Building Codes

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Bloomberg’s New York City

Michael Bloomberg has put an array of game-changing development projects at the forefront of his administration’s urban planning policy– and seen a lot of them through. As Bloomberg prepares to leave office at the end of his present term, The Architect’s Newspaper has put together a fascinating survey piece that describes many of the individual projects of the Bloomberg era, which together have reshaped the city in the most significant ways since the time of Robert Moses. (Thanks, Jon Goldman, for the tip!)

A new vision for Coney Island. Source: NYCEDC.

As a New Yorker (regionally, at least), I have very mixed feelings about Bloomberg’s planning legacy. On one hand, I now work in the city two or three days each week, and I have to say that I really enjoy the streetscaping changes that have been made to Broadway, in particular. Sometimes, when I feel like I need some exercise at the end of the day, I’ll walk up Broadway from the office in Gramercy Park to the PATH station at Greeley Square. The transformation of Broadway is palpable: Traffic lanes have been replaced with trees, bike lines, and outdoor seating. One day last week, a wedding was being performed in the middle of the street. With the reduction of motor-traffic, it became clear how much of the stress-inducing aggression that one expects to find in New York City is a direct result of having homicidal drivers competing for blacktop. Without them (or, even, with fewer of them), Broadway– in Midtown– has been transformed into a relatively quiet and peaceful setting. The redevelopment of Broadway is part of a wider administration focus on complete streets. No doubt that further reductions in vehicular traffic, as the Bloomberg administration has sought, would improve the ambience of the city, immeasurably.

On a much grander scale, I also really admire the ambition of a lot of the city’s signature projects, as highlighted in the Architect’s Newspaper article. The Hudson Yards Redevelopment Area, for example, will herald the most significant change to Manhattan’s geography since the 1920s: It will open an enormous new section of the city to Midtown-style development, supported by a  city-financed extension of the No. 7 subway (which is almost complete), and by the 2005 and 2009 upzonings of nearly 60 blocks on the Far West Side. Across town, in the middle of the East River, a new Cornell campus on Roosevelt Island will greatly increase the university’s footprint within the city limits. Downtown, the new World Trade Center is finally coming together, while Governor’s Island remains an empty canvas–but not for long. It’s an exciting time in New York City development. Forget about the numbers– the money to be made, the square footages to be built. Just look at the pictures in the above-mentioned article, and try to not be impressed by what’s happening.

On the other hand, I can’t help but feel that the city has become too managed, and too planned, on a human scale. It’s hard to characterize, exactly, what has been diminished over the last decade. But it feels as though the chaos and spontaneity that once made New York New York have been methodically reduced, and what we now have in New York is something more like a polished European capital, whose politically-connected denizens have shaped it to showcase their own riches and refinement, than like the crazy American city that we once loved. I still remember a city whose energy and danger seemed to promise that anything could happen here. What happened to that? The city of today is easier to deal with, in some ways. But it’s also become a preening, intolerant, and exclusive in-club, in ways that America’s largest city should never have been allowed to become. There’s something that I just find deeply dispiriting and stifling about much of New York now. It represents, I think, in all of its hair-splitting regulations, its commercialized hipness, and its matter-of-fact acceptance of locked doors, the decisive transformation of metropolitan America into a class-structured society whose boundaries are increasingly impenetrable to all but a select few. Its neatness is not something to celebrate.

It would be unfair, and perhaps too easy, given his personal characteristics, to lay most of the blame for this on Mayor Bloomberg. These changes have been coming for a generation, and many are the results of national and even global phenomena. Furthermore, to give credit where it’s due, the Bloomberg administration has probably done more to prioritize the development of affordable housing than any New York City mayor since the 1960s. Few things represent the narrowing of the city more starkly than its cost of living; and while Bloomberg’s willingness to tackle this may simply make good business sense, it also addresses an inequity that has been tolerated for far too long. At the same time, Bloomberg has had more than 10 years to leave his mark on the city, and it is what it is. There may be more affordable units in the pipeline as a result of his policies, but rest assured that their numbers will be very tightly controlled; and never will enough of them be permitted through the city’s land use policies to threaten the astronomical market equilibrium. Instead, the experience of living in New York City will become increasingly bureaucratized and contingent for those who are not rich: As Bloomberg once gloated, he believes the city is a “luxury product” for which people ought to expect to pay. And pay they do. His is not a vision of a city whose plans respond to the needs of its people; rather, it’s a city whose political players make room for the people they might need.

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A Land Use Riddle in Newark

One summer during graduate school, I often walked past the National State Bank Building on my way to an internship in Newark’s City Hall. The building is located at 810 Broad Street, at Edison Place. I wondered: Why did Cass Gilbert, architect of the neoclassical tower that was completed in 1912, design his building to have a completely detailed façade that faced a mid-block lot line?

It’s unusual for a zero-lot-line property to have its lot-facing wall detailed. And this one is elaborate. How did the developers here know– correctly– that more than a century later, their southern exposure would continue to look out on sunlight and green space, rather than find itself pressed flush against a high brick wall?

A first thought was that maybe the bank had owned the yard, but that didn’t seem to check out: Behind the yard is an older, church-related structure which the green space adjoins; across the yard, and closer to the street, is a very old church. These two structures are related: along with the yard, they make up the campus of the Old First Presbyterian Church.

The Old First Church had its origins in the Puritan congregation of Robert Treat. Treat’s was the party that settled Newark under a charter from Governor Carteret in 1666. The church building, itself, was begun in 1787, simultaneous with the Philadelphia Convention. That’s all pretty significant, at least on a local level. Could the history of the church have meant that its property would be preserved by some device that predated formal historic designations?

It sounds plausible that Newark might have had an ad hoc arrangement to preserve its first church, even though widespread historic preservation statutes didn’t arrive until the late 20th century. But even if some arrangement had been made to preserve the historic church, that structure is located far enough from the lot line that the intermediate land, including the yard and the auxiliary building beyond, could presumably have been sold and developed without disturbing what was meaningful to the city’s history.

Another thought was that there might have been a burial ground on the land in question, and that some common-law precept would have therefore prevented its future development in the minds of 1912 architects. I actually thought this was the answer, but it turns out that what had looked (to me) like tombstones once before are actually weathered concrete benches. Here’s the patch of land, and it doesn’t contain any visible tombstones (at least, not in the summer undergrowth):

The gates are usually padlocked, so it’s difficult to get close. But a look at the Sanborn map from 1892 also fails to support the cemetery theory:

In 1892 there was, in fact, a large cemetery near the Old First Church, but it was in back, where the Prudential Arena now stands, reaching east toward Mulberry Street. The land in front was not labeled at all. Meanwhile, the same bank also had a previous building on the site of its 1912 building. So, what’s up here? Are we dealing with a private law device? Some early way of preserving genuinely historic properties, including their grounds, before everything that had grown old was ‘historic’? Was there some sort of a covenant between the bank and the church?

I’m only writing about this because I drove past the site today. There was an empty stretch of curb, and it was a good day for taking a few pictures. It jogged my memory. I’d like to dig some more, but if anyone could shed some light, please do.

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DC to Relax its Height Limits?

The Independent has a piece about recent efforts to revise the DC building height limit of 130 feet (39.6 m). As Washington grows, its century-old height limit becomes a natural experiment in massing regulations and their impact on metropolitan land markets. After providing a brief history of the (aesthetics-driven) massing regulation, the author, Rupert Cornwell, notes:

[T]he price of a European feel is not only to be measured in commuter misery. The ban on tall buildings curbs the supply of space when demand is soaring; the result, naturally, is higher prices, across the board. DC has a chronic hotel shortage, while the cost of office space has hit Manhattan levels, and Washington’s [poor] residents find it ever tougher to make ends meet as . . . gentrification pushes rents remorselessly higher. The city, meanwhile, loses much potential tax revenue.

Washington is an unusually beautiful American city, in the sense that it actually has a classically-proportioned plan. And part of its proportioning lies in the scale of its buildings, which complement the city’s layout. L’Enfant’s 1791 plan predated tall buildings by a century, and in that sense it was silent about building heights. But it was also the blueprint for an airy city of wide boulevards, open spaces, and preeminent public buildings. The 130-foot building limit, imposed in 1899, has been consistent with the original blueprint and its Enlightenment-era political symbolism for America’s capital.

It would be a shame to see L’Enfant’s aesthetic suddenly disrupted; it would also be a loss to market-driven planning innovation to end the city’s role as one of the last American places where old-fashioned land-use efficiency (including the use of courtyards and alleys) is a serious consideration for individual projects. But there are certainly both practical and equitable arguments for relaxing the current height limits. Washington’s recent experience illustrates, starkly (I think), the costs of strictly regulating the massing of buildings in growing real estate markets. Even in cities without such purposive policies, the aggregation of land use regulations is presumably having similar impacts.

L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, DC.

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America’s Gated Cities

Forbes is back on the case of how the aggregation of local land use regulations can distort metropolitan land markets, creating barriers to entry in agglomeration economies, and possibly even slowing economic growth by depriving such economies of desperately needed new blood. This closely follows some of the insights that Ryan Avent hit on, last year, in The Gated City.

To the list of grievances against overzoning, I would add the appalling inequity of making entire metropolitan regions effectively off-limits to the middle and working classes, to the young, and to those who have children– including so many of those regions’ own long-time residents. Government and academic research have almost completely dodged the question about what has driven the massive, native-born out-migration from places like California and the Northeast– and whether this migration has been truly voluntary. To hear the press coverage, millions of stupid people have eagerly given up their proximity to friends, family, and relatively stronger economies in order to snap up cheap, new houses in Godforsaken places. I’m cynical, but not that cynical.

The truth is that housing costs have been forcing people out, and it is apparent that the labor forces in those cities that have been abandoned by the US-born working class have been steadily replaced by migrant workers who see being crowded and overworked in an American city as an improvement. On a long-term basis, this is not a sustainable arrangement. But the ultimate challenge is in overcoming the myopic politics of municipal government, writ large, that resists even the most modest changes to existing land use patterns. I really appreciate that Forbes is keeping up on this story. I feel like this is a drum that needs to be beaten until the harm of overzoning becomes clichéed.

Back in the 1970s, in a harbinger of what has come, the New Jersey Court addressed the issue of what was then called exclusionary zoning in its first Mount Laurel decision. In 1983, Justice Pashman described the specific land use devices that were resulting in the wholesale exclusion of market uses in his concurrence to the second Mount Laurel decision. In those days, only the housing markets for poor and working-class people had been strangled. By the 90s and 2000s, the suburban middle class was starting to get screwed. Today, Silicon Valley and Forbes are complaining. Maybe now it becomes an issue.

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Can Communities Zone for Small Merchants?

New York City is trying. I’m skeptical. As long as the aggregation of zoning laws continues to cap the total available space in high-demand metropolitan regions, I don’t suspect that slicing and dicing the existing land-use allocations will have much of an effect on land costs, which are ultimately the bottom line. On the other hand, preserving a significant number of smaller spaces might, at least, leave some options on the table for merchants with fewer resources who seek a physical presence in the neighborhood– in much the same way that tiny studio apartments permit many individuals to live in neighborhoods (at market rates) where they could not purchase full-sized units. So, it should be an interesting experiment.

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Addressing the Metropolitan Housing Pinch

In spite of vacant mansions across the Sun Belt, and abandoned properties across the Rust Belt, we still don’t have enough affordable housing in the places where it might help.  That’s the conclusion that Matt Yglesias reaches in a recent Slate squib, shortly after the Economist‘s Ryan Avent wrestled with the same basic issue, at length, in The Gated City.  It’s a real problem.  It may be that we’re long overdue for a political system that finds the courage to tell homeowners: Look, you’re going to have to accept less distorted property values, and get used to having some new apartments in the neighborhood.  But the question is, logistically, how?  Given the outsized influence of ultra-local politics on land use regulations, it’s a Sisyphean task.  In New Jersey, Mount Laurel hasn’t been adequate, and neither has targeted redevelopment.  It’s not thatGiven the degree of political and bureaucratic bullshit that obtaining a building permit can often entail, investors are understandably sour toward any residential construction project that doesn’t promise big returns.

I fear that the longer this goes on, the more currency proposals like Avent’s will gain.  That is, it begins to seem more sensible to ask: why not simply cut the Gordian Knot, and abolish all but the most utilitarian building codes?  It is particularly maddening to see the entrenched resistance to any sorts of sensible reforms, because addressing this unmet demand could be a real boon to the economy, with benefits redounding to all– including the homeowners who would predictably resist.  That is, targeted land use reforms aimed at freeing a meaningful portion of urban land for new, modest residential uses would put tradesmen and laborers back to work; allow a broader base of people to invest in the country’s strongest metropolitan land economies; and could ultimately lower labor costs in those regions where opportunities tend to concentrate.  Unfortunately, we’ve been waiting for at least fifteen years for the political system to acknowledge that there’s anything undesirable about having a status quo of astronomical housing costs.  I’m not holding my breath.

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Quick Read on Local Building Regs

I recently came across a short book, Administration of Building Regulations: Methods and Procedures for Enforcement, that presents a concise overview of US building codes.  If you’re at all interested in the scope of American municipal building regulations, it’s worth the two hours or so that it takes to read.  Published in 1973, it is a clear, well-written presentation, with a minimal number of unnecessary tangents.  Building codes are direct heirs to the building bye-laws that Unwin discussed in Town Planning in Practice.  They controlled, among other things, the geometry of development in the years before that aspect of land use regulation was subsumed by comprehensive zoning.  Today’s building codes deal almost exclusively with technical specifications, including electrical, plumbing, and structural requirements.  As its title suggests, this book also covers the broad legal frameworks and enforcement mechanisms of municipal building regulations.

It may not be the easiest title to find.  They have a copy of the 1973 edition at the Rutgers law library in Newark.