(cc photo by David55King)

Interesting to see this on a website that seems to be part of Fox News:

Despite claims from the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that Jerusalem’s real estate market is free and open to anyone regardless of race or religion, a new study shows Palestinians do not have equal access to property in Jerusalem.

The Israel group Ir Amim released a new study showing that 80 percent of land in Jerusalem cannot be purchased by Palestinians.

You can learn more at the Ir Amim website.

As regular readers of this blog will recall, there’s basically no city on earth in which the use of land isn’t heavily regulated. Oftentimes, I think the volume of regulation is excessive. But the reason land use in urban areas is heavily regulated is that when people are packed densely together, some measure of fairly intrusive planning/regulation is necessary for public safety, sanitation, workability of infrastructure, etc. When you have an ethnically divided city, and a history of ill-will, and a massive gap in the political power possessed by one group over the other, this is what you get.

One thing I wish she emphasized more, however, is the legal impediments to this kind of adaptation. I think a lot of people will look at her presentation and say “if transforming these uses is so great, why don’t developers/businessmen/’the market’ do it on their own.” And a big part of the answer is that the prevailing land use regulations don’t permit it.

An earlier iteration of this blog was frequently written from Big Bear Cafe in Bloomingdale, and I still visit now and again and am friendly with the owner and some of the staff. So I’ve been interested in their efforts to secure a full restaurant license which would allow them to, among other things, serve beer. The initial hearing doesn’t seem to have gone so well according to Lydia DePillis:

“They’re probably in line to come talk to the commission, ready to make this a whole new world,” said ANC chairwoman Anita Bonds. “Because that’s what this is about.”

“One small entity begets another small entity begets another small entity,” said Edward Jones, a neighbor who has lived at 1st and R Street since 1994. “And then we end up with the same issues that make you a U Street or an Adams Morgan.”

Commissioner Barrie Daneker, who said that he had never been inside Big Bear, objected categorically to the restaurant’s ambitions on the basis of neighborhood character. “I do not want to see Big Bear open until 1 a.m.,” he said. “If you’re a restaurant, nobody’s eating at 1 a.m. in Washington. This is not New York.”

Commissioner Marshall Phillips, Sr. gave an impressive speech about the neighborhood’s history with drunks and crime caused by liquor stores, raising the specter of Catholic University undergraduate-type misbehavior and warning that criminal elements would take advantage of tipsy rubes.

In my mind, the underlying issue here is that DC is stuck on a “specter of Adams-Morgan” equilibrium. One reason two particular corridors in the city are so crowded with bar patrons is that it’s extremely difficult to open new bars. Conversely, one reason it’s so difficult to open up new bars is that people fear that new bars will turn their neighborhoods into the new Adams-Morgan. Realistically, if things were relaxes citywide we wouldn’t suddenly have a dozen Adams-Morgans — there are only so many people around — what would happen is that Adams-Morgan itself would calm down.

From a policy point of view, the main issue is that we’ve set up a governance system where we have these micro-elected officials on the local ANC boards who essentially have no power except to say “no” to stuff. That naturally leads to a mentality where thinking is dominated by downside risks and everyone errs on the side of saying “no.” I think the answer might be to increase the fees associated with liquor licenses, and then put the extra funds at the disposal of the ANC itself to fund community endeavors. That way members might see some more upside to letting things open. Of course another alternative is for the sort of young people who are likely to be supportive of bars and restaurants to get more engaged with local issues and put pressure on elected officials. In general, people pay too little attention to local politics even though in practice it often does more to shape one’s quality of life than these national issues.

Matt Johnson raises the curtain on Montgomery County’s proposed re-write of its zoning code:

In 1977, when the code was last rewritten, it spanned 274 pages. It’s now over 1,000 and grew by 100 pages in 2008 alone.

As with tax codes, I think there’s a natural tendency for relatively simple, functional documents dealing with this subject to become unduly complicated over time as a result of a combination of good intentions and deliberate malfeasance. It would be good practice for all jurisdictions to try to do a regular re-write in order to clear out the dead wood and rethink methods. Simple zoning of course doesn’t ensure good zoning, but it at least should make it easier for people to understand what’s going on

The low-density spot between the Friendship Heights and Bethesda density-pockets would probably get denser if it were legal. (Google Maps)

Montgomery County is a suburban country adjacent to Washington DC. It’s a nice place with good schools and as lots of anti-urbanist pundits are always assuring us lots of people enjoy living there. They’re also planning to update their zoning code but they’re making sure not to change very much:

At a Planning Department information session for the media today, planners were quick to make clear that only 2.6% of the County would actually see substantive zoning change; the majority of changes will take place in current commercial, mixed use or industrial zones (i.e. don’t worry your single-family residential heads). As one planner said, only 4% of the County is really left to develop, so changing zoning will help contain and sustain growth. Another goal of the rewrite is to consolidate and simplify land use. At present, the code still has designations for foundries and abattoirs (slaughterhouses) and has two separate codes for mini golf (“Golf Courses, Miniature” and “Miniature Golf”). The plan is to reduce the number of allowed uses from 433 specific uses to 120 broad categories.

These do sound like changes for the better, but it also highlights what I’m talking about when I talk about suburban sprawl as a policy-driven phenomenon rather than a market-driven one. If Montgomery County didn’t have so much space that’s given-over exclusively to single-family residential uses, then more people would live in Montgomery County which would mean fewer people in the farther-flung suburbs. They might still drive everywhere, but they’d be driving shorter-distances. What’s more, if it were legal to intersperse some stores with those residences, they actually might not drive everywhere. And if residential dwelling patterns were denser, it would make less sense to locate office buildings on the fringe which would further reduce the incentive for sprawl.

This would be more ecological sustainable, it would probably be healthier, and it would be more economically efficient. Win-win, in other words. What’s more, if changes were made broadly the volume of changes in most places would actually be pretty small. If you pick up one random slice of inner suburbs and say “build as dense as you want” people would find that very disruptive, but if changes were made on a broad scale you’d see a big-but-diffuse aggregate impact.

At any rate, Michael Lewyn of the Florida Coastal School of Law seems to share my interest in the subject and has a number of relevant papers. “You Can Have It All: Less Sprawl and Property Rights Too” makes the overall case, but the one I would really recommend to anyone either interested in evangelizing about this point to others or else to a skeptic who wants to really see a rigorous argument made is “How Government Regulation Forces Americans Into Their Cars: A Case Study” which is a detailed examination of zoning and land use regulation in Jacksonville, Florida.

This video from Dan Zack indicates that people are actually pretty bad at guesstimating the residential density of various areas, primarily because of an over-reliance on building height as a cue:

A lot of extremely dense areas, like central Paris, feature basically no super-tall buildings. Or I don’t think that if you walk around Somerville, Massachusetts it will be obvious to you that it’s one of the densest municipalities in America. The issue in both cases is that buildings occupy a very large fraction of the available space—you don’t have many wide streets, parking lots, setback buildings, interior courtyards, etc. For rowhouse neighborhoods, in particular, I’m coming around to the view that setbacks and unused front yards are sort of the silent killer.

I’m just saying that everyone needs to understand what they’re up against here. It’s not zoning per se that causes sprawl, it’s the fact that lots of registered voters actively want sprawl and have successfully demanded rules that keep density at bay. These kinds of land use regulations aren’t going away without the mother of all knock-down-drag-out fights first.

Ryan Avent observes part of what this gets wrong. It’s true that the problem of overly restrictive land-use rules is in large part a problem of voter-preference. But it’s not a problem of voter-preference for sprawl per se. It’s a general problem of homeowner eagerness to exclude outsiders. It’s politically difficult to build dense infill development in Washington, DC and that’s not because DC residents want to live in sprawling areas or because DC residents approve of sprawl as a phenomenon. It’s a mixture of selfishness, misunderstanding, and poor institutional design. As Ben Adler reminds us, surveys indicate that about a third of Americans would like to live in walkable urban areas but less than 10 percent of the country’s dwelling units are in areas that fit the bill. That’s why houses in walkable central cities (Manhattan) and walkable suburbs (near Metro in Arlington Country, VA for example) are so expensive.

Obviously we don’t have good near-term prospects for eliminating selfishness from human affairs. But based on informal discussions with people, reading of neighborhood blogs, and participation on listserves of various kinds it’s clear to me that there’s a fair amount of genuine misunderstanding about the impact of land use decisions. So hear on the blog we seek to improve understanding!

There are also real issues of institutional design. Incumbent residents of developed areas generally prefer that new development happen someplace else. But because everyone desires this, we all wind up worse off than we would be if we couldn’t all get our way. Federal transportation spending can and should be used as leverage to encourage more efficient (both economically and ecologically) use of land. Property taxes could be replaced with taxes on land. The lines of political authority over land use decisions could be rationalized so as to allow for some accountability—how many DC residents can name their ANC Single-Member District representative or even know what that means?

— Throughout America there are many regulations that restrict the density of the built environment.
— Were it not for these restrictions, people would build more densely.
— Were the built environment more densely built, the metro areas would be less sprawling.

O’Toole seems to want to engage in a complicated counterfactual hypothetical about whether or not most people would still prefer to live in large single-family homes even in the absence of regulatory restrictions. I don’t have a particular guess as to what the majority opinion would be, but I assume that we would have a mix. He also seems to want to engage in a viciously polarized debate about apartments versus single-family homes, but single-family developments vary widely in their residential density. So even restricting our attention exclusively to suburban living I maintain that absent lot size regulations, lot sizes would be smaller and there would be less sprawl.

What’s more, regardless of majority preference, I think the high cost of housing in New York, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Santa Monica, etc. indicates that there’s market demand for walkable urbanism and that if it were easier for developers to build more densely in those areas more people would live in them.

I’m not personally interested in debating the “smart growth” slogan. My point is that from a policy point of view excessive regulation of land use in already developed areas is bad for the economy and for the environment. And to be specific and clear about this, I don’t think the problem is “libertarian” hypocrites per se, the problem is specifically John Stossel and Randall O’Toole who are stridently opposed to anti-sprawl regulations but seem totally uninterested in sprawl-promoting ones. I believe that Stossel, for example, lives on the Upper East Side in Manhattan a neighborhood whose classic tall apartment buildings with no attached parking facilities would be totally illegal to build in virtually ever contemporary American city. That’s a shocking fact of which few are aware and would be well-worth doing an episode on.

Subways are wonderful, but they’re expensive to build. Really, really expensive. You can’t just throw up another line or another station on a whim. Consequently, metropolitan areas who’ve invested in building them have a real responsibility to use the land near the stations in an efficient way—buildings with offices, houses, and shops rather than parking lots. Obviously Congress, by its nature, is insulated from the market forces that might otherwise compel someone to do something more useful with this valuable land. But they always have the option of doing the right thing.

For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations. If Stossel wants to expand Americans’ lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending, namely, suburban sprawl.

Not being a libertarian or a conservative of any sort, I’m happy to just take it for granted that you’re never going to have a genuinely “small government” approach to the built environment. But I would sort of be interested to see, as an exercise, someone try to put together a serious, genuinely libertarian view of how cities and towns should be built—what’s the absolute minimum we could get away with.

But whatever that would be, it’s certainly not what we have in America’s sprawlier places. Take the thrilling Maricopa County Zoning Ordinance in Phoenix and it’s suburbs. Chapter 6 covers single family residential zones. You’ve got your R1-35 areas in which you need 35,000 square feet of land per dwelling unit, your R1-10 areas where you need 10,000 feet, and then separate zones for 8,000 square feet per unit; 7,000 square feet per dwelling; and 6,000 square feet per dwelling.

If you want to build a mult-family structure in those places, you can’t. If you find yourself an R2 zone you can, but it can only be a two family structure. Also your building can’t be taller than 40 feet, “There shall be a front yard having a depth of not less than 20 feet,” the year yard needs to be 25 feet, and the side yard needs to be at least 5 feet. On average, buildings can only occupy at most 50 percent of the lot. And there have to be two parking spaces per dwelling unit. And you can go so on and so forth throughout the whole thing. The point, however, is that walkable urbanism is illegal in most of the county. Not just giant skyscrapers, but anything even remotely non-sprawling.

There’s some good stuff in this Fast Company article on spraw, new urbanism, and the downturn but this is a head-scratcher of a paragraph:

Maybe the New Urbanists’ greatest innovation is “SmartCode,” their rigorous zoning manual for guaranteeing the integrity of a newly-built neighborhood. But its existence only underscores the fact that left to their own devices, market forces and their instruments–the developers–would never follow these precepts on their own. And why would they, when the system is aligned against it? Tax codes, zoning, community boards, and financing are a straitjacket on new types of development–they created a product that works, and they’re preconditioned to produce more of it.

I think this captures the slightly pathological incoherence of our discourse around these issues. It’s true that if we keep policy on auto-pilot that we’ll get endless reproduction of car-dependent sprawl. But that’s not the same as saying that car-dependent sprawl is the result of “market forces” that are “left to their own devices.” Rather, the issue is “tax codes, zoning, community boards” and a system of “financing” in which the government (through the FHA, Fannie Freddie, etc.) is deeply involved.

The issue isn’t whether we should do what New Urbanists want or else let the market decide. The issue is what kind of planning/infrastructure regime we want. Insofar as some people want to live in detached single-family homes on large patches of land then some people should do so. But a policy environment that specifically pushes people to live in detached single-family homes on large patches of land leads to very inefficient use of energy. That’s bad for the environment, and it also diverts energy resources away from more valuable commercial/industrial uses.

Elana Schor explained last week how they bias development against mixed-use:

(cc photo by dougtone)

Urbanists’ frustrations with Fannie and Freddie stem from a key fact: both mortgage guarantors will not deal in home loans for properties with more than 20 percent of space set aside for non-residential use. Plans for walkable, mixed-use complexes that combine housing, retail, and office space, therefore, are often out of luck.

“Every Main Street in America violates Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s rigid standards,” CNU President John Norquist said in a statement yesterday reiterating his group’s support for housing finance reform.

With a lot of urban planning issues, I don’t think there’s any realistic free market solution—it really just all comes down to a choice between competing forms of planning. But in this case we really could, and should, just let the market decide. Establishing special government-sponsored agencies that encourage the construction of single-use single-family homes is bad policy, but trying to have the agencies tweak the balance in favor of more urbanist ideas would also be a mistake. This is something we can simply not do, and capital can flow to whatever kind of projects people prefer to build.

As the northeast suffers through an intense cold snap following the massive snowstorm of a couple of weeks ago, it’s really striking how terrible the weather is in all the American cities with green transportation profiles. The nation’s leading commute-by-walking city, for example, is Boston. And you know where it’s really unpleasant to walk even a relatively short distance in February? Boston, that’s where. If you took the physical layout of the city and transported it to San Diego’s location, I bet that many many many more than 14 percent of people would walk to work.

In general, good weather should facilitate green transportation. I ride my bike around DC a lot. But many days during the summer it’s unpleasantly humid to be biking, and many days during the winter it’s unpleasantly cold. In Los Angeles, this wouldn’t be a problem. Waiting for a bus to arrive is, likewise, a very different experience in good weather versus bad.

Obviously the causes behind this aren’t all that hard to discern. The northeastern quadrant of the country was densely settled much earlier than the sunnier parts of the country. But it makes me think that the prospects for transformation in sunbelt metro areas may be brighter than is generally realized if policymakers decide they want to take action. Ultimately the fundamentals for walking, biking, and mass transit are in many ways much better in the south and west than in the northeast.

Something I think the city could use is some kind of explicit population growth target. That might help structure people’s thinking about specific development issues. The city’s peak population came around 1950 when about 800,000 people lived here. And the population of the United States as a whole was only 150 million back then. Given that the national population has doubled since then and continues to grow, it seems to me that a District with aspirations should be hoping to see a over a million people living here a few decades hence. That’s the alternative to endless sprawl. But since modern-day people occupy more space than the people of sixty years ago, the only way to make that work is with a combination of taller buildings and with buildings that occupy a larger share of the lots they’re situated in.

Looks to me like you could improve this one a lot by removing that nub of S Street and building something in the resulting triangle formed by the state-named avenues.

The owners of this vacant lot in this economically depressed retail corridor currently undergoing a bit of a renaissance would like to build a building here. You’d think people would welcome such a move since, you know, a vacant lot is not very helpful to anyone. But the owners want to build—wait for it—a four story building which the local Advisory Neighborhood Council seems to regard as beyond the pale:

According to ANC records, the organization sees the property as an opportunity to embrace the H Street Overlay and continue to develop uses favored by the community; they are unlikely to change their mind. The group strongly opposed the four story height arguing “all the other structures on the block are two stories.” The ANC also objects to the overall design of the project stating “it does not reflect any of the architectural elements found on H Street.” The ANC further objects to the planned ground floor use [professional services], preferring retail. Though the ANC’s approval is not required, the Zoning Commission will give weight to the ANC’s position.

The architectural point may have some merit. The other points, not so much. The H Street corridor already has plenty of narrow empty storefronts that someone or other could rent for a retail business. The best way to bring more retail to the area is to bring more demand to the neighborhood. For example, a four story office building would presumably bring workers to the street who would be potential customers for local businesses. Insisting that the only thing that can be done to the block is add a two-story building with retail space for lease to a corridor that’s already full of two-story buildings with retail space for lease is only going to lead to more vacant storefronts. Or possibly to the continued presence of a blight-inducing vacant lot since it may not be profitable to build.

Sadly, you see this in pretty much every developing neighborhood in DC. People want more retail options. But they don’t seem to want to let anyone build anything. The District, however, currently has several hundred thousand fewer residents than it did at its peak population point (present-day people have bigger houses) and the current population is more mobile thanks to car ownership and the construction of Metro. So to create a viable vibrant retail environment, you need a denser population of residents and office workers—taller buildings. And mind you, we’re talking about a four story building here, not a skyscraper.

The 237 single-family units will be built on approximately half of the 20 acres, abutting the Trinity and Catholic campuses along 5th and 6th Streets NE. The townhouses will range in sizes from 14 to 18 feet wide and including between 1,400 and 2,100 s.f., selling between $450,000 and $550,000, with 28 units set aside as affordable housing.

Sounds nice. But my question with this sort of thing is always wouldn’t we do more to make housing affordable if instead of building 209 expensive townhouses plus 28 “affordable” ones we just allowed for taller buildings and had more units? It can’t be that construction costs here are running between $450,000 and $550,000—a big premium is being paid for the land and the permission to build. But where land is expensive, it ought to be used intensively. That makes economic sense, and it makes environmental sense.

Here I think the key thing to keep in mind is that when you’re talking about new heavy rail construction, the potential benefits can be quite large but you have to decide if you actually want to seize them. This is the area around one of the proposed stations:

If you added a Metro station there, would the local area permit the surrounding quarter mile or so developed as a fairly dense walkable community? Or would people hear about proposals to build on the green space and up-zone the built-up area and decide that would lead to too much traffic? Maybe instead they’ll want to just turn the undeveloped patch into another parking lot. That’d be no good. And the existing land use patterns around Maryland’s Green Line stations don’t inspire a ton of confidence.

Some time ago I was complaining that the “middle tier” of the life we actually lead—neither local nor national—happens not at the level of states, but at the level of metropolitan areas. But while we have robust state governments, we’ve got pretty rickety structures at the metro level. Mark Muro has some ideas for improving things that don’t require unrealistic constitutional changes:

For example, the nation possesses 380 metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) that are already empowered–notwithstanding their variable quality–to engage in long-range transportation planning. Therefore, wouldn’t one way to thrust U.S. metros farther into federalism mix be to expand the MPOs’ role and responsibilities to mandate, say, planning and program alignment across a broader array of federal and state programs? Likewise, hundreds of other increasingly robust “metro” regional councils and other entities are also active, ranging from scores of councils of government (COGs) and myriad economic development districts (EDDs) to the metro mayors’ caucuses in Chicago and Denver; the older suburbs coalitions in Kansas City and Cleveland and Milwaukee; and the scores of other regional economic, civic, philanthropic, or environmental initiatives now working on regional problems. Shouldn’t these too be sought out, utilized more by Washington and the states, and empowered? Sure they should: Washington and the states should each seek out and work with the existing retinue of metropolitan actors as core partners in investment and program delivery.

In addition, Washington and the states should go farther and seek to stimulate the emergence of new metropolitan alignments. Perhaps the best way to do this is to stimulate multi-jurisdictional regional collaboration, say through federal grant competitions that reward such activity. That will inevitably coalesce new middle-tier governance entities. So why not apply—as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development does in the Notification of Funding Availability for its Neighborhood Stabilization Program—clear preferences for collaborative efforts? For that matter, why shouldn’t Washington apply a modest preference for multi-jurisdictional collaboration to essentially all of its activities, including dozens of the nation’s scores of categorical, block, and other grant flows? Such a “regionalism steer” would evoke much more metropolitan or quasi-metropolitan governance activity in U.S. regions. Such modest but clear pay-offs for cross-boundary cooperation would go surprisingly far toward producing more active “middle-tier” governance in America.

Good ideas. Another thing that occurs to me is that we could probably use more formal mechanisms for collaboration between House members whose districts all share a metro area especially if, as is often the case, the metro area crosses state lines.