The danger that I see with Matt's RPP plan is that at some point, reserving curb space for motorist parking may not be practical or the best use, as opposed to something like bike or transit lanes or stops. Ostensibly giving someone a perpetual right to store their private property on public land, only to rescind that later on, strikes me as a political disaster waiting to happen. The biannual payment at least makes it clear that the arrangement is (and should be) more of a lease than a purchase.
No joke. Years ago, my wife and her business partner were looking to open a restaurant in New Jersey. Had a great spot picked out: strip mall in an upper middle class town and no direct competition (same cuisine) for several miles around. But the one guy with a liquor license on the market wanted $500K. That was more than the cost of renovations, the kitchen, and furniture combined. (The kitchen was pretty cheap as they were planning to take a space that previously had a restaurant, so all the tile, plumbing, grease trap, gas, etc. was already in place.)
Eventually the RPPs would pass from residents to speculators who would be subject to upheavals in market demand for parking: people in dense neighborhoods stop owning cars and rely more on mass transit, ride share fleets of (autonomous?) vehicles, etc.
Yes, once you turn the RPP into a saleable asset, then a political community will form that will be dedicated to ensuring that asset doesn't go down in value.
It's about moving the current RPP-owning bloc from the anti-growth coalition to the pro-growth coalition, which is the narrow goal of the whole plan. Yes, this cedes power to an unfairly entrenched bloc, but that's politics!
And in the long run, as RPP owners become a smaller fraction of the population, especially if RPPs become accumulated by some corporate-landlord-but-for-parking entity, their clout is diminished and a future coalition can more easily disempower them to the right-of-way's benefit.
Given the potential for growth, there's very little in US urban politics more overrated than the status quo.
The idea that if you live on a property without off street parking, you just can’t own a car at all, is both relatively extreme and a direct harm to people who vote, in a way that other YIMBY goals are not. Yoking the legalization of apartment buildings to the abolition of car ownership just dooms the former IMO.
People aren’t stupid. A move like ending street parking for RPP holders would be understood in the context of parking maximums on new construction, redevelopment of existing public parking garages, and prohibition on any new ones.
I personally will only entertain living in units with dedicated spaces as long as owning a car is important to me, because I don’t want to get invested in this kind of politics, but I think plenty of people would be involved that way and there’s no need to make enemies of them in the fight for marginally less insane development policy.
I think this can be solved by adding a mechanism that requires the city to purchase X RPPs for every Y spaces permanently removed as part of a public works project. They could simply run an second price auction for the spaces and buy from the X lowest bidders at the price of the X + 1 lowest bid.
They could publicly announce the auction or just ask people to place an asking price pegged to inflation for their RPP at the initiation of the program. The asking price could also facilitate market transactions between two residents.
Sure but a person could still fear that overtime development would erode the usage value of their RPP by increasing the constituency for taking parking for other usages like bike lanes. I think this fear is rational and if the goal is to minimize opposition to pro housing agenda it's better to make more concessions than less around rational fears about parking availability losses.
I should also note that X could be less than Y in my proposal. Like you have to buy 0.75 permits for every parking spot taken.
What do you think that would do to the budget needed for a new bike lane project? How do you think that would affect the likelihood of a new bike lane being built? I’d guess it would make building them way more difficult.
It would undoubtedly make it more expensive, perhaps about $60,000 per space based on $100 per month value and 2% though this estimate may be way conservative for those who least value their RPPs. But it would also neutralize a lot of political opposition to bike lanes not to mention Matt's pro-housing agenda. The overall surplus of that agenda should be able to cover those costs.
EDIT: I think Matt's pro housing agenda would greatly increase the likelihood of improving bikablity. I think this "auction" concession is a relatively small price to pay for the surplus of said agenda.
Generally makes sense. Maybe $10,000 is a better estimate. It's plausible that it would be a four digit number instead of a five digit number. I find a three digit number unlikely given that it's in perpetuity and not just for like two years.
A bigger issue may be that large parts of DC do not have RPP parking, including much of wards 7 and 8 (you don’t need an RPP to park in these areas). So in practice, this would be a giveaway to residents in more affluent/developed parts of the District from which residents in some areas would be shut out, in ways that have regressive distributional impacts. These areas are probably some of those that would most benefit from additional development, and their legislators would also push back. There are probably creative solutions to this issue but it is a problem for the proposal as articulated here
Do you think this is a compelling argument in favor of mandatory parking minima?
I have a halfway-developed theory that mandatory parking minima may actually not be the dumbest intervention in the free market in certain contexts and neighborhoods for a variety of reasons, one of the big ones being the path-dependence of building anything (accommodating a garage when you're building a new building is generally going to be a *lot* easier and cheaper than realizing you need or want a car after you've moved in and your only option to to just change residences or build a garage). Also note that the "worst case" for a carless homeowner is something like "you have a garage to use for something else" - the disutility is marginal rather than absolute.
A lot of mandatory parking is in parking garages and off-street lots, which are useless to carless people. And your argument for how great it is for someone who doesn't want a garage is similar to an argument that every dwelling should have two bedrooms. Worst case you have a garage/second bedroom? No, worst case you can't afford the townhouse because it now costs more. You are in favor of forcing people to buy space they don't want, at great cost.
I think parking in townhouses is usually going funge against basement space in the same townhouse based on the development with which I’m familiar—which may well be something buyers don’t want and so still net-negative to them, but isn't going to increase the building footprint in the same way an extra bedroom is nor self-evidently increase construction costs. Parking garage minima or lot requirements probably do make much less sense. Also I think characterizing “ a halfway-developed theory that mandatory parking minima may actually not be the dumbest intervention in the free market in certain contexts and neighborhoods” as “in favor” is a bit of an unwarranted leap.
From a political standpoint, I suppose what I could accept as a first step compromise is to not have mandatory parking minimums (and also road lane allocation as well!) set at the highest level to account for peak conditions. That just creates a ton of wasted space during most of the day that also turns corridors into natural speeding tunnels not during peak conditions. I have mad respect for Trader Joe's (where I'm coincidentally about to go!) for actively recognizing just how ridiculously high some of these minimums are, and circumventing them where they can.
The RPP permit allows the owner to park in any available street parking space. If the city later removes some of the parking spaces for other uses (bus lane, bike lane, trees) then they wouldn't be available parking spaces and the RPP permit holder wouldn't be able to park in them.
Hm, I guess that would lower the temperature down in that RPPs in general just gradually become less useful, but I could still see nasty fights go down with property owners arguing "why are you taking away parking next to *my* property, but not *their* property?".
I'm guessing it's the result of jet lag. Once Matt has recovered from his trip, he'll be back to his more normal posting time of 6 AM Eastern / 5 AM Central / Eff You Mountain & Pacific. ;-P
As a Ca resident i will give you a heart lol. Also, if DC had the same density as Manhatten it would have 9 million people. Up zoning one city can solve any regon housing crises.
This post was with waiting a bit later in the morning for!
You hit the nail on the head at the end: we ought to have a flywheel of urban growth. This should be true for all cities - if you’re not growing, you’re dying. State and federal policy should also lean heavily in favor or supporting urban growth.
I'm kind of worried about SF, even though I don't live there any more. They fucked the dog on the way up the demand ladder, and I'm worried they're going to do the same on the way down and just spew problems out into the surrounding areas like ejecta from a dying star.
It's frustrating because I feel like solving the problem of legalizing office space to housing conversions is work but not work that requires a particular genius- and also I just don't believe it will happen on a time line that will matter.
>They fucked the dog on the way up the demand ladder, and I'm worried they're going to do the same on the way down and just spew problems out into the surrounding areas like ejecta from a dying star.
One aspect to the generic American anti-density tendency is that the only truly dense (in global terms) place in the country is Manhattan (not the Kansas one). Places like DC or Chicago or every other urban core are just dense enough to have the visible downsides without being dense enough to have the benefits. I wonder if Matt’s subtext is that if DC, for example, developed positive true density, more Americans would develop a density preference.
I think one thing people like us have to be cautious about, and I think this is what Matt is doing, is that while we are pretty convinced that the benefits of density are manifestly obvious and will win converts easily if properly implemented, a *lot* of people are not actually interested in significantly changing the sort of life that they live. it happens that their lifeways are pretty awful, but if someone has been living an auto-centric life in a lower-medium density neighborhood for 40 years they're not going to want to change no matter what the benefits are. so it's a good idea to emphasize that we acknowledge not everyone is going to want to live in the denser city and point out the benefits for those who prefer suburbia
Yes; one major theme of NIMBY narratives is that evil urbanists want to take away your right to live in the suburbs, and that suspicion is only reinforced by people saying, "Your preferences are misguided and you will see that actually dense urban living is great."
That's why Matt is careful to point out that we can generate huge wins just by meeting existing, unmet demand. If anything, drawing those people into the city will make it easier to find a place in the 'burbs. But the message has to be that this is about allowing people to live according to their existing preference, not about changing people's preferences.
"You're actually wrong, misguided, and dumb about how you want to live your life" is not very persuasive, and it's **amazing** how many would-be persuaders do not understand this!
The very-small-c conservative view, I guess, is that we want to avoid genuine shocks to the city system. If you don't like all the new growth and you want to cash out into the suburbs, fair enough--you should be able to do so with generous time to find a new job, etc.
I don't think this is realistically a *practical* problem, but it's one to which we should pay more than lip service (i.e., robust-sounding and robust-in-fact circuit breakers that will probably never be triggered in real life)
Except they may well prefer their little slice of less dense autocentric suburbia where they are in DC, rather than an hour away up Rockville Pike or 270 or something similarly disastrous.
This is not really correct. Manhattan is an outlier in global density at ~100k persons per square mile. Even Paris is only 60k/sq. mile.
Density in most cities worldwide is in the 25-50k persons per square mile range. We have this level of density in north Chicago, San Fran, the Koreatown area of LA, pretty much all of NYC, as well as DC/Philly. We also have the amenities that follow density in those places.
Nope. I’m showing DC density at about 12K per square mile (which feels about right…it’s just not a dense city at all). K-town is indeed close to 50K per square mile, it’s also a tiny tiny enclave. (Maybe Navy Yard would be an equivalent.) Philadelphia has the same density as DC at 11-12K per square mile. Center City is indeed at close to 30K per square mile.
Manhattan is at about 70K per square mile. But all 5 boroughs combined are at 27K per square mile. Subtract Manhattan and the other 4 go down to the low 20’s. Still more dense than DC (again, DC is not very dense).
These figures all look correct to me, but, what are you referring to in your previous comment about US cities lacking sufficient density for "benefits?" Plenty of cities in this world correspond to the typical figure for a US city. And they manage to get benefits. London's not overly dense. Nor is Berlin. Nor is Hamburg. Nor are Nordic cities, I think. Toronto has a similar density to Chicago, I believe. And so on. If we really need to push up our cities to Manhattan-like (or even just NYC-like) levels of density to get "benefits" we're going to be waiting a long time.
Yeah this is what befuddles me. US cities could be less loud, easier to travel around, with more public spaces and benches, as well as having less crime, but none of this is primarily a density issue.
Right. Presumably there's some cutoff below which it begins to get difficult or uneconomical to do certain things. But I'm pretty sure lots of American urban areas are characterized by densities well above this threshold (if not throughout the metropolis in question than at least in significant swaths).
Arguably they are, though? Noise is going to be a function of how busy the immediate area is and how densely packed your immediate apartment neighbors are and how well-soundproofed a building is, public spaces (particularly parks) compete with demand for private usage which is almost definitionally highest in the highest-density areas, travel ease has a lot of dimensions that go into it but at the most basic level it's much slower to go from point A to point B (whether via public or private transit and by train or by car) in denser areas (because highways are more congested and public transit, whether train or bus, will usually be making more stops, although as I said this is high-dimensional and express stops can alleviate in-transit time at the tradeoff of a narrower service corridor), and crime IIRC is generally believed to exhibit parallel scaling effects to density (often quadratic) as a negative externality as the positive externalities (e.g. individual worker productivity) to density touted by Glaeser et al. (I know I've seen that last but am struggling to find a source atm).
Some or all of these may have effective legislative or policy solutions, but I think that indexing them to density in the first place probably isn't erroneous (albeit travel is high-dimensional).
I’m suggesting that there might be a difference between 12K and 25-30K per square mile. (Maybe there isn’t! But DC has a lot of people sleeping in parks, a fair amount of crime and a lot of areas without restaurants or retail (and I’m not just talking about Anacostia).)
Is homelessness a function of density, or of demand relative to supply?
Opinions will differ on how much density impacts crime. I know on the micro level, more pedestrian street traffic feels safer. But on the metro or country level, I attribute the lack of social harmony much more to other factors. How much do you think density impacts it?
I agree with you that restaurants and retail will serve denser neighborhoods better than less dense ones.
I am only referring to the portions of Philly/DC you mentioned; I am aware that NW DC and north Philadelphia exist.
Koreatown and surrounding areas are big! 200k+ residents big. They're only an "enclave" in the context of a 20 million person metro area. They are much larger than Navy Yard.
The four main boroughs of NYC are well above 25k per square mile. This is my error for not mentioning to exclude Staten Island.
What amenities or other things were you imagining that aren't present in these places but are present in other places globally?
Yeah, Koreatown is not tiny. 3 square miles at 50 per mile is a lot of people. And for the purposes of this thread some of the adjacent neighborhoods, Westlake in particular, are just as dense or close to it.
I think you're on the right track here -- to extend the thought on density preference, many Americans of an older sort still have scarring from the thought of cities as crime-ridden dens, likely a reflection of late-80's and 90's 'super-criminal' dogma -- even though, as Matt writes, our densest metropole, New York, is actually quite safe! But, the recent rise in crime in relative terms these past few years only plays into that pre-existing narrative of unsafe American cities.
It gets to this idea that while positive true density is a necessity for Americans to develop said preference, it has to go along with the idea that cities are safe *and* functional. Otherwise, it'll remain a preference of a minority of Americans and the push for dense, walkable communities will face headwinds the entire way.
You've got some of causation mixed up there insofar as actually, late-80s and 90s 'super-criminal' dogma was a reflection of the fact that crime was genuinely out of control in the 80s and 90s. But yes, many older Americans are (somewhat understandably) scarred by that and persuading them otherwise is both important and challenging.
Matt I love this, but I think you’re missing one reason people will fiercely push back:
Suppose you like living in DC as it is (medium density, walkable). It becomes a lot more dense, and that’s not a good fit for you anymore, so you want to cash out. But if that happens, there will literally no longer be any city that has the environment of “old DC” to move to. So the big profit you make by selling isn’t enough to let you get the lifestyle you love back. People know this; it’s one of the reasons they fight so hard for “preservation.”
A true abundance solution needs to also include the creation of new walkable urban towns. Not the baloney fake lifestyle suburbs that have old colonial architecture and a retail street, but real walkable places built on the pre-war planning model instead of the post-war planning model.
Lacking a comparable alternative place to move to, people will still have strong incentives to fight against meaningful change being allowed in DC.
>>It becomes a lot more dense, and that’s not a good fit for you anymore, so you want to cash out. But if that happens, there will literally no longer be any city that has the environment of “old DC” to move to.<<
What percentage of people would really be hurt by greater density? Safer streets, better shopping, more transit options, more dining options—these are all good, aren't they? Yes, in any large jurisdiction you're going to find outliers. But I suspect in actual practice, a very large percentage of incumbents would welcome the changes as time goes by. Very few would want to "cash out" because they're disgruntled by changes. (Getting them to back the plan in the beginning is the heavy lift.)
Also, I think most people who would "cash out" of a home in DC after living there for quite a while would do so because they A) have to transfer to a different city; B) or want to retire, perhaps to a suitable community, or warmer climate, or what have you; C) or maybe they just want a back yard or different schooling options for kids.
I'm not envisaging a large "Damn, DC's got too many new restaurants and swanky condo buildings these days, but Cincinnati doesn't work for me!" cohort.
OMG! I finally get to use the lived experience card! That $1.1 million studio in NY is not representative. You can go to any city in the country and cherry-pick expensive real estate. I just bought an apartment in NYC in a pretty good neighborhood (Upper East Side) that’s bigger than this for less than half the money. Anyone who is buying that place is doing so because they REALLY want to be in the trendiest neighborhood in the city, but that’s a personal choice, not a requirement.
Even in affordable places like Tokyo central wards are relatively expensive, so we will never have the world you imagine in your last line. There will be a price premium on inner city living.
Exactly - relative pricing hugely impacts those preferences. Using my example Manhattan is $2k sq/ft and NJ is $300. If it was $1500 vs $750 relatively more people would prefer to live in Manhattan.
I do think think cost is the number one concern for most people. And so, assuming someone can afford it, the question then becomes one of tradeoffs and benefits of urban vs some other kind of living.
And there is also cost of living.
I do like urban living, but with three school age kids it's not financially practical so we are in the burbs until the kids are grown and flown.
What you say makes total sense. I just didn’t want to leave it uncontested that you have to spend $1 million to get a studio in NYC, because you don’t.
It’s like if you have two suburban towns. One is middle class with a lot of nurses, teachers, plumbers, cops, etc. The nicer town next door is more expensive and is popularized by doctors, executives, lawyers, etc. The test scores in the “nice” town are higher and people attribute that to the schools being “better.” When in reality the kids in the nicer town have inherited the higher cognitive ability of their parents. If you randomly swapped kids between schools, they’d end up doing just as well as in their original school.
Moreover, your kid is going to find it more difficult to achieve a lofty class ranking in a top-ranked, affluent school district than he or she is in one characterized by lower SES.
I doubt a top 3% high school senior from a working class community and strong SATs is going to have a harder time gaining entrance to a competitive program than a top 20% high school senior with identical SAT scores from a highly affluent community.
(I've never worked in college admissions, so that's just guess).
Exactly. It must be a social or status thing as well as education, or maybe people just prefer to solve their problems at the lifestyle level, but I never understood why private school / expensive school district folks don't just plow a portion of that money directly into the child via 1-on-1 tutoring and other supplements. You'd come out way ahead compared to relocation or tuition.
I went to a bottom-tier PA public high school (majority-minority, 1/3 economically disadvantaged) and we still had fine AP and honors classes. The kids with attentive/strict/well off parents (or just plain smart kids) all made their way to those classes and hung out together. Plenty got into top 20 schools.
>>> I never understood why private school / expensive school district folks don't just plow a portion of that money directly into the child via 1-on-1 tutoring and other supplements. You'd come out way ahead compared to relocation or tuition.
I think this is a very good question in general (and maybe Hagwon and equivalents are kinda this? Seems like an unpleasant solution), but my best guess is that it runs into significant market evaluation problems - an individual tutor can't really scale up very well, the selection of tutor for your child matters a *lot,* and any given tutor is presumably going to be heavily reliant on word of mouth to generate new business, but the results they achieve are only partially dependent on their abilities and partially on those of the child, and the lag time is going to be pretty high.
And not only is the market pretty opaque to begin with, but the people with the best credentials are also going to the be in large part ones that have other, non-tutoring options available to them in the rest of the labor market (at a minimum making prices quite steep even as quality evaluation remains hard). It's a tough nut to crack, although I personally would consider it valuable for it to in fact be cracked.
I lived both in NYC and suburban NJ. I have seen schools in both places with my own eyes. Places like Edison pay teachers 50% - 70% more than NYC does, and all other aspects of public schools are similarly better funded in NJ.
I like this agenda. You can combine the parking reforms to the zoning reforms though by tying the RPPs to the existing building stock. The RPPs could be linked to specific properties, and be dissolved if the building is demolished and the site redeveloped - gradually reducing the amount of on-street parking in the city as it gets denser, but without screwing over any existing residents and pricing in the effects of removing car-based mobility into land-use choices.
That’s a great idea. The flaw in Matt’s plan is eventually you’d have firms buying up permits and renting them to homeowners. That would undermine support for the system. Better to link them to a residence.
That would surely be a feature, not a bug. By the time that happens density will have increased enough that we’ll need more non-car transportation, including dedicated ROW for buses and bikes.
Much easier to create that by repealing the RPPs at the expense of a bunch of large corporate interests than taking mom and dad’s parking pass.
Yeah, reading Matt's proposal for RPP allocation I could help but think "isn't this recapitulating the exact kind of land speculation that the Georgists make a compelling case is a bad dynamic?" I think the possible end-state you hypothesize is a good example of why it's probably not enough on its own terms as a proposal.
I think your idea improves on Matt's, but in many cases if you're going to effectively use that curb space for non-motorist use, you need to use the entire block's curb space. Frontage along a single lot could work for something like a bus stop or a sidewalk patio, but if you want to implement something like a bike or transit lane, you'll likely have to pull the rug on on-street parking for several adjacent lots simultaneously.
I think this is a good post with good ideas, but I’m skeptical regarding street parking. That is different because streets are public rights-of-way and allowing some people to essentially “own” a piece of public property to the exclusion of others is not a good idea IMO, for a number of reasons.
Instead the you let the market and reduced regulations work - as street parking becomes harder to find with more density, developers have more incentives to create off-street parking. Turning parking into the functional equivalent of Taxi medallions would not be an improvement IMO.
On the flip side, someone wanting to move there will have to factor in the additional cost to buy one of these exclusive parking permits which de facto raises the cost of the housing. And given that street parking is not going to increase, the value (and cost) of those permits will rise with density.
I don't think this is really a problem. You want to attract residents who prefer car-free living. Sure, you need decent transit to make it all work, but Matt's plan would presumably raise more money for that. And, over the long term, the total cost of housing in DC should be more affordable than under the status quo (because of extra supply) even if, yes, at the margins, this will be more true for non car owners than car owners.
At end of the day, this isn't a development plan for San Bernardino County. Cars have their place, but making it easy to own them in a dense urban environment shouldn't be a priority. Discouraging them should be a priority.
Sure, but there are better ways to discourage cars than creating a half-privatized parking permit system. Something like an annual auction or lottery for permits would be a lot better than granting transferable and valuable ownership rights to the use of public property.
The point of Matt's parking idea, I gather, is not to find an optimal way to discourage cars. Rather, the point is to neutralize the opposition to this upzoning proposal from incumbent residents who currently enjoy free street parking, and who fear an increase in population (because it'll make it harder to find a parking space).
I’m not opposed to “let the market work” regarding off street parking spaces, but what we are actually seeing is that once regulators change their minds on parking, they impose maximums instead of minimums.
That's Matt's point, though. Any time you have potential new entrants to a market, the rational incentive of the incumbents is going to be to prevent them from entering, e.g. occupational licensing, car dealership exclusivity, etc. RPP privatization flips that on its head; now the newcomers are new customers, not competition. I like it because it jujitsus the typical bad housing dynamic where no one speaks for the people who want to move in and turns that to the advantage of YIMBYism.
Not the mention that politically, the message of "let[ting] the market and reduced regulations work" is heard as "Yes, we are exposing you to the vicissitudes of the market, but don't worry because everything will be allocated efficiently in the end and if you're priced out, it's because someone else can make greater use of that resource." It's not exactly a winning argument.
Matt's proposal is a free market and reduced regulation proposal. He's careful not to characterize it with those words, which will trigger some people, but that's what he's advocating for - much reduced regulation of urban housing and a much freer market.
The problem with RPP privatization is that it is not actually privatization. It's same problem with Taxi medallions but worse. You're giving people an exclusive right to not only benefit from publicly owned and maintained land, you'd also be giving RPP "owners" the right to profit from it. In essence it becomes an asset, one where the owner gets all the benefits and profits, while the maintenance and upkeep is socialized. It's cronyism IMO and it could actually create a barrier-to-entry for those who want to move to the area, but need parking since the price of that asset is guaranteed to increase. It would, therefore, de facto raise the cost of moving and that cost will only go up as density increases.
I think there's a slight wrinkle to your last paragraph, which is that for NIMBY homeowners rather than renters, the YIMBY argument is often along the lines of "Don't worry, you effectively can't be priced out! The rise in land values due to the development frontier expanding will be paid to you in cash when you move out!" The trouble is that for anyone who just wants to, like, *live* in their home and the neighborhood they bought into (i..e. to get use-value rather than transaction-value of their house) there's no guarantee nor ex ante reason to believe that the hypothesized objective increase in land values will fully compensate them for the potential (subjective) diminution in use-value plus the transaction costs of moving.
EDIT: yes, admittedly, something something capitalization but I don't have time to chew through all of that at the moment...
>>>This doesn’t make the city more desirable for literally every single person — some people may just miss the low density<<<
I can scarcely think of a less agreeable environment to live in than one that is both A) truly urban and, B) low-density. Maybe Oslo makes it work. But not many American cities do. I picture weedy vacant lots, inappropriately situated strip malls, and dead quiet streets that are really scary to walk on after dark.
In any plan like you suggest that includes substantial fees for new development, you may want to consider having those fees spread out over the first dozen years after the building gets its certificate of occupancy rather than being paid up front. Ideally the fees are assessed in years 3 through 12.
While in a theoretical model, it shouldn’t matter, as a practical matter soft costs like impact and neighborhood fees are much more challenging to finance when developing a building. Paying them over time is viewed just like any other property tax or municipal assessment.
If the goal is housing abundance, it’s important to focus on reducing the financial and practical barriers to getting the housing actually built. Land use rules and citizen veto points matter. The idiosyncratic issues that developers face in putting the project financing together matter a lot too.
Ugh, I hate the parking proposal, but I'd agree to the whole plan. The city could still just remove some street parking (for a road diet, or to close a street to cars, or to put in non-door-lane bike lanes).
In most cases, you can road diet well by only taking out motorist travel lanes, especially given how much ridiculous space we allocate to them. But as I said in my own top level comment, yes, at some point motorist parking is going to have to give way to non-motorist uses.
A coworker once asked my why empires are always trying to grow bigger. My answer was that for any state, its growth rate (the first time derivative of its size) can be positive, negative, or zero. Negative means someone else *is* growing, and also that either you'll eventually disappear or you'll approach zero or positive growth instead. Zero is at best metastable, and any major shock could swing you in either direction. So, you have to aim for positive to survive long-term. This is a pure math answer, it's just calculus (and maybe a hint of thermodynamics), nothing specific to states. The same applies to cities, forests, tumors, anything that can grow and shrink within a changing environment.
On the concessions to left-NIMBYs, I'm ambivalent about the ideas, but IMO the YIMBYs and social justice advocates clearly misunderstand the real purpose of the current neighborhood-based vetocracy system. The idea of allowing the poorest neighborhoods to opt out implies the rationale for the current "community veto" process is to give a voice to different communities. By prioritizing voices for underprivileged communities we could have the "good" aspects of this while not sacrificing the benefits of encouraging development in rich areas.
I think this is kind of reverse to the real reason for having these sorts of community vetos. In reality rich neighborhoods will organize and have councilmembers and mayors thrown out of office if something happens that they don't like. They tend to vote, donate, and organize very effectively, and their influence goes up an order of magnitude in a low turnout/low information local election. So the rich neighborhoods and elected officials have worked together to arrange a system where people who show up at meetings have a veto on anything that happens in their neighborhood... this protects the rich neighborhoods from things they don't like and protects elected officials from an organized groundswell for their seats originating from rich/engaged residents.
So a proposal to replace the current community input process where rich people have a ton of sway with a new process where only underprivileged neighborhoods get a say cannot work, because the point of the old system is to give rich people for of a say. Rich neighborhoods will respond to the above settlement by organizing winning council elections...
The danger that I see with Matt's RPP plan is that at some point, reserving curb space for motorist parking may not be practical or the best use, as opposed to something like bike or transit lanes or stops. Ostensibly giving someone a perpetual right to store their private property on public land, only to rescind that later on, strikes me as a political disaster waiting to happen. The biannual payment at least makes it clear that the arrangement is (and should be) more of a lease than a purchase.
This. Did we learn nothing from turning taxi medallions into an investment vehicle?
And liquor licenses. Don’t forget the liquor licenses.
No joke. Years ago, my wife and her business partner were looking to open a restaurant in New Jersey. Had a great spot picked out: strip mall in an upper middle class town and no direct competition (same cuisine) for several miles around. But the one guy with a liquor license on the market wanted $500K. That was more than the cost of renovations, the kitchen, and furniture combined. (The kitchen was pretty cheap as they were planning to take a space that previously had a restaurant, so all the tile, plumbing, grease trap, gas, etc. was already in place.)
Artificially constrained liquor licenses are a huge clusterfuck in this state.
Eventually the RPPs would pass from residents to speculators who would be subject to upheavals in market demand for parking: people in dense neighborhoods stop owning cars and rely more on mass transit, ride share fleets of (autonomous?) vehicles, etc.
Yes, once you turn the RPP into a saleable asset, then a political community will form that will be dedicated to ensuring that asset doesn't go down in value.
There is already a huge political community dedicated to insuring that not one space of free street parking gets removed.
And turning those spaces into a financial asset won't solve that problem IMO.
I agree, but you have to give to get. We might not be able to get everything we want but it's still better to get some of the things we want.
It's about moving the current RPP-owning bloc from the anti-growth coalition to the pro-growth coalition, which is the narrow goal of the whole plan. Yes, this cedes power to an unfairly entrenched bloc, but that's politics!
And in the long run, as RPP owners become a smaller fraction of the population, especially if RPPs become accumulated by some corporate-landlord-but-for-parking entity, their clout is diminished and a future coalition can more easily disempower them to the right-of-way's benefit.
Given the potential for growth, there's very little in US urban politics more overrated than the status quo.
The idea that if you live on a property without off street parking, you just can’t own a car at all, is both relatively extreme and a direct harm to people who vote, in a way that other YIMBY goals are not. Yoking the legalization of apartment buildings to the abolition of car ownership just dooms the former IMO.
Nonsense. Parking is for sale. The person could buy a parking space, or buy a parking permit from someone who had one.
You can always rent a private parking space (either in a garage or in someone else’s already existing off-street space).
People aren’t stupid. A move like ending street parking for RPP holders would be understood in the context of parking maximums on new construction, redevelopment of existing public parking garages, and prohibition on any new ones.
I personally will only entertain living in units with dedicated spaces as long as owning a car is important to me, because I don’t want to get invested in this kind of politics, but I think plenty of people would be involved that way and there’s no need to make enemies of them in the fight for marginally less insane development policy.
I think this can be solved by adding a mechanism that requires the city to purchase X RPPs for every Y spaces permanently removed as part of a public works project. They could simply run an second price auction for the spaces and buy from the X lowest bidders at the price of the X + 1 lowest bid.
They could publicly announce the auction or just ask people to place an asking price pegged to inflation for their RPP at the initiation of the program. The asking price could also facilitate market transactions between two residents.
You don't have to do that. RPP entitles the holder to search for a parking space, not to find one.
The only thing that entitles someone to a parking space is shoveling at least a foot of snow out of one and blocking it with a trash can.
Sure but a person could still fear that overtime development would erode the usage value of their RPP by increasing the constituency for taking parking for other usages like bike lanes. I think this fear is rational and if the goal is to minimize opposition to pro housing agenda it's better to make more concessions than less around rational fears about parking availability losses.
I should also note that X could be less than Y in my proposal. Like you have to buy 0.75 permits for every parking spot taken.
What do you think that would do to the budget needed for a new bike lane project? How do you think that would affect the likelihood of a new bike lane being built? I’d guess it would make building them way more difficult.
It would undoubtedly make it more expensive, perhaps about $60,000 per space based on $100 per month value and 2% though this estimate may be way conservative for those who least value their RPPs. But it would also neutralize a lot of political opposition to bike lanes not to mention Matt's pro-housing agenda. The overall surplus of that agenda should be able to cover those costs.
EDIT: I think Matt's pro housing agenda would greatly increase the likelihood of improving bikablity. I think this "auction" concession is a relatively small price to pay for the surplus of said agenda.
Sixty grand sounds high for a non-guaranteed space. An RPP just gives you the right to compete with all the other RPP-holders in your neighborhood.
Generally makes sense. Maybe $10,000 is a better estimate. It's plausible that it would be a four digit number instead of a five digit number. I find a three digit number unlikely given that it's in perpetuity and not just for like two years.
Just change the rights of the RPP slightly. Allow the city to buy back rRPPs and transform that number of spaces into what is best for the city
A bigger issue may be that large parts of DC do not have RPP parking, including much of wards 7 and 8 (you don’t need an RPP to park in these areas). So in practice, this would be a giveaway to residents in more affluent/developed parts of the District from which residents in some areas would be shut out, in ways that have regressive distributional impacts. These areas are probably some of those that would most benefit from additional development, and their legislators would also push back. There are probably creative solutions to this issue but it is a problem for the proposal as articulated here
Do you think this is a compelling argument in favor of mandatory parking minima?
I have a halfway-developed theory that mandatory parking minima may actually not be the dumbest intervention in the free market in certain contexts and neighborhoods for a variety of reasons, one of the big ones being the path-dependence of building anything (accommodating a garage when you're building a new building is generally going to be a *lot* easier and cheaper than realizing you need or want a car after you've moved in and your only option to to just change residences or build a garage). Also note that the "worst case" for a carless homeowner is something like "you have a garage to use for something else" - the disutility is marginal rather than absolute.
A lot of mandatory parking is in parking garages and off-street lots, which are useless to carless people. And your argument for how great it is for someone who doesn't want a garage is similar to an argument that every dwelling should have two bedrooms. Worst case you have a garage/second bedroom? No, worst case you can't afford the townhouse because it now costs more. You are in favor of forcing people to buy space they don't want, at great cost.
I think parking in townhouses is usually going funge against basement space in the same townhouse based on the development with which I’m familiar—which may well be something buyers don’t want and so still net-negative to them, but isn't going to increase the building footprint in the same way an extra bedroom is nor self-evidently increase construction costs. Parking garage minima or lot requirements probably do make much less sense. Also I think characterizing “ a halfway-developed theory that mandatory parking minima may actually not be the dumbest intervention in the free market in certain contexts and neighborhoods” as “in favor” is a bit of an unwarranted leap.
Fair enough.
From a political standpoint, I suppose what I could accept as a first step compromise is to not have mandatory parking minimums (and also road lane allocation as well!) set at the highest level to account for peak conditions. That just creates a ton of wasted space during most of the day that also turns corridors into natural speeding tunnels not during peak conditions. I have mad respect for Trader Joe's (where I'm coincidentally about to go!) for actively recognizing just how ridiculously high some of these minimums are, and circumventing them where they can.
The RPP permit allows the owner to park in any available street parking space. If the city later removes some of the parking spaces for other uses (bus lane, bike lane, trees) then they wouldn't be available parking spaces and the RPP permit holder wouldn't be able to park in them.
Hm, I guess that would lower the temperature down in that RPPs in general just gradually become less useful, but I could still see nasty fights go down with property owners arguing "why are you taking away parking next to *my* property, but not *their* property?".
What's this? Publish time at a much more reasonable part of the morning for those of us out west? Thank you so much!
I can finally get in early and farm the hearts I need to feed my family
They should be eating well tonight!
I'm guessing it's the result of jet lag. Once Matt has recovered from his trip, he'll be back to his more normal posting time of 6 AM Eastern / 5 AM Central / Eff You Mountain & Pacific. ;-P
As a Ca resident i will give you a heart lol. Also, if DC had the same density as Manhatten it would have 9 million people. Up zoning one city can solve any regon housing crises.
This post was with waiting a bit later in the morning for!
You hit the nail on the head at the end: we ought to have a flywheel of urban growth. This should be true for all cities - if you’re not growing, you’re dying. State and federal policy should also lean heavily in favor or supporting urban growth.
I'm kind of worried about SF, even though I don't live there any more. They fucked the dog on the way up the demand ladder, and I'm worried they're going to do the same on the way down and just spew problems out into the surrounding areas like ejecta from a dying star.
It's frustrating because I feel like solving the problem of legalizing office space to housing conversions is work but not work that requires a particular genius- and also I just don't believe it will happen on a time line that will matter.
Damn dude, was "screwed the pooch" too euphemistic?
"was "screwed the pooch" too euphemistic?"
He started with that English phrase, then ran it through the translator into Borat and back to English again.
Maximum username / comment-topic synergy unlocked
Best comment on this thread. Nominative determinism for the win!
15 years is the cutoff for screwing the pooch.
>They fucked the dog on the way up the demand ladder, and I'm worried they're going to do the same on the way down and just spew problems out into the surrounding areas like ejecta from a dying star.
i love anglophone poetry
Yes i love it too.
One aspect to the generic American anti-density tendency is that the only truly dense (in global terms) place in the country is Manhattan (not the Kansas one). Places like DC or Chicago or every other urban core are just dense enough to have the visible downsides without being dense enough to have the benefits. I wonder if Matt’s subtext is that if DC, for example, developed positive true density, more Americans would develop a density preference.
I think one thing people like us have to be cautious about, and I think this is what Matt is doing, is that while we are pretty convinced that the benefits of density are manifestly obvious and will win converts easily if properly implemented, a *lot* of people are not actually interested in significantly changing the sort of life that they live. it happens that their lifeways are pretty awful, but if someone has been living an auto-centric life in a lower-medium density neighborhood for 40 years they're not going to want to change no matter what the benefits are. so it's a good idea to emphasize that we acknowledge not everyone is going to want to live in the denser city and point out the benefits for those who prefer suburbia
Yes; one major theme of NIMBY narratives is that evil urbanists want to take away your right to live in the suburbs, and that suspicion is only reinforced by people saying, "Your preferences are misguided and you will see that actually dense urban living is great."
That's why Matt is careful to point out that we can generate huge wins just by meeting existing, unmet demand. If anything, drawing those people into the city will make it easier to find a place in the 'burbs. But the message has to be that this is about allowing people to live according to their existing preference, not about changing people's preferences.
"You're actually wrong, misguided, and dumb about how you want to live your life" is not very persuasive, and it's **amazing** how many would-be persuaders do not understand this!
The very-small-c conservative view, I guess, is that we want to avoid genuine shocks to the city system. If you don't like all the new growth and you want to cash out into the suburbs, fair enough--you should be able to do so with generous time to find a new job, etc.
I don't think this is realistically a *practical* problem, but it's one to which we should pay more than lip service (i.e., robust-sounding and robust-in-fact circuit breakers that will probably never be triggered in real life)
Except they may well prefer their little slice of less dense autocentric suburbia where they are in DC, rather than an hour away up Rockville Pike or 270 or something similarly disastrous.
This is not really correct. Manhattan is an outlier in global density at ~100k persons per square mile. Even Paris is only 60k/sq. mile.
Density in most cities worldwide is in the 25-50k persons per square mile range. We have this level of density in north Chicago, San Fran, the Koreatown area of LA, pretty much all of NYC, as well as DC/Philly. We also have the amenities that follow density in those places.
Nope. I’m showing DC density at about 12K per square mile (which feels about right…it’s just not a dense city at all). K-town is indeed close to 50K per square mile, it’s also a tiny tiny enclave. (Maybe Navy Yard would be an equivalent.) Philadelphia has the same density as DC at 11-12K per square mile. Center City is indeed at close to 30K per square mile.
Manhattan is at about 70K per square mile. But all 5 boroughs combined are at 27K per square mile. Subtract Manhattan and the other 4 go down to the low 20’s. Still more dense than DC (again, DC is not very dense).
These figures all look correct to me, but, what are you referring to in your previous comment about US cities lacking sufficient density for "benefits?" Plenty of cities in this world correspond to the typical figure for a US city. And they manage to get benefits. London's not overly dense. Nor is Berlin. Nor is Hamburg. Nor are Nordic cities, I think. Toronto has a similar density to Chicago, I believe. And so on. If we really need to push up our cities to Manhattan-like (or even just NYC-like) levels of density to get "benefits" we're going to be waiting a long time.
Yeah this is what befuddles me. US cities could be less loud, easier to travel around, with more public spaces and benches, as well as having less crime, but none of this is primarily a density issue.
Right. Presumably there's some cutoff below which it begins to get difficult or uneconomical to do certain things. But I'm pretty sure lots of American urban areas are characterized by densities well above this threshold (if not throughout the metropolis in question than at least in significant swaths).
Arguably they are, though? Noise is going to be a function of how busy the immediate area is and how densely packed your immediate apartment neighbors are and how well-soundproofed a building is, public spaces (particularly parks) compete with demand for private usage which is almost definitionally highest in the highest-density areas, travel ease has a lot of dimensions that go into it but at the most basic level it's much slower to go from point A to point B (whether via public or private transit and by train or by car) in denser areas (because highways are more congested and public transit, whether train or bus, will usually be making more stops, although as I said this is high-dimensional and express stops can alleviate in-transit time at the tradeoff of a narrower service corridor), and crime IIRC is generally believed to exhibit parallel scaling effects to density (often quadratic) as a negative externality as the positive externalities (e.g. individual worker productivity) to density touted by Glaeser et al. (I know I've seen that last but am struggling to find a source atm).
Some or all of these may have effective legislative or policy solutions, but I think that indexing them to density in the first place probably isn't erroneous (albeit travel is high-dimensional).
I’m suggesting that there might be a difference between 12K and 25-30K per square mile. (Maybe there isn’t! But DC has a lot of people sleeping in parks, a fair amount of crime and a lot of areas without restaurants or retail (and I’m not just talking about Anacostia).)
Is homelessness a function of density, or of demand relative to supply?
Opinions will differ on how much density impacts crime. I know on the micro level, more pedestrian street traffic feels safer. But on the metro or country level, I attribute the lack of social harmony much more to other factors. How much do you think density impacts it?
I agree with you that restaurants and retail will serve denser neighborhoods better than less dense ones.
I am only referring to the portions of Philly/DC you mentioned; I am aware that NW DC and north Philadelphia exist.
Koreatown and surrounding areas are big! 200k+ residents big. They're only an "enclave" in the context of a 20 million person metro area. They are much larger than Navy Yard.
The four main boroughs of NYC are well above 25k per square mile. This is my error for not mentioning to exclude Staten Island.
What amenities or other things were you imagining that aren't present in these places but are present in other places globally?
Yeah, Koreatown is not tiny. 3 square miles at 50 per mile is a lot of people. And for the purposes of this thread some of the adjacent neighborhoods, Westlake in particular, are just as dense or close to it.
I think you're on the right track here -- to extend the thought on density preference, many Americans of an older sort still have scarring from the thought of cities as crime-ridden dens, likely a reflection of late-80's and 90's 'super-criminal' dogma -- even though, as Matt writes, our densest metropole, New York, is actually quite safe! But, the recent rise in crime in relative terms these past few years only plays into that pre-existing narrative of unsafe American cities.
It gets to this idea that while positive true density is a necessity for Americans to develop said preference, it has to go along with the idea that cities are safe *and* functional. Otherwise, it'll remain a preference of a minority of Americans and the push for dense, walkable communities will face headwinds the entire way.
You've got some of causation mixed up there insofar as actually, late-80s and 90s 'super-criminal' dogma was a reflection of the fact that crime was genuinely out of control in the 80s and 90s. But yes, many older Americans are (somewhat understandably) scarred by that and persuading them otherwise is both important and challenging.
Matt I love this, but I think you’re missing one reason people will fiercely push back:
Suppose you like living in DC as it is (medium density, walkable). It becomes a lot more dense, and that’s not a good fit for you anymore, so you want to cash out. But if that happens, there will literally no longer be any city that has the environment of “old DC” to move to. So the big profit you make by selling isn’t enough to let you get the lifestyle you love back. People know this; it’s one of the reasons they fight so hard for “preservation.”
A true abundance solution needs to also include the creation of new walkable urban towns. Not the baloney fake lifestyle suburbs that have old colonial architecture and a retail street, but real walkable places built on the pre-war planning model instead of the post-war planning model.
Lacking a comparable alternative place to move to, people will still have strong incentives to fight against meaningful change being allowed in DC.
>>It becomes a lot more dense, and that’s not a good fit for you anymore, so you want to cash out. But if that happens, there will literally no longer be any city that has the environment of “old DC” to move to.<<
What percentage of people would really be hurt by greater density? Safer streets, better shopping, more transit options, more dining options—these are all good, aren't they? Yes, in any large jurisdiction you're going to find outliers. But I suspect in actual practice, a very large percentage of incumbents would welcome the changes as time goes by. Very few would want to "cash out" because they're disgruntled by changes. (Getting them to back the plan in the beginning is the heavy lift.)
Also, I think most people who would "cash out" of a home in DC after living there for quite a while would do so because they A) have to transfer to a different city; B) or want to retire, perhaps to a suitable community, or warmer climate, or what have you; C) or maybe they just want a back yard or different schooling options for kids.
I'm not envisaging a large "Damn, DC's got too many new restaurants and swanky condo buildings these days, but Cincinnati doesn't work for me!" cohort.
“Surveys show clearly that a majority of Americans prefer to live in auto-oriented suburbs and do not want to live in dense, walkable neighborhoods.”
I don’t think that’s accurate.
They don’t want to live in a $1.1 million 500sq/ft studio:
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/77-Charlton-St-N10E_New-York_NY_10014_M30740-87815?ex=2945683625
When they could live in a 6 bedroom 5 bath house for similar money:
https://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/395-Wood-Ave_Edison_NJ_08820_M62020-27929?ex=2943285264
If a 4,100 sq/ft place in Manhattan was the same price as a 4,100 sq/ft place in the wilds of NJ - the number would be very different.
OMG! I finally get to use the lived experience card! That $1.1 million studio in NY is not representative. You can go to any city in the country and cherry-pick expensive real estate. I just bought an apartment in NYC in a pretty good neighborhood (Upper East Side) that’s bigger than this for less than half the money. Anyone who is buying that place is doing so because they REALLY want to be in the trendiest neighborhood in the city, but that’s a personal choice, not a requirement.
That house on Wood Avenue is also not representative.
Even in affordable places like Tokyo central wards are relatively expensive, so we will never have the world you imagine in your last line. There will be a price premium on inner city living.
Also, people understand their own preferences.
“ Also, people understand their own preferences.”
Exactly - relative pricing hugely impacts those preferences. Using my example Manhattan is $2k sq/ft and NJ is $300. If it was $1500 vs $750 relatively more people would prefer to live in Manhattan.
Mind if I ask where you grew up and live? Has it been the suburbs/exurbs at any point?
I think if you're around this type of American you quickly learn they really prefer those areas. That's my conviction.
I’ve lived in both cities and suburbs. Have you? You presumably agree that per sq/ft cost is a huge factor.
Certainly price is a big factor.
I do think think cost is the number one concern for most people. And so, assuming someone can afford it, the question then becomes one of tradeoffs and benefits of urban vs some other kind of living.
And there is also cost of living.
I do like urban living, but with three school age kids it's not financially practical so we are in the burbs until the kids are grown and flown.
What you say makes total sense. I just didn’t want to leave it uncontested that you have to spend $1 million to get a studio in NYC, because you don’t.
The cost of housing is just one part of the story. There’s also the fact that the NYC public school system is terrible.
What makes you think the NYC public school system is terrible? It’s not once you adjust for demographics.
When people are picking schools for their kids, they don't usually adjust for demographics.
But they should.
It’s like if you have two suburban towns. One is middle class with a lot of nurses, teachers, plumbers, cops, etc. The nicer town next door is more expensive and is popularized by doctors, executives, lawyers, etc. The test scores in the “nice” town are higher and people attribute that to the schools being “better.” When in reality the kids in the nicer town have inherited the higher cognitive ability of their parents. If you randomly swapped kids between schools, they’d end up doing just as well as in their original school.
Moreover, your kid is going to find it more difficult to achieve a lofty class ranking in a top-ranked, affluent school district than he or she is in one characterized by lower SES.
I doubt a top 3% high school senior from a working class community and strong SATs is going to have a harder time gaining entrance to a competitive program than a top 20% high school senior with identical SAT scores from a highly affluent community.
(I've never worked in college admissions, so that's just guess).
Exactly. It must be a social or status thing as well as education, or maybe people just prefer to solve their problems at the lifestyle level, but I never understood why private school / expensive school district folks don't just plow a portion of that money directly into the child via 1-on-1 tutoring and other supplements. You'd come out way ahead compared to relocation or tuition.
I went to a bottom-tier PA public high school (majority-minority, 1/3 economically disadvantaged) and we still had fine AP and honors classes. The kids with attentive/strict/well off parents (or just plain smart kids) all made their way to those classes and hung out together. Plenty got into top 20 schools.
>>> I never understood why private school / expensive school district folks don't just plow a portion of that money directly into the child via 1-on-1 tutoring and other supplements. You'd come out way ahead compared to relocation or tuition.
I think this is a very good question in general (and maybe Hagwon and equivalents are kinda this? Seems like an unpleasant solution), but my best guess is that it runs into significant market evaluation problems - an individual tutor can't really scale up very well, the selection of tutor for your child matters a *lot,* and any given tutor is presumably going to be heavily reliant on word of mouth to generate new business, but the results they achieve are only partially dependent on their abilities and partially on those of the child, and the lag time is going to be pretty high.
And not only is the market pretty opaque to begin with, but the people with the best credentials are also going to the be in large part ones that have other, non-tutoring options available to them in the rest of the labor market (at a minimum making prices quite steep even as quality evaluation remains hard). It's a tough nut to crack, although I personally would consider it valuable for it to in fact be cracked.
I think a fair number of people think the higher test scores reflect better pedagogy.
I lived both in NYC and suburban NJ. I have seen schools in both places with my own eyes. Places like Edison pay teachers 50% - 70% more than NYC does, and all other aspects of public schools are similarly better funded in NJ.
The Google tells me median NYC teacher makes $87k and it’s $97k in Edison.
Do a cost of living adjustment.
My brother was an NYC teacher once. They matched his salary in Buffalo. The real world difference was a 60% pay increase.
Northern NJ is very expensive, and in any event NYC teachers aren't required to live in the five boroughs.
$87K is the high end of the NYC teacher salary range:
https://www.schools.nyc.gov/careers/working-at-the-doe/benefits-and-pay
I like the binary inclusionary zoning, here in the Bay Area it feels like the goalposts just get moved when the developer agrees.
Also, good to see an old fashioned Rent Is Too Damn High post. Makes me feel young again.
I like this agenda. You can combine the parking reforms to the zoning reforms though by tying the RPPs to the existing building stock. The RPPs could be linked to specific properties, and be dissolved if the building is demolished and the site redeveloped - gradually reducing the amount of on-street parking in the city as it gets denser, but without screwing over any existing residents and pricing in the effects of removing car-based mobility into land-use choices.
That’s a great idea. The flaw in Matt’s plan is eventually you’d have firms buying up permits and renting them to homeowners. That would undermine support for the system. Better to link them to a residence.
That would surely be a feature, not a bug. By the time that happens density will have increased enough that we’ll need more non-car transportation, including dedicated ROW for buses and bikes.
Much easier to create that by repealing the RPPs at the expense of a bunch of large corporate interests than taking mom and dad’s parking pass.
A good, intriguing point.
Yeah, reading Matt's proposal for RPP allocation I could help but think "isn't this recapitulating the exact kind of land speculation that the Georgists make a compelling case is a bad dynamic?" I think the possible end-state you hypothesize is a good example of why it's probably not enough on its own terms as a proposal.
I think your idea improves on Matt's, but in many cases if you're going to effectively use that curb space for non-motorist use, you need to use the entire block's curb space. Frontage along a single lot could work for something like a bus stop or a sidewalk patio, but if you want to implement something like a bike or transit lane, you'll likely have to pull the rug on on-street parking for several adjacent lots simultaneously.
I think this is a good post with good ideas, but I’m skeptical regarding street parking. That is different because streets are public rights-of-way and allowing some people to essentially “own” a piece of public property to the exclusion of others is not a good idea IMO, for a number of reasons.
Instead the you let the market and reduced regulations work - as street parking becomes harder to find with more density, developers have more incentives to create off-street parking. Turning parking into the functional equivalent of Taxi medallions would not be an improvement IMO.
>>>as street parking becomes harder to find with more density, developers have more incentives to create off-street parking.<<<
Right, but incumbent residents have more incentive to fight development. Because parking's getting harder to find! (Or so they fear).
On the flip side, someone wanting to move there will have to factor in the additional cost to buy one of these exclusive parking permits which de facto raises the cost of the housing. And given that street parking is not going to increase, the value (and cost) of those permits will rise with density.
I don't think this is really a problem. You want to attract residents who prefer car-free living. Sure, you need decent transit to make it all work, but Matt's plan would presumably raise more money for that. And, over the long term, the total cost of housing in DC should be more affordable than under the status quo (because of extra supply) even if, yes, at the margins, this will be more true for non car owners than car owners.
At end of the day, this isn't a development plan for San Bernardino County. Cars have their place, but making it easy to own them in a dense urban environment shouldn't be a priority. Discouraging them should be a priority.
Sure, but there are better ways to discourage cars than creating a half-privatized parking permit system. Something like an annual auction or lottery for permits would be a lot better than granting transferable and valuable ownership rights to the use of public property.
The point of Matt's parking idea, I gather, is not to find an optimal way to discourage cars. Rather, the point is to neutralize the opposition to this upzoning proposal from incumbent residents who currently enjoy free street parking, and who fear an increase in population (because it'll make it harder to find a parking space).
I get that, but I think one has to acknowledge the perverse incentives his specific proposal would create long-term.
I’m not opposed to “let the market work” regarding off street parking spaces, but what we are actually seeing is that once regulators change their minds on parking, they impose maximums instead of minimums.
That's Matt's point, though. Any time you have potential new entrants to a market, the rational incentive of the incumbents is going to be to prevent them from entering, e.g. occupational licensing, car dealership exclusivity, etc. RPP privatization flips that on its head; now the newcomers are new customers, not competition. I like it because it jujitsus the typical bad housing dynamic where no one speaks for the people who want to move in and turns that to the advantage of YIMBYism.
Not the mention that politically, the message of "let[ting] the market and reduced regulations work" is heard as "Yes, we are exposing you to the vicissitudes of the market, but don't worry because everything will be allocated efficiently in the end and if you're priced out, it's because someone else can make greater use of that resource." It's not exactly a winning argument.
Matt's proposal is a free market and reduced regulation proposal. He's careful not to characterize it with those words, which will trigger some people, but that's what he's advocating for - much reduced regulation of urban housing and a much freer market.
The problem with RPP privatization is that it is not actually privatization. It's same problem with Taxi medallions but worse. You're giving people an exclusive right to not only benefit from publicly owned and maintained land, you'd also be giving RPP "owners" the right to profit from it. In essence it becomes an asset, one where the owner gets all the benefits and profits, while the maintenance and upkeep is socialized. It's cronyism IMO and it could actually create a barrier-to-entry for those who want to move to the area, but need parking since the price of that asset is guaranteed to increase. It would, therefore, de facto raise the cost of moving and that cost will only go up as density increases.
I think there's a slight wrinkle to your last paragraph, which is that for NIMBY homeowners rather than renters, the YIMBY argument is often along the lines of "Don't worry, you effectively can't be priced out! The rise in land values due to the development frontier expanding will be paid to you in cash when you move out!" The trouble is that for anyone who just wants to, like, *live* in their home and the neighborhood they bought into (i..e. to get use-value rather than transaction-value of their house) there's no guarantee nor ex ante reason to believe that the hypothesized objective increase in land values will fully compensate them for the potential (subjective) diminution in use-value plus the transaction costs of moving.
EDIT: yes, admittedly, something something capitalization but I don't have time to chew through all of that at the moment...
I'm struck by these words:
>>>This doesn’t make the city more desirable for literally every single person — some people may just miss the low density<<<
I can scarcely think of a less agreeable environment to live in than one that is both A) truly urban and, B) low-density. Maybe Oslo makes it work. But not many American cities do. I picture weedy vacant lots, inappropriately situated strip malls, and dead quiet streets that are really scary to walk on after dark.
Los Angeles!
I look forward to the first mystery novel where the victim is murdered because th family wants to inherit the free street parking pass.
In any plan like you suggest that includes substantial fees for new development, you may want to consider having those fees spread out over the first dozen years after the building gets its certificate of occupancy rather than being paid up front. Ideally the fees are assessed in years 3 through 12.
While in a theoretical model, it shouldn’t matter, as a practical matter soft costs like impact and neighborhood fees are much more challenging to finance when developing a building. Paying them over time is viewed just like any other property tax or municipal assessment.
If the goal is housing abundance, it’s important to focus on reducing the financial and practical barriers to getting the housing actually built. Land use rules and citizen veto points matter. The idiosyncratic issues that developers face in putting the project financing together matter a lot too.
Ugh, I hate the parking proposal, but I'd agree to the whole plan. The city could still just remove some street parking (for a road diet, or to close a street to cars, or to put in non-door-lane bike lanes).
In most cases, you can road diet well by only taking out motorist travel lanes, especially given how much ridiculous space we allocate to them. But as I said in my own top level comment, yes, at some point motorist parking is going to have to give way to non-motorist uses.
Amazing how many of these discussions involve the argument - no one wants to live in cities they are too crowded and expensive.
A coworker once asked my why empires are always trying to grow bigger. My answer was that for any state, its growth rate (the first time derivative of its size) can be positive, negative, or zero. Negative means someone else *is* growing, and also that either you'll eventually disappear or you'll approach zero or positive growth instead. Zero is at best metastable, and any major shock could swing you in either direction. So, you have to aim for positive to survive long-term. This is a pure math answer, it's just calculus (and maybe a hint of thermodynamics), nothing specific to states. The same applies to cities, forests, tumors, anything that can grow and shrink within a changing environment.
On the concessions to left-NIMBYs, I'm ambivalent about the ideas, but IMO the YIMBYs and social justice advocates clearly misunderstand the real purpose of the current neighborhood-based vetocracy system. The idea of allowing the poorest neighborhoods to opt out implies the rationale for the current "community veto" process is to give a voice to different communities. By prioritizing voices for underprivileged communities we could have the "good" aspects of this while not sacrificing the benefits of encouraging development in rich areas.
I think this is kind of reverse to the real reason for having these sorts of community vetos. In reality rich neighborhoods will organize and have councilmembers and mayors thrown out of office if something happens that they don't like. They tend to vote, donate, and organize very effectively, and their influence goes up an order of magnitude in a low turnout/low information local election. So the rich neighborhoods and elected officials have worked together to arrange a system where people who show up at meetings have a veto on anything that happens in their neighborhood... this protects the rich neighborhoods from things they don't like and protects elected officials from an organized groundswell for their seats originating from rich/engaged residents.
So a proposal to replace the current community input process where rich people have a ton of sway with a new process where only underprivileged neighborhoods get a say cannot work, because the point of the old system is to give rich people for of a say. Rich neighborhoods will respond to the above settlement by organizing winning council elections...