Zoning

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Funding Sprawl

The Atlantic has an article by Jordan Weissmann entitled, “Why Your Prius Will Bankrupt Our Highways.” It paints an ominous picture of the relationship between gasoline taxes and federal highway funding. I think it’s interesting that proposed public spending on rail infrastructure is reliably controversial in the United States, but not the subsidizing of motor travel through public spending on roads, highways and related infrastructure costs. It would be fair to say that the business model for private railroads would be a lot rosier if the government built and maintained all of the tracks, switches, and stations across the country, without controversy, and the private sector had only to supply the actual engines and rail cars.

Weissmann’s article also, indirectly, makes the case for land use policies that discourage sprawl and facilitate more compact development patterns. I’ve been reading about this topic lately in connection with some work that I’m doing for a research center. Studies have found that, in addition to the staggering highway costs that are generated by car-based land-use patterns, added costs for the development and maintenance of water and sewer infrastructure, private sector utilities, and lost productivity due to traffic congestion also grow in direct correlation with low-density, sprawl-type development.  These externalities ultimately redound to taxpayers, utility customers, and other consumers, where they are shared by town-dwellers and sprawl-dwellers alike. In traditional towns and cities, these costs were borne more directly by those who would benefit– a practice which strongly encouraged efficient land use.

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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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Marijuana: Zoned Out in New Jersey

The Newark Star-Ledger has a piece about a proposed bill in the New Jersey General Assembly that would override local attempts to use municipal land use powers to block the farming of medical marijuana. The bill is being proposed by Assemblyman Declan O’Scanlon, a Republican from Monmouth County, so Governor Christie’s stated opposition sets up an interesting intra-party schism on the topic. Presumably, if it went to a vote, the Dems would also split, given the surreal political calculus of a bill that encompasses both drug policy and suburban land use. The land use aspect of the New Jersey law has come to the forefront as local opposition to both cultivation and dispensary siting has frustrated its implementation since it was signed by Governor Corzine in 2010. So far, only Montclair has approved a proposed dispensary.

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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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‘Fracking’ v. Euclid

Heard this story on N.P.R. tonight while driving home: The Pennsylvania State House is considering legislation that would preempt local land use policies that restrict ‘hydrofracking’ within their jurisdictions. I think it would be fair to say that this proposal aims at the heart of US zoning’s basis for legitimacy.  That is, keeping industrial nuisances out of residential neighborhoods is the most basic premise for authorizing a zoning ordinance.  Historically, zoning was a direct response to the land-use chaos ensued from the Industrial Revolution.  Seriously: If the state won’t allow local governments to keep hydraulic fracturing out of residential neighborhoods, what business does it have authorizing them keep out apartment houses or barbershops?

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People v. Regulations

There was another good piece in the Times today by Michael Kimmelman: this one about the conflict between the embedded priorities of New York City’s building, zoning, and occupancy regulations and the people who require the city’s living space. The crux of the story focuses on the mismatch between housing that is oriented toward nuclear families, and the much more diverse array of households that make up the city. The piece starts with an architectural profile of a new S.R.O. on Bronx Park East, in Pelham Parkway, and describes how permits for such buildings are now relegated to special uses; it then spins off into a discussion about the potential to create smaller, cheaper, and more individualized living spaces on modest canvases of urban land: all good points.

I lived in an old S.R.O., briefly, when I was 18-19, and going to school in the Village. Based on that experience, and the deprivation of light, space, and privacy that it entailed, I’m not sure that the return of the old S.R.O. model to the urban marketplace would be ideal. But the basic concept certainly provides a starting point for land-use efficient housing, and illustrates the creative building traditions that have been stifled by the homogeneous dictates of post-Euclid regulations, even in America’s large east-coast cities.

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Land Use is Dead: Long Live Land Use

I had a chance to read The Gated City.  Ryan Avent offers a compelling case about of the misuse of land use powers by local government.  Sadly, his argument echoes the findings of the New Jersey Supreme Court in its 1975 Mount Laurel decision.  There, the justices found that municipalities were abusing their state-delegated discretion over land use matters to avoid housing their respective fair shares of New Jersey’s poor residents, in violation of the state’s constitution.  Today, 36 years later, the issue is not simply that post-war Euclidean suburbs are zoning out viable housing options for poor people, but that entire metropolitan regions are failing to provide housing options for the middle class.  When it comes to metropolitan housing, the effects of NIMBY-ism have become a tragedy of the commons.

Avent depicts how inflated housing costs in some of America’s most dynamic regions are driven by legal restrictions on the expansion of housing supplies.  He argues that these costs now frequently outweigh the economic benefits of working in the same regions.  As a result, large numbers of Americans have migrated out of the economically vibrant regions around places like New York City, Boston, Washington, and San Francisco, where money, expertise, and strong networks are concentrated.  Instead, he argues, they have relocated to more affordable regions like Phoenix, Houston, and Las Vegas, which inherently offer fewer economic opportunities.  But I’m not persuaded that these groupings of cities necessarily occupy two sides of a static dichotomy.

Avent’s analysis is compelling, but his approach is essentially libertarian, and I don’t agree with the embedded assumption of his argument: namely, that the housing markets of America’s great metropolises ought to be left to find their natural equilibria.  In the last chapter, he writes:

[A] good first step would be to strengthen urban property rights. A very straightforward way to accomplish this would be to declare that a neighborhood can limit development on land to whatever extent it wants, so long as it’s willing to either buy the land in question or pay the land’s owner to comply. Among the key problems associated with NIMBYism are the wedges driven between societal costs and private costs, and between private costs and private benefits.

Are these killing the American Dream?

Penn Central tried a limited version of this same argument at the U.S. Supreme Court in 1978, and lost.  I’m actually sympathetic to Penn Central’s contention that individual properties should be purchased if they are to be singled out from adjacent properties as landmarks; otherwise, we create a disincentive for the private construction of beautiful buildings.  But Avent takes his argument a big step further, essentially saying that the fundamentals of Euclidean zoning, and even the sensibly modest Victorian building codes, should (ideally) be done away with in favor of urban private property rights.  This is too much.  A healthy city is not a culture in a Petri dish: The slum tenements and social depravity of urban life in the Victorian period showed the dangers of unbridled land use.  The legal and political systems have roles to play in mediating the use of urban land.

But Avent’s piece is also a wake-up call: The system of land use regulation in this country is broken, and it is failing too many of our people.  What’s more, its failure is discrediting the moral arguments on which it rests.  In too many places, land use regulation has ceased to make life better, and has instead become a tool of exclusion and social inequality, a barrier that prevents people from finding decent homes and work spaces, and a way to game the legal system for the benefit of local political insiders.  Bad land policy has also resulted in the scarring of our landscape by ugly, politics-driven development.  These costs are no longer reserved for poor people, but now also harm many who are educated and rich.  Without serious reform, calls for scrapping the entire Euclidean régime will become increasingly difficult to resist.

Independent of concerns about the legitimacy of zoning, magnet cities like New York and San Francisco, for their own economies and equities, need to develop much, much larger and more  durable stocks of affordable housing.  This could be accomplished through limited-equity legal arrangements, with a measure of planning guidance; and also through targeted, substantial increases in regional densities.  At the end of the day, however, there needs to be a balance between market forces and human considerations.

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‘The Gated City’: Land Use Laws and Price Distortion

Reason‘s Peter Suderman recently interviewed Ryan Avent about his new piece, The Gated City. I’m looking forward to finding some time next week to read the book.  Judging from Avent’s interview responses, his analysis sounds accurate: Land use laws are distorting the costs of housing in older, denser, and more desirable US cities. That is to say, because of the restrictions that zoning, massing, preservation, and other rules have placed on the supplies of local housing stocks, demands cannot be met, and the prices of land in high-demand regions (New York City, San Francisco, Boston, etc.) exceed those that would naturally arise from the strengths of their local economies.

By itself, the consequence of higher regional housing costs isn’t a reason to gut local land use laws.  High housing costs have driven a lot of redevelopment, and have created a good amount of new wealth.  Furthermore, the benefits of land use regulation in the realms of aesthetics, logistics, historic preservation, and the environment can be priceless.  But the dilemma does suggest that policymakers should be cognizant that they are engaging in a balancing act.  On the issue of such mixed incentives, I liked this:

Reason: You argue that density has a lot of benefits for residents. But if greater density lowers housing prices, then don’t local homeowners have a pretty strong economic incentive to keep density low?

Avent: Yes—up to a point. Limits on development are somewhat like cartels or unions in this way: They allow insiders to capture rents, but only to the extent that they don’t put themselves out of a job in the process. In the short run, productive agglomerations are fixed, but in the long-run they’re mobile. If development rules in Silicon Valley drive enough people to other, more affordable agglomerations, then other innovators may eventually find it advantageous to follow, and the region may lose the unique factor that created the opportunity for rent-seeking in the first place. And in general, this dynamic is one reason why it’s a bad idea to subsidize homeownership. Renters are happy for … costs to stay low.

Avent advocates institutional reforms that would make allowances for greater overall densities by offsetting new development restrictions in certain areas with more lenient guidelines in others. I think a good aesthetics framework can also play a role in successful upzoning.  85 years after Euclid, and much longer since the introduction of local building codes, it should go without saying that, done wisely, land use regulation can be a public good.  But Avent is wrestling with what has become a more urgent topic: In the choking of the present economy, bad land policy has been, and continues to be, an unnamed culprit.  It’s a point that needs to be made.

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After-Market Towns in the Suburbs

The Times has a story in its Real Estate section about the self-conscious construction of a town center in the Long Island hamlet of Coram.  It sounds conceptually similar to a development that is now mostly completed in my own vicinity.  It’s a trend.  My main gripe about such after-market urbanism, if you will, is its tendency to produce results that are very aesthetically monolithic when compared to town centers that develop, organically, from the smaller contributions of diverse landowners working on the varied canvases of multiple land parcels.  Also, like ambitious redevelopment projects, the insularity of these after-market towns may or may not cause them to spawn similar development in the surrounding blocks; they may become, simply, islands amid a sea of sprawl.  But, at the end of the day, these projects are moving the building vocabulary of suburbia in a good direction: one that includes consciously planned streetscapes, smaller housing units, walkable blocks, and a vibrant commercial-residential mix.  To that, it’s hard to object.  And so, the conversation goes on.