To end the affordable housing crisis, Washington needs to legalize Main Street
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
> Ever since Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department helped promote the spread of model zoning codes that physically separated people and their community institutions, the federal government has poured its energy and resources into encouraging the growth of widely dispersed single-family homes and large, centralized tower blocks. To this day, FHA standards for loans, which set the market for the entire private banking sector, prohibit any but the most minimal commercial property from being included in residential development. As a groundbreaking report by New York City’s Regional Plan Association found, these standards are “effectively disallowing most buildings with six stories or less.” And depending on the program, a building could have to reach to 17 stories before it is eligible for participation in the normal housing markets. Without the FHA’s blessing, projects are granted the “nonconforming” kiss of death unless their developers can persuade a local bank to write an entirely customized loan for them, one whose risk the bank would have to keep entirely on its own books.
(1) It's a jobs program in the form of a subsidy for the construction and automotive industries, both of whom are huge employers.
(2) It's to disperse the cities to make them less attractive bombing targets, especially for nuclear weapons.
The latter seems less likely if it goes back to the 30s but more likely as an explanation for Cold War era efforts to disperse cities.
Anyone have any other potential explanations?
I haven't read it yet, but this book might be insightful: http://amzn.to/2dQutwR ( Zoned in the USA: The Origins and Implications of American Land-Use Regulation )
Other recommendations would be welcome. I'm tremendously interested in this issue.
Edit: I'll add this book, too: "Zoning Rules!: The Economics of Land Use Regulation" - http://amzn.to/2dHphdJ - haven't read it yet but it looks quite informative.
I don't think that's the whole story though.
Zoning regulations happened en masse at the tail end of the Great Migration, to control and confine black migration to northern cities.
But sure. Persuade whatever West Coast city to aggressively build for density. For better or worse, we don't do these things as top-down directives in the US.
Correct, but unfortunately this attitude has been used to justify preventing anyone _else_ from living in a city because Joe and Jane homeowner like living in a quiet country village right next to a major metropolis. See also: the massive hypocrisy in that is every city on the peninsula except SF. How can they claim to support affordable housing without supporting building housing, ideally near transit so people aren't burdened with the expense of a car?
With regards to cities, blame the NIMBYs and their political allies who uses all sorts of "livability studies, heritage laws, and more, to prevent affordable housing from being built. This is simply code for "we don't want THOSE people living here". The vast majority of housing laws are simply modern day redlining tarted up with feel good phrases and misdirection.
My grandfather lived in a small town in Oklahoma that was literally three blocks long. It had a traditional pre-war Main Street of attached commercial buildings with on-street parking, surrounded by detached single-family housing. But when you go there now, the whole town is surrounded by exurban sprawl: all newly constructed businesses are surrounded by a lawn enclosing an oversized on-site parking lot and the business in a detached building. It is nearly impossible to go in and do your shopping by walking from business to business: you have to drive to do every kind of errand.
And this is true of small towns all over: any rural small town with recent construction now has its own exurban zone. It's ridiculous: the closest thing to a prewar Main Street is a strip mall with an onsite parking lot.
The "build more roads" thing does influence land prices.
I have studied housing history in th US dating to about WW2. I have written a number of long comments in various places on the internet and injected a bit of that into some blog posts. I get tired of repeating myself (and being mostly ignored), but the nutshell version is that poor people went to war, savings rates during the war were as high as 50% for some parts of the war, and the soldiers came home with money in the bank and military benefits that helped them buy houses and go to college. So there was enormous and unprecedented housing demand and the nation as a whole rose up to meet it at impressive speed. The demand was for family detached homes and it gave birth to the modern suburb. Since then, our demographic has differentiated while our housing policies, ideals, and financing mechanisms have converged on this one standard that served the nuclear family well but does not serve our current population well.
I live without a car. I am still trying to figure out how to reconcile having stuff in walking distance with wanting to be left the hell alone. The result: My walking stamina has steadily increased since I got rid of my car. So the definition of "walking distance" has changed in my mind.
It's probably a combination of many factors.
One that comes to mind is public health--don't diseases spread faster and through a larger fraction of the population in densely populated areas?
Unless you're dealing with something very contagious, in which case the city density is the least of your problems (people still get together in schools, offices, etc)
Places like New York City had urban blight because of peculiarities in the tax code. You could live in the 1950s and 1960s in NYC in a poor quality apartment cheaply - it wasn't until the 1970s that price started going up. As I've been told, people left larger cities in the '50s a lot because of drugs and because industry was vacating city centers. And there's always white flight.
Also, people in the U.S. have ridiculously large houses (except in S.F. and New York).
800 square foot is huge, the average 2-bedroom apartment here in Montevideo is about 600 square feet, and serves a family of four more often than not.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/style/portland-affordable-...
in Singapore the typical hdb flat for a family is 2-3 br which is between 900 to 1100 sqft (but goes up to 4 brs at 1600 sqft). and on a habitable land basis it is one of the densest cities in the world. so yes you can provide liveable spaces to a lot of people and have them all in the same area at once.
but they also have a state admin that controls a large proportion of residential land supply and is willing to sacrifice property prices as the main method of wealth creation (which imo is a good thing, because firstly one can never fully unlock that kind of equity in his life as long as he needs a place to stay, and second because it pulls capital away from productive sectors)
This is untrue. A reverse-mortgage or HELOC can easily unlock the equity while keeping your ownership stake at a safe level and allowing you to continue residing.
But they also have laws around cars that would have Americans screaming for their guns. A certificate of entitlement (COE) can cost $50~$70k SD, and that's just for the right to buy a car. That doesn't include the cost of the car or registration.
In this way my car would be stored in a secure (either monitored or physical) area outside of the city core.
Given that, it is logical to restrict the use of in-city travel to electric vehicles, bicycles / other human powered devices, and foot traffic. Maybe we could even have nice people mover beltways and fully covered ways between the buildings. (turning the city in to more of a mega 'mall')
(In my (European) city we actually have the opposite - new developments are unlikely to be approved unless they're "zero parking", because we already have as many cars as the streets can take).
Of course, the parking lots service ~1000 people, while apartments obeying the height limits might accomodate a few dozen and would of course be even more desirable/expensive now that commuting to the station from far away is harder.
Taxpayer owned, profits (after maintenance, expansion of the program, etc) going to decrease taxes, parking structures at the edges of cities located at nexus points of vehicle and intra-city transit grids: preferring density on both.
Step 2:
Make movement /intra/ city on public transit and systems free (possibly only for uses of the parking system).
Step 3:
Affordable 'carts' designed to be used with the transit system for people to move goods from their cars and/or shopping trips back to their homes. Bonus points if there are 'pod' versions that are lockable, trackable (smart phone app), and which other delivery services can be paid to bring to your apartment/condo/etc.
Step 4:
Expand the jurisdiction limits of the city to the point that it encompasses the metro area, to make planning actually work.
Step 5:
Encourage development of the right kind of housing in the right areas; encourage it by carrot and stick until the price of housing is where you desire it.
The suburbs of today must become the favelas of tomorrow!
> In many North American municipalities, secondary suites are illegal because they do not conform to the zoning or land use district the property is in, they have been developed without the proper permits, or they do not meet the local building code. However, some localities only prohibit the renting out of secondary suites, and allow occupation by a relative or guest, leading to the use of the term "mother-in-law" house or apartment. Local jurisdictions may have rules regarding allowing certain relatives to live there and rules about what, if any, rent may be charged.
and from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garage_apartment :
> The idea of integrating garage apartments into urban planning is a key aspect of new urbanism, although many jurisdictions in the U.S. prohibit new construction of or occupancy of ADUs except for relatives.
These, obviously, are not favelas.
But, surely, America can find some happy medium where we build actually affordable housing that is decent as well. I see no reason why it has to be slum housing.
The real problem is over-urbanization. People are moving to a few cities and draining out the rest of the country. The US population isn't increasing by much. The current rate of increase is 0.72%, and most of that is illegal immigration.
The Internet was supposed to make it less important where you lived. What went wrong?
The assumption was wrong. The world has organized around cities for millennia, and we're supposed to believe that a few advances in communication would change that? Since when has communication ever been so important? Until you can start teleporting physical goods and people stop caring about social needs, you won't see any change in urbanization. In fact, as resource scarcity increases, you'll likely see increases in urbanization.
Jenna, Germany. 100k people. 4 trams. 3 intercity stations, one with an ICE line.
Chattanooga, TN. 200k. The Chattanooga choo-choo from the song has no trains. Not even an AmTrak. Even talk of a train to Atlanta got everyone angry because they didn't want Atlanta commuters.
I don't understand why Americans love their cars so much and hate rail.
http://www.realclearpolicy.com/blog/2015/03/31/high_costs_ma...
Plot the London Underground in LA and it still wouldn't work for most people because they live 10 times further away from their destinations. The average speed of the underground isn't even that high, really, but for most journeys you don't need to go that far.
Conversely, plop LA's rail system on London and it would be far more effective than it is in LA, because you could actually be near the things you wanted to visit when you stepped off the platform, instead of 4 more miles away from them. I mean, seriously, LA built a light rail station a mile away from the airport and called it "Aviation station", yet using it to get to the airport is a sheer misery of unlabeled buses and bad schedules.
I live in a city where I can walk 1.5 miles or less to everything I want, and that includes universities, hundreds of bars and restaurants, many theatres, and of course friends. If this were the US it would be mostly parking for the two major sports stadia.
Good. Unless you're a farmer you're not helping anyone by sprawling--you're just using more resources while everyone else subsidizes the extra utilities it takes per person.
>The Internet was supposed to make it less important where you lived.
If anything the internet just showed more people that living in sprawled, boring, isolated areas isn't desirable.
People naturally want to live in walkable, active, pedestrian-friendly areas. It's only through the massive push for the car has a couple of generations grown up in sprawled environments and now they're realizing that's not what they want.
Really, now? Or has more demand priced out longtime residents?
EDIT: That said, the rest of the article is very good. My guess is, the author didn't caption that photo.
Anyway, these people rely on their vehicles for transportation to work or school, and they pay for a parking spot. If a huge influx of drivers arrived without corresponding parking supply increases, I'm not sure these folks would be able to reliably park near their homes or get to work.
We can imagine solutions involving increasing the street permit price, etc., but fundamentally more drivers without more supply (road* and parking) is bad for current drivers.
*insert warning about Braess paradox and induced demand.
Seems like an example of an "economic calculation problem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
Parking on my street is very limited, so the spots are expensive. This way there's often at least one available. If there isn't, I can park around the corner in a privately-owned garage. Nobody says you can't build new apartments because they expect parking welfare at their neighbours' expense.
The problem is that most people feel it's perfectly reasonable to expect to claim a bit of land _for free_ for their car - if I just built a second house on a parking spot people wouldn't say "well the solution is to limit park-house-permits to local residents", they would demand I buy land on which to place my house.
You can't anticipate it, which is why you should never view street parking as a guaranteed feature of your home. People who can't afford homes with garages or driveways just need to be realistic about the fact that the parking situation on their street might change in the future.
Similarly, all homeowners, whether they have garages and driveways or not, need to be realistic about the fact that many things in their neighborhood might change, including density and traffic. That's just life. You can't fully control what happens on land you don't own.
What makes you think someone parking on your street is an outsider, rather than a neighbor, or a guest of a neighbor who might very well pay property taxes in the same city you do?
I also find it bizarre that some HN users (not you obviously since you can't downvote a direct reply) frequently downvote comments that provide a differing perspective from the anti-suburban anti-car view.
Certainly imposing on everyone else by forcing them to cover the costs of your personal needs is somewhat sub-optimal.
If you build housing with no parking attached to it, you won't be able to sell it for as much money. If people really care a lot about parking, that housing will have to be a lot cheaper to attract buyers. Perhaps so cheap that the developers won't make a profit on it and no one will build that kind of housing.
As elsewhere "what is the correct amount of parking for a given unit of housing" is basically impossible to solve at a citywide level and is a perfect example of this, posted elsewhere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem
Most likely there are different kinds of people - some who care a lot about parking, and others who ride their bikes all the time or something. By providing diverse amounts of parking, people will sort out into different places that most suit their needs.
Maybe bathrooms should be optional? Some people may prefer to shit out the window or use the local YMCA to shower? Yeah that's a sanitation concern, but parking is a transit concern, both are major issues in cities.
There needs to be some forethought into how the new residents are going to get into and out of the city. Simply leaving it up to profit seeking businesses to sort out doesn't mean a functional solution will actually be found.
Build your city in a grid, and adapt. 150 years ago, that forethought would have created good infrastructure for horses. Now, that might not be so much of a concern. As much as possible, people should be free to choose. See also: The High Cost of Free Parking: http://amzn.to/2dRbceN
Every time you mandate parking spaces in new developments, you mandate the continuation of the car-centric city model that is simply unsustainable once the population grows past a certain point. Cars are effectively being subsidized by the government in most cities. That money should be spend on transit instead.
Serious rail projects take on the order of 30 years. I think it's much more likely that people would go somewhere else, rather than endure an entire adult life without acceptable transportation options so that maybe the grandchildren would have it better.
They sure as hell don't take 30 years when they care, though. How long was it to get 405 expanded with another lane? And for all that it's now even slower than before!
The other answer is that if you're asking me to weigh a place for someone to live against someone else's privileged ability to conveniently have everyone else pay for them to park a car, I'm going to favor living space every time. I think cities favor cars too strongly.
Unless you had some kind of legal guarantee to park in front of your own home, you never should have counted on being able to do so. If you feel bad when you can't do it anymore, it's because you had unrealistic expectations from the beginning. You just happened to be lucky that nobody else parked there.
If you want to guarantee that you will always be able to park in front of your house, buy a house with a garage or a driveway.
But if there's a driveway, then no one can park in front of it, and only the owner can use the driveway. A driveway, therefore, effectively replaces a public street parking spot with a private, personal spot.
From a parking utilization standpoint, it only makes sense to allow driveways and garages if it's very likely that more than one car will park there at times when on-street parking is full. (For example, in one place I rented, we had two cars parked in the side yard and one on the driveway, and did the car shuffle when needed.)
Here's the math. http://www.drivewaytips.com/layout.html says "A single car driveway width should be 10' wide, anything less than 10 feet will be too narrow to drive or park on comfortably. 12' is often used for added comfort and assuring to get out of your vehicle without stepping on the lawn or landscape." Others confirm that 10-12 feet is pretty standard.
In many cities, no parking is allowed within 5 feet of the end of the driveway. Seattle is one, see http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/parking/drivewaymarkin... , where you'll see the 5 feet isn't from the width of the driveway proper but also includes the opening it makes when it reaches a curb.
(Other cities have smaller limits, even down to 0 feet, while others have higher, even 10 feet. 5 feet seems pretty common)
Therefore, a driveway takes about 22' of space on the curb, or perhaps a bit more.
The standard parking space for parallel parking is 24' long for standard or 21' for compact: http://www.danbury-ct.gov/filestorage/21015/21087/21123/2301... .
Effectively, each driveway takes away a public parking spot.
There's also an occupancy issue. Consider a worst-case scenario where someone lives near a park-and-ride train station, but needs to drive to work. In the morning there is a lack of parking spaces, because of people parking to commute into the city. In the evening, there's no problem to find parking. If the resident had no driveway then parking, for the most part, wouldn't be a problem because plenty of spaces are free. For the others, it means one extra spot is available.
Now, put the driveway in and the homeowner has a easier time (eg, call in sick, go to the doctor, and sometimes there's no nearby parking spot for the return), while every single day someone else has a harder time to find parking.
See that 'passo carrabile' sign? https://goo.gl/maps/yjGQ5i1wg222
That means you can't park there, but it also means you have to pay something to obtain the sign. No sign, no enforcement.
My block in Denver is weird in that the alley only goes half way down it. So half of the block has no driveways since they have an alley and the other half has driveways. The width is like everyone has driveways. It's kind of like driving down the barrel of a gun.
That's not how most humans think - and if logic disagrees with people's moral intuitions, so much the worse for logic.
It's not just logic -- it's the law. The street is public property. Even in areas with parking permits, anyone with a permit can park on any part of the street, and you aren't guaranteed a spot in front of your own house.
Welcome to Amsterdam. Living in a dense city with very constrained parking is nice, but it's unfit for dual-car households. You need to use the bike and public transport. Or move to a suburb.
If parking is truly an issue, the market can of course solve it with private parking lots.
No, it can't - it doesn't.
I think some supporting evidence would be good in your post. Is there some kind of market failure at work here? Absent regulations preventing it, I see no reason people couldn't build a parking garage or something. Here's a parking garage in the oldest, densest part of Padova, where I used to live: https://goo.gl/maps/sS3dds2h3yt - it's not cheap (they use an elevator system!) but someone built it and operates it at a profit.
"Someone built an expensive garage" doesn't demonstrate solving anything.
It is "not being solved" in a system that bears little resemblance to a free market. Housing and cities are one of the most tightly regulated markets in the US. The level of detail that most zoning codes go into in the US is mind boggling.
For instance, with regard to parking minimums, here in Bend, we have this (which was probably cut and pasted from some other town):
> "Beauty parlor and Barber shop: 3 spaces for each of the first 2 beauty or barber chairs, and 1½ spaces for each additional chair"
That is most emphatically not what I would call a 'free market', but rather detailed and specific government regulation.
I'm not a libertarian and I do not think markets solve all the world's problems - far from it. However it is undeniable when you start looking into the details, that these markets are very, very far from "free markets".
Converting parking lots to apartments just gives you more apartments on the same footprint. It doesn't bring the workplaces of the people in those apartments any closer.
There is an insane amount of rail opposition in the us that had less to us being a massive energy consumer and polluter.
I sold my car 5 years ago.
A hundred years ago, there was a rail network that at least linked towns together, but that's long gone, at least as far as passenger service goes - a lot of it is still in service for freight. Amtrak tries, but in comparison to countries that actually have rail service, it's a sad joke.
Just a few key tram lines in major cities can alleviate a lot of traffic, not to mention the growth of business and commerce along rail lines.
(I don't have a helicopter, it's meant to illustrate the problem with your argument).
Are you calling us trespassers? I don't recall putting my property on your land.
Not only this, but why are houses required to keep a 30 foot lawn extending from the sidewalk to their home? Not only does it require considerable irrigation, but that land can be much better suited as increased living space.
Over the past two decades from what I observed the office space available to software developers has decreased. Single offices and generous cubicles have been replaced by denser setups. Full time staff has been complemented by contracted staff often working in much more cramped conditions. Some have not a fixed desk and in part working from home offices not alone to save commute time.
On the wholesale side margins are getting compressed as differentiates are missing and wholesale distributors like Amazon or directly distributed branded products are eating away their share and need a lot less prime real estate.
There may be local markets where commercial real estate is tight. But secular trends are not looking good.
Crucially, loans qualify for purchase by Fannie and Freddie (and therefore have lower interest rates) only if they meet standards set by the Federal Housing Administration. These standards have always been hugely biased towards suburban single-family homes [0], and in some ways have become even more so recently. For example, Dodd-Frank amended the FHA rules to stipulate that at least half of the units in any new multi-family condo building must be sold before any buyers can qualify for an FHA-approved mortgage on any unit in the building. This rule alone has effectively killed the market for new-construction condo buildings in most American cities, since only luxury buildings in the hottest markets can expect to pre-sell half or more of their units to cash buyers or buyers who can get spec mortgages.
0. E.g., by specific practices such as "redlining", introduced by the National Housing Act of 1934, which created the FHA (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redlining), but predominantly by lending standards which have always been far more lenient for new single-family homes than for any other form of housing. Federal housing and transportation policy have also promoted suburban over urban development in myriad other ways; for a broad take, I recommend Kenneth Jackson's book Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (1985), https://www.amazon.com/Crabgrass-Frontier-Suburbanization-Un....
He:
Was a gifted and successful mining engineer (Worked overseas in Australia and China, and later for himself.
Fed Europe during and after WWI (preventing a Famine in Russia - and elsewhere).
Created the foundations for the modern system of Broadcasting Regulation.
Created the foundation of common regulation of Motor Vehicles and Traffic Laws.
Successfully ran a relief effort for the 1927 Mississippi Flood.
Delivered the "Death Knell" to the Morgenthau Plan and arguably laid the foundations for the Marshall Plan.
Led the effort to modernize and reorganize the federal government post WWII.
Wrote over 40 books, on such varied topics as mining, game preservation, fishing, foreign policy and a well renown book on Woodrow Wilson.