One great example of how much politics is about identity is the spectacle of libertarians like John Stossel doing things like defending sprawl. They note that “smart growth” environmentalists disparage sprawl and want to regulate what people can build and where, and they know that libertarians don’t like environmentalists, so they write in defense of sprawl. But as Austin Bramwell points out at The American Conservative sprawl is also central planning:

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.

Back before the financial crisis hit, conservatives would frequently make some good points about the problems with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Ever since the crisis, you’ve been more likely to hear nutty stuff from the right about how somehow the whole recession is a conspiracy between Fannie, Freddie, and the Community Reinvestment Act. But that nonsense aside, there are still a lot of problems with Fannie and Freddie and I hope that congress will do away with them.

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.

Another factoid from the recently released population estimates is that after decades of decline, Washington DC has posted a strong decade of population growth and is now just a tiny bit shy of the 600,000 mark—basically where it was twenty years ago:

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.

I’m slightly obsessed with the havok wreaked on Washington, DC’s street grid by the diagonal streets. Perhaps my new least-favorite intersection is the bizarre tangle where Florida Avenue, New Jersey Avenue, Rhode Island Avenue, and S Street all collide:

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.

Courtesy of Google StreetView, here’s 1242 H Street NE in the District of Columbia:

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.

Welcome to EYA’s new townhouse development at St. Paul’s College in Brookland:

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.

Dave Murphy considers the proposal to extend the Green Line out to Fort Meade. The idea has some compelling promise largely because “Fort Meade is the largest job center in the state of Maryland, and it is currently unserved by transit” so that could bring some considerable benefits. But of course Fort Meade’s also a bit far away from where the Green Line currently goes, so an important question becomes whether you can make the intermediate steps into anything useful:

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.