Bloomberg CityLab: The Questionable Economics of the 15-Minute City - The goals of this trendy urban planning model are laudable, but cities need to be realistic about their ability to place retail, services and jobs close to all residents. Excerpts:
"The economics of the 15-minute city don’t really work...
What hasn’t been said is that the economics of 15-minute city planning go against foundational principles of how urban markets function....
Employment markets are even less localized. The very raison d’etre of cities is as a vehicle for labor pooling and sharing — this cannot happen effectively at the neighborhood scale. Setting up an expectation where people live within 15 minutes of their place of work will at best result in bad matches between workers and jobs, and at worst no matches."
Arpit Gupta's "Contra Strong Towns" critique focuses on challenging the Strong Towns movement's assertion that suburban growth operates as a "Ponzi scheme." Gupta argues that the evidence does not support the claim that suburban development is inherently financially unsustainable. He emphasizes the need for rigorous accounting and empirical data to substantiate such arguments, which he finds lacking in Strong Towns' narrative. Hat tip to Zoabe.
Antiplanner: "But today’s density policies depress fertility rates and the anti-immigration movement make it more difficult to compensate for those policies. Fortunately, some are getting the message that “maybe we should rethink” YIMBYism."
Twitter: "There's a growing consensus on YIMBY Twitter that we need to build a lot of new high density housing in the biggest cities. Maybe we should rethink that idea." Or go with the Houston free-market model: allow lots of high-density housing in the core for those that want it (typically non-families) as well as plenty of low-density suburban housing for those that prefer that (typically families). Best of both worlds.
Strong Towns is a weird urbanist cult + Tokyo's Houston-like minimal land use regulation
Strong Towns is a weird urbanist cult that can’t produce hard numbers to back up their assertions suburbia is financially unsustainable (how many suburban municipality bankruptcies have you heard of?). If you really think about it, every suburban home has a few tens of thousands of dollars of city infrastructure that go with it (some pavement and pipes), a very reasonable replacement burden from property taxes spread over 30+ years on a multi-$100k home (and most infrastructure will not need to be replaced that often).
“A municipality deep in decline, facing decaying infrastructure and accelerating poverty can hardly afford lengthy legal battles.”
The metro is booming. The City has challenges but is doing ok, especially vs. many other similar-sized municipalities. The accelerating poverty comment is flat-out wrong – immigrants move here, make a life, and move up and out to the suburbs to be replaced by a new wave of immigrants. And many parts of town are positively booming. Property values move up every year and the City laments the tax cap forcing them to cut the tax rate to keep overall revenue at inflation + population growth – does that sound like “accelerating poverty”? 🙄
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A couple of interesting pieces on Tokyo this week along with some excerpts I pulled.
"The median Japanese tenant spends about 20% of their disposable income on rent (in America it's 30%). Rent for a studio or one-bedroom apartment in Tokyo, which Americans are fawning over as "the new Paris," is a quarter of what it is in New York.
In September, when New York City Mayor Eric Adams unveiled his plan to build 100,000 new homes, he pointed enviously to Tokyo's ability to keep "housing costs down by increasing the supply of housing." "How are we allowing Tokyo to do things better than us?" he asked."
...
"Most American consumers probably wouldn't want to live in the studio or one-bedroom apartments that Japanese people just sort of take for granted," Schuetz said. But, she added, we shouldn't have many of the minimum size regulations we have. Instead, we should let consumers decide what tradeoffs they're willing to make. "Allow the market to build stuff, and the market will figure out what people are willing to pay for," she says.
"As housing prices have soared in major cities across the United States and throughout much of the developed world, it has become normal for people to move away from the places with the strongest economies and best jobs because those places are unaffordable. Prosperous cities increasingly operate like private clubs, auctioning off a limited number of homes to the highest bidders.
Tokyo is different.
In the past half century, by investing in transit and allowing development, the city has added more housing units than the total number of units in New York City. It has remained affordable by becoming the world’s largest city. It has become the world’s largest city by remaining affordable.
...
But the benefits are profound. Those who want to live in Tokyo generally can afford to do so. There is little homelessness here. The city remains economically diverse, preserving broad access to urban amenities and opportunities. And because rent consumes a smaller share of income, people have more money for other things — or they can get by on smaller salaries — which helps to preserve the city’s vibrant fabric of small restaurants, businesses and craft workshops. (sound familiar? ;-)
...
In Tokyo, by contrast, there is little public or subsidized housing. Instead, the government has focused on making it easy for developers to build. A national zoning law, for example, sharply limits the ability of local governments to impede development. Instead of allowing the people who live in a neighborhood to prevent others from living there, Japan has shifted decision-making to the representatives of the entire population, allowing a better balance between the interests of current residents and of everyone who might live in that place. Small apartment buildings can be built almost anywhere, and larger structures are allowed on a vast majority of urban land. Even in areas designated for offices, homes are permitted (this is one of my easy recommendations for traditionally zoned cities). After Tokyo’s office market crashed in the 1990s, developers started building apartments on land they had purchased for office buildings.
“In progressive cities we are maybe too critical of private initiative,” said Christian Dimmer, an urban studies professor at Waseda University and a longtime Tokyo resident. “I don’t want to advocate a neoliberal perspective, but in Tokyo, good things have been created through private initiative.”
'“Car-oriented” and “sprawl” aren’t the same thing: the word “sprawl” is imprecise. But it surely does not apply to heavily urbanized areas where office towers mingle with multi-story apartment buildings. Easterners are accustomed to a dichotomy between “walkable urban” and “driveable suburban”. Much of Houston’s core is “driveable urban.”
...
Inspired: As a market urbanist, I was already a fan of Houston in theory. But the visit made me significantly upgrade my evaluation of Houston as a place. It is far more interesting than Austin, for one thing. And although it is automobile-oriented, it is definitively a city, with all that implies.'
“After Uptown officials spent $192 million rebuilding the street to develop the line, operated by Metro, to carry 12,000 riders per day, bus drivers are ferrying fewer than 800 on many work days.”
Our URI/COU 2022 edition of the Demographia affordable housing index has been released. Sadly, Houston's median house-to-income ratio has moved up to 4.5, earning the "seriously unaffordable" label, although still much better off than most of the country's major metros (see below).
Finally, if you missed our URI/COU webinar last week on "The Case for Suburbia", you can check it out here. Great panel, and yours truly gets a mention for my work on MUDs.
Reason: "The city of Houston gets it more or less right" on densification vs. sprawl, with a variety of housing types. Free market with deed restrictions, but no zoning and no urban growth boundary.
A great video, although I wish they hadn't shown the beer can house (talk about poster-child for terrifying people about eliminating zoning!) and had used a map less than 50 years old, lol. It didn't even have a completed 610 Loop on it!
"Houston is known for its lack of Euclidean-style zoning, but the city still has various ordinances that control land use. In 1998, Houston reformed its subdivision rules to allow for parcels smaller than five thousand square feet citywide. In this paper, we discuss the unique land-use rules in place in Houston prior to reform and the circumstances that led to reform, including the “opt out” provisions, which mediated homeowner opposition to substantial increases in housing density. We then analyze the effects of reform. After relief from large lot requirements, post-reform development activity was heavily concentrated in middle-income, less dense, underbuilt neighborhoods."
Municipal utility districts seem to work in the Lone Star State. They have increased the housing supply, using lighter regulations, resulting in downward pressure on costs. Now, they may be catching on elsewhere.
"Houston—whose median home values are only 76% of the national average—stands out. Since 2010, it has had America’s 2nd-highest net population growth but is #1 in permits issued. This has made it an affordable city even in core locations; 1-bedroom, 1-bath downtown condo units can be found for under $200,000.
How does Houston remain so elastic? Less regulation. The city famously lacks a zoning code, and many of its suburbs are also very pro-growth. This means it has fewer legal barriers to more housing than inelastic coastal metros, where proposed zoning changes can trigger lengthy and contentious review processes."
"Similar proposals show that the basic idea of hyperlocal zoning has precedent. Houston has been able to remain a city without zoning laws in part because residents had options in the form of deed restrictions, where neighbors could choose their own rules at the hyperlocal level. In 1998, policymakers were able to reduce the city’s minimum lot sizes by allowing residents on individual streets and blocks to opt out of that change, a move which helped overcome local resistance because residents felt they had control over the risks. The result? Some 25,000 more housing units, including denser townhomes, built close to job centers and transit, many of which Houstonians would not have seen built otherwise."
WSJ: How Remote Work Is Reshaping America’s Urban Geography (archive link) - Smaller cities and communities are turning into ‘Zoom towns’ and competing with coastal hubs as workers move to find more space and lower costs. Basically, Richard Florida articulates Creative Class 2.0, which is the same as 1.0 but for remote workers outside superstar cities. Key excerpts:
Eye-opening stat: "remote workers are often more efficient than their in-office counterparts. They don’t waste hours on mind-numbing commutes, and they aren’t distracted by unnecessary meetings and water-cooler chitchat. The productivity boost to the U.S. economy from remote work could be as high as 2.5%, according to research by Stanford University economist Nick Bloom and colleagues."
Conclusion: "The remote-work revolution promises to change the way that Americans work and live. It will allow smaller cities, suburbs and rural areas to compete with the superstar cities on the basis of price and amenities. It will shift the main thrust of economic development from paying incentives to big employers to investing and building up a community’s quality of life. As communities attract more remote workers, their tax bases will grow, allowing them to improve schools and public services, benefiting everyone. Eventually, companies will come too. That holds out the possibility of a better, more virtuous circle of economic development."
Finally, a couple items on Houston as a startup hub. First, we rank #4 on this list for annual startup formations and jobs created by startups (#10 for formation rate), behind DFW but - surprisingly - ahead of Austin! Second, the excellent Texas Startup Manifesto 2.0 is out (highly recommended), arguing for treating the Texas Triangle as one giant startup ecosystem (absolutely), with this excerpt on Houston:
"Houston (East and Gulf Coast) is the fourth largest, and the seventh most diverse city in the US. It’s the energy capital of the world and is home to the Texas Medical Center (TMC), the world’s largest concentration of healthcare delivery and research institutions; to the NASA Johnson Space Center, a hub for cutting-edge human space flight research and astronaut training; to the number one seaport in the nation for waterborne tonnage, for foreign waterborne tonnage, and for vessel transits. Houston is an international city — a seaport, a spaceport, a “health-port”, and an “energy-port.” As a result, Houston has a diverse, high-tech industry ecosystem, and is increasingly an industry destination, serving as the home to 22 Fortune 500 company headquarters (with Hewlett-Packard Enterprise becoming the latest addition)."
How a Biden presidency can boost Houston, plus the cause of our growth, how LA is like us, Montrose is dead, and a graffiti artist guide to visiting HTX video
A lot of people are probably thinking about a Biden presidency as a negative for the oil industry and Houston, but there are some potential silver linings here. A big one would be a massive federal infrastructure investment bill that could dramatically improve Houston's flood resilience, including the Ike Dike and Galveston Bay Park surge barriers (great overview video). Another would be reopening international migration, which has been a big booster for Houston in the past (and has been significantly suppressed since 2016).
But the biggest potential boost would be the oil industry giving him a viable alternative to the Green New Deal. Instead of banning fracking or federal drilling permits - which just imports more oil from the Middle East - how about a tariff on imported oil to boost local jobs while also reducing carbon emissions? (by keeping prices up) Could the industry give him cover to get it passed and popular with the public? How about channeling the industry into something it has the expertise, infrastructure, and capital to do very, very well: carbon sequestration? (i.e. injecting it into the ground) How about encouraging LNG exports to Europe to give them an alternative to coal and Russian natural gas? Or LNG exports to China to displace the massive coal plants they're building there? There are so many ways the oil industry could be part of the solution on carbon, if they would just engage in good faith.
Moving on to some smaller items this week:
Market Urbanist Scott Beyer at the Foundation for Economic Education: What's the Cause of Houston's Growth?For decades, Houston has been the nation’s leading example of an “opportunity city.”
"If America had a more market-oriented urban approach, those aspects of Houston—the density and affordability—would be the ones most likely replicated. For this reason, “getting a bunch of Houstons” should be an urbanist goal."
Los Angeles: a city that outgrew its masterplan. Thank God. In the first of our regular series of dispatches from around the world, this longtime LA resident argues that his city's endless variety should be a key part any new metropolis's design. Sounds a lot like Houston. Hat tip to George.
"The very lack of defined form and cultural tradition here, the statelessness of the city itself or those who live in it, allows for a distinctive type of vitality that I've felt nowhere else."
Finally, I'll end with a fun video: Houston by a Local - Travel Tips for Houston - A Day in Houston, Texas. Discover Houston with a local: Graffiti artist Gonzo 247 shows you highlights of his home town in the U.S. state of Texas. One of them is Space Center Houston. Hat tip to George.
"I love the ugliness of Houston, but I know that’s far from all this city is. I can’t wait to get to know the community that has already felt welcoming and warm and to experience the food, music, museums, parks and more. Houston is far, far more than its outward appearance.
Until then, I’ll appreciate the comforting ugliness and continue my mission of trying all the take-out I can. Houston already has the best food in Texas, hands down."
"In Houston, African Americans enjoy high political representation, homeownership, historically black universities and several black newspapers – all of which empower the community, Conyers said.
“If people can negotiate and communicate, they don’t need protests,” he said.
Stein agreed that leadership in Houston has played an important role – and not just in city government.
“The black leadership in these communities tends to be church-centric, very much built into the churches. That’s not what you see in the North and Northeast,” he said. “And the second is, it’s an older population… and to a large extent, these are people who followed Dr. King’s nonviolence.”
Stein also credits less racial segregation than in other cities and its low density as factors that help keep Houston relatively peaceful in times of social unrest."
Great piece in Texas Monthly by Evan Minz on the new Houston book from Rice's Stephen Klineberg. I get that education is critical to Houston's future, but who's the right model for us to follow? Who's doing it right? I have trouble finding good examples, even in the much higher spending blue states. California spends much more per student than Texas but with worse results. The most success I've seen is the big charter operators - maybe we just need to let them expand even faster? That, plus more pre-K funding. The comments are also really good on this one. A favorite:
"The article is right, Houston isn't about the city, it's about the people. What most people outside of Houston don't understand is what that means. Houston is an attitude, a drive, a motive. Houston thinks forward, never back. The most generous, open people you will ever meet. Houston is not a destination, it's a journey."
WSJ: The Coming Urban Exodus - Failing progressive governance is making daily life too chaotic and stressful in many U.S. cities. A warning for Houston, where we're already seeing population shifting out of the city and county.
Scott Beyer, Market Urbanist: Three Ways the Government Blocks Urban Density - Limits on height, floor-area ratio, and dwelling units per acre have tremendous societal costs. Luckily Houston has very few of these. Excerpt:
"All these rules and more strip creativity and artistic flair from the city development process. Ultimately they raise rents preventing our cities from densifying, robbing the nation of wealth, productivity, and the opportunity for more people to live in economically vibrant urban settings. They’re perhaps the costliest regulations we have in the U.S., and, at least to me, make for our biggest domestic policy mistake."
McKinsey: Restoring public transit amid COVID-19: What European cities can learn from one another. I think the biggest impact locally will be the park-and-ride service, but Metro should be able to manage overall. But I truly don't see how NYC will be able to operate anywhere close to normal. DC, Chicago, Boston, Philly, SF, and others will also be significantly affected.
"Physical distancing will cut transit capacity to 15-25% of normal, but use of PPE could increase capacity to 40%."
NYT: The Agonizing Question: Is New York City Worth It Anymore?For many, the call of an easier, safer and more affordable life beckons. But die-hard New Yorkers find the city more appealing than ever. The new Escape from New York... 420,000 already gone in three months is a staggering number! Obviously many are temporary. But there are also probably tons of people still there that have decided to leave but are waiting out their leases.
“New Yorkers have been fleeing for months. But the fear some residents have of the violent reactions to the protests here is adding a new challenge to those asking themselves whether they can hack the city. Many are deciding not to return.
It’s a decision that must be made individually and privately, one that some 420,000 New Yorkers with the resources to do so had already made between March and May in reaction to the pandemic, according to cellphone data analyzed by the Times.”
"For some, it’s a chance to be closer to family, which feels more urgent in the midst of a global health scare. For a large swath of people in the country’s most expensive cities, it’s a way to get more living space and be closer to nature, something increasingly made possible by the growing trend of remote work. And for many others it’s not really a decision at all, but a necessity in the face of growing job losses and still sky-high rents.
… And people in cities hit hard by the pandemic — New York, San Francisco and Seattle — are searching for remote work opportunities significantly more than the rest of the country, LinkedIn data shows. Some real estate data suggests many are already considering or making a move to a smaller town or suburb. Real estate company Redfin said page views of homes in small towns more than doubled during the last week of April compared with last year.
... She said she’s hearing from mostly young families — professionals with small children — who want to trade the confines of a locked down New York City for houses with home offices and yards.
“It’s no longer temporary. People are saying, ‘I’m not going back. This could happen again and we don’t know when it’s going to end,’” said Bernstein.
“New York doesn’t feel worth it anymore,” he said."
The convention business is cratering, and cities are getting stuck with the bill. I'm not sure how our bonds are structured, but I'm guessing Houston and Harris County will be hit pretty hard by this. We've used hotel taxes to subsidize GRB, NRG, and stadium expansions, and now those hotels are bringing in very little revenue. I'm assuming taxpayers are on the hook to make the payments...
"Houston and NYC both issued around 61k permits in 2019. But metro New York City is nearly 3 times bigger than metro Houston, meaning its construction activity in 2019 (30.4 permits per 10k residents) was much less than Houston’s (88.3 permits per 10k)."
Click to enlarge
Cities With the Most Self-Employed Workers. Houston is #15 by percentage, but #3 by total numbers with 330,415, behind NYC and LA. Miami is #1, I assume because drug smugglers are considered "self-employed" (just kidding! watched too much Miami Vice as a kid, lol ;-)
City Combined Taxpayer Burden Report 2020. Houston has a combined local government debt burden of $25,800 per taxpayer, which is the 4th lowest of the top ten cities, and far better than NYC at $83,600 and Chicago at a whopping $122,100! Looking at their math, they have ~681k taxpayer households for Houston, which sounds about right for a city of 2.3m. Hat tip to Charles.
Finally, I wanted to end with a short video from the KAS Strong Cities 2030 project that I've been involved with the last couple of years. They put together clips of how different cities are dealing with the Covid-19 crisis, including yours truly at the 1:49 point (albeit recorded a couple of months ago and a bit dated at this point).
Debating deed restrictions and zoning, office vs. remote work, transit radio show, and more
I've actually been accumulating items faster than I've been posting them, and it's gotten out of control, so this will be a long post to do some catching up.
The featured item this week is I got in an active debate with the Market Urbanist Scott Beyer on the value of deed restrictions vs. zoning, which you can read in the comments at the bottom of his piece on deed restrictions here.
Moving on to the rest of this week's items:
Dispersion in US metros increases even before Covid-19: New Census estimates. Houston growth has slowed a bit since the oil boom days, but still ahead of most other big metros. We just crossed 7 million metro population, which is an impressive achievement only 4 other US metros have accomplished (NYC, LA, Chicago, DFW).
"New York City has withstood and emerged stronger from a number of catastrophes and setbacks — the 1918 Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, the 1970s financial crisis and the 2001 terrorist attacks. Each time, people proclaimed the city would forever change — after 9/11, who would want to work or live in Lower Manhattan? — but each time the prognostications fizzled.
But this moment feels substantially different, according to some corporate executives.
The economy is in a sustained nosedive, with unemployment reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression. Many companies are in financial trouble and may look to shrink their real estate as a way to cut expenses.
More fundamentally, if social distancing remains a key to public health, how can companies safely ask every worker to come back?
“If you got two and a half million people in Brooklyn, why is it rational or efficient for all those people to schlep into Manhattan and work every day?” said Jed Walentas, who runs the real estate company Two Trees Management. “That’s how we used to do it yesterday. It’s not rational now.”
“We have a lot of millennial buyers who are already used to working remotely. They don’t know how long this (pandemic) is going to last, and they’d rather be here (Tahoe),” Bednar told the Tribune, “The people I’m talking to are looking for a simpler life, a close community. They want the outdoors and don’t want to be stuck in places where there’s a health problem.” ...
“People are starting to ask themselves, ‘Why do I have to live in such an expensive area and drive an hour to work every day, or rent out an expensive office space when everyone can work remotely?' If you don’t need to live in the city, why would you?” Bednar said.
“The COVID-19 pandemic forcing those who could work from home to do so has led to a surprising result — improved productivity. U.S. workers were 47% more productive in March and April than in the same two months a year ago through cloud-based business tools, chat applications and email, according to an analysis of 100 million data points from 30,000 Americans by workplace-monitoring company Prodoscore.”
...
“Our salespeople meet five to eight customers a day now [via videoconferencing] versus the one it took them three days [to see in the past] because of travel,” he added.
This gets reinforced in the comments of a pro-office op-ed in the NYT, which are at least worth skimming. Even though the author makes a case for some of the benefits of the office, the overwhelming sentiment in the comments is “screw that, I love working from home and not commuting!” for all sorts of reasons, including less office drama/politics and fewer worthless meetings. It’s clear to me that both overwhelming sentiment, as well as simple economics/costs, work against offices. I think they will go into a significant decline. One other point the author misses is that you can separate the social aspect from the work aspect with the rise of coworking spaces, which are exploding everywhere: a shared space where there are others you can interact with, but everyone works for different companies. Still get the networking and socialization without the long commute to one central office with all of your company’s other employees.
"An important step is simply to permit more housing in more locations. We should put an end to zoning policies that restrict building to single-family homes and stop mandating that lots meet large minimum-size requirements, leading to sprawling, sparsely populated neighborhoods. Ending such restrictive zoning doesn’t have to lead to the construction of towering apartment buildings. Rather, we should encourage cities to permit more homes on existing single-family lots, allow apartments in retail districts and near transit, and dedicate excess or underused public property like surface parking lots in downtowns to new housing. All of this can be done without materially changing the look, feel and experience of a place.
The second important step is to reduce the cost and uncertainty of getting a housing project built. It often takes years to get permission to build. Local government processes often allow multiple “bites at the apple” of public comment and hearings for a plan. Sometimes, even when there is a vote to approve a project, a neighbor or special interest can sue to stop the approval, resulting in further significant delay. These delays add cost and risk, driving up the price of new homes and sometimes stopping projects in their tracks entirely.
...
These types of actions, which can be taken now, will lay the groundwork for a broad and shared prosperity. When denser housing is allowed, workers can live closer to their jobs, help save the planet by driving less and pay less in rent or mortgage payments because a bigger housing supply will lead to lower costs. Research shows that children tend to be more successful in neighborhoods with access to high-quality schools. In restricting building, more-affluent Americans are shutting lower-income families off from economic opportunity.
Now is an especially good time to reduce restrictions and allow for denser housing. Construction is hit hard during recessions, and opening up more building opportunities would be a stimulus for the industry, and it doesn’t require any extra funding. This would get workers back to work, provide safe and affordable living for those hard hit by this pandemic and get property taxes and other revenue flowing back to local governments for the services communities need. It would be a win for everyone."
"Without a significant expansion in the supply of housing, adding vouchers would be like adding players to a game of musical chairs without increasing the number of chairs.
Market-rate construction can help: More housing would slow the upward march of housing prices. New York and San Francisco are the nation’s most tightly regulated markets for housing construction, and it is not a coincidence that they also are the most expensive. Tokyo, often cited as an international model for its permissive development policies, has expanded its supply of homes by roughly 2 percent a year in recent years, while New York’s housing supply has expanded by roughly 0.5 percent a year. Over the last two decades, housing prices in Tokyo held steady as New York prices soared."
Finally, I'd like to end with a radio show I did with Bill King along with Carrin Patman and Tom Lambert of METRO on what's happening with the past, Covid present, and potential future of transit. Apologies for my bad body language - I didn't even realize I was being videoed until over halfway through, lol. I was just focused on my notes and getting the audio right.
"There’s a quality about Houston, though, that transcends its built pattern: affordability. For decades, Houston has been the nation’s leading example of an “opportunity city”. It has, like coastal cities, high demand—aka fast growing job opportunities and population growth. But unlike those metros, it builds lots of housing, thus stabilizing prices. The median home price is $190,000, which is just 4/5ths the national average, according to Zillow. Midtown’s median home prices are $309,000, extremely low for a centrally-located urban neighborhood. This affordability has made Houston a refuge for expats from expensive states, and for immigrants—it is now the nation’s most diverse city.
The affordability can be tied to both Houston’s density and sprawl. Rather than one being good and the other bad, both forms of growth have helped stabilize prices. But the multi-family infill housing is the most organic outcome to be found in the Houston model. If America had a more market-oriented urban approach, those aspects of Houston—the density and affordability—would be the ones most likely replicated. For this reason, “getting a bunch of Houstons” should be an urbanist goal."
This is pretty much the perfect solution to Houston - and the country's - energy woes. And it should please both the right (nationalism and the economy) and the left (increasing the cost of carbon). Coincidentally, I went to Rice with this guy!
"A farsighted leader, argued Andy Karsner, a former U.S. assistant energy secretary, “could have imposed a variable U.S. tariff or fee on imported oil, which would be easily absorbed while prices are now slumping.” Such an import fee “could dynamically and automatically kick in incrementally if prices fell below an agreed floor, say $40 to $50 a barrel — the price that U.S. producers need to stay in business and supply America. The fee would disappear if prices jump above the agreed level. Brent crude is now around $31.”
If we guaranteed U.S. oil producers a predictable price floor to enable the least indebted and most productive of them to survive, Karsner told me, it would pay multiple benefits: “It would raise money for us to invest in infrastructure; prevent job losses for skilled engineers and multibillion-dollar bailouts for U.S. oil companies; keep manageably low gasoline prices for U.S. consumers; and strengthen our energy security from predatory efforts by Russia and Saudi Arabia to wipe out our domestic oil industry.”
But, most important, it would accelerate our clean energy transition, by shielding our electric car industry from foreign-manipulated gasoline prices and our wind and solar industries from temporarily suppressed natural gas prices."
"Several experts are advancing another explanation, too: Features that have long been viewed as liabilities — the state’s solitary car culture and traffic-jammed freeways, a dearth of public transportation and sprawling suburban neighborhoods — may have been protective.
“Life in California is much more spread out,” said Eleazar Eskin, chair of the department of computational medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Single-family homes compared with apartment buildings, work spaces that are less packed and even seating in restaurants that is more spacious.”
Many scientific studies have found a correlation between population density and the spread of flu and other infectious diseases, something that may exist for the coronavirus as well."
"Imagine Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile discovered that, no matter how much they expanded their cell-phone networks, people kept buying new smart phones and using those networks. Would they decide to stop expanding their services for fear of turning too many people into smart-phone junkies? Of course not; so long as revenues covered their costs, they would happily expand to meet the demand.
The point is that almost anyone would consider that an investment leading to increased use to be a sign of success. Yet Transportation for America sees it as a sign of failure. Would T4A have us stop building libraries, hospitals, and schools because the ones we build get used by readers, patients, and students?"
Protecting residents from dangerous industrial businesses, reducing crime, street parking for mixed-use retail, and rethinking Vision Zero
This week we have a special edition of Houston Strategies focused on... specific strategies for Houston (;-). The specific topics are protecting residents from dangerous industrial businesses, reducing crime, street parking for mixed-use retail businesses, and rethinking Vision Zero plans.
First, Judah passed along this story on zoning (or lack of it) coming up again in Houston since the warehouse explosion on the westside. My simple observation is that we don't need zoning to address this problem. If we have laws about minimum distances between adult business or liquor stores and schools+churches, we could certainly do the same for certain kinds of hazardous industrial businesses without adding zoning. More on this at blogHouston.
As far as reducing crime, the Houston police need to be all over using NextDoor as an intel source for neighborhood crimes. It could make a huge difference in reducing all sorts of minor (and not-so-minor) crimes in the neighborhoods.
“I’m so sick of Midtown,” Masson says. “The biggest issue is parking. Even though there is a humongous parking garage behind the bakery, no one knows it’s there. No one takes the time to look for it. They drive by, they don’t see a parking spot, they don’t pull over.”
I posted this to the Market Urbanism Report Facebook group and it generated a huge debate in the comments. While mixed-use sit-down restaurants seem to do well (people are willing to hunt for parking if they're staying a couple of hours), I think part of the problem for a quick in-and-out business like hers (bakeries, laundries, convenience stores, etc.) is she needs a couple of dedicated parking spaces right in front limited to her customers. But since it's City of Houston street parking, they can't do that, so those spaces are always full of longer-term parkers visiting the neighborhood. I've noticed most strip centers (hated by urbanists), will offer their tenants dedicated spaces right in front of their businesses (with signs limiting parking to customers). Maybe the City needs to offer that for street parking as well? Maybe the businesses pay for it? For those sorts of businesses, people are not willing to hunt for parking and they’re also not willing to go through the parking meter hassle (it takes several minutes to go through the process at a CoH meter). Just let the business pay for dedicated spaces during business hours (or, alternately, spaces limited to a quarter or half-hour).
Finally, Vision Zero plans have been adopted by many cities - including Houston - to reduce traffic fatalities, but they aren't working. Excerpts from another piece are a cautionary warning to Houston's efforts:
"Yet Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, among others, saw sharp increases in pedestrian and/or bicycle fatalities after adopting Vision Zero policies.
This won’t be a surprise to Antiplanner readers. As described in Policy Brief #25, Vision Zero is an overly simplistic strategy that fails to solve the real problems that are causing pedestrian fatalities to rise.
Vision Zero is based on the observation that pedestrians hit by cars traveling at high speeds are more likely to die than if the cars are traveling at low speeds. So Vision Zero’s primary tactic is to reduce driving speeds. Vision Zero’s secondary goal is to reduce driving period by making auto travel slower and less desirable compared to the alternatives. Neither of these are working very well.
... For decades, traffic engineers followed a tried-and-true formula for reducing auto fatalities: improve roadway designs in ways that reduce the number and impact of accidents. Vision Zero has diverted cities from that formula in an overt anti-auto strategy that sometimes actually makes streets more dangerous (such as when one-way streets are converted to two-way operation). So it is no surprise that Vision Zero isn’t working."
As I've said before, I support Vision Zero when the focus is on fixing problematic intersections and other pragmatic safety improvements. I don't support it when it's just a thinly veiled mask for anti-car urbanists (road diets, reduced speeds, one-way to two-way conversions, speed humps everywhere).
Three perfect days in HTX, growth forecasts, increasing our density, reducing homelessness, protesting property taxes, and more
Happy New Year/Decade everyone! Hope you enjoyed your holidays as much as I did (OC/LA w/ family). Lots of backlogged smaller items, but before we get to them, a short word about our sponsor: if one of your new year's resolutions is to save big money on electricity this year, My Best Plan is incredible at absolutely optimizing the lowest-cost electricity plan for you. I've known David over there for years (fellow Rice MBA), and his optimization algorithm is the best, bar none. And completely unbiased too, which can't be said for some of the other optimizers out there that have been uncovered as fronts for electricity marketing companies. Send him (or me) your latest electricity bill to get an estimate of your potential savings - it's free, and you have nothing to lose while potentially saving hundreds or even thousands of dollars (as he's saved me over the years).
On to this week's items:
The Greater Houston Partnership has released its 2020 Employment Forecast. Only time will tell if their vision is 20/20... (sorry, couldn't help myself! ;-)
Speaking of density, the City is moving forward with plans to allow more density (reduced setbacks and parking) near transit, but Michael Skelly doesn't think they're going far enough. I think it's a modest start that can be expanded incrementally to minimize opposition.
MetroNext kudos and tensions, HTX traffic is better than you'd expect, road diets kill businesses, the aging affordable housing pipeline, and more
Before getting to this week's items, some thoughts on last week's MetroNext board workshop I attended (presentation slides here). First off, kudos to Metro (and Chair Carrin Patman) for sticking to its guns on the value of BRT over LRT. They can build three miles of BRT for the cost of one mile of LRT, getting more service to more areas more quickly and cost-effectively. People keep asking for fantasyland LRT service everywhere without understanding the economic tradeoffs, and it's good to see Metro have the backbone to say no.
As Dug's Chronicle story mentioned, there was tension on the Hobby line routing between the board and Houston City Councilmember Gallegos. He doesn't want it to come down 75th Street even though that's the most efficient routing with the best service, including bringing people to a renovated Mason Park (he's worried about right-of-way loss, which Metro thinks would be absolutely minimal if any). He's insisting on a longer routing that hits the new botanic gardens but misses shopping and restaurants of Gulfgate, which I guarantee generates 100x the trips the botanic garden does. How often do you eat or shop vs. go to tourist attractions? (probably in about the same proportion as you go to work vs. go to the airport!) Metro's plan includes an autonomous shuttle that would run from a stop near Reveille and Telephone along Sims Bayou to offer connectivity to the botanic gardens at Glenbrook Park, which I think could be an attraction in itself. It makes total sense.
Moving on to this week's items:
Houston #2 best city in Texas behind Flower Mound, and the only major city among the top five. Actually, neither Dallas nor Austin are in the top 100!
Houston is very good at this process of keeping up a steady supply of new housing that eventually becomes affordable older housing: Market Urbanism Report - Why the used housing market should be like the used car market - "As with the car market, the creation of new housing means used housing can filter down, to be bought or rented by lower income groups."
"There’s room for a new politics that recognizes that the path to actual social justice lies primarily in expanding opportunities for a broad range of jobs and housing options. But this can only be done by confronting the current approach to social justice that results in conditions demonstrably unjust."
"The new TomTom Traffic Index puts Houston at No. 204 globally and No. 18 nationally for traffic congestion, as well as No. 2 in Texas.
In Houston, drivers spent an average of 23 percent extra travel time stuck in traffic last year, according to TomTom. The worst day in 2018 for traffic congestion in Houston: October 31 (44 percent). The best: Christmas Day (1 percent)."
Bush and Houston, #1 take-home pay, Europe's rail fail, increasing access to jobs, zoning as crony capitalism, transit's decline, Houston beats Austin and Dallas for affordable housing, and more
Apologies for the long gap between posts due to travel. Catching up on many smaller items:
"So Dallas has decided to legalize the granny flat — subject to enough rules and regulations to ensure that this has approximately zero impact on the housing market. The political mind at work again: Dallas studied Austin’s granny-flat liberalization program, which over the course of several years saw 200 units come onto the market, some of them new construction but mostly the rental of properties that hadn’t been rented before. Austin has almost 1 million people. Dallas copied the Austin model — on purpose, knowing that it would produce negligible results.
Let’s summarize: The city, having prohibited a common form of affordable housing, decided to reverse that prohibition in the hopes of bringing back some of that affordable housing by following the example of another city whose efforts produced basically no affordable housing. Ingenious!
Down the road a bit in Houston, they’ve had some success with a radically different approach: building houses."
"For decades transit planning agencies and public officials (including when I served on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission) have claimed that new transit rail systems can materially reduce traffic congestion. The development of access metrics should put an end to such misconceptions (Note 3).
Regional planning agencies, transportation agencies and public officials should use the access metrics to direct funding to strategies that improve 30 minute access throughout cities. That principally means attention to improving the highway system. It’s time to develop a metric for urban transportation investments to address the fundamental goal of improving access, specifically the cost per new percentage point of job access. Getting people more access is critical to strong economies and reducing poverty, and deserves an assessment based on facts, not wishful thinking or mythology."
Why Passenger Trains Don’t Work in Europe. Mainly because they don't get that much more market share than in America yet they have displaced heavy freight to trucks that would be much better shipped on trains. America focused rail on freight, and that was the right decision.
"Five cities—New York, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco—accounted for a third of all Fortune 500 headquarters and half of Fortune 500 firms’ profits last year"
Finally, a moment of remembrance for a great Houstonian, George H.W. Bush, whose statue I was admiring at the airport just hours before his death hit the news. And a quote I love from the NYT piece talking about his relationship with Houston:
"Mr. Bush and Houston — both a little quirky, a little square, a little misunderstood — were a natural fit. "
"I argue that we should interpret Jane Jacobs as a spontaneous order theorist in the tradition of Adam Smith, Michael Polanyi, and F.A. Hayek. Built into her work is a profound appreciation of the importance of local knowledge, decentralized planning, and the spontaneous orders that structure urban life. Needless to say, this is not the prevailing interpretation of the importance and meaning of Jacobs’ work. Two very different alternative interpretations prevail. In this post, I argue that both interpretations are mistaken."
She did NOT support a form-based code, nor was she a NIMBY:
"Between the publication of Death and Life and 1961 and her passing in 2006, Jacobs regularly advocated for performance zoning, a form of zoning that focuses exclusively on the negative externalities of new development. At the 1970 event, Jacobs even articulated the key issues that such a performance zoning code should focus, including noise, pollution, scale, signs, traffic generation, and demolitions (VMT p. 216). “Under performance zoning, far greater freedom of land use could be permitted than is now the case, with superior results for the environment.” Given that her theory of urban growth and change militates against stricter top-down land-use controls, and her advocacy of performance zoning suggests a viable alternative to the status quo, there is little reason that Jacobs’ observations about urban design should be taken as a blueprint for any kind of form-based code or transect zoning."
Congestion improvements, global superstar city, biggest homes in America, up vs out debate, Vision Zero flaws, CA vs. TX, and more
Ok, first an apology for such a *long* gap between posts. I have been nearly continuously traveling since early Sept (multiple trips mixing work and fun), including presenting MaX Lanes at the Strong Cities 2030 sustainable mobility symposium in Essen, Germany and debating up vs. out urban development policies at the Breakthrough Institute Ecomodernism 2018 conference in DC. Both events went really well and I got very positive feedback. As you might expect with such a long gap, a lot of smaller items have gotten backlogged:
"The other point that leaps out of the table is the change in rank of Dallas and Houston, both of which moved significantly lower in the league table of most-congested metro areas. Both have a growing fraction of their expressways that are tollways, and both have expanding networks of variably priced managed lanes. Also striking is that Portland, with just one-third the population of Dallas, has nearly the same average congested hours per commuter and has nearly double the percentage of peak period hours that are congested."
"Vision Zero is a failed policy from a paternalistic government that takes millions of dollars to implement and never reaches its goal of zero deaths, in part because its goal is completely unrealistic. But Vision Zero does make life harder for commuters and those delivering freight. Yet this is the policy that many U.S. cities want to implement."
Joel Kotkin in City Journal on "One Nation, Two Economies - More than gender, race, or other hot-button media issues, a deep socioeconomic divide will shape the midterm elections."
"The 50 cities account for 8 percent of global population, 21 percent of world GDP, 37 percent of urban high-income households, and 45 percent of headquarters of firms with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. The average GDP per capita in these cities is 45 percent higher than that of peers in the same region and income group, and the gap has grown over the past decade."
The paradox of liberal coastal cities and the real reason for growing inequality, Austin embraces BRT, the freeway of the future is congestion-priced, and our growing density
"And last month, [Senator Kirk Watson] gave a big signal that he’s ready to get involved in bringing a full-fledged mass transit system to the area.
And that it probably won’t be light rail.
[Capital Metro's CEO has been promoting] a regional system of autonomous, electric-powered buses moving in platoons along dedicated transit rights of way on or next to Central Texas streets."
"In 2017, there were 168,600 households in buildings with 50 or more units — more than double the number in 2013. They are moving to recent large-scale residential additions to the city such as Camden McGowen Station and the Pearl in Midtown."
Excellent post on the power of congestion-priced toll lanes (i.e. MaX Lanes). Turns out the optimum speed for maximum throughput is only 50mph, which was a bit lower than I expected. I hope autonomous vehicles will be able to go much faster much closer together to move that speed up substantially.
"The real problem here is that housing is never just a question of “build” or “don’t build.” It’s “build here” or “build somewhere else.”And if you live in a coastal U.S. city, somewhere else is usually way worse for the environment. People don’t disappear just because they can’t move to our cities; they move to the suburbs of Texas, where housing continues to be produced in abundance and, as a result, costs have stayed reasonably low.
...
Some of you may remember the hub-bub in 2014 over Thomas Piketty’s book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which examined wealth inequality in Europe and the U.S. over the past few centuries. It was an absolute blockbuster (for an economics book), showing that the share of income coming from returns on capital was increasing over time, which was bad news for those of us who don’t earn most of our money on stocks, property, or other capital investments (i.e., most of us). It was a rallying cry for liberals around the developed world.
What you may not have heard about was the critique of Piketty’s work by a 26-year-old MIT graduate student named Matthew Rognlie, who basically said that the issue isn’t so much capital in a general sense, but housing in particular. In other words, the growing value of housing relative to other assets (as well as labor income) is responsible for almost 100 percent of increasing wealth inequality in the Western world.
... By doing essentially nothing but letting things happen, conservative America is kicking our ass at providing opportunities for low income and working classes to build wealth and get ahead. Cities like Dallas, Phoenix, and Atlanta have managed to stay affordable by simply allowing housing to continue to be built as their populations grow, and the result is that people keep moving there.
...
So, this is the paradise we’ve built across the liberal cities of the United States. Are we proud? I’m not. We’ve walled off our cities to those of lesser and greater means, making pathetic, often subtly racist or classist arguments about “character” and “culture.” We’ve destroyed any possible opportunity for low income and working class households to build wealth in the same way as their affluent neighbors, or displaced the poor households so that they’re no longer neighbors at all."
This Dallas News article reports on a comprehensive survey by Zillow which concludes that the vast majority of people in North Texas (including millennials) still want a home in the suburbs with 81% preferring a single-family dwelling. Hat tip to Oscar.
Fantastic interactive map for checking out the real flood-vulnerability of your home or other neighborhoods in Houston, including how badly they flooded during Harvey and some pics/images from the flooding.
Great quote: "I think of light rail as the diamond-encrusted Rolex watch of transit. It’s something that doesn’t do as much as a real watch can do. It costs a lot more. And it serves solely to serve the ego of the people who are buying it." -Randal O’Toole, transit expert for the Cato Institute
"With many major urban areas seeing ridership decline by 20 to 40 percent in the last few years, however, transit agencies are desperate for new ideas that can recapture some of those lost riders. The changes they will make, however, are most likely to be too little, too late.
On close scrutiny, Houston’s story isn’t as compelling as some claim. In 2012, Houston buses carried 66.1 million trips. After revamping the system, they carried 68.6 million in 2013. So far, so good. But by 2015, the number had fallen to 66.5 million, and in 2017 it was 66.4 million — barely 1 percent above the 2012 level. One reason for the 2015 decline was that Houston opened new light-rail lines that year, which no doubt captured some previous bus riders. But, if anything, the real story is that bus ridership hasn’t declined as much since 2012 as it has in other cities such as Los Angeles.
Houston’s real problem was that it built light rail in the first place. In 2002, as it was starting light-rail construction, buses carried 94 million riders. After the light rail opened in 2004, bus plus rail together beat the 2002 number for three years. Then ridership began to collapse, falling to 77 million in 2010, possibly due to a 12 percent decline in bus service. With the revamp of bus routes and opening of new rail lines, ridership grew to 85 million trips in 2017 — which is still 9 percent fewer than bus alone in 2002.
But that growth is mainly due to the new light-rail lines. Since 2012, light-rail service has nearly quadrupled from 0.9 million to 3.4 million vehicle-revenue miles. For all that, they got a 65 percent increase in light-rail ridership. From 2012 to 2017, bus vehicle-revenue miles grew by 5 percent, but ridership grew by only 1 percent — and bus ridership in 2017 was less than in any year from 1984 through 2011. Since Harris County’s population grew by 9 percent between 2012 and 2017, a 1 percent growth in bus ridership is hardly something to cheer about."
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Well, worth cheering about relative to other transit agencies, but Metro and others are certainly facing some daunting headwinds. Here's to hoping they ride the new technology wave with their new plan instead of fighting - or ignoring - it.
Finally, I wanted to share this super-cool National Geographic award-winning pic from Hong Kong really conveying the density there! (click on it for full size)
"This is the genius of Houston’s unique system: Let those with strong preferences for tight restrictions have them and the city as a whole can go on operating under a largely liberal land-use regime. There is a valuable lesson here for other cities: when attempting to liberalize land-use regulations, consider strengthening the private (subdivision deed restrictions) and public (stricter local rules subject to local consensus) mechanisms whereby the most powerful opponents of liberalization can simply opt out. Houston figured this out in 1965 and again deployed this strategy to great effect in the 1998 subdivision regulation overhaul. In relationships as in city planning, sometimes you have to give a little to get a little."
"In the meantime think about this. What could we have done instead with the $2.2 billion that was spent on light rail? The answer is lots. Like solving most of our flooding problem or resurfacing virtually every street in the street in the City or repairing our dilapidated wastewater system or putting more police officers on the streets or demolishing some of the thousands of dangerous buildings in the City or any one of dozens of other critical priorities facing the City.
The question is not whether light rail is a good thing or not. The question is whether it was the best use of $2.2 billion of taxpayer money. The answer to that question is pretty clearly, “No.”
"According to the American Public Transportation Association, the average speed of rapid rail (a.k.a. heavy rail) is just 20 mph, while the average speed of rapid bus is less than 11 mph.
According to the 2016 National Transit Database, the nation’s fastest heavy-rail line is BART, which averages 35 mph. Atlanta’s is 31 and Washington’s is 27, while New York City subways average just 18 mph. Considering that most transit riders also have to take time getting to and from transit stations, none of these can compete effectively with door-to-door driving, which in San Antonio averages 33 mph."
"For decades, cities have overseen transit monopolies that use heavy infrastructure, fixed routes and set schedules, under the premise that these will spur surrounding growth. And in many cities, they have. But thanks to the rise of the gig economy, workers often find themselves making multiple trips in a given day, and public transit has proven inflexible — unable to get them from point A to point B in a timely manner, or at all. As a result, even densifying cities have seen declining ridership.
Contrast that with private transit, which has grown in success by pursuing “microtransit.” This model stresses malleable routes, on-demand service, smaller vehicles and minimal brick-and-mortar infrastructure. Companies include the bus services Via and Chariot; the ride-hailing services Uber and Lyft; and the bike-share services Zagster and LimeBike. Their flexibility lets them locate where demand exists, rather than counting on populations to come to them.
... Indeed, these new microtransit companies could increase the flexibility of transit, creating systems that are complicated yet smart, not orderly but dumb."
Finally, building on last week's post, it turns out that not only does Houston employ more people inside its city limits than larger city Chicago, it even employs more than much larger Los Angeles! Reasons: I'd guess good annexation and multiple major job centers. Again hat tip and graphics credit to George. Click to enlarge.
An open dialogue on serious strategies for making Houston a better city, as well as a coalition-builder to make them happen. All comments, email, and support welcome.
