Monthly Archives: March 2013

Livability urbanism v. general welfare urbanism

I think this piece by Richey Piiparinen at New Geography (via The Urbanophile) is mostly on point, although he commits the sloppy journalistic sin of declaring that Chicago is suffering from “record levels of violence,” which is not true by any metric and which is, in fact, so unsupported by any evidence that it makes you wonder whether anything in the entire piece was fact-checked.

Still, the backlash to what Piiparinen calls “livability urbanism” is a real thing, and on the whole a force for good, and plus it’s nice to see New Geography publishing something thoughtful. (When I read New Geography, which is less often than I used to, it frequently reminds me of Lionel Trilling’s quote about conservatism, which was that it was not really a coherent body of thought but rather an “irritable mental gesture.”)

I also think that part of the phenomenon that Piiparinen finds so frustrating – and which I’ve been turning over in my head recently – is the tendency of urbanists to conflate ways in which their preferred urban policies promote the general welfare, broadly defined (improved safety, reduced time commuting, reduced commuting costs, better access to jobs, fewer carbon emissions), and ways in which their preferred urban policies promote the creation of neighborhoods they think it would be fun to live in.  These are not the same thing. For example, the general welfare is promoted if a postwar suburb decides to make sure all its streets have sidewalks, and that buses come at least every 15 minutes on major routes during the day, and that denser apartment buildings will be allowed near major intersections. However, it has failed to create an environment, in all likelihood, that twentysomething liberal arts graduates will want to live in. On the other side, if Chicago declares Uptown an entertainment district, and gives subsidies to venues there and makes Broadway more attractive, he has probably increased the amount of fun that young educated people will have in the area (and increased the profits of those music venues), but the general quality of life of the people who live in the neighborhood is unlikely to change a tremendous amount.

What makes this conflation more devious is that many cities have decided that, in fact, they will improve the general welfare by making themselves fun places for educated twentysomethings, and thus sparking economic development. But it’s worth noting that this strategy has, as its end goal, something very different than just a direct application of urbanist principles to improve people’s lives. Where this kind of economic development is successful, the tendency is for zoning-restricted housing supply to cause a huge surge in housing prices, which leads to a rise in the area’s average income and quality of life – but with the downside that those benefits accrue to only the upper end of the class spectrum. Or, you know, gentrification. The economic and ethical problems with this approach are well explored.

But moreover, conflating urbanism with places twentysomethings think are fun ignores the fact that not everyone has the same ideal living arrangement. Some people – hell, most people, at least in this country – would like to live in a primarily single-family neighborhood where they can drive on wide, fast-moving streets and find parking easily. When we pretend that those things are incompatible with basic urbanist principles – because they’re the opposite of what’s considered hip – we, as urbanists, are telling the vast majority of Americans that we have nothing to offer them. If we kept in mind the distinction between “livability” urbanism and general welfare urbanism, that would be much less of a problem.

Things I have not had time to note

1. Speaking of elitist urbanism: This article from DNAInfo fairly dumbfounded me when I first read it. An independent grocery store in Ukrainian Village – Ashland just south of Division – wants to start selling liquor. The local neighborhood association is concerned, however, that alcohol might bring around unsavory characters. Or, well, not all alcohol:

A local grocer has been offered a liquor license with a twist: no mass market beers like Bud or Old Style and no cheap wines, either. [T]he deal that would allow him to sell only craft beers and higher-end wines….The restrictions are designed to ease fears by neighbors that the market could create alcohol-related problems.

…so the government is mandating that the store only sell products that are too expensive for “problem” customers. I.e., poor people.

If this doesn’t strike you as obviously ridiculous, imagine if the shoe were on the other foot: if some community organization somewhere, like Uptown or UKRAINIAN VILLAGE TEN YEARS AGO, decided to fight gentrification by telling a liquor store that they could only sell cheap, mass-produced beer – no crafts, no local stuff, nothing small-batch or artisanal. (Of course, there would also have to be a ban on PBR.) If that happened, we would all shake our heads and say something like, “No, that’s just not how it works.” But when it comes to government-mandated class exclusivity, I guess it is!

More broadly, this is also an example of “local control” favoring a small set of provincial interests rather than a wider constituency of everyone who is affected by the decision. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that a majority of residents of this area are in favor of this policy, which I doubt. (The impetus for the special license was the East Village Association, which, if it is anything like every other neighborhood association ever, is not a representative sample of the people they ostensibly represent.) What about the people who work in the many service-sector jobs in Ukrainian Village, who may want to pick up a six pack of beer on their way home for $6.99 instead of $12.99? Or people whose commutes take them through the area? Or potential future residents? Why do none of them get a say? I’m a reasonably community-minded person, who believes that collective attachment to a place, and a collective culture, should matter in policy. But what deep spiritual attachment do the residents of the East Village have to craft beer and expensive wines that would justify this? Or – if we want to be credulous and take the crime angle seriously – exactly how much crime do the local police officials expect to be produced from a single liquor store at Ashland and Division? Have they walked around Division recently? Are they expecting drunk yuppies to start attacking innocent bystanders with their strollers?

It is certainly the EVA’s right to make requests of a neighborhood business, or to ask that there not be any liquor licenses in their area at all. It is also, of course, a business’ right to target their products to whatever slice of the income ladder they choose. But a compromise that involves making it illegal to sell products that are affordable to low-income people is pretty awful.

2. Yay suburban express buses! This article about the success of Pace’s BRT-ish highway-shoulder-riding express buses to downtown Chicago is pretty cool. The ridership is still pretty low – it’s quoted at 550 for the two routes – but they’re doubling the number of runs, so it sounds like it’ll probably keep rising. Plus, what a great way to give people who don’t live near Metra transit access to downtown! No wasting years in studies and trying to find hundreds of millions of dollars to construct new rail lines – just send those buses down the highway! Now the question is – or my question is – whether this (or BRT more broadly) could be a model for suburb-to-suburb transit as well. Cheap, easily changeable to meet new job clusters/transit demand, relatively fast. Might this be a pilot/replacement idea for Metra’s proposed suburb-to-suburb STAR line? Do other cities do this?

 

 

 

Questions for Richard Florida, one month late

1. Why, in these graphs, are we comparing wages minus housing costs to…housing costs? It’s certainly interesting that greater real estate prices are so positively correlated with white-collar wages that those workers end up with greater take-home income in high-housing-cost metros, even after subtracting those housing costs. But wouldn’t the better comparison – if your question is whether the concentration of college degree holders in certain metro areas is good for non-college degree holders in those same metros – be after-housing-cost wages for non-college degree holders versus the percentage of white-collar workers in the labor pool? Maybe the results would be the same; but it would be nice to see.

2. Even better, given that metro areas with high housing costs tend to be older cities with solid public transit systems, what do those graphs look like if you chart wages minus housing costs and minus transportation costs against the percentage of white-collar workers in the labor pool? As the Center for Neighborhood Technology has shown, including transportation costs in the “structural costs” of a given metro area gives a very different picture of the burden on low- and moderate-income families than looking at housing alone. (Of course, the tendency of elite cities to be transit-friendly isn’t necessarily inherent to the phenomenon of talent clustering – except that much of this conversation is about using urbanism to attract college-educated workers. Given that, it seems relevant whether the current urbanist model of lower transportation costs and higher housing costs does, on net, hurt blue-collar discretionary income.)

3. This is outside the immediate scope of your project, maybe, but how do these effects vary by metropolitan area? What is the relationship between talent clustering and blue-collar well-being, on the one hand, and restrictive zoning (which has been shown to artificially raise real estate prices), or economic segregation? Are there extremes where, even according to your original models, an increase in white-collar workers is good, economically, for blue-collar workers – say, in a very poor, tax-base-thin city like Detroit?

Answers, hopefully to come!

Yuppie Urbanism v. Egalitarian Urbanism

Via Whet Moser, an Urbanophile piece that asks: “Is Urbanism the New Trickle-Down Economics?”

That depends, it seems to me, on what we mean by the question. If we mean, “Do elites in the government use urbanist policies primarily for the benefit of other elites?”, then I think the answer is a clear yes. As Aaron Renn points out, much of the time politicians aren’t even pretending otherwise; investments in transit, bike lanes, or walkable design are explicitly pitched as bait for young people with college degrees and cultural and economic power. (Witness the incredibly stupid fight between Rahm Emanuel and the mayor of Seattle over whose bike lanes will poach the other’s tech workers.)

But that’s hardly a surprise. We could delete the word “urbanist” from the question and get the same answer. It is a given, here and nearly everywhere else, that governments are under outsized influence from the rich and powerful, defined broadly, and even policies that are ostensibly egalitarian or redistributionist rarely get enacted without partial or total cooptation. This is true in health care, this is true in taxes, this is true in urban policy. Our last great era of rethinking what cities should be – against which this one is often explicitly compared – involved even more blatant pro-elite bias (with elite, during the midcentury, having a more open racial component). Look at the history of the Chicago Housing Authority, which started as a basically socialist, redistributionist program and quickly devolved into government-enforced relocation and segregation of blacks, a story repeated in dozens of cities around the country; or the reign of Robert Moses in New York, and his exclusionary public works.

A better question, I think, is whether the current flavor of urbanism is inherently elitist – that is, whether the kind of urbanist policies promoted at The Atlantic Cities, or Streetsblog, are unprogressive even before being perverted by the political process. That’s a harder question, but I think the answer is no. Certainly, the aspects of urbanism that are most potentially redistributionist – radical liberalization of zoning laws, provision of city services, etc. – are not the ones with the greatest grassroots excitement. And a lot of urbanist causes célèbres, like bike lanes and urban farming, are fairly tangential to social justice.

But I think it’s hard to conclude that the standard basket of urbanist policies, taken as a whole, doesn’t have a strongly redistributionist bent. Two of its main effects – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and lower the burden of transportation costs, especially on low-income households – are clearly progressive. (See the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Housing + Transportation Affordability Index for details on the latter.)

The more interesting debate, which Renn sort of brushes up against without taking on directly, is whether the fact that urbanists tend to be culturally elite college-degree-holding types means that, inevitably, the more redistributionist parts of the policy basket won’t ever get enacted. It’s absolutely true, as he writes, that “with some notable exceptions, you don’t see social justice and equity issues front and center in the urbanists discussions outside of old-school community organizing/activism circles, groups that are almost totally distinct from Atlantic Cities style urbanism.” So we’re not getting any great political movement with the aim of urban economic justice.

But whether that fact dooms egalitarian urbanism depends in large part, it seems to me, on how successful yuppie urbanism is. If, on the one hand, the new urban ideology is applied in a limited, targeted way – if public transit investment goes mainly to pretty-looking but functionally useless streetcars in gentrifying downtown districts, rather than improving regional bus networks (and maybe trains in some metro areas); if politicians’ commitment to urban design is limited to sexy mixed-use development only in those same central areas they want to gentrify, rather than a complete overhaul of zoning and design standards across the region; if a few center-city bike lanes aren’t accompanied by a broader change in road construction guidelines to make walking and accessing public transit viable and safe; then early 21st century urbanism will have the same anti-egalitarian legacy as mid-20th century urbanism.

But if, instead, urbanists – out of pure self-righteous self-interest – win a kind of total ideological victory and manage to change the urban planning paradigm as fundamentally (or even half as fundamentally) as it was changed in the years after World War Two, and we get those improved regional bus networks, the liberalized zoning, the better design that allows for decreased dependence on cars and lower transportation costs, then the legacy will be quite different. The real challenge, of course, will be in those areas not where yuppie urbanism and egalitarian urbanism happen to coincide, but where they clash. Regional bus systems, and improved design guidelines in the ungentrified, and ungentrifiable, suburbs, may not get most urbanists to throw a party, but they’re clearly aligned with their ideological interests and don’t pose any kind of threat.

What does pose a clear threat to the professional class are policies more explicitly aimed at economically integrating neighborhoods: the dismantling of exclusionary zoning codes, the loosening of historic preservation districts, scattered-site public housing in non-poor neighborhoods, and so on. Those are the policies whose chances I would worry about most – and, unfortunately, they also seem to me to be the ones of greatest importance: reducing the burden of transportation costs on poor households is important, but economic segregation is the root of a number of cities’ most intractable problems, including crime and education.

Finally, I think it’s worth noting that I’m not totally convinced that a broad political movement that did explicitly promote egalitarian urbanism would do much good, at least on the economic integration front. The lines of self-interest would basically pit the lower half of the economic spectrum against the upper half, and it doesn’t take a genius to put odds on that battle.

Speaking of Houston: Two Links

The Atlantic Cities has a longish essay on the limitations of “density” as a goal for urbanists, which attempts to answer some of the questions I posed about the value of density per se versus traditional, walkable urbanism that may be less dense. (I apologize for using the word “density” or “dense” three times in one sentence, but this is a blog, and you should expect subpar prose.) The upshot is that, at least from an environmental standpoint, what matters most is a sort of functional urbanism that allows a high level of non-car travel, rather than simply a high people-per-square-mile statistic. Not really addressed: social and economic justice. Worth reading nonetheless.

This paper from the Victoria Transport Policy Institute does take on the economic side of things, and purports to show that functional urbanism is, in fact, the best policy to promote transportation affordability. Not shocking. What I’m not sure if it covers–I haven’t read the whole thing yet–is how functional urbanism affects economic segregation, which is more of my interest. Read it here.