Urban Issues

Friends of the Urban Forest

John Sanphillippo — Fri, 25 Nov 2022 20:28:58 -0500

Cities are better when there’s a generous tree canopy. Vegetation keeps the city cooler in summer, trees help clean the air, absorb noise, and beautify the landscape. Properties on tree lined streets are often more desirable and statistically more valuable than those in barren neighborhoods. But trees that grow in the city are different from those that grow in nature. They need to be selected for specific characteristics and require ongoing care from people.

Here in San Francisco city agencies realized that official crews were good at some aspects of cultivating tree cover, but bad at others. Cutting holes in the sidewalk, planting new trees, and trimming mature trees were all pretty straightforward for government bureaucracies. But providing ongoing care for young trees and keeping them alive long enough to mature was a real challenge.

San Francisco has a Mediterranean climate. In a good year we get three or four months of rain in winter followed by eight or nine dry months. In a drought we might not get any rain at all for four or five years in a row. So young trees need to be hand watered for a while until they set deep enough roots to find their own ground water. They must also be protected from vandals and occasionally replaced after random mishaps.

That’s why Friends of the Urban Forest was created in 1981. FUF is a non-profit organization that works with private property owners and city agencies to install and maintain street trees and sidewalk gardens. The city does what it’s good at while residents tend specific trees and gardens where they live and work. I first planted trees with FUF in the 1990s when I was living in a rental space. The owner of the property needed to sign off on the project, but I did the work. I’ve continue to be engaged with the organization on and off ever since and some of the trees I planted are now decades old.

I’m often surprised by how much a single plant can transform an otherwise banal little sliver between buildings. FUF helps resolve various conflicting uses of public and semi-public space. The sidewalks must be free of obstructions that would impede pedestrians, wheelchairs, baby carriages, driveways, emergency access, and underground utilities. The correct kinds of trees and plants must be selected so as to avoid aggressive roots breaking up the concrete or foundations. The esthetic preferences of each property owner must be balanced with pragmatic considerations.

The ancient technique of espaliering trees up against a flat wall is used to great effect in this instance - complete with an abundance of figs. A determined gardener will always find a way to cultivate something even where others see no potential. It’s this impulse on the personal level that needs to be bridged with municipal scale processes, attendant regulations and infrastructure.

FUF also serves as a de facto force for community organizing. There’s an economy of scale associated with cutting multiple holes into nearby sidewalks and planting dozens of trees in the same general location all at the same time. FUF requires neighbors to work together in a coordinated fashion in order to enjoy the benefits of these municipal investments. In turn, neighbors are more likely to encourage each other to tend to their new trees and gardens and build stronger social bonds.

Read the rest of this piece at Granola Shotgun.

Johnny Sanphillippo is an amateur architecture buff with a passionate interest in where and how we all live and occupy the landscape, from small rural towns to skyscrapers and everything in between. He travels often, conducts interviews with people of interest, and gathers photos and video of places worth talking about (which he often shares on Strong Towns). Johnny writes for Strong Towns, and his blog, Granola Shotgun.

Photos: by the author.

Federal data shows Twin Cities light rail is the most dangerous in America

Peter Nelson — Thu, 24 Nov 2022 20:28:58 -0500

According to federal data, people who decide to step on light rail in the Twin Cities are at more risk for being injured by an assailant than any other light rail system in America. This dramatically higher rate of crime and injury on Metro Transit light rail reveals years of mismanagement. This mismanagement only adds to Metro Transit’s embarrassing delays and cost overruns with the Southwest Light Rail Transit project. With this record of failure, Minnesota lawmakers need to seriously reexamine the future of the Met Council that runs Metro Transit and the ongoing expansion of light rail.

Background

Federal law requires the Federal Transit Administration to maintain a National Transit Database to support planning efforts, make multi-year comparisons and perform trend analyses. Part of this data collection tracks personal security events, which includes assault, homicide, robbery, larceny/theft, motor vehicle theft, rape, and suicide. Because the FTA maintains a uniform method of collecting and reviewing the data, it represents the best source for comparing light rail systems.

Personal security events must meet a certain reporting threshold of injury to be counted. This includes a fatality, a serious injury, or an injury requiring transport from the scene for medical attention. Serious injuries are those that require hospitalization; result in fractures; cause severe hemorrhages or nerve, muscle, or tendon damage; involve an internal organ; or involve second- or third-degree burns. These thresholds effectively limit the data to only major events where victims were injured during a crime. Thus, the number is much smaller than the total amount of crime reported by law enforcement agencies.

Importantly, this focus creates a more apples to apples comparison to determine where crime leads to the most severe injuries—the sort of crime people fear most and want to avoid. The data presented here excludes suicides to further narrow the focus on injuries people suffer when they are victimized by another person committing a crime.

The Data

Overall, this data shows Metro Transit has consistently operated one of the most dangerous light rail systems in the country since 2014. The following figure shows the rate of people injured by an assailant on Metro Transit light rail was substantially higher than the national average from 2014 to 2018. However, this rate soared dramatically higher than any other light rail system in the country in 2019. That year, the rate of people injured per billion passenger miles leapt to 1,164. That represents a 254 percent increase from the previous year. This rocketed the rate to 6.7 times higher than the national average.

Looking at the number and proportion of personal security events occurring on Metro Transit light rail is maybe more shocking. The number of personal security events jumped from 33 in 2018 to 117 in 2019. That’s twice as many as the next closest light rail system. As the next figure shows, that’s also 40 percent of all personal security events that occurred across America’s 22 light rail systems. Putting that in context, Metro Transit accounted for 40 percent of personal security events on light rail while carrying only 4 percent of passenger miles.

Read the rest of this piece at American Experiment.

Peter Nelson is a Senior Policy Fellow at Center of the American Experiment.

After Intersectionalism

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 20:28:58 -0500

The divisive racial ideology that dominated American politics for the past decade is dying. Led by minority activists and white progressives, “woke” ideology promoted a Manichean struggle between a coalition of the BIPOC, an acronym for “Black, Indigenous, and people of color” (assumed to be natural allies) against what the BIPOC Project calls a hegemonic system of “white supremacy, patriarchy and capitalism.” But this vision of Black and white racial conflict, while still influential in universities and elite institutions, keeps getting rejected by American voters—as happened in political referendums on issues like policing and immigration, and most recently in the triumph of “normies” and centrists in the midterm elections.

Does this mean that Americans should expect a new era of kumbaya racial harmony? Not likely. Rather, the future may look more like the past, as America reverts to an older style of ethnic politics in which ideology takes a back seat to practical concerns and different groups compete over resources like jobs and the spoils of government spending.

A recent example: Last month, LA’s Latina City Council president, Nury Martinez, was caught on a leaked audio recording making racist comments about Black people, Jews, and Armenians. Martinez, who has since resigned, described a white council colleague’s adopted Black son as a “parece changuito” or “like a monkey.” The recording, which was anonymously leaked online shortly before an election, had captured a private conversation between Martinez and other powerful Latino Democrats in LA that took place in the headquarters of a powerful labor group, and centered on how to shore up their power.

In trying to fortify her own ethnic bloc, Martinez saw Black voters, as well as Armenians and Jews, as potential threats. She grouses about “judios” who “cut their deal with south LA”—the complaint being that LA’s Jewish officials have aligned themselves with Black politicians (an alliance that helped Tom Bradley become the city’s first Black mayor in the early 1970s) to the detriment of the Latino political bloc. Martinez had previously complained that her district, an area long populated by Jews but becoming increasingly Latino, was misrepresented by “the Katzes of the world, the Bermans of the world. I never saw them in the community or at the grocery store with us. I just saw them on TV.” Following the classic pattern of urban American ethnic political jostling, Martinez’s rant was largely about traditional issues of redistricting and the awarding of valuable money-generating assets to Latino, as opposed to African American or Anglo, districts.

This jostling reflects the shifting ethnic makeup of LA, where Latinos now constitute nearly half of the population while the share of Black Angelinos has dropped to less than 9%. That is part of a longer term trend: “Between the 1980 and 1990 censuses,” notes a New York Times article from 1995, “the Black population of Los Angeles County dropped to 11% from 13% of the population, while the Hispanic and Asian populations swelled.” The article pointed to the South Central area of LA as an exception that was still “predominantly Black,” but even that has changed. 80% African American in 1970, South Central LA is now two-thirds Latino. There are more taco stands than barbeque joints, the vibe more East LA than old South Central.

Rather than a united uprising of “people of color,” what happened in Los Angeles—and what will happen soon across the country—was a conflict caused by the complex and shifting landscape of ethnic politics in America.

The future may look more like the past, ideology taking a back seat to practical concerns.

Ethnic political conflict is nothing new in the United States. Coming from distinct backgrounds and enjoying different levels of success, ethnic groups have always competed for political influence. In the late 19th century, Boston’s James Michael Curley waged a successful campaign that allowed the Irish to supplant the city’s Anglo elite. In New York City, William R. Grace became New York’s first Irish Catholic mayor in 1880, beating mainstream Protestants opposed to both his ethnicity and faith. In melting pot meccas like New York and Chicago, Jews, Italians, and other minorities struggled for dominance, either through Tammany Hall or the Daley machine, both long dominated by Irish political bosses. Describing the New York City of his upbringing, Gen. Colin Powell recalled that it was not sharply divided along Black and white Lines, but rather was “a mélange of numerous often competing” ethnic communities.

Read the rest of this piece at Tablet.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and Executive Director for Urban Reform Institute. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Los Angeles Fire Department via Flickr CC 2.0 License. Nury Martinez and Los Angeles City Council members attend the opening of a Fire Station.

Shifting Downtown Density Threatens Architecturally Significant Anchor Neighborhoods

Douglas Newby — Sun, 20 Nov 2022 19:28:58 -0500

Downtown Dallas continues to creep away from the original Central Business District on Main Street and towards our residential anchor neighborhoods. This is not because the occupancy has outgrown the Central Business District. In fact, many buildings are empty or are being repurposed.

The real reason for this movement of the Central Business District away from the original heart of downtown Dallas lies in human preferences.

People like the vibrancy of big cities. But they are not particularly attracted to cold, canyonlike streets of tall buildings with few traces of humanity. People love the combination of nature alongside stores, restaurants and lower-density inner-city neighborhoods. There have been many more popular bars and restaurants in uptown residential neighborhoods than downtown Dallas.

The Dallas Central Business District is Drifting Away from the Dallas Core

We saw the core density of the Dallas Central Business District move away from Main Street to Ross Avenue, the Arts District, Klyde Warren Park, and then jump across Woodall Rogers Expressway to Uptown, now home to the most expensive office space in Dallas.

Developers Prefer to Build High Rises in Low-Density Inner city Residential Neighborhoods

Downtown high-rise density continues to expand towards the greenest neighborhoods and goes along Turtle Creek and the anchor Katy Trail neighborhoods of architecturally significant homes. Currently, those neighborhoods are zoned MF2 – multifamily, low rise buildings of three stories or less.

Oglesby Group Architects designed these modern condominiums at Armstrong and Travis. The townhouse and condominiums designed projects by Ogelsby Group in PD193 makes the Katy Trail area one of the favorite anchor neighborhoods in Dallas.

Rather than being densified, areas like The Katy Trail should be protected from high-rise zoning and development that will make the sun-filled and treelined Katy Trail a a visual alley for high-rises, in order to protect architecturally significant townhouses, condominiums, single-family attached, and single-family homes. This area has the largest collection of midcentury and late 20th century architecturally significant homes and is as important as Swiss Avenue, which has the largest collection of early 20th century architecturally significant homes in Dallas.

Swiss Avenue Homes were threatened by a proposed high-rise zoning change in the 1970s; now the Katy Trail area faces the same threat, 50 years later. Just as the historic and architecturally significant homes on Swiss Avenue were protected, so too should we ensure the protection of the historic and architecturally significant homes along the Katy Trail area.

The finest Dallas architects in the early 1900s designed the homes on Swiss Avenue Boulevard in Munger Place. These architects included Hal Thomson, who many consider the godfather of eclectic architecture in Dallas, and other great architects like Lang and Witchell, Bertram Hill, C.P. Sites, and many others.

Architecturally Significant Modern Home Neighborhoods Now Threatened by High Rises

Architects like Frank Welch and Bud Oglesby, who trained, influenced and mentored a whole generation of modern architects designing modern homes, invented the Dallas modern urban townhouse in the 1970s and created inspired low-density modern condominiums. For his client, Steve Levine, architect Lionel Morrison designed the first modern attached single-family residences in the Northern Heights neighborhood of Dallas. Architect Ron Wommack, who worked with both Frank Welch and Bud Oglesby Cliff Welch, Joe McCall, Oglesby-Greene, Truitt Roberts, and Gail Adams.

High Rise Development Defeats Avant-Garde Goal of More Affordable Housing

The avantgarde goal of Dallas is to provide more affordable housing. Yet, the push is to rezone areas of affordable homes, townhouses, attached single-family homes and condominiums for the most expensive type (per square foot) of construction – mid and high-rise residential buildings. It is also quite apparent that mixed use high-rise and mid-rise buildings also eliminate affordable housing.

Developers building these pricey high-rises do not provide affordable housing. Instead often the new 400 square foot studio apartment costs the same as the old 1,400 square foot apartment but clearly does not provide affordable space for a family. If the city is subsidizing developers or granting extra density and height allowances so developers to subsidize a few units for a few years, this is not providing long-term affordable housing for our Dallas neighborhoods or for the city of Dallas.

For 70 years, Dallas planners have pushed density for our low-density residential neighborhoods so Dallas can be more like the nation’s older cities. These older rust belt cities are hemorrhaging population, especially middle-class population. Still planners are promoting and subsidizing apartments and denser development. Why would a city with a shrinking population, which includes Dallas, want to add residential density?

Architects for 100 of Years Promote Trendy Ideas for New Density

Every generation of architects tends to come up with a trendy argument for why apartments need to replace single-family homes, and why high density needs to replace low density residential homes. Architect Le Corbusier wanted to replace streets with his Moscow style modern block housing. Social reformers and many architects pushed for uniform government housing to replace walk-up tenement housing or dilapidated housing in Dallas as well as other cities.

One architectural fad was dense government apartment housing that opened to backyard courtyards, which created private zones for criminal activity not visible from the street. One of the most popular arguments for apartment density is that it will help fixed-rail mass transit. Fixed-rail mass transit is now as functionally obsolete as fixed-line telephone booths. Often architects will argue that the denser the residential development, the less the carbon footprint and the greener the development is. Tearing down existing housing that allows breezes, trees, nature and sunlight to build new denser developments, does not create a friendly carbon footprint.

Dallas is not Farmland to Develop from Scratch

It’s important to remember that Dallas is not farmland being developed from scratch. When there is a blank slate of land for a new community, it makes sense to have a mix of residential densities. This is good for the long- and short-term health of the community. Not every neighborhood can be or should be saved. However, if density is going to be added, it should be first added downtown or on the edge of downtown.

Low Density Multifamily Zoning Allows Sunlight and Protects Nature in Neighborhoods Along Urban Trail

Our MF2 architecturally significant neighborhoods protect the sunlight and nature of the Katy Trail. They also provide the protective scale and architectural significance that creates value for the adjacent historic and conservation districts, every inner city neighborhood linked by the Katy Trail and the rest of the bike and running trail system in Dallas and Highland Park, Dallas. If the Katy Trail becomes in essence a canyon between tall high-rises that block the sunlight and kill the trees, it will diminish our entire bike and running trail system. The biking and running trails that run through our neighborhoods connecting White Rock Lake and the Trinity Forest are only as enticing as their weakest link. The Katy Trail should be one of the prettiest stretches, not a section of a trail to be avoided.

Dallas Architectural Legacy is 20th and 21st Century Homes

Every city has an architectural legacy. Some cities are bland and generic, some are vibrant and city specific. Dallas has a wonderful 20th century architectural legacy that was laid in the mid and late 20th century. To understand the evolution and character of Dallas, we need these historic and architecturally significant neighborhoods to survive. High-rise zoning in the Katy Trail area will kill them.

Dallas still has an abundance of opportunities for high-rise development in downtown Dallas, not to mention opportunities from the growth of at-home work and the reduced demand for brick and mortar retail. There are also some neighborhoods surrounding what will be the new Entertainment District of Fair Park after the current bond proposition passes. The southern and western side of the Trinity River and Trinity Groves is ripe for high-rise density to balance the economic viability of both sides of the river. High-rise density should not go in the architecturally significant lower density neighborhoods already contributing in a meaningful way to Dallas. Dallas needs to encourage development where development is a benefit, not allow developers to profit on the backs of homeowners in the neighborhoods they love and wish to protect.

Douglas Newby is a national award-wining real estate broker who writes about real estate, cities, architecture and Organic Urbansim. He gave the TEDx Talk Homes That Make Us Happy. You can read more about him and his work on his website Architecturally SignificantHomes: DougNewby.com and on his blog DouglasNewby.com.

Lead photo: Downtown highrises were built in the Dallas Central Business District over several decades before downtown density moved towards the anchor neighborhoods.

A Better Future

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 16 Nov 2022 20:28:58 -0500

In earlier times, even with a soaring population, Americans knew how to accommodate housing demand. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we built cities from scratch along the frontier. The existing major urban centers—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia—all expanded rapidly, both by density and expansion into land on the periphery.

After the Second World War, mass suburbia and its expansion in homeownership ushered in a period of sustained prosperity that lasted until the 1970s. After 1940, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. homeownership rates grew rapidly, from 44 percent to 63 percent over the next three decades.

But now, in many places, it is exceedingly difficult, even impossible, to build the kind of family-friendly housing long sought by most Americans. Instead we are being left with two negative trends: increasingly low housing affordability for many, and the forced march of a whole new generation into the kind of small, crowded spaces they generally eschew, particularly after they enter their thirties.

The Suburbs Are the Urban Cutting Edge

When academics and the media focus on urban innovation, they tend to look at cities. But the real action—and the best guides to the future—lie with the suburbs. Between 2010 and 2020 the suburbs and exurbs of the major metropolitan areas gained two million net domestic migrants, while the urban core counties lost 2.7 million. Americans have been heading to the suburbs for generations, growing from 13 percent of the metropolitan population in 1940 to 86 percent in 2017, a gradual increase of 2 percent annually.

Exurbs, the locale for most new innovative development, have grown in population at twice the national rate for over a decade. This is where we see the rise of new, privately designed and financed models for building better, more affordable, and even environmentally friendly communities. The technology for creating such communities extends back to the early visions of Frederick Law Olmsted and Britain’s Ebenezer Howard, who originated the idea of “garden cities,” essentially exurban communities where people could work, recreate, and live in the same environment.

These new cities consciously rejected the old suburban notion of serving the central city. Communities like Irvine, south of Los Angeles, function more as job and retail centers than adjuncts to an urban core. The 300,000 residents tend to work more at home, commute less, and have more access to open space than most metropolitan communities.

Irvine epitomizes a historical shift from the suburban “bedroom” model of the 1950s—in communities like Lakewood in the Los Angeles metro area and the Levittowns in Pennsylvania and on Long Island—that provided inexpensive housing for workers in nearby plants and downtowns. The new urban legacy owes much to visionaries like Irvine’s William Pereira, the Woodlands founder George Mitchell, and Columbia’s James Rouse. These communities, suggests Harvard’s Ann Forsyth, fulfilled most of today’s New Urbanists’ underlying aim, and they did so at a grand scale exhibiting “cutting-edge planning and design strategies.”

Read the rest of this piece at American Mind.

Photo: Ken Lund via Flickr CC 2.0 License.

Housing Affordability in California: Part 3 — A Way Forward

Wendell Cox — Tue, 15 Nov 2022 19:28:58 -0500

Urban containment has significant costs. In commenting on the association between London’s urban growth boundary,¹ and the higher costs of housing, The Economist said: “Suburbs rarely cease growing of their own accord. The only reliable way to stop them, it turns out, is to stop them forcefully. But the consequences of doing that are severe.”² These are evident in California:

Middle-Income Housing Affordability: Downs noted that even a 10 percent increase in house prices is "socially significant” because of the number of households it denies home ownership.³ As the Economic Report of the President shows, this is a price premium long since exceeded in California.⁴
High Poverty Rates: California is testimony to those consequences, with the highest cost of living adjusted poverty rate of any state (including better known centers of poverty, like Mississippi and West Virginia).⁵
Worsening Inequality: By definition, as housing affordability becomes more severe, inequality is increased, because fewer households can afford the higher prices. Some are forced to seek housing subsidies, which can require years on waiting lists, assuming that waiting lists are open. For example, all nine waiting lists are closed in the city of San Francisco.⁶ And, as noted above, nearly all of the cost of living difference between high cost metros and the national average is explained by higher housing costs.⁷ Moreover, higher cost housing has resulted in a massive intergenerational wealth transfer, as existing owners have reaped huge gains in house values, which has severely limited homeownership among younger households. Unaffordable housing is a principal driver of rising inequality.
Retarded Economic Growth: Research indicates that tighter land-use regulation has diminished national economic growth, while relaxation could produce “significant growth effects.”⁸ One estimate indicates that US labor productivity would be 12.4% higher if states rolled back their housing regulation levels halfway to the Texas level.⁹
Declining population growth and increasing domestic migration: For nearly all the 20th century, California was the national growth leader. In every census from 1930 to 2000, California added more residents than any other state. In 1900, California ranked 21st in population in 1900, and by 1970 had reached the top position, which it has occupied since that time. But much has changed since then. California lost 70,000 residents in 2019-20, and there has been a net outflow of residents to other states of 2.7 million since 2000¹⁰, as housing affordability has deteriorated.

Without restoring the competitive supply of land on the urban fringe, material improvement in housing affordability is likely impossible. Indeed the prospect is for further worsening, with pent-up demand driving prices even higher.

This article is adapted and updated from Chapter 2 (“California’s Housing Crisis”) by Wendell Cox in Saving California: Solutions to California’s Biggest Policy Problems, Stephen Greenhut, editor. The chapter is being published by newgeography.com with permission of the Pacific Research Institute, in three parts:
Part I: Housing Affordability in California: The Situation
Part II: Housing Affordability in California: Urban Land Markets
Part III: Housing Affordability in California: A Way Forward (this piece)

A Way Forward: The Housing Opportunity Area

Solving California’s housing crisis will require addressing the root of the problem — land values have risen to a point that prevents production for all but the most affluent middle-income households in the four coastal markets.

However, though housing is severely unaffordable in the interior markets, it is far better than on the coast. There may be an opportunity to stop further affordability retardation, by preserving a modicum of middle-income affordability, while giving businesses a relocation area sufficiently competitive relative with other states.

A Housing Opportunity Area

It is recommended that a “Housing Opportunity Area” (HOA) be legislated in the interior, to restore the competitive market for land, thereby preventing further deterioration in housing affordability.

Geographical Extent: The HOA would include the San Joaquin and Sacramento valley counties from Shasta to Kern, as well as San Bernardino, Riverside and Imperial and Antelope Valley in Los Angeles County.¹¹

Regulation in the HOA: Land-use regulation in the HOA would be liberalized.¹² The HOA would be exempt from urban containment, and other post-1970 regulations associated with undermining the competitive market for land. Like the CEQA streamlining authorized for subsidized low-income housing in Senate Bill 7,¹³ it is proposed that zoning and land use regulatory streamlining would apply to middle-income and low income greenfield projects. Authorization would be virtually automatic for developments of, say, at least 50 plus houses or apartments, that is to be served by infrastructure (public or private). Adjacent development would not be required, though reasonable detached housing maximum lot sizes would be allowed (consistent with California’s historic small lot sizes). This type of development would be particularly appropriate given the current shift to much greater remote working.

Effect: Prevention of further housing affordability deterioration would provide an otherwise fleeting opportunity for middle-income households to achieve the California Dream of home ownership, rather than leave California. Moreover, the stronger economic and housing affordability in the interior could unleash competitive pressures on the coastal markets that could influence better housing affordability.

The HOA would be transformational, but is the type of root cause solution that may be necessary to address California’s housing crisis.

Impact Fee Reform: The state needs to identify means to finance new development from general revenue sources, not new owners and apartment dwellers.

Conclusion

The major regulatory changes adopted in California but not in most other places have been widespread urban containment (growth control and CEQA) at the housing market level and, to a lesser extent, the excessively high municipal impact fees. The association between these strategies and deteriorated housing affordability is clear.

Appendix Boxes

Box 1
Urban Sprawl in California

Urban planning has been pre-occupied with curbing urban expansion, popularly called “urban sprawl,” and has embraced urban containment as a principal solution. Regrettably, urban containment is strongly associated with severely unaffordable housing and its consequences (below).

Paradoxically, California is the least sprawling of any state. California has the highest urban densities, at 4,304 residents per square mile in 2010. New York ranks second, at 4,161. Further, California’s density of new urban development was more than double that of any other state and more than 5.5 times the national average between 2000 and 2010.¹⁴ The three densest large urban areas in the United States are Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Jose, all denser, perhaps surprisingly, than New York.¹⁵

Box 2
Evaluation of Other Explanations

There are other views on the causes of California’s housing affordability crisis.

Shortage of Developable Land: In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the high house prices are often blamed on a shortage of land. However,, there is no shortage of agricultural land, which has typically been used for new urban development. In 2017, the total agricultural land in just the San Francisco and San Jose metropolitan areas alone was equal to 150% of the urbanized land.¹⁶

As a matter of interest, geographer John Fraser Hart of the University of Minnesota has noted that “The loss of cropland to suburban encroachment may be cause for intense local concern, but attempts to thwart development cannot be justified on grounds of a net national loss of good cropland.¹⁷

Moreover, agricultural land costs have increased 30% per acre since 1969,¹⁸ far less than the nine times increase in land values.¹⁹ The 2017 value of agricultural averaged $1,800 per quarter acre,²⁰ far less than the average quarter acre residential lot in metro San Francisco ($900,000) and San Jose metros ($1,200,000) — from 500 to more than 660 times agricultural values.²¹ The “land shortage” results from public policy, not topography.

Demand: Housing affordability deterioration is frequently blamed on increased demand, especially by international interests, major investors, and investment or “speculation.” Demand generally leads to higher prices only if there is not enough supply, which makes it more difficult to build houses affordable to middle-income households. Housing affordability can then worsen further, as demand continues to increase, without sufficient supply enhancement.

View and download endnotes (PDF opens in new tab or window)

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a founding senior fellow at the Urban Reform Institute, Houston, a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is co-author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Mayor Tom Bradley appointed him to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (1977-1985) and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich appointed him to the Amtrak Reform Council, to complete the unexpired term of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman (1999-2002). He is author of War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life and Toward More Prosperous Cities: A Framing Essay on Urban Areas, Transport, Planning and the Dimensions of Sustainability.

Photo: The Bakersfield Arch, by Nick Chapman; used under CC 2.0 License. Bakersfield, California: Metropolitan area in the California Central Valley, nearly 1,000,000 residents

“Straight Line Crazy” offers insights for post-pandemic real estate

Jerry Sullivan — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 19:28:58 -0500

This won’t start off about real estate but it will end there — like so much of life.

At the Shed in Hudson Yards, “Straight Line Crazy” is enjoying a sold-out run of months, if not longer. It is the story of Robert Moses, who outfoxed every politician in New York to create a proprietary stream of public money that financed his role as the city’s lynchpin builder from the 1920s into the 1960s.

The play, in my view, is a failure despite the star power of Ralph Fiennes, who plays Moses. It skips too much ground too lightly, leaves out fascinating aspects of Moses’ career, falls into a cartoonish caricature of New York Gov. Al Smith — who deserves better — and wraps up with a wholly unsatisfactory lecture that reflects the cloying nature of political discourse in America today.

All told, it is a sugar buzz of performances spinning around what ends up as empty calories of dramatic tinkering.

The sum total is frustrating because a number of well-crafted lines offer an astonishing reminder that Moses’ character contained bits and pieces that can be found in other larger-than-life achievers of good and bad who have followed.

“I despise incarceration,” Moses says at one point, making him a forerunner of everything from Black Lives Matter to the Democratic Socialists of America.

“It’s not clever to splash around and not move,” he sniffs — and doesn’t that sound a bit like Elon Musk explaining why he put administrative assistants on the production line to meet a Tesla production goal?

“People don’t know what they want until they have it,” he declares, leaving us to wonder how he and Steve Jobs might be getting on in the afterlife.

“When a project is large enough it boggles the mind, and when the mind is boggled the pockets are open,” goes Moses, and if you closed your eyes you might think you caught Donald Trump.

“If I align myself with virtue, I can do whatever I want,” he says, offering an aphorism that one can imagine coming from the likes of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Sean Hannity.

We end up on real estate thanks to a line Moses spouted about changes afoot in the 1920s, as the average work week dropped to 45 hours and newfangled inventions eased daily chores and allowed the masses to loosen their bonds to factory and field and set about a new occupation.

Excerpt re-published with permission of The Real Deal. Read the rest of this piece at The Real Deal.

Jerry Sullivan is National Managing Editor at The Real Deal. You can follow him @SullivanSaysSC

Photo: screenshot from official trailer.

West Coast Blues

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 19:28:58 -0500

Few regions have been more consistently Democratic than the West Coast. Even compared with the Northeast, where Republicans occasionally win governors’ offices, the appropriately named “left coast” has been adamantine in its progressivism. Republicans haven’t won statewide office in California in years; in Oregon, it’s decades. Washington has elected a Republican secretary of state, but she now serves in the Biden administration. And the region’s major cities are overwhelmingly blue.

That could be changing, at least a bit. As cities from Seattle and Portland to San Francisco and Los Angeles fight crime and disorder, something of a political rebellion has broken out. One progressive fashion entrepreneur has called San Francisco “a city of chaos,” where his employees are not safe. The city, by some estimates, has deteriorated further and faster than virtually any urban area in the country. Within the last year, though, San Francisco recalled its progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, as well as left-wing members of the city school board. Meantime, remarkably, Seattle elected a Republican as city attorney, and Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón has faced backlash, and a possible recall. Voters have a chance to continue this rebellion this week.

Progressive candidates will likely eke out some wins. L.A. mayoral candidate and former Republican Rick Caruso has recovered some momentum after a weak summer and could conceivably beat progressive opponent Karen Bass, though Bass leads in betting markets. In Washington, long-time Democratic senator Patty Murray faces a surprisingly tough challenge from Republican Tiffany Smiley, though Murray, too, is favored.

But some heterodox candidates seem poised for upsets. In Oregon, Christine Drazan could become the first Republican governor since the 1980s, replacing the ultra-progressive and highly unpopular Kate Brown. In California, Republican Lanhee Chen, endorsed by the state’s usually lockstep progressive press, could be elected state controller, in what would be the first statewide win for a Republican since 2006.

Crime and chaos drive the GOP revival, but looming economic and fiscal crises are also factors. The once-flourishing tech industry may face at least a short-run implosion that has rattled investors. In California, where the post-pandemic recovery has lagged, the one industry left booming in Silicon Valley may be psychotherapy. Don’t expect a more business-friendly climate to emerge after the election. New proposals for wealth taxes, a 32-hour work week, and controls on franchise employment are likely—despite regional struggles with pensions, jobs, and business flight.

The physical economy, too, has declined across the West Coast. Manufacturing is lagging, particularly in California. Due to regulations and a lack of storage for water supplies, the Golden State’s once-dominant agriculture sector is declining. The state’s highly regulated housing sector has lagged on construction, leaving the state vulnerable to a real-estate downturn that is already hurting housing markets.

In addition, state policies drive electricity and fuel prices that rank among the nation’s highest, discouraging price-sensitive industries from staying in state and putting millions on the edge of energy poverty. California, in fact, suffers the nation’s highest rates of cost-of-living adjusted poverty, with residents of the less temperate and poorer interior far less able to pay for the state’s green zealotry than residents on the coast. And California, despite massive education spending, suffers the highest percentage of illiteracy of any state.

Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.

Housing Affordability in California: Part 2 — Urban Land Markets

Wendell Cox — Sun, 06 Nov 2022 19:28:58 -0500

Harvard’s William Alonso showed that the value of residential land tends to increase from the rural uses on the urban fringe¹ to centers of economic activity, such as central business districts.²

Urban Containment: Urban containment has become the dominant planning strategy for combating urban expansion and has been implemented in California through CEQA ³ and growth management.

According to prominent urban planners Arthur C. Nelson and Casey J. Dawkins: “… urban containment involves drawing a line around an urban area. Urban development is steered to the area inside the line and discouraged (if not prevented) outside it.”⁴ Further: “… urban containment programs can be distinguished from traditional approaches to land use regulation by the presence of policies that are explicitly designed to limit the development of land outside a defined urban area, while encouraging infill development and redevelopment inside the urban area.”⁵

Urban containment is intended to increase land costs. According to Nelson and Dawkins “ …the regional demand for urban development is shifted to the area inside the boundary. This shift should decrease the value of land outside the boundary and increase the value of land inside the boundary.”⁶

This article is adapted and updated from Chapter 2 (“California’s Housing Crisis”) by Wendell Cox in Saving California: Solutions to California’s Biggest Policy Problems, Stephen Greenhut, editor. The chapter is being published by newgeography.com with permission of the Pacific Research Institute, in three parts:
Part I: Housing Affordability in California: The Situation (published October 24, 2022)
Part II: Housing Affordability in California: Urban Land Markets (this piece)
Part III: Housing Affordability in California: A Way Forward

The impact of urban containment on urban land is illustrated in Figure 1 (below). The land value increases inside the urban growth boundary (UGB) are the “urban containment effect.”⁷ Other land value increases from land use regulation, such as “ordinary zoning” would be in addition to higher values from the urban containment effect.

Thus, the operative dynamics of urban containment are that:

Land values rise precipitously at UGBs (or their equivalent).
This increase is telescoped onto virtually all plots inside UGBs, raising house prices.

There was, however, a risk. Nelson and Dawkins note that “higher prices (especially for housing) could occur if planning fails to increase the supply of buildable land within the boundary” and that “…urban containment boundaries are prudent land-use policies … only when accompanied by policies that increase urban development density and intensity.”⁸ Housing affordability would be preserved by expanding urban containment boundaries “to accommodate projected growth over a specified future time period, typically 10 to 20 years.”⁹

Elusive Densification: However, sufficient densification did not occur. Perhaps the “social engineering” required to force households into smaller, often multi-family housing was politically infeasible.

Without the massive densification that would have been required to preserve housing affordability, it is not surprising that considerable political pressure has been directed toward reform of single-family zoning (an ordinary zoning measure) in markets with urban containment. As house prices have risen, so have rents (though at a slower rate¹⁰).

However, replacement of single-family zoning may not lead to materially improved housing affordability. For example, in the city of Vancouver (BC), has virtually eliminated single-family zoning¹¹ and massively densified, increasing its population 65% from 1961 to 2016,¹² without material annexation or greenfield capacity.

University of British Columbia planning Professor Patrick Condon, who has studied Vancouver extensively, has concluded “… there is a problem beyond restrictive zoning. … No amount of opening zoning or allowing for development will cause prices to go down.”¹³ The problem, according to Condon, is that upzoning as a densification strategy does not improve housing affordability.¹⁴

Despite the densification, Vancouver housing market had experienced massive housing affordability losses. Metro Vancouver has the highest house prices and highest rents in Canada.¹⁵ Further, Vancouver is the second least affordable market in Demographia International Housing Affordability. Affordability has worsened from a 3.9 median multiple in 1970¹⁶ to 13.0 in 2020. Metro Vancouver has had stringent urban containment policy for decades.

The housing affordability (median multiple) range was far less when there was only ordinary zoning. Median multiples in major US markets did not rise above 4.0 until urban containment.¹⁷ In 2019, the 12 least affordable markets had median multiples of from 5.1 to 9.0, and all had urban containment.¹⁸

Moreover, examination of US data suggests this opposite relationship. Metros with more single-family housing and larger lot sizes (both indicators of lower density) have substantially better housing affordability (Table 3).

San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco and Los Angeles ranked 44th through 47th in their shares of single-family housing.¹⁹
Some of the smallest lot sizes were in San Diego (42nd), Los Angeles (47th), San Jose (48th) and San Francisco (50th).²⁰

Table 3 Single Family Houses & Lot Sizes Major Metropolitan Areas: By Affordability Ratings (2018)
Housing Markets (Metropolitan Areas): Number by Affordability Rating (Median Multiples Shown)	Single Family Share of All Housing Units	Single Family Housing Average Lot Size (Acres)
Affordable (3.0 & Lower)	66.1%	0.34
Moderately Unaffordable (3.1 - 4.0)	61.7%	0.30
Seriously Unaffordable (4.1 - 5.0)	60.4%	0.24
Severely Unaffordable (5.0 & Higher)	53.7%	0.19
Number of Housing Markets with Data	53	50
Sources: Affordability Data: American Community Survey 2018 (Census Bureau), Demographia International Housing Affordability Lot Sizes: American Housing Survey: 2011 & 2013(Census Bureau)

Contravening Land Market Dynamics: Often urban containment requires new development to be adjacent to existing development. One of the world’s leading urban and housing analysts, New York University Marrron Institute Director of Urban Expansion, Shlomo Angel explains the problem with this approach.

“If only plots that were directly adjacent to existing built-up areas were allowed to develop, their owners would have monopolistic power. For the land market on the urban periphery to function properly, supply must be adequate to allow competition to determine land prices.”²¹

This could lead to the virtual destruction of the competitive supply of land, which Brookings Institution economist Anthony Downs stressed is required to maintain housing affordability. Legendary British planner Peter Hall,²² and colleagues at University College London expressed concern that land-use plans could “act as a speculator’s guide.” Land with planning permission or likely planning permission becomes a desirable item which will be traded at increasing prices, or hoarded.”²³

Urban Containment Research: In fact, urban containment has been associated with deteriorated housing affordability.

According to Angel: “… the explicit containment of urban expansion— by greenbelts, as in Seoul, Korea or in English cities, by urban growth boundaries, as in Portland, Oregon, or by environmental restrictions as in California—has inevitably been associated with declines in housing affordability.”
Hall, et al suggested that by the early 1970s, the “speculative value” of land with planning permission in the UK was five to 10 times that of land without planning permission.²⁴ They also concluded that the failure to prevent housing affordability losses was “perhaps the biggest single failure” of urban containment in the UK.
Mariano Kulish, Anthony Richards and Christian Gillitzer of the Reserve Bank of Australia report that that land increased in value from 12 to 20 times when brought within the Melbourne UGB.²⁵
Arthur Grimes, former chair of the Board of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and Yun Liang found a land value gap of 7.9 to 13.1 times over the Auckland UGB²⁶
Gerald Mildner of Portland State University found that a gap in land values of 10 times across the UGB in Portland.²⁷
The Barker Reviews indicated that land on which housing was permitted had a value of more than 250 times that of the agricultural land outside London where housing was not permitted.²⁸
Benjamin Dachis of the C. D. Howe Institute has associated administration of Toronto’s urban containment (greenbelt) program with far higher house prices.²⁹ By 2020, the median multiple had reached 250% of its 2004 (pre-urban containment) level.³⁰

Prominent housing economists Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Joseph Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania presented evidence in the San Francisco metropolitan area (city of San Francisco and suburbs) that land values³¹ were approximately $490,000, or 10 times ($440,000) the expected 20% in a well functioning market. Much of this additional cost is attributable to urban containment.

Where there is severely unaffordable housing, urban containment tends to be present.³² This includes some major markets in the United States and Canada, as well as virtually all major markets in Australia, the United Kingdom and New Zealand. All 92 severely unaffordable major markets in Demographia International Housing Affordability have urban containment.

Angel, an advocate of densification has strong reservations about urban containment:³³

“You have to show me that you have enough room that you are creating for the demand for me to say it’s okay to have containment, but usually you can’t. So, what it means is that you need expansion.”

Urban containment may be the “critical mass” that explains much of the housing affordability crisis in the least affordable markets, including California.

Indeed, economist Claude Gruen observed, “…growth controls in economically powerful coastal cities is to the middle-class what the economic disaster of slum clearance was to the poor.”³⁴

View and download endnotes (PDF opens in new tab or window)

Photo: Embarcadero, city of San Francisco, by Bob Collowan via
Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License

Is America Entering a New Age of Democratic Capitalism?

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 04 Nov 2022 20:28:58 -0400

Most everyone outside the Biden administration knows that a recession is now more than likely. We could be entering what economist Noriel Roubini describes as the “Great Stagflation: an era of high inflation, low growth, high debt and the potential for severe recessions.” Certainly, weak growth numbers, declining rates of labor participation and productivity rates falling at the fastest rate in a half century are not harbingers of happy times.

But the coming downturn could prove a boon overall, if we make the choices that restore competition and bring production back to the United States and the West. The contours of a new post-pandemic economy are becoming clear, particularly in the Sun Belt and parts of the heartland. That revival could leave us with an economy that is stronger, more innovative and entrepreneurial.

This is not to say that a recession won’t be hard, particularly for groups like millennials, blue-collar workers and immigrants who have already suffered through the 2008 recession as well as the pandemic. They have been victims of very poor business and government practices that have created inflation and incentives either not to work or to invest in nonproductive activities. But if the 2008 recession ended with only tepid growth, this time around we may eventually see something different.

The best evidence for the prospect of better times lies in the post-pandemic increases in new business formations, in 2020 up to 4.4 million applications compared to roughly 3.5 million in 2019. In the first half of 2022, applications including those from non-employer businesses remained up by 44 percent from before the pandemic. In 2021, applications, including likely employer applications, totaled around 1.8 million by year’s end — almost half a million more than in 2019. According to the Economic Innovation Group, US new-business starts are on course to set a record this year.

The action today, unlike that of the previous decade, is not found so much among finance-backed IPOs, which are suffering their biggest decline in two decades. Instead, small grassroots businesses are seizing new niches, even in service industries, that could transform our economy. “Lots of good things happened during Covid,” suggests Shaheen Sadeghi, founder of California-based LAB Holdings, which builds “anti-malls” hosting local businesses. “The mediocrities went under, but the people who survived are doing better than ever before. They created new ways of doing business that fit the new realities.”

This grassroots growth is very different from what happened after the last serious recession in 2008. Once the financial engineers of the City and Wall Street finished demolishing the economy, governments moved to bless more consolidation.

The big banks recovered gloriously as inequality soared and incomes, particularly for minorities like African Americans, sank. As one conservative economist put it in 2018, “The economic legacy of the last decade is excessive corporate consolidation and a massive transfer of wealth to the top 1 percent from the middle class.” Fortunately, entrepreneurialism remains embedded in our national DNA. In more managed societies — like Germany, Japan or France — the leading companies tend to remain the same over time; even those historically connected to fascism, such as Mercedes, Krupp and Mitsubishi, survived their ignominy and remain dominant. But in the United States disruptive change has been the norm: only fifty-three of the current Fortune 500 companies were here in 1955.

This emerging new economy is also reshaping our economic geography. Sadeghi’s LAB (“Little American Business”) has developed nearly fifty projects for small, independent firms, predominantly in suburban settings, places not usually thought of as sources of cultural and business innovation. By contrast, the massive bailouts standard for the last three years have not slowed the movement of people and companies away from dense, often hyperprogressive urban locales, dispersing people and work to their periphery.

This is a marked change from the last recession. The great financial crisis of 2008, precipitated by the bursting of a housing bubble, led to much speculation that Sun Belt suburbia would become what the Atlantic predicted would be “the next slums,” and that city living would make a comeback. To be sure, the oligarchic nature of the recovery was somewhat less damaging to cities like New York, San Francisco and Boston, where financial and tech firms are concentrated and key managerial talent remained, despite its previous malfeasance.

Yet the ongoing exodus from big urban centers started before Covid, with over 90 percent of all metropolitan growth between 2010 and 2020 in the suburbs and exurbs. The 2020 census notes that four of the five US counties gaining at least 300,000 people were in Texas, Arizona or Nevada. Houston and Dallas added far more people than New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or the Bay Area.

The pandemic, and the rise of online work, seem likely to accelerate this movement. The big blue coastal cities have all experienced meager growth and, since 2020, serious population losses. In the last year, the biggest migration losses took place in three key states: New York, New Jersey and Illinois. In the post-pandemic economy where some 30 percent of the employed expect to work mostly remotely, this turns even small towns into new centers of economic dynamism.

Overall, notes demographer Wendell Cox, offices on the fringe have recovered far faster than those in the largest urban cores. According to Jay Gardner, president of Site Selectors Guild, leading companies are looking increasingly at opportunities in smaller cities and even rural locations. The biggest upsurge in new business formation took place in the Deep South, Texas and the southwest while New York and the West Coast lagged. This year, Zen Business found that the best places for small businesses — in terms of taxes, survivability and regulation — were overwhelmingly in the south, parts of the Great Plains, Utah and the Midwest.

One surprising aspect of the emerging economy reflects tentative steps by corporations to return production to the United States. The “reshoring” movement has been building over the last several years, helped by the boom in shale oil and gas, which makes US manufacturing more efficient. But the return became imperative when China blocked healthcare exports during the worst days of the pandemic. Our painful dependence — even for military goods — on our primary global adversary is starting to concentrate minds.

Read the rest of this piece at Spectator World.

Photo: Local businesses in Carterville, Illinois by Brian Stansberry via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License.