Tag Archives: smart growth

Mobility vs. Access, Chesterfield vs. Manhattan

Posted on June 20, 2014 by | 11 comments

by James A. Bacon

Luke Juday, writing in his personal blog, “Mapping the Commonwealth,” picks up the cudgel against a recent Wendell Cox essay that I inveighed against in, “Subsidize It, and They Will Come.” While I focused on the idea that a metropolitan strategy of building your way out of congestion is fiscal folly, Luke bores in on an even more important point: Cox confuses mobility (lack of congestion) with access. I’ll let Luke take it from here:

Most people perceive the inconvenience of traffic in terms of how fast they can drive on a road, which is ridiculous. They ought to evaluate it in terms of their increased or decreased access to possible destinations. So yes, ten minutes of driving in Manhattan might barely get you a mile. But that mile driving radius gets you access to a million people, several million jobs, and tens of thousands of retail stores and restaurants.  Contrast that with suburban Richmond. Ten minutes of driving in Chesterfield County might get you geographically farther in any one direction (including time on side streets to get to destinations), but that only gives you access to less than a hundred thousand people, and not nearly the concentration of jobs or amenities.

Now, dig this. Luke applies a mapping algorithm to show how much territory you can cover in a 10-minute drive in Manhattan’s congested city streets versus a 10-minute drive in Chesterfield. Using the same tool to display Manhattan and Chesterfield on the same scale (I think Luke’s maps were on different scales), I generated the following. Here’s how far a ten-minute drive in Manhattan gets you:

manhattan

 And here is a 10-minute drive in Chesterfield:

chesterfield

No question, you can cover a lot more ground in Chesterfield. You’re flying along, top down on your car, wind flying through your hair, no crazed yellow taxis cutting you off, no crowds of pedestrians to wade through at every intersection. But at the end of the ride, you have access to a small fraction of the number of people, businesses and amenities that you would get in New York.

(Admittedly, parking is a nightmare in New York compared to Chesterfield. On the other hand, Manhattan provides transportation options — walking, biking, buses and the subway — that are either impractical or do not exist in Chesterfield.)

Cox dwells on the fact that density creates congestion. He is quite correct about that. But he ignores the fact that density also creates access. It’s access, not mobility, that is critical to economic growth and quality of life.

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Menu Items on the Free Lunch Smorgasbord

Posted on June 20, 2014 by | 1 comment

Last week I published “Lean Urbanism and the Bureaucratic State,” a post that described a New Urbanist project to rectify the baleful effects of excess regulation upon urban re-development efforts. Questions arose in the comments regarding this initiative. What were these terrible regulations? Were the New Urbanists exaggerating the costs they imposed? Reader Richard N. Maier, a real estate manager for a major Central Texas homebuilder, contacted me to share his experience trying to redevelop a single property in Austin a few years ago. I republish this with his permission. Remember, this is Texas, where it is easier to build than almost anywhere in the country. — JAB

Bungalow for rent in Austin, Texas

Bungalow for rent in Austin, Texas

The Cost of Regulation: The Effect of Municipal Land Use Regulations on Housing Affordability

by Richard N. Maier

One of my professors at the University of Chicago told the class on the first day, “I don’t expect you to remember everything I talk about here, so my suggestion is for you to walk out of here with one takeaway from each class.” I can’t really say I did that every time, but sitting at convocation at Rockefeller Cathedral, I decided the one takeway that trumped all others was, “There is no free lunch.”

Throughout my career it has intrigued me how many of us travel through our careers and personal lives thinking otherwise.

A discussion of “affordable housing” is a perfect platform for testing this statement. While attending the University of Pittsburgh as an undergraduate, I worked for the Allegheny County Housing Authority in Pittsburgh. Our mission was affordable housing. The Authority constructed, rehabilitated and managed thousands of housing units aroud the count. This program was provided courtesy of the Federal government (a/k/a the American taxpayer). After getting my Bachelor’s degree, I entered the private sector and began my lessons in the practicalities of how such programs became re-titled as “exactions,” “incentives,” “impact fees,” “water quality preservation” and so forth. While I understand that various governments believe their regulations, laws and ordinances serve a variety of purposes that are in the public interest (neighborhood and historical preservation, safeguarding of public safety and the environment, “saving” resources, and so forth), the cost of that menu of delicacies can be expensive to the homebuyer and therefore a tax on the economy.

Inasmuch as my career the lat twenty-five years or so has centered around Austin and Central Texas, my examples will be drawn from that experience.

If life in the development/homebuilding business were simple, we could find a property, get it properly zoned, develop the lots or building sites, and construct the homes. But then it’s not, in fact, simple.

Let’s start with an actual example of building on a single lot in a central city residential neighborhood in Austin. A few years ago we contracted to purchase a lot in an area known as North Hyde Park. This example is utilized to illustrate the extreme costs incurred when developing in the central city, an area of high demand and low supply. The various regulations that overlaid this property were the zoning code, a residential design compatibility ordinance known as the “McMansion Ordinance” (all 26 pages of it), impervious cover limitations, “Neighborhood Conservation Combining District” regulations (a 28-page ordinance that supplements the zoning ordinance), handicapped accessibility requirements, sidewalk construction ordinances, a tree protection ordinance and an historic preservation overlay (which threatens even the simplest of structures with the prospect of being labeled “historic” or “significant”). While each of these eight regulation categories (which I consider to be menu items on the free lunch menu) have what the municipalities or jurisdictions consider to be public purposes, in many instances they are very costly to the ultimate homebuyer and contribute to the reduction in home affordability. As such, they are certainly not free. The following addreses a few of these categories and their impact on development.

Menu Item #1: Historic Preservation

The building lot in this real example in the City of Austin, Texas, was 80′ x 130′; approximately 10,400 square feet in total area. Situated thereon was a bungalow constructed in the early ’40s. It was about 90 square feet in size, had no particular architectural significance (there are probably a hundred similar structures within a mile and a half), was generally rented to students at the University of Texas and was acquired for the value of the land ($266,000) for new home construction. Despite the builder’s determination that the structure was beyond its useful life, the demolition permit was opposed by a neighbor (a renter, in fact; it should be noted that none of the neighbors who owned their homes opposed the demolition). This neighbor posited to the municipality that the structure to be demolished was historically significant and should be preserved. This declaration launched the seller of the house into an entirely new and unanticipated process of having to fight historic designation of the structure. The process from start to finish took approximately nine months during which time the property was left empty.

Continue reading.

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Posted in Environment, Housing, Planning, Regulation

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Terry McAuliffe: Working Hard to Make His Own Mistakes

Posted on June 19, 2014 by | 12 comments
Terry McAuliffe: Denounce old guy, clean up his mess, make same mistakes.

Terry McAuliffe: Denounce old guy, clean up his mess, make new mistakes.

Governor Terry McAuliffe is working hard to clean up the transportation boondoggles of the McDonnell administration — but how many new boondoggles will he create of his own making? Yesterday, the governor announced $13.1 billion in transportation capital expenditures after making final adjustments to the state’s Six-Year Improvement Plan.

In the announcement, McAuliffe made much of the fact that his administration ramped up public involvement this spring “by getting out into the communities and holding hearings in nine regions across the state to solicit input. Nearly 400 people attended and 1,620 oral and written comments were collected. From that information, the CTB adjusted the program to reflect the needs and priorities of local officials, residents and the traveling public who use and know their transportation system better than anyone else.”

Cough! Cough! Hack! I think I just swallowed my tongue.

Who shows up to those public hearings? I blog about transportation and land use for a living and no one notified me. The overwhelming majority people who attended, I’ll wager, were people who are paid to track such meetings and represent a particular constituency or special interest. They are lobbyists, environmentalists, road builders, Chamber of Commerce executives and maybe the odd citizen gadfly with more time on his hands than he knows what to do with. McAuliffe didn’t consult with the public, he consulted Virginia’s political class.

What is the common thread of the people who showed up or submitted comments? If you read my previous post, you’ll know that they are people who want something for nothing. They want highways, rail service and other improvements to be paid for by someone else. Thanks to Bob McDonnell’s transportation “reform” (enthusiastically backed by McAuliffe, incidentally), that’s what we have — a transportation funding system that raises less money than ever from the people who use roads and rail and more from general revenue sources like the sales tax. That money goes into a giant slush fund that is allocated through the Six-Year Improvement Plan at the behest of local politicians and lobbyists. It’s one, big something-for-nothing scheme.

The outcome is hundreds of projects around the state, some of which, no doubt, are entirely justified and would pass any cost-benefit test, but some of which are entirely political in inception and would never see the light of day without massive subsidies from people who will never use them. So, according to Leesburg Today, McAuliffe justifies advancing the Bi-County Parkway in Northern Virginia on the grounds that Washington Dulles International Airport needs a boost to its cargo operations. (This project is one legacy of the McDonnell administration, it appears, that he is willing to live with.) Then there are $3.2 billion in transit and rail projects — nearly one quarter of the transportation budget — none of which would have a prayer of being built without massive public subsidies.

So, merrily we skip along, funding highway and transit projects and adding to a transportation asset base that will have to be maintained and operated at considerable expense — even as the state faces a billion-dollar shortfall in the next biennial budget. And we do this knowing full well that the world stands on the verge of the most incredible transportation revolution since the invention of the automobile — the marriage of automobility with the Internet of Things — that will scramble the demand for roads, highways and transit in ways that we can only dimly imagine at the moment.

Transportation is a complex system in the midst of a massive perturbation and we’re treating it as a complicated system that warrants conducting business as usual. (Read “Complex Cities.”) Folly, folly, everywhere! It’s enough to drive me to despair.

Important update: The Washington Post adds critical perspective to the Leesburg Today article: “During the campaign, McAuliffe was noncommittal on the proposed north-south highway in Prince William and Loudoun counties, just west of the Manassas National Battlefield and south of Dulles International Airport. In April, Leesburg Today reported that McAuliffe said during a visit in Manassas that he liked the Bi-County Parkway ‘conceptually,’ as a way to ease traffic in and out of Dulles International Airport. However, he went on to say he was not taking a position on the proposal, because it still must go through an evaluation process approved by the Virginia General Assembly during this year’s session.”

It is extremely reassuring to hear that the Bi-County Parkway project will go through the Return-on-Investment evaluation process. I erred in bundling the Bi-County Parkway project with other projects listed in the Six-Year Improvement Plan. My bad. My apologies.

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Subsidize It, and They Will Come

Posted on June 19, 2014 by | 3 comments

by James A. Bacon

There is a particular intersection near where I live in Henrico County — Patterson Avenue and Parham Road — that gets really jammed up during rush hour and sets my teeth to grinding. I hate it. I curse it. I give its traffic signals the finger. (Yes, I do have incipient road rage issues.) But I suppose I really have no grounds to complain. According to Wendell Cox, writing in New Geography, Richmond is the least congested of the nation’s 50 largest metropolitan areas. No one else comes close.

Cox derived his ranking from a composite of three major traffic congestion indexes: INRIX, Tom Tom and the Urban Mobility Report. One thrust of his blog post is to argue that traffic congestion is correlated with density: The greater the density of a metropolitan region, the greater the traffic congestion.

Adapted from Wendell Cox

Adapted from Wendell Cox

I can’t argue with Cox on this. There is a correlation between density and congestion. And Richmond (the blue dot) is a case in point. We have a relatively low-density metro. He acknowledges that other factors affect congestion as well. One of them, which he does not mention, is simply the size of the metro region. The most congested metros tend to be the largest.

Cox advances yet another explanation: the unwillingness or inability of congested metros to add new transportation highway capacity. Unlike my Smart Growth colleagues, I agree that it is theoretically possible for a region to build its way out of congestion. Theoretically. If money were no object. If Martians came along and beamed down billions of dollars in gold ingots. Of course, in the real world, money is always an issue. My argument is that building highways willy nilly is fiscally unsustainable. If the people who used those roads and highways actually had to pay for them through tolls, not many projects would get built. People always want new roads if someone else will pay for them. If they have to pay themselves, not so much. They’ll find better things to do with their money.

The same holds true of mass transit. People are happy to build new heavy rail, light rail and street cars if they can find someone else to subsidize them. If riders had to pay the full freight, none of them would get built.

The fact is, we subsidize the construction of more transportation capacity than we really need. We hate congestion but we hate it less than paying our fair share of what it costs to make the congestion go away. At some point, the congestion crisis will get so intense that people will be willing to pay out of their own pocket — in other words, when they’re willing to pay the tolls and/or fares — what it takes to build and operate the new capacity. That’s the point at which we should expand the system, not before.

By the way, the Washington metro region is No. 7 on Cox’s composite list of most congested metros, and Hampton Roads is No. 24.

An aside. Cox makes an interesting argument that less congestion offers a competitive economic advantage. “Because traffic congestion increases travel times, it necessarily reduces the share of a metropolitan area’s (labor market) jobs that can be reached by the average employee. A considerable body of research associates greater access (measured in time) with improved economic performance and job creation.” Sounds great. Here in Richmond, we’re waiting…

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Suburbia’s Silent Storm Water Crisis

Posted on June 17, 2014 by | 2 comments
What happens when your storm water system fails. Photo credit: Associated Press.

What happens when your storm water system fails. Photo credit: Associated Press.

America’s older suburbs may face an infrastructure crisis from the last place they expect — aging storm water management systems.

In a presentation at the annual LOCUS conference in Washington, D.C., this morning, Ellen Dunham-Jones, author of “Retrofitting Suburbia,” listed a number of factors driving the re-development of America’s suburbs. They include the usual suspects such as energy-efficiency, emancipation from auto dependency and housing affordability as well as some less commonly recognized trends such as the aging of the population and public health. But the one that took me by surprise was water.

“Water is the next oil,” said Dunham-Jones, a Georgia Institute of Technology professor. By that, I understood her to mean that clean water is the next object of resource scarcity, especially in western communities where much of the waste water is, well… wasted.

Water issues also have dogged America’s older cities where waste-water and storm-water infrastructure built a century ago first began to decay. But the problems are spreading to suburban jurisdictions developed since World War II, Dunham-Jones said. The early suburbs were built with little thought to water issues. Many developments were built in flood plains or wetlands. Streams were funneled through storm culverts. Engineered, hard-infrastructure solutions that may have been adequate back then have proven less so as development spread and watersheds were paved over with impermeable surfaces, she explained.

Add to that the fact that some older pipes and culverts are crumbling and that warmer climate is associated with more extreme weather events, and the suburbs could have a time bomb on their hands — one they don’t even hear ticking.

— JAB

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The Rise of Walkable Urbanism and “the End of Sprawl”

Posted on June 17, 2014 by | 2 comments

foot_traffic_aheadby James A. Bacon

The Washington metropolitan region is the national model for “walkable urbanism” in the United States — more so even than metropolitan New York, according to the findings of “Foot Traffic Ahead: Ranking Walkable Urbanism in America’s Largest Metros,” a report released this morning by LOCUS, an organization of smart-growth real estate developers, and Smart Growth America.

The study identified 558 WalkUPs — regionally significant activity centers characterized by a high level of walkability — in the nation’s 30 largest metros. Forty-five of them are located in the Washington region, about half in the District of Columbia and half in surrounding Virginia and Maryland jurisdictions. The overall walkability exceeds even that of New York. While Manhattan is the single-most walkable place in the United States, it accounts for only 0.3% of the New York metro region’s land mass, and outer jurisdictions dilute its overall walkability, explained Christopher B. Leinberger, LOCUS president  and co-author of the report, during the LOCUS annual conference.

Washington’s lead in developing “walkable urbanism,” in contrast to the “drivable suburbanism” that dominated U.S. growth and development between World War II and the Great Recession of 2007-2008, should stand the region in good stead as it faces an economic future made insecure by the retrenchment of its main growth industry, the federal government. Walkable urbanism is closely correlated with the presence of a highly educated workforce, and a highly educated workforce is closely correlated with faster economic growth. While correlation does not necessarily mean causality, an argument can be made the the desirable attributes of walkable urbanism make it easier to attract and retain educated workers who, in turn, contribute to economic growth.

The report findings suggest that there will be future demand for hundreds of millions of square feet of walkable development over the next generation, said Leinberger. “This is likely the end of sprawl.”

A clear sign of shifting market preference is the 74% premium the market is willing to pay for office space in WalkUPs compared to space in Drivable Urbanism.  That’s the reverse of 30 years ago when suburban office parks enjoyed a marked advantage, Leinberger said. Even excluding the New York market, which skews the results, WalkUps enjoy a 44% edge, he said.

While Washington was the star metro, some surprising regions have been coming on strong thanks to dramatic shifts in development patterns in the post-2008 development cycle. Metropolitan Atlanta, which only 20 years ago was the poster child of sprawl, has concentrated 50% of its development in WalkUP districts comprising only 1% of the region’s land mass. Perhaps even more surprisingly, Detroit has seen similarly focused re-development in downtown, midtown and a handful of urbanizing suburbs.

Leinberger attributed Washington region’s success to five main factors. First, the region has the highest overall education level of any metro in the country, Second, the region has been aggressively expanded its Metro rail system; 80% of the WalkUPs in the region are, or soon will be, served by Metro. Third, for the most part local governments put in the right kind of zoning around their Metro stations, encouraging walkable, mixed-use development. Fourth, the region’s real estate industry has mastered the discipline of developing WalkUPs, which are inherently more complex and expensive than green-field development. And fifth, the public sector has done an exceptionally good job of “place management” — creating quality walkable places.

While rail transit gives a big boost to walkable urbanism, said Leinberger, it is not essential. One out of five WalkUPs in the Washington region are not connected to the Metro. Also, many small cities and towns have walkable places. “It sure does help but it is not required.”

Emerick Corsi, president of Forest City Enterprises Real Estate, agreed. “Walkable can be built anywhere,” he said. He cited the example of a town miles outside of Los Angeles where his firm is converting an old shopping center into 2 million square feet of new buildings with the capability to expand a lot more by going “totally vertical.” There is no transit but the development will be highly walkable, he said.

Leinberger predicted that real estate development in the foreseeable future will be driven by the desire to meet the demand for walkable urbanism. The process won’t necessarily be smooth. Some metros — San Antonio, Kansas City, San Diego — have continued to sprawl. Providing affordable housing in the most desirable areas will be a challenge. But if Leinberger is right and the most walkable regions prove to be the most economically dynamic regions, the success of metros like Washington, Boston, New York and even Atlanta and Detroit will be clear for all to see.

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Posted in Economic development, Housing, Infrastructure, Land use & development, Transportation

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Want to Combat Noise Pollution? Measure It

Posted on June 16, 2014 by | 3 comments

I’m a big fan of city life but I’m the first to acknowledge that there are drawbacks to crowding and congestion. The foremost of those is noise. Cities are noisier than the burbs and the countryside. The older I get (I’m 61 now), the larger the noise factor looms in my consideration of things. Even in suburbs, it doesn’t take much commotion to jangle my nerves. In the early morning birds can drive me crazy with all their chirping and cawing and twittering. As for children, don’t get me started. The noise-oblivious little monsters can be worse than freight trains. If it sounds like I’m turning into a cranky old man… yes, I believe that’s exactly what’s happening.

As a rule, cities are even noisier than the burbs. People are more densely packed in urban areas, so there are more people — more drunks, more wife beaters, more backyard dogs, more buses, more sirens, more jackhammers, more big, honking HVACs — generating sound waves within hearing distance. Cities also have more concrete and masonry that reflect sound and less in the way of trees, bushes and vegetative mass to dampen it. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), problems resulting from too much noise include poor work and school performance and even cardiovascular problems. Clearly, in the battle for livability, the noise factor favors suburbs, small towns and rural areas.

How does a city combat that disadvantage? Ordinances can limit excessive noise from construction, honking horns or barking dogs. Transportation officials can build sound walls along highways. Aside from such obvious measures, one useful place to start is to measure decibel levels to visualize where noise is the worst. Thanks to the increasing ubiquity of smart phones, the practice of noise mapping is spreading around the world.

In 2010 the Sony Computer Science Lab in Paris released an app, NoiseTube, that anyone can download and use to record decibel levels wherever they go. Users can tag particularly obnoxious noise sources and display them on Google Maps. The data can be aggregated to create noise maps accessible to researchers and city officials.

Sony appears to have neglected its website. NoiseTube.com claims to have data from 509 cities worldwide (including Norfolk, Virginia Beach, Richmond, Scottsville and Lynchburg) but the data doesn’t upload to my PC. Regardless, the code is open source, and anyone is free to improve upon it. Creating regional noise maps sounds like a cool community project to undertake. I’d volunteer to participate.  If there are any civic hackers in Virginia looking for a project, let me know.

— JAB

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Posted in Environment, Health Care

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Will Virginia Embrace the Coming Transportation Revolution or Thwart It?

Posted on June 15, 2014 by | 9 comments
A Lyft car. Idiosyncratic but revolutionary.

A Lyft car. Idiosyncratic but revolutionary.

by James A. Bacon

Has Virginia has given up any pretext of being a market- or innovation-friendly state? The Department of Motor Vehicles has issued cease-and-desist orders to the Uber and Lyft ride-sharing service and slapped the companies with a total of $35,000 in fines. Their offense? Operating order-a-ride-with-a-smart-phone services and giving traditional taxicab companies a good scare.

According to the Washington Post, DMV claims the two companies are operating in violation of state law (although it’s not clear from the article what provision of the law they are breaking). Here’s what a DMV spokesperson had to say:

Virginia DMV supports innovation. … DMV has been charged by the General Assembly to conduct a study of these transportation network companies. We are confident that the solution to transportation network companies operations will come out of the study and we hope that Uber and Lyft will actively participate in the study and be a part of creating the solution. In the meantime, Virginia DMV must fulfill its obligation to highway safety and enforce the law as it is currently written.

Uber and Lyft maintain that they are operating legally, and they will not obey the cease-and-desist order.

Bacon’s bottom line: This dispute is far more important than Virginians realize. It’s way more significant than a dust-up between local taxicab companies and the Silicon Valley up-starts who would compete with them. We are in the early phases of a transportation revolution. Right now, companies like Uber and Lyft are targeting the premium end of the market because that’s where the money is and where they can most rapidly recoup the cost of developing their software apps, administrative systems and algorithms for positioning their vehicles. Once those concepts are refined and proven in the marketplace, we will see them migrate downstream to other market segments. I recently highlighted Bridj, which is providing premium bus service in the Boston area fore highly competitive fares as an example of the next wave of innovation.

The logical culmination of this technology revolution will be the emergence of a wide array of transportation services with different mixes of convenience, price and amenities targeted to different population segments. People will enjoy a far broader array of transportation services than they do now, and it is entirely reasonable to expect new enterprises to begin serving low-income populations in neighborhoods that municipal bus lines do not now serve. This change will be driven by the profit motive — by entrepreneurs filling niches in the marketplace that are now ill-served by taxicabs and municipal bus lines — and will not require government subsidies.

While it may be appropriate to maintain basic minimum regulations — companies and drivers need to carry insurance, for instance — all government has to do is step out of the way. While cities from Chicago to Seattle are throwing up barriers to transportation innovation, Virginia should embrace the trend. DMV should back off while the General Assembly studies the issue. And the McAuliffe administration should make it a core plank of Virginia transportation policy to become the most hospitable state in the country for the likes of Uber, Lyft, Bridj and other heralds of the New Transportation.

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Posted in Poverty & income gap, Regulation, Transportation

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Lean Urbanism and the Bureaucratic State

Posted on June 13, 2014 by | 18 comments

building_codesby James A. Bacon

The really big idea to emerge from the 2014 Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) was “lean urbanism.” The idea isn’t entirely new. Andres Duany, New Urbanism guru and the driving force behind “lean” urbanism, has been publicly discussing the idea for a year or more. But he used the annual confab to flesh out the idea in a series of forums and conversations with others. The idea received a positive response — far more people attended his sessions than Duany had expected — but he received at least one reminder, which I shall recount shortly, that bringing about the kind of reforms he envisions will be exceedingly difficult. The fundamental problem resides not in bureaucratic intransigence or political obstreperousness but in the extraordinary complexity of modern democratic society.

The concept of lean urbanism arises from Duany’s observation that municipal zoning codes and building codes are so complex and onerous that they make it exceedingly difficult for young people, artists, gays and other small-scale players with a high tolerance for risk to gentrify and re-develop decaying urban neighborhoods. They simply lack the scale to hire the architects, planners and lawyers needed to push their projects through City Hall. Without the risk-oblivious pioneers to pave the way and demonstrate the viability of a neighborhood, big-money developers stay away unless government mitigates the risk through partnerships and subsidies, which, of course, are highly risky and expensive for government.

Duany experienced what he calls an “aha” moment, however, when touring Detroit not long ago. He was astounded by hot spots of revitalization where young people had moved into neighborhoods and begun rebuilding under the radar. Detroit’s bankruptcy, he contended, had forced the city to pare back its code enforcement apparatus, with the result that the Millennial pioneers no longer faced the bureaucratic obstacles that had halted re-development before. Was there some way to replicate that experience by, in effect, pre-negotiating a stripped down set of codes and regulations for districts targeted for development?

Lean urbanism, as best I could decipher it from the CNU sessions I attended, moves along two tracks — one on the private-sector side, the other on the public-sector side. In a series of sessions, a succession of lean-urbanism advocates presented papers on different strategies and tactics for bringing down the private-sector cost of re-development projects. Duany sat in attendance as commenter and interloculator.

Thus, David Brain, a board member of the National Charrette Institute, made a presentation on how to reduce the cost of charrettes, which are visioning and design sessions conducted with extensive public input. Charrettes are manpower-intensive and run up significant bills for the developers who hold them. Perhaps the idea could be re-tooled, Brain suggested, by bringing in smaller teams that focused on incremental changes rather than grand visions and by settling for rougher sketches without the complete documentation. There would be trade-offs, to be sure, but the result would be a tool that can “do more with less in the way of financial resources.”

Another concept was to build on the idea of tactical urbanism, in which planners, non-profits and/or volunteers mock up changes to the cityscape by repainting traffic lines, bringing in trees and bushes in planters, installing movable street furniture and holding events to show people what is possible. The idea is to undertake small, inexpensive experiments. If they fail, they can be scrapped at little cost. If they succeed, municipalities can follow up by making permanent changes.

One CNU session highlighted an example of “lean sprawl repair” for the Oak Hollow Mall in High Point, N.C. That project visualized transforming an abandoned mall into a business incubator with space for live-work studios, artisan workshops and a culinary institute. Parking lots would provide space for cheap, pop-up business quarters in the form of shipping containers. Cheap. Fast. Low risk. Other presentations explored the potential for making greater use of live-work units, using lean urbanism to revitalize small towns, and adopting the vernacular architecture of the Philippines to increase energy efficiency of American buildings at low cost.

But achieving public-sector reform is a tougher nut to crack. In yet another session, Richmond, Va., attorney Daniel K. Slone tackled the prospects for reforming the building code. Rules in the building code exist for a reason, he said. They are designed to protect against hazards common to the construction of buildings and they have constituencies that will fight to preserve them. Responsible builders prefer having codes because they protect against competitors underbidding them by doing shoddy work and because hewing to accepted best practices protects them against lawsuits if something does go wrong. When Millennials in Detroit ignore the permitting process, they take on risks — or pass them on to others — that they may or may not be prepared to deal with.

Unlike many government standards, which are imposed from above, building codes come from a grassroots, bottom-up process in which government plays a negligible role in setting the standards. The process is open to anyone who wants to participate, and the results reflect a give-and-take between stakeholders. The 1990s saw important updates to the code as environmentalists pressed for alternative building designs for such things as green roofs, adobe houses and putting outdoor lighting in trees rather than on creosote phone poles. Another wave of reform resulted in the creation of a Rehab subcode that recognized that the renovation of existing buildings justifies different rules than does construction of new buildings, achieving some of the goals that the Lean Urbanists are agitating for.

It might be useful, suggested Slone, to examine the concept of sovereign immunity that protects public officials for the negligent actions of government. Sovereign immunity has eroded over the years as citizens, legislators and courts have sought to hold public officials more accountable. Understandably, government officials are reluctant to expose themselves to the risk of lawsuits by modifying the building code. Clarification or expansion of sovereign immunity may be one of the most overlooked aspects of achieving lean regulatory reform, Slone wrote in a draft white paper. However, reformers should expect the possibility of resistance from the plaintiff’s bar and consumer advocates. Continue reading →

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Posted in Environment, Health Care, Housing, Insurance, Land use & development, Planning, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulation

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Safer Streets Require Less Traffic Engineering, Not More

Posted on June 12, 2014 by | 23 comments

by James A. Bacon

A week or two ago, I lamented the disparity between the high cost of traffic accidents in Virginia and the paltry resources devoted to reducing their number. But to say that insufficient attention is being paid to the issue is not to say that no attention is being paid. According to Virginia’s 2012-2015 Strategic Highway Safety Plan, traffic deaths in the state fell 23% between 2006 and 2010. We are making progress.

Since my blog post, the Hampton Roads Transportation Planning Organization (HRPTO) published its own regional safety study. The HRPTO did a number of worthy things. It mapped the location of accidents across the region and honed in on the worst freeways and intersections that offered the best prospects for improvement. The planners asked a critical question: Which improvements offer the best benefit/cost ratio? As Brian Chenault with the HRPTO summarizes the range of possible solutions: “Recommendations run anywhere from restriping pavement, bicycle and pedestrian improvements, optimizing signal timing, adding additional lanes, trimming vegetation, reducing speed limits, adding extra signage/signals, etc.”

As untutored as I am in the arcana of traffic engineering, it strikes me that the HRTPO has identified a number of projects that will provide considerable bang for the buck, at least as measured by traditional traffic-engineering criteria. Some of the tactics it advances are ideas that I have championed, such as making better use of roundabouts and traffic light synchronization. Its recommendations undoubtedly would amount to a net positive for the people of Hampton Roads — and I hope readers will view it in that light even as I discuss its shortcomings.

The problem with the study is that the authors approach the safety issue from a traffic-engineering perspective. Not surprisingly, every traffic-engineering challenge has a traffic-engineering solution. Indeed, for some safety problems, traffic-engineering solutions are entirely appropriate. But for many, they are not. In many instances, the best solution is precisely the opposite of what traffic engineers recommend.

mercury_boulevard
For purposes of illustration, let us look at the intersection of Mercury Boulevard and Power Plant Parkway, as shown above. (Click for larger image.) This particular intersection averaged 43 crashes per year between 2009 and 2012, the second most of any intersection studied. The HRTPO’s analysis attributes the high accident rate to a variety of micro-factors, which can be summed up by noting that the traffic patterns here are highly complex, leading to a high number of rear-end crashes and side-swipes. The report makes three recommendations:

  • Add a painted triangle yield line with YIELD pavement markings
  • Relocate stop bars
  • Add a flashing “signal ahead” sign
  • Add a pedestrian signal and crosswalk with ladder striping

What’s the common denominator here? It’s the expectation that more signage and clearer road markings will induce drivers to drive more safely.

Now, let’s take a radical leap. At the 2014 Congress for the New Urbanism conference last week, Ben Hamilton-Baillie, an English consultant who specializes in reconciling traffic movement with quality public spaces, showed a clip of San Francisco street traffic filmed days before the 1906 earthquake. There were no marked lanes. There were no turn arrows. There were no traffic lights. There were no street signs. Pedestrians, trolleys, horses, horse-drawn carriages, bicycles, pull-carts and automobiles shared the street. At first view, it seemed like chaos. People were jay walking and standing around in the middle of the street. Cars weaved between lanes. Vehicles made U-turns. It was a traffic engineer’s nightmare. But no one — at least not in this 12-minute film clip — experienced a mishap. Watch the clip. It’s mesmerizing.

Undoubtedly, some accidents did occur in those days and people did get hurt. Such incidents provided the pretext for the traffic engineers to step in. In the 1920s and 1930s, they segregated vehicular traffic from pedestrian traffic — roads became the domain of cars, and people were relegated to the sidewalks. Not only would this arrangement create safer streets, it was thought, keeping people off streets would allow cars to travel faster, thus increasing the carrying capacity of streets and reducing congestion. That is the path cities have traveled for some 80 years now, with the result that contemporary Americans cannot imagine any other way of doing things. Today, the traffic-engineering solution to every problem is more signs, more lane markings, more signals, more information overload. Continue reading →

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The Smart Transit Revolution

Posted on June 10, 2014 by | 5 comments

by James A. Bacon

Bridj, a Boston start-up, bills itself as “the world’s first smart transit system which uses big data and luxury shuttles to adjust to your individual commuting needs.” The company charges $6 per ride, or three times that of a city bus, but it provides Wi-Fi connectivity and luxury seats, and it saves riders time by providing direct service between destinations. For well-heeled commuters, the top-of-the-line service is vastly preferable to either the city bus or driving and paying for parking. If the experiment works out — it launched this month — Bridj could significantly enlarge the market for mass transit.

Not to blow my own horn (Arooo-ga! Arooo-ga!) but I’ve seen this coming for a long time, ever since Uber launched its luxury transportation service as an alternative to traditional taxicabs. The smart phone revolution is making it easier than ever to match rides with riders, reserve seats and make payments. Meanwhile, the ability to process massive volumes of data enables companies to optimize the deployment of their vehicle fleets.

What I find fascinating is that Bridj and start-ups providing similar services in Chicago and San Francisco (see the post in City Labs) are demonstrating that there is a demand for mass transit not being met by one-size-fits-all municipal bus service. As typically happens with the introduction of a new product or service, the first wave of entrepreneurs targets the affluent market because that’s where the money is. One would expect that as these business models prove themselves and as technologies and algorithms are perfected, these private transit companies will begin providing differentiated services for other market segments. One could readily imagine a less luxurious Bridj-like service catering to middle-class riders, and tighter-packed, less comfortable but cheaper services providing mobility to lower-income individuals.

Extending the smart transit revolution from well-heeled riders to the rest of the population will be good all the way around — it will provide more transit options for a wider variety of people. It will get more cars off the road, reduce pollution and cut the demand for parking. There will be only one set of losers — local municipal transit monopolies. We can expect push back from the transit companies against Bridj, just as the taxicabs have sought to block Uber in city after city. The transit companies will wail about the private carriers “skimming the cream” and the disasters that will befall their lower-income riders if they go bankrupt.

There’s nothing stopping municipal transit companies from embracing the same technologies and the same strategies. They won’t, of course, (a) because they are innovation-stifling monopolies, (b) they are dependent upon state and federal subsidies, which come with all manner of strings attached, (c) they are subject to the dictates of local politicians and (d) they lack the financial wherewithal or management skills necessary.

If I were a local elected official in Virginia, especially if I were in a suburban county where lots of my constituents drove to work downtown, I would be on the phone begging Bridj to expand to my metro. And I would promise that when they came, my community would roll out the red carpet.

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Mobile Homes, Wealth Accumulation and the Poor

Posted on June 8, 2014 by | 7 comments

trailer_parkby James A. Bacon

Manufactured dwellings — mobile homes, trailers, call them what you will — are a major source of affordable housing in the United States. But a few market reforms would make them even more affordable to lower- and middle-income families and make them better vehicles for accumulating wealth. That was the message from a session Friday morning at the 2014 conference of the Congress of the New Urbanism in Buffalo, N.Y.

The great advantage of manufactured housing is that it costs less than site-built housing– $44 per square foot on average compared to $86 per square foot, not counting the value of the land, said Doug Ryan, director of affordable housing initiatives for the Corporation for Enterprise Development. But there are drawbacks. Many homeowners don’t own the land beneath their trailers and they cannot obtain long-term mortgage financing like other homeowners can. Also, zoning codes often marginalize manufactured housing, relegating trailer parks to undesirable locations, if permitting it at all.

Many problems with the industry originate from its origins decades ago when companies manufactured mobile trailers primarily as recreational vehicles. Over time, the trailers evolved into houses set in semi-permanent locations while campgrounds evolved into trailer parks. In 1976 legislation formally recognized the difference between “recreational vehicles” and “manufactured housing” but the underlying business model – RVs/mobile homes sitting on land owned by someone else – did not change.

Severing the connection between home ownership and land ownership created at least two big problems. First, trailer owners were subject to the whims of the landowner. In most states, trailer park owners could evict tenants for undesirable behavior or any other reason with only 30 days’ notice. If the landowner wanted to sell to a developer – boom – long-term tenants found themselves uprooted and forced to move to another location, if they could find one, at considerable expense.

Second, financing companies classified trailers as “chattel” property the same as RVs, which meant that homeowners could not access mortgage financing which charged lower interests rates and stretched out payments over longer periods. The second problem was tied to the first: The disconnect between the trailer and the land beneath it made it less desirable collateral for financiers.

Fortunately for mobile homeowners, a non-profit movement has arisen to address those problems. As Lisa Davis, program officer for the Ford Foundation, described it, reformers are moving across a broad front: changing the law to get manufactured housing titled as real estate; improving product quality with a focus on energy efficiency; solving the land-tenure problem; and reforming the financing system.

ROC USA, a not-for-profit enterprise, is addressing the land-ownership issue by converting trailer parks into land-ownership co-ops. It is impractical to subdivide trailer parks into individual lots for individual trailers, said Paul Bradley, president of ROC USA. But giving trailer tenants an ownership interest in a communal property does several positive things. It gives them equity ownership in the land, and it gives them security against the landlord selling the property and evicting them. Thirty years of experience has shown that homes in resident-owned communities sell faster and sell for more, allowing homeowners to build more equity.

Next Step Network is working on several initiatives to help trailer owners. The organization provides education and credit counseling to trailer buyers to ensure they make intelligent consumer decisions, and it works with the industry to make the costs and risks of ownership more transparent, said Dave Betler, marketing and operations specialist with Next Step. The group urges homeowners to look beyond up-front costs and look at life-cycle costs, which include energy payments. Manufacturing trailers to Energy Star specifications can lower monthly payments and increase re-sale value. Energy expenditures loom large for low-income families – twice the percentage of their income compared to average households.

Bacon’s bottom line: For the most part, I find these initiatives to be highly commendable. Instead of seeking government subsidies or engaging in social engineering, they are trying to make the market work more effectively. The goals of greater transparency and consumer education are laudable. Addressing the land-tenure issue by converting trailer parks into co-ops is inspired. Nudging the financial industry into providing mortgage financing sounds reasonable, although there may be complicating issues, such as the use of long-term mortgages that extend longer than the expected life of the trailer, that the panelists did not discuss.

The other reason I prefer this approach to many other affordable-housing initiatives is that it does not bilk taxpayer or turn lower-income people into wards of the state — it turns poor people into property owners and gives them a means to accumulate at least a small amount of wealth. That builds a much healthier society.

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What Makes a Resilient Community?

Posted on June 6, 2014 by | 22 comments
Harriet Tregoning

Harriet Tregoning

by James A. Bacon

During the depths of the Great Recession in 2008, hundreds of cars dropped off the Department of Motor Vehicle rolls in Washington, D.C. As then-director of planning Harriet Tregoning parsed the data, people were dialing back their expenses to make ends meet. Yes, that was a sign of economic hardship but it also was an indicator of Washington’s resilience. You see, people could sell their cars because the city had such a rich array of transportation options. The result: Washington had fewer foreclosures and experienced less economic distress than many other jurisdictions in the region.

Today, Tregoning is director of the Office of Economic Resilience at the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It’s her job to think about how regions can prepare for economic uncertainty, globalization and restructuring, climate change and extreme weather. Speaking yesterday at the 2014 Congress for the New Urbanism in Buffalo, N.Y., she enumerated several key traits of the resilient city. The availability of transportation options was at the top of the list.

Some may attribute the strength of Washington’s economy during the recession to a surge in stimulus spending. But the local economy has remained vibrant even after sequestration began throttling the federal budget, Tregoning said. The city is gaining population by an average of 1,100 residents per month. Led by entrepreneurial start-ups, private-sector jobs have more than offset the decline in federal jobs.

Here are some of the ways, in Tregoning’s view, in which Washington cultivates resilience:

Transportation choice. Residents have numerous transportation options. Washington is served by buses and one of the nation’s largest Metro systems. The city is building a bicycle network and fostering a bicycle culture through its bike-share program. The city has taxis and taxi-like services such as Uber. Car-sharing services are making inroads. And, of course, Washington streets are highly walkable. The ability to live a car-free or car-lite lifestyle saves households in the range of $4,000 to $16,000 yearly per car.

Willingness to experiment, willingness to fail. Washington’s first shared-bicycle service was “an abysmal failure,” said Tregoning, who was a champion of the shared-bicycle concept. Rather than abandon the idea, the city figured out what it had done wrong and then launched a second enterprise that fixed the problems of the first. Capital Bikeshare has been highly successful. “Innovative cities have to experiment,” Tregoning said. They aren’t paralyzed by fear of failure. Getting things right is an iterative process. The city re-striped the bicycle lanes on Pennsylvania Avenue seven times before people were satisfied.

Pop-up plazas. Resilient cities abhor a vacuum, Tregoning said. They find temporary uses for vacant spaces such as pop-up parks or open-air food courts served by restaurants on wheels. Engage people by mocking up a plaza or other public space using paint, portable furniture and mobile landscaping. Allow people to visualize how the space could be different. If it’s a hit, follow with hard investment. If not, move on to the next experiment.

In the same spirit, I would add a couple additional criteria.

Housing choices. Just as people need transportation choices, they should have housing choices. By that, I don’t mean “affordable” housing as traditionally defined. Homeowners should be free to rent basement apartments, garage apartments or even single rooms to individuals (or even families) not in their household. Property owners could bolster income by an amount equivalent to what they would save selling an automobile; renters would enjoy a greatly expanded supply of housing choices, typically in far nicer neighborhoods than they could find in subsidized housing. Zoning restrictions severely curtail what homeowners can do with their property but resilient cities would give homeowners more flexibility to adjust their living arrangements as economic conditions dictate.

Fiscal sustainability. Cities supply a valuable service to citizens when they maintain buses, trolleys and trains. But municipal transportation enterprises invariably lose money, creating a burden on taxpayers. Here’s the big question: Can municipalities continue to maintain those subsidies in the event of an economic shock? A resilient city, I would argue, develops transportation systems that are financially self-supporting, thus less vulnerable to disruption by adverse economic conditions.

In sum, Tregoning makes excellent points. I hope to elaborate upon some of them — especially the emphasis on experimentation and the willingness to take small risks — in future blog posts. But I would expand the scope of what constitutes a resilient community.

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Deconstructing Duany

Posted on June 5, 2014 by | 16 comments
Andres Duany. Photo credit: Miami Herald

Andres Duany. Photo credit: Miami Herald

by James A. Bacon

Never in all the times over the years that I have heard Andres Duany speak, nor in those occasions in which I interviewed him, have I heard him utter a scintilla of partisan political sentiment. If I had to guess, I would say that he disdains both political parties. As he said yesterday of the New Urbanism movement, “We’re non-ideological. I can’t emphasize that enough.” New Urbanists are interested, he said, in “what works over the long run.”

But to say that Duany, the godfather of the New Urbanism movement, is non-partisan and non-ideological is not to say that there is no ethical basis for his thinking. Indeed, when he was providing an overview of New Urbanism basics to newby attendees of the 2014 Congress for the New Urbanism conference, he commenced with a discourse on the movement’s ethics.

Environmentalism is an ethical imperative that gives primacy to nature, nature’s creatures and the natural habitat. By contrast, New Urbanism puts people at the center. “The New Urbanism cares about the human habitat — not about the polar bears. How’s our species doing?”

Duany describes his way of thinking as old-fashioned “American pragmatism.” He asks how the built environment affects people. He wants to know what works. To use philosophical jargon, he is an empiricist. While he offers detailed prescriptions about the best way to build communities, he is ever-ready to revisit old assumptions on the basis of new evidence. One of the most fascinating things about listening to him year after year is to hear how his thinking changes based upon the experience of New Urbanism projects in the real world.

Duany is best known for his critique of suburban sprawl, the low-density auto-centric pattern of development that has prevailed in North America since World War II. Sprawl communities were built for the care and feeding of automobiles, not people. He is no fan either of spectacular “starchitect”-designed buildings that lavish attention on the buildings while sacrificing the public realm where people actually interact. Likewise, while he is ever receptive to new techniques, he is skeptical of those who tout technology or other silver bullets as magical solutions to incredibly complex problems.

There is a strong libertarian streak in Duany’s thinking. Perverse government regulations — zoning codes that segregate land uses, Department of Transportation specifications that mandate crazy-wide streets, fire marshal regulations that make it impractical to build alleyways through city blocks — are the frequent target of his ire. Government rules are full of unintended consequences. (He has deepened his critique of over-regulation in his recent emphasis on Lean Urbanism.) How is it possible, he asked yesterday, that in the 19th century the United States managed to house 30 million penniless immigrants with no government assistance while today, with massive government involvement, the country is completely incapable of housing poor people properly?

Duany respects market forces. He is acutely aware that development projects must make money for developers (his clients) and be affordable to buyers. Accordingly, he is always alert to materials, building techniques, regulatory work-arounds and other strategies to drive costs out of building New Urbanist communities without compromising core principles.

That libertarianism is leavened, however, by a Burkean conservatism that respects the classical patterns that evolved over millennia of trial and error. The English thinker Edmund Burke found value in the wisdom accumulated over generations and argued that old habits and practices should not be lightly discarded.  Likewise, Duany finds value in the old, human-scale patterns of architecture and city design handed down over the ages until tossed aside by the radical disruption of the automobile culture.

Finally, Duany maintains a healthy skepticism toward the social engineers and visionaries who put ideology first. “We don’t experiment on people,” he said. Too many experiments in urban development — Pruitt Igoe-style public housing, anyone? — have proven disastrous. Given the slow turnover in the built environment, the effect of bad ideas lasts for decades.

Currently, that skepticism manifests itself in his awkward relationship with environmentalists. One of the best things that happened to the New Urbanism movement is when the environmentalists discovered that it offered a fully blown critique and alternative to auto-centric sprawl. “We’re now riding the ecological movement,” he said: “Fewer cars, less pavement.” But environmentalists can get carried away, whether they’re protecting snail darters or polar bears or they’re advocating expensive LEED certification that drives up the cost of new buildings. He decried the consultants — “a whole profession of sucker fish” — who have arisen around implementing the standards. Too many experts insist upon expensive, high-tech solutions while low-tech solutions, many of them found in vernacular architecture that uses passive techniques to heat and cool, will conserve energy far more cost effectively.

With a curious, wide-ranging mind, Duany is prone to digressions. At the moment, he is fascinated by the city plans adopted by 19th-century Mormons, and he’s updating the ideas of Ebenezer Howard, the 19th-century English author of “Garden Cities of Tomorrow,” the forerunner of modern suburbia, to create a yardstick for measuring modern garden-city revival projects. Pretty esoteric stuff. But in the end, he always comes back to what works, what kinds of communities best meet human needs.

Duany’s refusal to be pigeon-holed ideologically is one of the reasons for New Urbanism’s success. An appreciation of walkable, human-scale communities is penetrating all levels of government and society. That’s happening because, as a non-partisan movement, New Urbanism does not alienate partisan elected officials. It probably doesn’t hurt that Duany’s approach also appeals to a populace that is increasingly disenchanted with technocrats and ideologues.

He does not cast New Urbanists as heroes who swoop in and save the world. Rather, New Urbanists help define the rules that enable ordinary people to improve their lives and communities. “Patient, long-term investment is what works,” he said. “We set things up so communities can heal themselves.”

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Lean Urbanism: Cheaper, Faster, Smaller

Posted on June 4, 2014 by | 12 comments
Andres Duany. Photo credit: The Guardian.

Andres Duany. Photo credit: The Guardian.

by James A. Bacon

Andres Duany, the leading theorist of the New Urbanism movement, has toured Detroit seven or eight times. The first trips consisted of what he calls “ruin porn” — post-apocalyptic landscapes of tumble-down houses, weeded lots and decrepit public buildings. But the most recent trip was very different. His guide conducted him through an archipelago of places where people were moving back in, fixing things up and creating jobs. It was a huge “aha” moment for him, he told attendees of the 22nd conference of the Congress for the New Urbanism this morning.

How could revival be happening in a city that had filed for bankruptcy and was scaling back on the delivery of essential municipal services such as public safety, infrastructure and schools? His incredible realization: Bankruptcy benefited the city by cutting spending on the regulatory apparatus that had strangled the city in the first place.

“When Detroit went bankrupt, they couldn’t maintain the regulators,” Duany explained. People simply stopped bothering to get permits; they side-stepped the suffocating rules and red tape that made it devastatingly expensive to invest in the city. The young Millennials who are leading the city’s revival simply had no patience with the regulations. They proceeded as if the regulations didn’t exist, and no one stopped them.

That epiphany sparked a major turn in Duany’s career. Renowned for his critique of suburban sprawl, his evangelism of creating cities for people, not cars, his design of New Urbanist communities such as Seaside in Florida and the Kentlands in Maryland and his role creating form-based codes as an alternative to traditional land used-based codes, Duany now is propounding what he calls “lean urbanism.” His goal: to strip away all but the most essential regulations to encourage more urban re-development.

Duany was 30 years old when he designed Seaside, the beach-front town that did so much to define the early New Urbanism movement. One reason the project was so successful is that there were no regulations to impede it. But the nation has layered regulation after regulation onto the development process over the past 30 years, he explained. The last building he designed was so festooned with regulations, he said, he had to hire a consultant who specialized in handicap-accessibility code. That one set of requirements contains as many rules and specifications as the entire development code when he got started!

Developers who started in the game 30 to 40 years ago have had decades to master the new regulations as they accumulated. “Those of us who grew up with it are expert navigators,” he said. “We’re experts at work-arounds and patches.” The tragedy is that young people confronting the mass of regulation for the first time don’t have a clue. After seeing what they’re getting into, many quit and go into another profession, he said only half-facetiously.

The rise of the regulatory regime tilted development decisively in favor of the cookie-cutter, urban-sprawl pattern of development. To understand why, it is necessary to understand how urban re-development works. The first phase is when the “risk oblivious” sector of the population — typically young people, gays, artists and the like — move into a decayed neighborhood because it’s inexpensive. This first wave makes the neighborhood safe, introduces amenities that it lacked and creates an aura of coolness. Once pioneers demonstrate the market potential for an area, large-scale developers with less appetite for risk move in with the big money.

Hiring the lawyers and consultants to move a proposal through City Hall is expensive and time-consuming. There are economies of scale inherent in the process that confer a huge advantage to developers who can spread the regulatory cost over a large number of lots. “You can’t make a living doing two or three houses per year. You need twenty to thirty.” By enacting reams of regulations, Duany said, “government has exterminated that first phase of development.” That doesn’t hurt the suburbs where green-field land is available for large-scale projects. But it is a killer in cities where the land has been developed already and where re-development occurs lot by lot.

The way to level the playing field is to create “pink zones” in cities that are similar to suburban PUDs (Planned Urban Developments). “You negotiate down the red tape so that the person who comes in has a very short protocol” of requirements. Says Duany: “We have to do it with less. We have to do it faster. We have to do it smaller.”

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