Jedediah Drolet, a fellow Blousteiner, has spent a good deal of time at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, one of the most significant U.S. sites of the Ancient Pueblo Peoples. He is also the author of Gambler’s House, a blog which examines the land use, archaeology, and cultural history of Chaco Canyon and surrounding parts of the American Southwest. Jed’s combination of personal experience and currency with ongoing scholarly research gives his blog a unique perspective. It’s well worth a read.
New Open Yale Course: Environmental Politics and Law
A new course, recorded last spring, is now posted: John Wargo’s Environmental Politics and Law. I watched one lecture about LEED certification and some of its drawbacks (#21) and another that looks back over four decades of public lands management in New York’s Adirondack Park (#18). Both were good.
Other free courses are listed here. Highly recommended: Diana Kleiner’s lectures about Roman architecture.
Urban Design and Land Use Patterns in Dallas
Source: City of Dallas, TX.
A grad school friend, Justin Tirsun, is working on a compelling and beautifully detailed urban design and land use analysis for the City of Dallas, Texas. The project focuses on documenting the elements that distinguish the city’s rich variety of neighborhoods. Fittingly, it appears to be co-sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.
Check it out.
World Trade Center Update
The NYT has a progress report out today on the World Trade Center.
With the naked eye, you can make out the fuzz of construction lights at the World Trade Center.
I walked through the site about a month ago, and was impressed by 1 WTC. I think the real mark of progress will come when the new tower can be readily seen rising up above the surrounding buildings from vantage points in New Jersey and Brooklyn. That will be the moment when lower Manhattan once again begins to have a distinctive spire in its otherwise boxy and consistent skyline. It should be soon: You can make out the fuzz of construction lights on the scaffolding now, at twilight, from Eagle Rock Reservation in West Orange Township, New Jersey. (A distance of 13.4 miles.)
2012 Planetizen Rankings
So Planetizen, the US-News-of-planning-schools, has published its 2012 rankings of 105 graduate programs in the US and Canada. Has anyone (ever) bought the full report? I’m kind of interested in what criteria they examine, and how these are weighed. Here’s how they stacked up their list of top grad schools for 2012:
Shameless Plug
Drawing of Theater Square, Newark.
I have a couple of blurbs in the current issue of Transit-Friendly Development, a Rutgers-related newsletter where I’ve made some contributions. One is a review of a 2010 AARP study that considers the dangers to affordable housing for seniors near transit; another, somewhat longer piece looks at the transit infrastructure and inherent T.O.D. potential in Newark.
Here’s a file of the full-length Newark article, unedited for TFD: TOD in Newark.
Art Imitates Land Use
Early Vesting v. Late Vesting
A perennial controversy in land use law is the distinction between early-vesting and late-vesting policies for land development rights. The issue: whether the right to build on a parcel, in accordance with the current zoning specs, vests at the time of the initial application for a building permit (early vesting), or only at the time when the permit is issued (late vesting), or even later. The former approach gives property owners and developers a predictable set of guidelines that, if followed, will allow the project to go forward; the latter approach allows local governments to change the rules of the game once a development proposal is made that politicians or neighbors do not like.
Public comment is not always favorable. Source: AP
It strikes me that this distinction presents such a clear-cut issue of basic fairness that early-vesting ought to be the universal rule. After all, a municipality is free to revise its zoning ordinances at any time it likes. So, why should a builder be subjected to a sudden rezoning that occurs only after (and presumably, in response to) his permit application? And yet, in the majority of American states, the rule favors late vesting. Such a policy allows local government to sit on its right to act, and to avoid any land use controversy until an unpopular proposal is actually made; and it shifts the costs and risks of political uncertainty to property owners and developers, who can never be sure that their investment will be viable until a period of political purgatory has been allowed to run.
Of course, before the million-dollar question is ever answered, developers are required to invest in optioning the property; hiring engineers, architects, environmental consultants, and land use planners; and hiring lawyers to advocate for the proposal’s approval. Now, I’m all for professional services being kept in high demand. But I think it’s fair to say that those services should be retained pursuant to projects that are predictably going forward, and not for work that’s going to end up in the proverbial circular file. An early-vesting rule would provide an incentive for local governments to maintain zoning policies that are up to date, and which provide honest reflections of local priorities. It would also be favorable to competition, by allowing smaller, less well-connected investors to manage the risk of making development proposals.
Limited Equity: Why It Matters
Penn South, NYC.
The Times has a two-page piece on the financial challenges facing Penn South, the last of the big limited-equity (LE) co-ops remaining in Manhattan. The LE developments– championed by local labor unions and left-wing organizers– filled a crucial gap in the New York City land economy, providing decent housing at a price-point between the public housing projects for the poor and the market-rate units whose price tags predictably soared with every boom-time economy. The LE co-ops sold their units to middle-income buyers at reliably low prices, with two major caveats: (1) Buyers were required to meet the co-op’s household income guidelines (which tended toward union wages), and (2) co-operators who moved out were only permitted to sell their stake back to the co-op board for a comparable price to what they had paid; there were no opportunities for boom-time windfalls.
In the mid-20th century, the LE co-op model was big in NYC. Men like Abraham Kazan, Sidney Hillman, and Herman Jessor championed the cause and built prolifically throughout the city. In Manhattan, the LE model included Penn South, in Hell’s Kitchen, with nearly 3,000 units; a couple of large developments known together as Co-op Village, on Grand Street; and the smaller, adjacent Amalgamated Co-op. In the boroughs, even larger LE co-ops would come to dominate the skylines of far-flung neighborhoods like Coney Island, Jamaica, and Baychester by the early 1970s. The LE’s created large, stable, affordable communities of middle-income stakeholders in a city whose vacillating real estate landscape was anything but friendly toward middle-income workers. In context, the LE co-ops were the vanguard of the NYC labor movement that took off in the heady years after the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, and lasted until the NYC financial crisis and the US-left meltdown of the 1970s.
Twin Pines, symbol of co-operative principles, can be found at many NYC LE complexes.
Today, with Manhattan housing having become a costlier proposition than ever, an experiment like Penn South seems almost preposterous. And yet, it has survived for more than 40 years, representing a viable private-sector alternative to the disastrous public housing projects of the same period. Its units– when they become available– remain priced at the unbelievable value of just $12k per room. Much credit is due the Penn South co-operators, who (mostly in their 70s, according to the NYT article) are still refusing to convert their priceless Chelsea complex into a market-rate windfall.
Penn South and the other remaining LE co-ops of Greater New York are the legal remnants of a fading past, when middle-income Americans were able to leverage their collective clout into a meaningful economic stake. They stand as massive, brick-and-mortar testaments to what once was possible, even in the mad real estate marketplace of 20th century New York; and to the occasionally realized ideal of the inclusive American city. Their dwindling numbers stand as a counterpoint; a sad illustration of the economic trajectory of the US middle classes over the last two generations.
SF Moves Toward Zoning Amendment for Urban Farms
The Chronicle has the story.