Austin Contrarian

San Marcos and student housing

I would have rewritten this lede:

Residents cheered as the San Marcos City Council rejected a zoning change Tuesday that would have allowed a controversial high-density development in a predominantly single-family neighborhood.

to this:

Residents cheered as the San Marcos City Council rejected a zoning change Tuesday that would have allowed a controversial student housing development across the street from the 34,000-student Texas State University.  

The proposed development would have been a 42o-unit mixed-use development on 14 acres.  As you can see, there is a lot of undeveloped land on the development's side of Sessom Drive, surrounded by low-density single-family housing.   As you can also see, a very large university does indeed lie across the street.

(The outline shows the general area and size of the tract; I haven't attempted to accurately sketch its somewhat complicated boundary.)

Texas State University used to be a small, sleepy teachers' college.  The area to the northwest was obviously low-value land that developed as low-density single-family housing.  Now Texas State University is very large and generates huge demand for student housing.  Large, vacant tracts across the street are logical places to put it.

San Marcos is off my beat, so I don't presume to understand the politics in that town.  Do homeowners there believe their interests are homogeneous?  They are not.  The homeowners in the immediate vicinity might hate the idea of lots of students living nearby, but those students have to live somewhere.  If they can't live in one neighborhood, they will find another neighborhood.  They'll double-up or triple-up in homes in other single-family neighborhoods.   Rather than walk or bike across Sessom to get to class, they'll pile into a car and clog the city's streets.  If I were a homeowner in San Marcos who didn't live on or near Sessom, I'd be delighted by this project. 

And, as a San Marcos homeowner, I would also recognize that my property's value depends on the long-term health of Texas State University.  San Marcos has no particular competitive advantage over other central Texas locations other than that university.  San Marcos needs to zone its land to accommodate a large, growing university.  If it doesn't, students will be stuck with lower-quality but more-expensive housing, and the university will be a less attractive place.

Making corruption easier won't make it less likely

Critics of Austin's current system of city-wide Council elections are correct that Council elections are dominated by a "white, liberal, central city power base" a/k/a central Austin homeowners.  I think this is a bad thing.  Central Austin homeowners are a parochical lot and they elect parochial Council members who adopt policies that stifle new housing and development and run up the price of existing housing.  Central Austin has fewer residents, more expensive housing, and lower-quality housing than it should have, thanks to a system dominated by central-city voters.

And I will support an alternative system as soon as someone proposes a better one.

From where I sit, parochialism is the City's principal problem.  Single-member districts are not a cure for  parochialism.  On the contrary, they institutionalize parochialism.  A Council member whose district will be affected directly by a particular vote will have an incentive to consider only the effect on his or her district, rather than the broader harm or benefit to the City as a whole.  Council members whose districts will not be affected  directly will have an incentive to defer to the affected Council member; they will want and expect that deference to be reciprocated.  That is the genesis of "ward courtesy."

SMD proponents argue that city-wide elections are corrupted by money, but it is the SMD system that is prone to corruption.  In a ward courtesy system, you only need one vote for zoning changes as a practical matter.  That makes corruption a more feasible proposition, both economically (fewer people to buy off) and logistically (fewer people on the take means less chance of getting caught).   And for those who really believe that money has been buying Austin's elections, note that switching to single-member districts will make elections cheaper to buy.  SMDs won't rid politics of money; they'll just stretch the money a bit farther.

If someone can convince me that Austin won't degenerate into ward-based politics, I'll switch my support to SMDs.  I'd like to see a larger Council representing more diverse viewpoints.  But I don't like the incentives created by single-member districts, and I think incentives are a better predictor of the system we'll get than banal assurances that our new Council members will act for the common good.

Sometimes parking regulations don't matter

I think minimum parking requirements are bad policy.  If I had my way, the City would abolish its minimum parking requirements tomorrow. 

I'm a Shoupie.

But it's worth reminding oneself every now and then that the regulations on the books -- even the bad ones -- don't always matter. Minimum parking requirements don't matter when the market demands (or, at least, the developer perceives the market to demand) more than the minimum.

Greystar's proposed mixed-use project at 1200 S. Lamar (the South Alamo drafthouse site) is a case in point. According to the parking calculations on the site plan, the project will provide almost 60% more parking than code requires.

I'm sure this demand for parking is being driven by the Alamo Drafthouse. Anyone who's been to the South Lamar Alamo -- or tried to get take out from Suzi's China Kitchen -- on a Saturday night knows that the Alamo gobbles up parking.

There is good evidence that parking regulations do matter in general. They can matter a great deal in specific instances. How much extra space do we reserve for empty asphalt thanks to city regulation? We don't know and we can't know unless the city gets rid of its minimums. But it's important not to be seduced into believing that every massive parking garage or expansive surface lot is a manifestation of bad city regulation.

Urban wildlife

My five-year old son spotted this high up in our (lone) back-yard tree:

 

I think it's an eastern screech owl.

My wife thought it was a hornet's nest at first, but then my son said he saw it move.   (I honestly don't know how he managed to spot it among the leaves and branches.  Or why he was even studying the crown of the tree that closely.  I wouldn't notice a puma in a tree.)

This is a bit more exotic than the raccoon I almost ran over yesterday.

Jaywalking

The City of Austin is enforcing its ban on jaywalking.  Yes, jaywalking sometimes poses a high threat to drivers and the pedestrians themselves.  No pedestrian should cross a high-speed freeway like I-35, for example -- people are really bad at estimating the closing speed of a vehicle traveling the length of a football field every three seconds.  Pedestrians who misjudge traffic not only risk their own lives, but the lives of the drivers who swerve to avoid them.

But if the City really intends to enforce a ban on mid-block crossings of interior, arterial streets, it needs to give pedestrians a reasonable option.  The City leaves them with no reasonable choice on many of its "urban" streets -- unless one counts forsaking the walk altogether and hopping in a car as a reasonable alternative.

Take South Lamar.  It is one of the two main arterials through south Austin.  It is one of the busiest arterials in Austin, with (2009) weekday traffic counts of 36,000-40,000 along the main segment.  It is a major bus route.  It has a dense concentration of businesses both small and large on both sides of the street.  Property owners along the street have been investing in their properties, refurbishing and remodeling old stores or tearing them down for new, more pedestrian-friendly buildings.  New restaurants, bars, barber shops, coffee shops and pharmacies are springing up on either side.

But the street is still signaled as if it were a semi-rural county road.  The 2.5 stretch of South Lamar from Barton Springs to Panther Trail has just nine stoplights, including the lights at Barton Springs and Panther Trail.   Stoplights -- and thus crosswalks -- are spaced an average of 1,650 feet (0.31 miles) apart.  In some places, the lights are spaced nearly half a mile apart:

A pedestrian who wants to make a "midblock" crossing between, say, Hether and Lamar Sq. has a choice:  he can wait for a break in the traffic and dash the eighty feet across the street, or he can walk 1000 or so feet to the nearest light, wait through the signal, and trudge the 1000 feet back.  A 10 second dash or a 6-7 minute, roundabout walk?  It's an easy choice, particularly when its 105 degrees.   For those whose walk would start and end mid-block, a ban on jaywalking is a ban on walking.

The City is spending or plans to spend millions of dollars on grand plans to refashion East Riverside Drive and Airport Boulevard as pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use thoroughfares.  That's great, but it shouldn't irngore the low-hanging fruit.  It needs to begin treating urban arterials like urban arterials.

More:

South Lamar's spontaneous redevelopment (3/22/07)

Baby steps toward new urbanism (4/21/08)

Stats test

Via FlowingData.

Cops and water lines

As the comments here and here show, discussions of subsidies for suburban development often become entangled with discussions of the relative cost of city infrastructure and suburban infrastructure, and with density's impact on those costs.

I'd like to focus here solely on the dynamic of infrastructure costs.  The distinctions between capital costs, long-term variable costs and short-term variable costs seem to get muddled in the discussion of infrastructure, so let me use police costs as an analogy.  It will help to make some simplifying assumptions.

Imagine a city hiring its first police force.  It has to pay an upfront cost for training the policemen.  But after it makes that investment, its initial yearly labor expense is pretty low.  Young policemen aren't paid much, their health expenses are low, and their pension payments aren't due for many years.

But as the police force ages, it gets more expensive.  The city has to pay higher salaries.  Older policemen need more medical care.  And, eventually, everyone notices the looming, gigantic pension expenses.  The mayor and city auditor and the local newspaper begin to moan about excessive health and pension benefits and shortsighted politics.

Suppose the city's population is constant.  The residents pay the upfront cost of the police either through initial assessments incorporated into home prices or a tax levy.  But the per capita annual cost of the police force is low at the beginning.  As the police force ages, the per capita cost rises if, as we've assumed, the city maintains a stable population.  If the city's residents are in fact sensitive to their tax burden, though, some will move away rather than pay the higher per capita fees.  This will increase the per capita burden on the remaining citizens, which will encourage more to move, and so on in a vicious cycle.   (Something like this has played out in many aging midwestern industrial cities.)

Allowing density to rise breaks this cycle, or at least slows it, as long as the police costs don't rise as fast as the population.  And there's no reason they should -- there are a lot of fixed costs, and it won't take twice as many officers to patrol one square mile if the population of that square mile doubles. 

The same cycle will play out in any other city, including a suburb.  A young suburb in the early part of the cycle might seem to be in a better position -- and in a sense it is, since its day of reckoning is further away.  But it eventually will face the same reckoning.  Its police force, too, will become an ever-increasing burden, and its tax-sensitive citizens will move in increasing numbers -- unless the suburb attracts more residents over time.

Water and sewer infrastructure works almost the same way.  There is a large upfront cost, low initial expenses because young lines don't require much maintenance, but rising costs as lines age and break and water treatment plants wear out.  These culminate eventually in very large charges for digging up and replacing lines or replacing other infrastructure, which lead to a lot of hand-wringing by the mayor and the city auditor and the local newspaper.

A growing population helps with water infrastructure just like it helps with the cost of an aging police force.  A city cannot simply decree that people move within the city limits.  Most central cities don't enjoy a growing population.  But if there are people clamoring to move into the central city, the incumbent residents ought to realize that as a good opportunity to spread spread long-term costs among a larger population.

Why do voters vote for road subsidies?

Readers naturally interpreted this post as a criticism of suburban development.  I in fact believe that we over-subsidize suburban development through road construction, but I mainly wrote the post for two other reasons.  First, it is rather obvious evidence that those who claim drivers pay the full cost of roads are wrong.  And, second, there are a few central Austinites who claim that infill development actually imposes more costs on local governments than suburban development.  The County's subsidy is some evidence they are wrong, and in the comments Shawn hits on some other reasons they are wrong.

The proposed bond package and its likely approval raise an interesting question:  Why do central city voters -- and, for that matter, suburban voters who already have the roads they need -- vote to subsidize suburban roads?  It's a puzzle if we assume voters are rational and vote according to their perceived self-interest.   (I always start with that assumption rather than simply assume voters are dumb.)

It's not obvious.  The bond package, because it is a true subsidy, is a wealth transfer from the average voter to a relatively small group of property owners.  Subsidies like this also hurt central city property values because the improved roads make the suburbs relatively more attractive.  Enticing more people to the suburbs hurts other suburbanites, too, because it puts more cars on the suburban arterials, increasing congestion. 

Yet voters still vote for them. 

I don't know the answer, but one possibility is that voters think population growth is good.  Each new resident increases demand for doctors, dentists, restaurants, etc., which is good for doctors, dentists, restaurants, etc.  Population growth is good for property owners.  It is even good for downtown because it increases the pool of workers.   I agree that the "Texas jobs miracle" is mostly population-driven.  A larger population also sustains a greater variety of stores and restaurants. 

Another possibility is the expectation of reciprocity.  Perhaps there is an implied compact that I will support road subsidies for you if you support road subsidies (or bicycle lanes or parks) for me when it's my turn.  I'm a bit more skeptical of this explanation but I throw it out there.

Maybe someone has a better explanation.

N.B.  Note that voters don't have to believe that population growth is good per se.  It might be enough if they believe that population decline relative to peer cities is bad.  If that's true, then lots of road building by peers would spur more road building here.

See the comment by Jim below, however.  He's got a much more sophisticated, empirical analysis.

We really do subsidize suburban growth

There's not much direct subsidy of suburban subdivisions -- developers pay for all interior roads and sidewalks, sewer and water hookups to City lines, and drainage and water retention facilities.  They pay steep fees for City reviews and inspections.  Depending on the size of the project, the City might require the developer to build on-site facilities like wastewater treatment plants.  The City charges impact fees on top of these costs, and also can make developers pay the cost of off-site improvements that are roughly proportionate to the development's impact.

The real subsidies are the large amounts of money we spend to construct and improve the arterials that serve the suburban developments.  Travis County has just proposed another such subsidy -- $133 million in bonds, mostly for new and expanded roads in the City's suburban fringes, particularly the rapidly developing northeastern part of the county: 

"Precinct 1 is where most of the action is occurring, and it has the greatest need," said Steve Manilla , county executive for transportation and natural resources. "Typically what happens is that development moves in, they do minimal improvement to the roads and then all hell breaks loose. We're trying to get ahead of the game."

The bond projects, which would be built over the next seven years, include six new roads and the design of a seventh; widening of seven other roads, typically from two lanes to four; rehabilitation of three aging bridges; and raising several other roads and low-water crossings to make it less likely that water will overtop the pavement.

The Statesman's graphic makes the point more vividly:

It is theoretically possible that these improvements could pay for themselves.  The roads will increase property values in these areas; higher property values mean higher property taxes.   But Travis County collects just 47 cents per $100 of assessed value.  Using reasonable assumptions, the present value of the future stream of county taxes generated by $100 assessed value is $9.4.  Thus, the roads must increase property values by around $1.4 billion to pay for the cost of construction.  But that doesn't include the annual cost of maintaining these roads.  If we assume the lifetime cost of maintenance equals the cost of construction, these roads must generate a net increase of $2.8 billion in property value to pay for themselves.  That's the equivalent of 15,000 $180,000 homes that would not be built but for the new roads.

According to a rigorous analysis I conducted by staring at the ceiling with my eyes closed, these roads won't yield anything close to that value.  This means the roads won't pay for themselves and the average Austine will be kicking in money to make up the difference.  I.e., a subsidy.

Internet wine purchases pose a clear and present danger to Texas consumers

Example #29 that Texas, despite its reputation as a hotbed of free-market conservatism, is no such thing.  Or at least its Legislature is not.  Nor -- perhaps less surpisingly -- is its state bureaucracy:

Texas is putting a cork in wine shipments from a significant number of out-of-state retailers.

State officials have teamed up with FedEx, UPS and other shippers to ferret out wines being sent to Texas by websites that don't have proper permits.

That has prompted Wine.com and several other resellers to restrict sales to consumers in the Lone Star State.

Wine.com has 30,000 active customers statewide, CEO Rich Bergsund told the American-Statesman on Thursday. Those customers were notified via email this month that the company had halted shipments of wine to Texas.

Other sites not currently shipping wine to Texas include TheWineBuyer.com, WineBid.com, WineExpress.com and WineLibrary.com.

A law blocking the deliveries isn't new, but the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has ratcheted up enforcement efforts this year.

"Anybody who is going to sell to Texans has to have a permit," TABC spokeswoman Carolyn Beck said.

You might ask, So what?  In-state retailers must get permits.  It's only fair to require out-of-state sellers to do the same.

The catch is that out-of-state sellers can't get permits:

And, right now, Beck said, there's no law enabling out-of-state resellers to obtain permits allowing them to sell wine here. "They haven't been authorized by the Legislature," she said.

In March, TABC investigators reviewed reports submitted by shipping companies and identified about 51,000 wine deliveries from 177 firms thought to be improperly sending wine to Texans, Beck said.

By June, increased TABC scrutiny had helped drop that number to about 35,000 wine shipments from 112 resellers.

TABC doesn't even try to justify this as a consumer protection measure.  And it's obviously not.  Buying wine from Wine.com poses no more threat to health and safety than buying from the local liquor store.  The only ones who benefit from such a rule are Texas wine wholesalers and retailers.  Texas consumers lose access to greater variety and lower prices as wine merchants squelch an incipient source of competition.

Alcohol peddlers are damned good at protecting their market. 

Although I'm not a libertarian by any measure, I confess that I have certain . . . tendencies.  And I think we'd all be better off if voters would presume that every permitting requirement is an anti-competitive, anti-consumer measure until the state to proves otherwise. 

Thankfully, Texas booksellers didn't have the political clout wielded by wine merchants and wholesalers when Amazon was getting off the ground back in the 1990s, else the State would have banned buying books off the internet, too.

/rant