Archive for ‘compact development’

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08/24/2011

David King on the Co-Development of Subways and Real Estate in JTLU

The Journal of Transport and Land Use always has good things in it, and this time out is no exception. I’ll pull out two papers to discuss this week.

The first is from fellow UCLA alumni and now assistant professor at Columbia University, David King. His manuscript is

King, D., 2011, Developing Densely: Estimating the Effect of Subway Growth on New York City Land Uses The Journal of Transport and Land Use, 4(2), pp. 19-32.

From the abstract:
Abstract:In the early twentieth century, New York City’s population, developed land area, and subway network size all increased dramatically. The rapid expansion of the transit system and land development present intriguing questions as to whether land development led subway
growth or if subway expansion was a precursor to real estate development. The research described in this article uses Granger causality models based on parcel-level data to explore the co-development of the subway system and residential and commercial land uses, and attempts to determine whether subway stations were a leading indicator of residential and commercial development or if subway station expansion followed residential and commercial construction. The results of this study suggest that the subway network developed in an orderly fashion and grew densest in areas where there was growth in commercial development. There is no evidence that subway growth preceded residential development throughout the city. These results suggest that subway stations opened in areas already well-served by the system and that network growth often followed residential and commercial development. ăe subway network acted as an agent of decentralization away from lower Manhattan as routes and stations were sought in areas with established ridership demand.

This is a wonderfully written paper, and I can’t claim any particular objectively because I think David is the shizzle. However, it’s worth chatting about the paper in some depth.

In this introduction, King notes three factors that reinforced the idea that the subway followed people rather the other way around:

1. The subways were developed by private transit companies with public financing. These companies were not real estate developers: they relied on fares alone for their business. I strongly suspect that this is the biggest single factor in the story he has to tell. If you are a private company, you don’t pour capital investment into places unless you are pretty clear that there are going to be passengers. Contrast this behavior with the behavior of pork-barrel, get-my-slice-of-the-capital-funding-pie-no-matter-how-few-passengers-there-are temptations of public funding for capital improvements.

2. There was no real zoning prior to the 1960s, so developers could cram as many units as they could pencil out into the parcels they owned.

3. Land values were on the rise, which would reinforce #2, and which drove manufacturing off Manhattan in favor of offices–so that we today can stroll around Manhattan and oooh and aaaah at its sustainable urban form populated by, among others, billionaire I-bankers holding the reigns of a capitalist machine that is currently eating the entire universe. But they live in apartments and walk more than everybody else, so they must be The Better Environmental People.

Anyhoozily, I am not the world’s biggest fan of Granger models, but King’s application of them is clever here. To make a long story short, the models look for a first period change in a variable that correlates with a second period change in different variables. King sets up the analysis to look at both possible directions: subway supply change lagged against real estate development (the subway following the people hypothesis) and the alternative, development lagged against subway supply (the people follow the subway hypothesis).

He tests against both commercial and residential development, and he finds that there is no support for the belief that the subways were speculative–that is, that they came before the development. Instead, subways followed development, and commercial real estate most importantly.

One quibble is that I wish he’d left Staten Island in the analysis. He drops it because it’s not a part of the subway network, but I think that makes for an interesting control. Another swing at the questions King brings up concerns whether there is a change in the rate of development once the station appears.

David King blogs about transportation over at Getting From Here To There.

Posted in compact development, real estate, regulation, sprawl, Transit | Leave a Comment »

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03/22/2011

In which epidemiologists tell us what we already knew

I’m on the editorial board of Transportation Research Part A, and it’s an excellent journal by any measure. But one article this morning seemed so promising, and then rather failed to deliver:

Graham-Rowe, E., Skippon, S., Gardner, B. & Abraham, C., 2011, Can we reduce car use and, if so, how? A review of available evidence, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice.

Great, right? Another review, and we probably needed another review after this inappropriately optimistic one appeared in JAPA last year:

Ewing, R. & Cervero, R., 2010, Travel and the built environment, Journal of the American Planning Association, 76(3).

The latter review was problematic because it summarized the evidence and then concluded “Yes, well, all the empirical evidence shows small effect and insignificant effect sizes, but we still think our interventions work under the right conditions.”

There comes a point where you have to wonder if those right conditions are feasible if the research can’t find them time and time again.

However, Graham-Rowe sort studies according to quality, stating what’s obvious to everybody: there aren’t enough randomized trials in applied social science research.

Gee, ya think?

There’s a reason why the high quality studies are looking at program evaluations and why the cross-sectional studies look at before and after projects. Unlike medical and psychological research, researchers in my world don’t get to randomly select controls for anything other than programs, and often not even then because there are practical problems with employers or city governments allowing some employees or residents–but not others–to participate in a program that carries a benefit, like being paid not to drive.

So undeniably, we’d have better research if I could select random samples and controls for selected interventions, use our godlike hands to pick drivers up by their heads, place them in case-control groups according to intervention versus non-intervention environments or programs, and make them live there/participate as long as we wanted them to. Unfortunately, doing that sort of thing in societies where human beings have freedom of movement and self determination tends to be frowned on.

The takeaway–AGAIN–is that self-selection and endogeniety go hand and hand. Gargh.

I don’t see a path out of this cycle of research-critique. We’ve hit a stalemate. People who are advocates of particular position–that mixed land uses and transit supply reduce auto use–are like Fox Mulder: “I want to believe.”

Social scientists can try to tinker on the margins of what we have, with instrumental variables and various econometric contraptions strapped on to different datasets, but there’s no way around the residential self-selection problems here.

We can publish critique after critique, and perhaps that’s useful, but I don’t see how. We know where we are with this research–and we also know that planning, policy, and forecasts are thundering ahead with the “I want to believe” attitude. The alternatives to believing aren’t particularly attractive, either.

Posted in cars, compact development, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

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03/15/2011

Thomas Sowell in the National Review on housing in San Francisco

Thomas Sowell has an interesting essay up in this edition of the National Review..

There are a number of things here that I find especially interesting. One: we start with an experiential anecdote about how few black men Sowell encounters in San Francisco. It will be interesting to see if the Census data bear him his experience out empirically.

Two: his association of growth control policies with liberals, and his association of those growth control policies with higher land and housing prices. In theory–in theory–I am told by advocates of growth controls that with infill and higher density, you can create more housing than you restrict with growth controls. However, if political support for one of those strategies (growth controls) bangs up against anti-infill neighbors–or advocates are just plain wrong in believing San Francisco has all this excess capacity in land that could be densified easily–the results will be a cherrypicked policy where growth is controlled and affordable housing gets left by the wayside.

I’m told this problem doesn’t happen in Portland, but I am also told that New Urbanism and growth controls increase real estate values so I have to wonder how affordability and higher prices go together in urban land markets. It’s quite clear what Sowell believes.

Third: I routinely sit through assertions that the New Urbanism and Smart Growth are actually “free market” phenomena because they argue for less restriction on development densities. I suppose. But there are the form-based code people running all over planning, along with those who only read one thing in Don Shoup’s book, The High Cost of Free Parking: the fact that you can regulate maximum parking as well as minimum. Required mixed use doesn’t strike me as market based any more than disallowing it does.

Sowell doesn’t buy any of it:it’s all a bunch of envirozealot liberals at work. If he’s right, there’s a lot of fodder for research about what happens to traditionally urban populations, like African Americans, who get pushed out. Whither Harlem in 25 years?

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07/17/2010

Federal buildings for transit access?

The US DOT at the beginning of July issued guidance for increasing the sustainability of Federal buildings:

Siting buildings in sustainable locations will help insure that workers and the visiting public have convenient, safe transportation options to reach federal facilities, which in turn will help to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that result from worker and visitor commuting and will better integrate the federal presence into the surrounding community. Additionally, this improved access will lower transportation costs for workers and visitors and can provide communities with employment centers that can help drive economic development

link: DOT Press release

I wonder about this. Most of these kinds of things are symbolic politics, I think, where a loud and active leader like Ray LaHood wants to send a strong message this isn’t your parents’ DOT. The principals:

• Promote efficient travel and ensure access to transit to reduce the need for employees and the public to drive to the facility. • Locate in existing central business districts and rural town centers. • Locate near or be accessible to affordable housing. • Ensure the ability to walk or bike to the facility. • Use existing buildings, infrastructure and other resources. • Foster the development of previously developed, abandoned or underused locations known as greyfields or brownfields. • Encourage adaptive reuse of historic buildings and districts. • Preserve the natural environment. • Achieve agency goals for reducing emissions as set out in their Sustainable Strategic Performance Plans. • Discuss location alternatives with local and regional planning officials and consider their recommendations.

link: DOT Press release

These are pretty general planner recommendations. However, am I the only one who thinks that the clusters of federal buildings in DC are almost like superblocks in their domination of the city core in some places?

The DuPont Circle neighborhood is a great exemplar I think of what compact development advocates are trying to get at. But when you go farther down towards the capitol and the White House…it’s not as nice an urban place as the smaller scale, mixed use districts farther up Connecticut Avenue.


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03/12/2010

Increasing exposures with density

This week’s LA Weekly is running a story on density and higher human exposures to particulate matter from freeways:

Black Lung Lofts – Page 1 – News – Los Angeles – LA Weekly

The bottom line from the story is that city planning departments and developers, in their zeal to build more and more mutli-family housing, have placed a greater number of people in dangerous proximity freeway emissions.

Recent research that I have done with SPPD PhD student, Jianping Zhou, has found the same thing is true more generally. Environmental advocates have argued that reducing auto usage will improve urban air quality. Recently, public health researchers have similarly argued that infill development and sprawl reduction may improve respiratory outcomes for urban residents, largely because sprawl reduction should reduce the vehicle travel. But infill can also increase the number of residents exposed to poor air quality, and move people closer to stationary sources of pollution. Aside from emissions studies, planners have little information on the connection between urban form, ambient pollutant levels, and human exposures or how infill changes these.

We examine the neighborhood exposures in 80 metropolitan areas in the US. We used multi-level regression models to find the empirical relationship between a regional urban form measure and neighborhood air quality outcomes. Concentration levels for ozone are significantly lower in compact regions, but neighborhood exposures for both ozone and fine particulates are higher in compact regions and for neighborhoods occupied by impoverished whites, Latinos, African Americans, and Asian ethnic minorities. Fine particulate concentration levels do not correlate significantly with regional compactness.Of particular concern in our study are exposures among impoverished elders of color.


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02/21/2010

LA and California History viewed through Perry Mason and Paul Drake’s Hair

Ok, where to begin?

Perry Mason, for those who don’t know, is a fictional defense attorney practicing in Los Angeles, created by the mystery writer Earle Stanley Gardner, shown here. If you’ve never picked up a Perry Mason novel, I highly recommend.

Perry Mason was the basis of the long-running tv series–it ran from 1957 to 1966!–featuring Raymond Burr (one of my favorite actors) as Mason and the extremely lovely Barbara Hale as his secretary/confidante Della Street (shown below) . The show featured an excellent ensemble cast, including William Hopper as Paul Drake, Mason’s go-to private investigator, and undeservedly obscure character actor William Talman as the always-foiled district attorney Hamilton Burger.

So what lessons can we learn about urban and state history from the Perry Mason universe? A bunch.

First off, Raymond Burr’s lifelong commitment with his partner Robert Benevides is a object lesson for why California’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriage is a civil rights problem, no matter what you personally believe about the morality of homosexuality. Burr met Benevides in 1960 and together they built Burr’s acting career and a vineyard. Partners, no matter what sex they are, often sacrifice for the partnership, and theirs was no exception; Benevides gave up acting to help Burr manage his increasingly successful career. Together, they were philanthropists and buisinessmen. That is shared work and economic value.

After Burr’s death in 1993, Burr’s niece has challenged Benevides controlling Burr’s estate, particularly their vineyard, which he still runs. She may a point, for all I know, but it should caution us. Marriage isn’t just about a bedroom; it’s a set of property agreements, and under no accepted measure of justice should Benevides be threatened with the loss of what he built with Burr over the course of nearly 40 years. In some states, he would be in more jeopardy than he was in California. Everybody should have equal protection under the law, and that includes rights to property. The easiest way for partners to take care of each others’ property in legal agreements is marriage and pre-nuptials. .

Secondly, William Hopper himself was the son of high-profile Hollywood gossip Hedda Hopper, who is one of the early chroniclers of Hollywood history.

Hopper’s character, Paul Drake, is one of the most interesting in the series. Hypermasculinized as a player, his smooth blonde pompadour and his Thunderbirds were a California male ideal. Throughout the series, he drove Thunderbirds*: 1957, 1958, 1961, 1963, 1964, and 1965, including the convertible models. I think its hard for my car-hating students to understand just how unbelievably cool these cars were, shown below.





1957





1965 convertible

There is no disputing that these are two of the most beautiful cars ever produced, and no, car culture isn’t just about waste. In more innocent times, they manifested the beautiful material craftmanship of human imagination and vision.

Finally, when you watch Perry Mason, occasionally Paul has to take the Thunderbird out “all the way to the North Hollywood.” The glimpse you get from Mason in the late 1950s is a North Hollywood full of farms–way suburban fringe. It was really far out of town, you know. Now it has a subway station:


*Mason also drove some pretty cool cars, including the Ford Fairlane.


Posted in cars, compact development, social inclusion | 2 Comments »

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09/07/2009

Alex Marshall on the Underside of the City

Amongst the pop culture urbanists like Richard Florida and Jane Holtz-Kay, there are some that do good, accessible, interesting work and others that produce self-indulgent jeremiads (not to mention any names cough JamesHowardKuntsler cough …). Alex Marshall belongs in the former category. His book on suburbanization, How Cities Work, is both intelligent, accessible, entertaining, well-written, and delightfully non-histrionic in world full of repetitive screeds about the evils of American suburbs.

His latest book is Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities, and I was reading it for my class on the The Urban Context this past week. Since I am not going to teach the class, I won’t be using it, but I had to talk about it. It’s a wonderful look at 12 cities: New York, Rome, Paris, Moscow, London, San Francisco, Cairo, Syndey, Tokyo, Bejing, Chicago, and Mexico City. Here, he discovers the roots of urban density that go way, way back. He provides a timeline for each city with major events, and the best part: cross-sections of the city by infrastructure era. So for Moscow, you have ascending from the bedrock: the secret subway system, the subway, the secret tunnels, Ivan the Terrible’s secret library and torture chambers, the sewer, water lines, and river culverts.

His thesis is that density doesn’t come through design or through policy. It’s the product of centuries-long urbanization processes. So perhaps my beloved Los Angeles can be forgiven for its settlement pattern given the fact that no planner visiting here in the late 1950s could have foreseen the millions of new people who would arrive, en masse, over the next few decades. Perhaps we should check in after another 100 years and see what LA looks like then.


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08/10/2009

Things that are never listed as urban sprawl

1. Golf courses

2. Horse farms

3. Penthouses (think about it; one family uses space that other families would normally use; no, it’s not as space consumptive as single-family homes, but 3,000 sq ft units are still a great way to keep poor people out)

4. Ponds and parks (I like parks as much as the next person, but when you put them in, they do spread out land uses, even if you control land around them, as in Manhattan, and you could use the land in Central Park for housing a la Singapore or Hong Kong at even residential densities. No, I am not advocating we get rid of Central Park.) That is, unless you think the lack of open space in cities prompts people to suburbanize. Interesting question, that.

5. Tiffany’s, as the nice new set up in Pasadena. Did LA need another Tiffany’s outside of Rodeo Drive? I mean, how many impulse trips to Tiffany’s does one take? It’s hard telling. Now, affluent Tiffany patrons in the outer suburbs can drive shorter distances, saving emissions, right? But Tiffany’s is in a walkable space in Pasadena, served by light rail, so it’s ok, just as long as the patrons are also picking up their locavore packages, right? Oh, but Target or Walmart? Sprawl, sprawl, sprawl: people should be ashamed of themselves for going there, shouldn’t they, tsk, tsk, unlike Banana Republic.

I’m trying to get you to look at the sprawl discourse using social class as lens instead of environmentalism. Yes, the environmental discourse is really important. But we can’t assume that the environmentalism discussion covers the social justice discussion entirely.


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07/15/2009

Cheap Commercial Land in Manhattan

I started off this morning reading through the new material sent me by Wiley Interscience journals. I subscribe to email alerts for new papers from a bunch of journals–one of the few ways that email has actually improved my life–and a paper in Real Estate Economics caught my eye for a couple reasons:

Wheaton, W. C., M. S. Baranski and C. A. Templeton. 2009. “100 Years of Commercial Real Estate Prices in Manhattan.” Real Estate Economics. 37 (1): 69 – 83.DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-6229.2009.00235

I always pick up stuff from William Wheaton because he’s my academic grandfather–my advisor’s advisor–though we’ve never met. He’s also somebody whose work I’ve followed since before I went back for my PhD.

This is a particularly interesting manuscript. The abstract is short enough to include:

This article is able to put together a database of 86 repeat-sales transactions for office properties in lower and midtown Manhattan spanning the years from 1899 to 1999. Using this very limited database, decade-interval changes in real property prices are estimated—with varying degrees of precision. Our conclusions are two fold. First, adjusting for inflation, commercial office property values were 30% lower in 1999 than they were in 1899. Second, within any decade values often rise and fall by 20–50% in real terms. With these results, the long-term historic return to New York commercial property must mostly comprise yield with capital gains limited to general inflation. Other historical studies consistent with this conclusion are reviewed.

A perfect paper for an intro to urban economics or a class on urban sprawl, for it would be very counterintuitive for students, particularly planning students, who think New York is the poster child for a metro area that has not decentralized.

Those MIT peoples are smart.


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07/09/2009

Cities and the Stimulus

One of my fantastic students from Virginia Tech, Eric Howard, posted this piece from today’s New York Times on Facebook. The NYT author argues that:

Two-thirds of the country lives in large metropolitan areas, home to the nation’s worst traffic jams and some of its oldest roads and bridges. But cities and their surrounding regions are getting far less than two-thirds of federal transportation stimulus money.

The reporter goes on to quote outrage from mayors. They also get information from one of my favorite experts, Rob Puentes at Brookings. As usual, Rob has a very good point here: this package isn’t just about business as usual revenue allocation–which has always had a strong rural bias due to the structure of the Federal representative system (as Owen D. Gutfreund points out). This rural strength made way more sense 150 years ago than it does now.

So, of course all of these smart people are right in that cities aren’t treated very well in the stimulus, as they aren’t treated very well in Federal politics in general.

However, we have to ask ourselves: would it really be sensible to hand out this money on a per capita basis either? The main argument for cities and against suburbs and small towns is an economy of scale argument. Those arguments underpin the “costs of sprawl” research. Urbanization and density of human settlement lower the cost of providing infrastructure because of all the sharing we city folk do: the same sidewalk can serve thousands per day instead of a handful of people per day, as in a low-density settlement.

Thus, cities should somewhat expect to receive less per person than other places. The key point is just how much less per person should we expect urban infrastructure to cost, given all this sharing. The problem with sharing, of course, is that sharing leads to congestion after a certain point in population growth, thereby raising costs for everybody and requiring either dispersal of population or additional infrastructure.

While planning and planners are hard-wired to think in terms of increasing density, building duplicate systems (ie increasing capacity) in congested areas is only one means of cost sharing: the other, more macro-scale approach is to direct more growth to areas with excess capacity or price congested facilities and shift more of the revenue generation burden back onto users instead of looking for Federal funds.
This latter approach is, I think, where we are ultimately heading with infrastructure finance in the new urban world. Do we have compelling arguments for why the Federal government should be involved in urban infrastructure if all they going to do is return revenues to source (the per capita/population distribution argument). Anti-federalists can and do make strong arguments for local funding of intracity systems, like metro rail systems, while Federal dollars should go to intercity and interstate projects.

So while the NYT and urban mayors are probably right in that this distribution of funding is skewed, they haven’t really told us what the right distribution would look like, other than to say that cities are important and they need more money. Of course they are and they do, but it isn’t as though some of the poorest places in this country aren’t places like the Central Valley rather than places like Los Angeles, and it’s not as though Boston doesn’t depend on connectivity between rural Florida and Boston for all parts of the freight and US food system.


Posted in compact development, infrastructure | 1 Comment »

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