, the architect best known for deriving inspiration from the design of large passenger vessels is none other than Le Corbusier, who was attracted by the streamlined nautical aesthetic of ships as well as their implications for urbanism. The Unité d'Habitation was itself conceived in part as a self-contained, permanently-anchored ocean liner equipped with both necessities and amenities, thus taking the lesson of the big ship quite literally -- perhaps too literally. The Unité mimicked the ocean liner's isolation even when there was no need to do so, and shrunk units even in the absence of spatial constraints.

Are there other, more pro-urban, lessons to be learned from the "high density design and rigorous servicing discipline" of ships, as Stewart Brand asked in How Buildings Learn? I'll leave that one hanging.

*The since-demolished Kowloon Walled City was reported to have had over 3,000,000 per square mile in the late 1980s – essentially representing four Dharavis stacked on top of one another.

Skyscrapers: Cause and Effect

2011-09-12T06:00:00.023-04:00

Last week, Planetizen ran an excellent piece on the role of skyscrapers in today's cities, contrasting the arguments of James Howard Kunstler and Ed Glaeser along with commentary from the engineers and architects responsible for designing and tall buildings and their infrastructure. It examines arguments based on comparative energy use, maintenance and refurbishment and on the effect on urbanism and city life, ultimately concluding that whether skyscrapers are appropriate in a particular case is a complex question that will turn on a variety of contextual factors.

This is a topic that I've discussed before, here, here and here. But I'd raise one more question: is it really possible to separate a discussion on the role of the skyscraper from the land use patterns and zoning constraints of the typical North American city?

Leon Krier has an illustration on this point in The Architecture of Community, where he depicts a recognizably American city of a handful of skyscrapers surrounded by a vast sea of detached single family homes next to his preferred model of the polycentric city with multiple nodes, none obviously larger in scale or importance to one another, under which he observes:

"Exactly like an individual who has reached maturity, a 'mature' city cannot grow bigger or spread out (vertically or horizontally) without losing its essential quality. Just like a family of individuals, a city can grow only by reproduction and multiplication, that is, by becoming polycentric and polynuclear."

The North American skyscraper, arguably, is only a symptom of the failure of cities to adhere to this growth model, a model that is inherently dense and mixed-used to enable the provision of convenient urban services and amenities to each quarter.

Consider one of the best examples of the North American type: Vancouver, which avoided the construction of downtown freeways, and which has a large and efficient mass transit network. As can easily be seen from an aerial map, Vancouver is a monocentric city, with commercial high-rises heavily concentrated in the downtown area outlined in red, representing just over 1% of the greater metro area:

The Vancouver city government confirms this, noting that over two-thirds of all city jobs (and 22 percent of regional jobs) are located in the immediate downtown area. In the same document, the city tries to allay fears that jobs are "moving out to the suburbs," even to the extent of touting zoning exclusively for commercial use (i.e., subsidizing office space). Unsurprisingly, the city notes that 102,800 commute in to the central business district each day, while 16,400 commute out. The transit system itself reflects this monocentric arrangement, as all lines of the SkyTrain converge on the small downtown. Outside the downtown, suburban-style single-family detached housing predominates, occupying the vast majority of city area -- perhaps in excess of 90%.

With this sort of development pattern, is it possible not to have a dense core of skyscrapers, regardless of what one may think of them? When residential areas are 1) low density and 2) zone out commercial and industrial over large areas, the remaining office areas, confined to the original central business district by an ever-expanding belt of homes, have nowhere to go but up. The exception, Washington D.C., its height constrained by law and its building footprints hemmed in by streets of excessive width, compensates by spreading its downtown horizontally and further outwards to several centers beyond its jurisdictional boundaries.

The mass transit system, in response to this arrangement, bends all lines toward the core, yet this only worsens the imbalance by further raising property values at the center. At last, we arrive at the familiar arrangement of 500-foot office buildings surrounded by mile upon mile of low-density homes, until the bursting commercial downtown leapfrogs out to an edge city on the residential fringe, leading to hand-wringing in the city council about the "decline" of the downtown. (Tyson's Corner lookalike Richmond, along with Burnaby, seem to fulfill that function in Vancouver, being as commercial-heavy, but even more auto-centric, than the downtown). Can the skyscraper really be blamed for this state of affairs?

On the other hand, an urbanism on the model Krier proposes, which exists in countless cities outside North America, including those of the United States' own southern neighbor, has no economic need for skyscrapers, and sprouts only a few, those driven by corporate status-seeking rather than necessity. The issue becomes nearly moot, and height limits, where they are implemented, less contentious.

A Vancouver built to a Parisian level of density, and imitating Paris' lack of Euclidean zoning, would occupy the area shown below -- barely 10% of the existing regional metro area, with no high-rises, and with the same population. The key difference, though, being that while today's Vancouver (and dozens or hundreds of cities like it) is built out with a giant and immovable low-density residential buffer, forcing the city to shunt its residential growth into towers in the already overburdened downtown, or to engage in a difficult process of upzoning low density residential, in this model, the city has abundant room for growth within its own borders by "reproduction and multiplication."

Coding Emergence

2011-09-07T15:52:00.004-04:00

I've been reading about the work of Swiss programmer and 3D artist Pascal Mueller, who has for the last several years been developing and refining a computer program capable of generating cities of realistic form and complexity. As the paper introducing the program describes:

"Modeling and visualization of man-made systems such as large cities is a great challenge for computer graphics. Cities are systems of high functional and visual complexity. They reflect the historical, cultural, economic and social changes over time in every aspect in which they are seen. Examining pictures of a large-scale city such as New York reveals a fantastic diversity of street patterns, buildings, forms and textures. The modeling and visualization of large-area cities using computers has become feasible with the large memory, processing and graphics power of today's hardware.

We present a system called CityEngine which is capable of modeling a complete city using a comparatively small set of statistical
and geographical input data and is highly controllable by the user."

The potential applications for a procedural creation range from research and educational purposes such as urban planning and creation of virtual environments to simulation. Especially the entertainment market such as the movie and game industry have a high demand for the quick creation of complex environments in their applications. ...

The results of one such modeling exercise are shown at right, where a Pompeii lookalike was generated using a few basic inputs -- essentially, a form-based code with architectural guidelines -- derived from study of the archaeological site.

Most interesting to me is CityEngine's process for creating street networks, which Mueller divides into four separate categories: the "basic," or organic, street network, the grid, the radial pattern, and a pattern designed to let streets follow the route of least elevation on hilly terrain (p. 304). From the point of view of the programmer, the organic network is simultaneously the simplest and the most complex of the patterns:

"This [the "basic"] is the simplest possible rule. There is no superimposed pattern and all roads follow population density. This may also be referred to as the natural growth of a transportation network. Mainly older parts of cities show such patterns. All other rules are based on restrictions of this rule by narrowing the choices of branch angles and road segment length."

The program therefore provides a glimpse at a possible way to mathematically recreate, or at least imitate, the process of organic street growth. Missing from this initial model is the element of time, and a way to show the evolution of a network, but this is something Mueller has since worked on heavily, as can be seen at this link. The paper describing the methodology is here. Remarkably, this appears to be one of the first attempts to realistically model the process of incremental, emergent urban growth by computer simulation (and no, SimCity does not quite count). To read more, Mueller has most of his articles linked on his website -- this is definitely a work in progress and something to follow.

Friday Read: Zoning, Here and in France

2011-09-02T10:24:00.004-04:00

A law journal article on the economic and environmental problems inherent in Euclidean zoning, always beneficial to read even if one is familiar with the arguments, but especially nice for launching a critique simultaneously from all ideological angles, leaving a little something for Randal O'Toole, Ed Glaeser and David Owen to each nod in agreement with:

"Euclidean zoning distorts the real estate market in so many ways that it manages to simultaneously conflict with conservative, libertarian, and liberal values. In addition to increasing the average price of housing, “[t]he fact that a zoning map allows high density housing in some areas, only single family housing in others, only industrial and commercial use in designated locations, and high rise office buildings in downtown areas, creates great disparity in value among a city’s many properties.” While “[a] local regulation imposing a maximum land value would almost certainly be viewed as a [Fifth Amendment] taking, . . . zoning laws that effectively impose a maximum land value have been upheld. . . .”

And because municipal zoning authorities, rather than the market, dictate what housing types will be available and favor single-family homes, “profitable sites for [multifamily housing] are artificially scarce” and thus artificially expensive. Such a situation is clearly incompatible with free-market principles, and since affordable housing often means some type of multi-family housing, it is also hostile to the goal of increasing the access of lower-income families to affordable housing. In addition, Euclidean zoning increases the burden on middle-class families: while the artificial scarcity of multi-family sites might be expected to reduce the cost of single-family homes by increasing the availability of single-family sites, this possibility is nullified by the tendency of suburban municipalities to require large minimum lot and house sizes. That “forces people to consume land and improvements they do not want,” at a higher cost than they would pay were they allowed to buy only the amount of property they want. “This forced consumption is inefficient because the recipient could sell the extra land and improvements on the market for more than what they are worth to the recipient. . . .”

As a bonus, it contains an in-depth comparative look at French and American (specifically, New York and Parisian) approaches to land use and zoning:

"[T]he most recent Paris zoning code divides the city and surrounding greenspace into just four zones, three of which are neither residential nor commercial (those three are Zone N (Nature and Forests); Zone UV (Green Urban), i.e. parks and other public landscaped areas; Zone UGSU (Major Urban Services), i.e. train stations and rail lines, hospitals, waste treatment centers, water reservoirs, riverside ports, convention centers, and major centers of industrial distribution); the city’s houses, apartment buildings, shops, cafés, offices, and other commercial establishments thus fall within a single zone, General Urban."
* * *

As for the relative absence of unsightly buildings, this is at least in part due to the fact that Paris has historically tended to zone for structures rather than uses. Between 1607 and 1902, zoning was used to set maximum building heights, to regulate building materials due to fire risk, and to impose minimum courtyard sizes to promote access to sunlight and free circulation of air. This has continued to the present day, with Paris’s General Urban district subdivided not into use zones but into areas of different maximum heights and structure types."

This is a true comparative look at property rights, much unlike the International Property Rights Index I mentioned earlier this week, and delves into the crucial details that, when applied in the aggregate, have enormous consequences for the resultant urban form.

Last Look At Seaside

2011-09-01T06:00:00.001-04:00

After reading Bruce Richards' comment on the previous Seaside post, I returned to the town on my last day in Florida and took a closer look at some of the "Krier lanes," the narrow footpaths running behind and between the houses of Seaside which apparently double as utility easements. Only by walking these paths can one appreciate some of the more subtle design decisions made by the town planners.

What I found interesting to note is not only the frequency of accessory houses, but the presence of four lots (in the center of the image at right, although there are several others in the town) of typical Seaside dimensions of 50'x100' which have each been subdivided into two 50'x50' lots, a size very close to that which Nathan Lewis has suggested for a dense neighborhood of single-family detached homes.

The only access to these lots, as with the accessory houses, is by the lanes. Despite the small size of the lots, the houses are quite ample:

The house to the left in the top photo is, I believe, this one, a 1,400 square foot house with 550 square feet of porch space. The address is given as Savannah Street, one of the wide, brick-paved streets, yet the only direct access is by the paths.

A city of residential lots of this average size, using a distance between houses the same as that in the lower photo (about 16') for rights-of-way, and with short and narrow blocks of 300'x100', would attain a density of over 9,100 units/square mile, or, using the American average of 2.59 persons per household, around 24,000 people per square mile. A few wider streets would be needed at intervals, but they should not alter this outcome greatly. A real life example is Nathan Lewis' own Tokyo suburb of Seijo, which he's used to familiarize us with the neglected area of Japanese urbanism:

The Seijo street view, with a remarkably Seaside-like house on the left:

Or, at right, consider an entire neighborhood built along these lines. This is a development at the fringes of Tokyo -- just a bit further west steep mountains quickly rise up. It also happens to be about 70 acres, very close to Seaside's 80. Even the street network is vaguely similar, yet density is about 25% higher. It's not necessarily a model to be copied, but it does show what could be accomplished using the basic 50'x50' lot that Seaside pioneered along with 16' streets. To densify further, while retaining a single-family detached form, subtract half or so of the 50'x50' lots and replace them with the "accessory dwellings" that are abundant at Seaside, and which, under separate ownership, can fit on their own 20'x25' lots:

These cottages offer around 500-800 square feet, not much different from the "micro homes" currently being built in Portland that commenter Vince has mentioned.

The promise offered by these common sense innovations at Seaside unfortunately has not carried over into most New Urbanist developments. At Kentlands, for instance, although many individual houses can fit within a 50'x50' lot, a rear yard of equal size has typically been reserved for a detached garage, an issue I've talked about before. But the lessons of Seaside are there for anyone willing to look a little closer at the remarkable planning that went into it.

For more on these issues, I strongly recommend reading Nathan Lewis' site if you haven't discovered it already:

Yours truly enjoying a beverage and a good book in Seaside
after a day exploring the town.

Ranking "Property Rights"

2011-08-29T10:53:00.009-04:00

In a previous post I mentioned the advocacy of economist Hernando de Soto for titling programs in the informal settlements (i.e. slums) of Latin American countries. De Soto claims that an informal arrangement of land ownership, which is to say an arrangement without the official sanction of a public body, impairs the extraction of capital from land and suppresses property values. In the 2011 International Property Rights Index, published earlier this year, the Property Rights Alliance attempts to rank property rights protection in over 100 countries using de Soto's particular economic theories as the yardstick.

In addition to "registering property," another of the listed criteria for the ranking is "access to loans," which "is included in the IPRI because access to a bank loan without collateral serves as a proxy for the level of development of financial institutions in a country." As recently as 2009, however, that year's Index gave a different explanation for the use of this variable: "because accessibility to a bank loan represents the opportunity for an individual to subsequently obtain property. Consequently, the easier it is to become a property owner, the stronger society’s support for a strong formalized property rights system and the investment in property."

At that point, someone may have informed the authors that the rate of homeownership in, say, Mexico, is over 80%, and that only 13% of Mexican homes are encumbered with mortgages. India, too, has a homeownership rate of over 80%, and it is 79% in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Increasing access to loans actually appears to be correlated with a decrease in the rate of property ownership. How do countries such as Mexico and India achieve this remarkable result? Through two primary means:

As the San Diego Union-Tribune notes: "Because Mexico's building regulations are less stringent than those in the United States, it's possible to build small, attached housing units on a massive scale to achieve large economies of scale."
Secondly, describing a situation in Honduras common to many Latin American countries: "[A] high rate of owner occupancy can be attributed to the fact that 46% of all residential properties in Tegucigalpa were obtained through illegal land invasion..."

Let's consider these two explanations. In the first, because Mexico has far lesser restrictions on private property rights -- for instance, a lack of minimum lot sizes, street widths or square feet per unit -- it is possible to construct immense quantities of highly affordable, and decent, housing that people can purchase without even the need for a loan, and still the developers profit. And yet, in the Index, Mexico is ranked 78th for its protection of property rights, far behind the United States at 18, which in spite of exceptional "access to bank loans" only pushed homeownership, for a fleeting moment, to 69 percent.

Favela street.

Property obtained through "invasion" of private or public land, on the other hand, is the least regulated of all. Because the state does not formally recognize the occupants' claim to the land, zoning and land use laws are not enforced, and individual property "rights" (defined as an individual's right to use his land for his chosen purposes) are arguably at their fullest, subject only to the possibility of eviction by the state, yet, in the slums of Mexico, the odds that this will happen are remote (see p. 14). Yet, bizarrely, it is in this freest of all property rights environments that de Soto perceives protection of property rights most lacking.

Where vacant public or private land is valued highly for residential use, impoverished squatters essentially condemn the large land holdings of indifferent absentee landowners for the benefit of thousands -- the exact inverse of the typical process of urban renewal in the property-rights protecting United States, where in the late 60s and early 70s alone over two million mostly low-income people were evicted from their titled homes to the ultimate benefit of wealthy and influential interests, whether those of well-connected property developers or land-hungry private institutions.

The home-building squatters are in fact living out a Lockean version of property rights, a vision which appeals to natural rather than legal rights:

"Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature hath placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men: for this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to, at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others." John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government.

Interestingly, the Index appears to contain some of the seeds of self-doubt. A study of an informal settlement in Buenos Aires (p. 58) tells a story that is at odds with the dire portrait often painted:

"In La Cava, only 16 percent of those polled said they have a property title for their houses. Some even asked what that was. Among the rest, 17 percent said they have an informal document, usually consisting of an informal sale/purchase invoice. Altogether, 84 percent said they do not have formal documentation. On average, they lived 15 years at the same house, which shows low turnover rates. Those who said they have a property title also have lived at the same house 15 years on average. [Note: longer than the U.S. average of 12 years].
....
There are not many problems in the sale/purchase of housing because deals are made with people they trust and payment is in cash at the moment of possession (90 percent of respondents). Only 27 percent said there could be installments but much trust or familiar ties were needed.

We asked La Cava dwellers how they solve problems with neighbors when there is conflict related to continued coexistence, such as negative externalities.
....
Confirming conclusions from a subjective cost interpretation of the Coase Theorem, 76 percent said they solve these problems by talking with the other side. They prefer not having intermediaries, either from the same neighborhood or outside, and they avoid violence at all cost."

This case study calls into question two of de Soto's major assumptions: that informal owners face insecurity of tenure, when they in fact have longer tenure than American homeowners; and that without titles, sales will be difficult to make, when they seem to be easier, quicker and cheaper to make, being bought and sold like any other good. This informal model of development is not necessarily one to emulate, but one to learn from, and particularly a good way to sharpen thinking as to what exactly is meant when we're talking about "property rights," and what sort of criteria might be best used to rank countries along those lines, if looking beyond the ones used in the Index.

Sources and Additional Reading:
2011 International Property Rights Index
Mexico's House Rules
Homeownership Rates: A Global Perspective
Urban Land Tenure Options: Titles or Rights?
Regularization of Informal Settlements in Latin America
Secure Tenure in Latin America and the Caribbean
The Role of Urban Slum Titling in Slum Improvement

Alys Beach: The New Urbanism Samples the Old

2011-08-22T22:47:00.005-04:00

Throughout the week, I'll be making the most of a trip to the Florida coast to post on several of the New Urbanist towns and developments in the area from an 'Old Urbanist' perspective. Today's piece, the third and final, examines Alys Beach.

Alys Beach, even in its current embryonic form, is the most promising New Urbanist project of the three I've visited over the past week. Promising, in that it discards the New Urbanism's 19th century American small town planning model in favor of an unapologetically traditional format, at least in part, and has the potential to show the way forward for subsequent developments. However, the issue of cars and parking -- the planning challenge of the day -- remains in flux, and it's not clear whether Alys Beach has made much of an advancement in that key area.

Courtyard townhouse under construction: The exterior
walls consist of concrete blocks which are filled with
rebar and solid mortar.

The project is the newest of the group, having been designed in 2003. In a difficult economic climate, less than 20 percent of all lots have been sold, with even fewer homes actually built. The developer (Birmingham-based EBSCO) has limited initial sales to a third of the project area and has engaged in very little speculative building. Homes are largely custom built by purchasers of individual parcels. With so little completed, there wasn't much to photograph, but enough has been constructed that it's possible to extrapolate the built areas to the remainder of the development. Encouragingly, several homes were under construction at the time I visited.

The description of designer DPZ focuses mainly on architecture rather than urban form:

"In the tradition of nearby Seaside and Rosemary Beach, Alys Beach will be a model resort town-- a place where the best concepts in town planning are applied to create an ideal urban experience in harmony with nature. ... Seeking to achieve an overall feeling of calm and simplicity for the town, the design team turned to a number of sources for inspiration. A trip to Bermuda led to the discovery of the perfect architectural style for the project. The simple volumes of whitewashed masonry and stucco typical of the style possess an uncomplicated, organic beauty. Buildings are grouped into small compounds and unified by perimeter walls, which are higher and more formal in the urban zones, lower and more rustic in the rural areas. The Bermuda style is combined with a patio house type that originated in Antigua and a courtyard building type that came from California."

The courtyard house is a traditional form, and the streetscape that results from these attached U-shaped dwellings is one which is unmistakably traditional as well:

There are several elements here which are unprecedented, or nearly so, for the New Urbanism. The exclusive use of attached residential dwellings -- of an outstanding quality -- is one. The flush street surface, with no sidewalk or lane differentiation, is entirely for the person on foot (promotional materials show children biking down a similar street, but when I tried to do the same it somehow did not feel appropriate -- the natural urge, reinforced by the level of architectural detail and glimpses into interior courtyards, is to walk the bike). The "subtle mechanical order" of Seaside and Rosemary Beach is avoided by a gradual widening of the street as it leaves a public square and by a use of a fina-like design concept in which buildings extend outdoor stairways, window shutters and large planters two or three feet into the right of way. The street, less than 30 feet at its widest point (lower image) narrows to under 20 (upper image). The combined effect is entirely traditional, and the resulting streetscape 100% "place," even if it could stand to be narrowed just a bit more.

To observe how Alys Beach deals with the automobile, take a turn down a narrow lane leading off the street in the above photos (an appropriate width for the two-story courtyard format):

At the end of this lane, behind the courtyard homes, we encounter ... a parking lot, complete with nature band-aids, to borrow the terminology of James Howard Kunstler:

Turning left to face the lot:

It's an unusually nice parking lot, but a parking lot nonetheless, making car storage more prominent than at either Rosemary Beach or Seaside. There appear to be at least two spaces provided for each courtyard house. These common lots are a fundamental design element of the Alys Beach plan, appearing below as the tree-dotted areas.

In this plan, we see that there are actually three different types of street: the pedestrian street, vehicular ways with raised sidewalks, and the paths leading between and around the network of parking lots. Only half of the courtyard homes open onto pedestrian ways, while two thirds of the street network is primarily or exclusively for the car, a proportion similar or greater than at Rosemary Beach.

An example of one of the vehicular streets is below, showing a 30-foot right-of-way:

The building lots in this area have a refreshing variety that characterizes the development as a whole, with dimensions including 60'x50', 30'x80' and ranging up to 40'x110'. Zero lot line designs are the norm. On the narrowest lots, suggested designs show a large townhouse, abutting the street, separated from a loft unit at the rear of the lot by a spacious courtyard (the photo shows such a design). Unlike the mini-cottages of Seaside or the granny flats of Rosemary Beach, these loft units will not be available for separate rental, according to the sales office. One doubts how much use they are likely to receive.

The area immediately adjacent to the beach incorporates a somewhat more irregular, if not organic, plan, and it turns out this area was not actually designed by DPZ, but by Porphyrios Associates, the firm of classicist Demetri Porphyrios:

In this area, lots sizes are as small as 30'x40', yet the insistence on providing two parking places per unit prevails even here, in the form of on-site parking rather than common lots. The overall plan provides for increasing lot sizes away from the beach, but it's not clear if this distribution actually reflects market demand since -- as the very helpful realtor at the sales office informed me -- subdividing lots will not be permitted. The smallest lots seem undersupplied, while the 40'x110' lots, offered at such high prices, look like strong candidates for partition. The designer explains that the distribution of lot sizes is attributable to the "urban-to-rural transect," yet the practical effect is to flatten the price distribution for lots, compensating for lower land values farther from the beach by setting larger minimum lot sizes.

One final point: like Rosemary Beach, Alys Beach shies away from embracing Highway 30A, adding large landscaped buffers with blocking hedges and broad bike paths and/or access roads which are nearly as wide as 30A itself. At 120 feet between facing buildings, the gap is not quite as large as at Rosemary Beach, but given the modest and traditional scale of the pedestrian paths and elegant buildings, the contrast is even more jarring. Although traffic noise from the road was a design concern here, the effect of drawing back from 30A in this manner will be to encourage higher traffic speeds, partially negating the intended benefits of the setback.

Despite quibbles with street layouts and lot dimensions, Alys Beach appears to be a true breakthrough for the New Urbanism. The architecture hits a high note of elegant simplicity, the pattern of attached courtyard dwellings establishes is a welcome change, and the presence of narrow, pedestrian-centric streets shows a confident embrace of traditional urbanism. One nagging concern, though, is whether this community represents a turning point in design, or is simply a magnificent one-off, the product of a particular architectural vision that is unlikely to be repeated.

The issue of cars and parking, though, needs some creative rethinking. In a community envisoned as "a place where out feet will take us where we want to go," as the Alys Beach exhibit proclaims, surely the designers imagined feet taking residents elsewhere than the driver's side door of a conveniently-parked SUV. Nathan Lewis in previous comments suggested the idea of a single parking garage at the edge of the community from which residents could proceed on foot, bike or golf cart -- an approach which has been implemented in other resort towns, and which is especially feasible in Florida's mild climate. Seaside's founder Robert Davis suggested valet parking some years ago to deal with a crush of cars there. There are many potential alternatives, but a community explicitly designed around walking, the notion of prioritizing access to the car above all else must be reconsidered.

That about wraps up my look at these three fascinating communities on the Florida panhandle. Thanks for reading!

The Successor: Rosemary Beach

2011-08-18T19:36:00.006-04:00

Throughout the week, I'll be making the most of a trip to the Florida coast to post on several of the New Urbanist towns and developments in the area from an 'Old Urbanist' perspective. Today's piece examines Rosemary Beach.

Rosemary Beach's origin dates to 1995, a time when the New Urbanism was in rapid ascendance. The Congress for the New Urbanism had been formed two years before, Seaside and Kentlands had already enjoyed great success, and as real estate began to enter its 10-year boom period work was abundant. Given the chance to design another coastal Florida town, DPZ might have simply copied Seaside's successful formula, but as the designers themselves explain, they chose not to:

"Fifteen years after the design of Seaside, Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company was given the opportunity to return to the Florida Panhandle to create another new neighborhood on Scenic Highway 30-A. A New York-based investment firm had purchased a 52-acre property just seven miles east of Seaside, hoping to reproduce that project’s success. Given this objective, the clear mandate was to differ from that earlier model as little as possible. However, the opportunity to revisit the concept of the coastal resort town after fifteen years of experience allowed the design team to apply techniques that distinguish Rosemary Beach from Seaside in several fundamental ways. ...

Since most residents of Seaside use their cars rarely, the plan of Rosemary Beach introduces a rear alley system so that cars can be parked in garages that are not visible from the street. About half of these garages are topped by granny flats, small apartments that can be rented out to help finance the construction of the main house. The presence of alleys also means that not every house needs street access at the front, allowing many of the smaller streets to be replaced by boardwalks. The wooden boardwalks, inspired by northern seaside towns like Fire Island, allow direct pedestrian to access the beach and bring the beach experience deep into the plan. Two public squares on the southern boundary further focus the neighborhood’s activity on the ocean."

So right away we have a fundamental reconfiguration of the street network -- or do we? In fact, both Seaside and Rosemary Beach share the same pattern of having a paved street on one side of homes, and a pedestrian path on the other, as can be seen by comparing the photos below with those from Tuesday's post:

"Back" and ...

... "Front."

So perhaps no "alley" has been introduced after all. Only the names have been changed. The logic of the decision to add garages is a bit obscure: because cars are used rarely, does it follow that large and expensive garages should be built to accommodate them?

The garage-facing side with its 30-foot wide flush road surface and lack of green space presents a far more traditional urban appearance than the side that has now been designated the front, yet the designer does not appear to consider this a virtue, noting approvingly that the garages "are not visible from the street," in spite of the fact that we've just been told that there are no streets, only boardwalks. Still, the arrival of the garages has, intentionally or not, created a traditionalist feel distinctively different from that of Seaside along certain of the so-called alleys, albeit one which depends heavily on the existence of homes above the garage to enliven and humanize the space.

The suggestion that the boardwalks were inspired by Fire Island is intriguing. Let's take a quick look at Fire Island's plan:

Do you notice anything unusual here? Access to Fire Island homes is only by boardwalks and pedestrian paths for a very simple reason, as the Fire Island website explains:

"There are no paved roads on Fire Island and only service and emergency vehicles are allowed on the island. Free of cars, traffic, pollution, and noise Fire Island offers a peaceful getaway unlike any other vacation destination. ... Walking, biking, and golf-carting are the modes of transportation and help to preserve our island’s natural beauty."

Here is a Fire Island "street," "alley," call it what you will:

Flickr/Joe Shlabotnik

Now, like Rosemary Beach and Seaside, Fire Island is largely a vacation getaway, but one which accommodates over four thousand housing units containing a summer population in the tens of thousands, all without cars! Could that be a viable planning model? The design statement for Rosemary Beach shows, I think, the ambiguous role of cars in New Urbanist projects. It is understood that cars are not an asset to the development and the feel of the community, yet they are guiding fundamental design choices. The mode of accommodation changes, but this unresolved design tension persists. The car-free option remains unexplored despite its obvious viability in the context of vacation destinations.

Moving on: here is the main commercial corridor of Rosemary Beach:

The architecture is of an outstanding quality, even exceeding the standard set at Seaside. Each building shows a meticulous attention to detail and proportion in every part, and in its relationship to its neighbors. There is a wonderful lack of large surface lots or garage parking -- a tremendous improvement over almost any other development in the surrounding area. Notice again, though, two features of the design that have been seen before in Seaside: an excessive width of the street, and a reappearance of Christopher Alexander's "subtle mechanical character" in that the street, although angled NE/SW in defiance of a strict orthogonal plan, is perfectly straight, and of a regular width along its length.

The streets of Rosemary Beach do bend a bit more than those in Seaside, however. The overall plan has a pleasing asymmetry, yet the surveyor's aesthetic is still evident here. The 19th century pattern of large-scale, attached commercial buildings and detached single family homes persists, although in an extraordinary architectural form that is a delight to explore and take in.

A final point concerns the drastic difference in the way Rosemary Beach and Seaside incorporate Highway 30A (which both towns span) into their designs. At Seaside, establishments are set back only 15-20 feet from 30A, which, despite its name, is only a 22-foot wide roadway with no shoulders. Seaside does not shy away from this road, but encroaches upon it and tames it, inducing drivers to slow naturally in response to pedestrian activity. Rosemary Beach, on the other hand, drops everything and runs away:

At the right hand side is the 22-foot wide 30A, appearing wider due to gigantic turning areas. Grass buffers extend for 20 feet on either side, followed by ten-foot bike paths, and then another 35 feet of grass for a grand total of 150 feet of sun-baked open ground between buildings at the narrowest point. On either side, the grassy buffers widen, creating a yawning gap of over 200 feet. There is no shade at the crosswalk. At high noon, the feel is of a no man's land, and I saw very few people bold enough to attempt this crossing on foot.

Why Rosemary Beach chose to abandon Seaside's approach and turned its back on this humble state road as though it were the Cross Bronx Expressway, I don't know. But it need not remain that way -- a solution is as easy as constructing additional homes and shops to link the existing areas north and south of the road.

Overall, Rosemary Beach feels like a place torn in two directions: between a traditionalist European village and a 19th century American resort town with its boardwalks and scrub plants, and between excluding and indulging the automobile. The clash produces an interesting, if not entirely harmonious, result. In terms of creating a consistent style and successfully integrating the automobile, Seaside comes out on top -- which is not so much a critique of Rosemary as a compliment of Seaside.

In the next post I'll take a look at the third and latest of DPZ's towns along the coastline -- Alys Beach.

Exploring Seaside

2011-08-16T16:39:00.012-04:00

[Updated 8/17, 10:00 p.m.] Throughout the week, I'll be making the most of a trip to the Florida coast to post on several of the New Urbanist towns and developments in the area from an 'Old Urbanist' perspective. Today's piece examines Seaside, FL.

For a person with New Urbanist (or Old Urbanist) leanings, a visit to Seaside feels a bit like a pilgrimage to a sacred site. Although the merits of the town have been debated for years, its significance in the history of American urban planning is undeniable. As one of the earliest steps in the evolution of the New Urbanism, which wouldn't formally arrive until more than a decade after the town's 1981 founding, Seaside is an intriguing glimpse into the origins of the movement. For me, it was a chance to examine the planning decisions made at this early juncture, including those that were repeated in later New Urbanist developments, and those which, for various reasons, largely fizzled out.

First, though, the intentions of the designers, in their own words:

"Seaside is widely acclaimed, financially successful, and almost completely built-out. It has become a symbol of the New Urbanism, exemplifying the movement’s underlying principles, which can be applied to all urban conditions: the built environment must be diverse in use and population; it must be scaled for the pedestrian yet capable of accommodating the automobile and mass transit; and it must have a well defined public realm supported by an architecture that reflects the ecology and culture of the region."

On the count of architecture, the assessment of a 2002 New York Times article that "the best part of Seaside is the houses" is not too far off the mark, though the planning achievements are ultimately more noteworthy. The tastefulness, elegance and attention to detail in many of the homes is astonishing. The achievement of creating (and encoding) a regional vernacular which is capable of endless varied repetition is truly remarkable. Notably, the style appears to have carried over into the local building industry, as "Seaside-style" homes are cropping up far north and south of Seaside itself.

Urbanism is distinct from architecture, however. On that count, does Seaside deliver on its promise of an environment "scaled for the pedestrian yet capable of accommodating the automobile"? Let's look at a typical Seaside street:

From white picket fence to white picket fence, the street spans 40 feet (a 20 foot roadway, plus two 10-foot parking lanes). Homes are set back another ten feet or so, making for a total distance between facing buildings of around 60 feet. Thanks to attractive paving and extremely light traffic, the street is not hostile to pedestrians, but this is clearly an environment scaled for the automobile. Cars were observed driving at high speeds through the neighborhood, a problem which has been addressed by marking intersections with all-way stop signs. Yet this decision actually seems to be worsening the problem of speeding. I witnessed several drivers roaring up to stop signs, coming to rolling stops, then gunning the accelerator in frustration. That Seaside has lately been overrun by cars has not escaped notice.

Interestingly, Seaside for the most part has no rear alleys. This New Urbanist calling card is present only in the newest areas of the town. On this street, parking spaces are tastefully integrated as water-permeable parking pads alongside the single family homes -- a far more economical solution than rear parking garages, but one which is negated by the addition of the two additional parking lanes along the brick roadway. Do vacation homes really need three parking spaces each? This in excess of most municipal standards for single-family homes, which generally require no more than two spaces.

In the area along the beach south of Highway 30A, however, a handful of really narrow streets do appear, and these are some of the most beautiful and memorable parts of the town.

This lane is so narrow that even biking feels inappropriate and intrusive -- an excellent indicator of intrinsically pedestrian-centric design. The sand-and-gravel surface physically impedes bikes as well. The homes to the left "cheat" a bit by storing their parking on the side facing the highway, but otherwise this design is outstanding. Although lanes like this feature only in the small area south of 30A, an extensive series of extremely narrow paths, invisible in any aerial view, run in place of where rear alleys might otherwise appear through most other blocks:

These paths, apparently introduced at the suggestion of Léon Krier (whose Classicist architectural fingerprints are evident everywhere you look), run in between rear property lines in most blocks. The scale is delightfully ~~pedestrian~~ human-centric and fine-grained. The paths are not really functionally necessary, but instead seem to be a foil to the wide streets, a means of providing an additional layer of connectivity that offers the same thrill of unexpected discovery that accompanies the very narrow traditional urban lane, a thrill that the wider streets do not offer. Notably, though, this is not a design feature that has reappeared in most other New Urbanist developments. By no later than 1992, the New Urbanist pendulum had swung in favor of rear alleys, and the front parking pads and footpaths largely gave way to the detached rear garage, as at Kentlands, although pedestrian paths continued to appear in a much-reduced role.

The commercial portion of the town is evocative of 19th century hypertrophism. A sloping, semi-circular grassy amphitheater, in scale and form reminiscent of the Piazza del Campo, occupies the center. A lack of shade or any real seating area leaves this important civic space a sun-baked void from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on hot summer days (perhaps an unfair critique, as the same goes for many an Italian piazza, too, except the Florida panhandle has not yet embraced the concept of the afternoon siesta). The space is so vast, meanwhile, that even four-story buildings around the perimeter fail to define it.

The area behind this first row of buildings has a typical 19th century feel with over-scaled, monolithic buildings and wide streets. Few people are out and about in this area. Much more interesting, again, is the area along the beach, which has a densely-packed cluster of one and two-story restaurants and shops with pedestrian paths running through and between them. One gets the sense that there really are two Seasides: the traditionalist village south of 30A, with its pedestrian paths and human-scaled buildings, and the vaguely 19th century lookalike north of the road.

[8/17 update: After returning to Seaside at 9:00 p.m., I'm more confident about my earlier observations of the area. At that time of day, activity is heavily concentrated around the beach-side restaurant and retail area. In recognition of this, the town has introduced numerous mini-trailer eating establishments (presumably seasonal) along the southern perimeter of the amphitheater, facing across 30A toward the small-scale shops and eateries on the other side of the road. Even at midday they are running a steady business (see below):]

The exception is a beautiful square framed by Seaside's handful of townhouses -- the feel is part Charleston, part French Quarter:

As to the big picture issues of street layout and population density, a few words from Christopher Alexander, who is generally very positive about Seaside:

"In order to achieve this very large, and humane effect [at Seaside], Andrés [Duany] has used what is a partly mechanical method. He has therefore been forced, in this first round of experiments ... to make a somewhat mechanical version of the ideal.

It is the nature of this 'mechanical' aspect which has to be examined carefully.

In essence it consists of making a rigid framework, and allowing, then considerable individual variation within it. But the carcase, the street grid, is rigid: it does not arise from the give and take of real events. In this regard it is unlike an organic community. It is as if one were to have a rigid mechanical skeleton and hang variational flesh on it. That is not the same as making a coherent whole, in which the public space arises organically from detailed, and subtle adaptations to terrain, human idiosyncracy, individual trees, accidental paths, and so on. ...

The subtle mechanical character which underlies the production of the street grid, is visible, though, in a more disturbing quality. Occasionally one hears that there is something 'unreal' about Seaside. Some of it is carping. Perhaps jealousy. But there is something about this comment that is real, and which goes to the very root of our current inability to make living space in towns."

The street layout at Seaside melds together a concentric ringed pattern with a typical 19th century grid of blocks generally 200' wide and 400' long. The influence of John Nolen, and in particular his plan for Venice, is evident. Yet, unlike Nolen's plan, the individual street segments are resolutely straight, refusing to bend or meander (with a handful of exceptions). The block lengths, too, are of predictable dimensions. I think this is the "subtle mechanical character" which Alexander is referring to.

A perfectly straight street, after all, tells us no more than: "A planner drew me with a T-square, and a surveyor marked me out." We intuitively sense this, since the march of human feet over ground will almost never proceed in a perfectly straight line. Is it more efficient than a street which emerges from "detailed and subtle adaptations to terrain"? Not necessarily -- it may be less responsive to topography and may require more grading, as was the case with the grids of New York or San Francisco. The perfectly straight street itself is a mechanical, or utilitarian aesthetic (to borrow Nathan Lewis' terminology), the aesthetic of the professional surveyor whose instruments are designed to mark straight lines and right angles, whether with the ancient groma or the modern laser theodolite.

The grid appears a preferred alternative to the modern suburban streets which meander purely for aesthetic effect, as did the early suburban plans such as Riverside, and in a true utilitarian sense that is probably correct, as the grid provides better connectivity and is easier to navigate. But in comparison to an organic plan, especially in a town of small size, the advantages as against the process Alexander describes may be less clear.

In terms of density, Seaside's use of single-family homes on small lots with modest setbacks and small backyards (and with very few grass lawns in evidence) is a separate achievement in and of itself. Although the houses are large and gracious, densities of about 6 units/acre are achieved. Backyards are considerably smaller than in the typical 19th century streetcar suburb. Overall, Seaside's density, in high season, appears to rise to as high as 12-14,000 people per square mile. This seems to be only slightly less than at Kentlands, despite Kentlands' much greater use of attached housing, perhaps due in part to the presence of space-devouring alleys in the Maryland development.

Overall, despite the critiques I've included here, I found Seaside to be more impressive than I had expected. The architectural achievement alone is inspiring, and one's hat has to go off to Duany and other architects who, during a nadir in design in the late 1970s and early 1980s, recreated so much beauty in the built environment. The town continues to improve and refine itself with infill and new design ideas. The area south of 30A, meanwhile, hints at a genuine traditionalist approach to urbanism. It is not an approach that has characterized most subsequent New Urbanist developments, however.

For the next installment in this series, I'll look at Seaside's successor: Rosemary Beach.

The architecture book selection at the Seaside bookstore.

In response to Joseph's comment, the above photo is of Thyme Street, two blocks over from where Seaside officially begins, looking toward Highway 30A. This is characteristic of many of the residential lanes leading off 30A. The sand-and-gravel surface is about 16 feet across, and traffic naturally proceeds at 10-15 mph. Setbacks are much greater than at Seaside, however, with the result that houses are about the same distance apart.