The Public Health Roots of Zoning

A lot of people bag on zoning as a major culprit in sprawl. What many of them either don't realize or take for granted is that in its early days (c.WWI) it was a major land use reform. Zoning prevented nuisance or polluting activites from taking place near residential housing (and vice versa), stabilizing the market value of land earmarked for each, and went a long way to protecting people from being poisoned or nuisanced out of their homes.

But like most regulations, it's had its unintended consequences. Metropolitan Institute fellow Joe Schilling and Leslie Linton of SDSU explore explore some of these side effects, and the prospects for legislative remedies, in a new article in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine (link via Planetizen)

Thoughts on The Planning Process

Raise the Hammer has a commonsense editorial on the state of planning in Canada's Great Lakes region; it may as well apply to anywhere in the US.

...cities since the early twentieth century seem to have forgotten that growth (increasing the size of economic activity) and development (increasing the density and complexity of economic activity) occurred naturally throughout most of history without teams of planners to micromanage the process.

Instead, city councils lurch convulsively from fad to fad, desperate not to be left behind. Now it's a low-density subdivision; now it's a community-smashing megaproject; now it's a bizarre "urban village" located in the middle of nowhere on prime farmland.

It seems to me that this effect is somewhat inevitable given that governments in a capitalist democracy are by definition quite unmoored from any primary economic considerations. One of the newest fads is to convene focus groups of "stakeholders" (the definition thereof pointedly ignores the extent or even existence of an entity's financial stake in the issue at hand) to, essentially, put anything from an entire project to the smallest architectural detail to a referendum of surrounding residents and businesses. It plays out in planning commission hearings that go until 2am, sometimes ordering in a midnight snack to tide the participants over until something approaching a consensus can be reached on, say, the top floor setback of a 4-story building going in across the street from 2-story houses.

Somewhat unintentionally, I suspect, this process lets citizens articulate a more sophisticated set of preferences for the look, feel and function of their surroundings in a way that encourages developers to listen and respond. That they often crowd into council chambers to do so belies the developers' protestations that they're simply serving up 'what the market demands' when they build cookie-cutter subdivisons. It should also comfort and encourage planners and designers pushing intelligent reform of the zoning and building codes largely responsible for sprawl.

As Jane Jacobs explains, the trick is to remove impediments and restrictions - like zoning regulations that segregate uses, parking requirements, basement requirements, etc. - so that real growth and development can take place at natural cross-roads and meeting places.

[...]

But the worst culprits are still the developers, accustomed to segregation and bland, sanitized sprawl. They hide behind the mantra, 'But we're just giving consumers what they want!'

Read the whole thing^TM

Anti-facilitation

Raise The Hammer attempts to get Crazy Jim Kunstler's opinion on Hamilton, Ontario's new "green belt" urban growth boundary. You'll have to look elsewhere for actual discussion of the boundary; what we get here is Kunstler's vision of the future, and you'll want to make sure your overalls and garden implements are in good condition.

The salient fact about the decades ahead is that we are entering a permanent global energy crisis and it will change everything about how we live. The suburban cycle which began a hundred years ago is nearly over. We are in for a period of contraction and economic hardship.

There is not going to be a "hydrogen economy," and no combination of alternative energy systems or fuels will allow us to continue the suburban pattern. It's finished. We will, however, desperately need to grow more of our food closer to home, and so the preservation of agricultural hinterlands is of great importance.

Maybe he's been reading Dies the Fire? He's surely looking forward to a time when our technological society returns to the soil:

The skyscraper - any building over seven stories really - will come to be seen as an experimental building type that doesn't work well in an energy-starved economy. Once these energy problems gain traction, there will be a large new class of economic losers, and consequently a lot of social turbulence.

I think we'll see a leveling off and then a contraction of population, not a continued upward trend.
[...]
Under the current high energy / high entropy regime, sustainable development is a joke. In the decades to come, the successful places will tend to be the smaller traditional towns and cities with viable farming hinterlands. The economy of the 21st century will come to center on agriculture. Life will be intensely and profoundly local in ways that we can't conceive of today. Economic growth, as we have known it in a cheap energy industrial paradigm, will cease.

OK, seriously now. Clearly the oil will run out someday, but we do have essentially limitless supplies of nuclear, wind, hydro, geothermal and various other sources of energy that will become economical as oil becomes scarcer.

And it will be a trend, not an overnight change. As oil supplies get low, they'll become harder to extract and refine. These higher costs, plus increased competition for the remaining supply will gradually bid oil up to the point where investment in alternative energy becomes not just feasible but smart business. Among other things, the grossly inefficient and energy-losing proposition of extracting hydrogen to burn in engines or fuel cells will likely become a best-available solution, and there will be a 'hydrogen economy'. It will undoubtedly change the economics of daily life and thus the decisions we make about where and how to live and work, but this will be a gradual transition with plenty of time and information available to everyone for planning ahead.

But hey, why bother with such boring details when you can get copy like this:

[Le Corbusier] was a shit-head. Just about everything he thought about cities was wrong. And the ideas of his that actually found their way into practice were deeply destructive - for instance, the tower-in-a-park, which mutated into the vertical slums of the late 20th century.

Forget Corbu. Forget Modernism. Forget yesterdays' tomorrow. The cities of the future will be much smaller than they are today.

[...]

The medieval town may be a more appropriate model for where we're going.

Bring me a shrubbery!!!

Property Rights

Reading about the Fort Trumbull eminent domain lawsuit here and here. There are a lot of issues tied up in something like this. For most homeowners, their house and lot are their primary--often their only--financial investment. As far back as the depression era, presidents from Hoover on the right to FDR on the left extolled the virtues of "a nation of homeowners" and passed sweeping measures putting billions of public dollars at stake to protect it. On the other side, there are times when the public, represented by an elected government, legitimately needs to transfer ownership of land in order to facilitate its use in a way that benefits society. Well-known and uncontroversial (in principle) examples include road easements and condemnation of structurally unsound buildings. Less reputably, the power of eminent domain has been used over and over again to clear slums for redevelopment. To condense a lot of modern anthropological research into one runon sentence, many or most such "slums" had been created over time by the systematic denial of mortgages or home equity loans to poor and minority residents by lending institutions who made [improper] use of FHA risk ratings--themselves bastardized from earlier Home Owners Loan Corp. (HOLC) classifications intended to direct federal loan guarantees toward poor homeowners. In other words, redlining turned often-decent neighborhoods into slums by denying residents access to capital, and then subsequently declared them "blighted" in order to evict the residents and build something new. 70s-era Urban Renewal made heavy use of that brand of eminent domain, and the planning profession unfortunately has something of a black mark to this day for its role in that mostly-failed effort.

I suspect cases like the New London one, or this neighborhood clearance in Cincinnati are related far more to zoning and economic development trends (in particular, the fad of deliberately encouraging an imbalance of jobs and housing) than to any nostalgia for public housing, but there's still danger here for planners if we become too strongly identified with those who justify any taking of property under the development mantra of the day. We have enough trouble getting buy-in from the public on a lot of things as it is.

More on Latino New Urbanism

It turns out Alexandria has its own example of this phenomenon. According to the public/private Alexandria Economic Development Partnership, the Arlandria neighborhood (located, of course, on the city limits between ARLington and AlexANDRIA) is known to the locals as "Chirilagua", after the Salvadoran town some of them, perhaps, hail from. Is this mainly marketing-speak? Urban Mozaik reports, you decide:

'One lifetime resident of Alexandria responded to a question about Chirilagua with, "oh, you mean Arlandria, yeah, i think I've played soccer down there. What are you going to write about, though? I mean, what is there to say about that strip? " This person has never walked the sidewalks of Chirilagua, and unbeknownst to him he is missing out on a growing part of his own hometown.'

I confess I'd thought that area was part of Del Ray, maybe because I have friends who live a couple blocks away and have never referred to it as Chirilagua, or Arlandria for that matter. The mental firewalling between Latino, downscale "Arlandria" and mostly white, upscale Del Ray literally a block away is an interesting topic by itself, but one for another day.
But apparantly the residents (as much Peruvian as any other latin nationality, based on my personal culinary canvass of the neighborhood) have participated in "an extensive community visioning process [...] The result of this effort was the creation of a new form-based zoning category that identifies special opportunities and land-use incentives for developers and business investors." And the goals:

• 'Fostering an urban, walkable, mixed-use community, capitalizing on the existing businesses and residents
• Combining local and national retail to serve a diverse residential and office community
• Promoting the State’s tax incentives for capital investment and job creation'

Of course, the place in question already is an urban, walkable community, (though with no mixed uses to speak of) and has been so since the time when Del Ray was built as a streetcar suburb. One rather feels the force of trendy new urbanist promotion behind the AEDP survey. 'Hey, you know how Latinos love walkable neighborhoods? Well here's one! Cool huh?'
And yeah, I think it's cool, but the overemphasis makes me wince, especially since AEDP's somewhat blinkered survey has one of my favorite concert venues on the block as a development site. Maybe it's not hispanic enough to fit their Big Idea for future development...

"Latino New Urbanism"

Via APA, USA Today says hispanic Americans like new urbanism for cultural reasons:

Advocates of this budding movement suggest that places where Hispanics are fast becoming the majority could help rein in sprawl by capitalizing on Latino cultural preferences for compact neighborhoods, large public places and a sense of community.

"I grew up in Mexico. We had a traditional urban square and plaza where everything is happening," says Mario Chavez-Marquez, 31, who lives in one of downtown Santa Ana's new loft apartments. "To me, it made sense to move back to the center, closer to my job. Now I can walk to a supermarket."

Builders and planners have largely ignored the cultural identity of this new wave of home buyers, says planner Michael Mendez, who coined the term "Latino new urbanism."

As a result, many Hispanics moving up the economic ladder choose typical suburbs far from work, mass transit and shopping because it's usually the only path to home ownership, Mendez says. "They have to assimilate into what's available."

I see a couple of interesting points here. First, as in the comparison of dense continental European cities to sprawling English suburbia, culture definitely matters in what kind of built environment people choose. The basic unit of non-hispanic white America is rather inarguably the nuclear family, and thus a large part of that group is content to live in a house by themselves, barely knowing their neighbors. At least in the DC area, this is the only demographic group that consistently moves out to the newest suburbs; everyone else settles much more evenly across the landscape, and some groups seem to cluster in more urbanized areas. So while saying that this or that ethnic group might prefer a different type of city than other groups is a little bit socially uncomfortable, it's not clearly incorrect.

Secondly, and somewhat contrarily, the article seems to be saying that if hispanic homebuyers go to the exurbs, they're being forced to conform to what the housing market provides, whether or not it's what they want; if they go to the innercity, it's because they like that style of neighborhood. Which completely ignores the obvious alternative explanation--they go to those places because it's what they can afford. I suspect that a little more research would find innercity hispanics to be largely poor recent immigrants, while exurban hispanic homebuyers are going out there because they're coming into the market now instead of ten years ago, and that's where the new homes are.

From the "What Else Are You Going to Do?" File

The Post reports that DC area commuters spend an average of 30 minutes commuting each way (about 10% above the national average -that's a noticeable difference added up over the entire year) but still see Metro as inconvenient. "Metro is widely admired but largely bypassed" essentially because of a vague feeling that it's even worse than sitting in traffic. They're not totally wrong. I did an experimental comparison of the cost and time involved in commuting by bus and subway versus by car in the inner and outer suburbs a couple years ago, and found that the public transit was substantially slower for almost any trip (traffic and parking congestion made it more competitive in the inner suburbs)

I think the nonobvious implication here is the importance of public education in planning. Those who use transit know that while it often does take longer than driving, there are tradeoffs. Most importantly, you're not behind the wheel and therefore you can read, work (including making any necessary phone calls, as irritating as it might be to your seatmate) or just bask in the downtime. I know many Metro riders who simply enjoy the people-watching opportunities. They'd hate to be sitting in traffic with nothing to do but listen to the same five CDs they've been meaning to change out for the past week. But you'd never think of those aspects until you try transit, and if you don't live near a Metro station, you probably don't know anyone who could tell you how to make the most of it. This is where education -facilitation, if you prefer- could make a big difference in how we commute, and thus ultimately in how we build in the next 20 years.

You Have to Start Somewhere

John Kelly's column in today's Post includes a blurb about the Metro's humble beginnings. I'm 29, and for me the system has always been part of the urban landscape. As a kid, one of my favorite parts of the summer was always the day my mom would take some friends and I downtown on the subway. We'd be fascinated by the lights in the tunnel passing by--at maybe 50mph, but it felt like 100. Hard to believe it started out like this:

"A colleague of mine, Mike Greenberg, gave me a little something his father-in-law, Bruno Zanin, had squirreled away. It's a 20-page booklet that appeared as an advertising supplement in the Washington Star on March 21, 1976. On the cover are the words, "This is Your Metro Owner's Manual."

It was an endearing bit of PR designed to familiarize Washingtonians with the subway system whose Phase I -- five stations between Rhode Island Avenue and Farragut North -- was just about to open. "

Five stations, all downtown. And look at it today. Clarendon, Ballston, King Street, Chinatown, U Street, Metro Center, and a dozen more places both downtown and suburban that were dying and have managed to pull new life at least partly out of that regional connection on their doorstep. Funny, then, that Kelly's headline is "Metro's Promise -- We're All Still Waiting". Maybe the funky orange jackets and caps (if not the funky orange upholstry) is long gone, but that just means Metro's made the transition from that glamorous new toy that you vaguely fear was a mistake, to the trusty old tool that reminds you of a hundred past adventures. Sure it's a little shabby these days, but can you even imagine what life would have been like without it?

Back to the Future?

In Michael Crichton's Timeline (the excellent novel, not the painful movie) a group of anthropology grad students sit in a cafe in rural France, explaining their architectural dig to a friend who works in a different profession. They note that the picturesque 12th-century village, which consisted of little more than a market square, tradesmen's shops (blacksmith, farrier, and soforth) and a tavern was built as a real estate venture by a consortium of aristocrats who hoped to capitalize on the local trade in goods and produce. In other words, it was a shopping mall.

Chuck Eckenstahler, AICP and Carl Baxmeyer, AICP make a similar analogy in their article, Planning Ten Ingredients Found in Successful Downtowns. The ingredients are:

1. Customer Focus
2. Tell A Story Everyone Knows
3. Clearly Communicated Shopping Experience
4. Value Driven Service
5. Brick And Mortar To Support the Mission
6. Reliance on Customer Attraction
7. A Long Term Customer Loyalty Program
8. Feedback on Performance
9. Dedicated Sales Staff Training
10. Good Business Rationssic - Cross Selling

While they don't go so far as to use ugly words like "mall" or "shopping center", items 2 and 7 really make the connection clear--the entire downtown is to be thought of as a single retail operation ("much like a living organism") with the mission of attracting and keeping customers who come there to shop and find substantially everything they need in one area. In other words, an open-air shopping center with a unified marketing message for the buying public.

This is the antithesis of Duany-style New Urbanist fervor, and it's also exactly what that movement needs to succeed; a hard-nosed business approach to making the traditional downtown not only look good but function economically.

'Cause I'm the tax man .. yea-ah the tax ma-an

Alexandria city officials have announced that real estate assessments (washingtonpost.com) are up 21% over the past year.

Ouch.

"The unprecedented increase in Alexandria home values is attributable to low interest rates, continued job growth in the region and the city's desirable location close to Washington, city officials said."

And they have supporting data for that conclusion. Broadly, assessments rose 70-75% across Fairfax County in 2000-2004, but 100% or more in Arlington and Alexandria (a jaw-dropping 158-161% in the are surrounding Columbia Pike)

Interestingly, most of the areas with the biggest increases seem to be the ones seeing the most new development or redevelopment, especially the outer ring areas of Fairfax, Eisenhower Ave corridor in Alexandria and the aforementioned Columbia Pike corridor in southeast Arlington. To my mind, that tends to support the notion that the region has a fundamental housing shortage. Homebuyers are flocking to -and bidding up- the places that have some inventory of housing to sell. And of course all that bidding up means a lot of people -including the tax man- will be hiding in the bathroom the day those bills go out.

"While all of this is good news for homeowners, the bad news is that we'll all . . . be paying an increase in property taxes," Euille said. "We don't want to force anyone out of Alexandria because they can't afford to pay the taxes on their property. That is of concern. What we're trying to do is determine a tax rate reduction that is reasonable."

Of course, someone at MI saw this coming...