Morning Roundup: Goodbye, Abe Edition
D.C. Police Seek Suspect in Series of Bank Robberies
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Photo of the Day: November 25, 2009
Ballou HS Rocks the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade
Former Editor-in-Chief Ryan Avent writes a weekly column about neighborhood and development issues.
It isn't particularly surprising, I suppose, that in Zachary Schrag's Metro history The Great Society Subway the role of central city savior is played by, you know, Metro. What is somewhat surprising, even to an unapologetic transit supporter like me, is how convincing his case is; faced with riot scarred neighborhoods and a downtown abused by suburban office and retail growth, the city was teetering on the brink before Metro helped usher in enduring prosperity. What shocks me most of all about Scrag's history, however, is how difficult a time Metro's builders had getting stations placed in some neighborhoods. The same community organizations you cheer when reading accounts of epic struggles against highway builders seem like total villains as they cost WMATA millions by forcing hearing after hearing on the placement of an airshaft.
Frustrating, yes, but it isn't hard to understand the base attraction of territoriality (Jackson Graham, who led most of Metro's early construction and faced dozens of angry residential neighborhood groups, found himself in retirement leading an effort to oppose the building of a road adjacent to his favorite country club). What's more difficult to identify and argue against in these situations, what fails to enter our minds often as we contemplate a new project, is the cost of doing nothing. We see money spent, and we imagine how else it might have been used, we see an airshaft and we think of the tree it displaced--that part of opportunity cost we get--but the burdens placed upon us by sitting on our hands are frequently ignored.
This week, the always enjoyable and informative Post columnist Marc Fisher wrote a piece arguing against the development of Poplar Point, a long neglected piece of relatively open land on the Anacostia, across from the Near Southeast baseball stadium development. His piece was eminently sensible from the point of view of the common man discussing land use over a beer. The residents of Ward 8 deserve a park just as much as those who live in upper Northwest. They need a place for their children to play, and after all natural land is scarce; there are, moreover, plenty of other places to develop east of the Anacostia river.
Hard to disagree. But what Fisher doesn’t acknowledge is that the potential tax revenues from development at Poplar Point, the potential jobs in retail establishments there, the gain to the city from having a bit more of its 66 paltry square miles developed are real and tangible things. On the surface, the cost of a park at Poplar Point is just the money needed to clean up trash and install some park benches. In real life, the cost is lost tax revenues and jobs, an additional barrier between economic activity in Near Southeast and Anacostia, and reduced space east of the river for commercial and residential properties. Open land in the Washington metropolitan area is scarce, but unused land near the center of the city is far scarcer. Maybe, after everything is added up, the park does outweigh the development. If so, then we should by all means build a park. But we do no one any good by pretending that the cost of that green space is simply the amount needed to clean up those few acres. The lost opportunities could easily run to the tens of millions of dollars, or much, much more.
Picture taken by Cary Scott Photography.
Like $10 billion, perhaps. That, according to a study commissioned by Mayor Williams, is the potential revenue available to the District over the course of two decades should the height limit in the city be increased by a mere 30 feet. That number is impressive, but it’s a lower limit on the gains such a change might mean for D.C. Greater heights should lead to additional space and lower rents, which would allow a larger and more diverse array of businesses to locate in the city. It would mean more residents, which could then support more businesses and employment opportunities. It would mean greater density, which would result in an increase in walking and transit use relative to automobiles. Those are gains which aren’t necessarily easy to quantify, but they are real.
And yet it’s easy to ignore them, because failing to raise the height ceiling is, on its face, costless, and it would no doubt entail protest from many who value things like the views accorded to citizens by low building heights. Those views do have great value, but placing them in one column and a null sign in the other and declaring the matter settled is absolutely wrong. It is important to ask ourselves what we’re willing to pay for our vistas. They are not free.
It’s something of an historical coincidence that $10 billion also happens to be the cost in nominal dollars of the construction of our Metro system, according to Zach Schrag's history. An impressive amount of money, to be sure, but in considering the alternative—a world where Metro had not been built--it certainly seems worth every penny. In imagining that world, where the central city either rots from poor accessibility or shrinks in potential due to a shift to lower densities and land loss to freeways and parking lots, one almost wishes that the planners had gone whole hog and spent $20 billion. With greater redundancy, capacity, and coverage of the area, the gains from the system might be larger still.
But even with the benefits of hindsight, we fail to consider the expense of doing nothing. Planned Metro to Tyson’s creaks under public opposition to its expense and engineering challenges, and practically no one even mentions expanding Metro in the core of the city, where a new line and river crossing would improve the utility of the whole system. It’s just too difficult to get past the idea of the billions that would be necessary to achieve such a thing. And maybe, in the final analysis, a new line wouldn’t be the best option. Maybe a light rail or streetcar network would be better. But the right calculus isn’t $4 billion on one hand and revenue from ads and fares on the other. Not embarking on such a big infrastructure project is expensive, too. It robs neighborhoods of value, it steals time from commuters, and it tamps down the economic potential of every area served by Metro. Doing nothing is never cheap.
There is growth pressure all around the Washington area, and the future will bring many choices like those above. There will be other green spaces to develop or not, other building projects whose densities will be subject to public scrutiny, and other chances to boost accessibility in our great city. The answer in every case might not be more building. But we will fail at every single decision if we don’t look at our problems correctly. Doing nothing is easy, but it isn't free.
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Ryan,
This is a great piece! There are times that I disagree with your prescription to a problem but it is a disagreement over the final choice and not this basic calculus. Dollars and cents are not all that should be considered in public policy equations. Businesses have switched over to things like the Balanced Scorecard that includes elements such as customer satisfaction and long-term potential. Surely, public policy in general and city development in specific need a similar equation.
One specific to start a squabble with - the height limit seems to be something that would have lots of public backlash for many reasons. Two big ones would be the supposed myth that it is to see the Capitol from everywhere (of course buildings and trees block the view from most places in the northwest now) and that people like not living and working in a city with shorter buildings and lots of natural light. Perhaps a way for the city to get over this and start the conversation would be to allow the height restriction to be waived (or increased) would be in very specific areas. Perhaps it would be a great way to redevelop Popular Point or the Anacostia area - not to mention the visual effect of having the governmental core bookended by Arlington and Anacostia's skylines. Long term this could be a way to add additional real estate (with taller buildings) throughout the city without changing the center core.
Either way, the point of your article is well taken. There is more to every decision then just dollars and cents. We just need a way to better quantify them so that they can be equally weighed.
Haven't Poplar Point redevelopment plans called for keeping something like 20 acres as open park? That's more than many areas get.
I don't know if that's the case, but I wouldn't be surprised. I'd also point out that there is quite a bit of other parkland east of the Anacostia.
Ryan:
Sports stadium. We are talking about a sports stadium here. Instead of asking for an outright cash bribe to build it (as with the Nationals Stadium) the team owner wants to be paid off in real estate. This is still District funding for a millionare team owner's stadium, and two decades of impartial studies show that this is always a bad deal for the public.
BTW, the biggest trash pile at Polar Point was left by the Architect of the Capitol, who should be forced to pay for clean-up.
Marc thinks that nothing but the stadium should go on Poplar Point. How that land should be allocated to developers is a separate issue from whether or not that land should be developed.
Mike -
I think we're talking about something a little more than a stadium at Poplar Point. The plans I've seen - and that have been discussed at public meetings - call for the United stadium, sure, but also soccer fields for leagues/tournaments/camps, mixed income residential space, a hotel, and retail space. Not to mention the waterfront park and amphitheater.
As to the stadium itself, of course, nothing has really been settled - there's no need to give the land away, even if it's merely keeping title and giving the team a sweetheart deal of a long-term lease for the land.
To go with Ryan's theme - the cost of not going forward with that could very well be more than the lost green space and the land under the stadium footprint.
"But what Fisher doesn’t acknowledge is that the potential tax revenues from development at Poplar Point, the potential jobs in retail establishments there, the gain to the city from having a bit more of its 66 paltry square miles developed are real and tangible things"
I agreed with Marc Fisher's post. He's been on a roll, lately. Ryan: Not many of those jobs, and fewer still of the high paying ones, would go to DC residents. If you look around, you'll see that our problem is not a dearth of jobs, but an inability to capture revenue from those we have.
So why give up our precious greenspace, when the lion's share of the benefit from doing so would be taxed in other jurisdictions? We shouldn't. It's a poor return on investment, and that ROI is where we should focus our energy first.
My comment was focused on jobs, but obviously the greater ROI matter isn't limited to that.
Ryan, another Sunday, another veiled argument for highrises on the Old Soldier's Home property.
You can't hear it, Reid, but I'm cackling diabolically.
Planned Metro to Tyson’s creaks under public opposition to its expense and engineering challenges, and practically no one even mentions expanding Metro in the core of the city, where a new line and river crossing would improve the utility of the whole system.
I think no one is talking about expanding Metro in the core of the city because of the massive disruptions this would cause. Some of us still remember the Dead Zone that U Street was during construction of that stop during the '70s and '80s. Ben's was just about the ONLY thing open on that stretch. Some of that was because of the '68 riots, but a lot of it was because of the massive digging involved. Proposing new downtown Metro lines is not only expensive, but would run into a LOT of NIMBYism from both the half-mil condo crowd who don't want to wake up to jackhammers AND the business community. Many of the latter know that Metro construction means economic death to them.
The fundamental problem with Metro rail is that by the time a new line is constructed to meet demand, demand has evolved elsewhere. The system was designed to address 1960s suburb-to-core commuting. Today, the demand is for suburb-to-suburb; the Purple Line is about 15 years too late. Who knows what it will be in another 20 years? Digging billion dollar holes will never be as flexible as expanding Metro bus capacity or adding/diverting new bus lines.
Ryan -
Great article. Well written and well thought-out.
A-T:
As I understand it, the developer not only wants a city-funded sports stadium, he has the balls to ask for land for other development projects too, which will provide no more than a few minimum-wage dead-end jobs and a token low-rent apartment or two for local folks. Don't take advice on this from the salesmen -- disinterested academics have reviewed enough deals like this -- and even reviewed the reviews of deals like this -- to show this is bad economics and worse public policy.
There used to be league soccer fields at RFK, so that's nothing new, but it could be that the last sports development genius paved those fields over for the DC Gran Prix. Wasn't that a brilliant deal.
Monkey, you're right that a cut and cover campaign through downtown would be costly. Without engineering technology that makes another tunnelling option feasible (and I don't know if there is or isn't any), it could be that another underground heavy rail line is too costly.
But I don't think it's right at all to say that demand has shifted away from a distribution that works for Metro. Certainly it's grown in other places, too, but WMATA still serves hundreds of thousands of hub and spoke commuters. The needs are beyond what new bus capacity can address, even if you assume that buses will have dedicated lanes and no interference from other automobile traffic, which isn't the case.
New demand is only going to grow, for current services and for potential ones. Buses are a key part of the whole transit picture, but without rapid transit expansions, they'll become overwhelmed, too.
This raises another example of lost opportunity. the National Harbor project in PG county should have been in DC, right across the river in that track, making it visible and easily accessible from the other side of the city. This would keep development near the core of the metro area, and be a huge financial tax base for the city, not to mention a jobs center. Instead, it's down in the middle of nowhere. A water taxi would have made sense to cross from the SW waterfront to the SE Harbor, but I don't see that much demand just to get back and forth over to Alexandria.
Ryan, I appreciate your point that "lost opportunity costs" need to be considered, but I think you have gotten it wrong by minimizing or simply ignoring certain actual costs associated with the Poplar Point soccer stadium proposal. First, the District under current proposals and the land transfer statute is required to expend some substantial money. Consider also that the District and its taxpayers pay in other forms, such as increased stress on an already highly-stressed and polluted Anacostia River - which District residents already must pay billions (yes billions) of dollars to clean up over the next few decades.
Just as importantly, you discount very highly the value of undeveloped or gently-developed parkland to a community. Groups like Earth Conservation Corps, a resident of the neighborhood directly across the river from Poplar Point, have helped many young mostly minority kids have life-changing experience with nature that they otherwise would not have because of the sad absence of such areas from their neighborhoods, a situation that kids living along Rock Creek don't contend with.