Urban Returns

Perry vetoes smart growth bill

Did anyone know that the Texas Legislature passed a "smart growth" bill?  I first heard about it when Perry vetoed it.

The legislation merely established a working group to study and recommend a smart-growth policy, so it would have had no immediate impact on growth patterns in Texas.  But it was charged with developing a "comprehensive smart growth plan for the state to prepare for the projected population growth in the state" and addressing things like the quality of community life, the design of municipalities, counties and regions, health issues and "the encouragement of community and stakeholder collaboration in development decisions."  

It's hard to get too worked up over legislation that merely would have established an advisory committee, but I think the veto was probably a wise decision.

As framed, the working group would have been charged with creating a statewide growth policy.  Bad, bad idea.  Most of our problems today stem from vesting TxDOT, a state agency, with unfettered control over major infrastructure projects.  It is TxDOT that decides whether to build this highway or that, to direct growth in this direction rather than that, and to toll or not toll.  (I admit TxDOT's policies on the latter match my preferences better than most of its others.)  And it is TxDOT that soaks up dollars that could be used to fund rail or other modes of transportation.

Infrastructure is destiny.  Choosing which and what kind of infrastructure to build is never a value-free choice.  And, today, the most important infrastructure projects reflect the values of a state agency rather than of the local communities most affected by them. Local communities should be able to shape their own environments.

We don't need a working group to give cities more powers.  Cities already have all the authority they need to regulate growth.  I think they mostly abuse it:  they impose minimum lot size requirements, rigid density limitations and strict separation of uses.  If a city can enact an ordinance like Austin's McMansion Ordinance, then it can do anything.

Counties lack some of these powers.  Counties can regulate platting and subdivisions, which allows them to dictate things like connectivity and minimum lot sizes, should they choose to do so.  But it's true they can't enact zoning.

Still, the problem for counties is not that they lack zoning, but that they can't regulate "commons" depleted by uncoordinated development.  Wells, for example.  Homeowners who lack connections to water utilities sink their own wells.  No individual homeowner has an incentive to ration his individual use; as a result, they cumulatively drain aquifers, especially in drought conditions.  Counties need the power to protect the aquifers for everyone.

But there is no reason to believe that a working group composed of state officials charged with implementing a statewide smart growth plan would have paid particular attention to county problems.  Much better to pass legislation tailored to counties rather than an open-ended mandate for statewide regulation.

My piece at Newgeography

Here.

My thesis:  Central Austin has a strikingly low percentage of families compared to the suburbs.  None of the usual explanations applies -- i.e., central Austin families (except for those in a few neighborhoods) have not abandoned central Austin because of crime, overcrowding, post-industrial blight, bad schools, or the flight of jobs to the suburbs.  The only explanation, I think, is that Austin's suburbs have better, bigger and cheaper housing.

I did not offer a prescription.  Anyone who reads this blog can guess, though.  We need more multi-family in central Austin to relieve the price pressure on single-family homes and to give households more options.  (Multi-family has many other benefits besides these, of course.)  And we need to make it easier to upgrade central Austin's generally older, smaller and inferior housing stock.   The McMansion ordinance did not cause this divide, but it certainly won't help.  (For those who don't know, the McMansion ordinance bans even relatively modest homes on some lots, homes no one would call a McMansion.)

I often experience buyer's remorse after writing a piece like this because I'm afraid my single friends will take it the wrong way.  I don't think families with children are more important or "better" than other households.  I merely think Austin's core must have a good mix of households to remain healthy.  (The suburbs would be healthier, too, if they offered singles or couples something other than inexpensive  housing in compartmentalized pods.)  Balance matters, if for no reason other than allowing us to continue using the expensive assets (like schools) already in place.  I don't think we have a good balance now.

For those interested, here is my previous piece at Newgeography.

Federalizing local street networks

Streetsblog has an interesting interview with John Norquist, the president of the Congress for the New Urbanism.  He discusses boulevard design, highways' impact on cities, and the benefits of dense, local street networks.

He also discusses a CNU proposal to use federal funds to encourage the latter:

The first step is to allow federal funds to be used to bring street networks up to a standard of 150 intersections per square mile. So if you have a suburban sprawl kind of situation where the intersection density is like at 40 per square mile, if you have a project that’s going to bring that intersection density up to 150, then the state would be eligible for getting federal funding to go in and do that.

As much as I prefer grids to cul-de-sacs, I think this is a bad idea.

First, it’s important to distinguish between local street networks and major arterials like boulevards and highways.  States and the federal government (indirectly) pay for most highways, while cities pay for most boulevards and other arterials.  Norquist rightly complains that the feds have shaped highway design and location for decades.  Not to mention the mix of highway and transit spending.

Local streets are different.  Local street networks look like they do because cities don’t build them anymore.  They instead are platted, built and paid for by subdivision developers. They don’t become public streets until dedication, when cities take title and the responsibility for maintaining them.  Cities thus have privatized their grid design.  We should not be surprised, then, that developers ignore spillover benefits -- especially connectivity -- when laying out their streets.

Cities do plat and build the arterial roads that link subdivisions to the rest of the city. But we can’t get intersection density by redesigning arterials.  Arterials are one-dimensional; grids are two-dimensional.  CNU understands that, which is why it wants federal funding for local street networks with a minimum intersection density.

I’m sure developers would be perfectly happy with CNU's proposal. It would eliminate one of their two major infrastructure costs. (The other is running connections from the subdivision to the local water, sewer and electric lines.)  Developers would lose some developable lots because a dense street network needs more pavement than the minimal street networks developers build.  But I’m sure developers would gladly give up 10% of their buildable lots if cities would agree to build their streets.

Do we want to abandon developer-financed local streets?  Even if cities and the feds paid just part of the cost, this would be an immense expense.  Most cities don't have the money.  It would take billions per year -- every year -- to make a noticeable difference in city structure.

It is also a bad idea to subsidize developers and property owners.  Reducing the cost of building subdivisions would get us . . . more subdivisions.  If you dislike the relentless spread of single-family subdivisions, then you want developers to bear all the cost.  (Actually, you should want developers to bear all their costs regardless.)  

Such a subsidy could be efficient in theory if it were limited to the extra expense incurred by the developer to densify their street networks.  But developers would have no incentive to disclose their true costs, and local officials could not figure that out on their own.

Finally, it is a bad idea to get the feds involved in local street design.  If “incentives” meant “funding,” the feds would dictate street layout, just like they dictate highway width, turning radii, and drinking ages. Cities wouldn't  use their scarce dollars to build more than the feds require.  Developers certainly wouldn't. And the federal government might not do it the way you or I want it done.  Suppose the feds, thanks to lobbying by property owners and developers, decided to fund only 100 intersections per square mile? Or 75? Then 100 or 75 intersections per square mile is what would get built.

There would be enormous pressure to go with less dense networks since they are  cheaper.  Developers would continually push for less dense networks even if the cities were footing the bill -- sacrificing 20 houses for road funding might be a good deal, but sacrificing just 10 houses would be a better deal.

So whenever someone wanted to change the rules for local street design, they'd have to run to D.C.  That's worked real well in the past, right?

Panoramic sprawl

Californian Matt Jalbert has taken a stunning set of panoramic photos of California sprawl.  My favorite is of this residential development in San Ramon.  I cropped a tiny patch for the photo to the right, but it does not begin to do justice to Jalbert's photo.

People use "sprawl" to mean lots of different things.  I suggest readers use the panoramic photo to self-administer a Rorschach test, a test to clarify your own definition:  What makes this sprawl?  (Or is it not?)

If you want to do it right, you have to assume you know nothing other than what's depicted within the four corners of the photo.  That is, you don't know how far the development is from the nearest major employment center, or whether it's two miles or ten miles outside a major city.  (Most Northern Californians know where San Ramon is, I imagine.)

So what makes it sprawl?  Note it's not vulnerable to the "sprawl is sparse" criticism -- i.e., that suburban large-lot homes chew up excessive amounts of open space.  This development is as dense, structurally, as an old Italian village.  The houses take up almost all of the space of their lots, leaving tiny yards at best.  

My take below the jump.

Why developers prefer cul-de-sacs

The cul-de-sac layout so ubiquitous in suburban neighborhoods can be partly explained as a collective-action problem.  But any explanation of its dominance must also acknowledge that developers use the cul-de-sac layout because it is cheaper.  Developers get more homes for less asphalt.

Take this neighborhood off Convict Hill in southwest Austin (outlined in blue). This is the prototypical suburban subdivision -- it's got several cul-de-sacs (blue pins) and just a few entrances (marked by Cookie Monsters). The interior streets (green) have little connectivity.  As a result, the neighborhood is inhospitable to through traffic. But it is also difficult for its residents to get from one point to another, or even to exit their own neighborhood. For example, someone on Vol Walker Drive (the yellow pin) has to take a circuitous route to get to the Convict Hill entrance (the red pin).

View Larger Map

But this neighborhood illustrates why developers like winding roads and cul-de-sacs:  they save infrastructure.

In order to estimate how much infrastructure the cul-de-sac layout saved, I've drawn in streets to complete a pseudo-grid (red).  It takes a lot of them. Gmaps tells me these "missing" streets together measure 4,905 feet long. The existing (green) streets are 7,390 feet long, which means the developer would have needed 66% more asphalt, street lamps, curbs and sidewalks to complete the grid.  Since sewer and water lines follow the streets, he would have needed 66% more sewer and water pipes as well.  And all that extra asphalt would have left less space for houses.

This subdivision would have cost a lot more to develop around a grid. This additional expense likely would have been passed back to the property sellers  or passed forward to the home buyers.

But if we are trying to determine the optimal street configuration, this can't be the end of the analysis.  The cul-de-sac layout imposes costs on the rest of us.  Laissez faire allows developers to socialize these costs while internalizing the benefits.  My view of these things is to price everything properly and then let God sort it out.  

The price of disconnectivity should include the higher fire station and EMS costs. On the other hand, the developer should get a credit for shorter water and sewer networks, which save the city money in maintenance.

The main problem with disconnected street networks, though, is that they exacerbate congestion and reduce mobility.  It might not matter if only one subdivision here or there eschewed the grid.  But when every subdivision does, traffic is channeled into overcrowded through streets and everyone is forced to take longer trips.  Because the cul-de-sac layout provides purely private benefits, the city should leave road maintenance costs on the subdivision.  (Note that the costs of the subdivision's design to the subdivision's own residents are reflected in their home prices, and are therefore not social costs.)

Shrugging off maintenance costs might not cover the city's loss, though.  Extending the grid rather than lopping it off might save a couple of minutes per day for hundreds or thousands of people.  That adds up.  Providing better opportunities for other modes of travel is worth a lot, too.  Saving a paltry few thousand dollars per year in maintenance might not offset these losses.

I'm not sure how to price the value of connectivity to the city and its residents -- "a lot" is the best I can offer.  I do think it's important to try, though, rather than simply mandate it.   As the example above shows, a street grid might need massively more infrastructure than a cul-de-sac layout.  We should give the developer the incentive to lay the right amount of asphalt rather than simply assume a grid is always the optimal solution.

Cul-de-sacs

Ryan Avent explains one theory why suburban developments are marked by disconnected streets and cul-de-sacs:

The logic behind cul-de-sacs is easy to understand. Roads in suburbs, unlike roads in cities, are for personal automobiles and personal automobiles only — there is no sense of a mode sharing role for the streets. As such, neighborhoods feel the need to carve out special streets for playing. But when a development does this, is redirects more traffic elsewhere. This encourages developments elsewhere to cut off their through routes, too. Eventually, the result is an extremely broken street grid that adds time and miles to all trips — the ordinary and the emergency. At the same time, it encourages the mental division of streets into play street and driving streets, such that on driving streets, awareness of pedestrians and cyclists is diminished.

A complete grid is good for the city as a whole, but there is every incentive for each subdivision to be the one that deviates and cuts off their through streets. When everyone does that, however, everyone suffers. Cities need to make street connections a priority.

Of course to do that while satisfying homeowners’ desires for safe streets would also require a reconsideration of street design and planning. Room must be made, along the street and in drivers’ minds, for pedestrians and cyclists, and on residential streets, speed cannot be planners’ top priority.

I've made this point before.  We frequently see the "beggar-thy-neighbor" dynamic play out in Austin.  One group of homeowners petitions to close a street through its neighborhood, diverting traffic through other neighborhoods.  The city gives into many such requests over the years, degrading the street grid and burdening residents everywhere with increased congestion and longer travel times. 

It's an open question, though, whether homeowners would prefer to live on a street grid even if they knew every other neighborhood would be built around a grid.  It's hard to find good comparisons. We can't compare a homeowner who lives on a cul-de-sac with a homeowner who lives on a busier through street in the same subdivision; the through street is busier because of the cul-de-sac.  Nor can we compare a homeowner who lives in a suburb with a homeowner who lives on a grid in the urban core; the neighborhoods differ along too many axes.

It's dangerous to rely on my own preference, but my guess is that most homeowners would prefer living on a grid if they knew everyone else had to live on a grid as well and if a house on a grid neighborhood were not too much more expensive than a house on a cul-de-sac.  I suspect that the benefit to them of better mobility throughout the town would outweigh the cost of slightly higher traffic on the street in front of their house.  Suburban New Urbanist developments with a traditional street grid do quite well.  Perhaps they would do better with a cul-de-sac layout, but they use the traditional street layout as a selling point, so I doubt it. 

"Sprawl" \'sprol\ n.

The Overhead Wire asks what sprawl is.  Ryan Avent gives his answer -- he uses "sprawl" to refer to neighborhood density rather than regional density.  (As a stats geek, I would state it this way:  "What matters is a metropolitan area's weighted density and not its standard density.")

My own thought it that it's time to retire "sprawl."  This little 5-letter word is being forced to do too much work; it simply has too many meanings.  And it might as well be a 4-letter word because it is the land-use equivalent of "asshole" -- I've told you I don't like you but I won't bother getting specific. 

Here are different meanings I've seen it given: (1) peripheral development -- greenfield development at the fringe of an urban area (one variation singles out "leapfrog" development); (2) economic dispersal  -- the rising cost (in both time and money) of getting from point A to point B; (3) "pod" development -- any development sharply segregating single-family, multi-family and commercial uses; (4) low-density development  -- always a relative metric, of course; and (5) auto-dependent development.  I'm sure there are others.

"Sprawl" literally means "to spread or develop irregularly." That best matches (1). But what makes it such a slippery word is the correlation between these definitions, which causes people to conflate one meaning with another. Peripheral growth can lengthen commutes. Virtually all new suburban development is "pod" development, and low-density development at that. And everything built more than a quarter-mile from a rail station -- virtually any suburban development -- is car-dependent, or at least car-oriented.  It is therefore unsurprising that people use "sprawl" to encompass several meanings at once.

For example, Dolores Hayden in A Field Guide to Sprawl defines "sprawl" as "a process of large-scale real estate development resulting in low-density, scattered, discontinuous car-dependent construction, usually on the periphery of declining older suburbs and shrinking city centers."  So she combines (1), (4) and (5), and possibly (3) as well, and throws in a jab at tract development for good measure.  (Note, though, that combining meanings technically narrows the definition rather than expands it.)  There are many others, of course.

But it's sloppy to mix them up.  The correlation is imperfect.  New Urbanist developments that mix single-family, multi-family and commercial uses into a walkable neighborhood are often built on greenfields at the periphery of urban areas and are not served by transit.  Density is not a perfect proxy for urban form because pod developments are sometimes denser than traditional, walkable neighborhoods; this is one reason why places like Phoenix have a relatively high weighted density.  Infill development is frequently not served by transit and consists of segregated uses.  Commuting costs can rise with rising density as well as increasing geographic dispersal if the transportation infrastructure is not up to snuff.

Each of these definitions suggests a different problem.  You cannot propose a solution until you have told the rest of us what problem you are trying to solve.  And "sprawl" is simply too mushy to do that.  If you are worried about the loss of open space, then New Urbanist greenfield development must be included within the definition of "sprawl."  If you are worried about rising commuting costs, it makes no sense to include greenfield development served by mass transit.  If you care about urban form -- if you hate pod development, for example -- you should include pod development whether it's core or suburban, dense or sparse.  We're engaged in lots of different debates over land use but we often don't realize it because we use just one word to characterize them all.

We need to develop more precise, clinical terms to advance the discussion.  Medicine, math and science (and law, more or less) define their terms precisely.  People make fun of jargon, but serious disciplines need it to keep distinct ideas straight.  As used today, "sprawl" is the medical equivalent of "sick."  Imagine the hilarity that would ensue if doctors used "sick" as their primary term for both prostate cancer and the flu.  

Define terms precisely.  And don't build moral judgments into them.  You can cast aspersions once everyone else knows what you're talking about.

Eureka!

We now have scientific justification for McMansion regulations:  Infill McMansions: Style and the psychophysics of size, by Jack Nasar, a professor of planning at Ohio State, and Arthur Stamps, a something at the Institute of Environmental Quality in San Francisco.  The abstract (I couldn't find an ungated version):

The number and size of infill oversized houses, or McMansions, has increased in the U.S. and the world. To maintain desirable neighborhood appearances, communities should know what constitutes “too big.” This paper reports six studies that used color simulations of blocks of houses to examine compatibility and visual appeal in relation to attributes of the infill house and its context. Following psychophysical findings, the relative size of the infill house should have larger effects on response than its actual size. The studies confirmed that the infill ratio had more weight than size for perceived compatibility. Compatibility did not always translate into visual appeal. For visual appeal, infill style had larger effects than did size or size ratio, height had larger effects than width, and, for larger sizes and ratios, infill ratio had larger effects than actual size. To maintain visual quality in relation to infill houses, communities should first seek an architecturally compatible style, and then try to control its relative size (the infill façade area). Tests of responses to real infill houses can show how well these findings generalize.

Translation:  Relative size matters more than absolute size; architectual style matters more than either relative size or absolute size; and height matters more than width.  (Based on these "findings," Austin's McMansion ordinance regulates the wrong things.)

One New Urbanist community's battle for approval

See this account of a developer's struggle to gain approval for I'On, a New Urbanist community in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, just outside Charleston:

[T]he neighborhood is located in close proximity to two historic districts that are, if price is any measure, the most sought after places to live in the area; through its Master Plan and Strategic Plan the Town had adopted a clear vision for the kind of development they wanted; we had two of the best, if not the best, planning teams in the country creating the initial plan [Dover Kohl and Andres Duany's DPZ - AC]; no less than four environmentally oriented groups endorsed the plan along with a substantial number of community leaders; and the developer had a track record of successful TND development within a 90-minute drive of the subject property.

But to gain approval, the developer had to cut the project from 800 single-family homes, 440 multi-family units, and 90,000 sf of commercial space to 749 single-family units and 30,000 sf of commercial space and eliminate the multi-family units, a gross density of only 3.1 units/acre.  It took two city council votes spaced over two years and a lawsuit appealed all the way to the South Carolina Supreme Court; the council members who voted for the project were turned out of office after bitter elections.  Attempts to connect the development to surrounding neighborhoods were shot down.  The developer won the right to locate a Montessori school in the village center only after obtaining another judgment affirmed by the court of appeals.

Although one can  speculate why there are not more New Urbanist greenfield developments, this kind of story, I think, explains why we don't see more NU infill developments.

Rethinking Federal Housing Policy

Ed Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko's e-book (pdf) on federal housing policy really is worth a read.  

Glaeser and Gyourko argue that federal housing policy wrongly treats every jurisdiction alike.  The country really has three different housing markets.

First, there are markets with high demand but elastic supply -- e.g., Houston and Atlanta.  Housing in these markets closely tracks the cost of construction.  Because developers cannot supply housing more cheaply than this over the long run, it makes no sense for the federal government to intervene directly in these markets -- there simply is no market failure.  (For the poor, Glaeser and Gyourko suggest outright transfers so they can buy more housing, or housing vouchers as a second-best solution). 

The second kind of market is the low-demand market -- Detroit, for instance --where housing can be had for less than the cost of construction.  It is silly to subsidize the construction of new housing in these places.

The third kind of market is the high-demand, inelastically-supplied market -- the West Coast, the Amtrak corridor in the northeast, and a few other markets in the country's interior.  These markets exhibit government-created market failures.  Tight zoning regulations in these markets combined with high demand have raised the cost of housing well above the cost of construction, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of dollars.  New construction permits amount to a tiny fraction of the housing stock.

The market failures in these jurisdictions endure because local governments have no incentive to increase the supply of new housing:  the benefits from new housing go mostly to non-residents, while the costs from polution and congestion -- not to mention the effect of new competition on housing prices -- fall on existing residents.  

Federal housing policy -- particularly the mortgage interest deduction -- has different effects depending on the market.  In elastically-supplied markets like Houston or low-demand markets like Detroit, the mortgage interest deduction increases consumer demand and stimulates the construction of more housing.

In high-demand, inelastically-supplied markets, though, the benefits of the mortgage interest deduction flow to existing homeowners.  The mortgage interest deduction paradoxically makes housing in these markets less affordable.   

Glaeser and Gyourko argue that federal housing policy ought to target the broken markets.   The goal, they suggest, should be to incentivize the high-demand, inelastically-supplied markets to allow more housing.

They propose capping the home mortgage interest deduction at $300,000 for households in these markets.  (They would phase out the deduction for current existing mortgages for equitable reasons.)  This cap would generate additional tax revenue.  The federal government would then refund that revenue to the local governments (via the states) provided the local governments made sufficient progress toward increasing their housing supply.  Glaeser and Gyourko essentially propose bribing local jurisdictions with their homeowners' tax dollars. 

Needless to say, I think this is a great idea.  Rich housing markets are becoming increasingly stratified by income.  The lower and middle classes are being run out of these markets by high home prices.  Their allegedly progressive citizenry, embarrassed by the increasing inequality, flail about for solutions.  But they won't allow the one thing that would improve affordability over the long-term.   

Incentivizing new development in these cities would benefit the rest of us, too.  The high-demand cities have high demand because they make their citizens more productive.  Restricting access to them creates a net welfare loss for the country as a whole.  

But Glaeser and Gyourko's proposal will be dead on arrival.   The costs of their proposals would fall on a small, clearly identifiable group -- wealthy homeowners in high-priced markets.  These homeowners would suffer a double-whammy, through the loss of their tax deductions and the loss of home value due to increased supply.  Everyone else would benefit, of course, but those benefits would be diffuse.  Local governments would benefit from the extra revenue, but local governments don't vote for senators or congressmen.  If this proposal were enacted, Barbara Boxer would hear the howls of Marin County homeowners from her seat on the Senate floor.