October 12, 2006
Growing a Better City
In the absence of government action, the problem isn't likely to get better in the future. The report notes that suburban populations will continue to increase, and it's not hard to understand why. As new residents move to the suburbs, their very presence increases congestion and commuting costs, which also act to increase the premium on living closer to the city center. Newer residents then have to move even farther out to find affordable housing, but they, too, suffer steadily increasing commuting costs as others join them in their quest for cheaper living situations. What you end up with is a lovely blob of countryside-covering sprawl.
These findings highlight the need for better metropolitan planning and improved transportation systems, but in the popular mind, at least, the connections between planning, congestion, and expense don't appear to be clear. Consider another story from today's Post, on the United States' impending breach of the 300-million person threshold. In it, the Post speaks to Dowell Myers, an urban planning professor from the University of Southern California:
"I don't think people view population growth as a plus anymore," he said, noting that Angelenos are punished by it "every single day" when they go out in freeway traffic.Of course, Los Angeles isn't home to some 17 million people because America is filling up. There are plenty of places in California, or New York, or Virginia--to say nothing of the Plains or Mountain West--where a person can look out 10 or 20 miles in every direction and not see any evidence of man. Los Angeles is full of people because it's a city, a vibrant hub of economic activity, and its citizens are punished on the freeways because of poor land use policies and a draconian approach to moving people around.
Which is why it's so important to invest in better transit systems in the Washington area. The metropolitan region desperately needs expansion in the backbones of its transportation system--Metro and the regional rail programs--as well as growth in the smaller feeder systems like streetcars and local buses. By increasing capacity and extending coverage, the area can help offset high central city housing costs. It can increase the overall capacity of the city, which boosts the earning potential of all those that live here. And it can help improve the living standards of low income workers and families that depend on access to the metropolitan market for their livelihoods, but cannot afford to settle close in.
The city should consider improving its housing policies, as well. A recent paper by economists Edward Gleaser, Joseph Gyourko, and Raven Saks estimated the "shadow tax" resulting from land use regulation in Washington at about 21%. That suggests that efforts to fight denser development in the metropolitan area have reduced supply to the extent that home prices are about a quarter higher than they ought to be. This shouldn't be taken to suggest that we ought to fill up the Mall with high-rise apartment buildings--certainly not--but it should help us recognize that when neighborhoods fight density or new growth to protect their own backyards, there is a real cost to every resident of the city.
And that's the key. Every new person to move into a city confers upon that city some costs and some benefits. With good planning, the city can ensure that the latter easily outweigh the former, but it requires dealing with issues with a more sophisticated tool than a blunt, anti-tax hammer. Whether regional leaders have anything else in their intellectual cupboard to work with will be the question that ultimately decides what kind of place Washington becomes.
Picture taken by AlbinoFlea.
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Um... if you look at all the other subways/metro transit associations out there, there's something they've got (except for maybe BART), that the Metro doesn't. Lots and lots of advertising. If they need to raise money...
I'm not crazy about it. It looks like in belongs in Dubai or something. On the other hand I like it because a lot of people will flat-out hate it. Anything that p*sses off the traditionalists gets my nod. I'm just not crazy about the site and setting (i.e. the lovely barracks as a backdrop).
I was a little freaked out one night last week though. I live not far away, and I was driving towards 395. Saw one spire of the monument in the distance, and for awhile I thought it was a rocket or something. It was a slightly foggy, dreary night, and the flashing clearance light on the top gave the illusion that it was a launching rocket or something. It took me about 10 seconds to figure out the situation. From where I was, it looked like a missle was being launched from Georgetown.
Sorry I posted to the wrong thread. Not sure how that happened??
"Affordable housing" in DC is one of those things like "a bottle bill" or "the weather": everybody talks about it, but nobody ever does anything about it. Every election cycle, candidates for City Council talk inevitably talk about creating more affordable housing in DC. And every year, the Doug Jemals and Horning Brothers promise to set aside a piddling 15% of their new construction for low income residents. And come construction time, wouldn't you know, that 15% gets whittled down to 5% because "they can't make the numbers work." Or the council re-defines "low income" as anybody making less than $80k a year.
MD/NoVA offer the two extremes of transit planning. In the latter case, Virginia's answer to traffic congestion is the same as Los Angeles': build more roads. But on the Maryland side, Annapolis' answer is to build no new roads (I believe the inner county connector has been on the drawing boards since the McKinley administration). DC seems to combine the worst of both worlds: let Metro become dilapidated to the point where they shut off escalators, allow roads to disintegrate from lack of maintenance AND move to shut down key points of access like the Whitehurst. And while I'm looking forward to the H Street Streetcar project, I'm worried that occupancy will approach that of the downtown Circulator or the Adams Morgan/U Street connector; i.e., empty.
A lot of this is classic nimbyism, from the ICC to infill. Some of it is antequated zoning laws that were meant to address 19th century Dickensian urban industrialism. But I'd say most of it is just politics as usual: DC bashes the 'burbs for stealing revenue, the 'burbs bash DC for bureaucratic incompetence and that old chestnut, "you elected Marion Barry." The sooner the pols in both regions grow some balls and/or ovaries, they sooner we'll get regional planning that actually makes sense. But I'm not holding my breath.
The conception of affordable housing implied in the WaPo article (three bedrooms, big house, big yard) is not something that I think we need to build public policy around. The American Dream as sold to us by Ford is unsustainable on many levels, increased Metro access or no.
Why wouldn't we want to fill up the Mall with high-rise apartment buildings? Kill two problems with one stone!
Considering the fact that Arlington and Fairfax counties are home to some of the biggest moneymakers in Virginia, it's a real wonder that Richmond has no desire to provide more funding for metro. It's rather comical that they're so "anti-public."
Perhaps its time to examine a new way of organization/funding for metro. Clearly the current system of triangulation (no pun intended) is really not working.I'm tired of having to hike up huge escalators for weeks at a time.
"19th century Dickensian urban industrialism"
What the hell does that mean? Especially wordy buildings for waifish orphans of mysterious parentage wielding loom bobbins? What does a revulsion over the building of the Cairo Apartments have to do with industrialism? Or Dickens for that matter.
I'm not a member of NBER, so I can't read that report, but I do note that it is written about NYC. It seems that it's arguing that the reason supply doesn't meet demand is that supply is artificially depressed by zoning. But I ask you, if we want some form of zoning at some level, it seems that whether it's DC's limited zoning or NYC's rather lax zoning, the end point is the same. Eventually demand will outpace supply and costs will rise.
While I think that we should encourage improved transit and targeting increases in zoning, I don't think that we should expect these tools to lower housing costs (improved transit probably raises housing costs more than it lowers them). The dirty secret is that there is plenty of affordable housing in DC, it's just in crappy neighborhoods that most people won't live in. That's why it's affordable. I think improving crime enforcement in dodgy neighborhoods is a much more effective way to "increase" affordable housing. Certainy some of those neighborhoods would gentrify, but if the crime fighting effort is wide spread enough, we could raise the "acceptability" of some housing without significantly raising the cost.
The circulator gets a lot of shit around here, and I think it's simply ignorance. A new transit option is rarely successful immediately. That is just an unrealistic expectation. Yes, the H St. streetcars will initially be empty. That's just how it works. Look at any new transit development in the past 10 years and you'll see the same pattern.
From a WashTimes article last week: There were 214,000 riders this August, compared with 92,262 in August 2005. Surpassing conservative expectations of 1,000 riders daily, the buses now carry about 7,000 passengers [a day].
I agree with Politburo, I don't know why there is so much hate for the Circulator; it took me a while to try it out, but once I did I loved it. $1 to get from Union Station to Georgetown? You can't beat that, on the rare occasion I grace Georgetown with my presence I take the Circulator. Every other option sucks, it is the only way to go IMHO.
Density is a part of the argument, and DC's height limit will always restrict that denisty below a certain point. We don't have 100 story apartment buildings, and probably won't in my lifetime. I'm not against the height limit, I just know that it has an impact on how DC and the region, grows.
The cornerstone of affordable housing, which by the way isn't code for Section 8 but rather something people who don't make 6 figures can afford, is letting people live in good neighborhoods. If the poor are always shuttled away into slums, why be surprised when they remain poor?
Reid - When you say you can't read it, what do you mean? I hit PDF and it opens like Barbara Walters jaw.
The REAL dirty secret is that the DC Government owns the majority of the vacant and abandoned properties in DC. Most of the rest is owned by the churches who have neither the capital nor the inclination to develop said properties. Actually putting those properties on the market, instead of leaving them fallow and perpetuating the ghettoization of downtown, would go a long way towards putting more supply on the market.
As for the Dickens crack, what I meant was that current DC zoning laws are pretty archaic and geared towards segregating residential from industrial. The original justification was that people didn't want to live next to a noisy factory, so you can't build one in a residential neighborhood. But now, many people actually want close proximity to commerce and their place of work. Mixed-use developments like Gallery Place are a good start, but don't go far enough to integrate business and residential. Workers should have the option of buying a condo in the same building their company is located if they so choose. The tax and building codes should encourage and reflect this.
"The original justification was that people didn't want to live next to a noisy factory, so you can't build one in a residential neighborhood. But now, many people actually want close proximity to commerce and their place of work. Mixed-use developments like Gallery Place are a good start"
As for the height restriction, that had nothing to do with industrialization. It had to do with revulsion of New York-style skyscrapers.
And there's a difference between industry and commerce. During that "Dickensian" time (by the way Dickens died in 1870, when DC was still very undeveloped and thirty years before the Cairo) there was more "mixed use" than you could shake a stick at. It wasn't the Victorian age that killed mixed use development, it was the modern one.
Actually DC has literally miles of affordable housing. It's just that it's not safe and not in trendy neighborhoods. We don't have an affordable housing problem - we have a safety problem. I can open the WP any day and see 2 BR apts for $1000. That, my friends, is affordable in a city center. The problem is, they are in unsafe neighborhoods because no matter how we slice it the majority of DC is still pretty much unsafe.
I'd be all for additional programs for workforce housing. That'd be terrific. But if we never built another public housing unit in DC I'd be quite happy. Affordable housing in DC has for decades all too often (but not always) meant free shit for people that won't work. It has ruined neighborhoods, caused massive crime, given us decades of kids churned out by moms that couldn't care less, and has, ironically, made those that are actually responsible citizens but are temporarily down on their luck and/or are actually unable to work have to live in hellholes.
Agreed with Reid and Hillman on the nature of affordable housing in DC. Barry might be re-elected if he ran on an affordable housing platform.
ME: DC Zoning is archaic, but it's not that archaic. We didn't even have zoning 'till the 50's. SP zoning is intended to function as a commercial/residential bridge, though it doesn't work that well in practice, mostly due to PUDs which historically have gamed the system toward higher density/more intensive use.
This is and stereotypical and somewhat antiquated view of public housing. Subsidized housing is a more apt description. For example, much of the SW residential development consists mixed-use development and subsidized housing for the elderly/persons with disability. Mixed-use development is fast become the norm for largescale residential developtment in DC -- market rate housing incorporating a fixed percentage of "affordable" housing units for qualified applicants (ie working poor).
Not exactly the welfare mother stereotype. It's an easy win for politicians who can claim to address affordable housing, and developers who can expedite zoning and building permit processes.