Author: Theo Mackey Pollack

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A Top Ten List for Urban Code Reform

R. John Anderson has an article at CNU’s Public Square identifying ten code-reform priorities that would help to address the endemic shortage of housing units in the United States. Several of these principles align with recommendations I’ve touched on here at LT, or in other articles, including: provisions to reduce parking requirements for new units; zoning that allows accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to be built, as-of-right; amendments to state and local building codes to allow small multifamily (Missing Middle) buildings to be built in accordance with the International Residential Code (IRC), rather than the more compliance-costly International Building Code (IBC); and a general liberalization of structural massing requirements and lot-size minimums, to facilitate more efficient uses of scarce metropolitan land parcels. This top-ten approach strikes me as a practical summary of salient points for code reformers to keep in mind. David Letterman would be proud.

To this list, I would add: amending state subdivision statutes (or municipal ordinances, in some places) to actively encourage the creation of new, tiny, privately-owned lots. I have in mind parcels less than 30 feet wide at the street line, with no side yard requirements. This would allow traditional attached buildings to be built in diverse designs, as part of a coherent overall pattern. Over time, this would foster the growth of a variety of small housing options, along with the richness and equity of a broad base of participatory property ownership. Ultimately, it would allow the kinds of tight urban blocks to be generated today, in plausible settings, that already characterize our favored old neighborhoods.

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A Real New York Institution Survives

The WSJ recently ran a fitting tribute to Gray’s Papaya, still going strong after about 48 years on the UWS. Reading this article, I learned a few important things, including that the original Gray’s began as a Papaya King franchise; and that its Recession Special — two hot dogs and a juice drink for $1.95 — was invented in response to an actual recession in 1982.

Sadly, I haven’t been to Gray’s since the iconic bright-yellow Greenwich Village location (Sixth Avenue and West 8th Street) closed a decade ago. Time does fly. I remember going there for a midnight snack when I lived at the New School dorm in 1999. I liked their piña colada — and the tinny sound of 1950s oldies, playing on WCBS-FM, that spilled onto the night sidewalk with the stark fluorescent light and the smell of burning hot dogs.

The erstwhile Gray’s Papaya at Sixth Avenue and West Eighth Street in New York closed around 2014.
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No, You Cannot Bicycle Out of a Century of Cars

This piece in the FT begins with an enticing premise, namely, that 19th-century urbanism achieved an ideal form, only to see it eroded by cars. True enough. Then it shifts to a common 21st-century refrain — an assertion that we can have the best of all worlds because, unlike the benighted souls who populated this planet before us, we moderns enjoy the limitless wonders of technology.

Eh, not really.

This framing isn’t completely wrong. In their better parts, Western cities of the 19th century were beautiful. No one is building new places that look like Sugar Hill or Park Slope today, and that is a shame. As an advocate for more traditional forms of urbanism, I believe that 19th-century cities expanded under a more workable framework than today’s zoned neighborhoods, and that the old way of doing things often produced practical and attractive results. (That said, the tenements of the Lower East Side provide a good counterpoint.) Meanwhile, I think one could fairly lay blame for much of the subpar urbanism since about 1920 on the rising influence of cars. If nothing else, cars decreased the emphasis builders once placed on the kinds of urban details that disappear when buildings are passed quickly.

But here’s the elephant in the room: in the United States, we now have a century’s worth of neighborhoods that were built for cars, and a large proportion of people live in those neighborhoods. Those people also need continued access to city centers.

People who argue that city motorists should be relentlessly harassed with fees, penalties, and parking rules, as a strategy to discourage the use of private cars in cities, are out of touch in a way that betrays their own privilege (despite the progressive veneer of such rhetoric). Sure, some large US cities, like New York, Chicago, and possibly Philadelphia, have adequate public transit service in core neighborhoods. (I say adequate because I’ve spent far too many years on the NYC subway to be any more generous.) That said, the parts of these cities that are adequately served tend to be the most expensive. For the vast majority of the working- and middle-class residents of the same urban regions, public transit is either a rare bird (I’m looking at you, once-per-hour buses in the suburbs!) or a hybrid option that includes driving (e.g., to the nearest subway or commuter rail station). Oftentimes, the transfer from car to public transit is further complicated by a serious lack of affordable parking options near transit nodes. This is a long-term failure of urban and regional planning policy that ought to be addressed. It is not a reason to vilify and harass residents of outlying neighborhoods who need to come into the central city.

As for predicting that e-bikes will soon be the primary form of urban transport, I almost don’t know where to begin. Are these enthusiasts unaware of the proportion of humans who are elderly, disabled, or simply dislike riding bicycles? Do they not know that people have young children? Have they never been to a city that experiences winter, or rain, or blazing heat? Do they not understand being tired at the end of a long day, or have they not noticed the many miles that often separate central business districts from the places where most people find homes? The idea is laughable. Subways (and commuter trains) are the arteries of global cities.

Until planners find ways to accommodate ordinary weather conditions (and the large number of us who live in outlying or car-centric locations), this silliness about attacking and vilifying motorized vehicles (including, apparently, now subways) has to stop.

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Salutations, and Some Readings

I’ve been writing less here over the past year because, to be candid, my writing capacity has been soaked up by other commitments. That said, we’ve been seeing a flurry of articles in the MSM over the past few months that confirm a growing recognition of one of the key premises that this blog has emphasized for more than a decade: the role of excessive, cumulative land use regulations in the chronic shortage of metropolitan affordable housing.

Thought I’d check in to post a round-up of some of the more interesting ones:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/01/housing-crisis-hedge-funds-private-equity-scapegoat/672839/

https://www.cityandstateny.com/opinion/2022/12/opinion-new-york-finally-has-momentum-housing-its-time-breakthrough/381311/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/11/us-housing-gap-cost-affordability-big-cities/672184/

https://nypost.com/2022/12/24/how-to-solve-new-york-citys-affordable-housing-problem/

https://www.city-journal.org/keep-talent-with-new-housing-new-york-city

You heard it here, first.

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The Decline of Chinatown’s Bilingual Street-Name Signs

I’ve always liked New York’s Chinatown, and its unique, bilingual riff on standard street-naming has highlighted the special qualities of this neighborhood for as long as I can remember — distinguishing its corners from those in the surrounding blocks of the Lower East Side and the so-called Civic Center (that cluster of neoclassical courthouses and public buildings centered on Foley Square). So this article at the Times gave me a pang of sadness — zeroing in, as it does, on a small but meaningful detail that I’d also noticed, showing how cities can change slowly, then all at once.

Several years ago, I had the good fortune to work in the Municipal Building, on Centre Street, for some time. Being there daily afforded me frequent opportunities to cover the blocks of Chinatown on foot (as well as the various subparts of the Lower East Side and SoHo), block by block, during lunch hours. I noticed then that the center of gravity was moving eastward, with a commercial nexus increasingly focused on East Broadway, far from the old core along Canal, Mott, and Mulberry Streets.

I also noticed that the new street-name signs were rarely subtitled, like the older ones had been:

Bilingual street signs in New York’s Chinatown, circa 2017. Photo: Theo Mackey Pollack

The Times essay, linked above, covers the history of these signs in the context of the history of the neighborhood. I do hope their decline is not a harbinger of rapid change. There have been rumors that Chinatown could soon be made a target for more intense gentrification; and some has already begun. But because it has not gone full-scale (yet), Chinatown is one of the few places in Lower Manhattan that retains some of the character of an older New York City — a messy, discordant, multilayered urban universe (photos by your webmaster) whose spirit has largely been tamed and curated into submission, elsewhere in the tangle of narrow downtown blocks that once teemed with so much human variety.

That is to say, Chinatown is still New York City, as it was meant to be. And I, for one, hope it will stay that way for a while longer.

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Inventing a National Currency in a Divided Nation

A photo of an early ten-dollar note, including a likeness of Abraham Lincoln.
An early ten-dollar note, including a likeness of Abraham Lincoln.

Here’s an engaging essay by Roger Lowenstein, at the WSJ, plugging a new book he’s written on the same theme: the early story of U.S. paper money and its debut by the Lincoln administration during the Civil War. This snapshot illustrates how hard it would be to overstate the transformative force of that bloody war in U.S. history. So much that has shaped and defined the modern Nation, not merely in areas of federalism and abolition, but also especially in the landscapes of law and economics, can be traced to the crucible of the 1860s. Our paper money — vested with an intangible faith in a particular living system, rather than a redemption value in a abidingly precious metal — is another ghost of that time.

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Gated, But Without Gates

That’s basically how Binyamin Appelbaum, at the Times, is describing the housing situation today in suburban Long Island, and he’s right. Four decades is an awfully long time to have to beg the good people of an ostensibly enlightened New York suburb to approve fewer than 150 new apartments:

Housing Help, a local civil rights group, first proposed the 146-unit development, known as Matinecock Court, in the late 1970s to provide some of the less expensive housing that the town so desperately needs. Huntington fought the project all the way to the Supreme Court, and even after losing the case, officials continued to find ways to delay development.

It’s not even a rental property. It’s a limited-equity cooperative. More:

For others, the issue has been transformed because now, rather than strangers, it is their children who are in need of more affordable homes. Hunter Gross, 26, grew up in Huntington and returned to the town after college in Ohio and a few years in Brooklyn. Mr. Gross, the head of a group called the Huntington Township Housing Coalition, which supports more development, makes about $60,000 a year as a political consultant, but he said he slept in a spare bedroom at his aunt’s house because he hasn’t been able to find an apartment.

None of this is new. In The Poor Side of Town, Howard Husock reported that in the late 1940s William Levitt resorted to packing a Hempstead zoning board meeting with a sympathetic crowd of returning World War II veterans (and their young families) to win approval from a skeptical board for a proposal that would become Levittown. Keeping certain groups of people out of town — and making others beg for permission to develop private property — has been par for the course since the advent of American zoning. (In earlier eras, subdivisions could achieve exclusion through similar devices in private covenants, but municipalities had less direct power to do so.) The biggest change is how much further up the socioeconomic hierarchy the exclusion now goes.

Still, one can be sure there’s no shortage of, “In this home, we believe …” lawn signs in Huntington. Across the New York suburbs, the cost of a single-family home with modest curb-appeal is creeping ever closer to a million dollars, and property taxes often rate in thousands-per-month. Here, “no human is illegal” — just the apartment that he or she could afford live in.

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Small Projects, Big Cities: An Abundance of Gems

I have a new essay at City Journal, in which I’ve reviewed Jim Heid’s recent book, Building Small: A Toolkit for Real Estate Entrepreneurs, Civic Leaders, and Great Communities. In this ULI Press publication, Heid, a Bay Area developer, offers a genuinely holistic and comprehensive approach to developing city lots (or combinations thereof) as small urban projects. His approach fits within the tradition by which cities have customarily been built: one small piece at a time.

Heid’s exploration shows how building small urban projects remains possible, and can still yield excellent results; but he also illustrates how the bureaucratic, regulatory, and financial parameters of present-day development culture have taken a timeless, iterative, and once-efficient process, and transformed it into something that is often much more difficult and expensive than the proponents of healthy growth should want it to be. This fits, unfortunately, with much of what we have covered at LegalTowns over the years.

On a practical note, Building Small offers readers a wealth of topical templates (hence, the ‘toolkit’ title), covering development tasks that range from structuring a special-purpose entity, to stacking funding from diverse sources, to working with attorneys (and identifying the qualities of good ones). Heid’s book is recommended, especially for planners and lawyers who value the development of coherent townscapes, and whose contributions to code development would be enriched by a clearer understanding of the small builder’s perspective. Small projects make great towns and cities.

Victorian brownstones on Carroll Street in Brooklyn. Most neighborhoods were traditionally developed lot by lot. This practice continued in American cities through the industrial era. While several adjoining lots were often built in tandem, the inherent potential for diversity on a single block, tempered by consistent spatial dimensions, due to building-lot sizes, fostered a balance between a spontaneous richness and an overarching order. This deepened over time, as individual owners modified their structures, or combined lots to create larger buildings with dimensions that were often neat multiples of the most prevalent, smaller houses. This quality of ordered irregularity is typical of older, traditional urban settings, like Park Slope, seen here; it is often absent from master-planned, strictly-zoned communities.

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The Traditional Urbanism of New York’s West Village

I thoroughly enjoyed this pair of online classes from the ICAA. The planner Rodrigo Bollat Montenegro takes us on a grand tour of the urbanism of Greenwich Village, in which he touches on everything from Leon Krier’s elements of good traditional cities to the still-visible remnants of colonial property lines and century-old street extensions. 3.25 credits toward your ICAA Certificate in Classical Architecture if you complete the quiz at the end.

Part of the urban fabric of the West Village, as it stood in 1895, from a Sanborn map of Manhattan.
Part of the urban fabric of the West Village, as it stood in 1895, from a Sanborn map of Manhattan. Red is brick; yellow is wood frame; green is a special hazard (with brick or frame construction signified by dots or X’s, respectively). Evidently, the lot that now contains one of the city’s great jazz clubs, 55 Bar, was already numbered 55 Christopher Street in 1895. Next door, the building that would become the landmark Stonewall Inn, stood at 53-51. Source: New York Public Library.