Austin Contrarian

Where are the New Urbanist developments?

(Sorry for the funky look below -- but Typepad changed the blog template on me without my choice and I haven't figured out how to restore my defaults yet.)

City Journal had a piece recently on New Urbanism.  I found this passage particularly interesting:

After more than a quarter-century of New Urbanism, proclaimed Stefanos Polyzoides--who, with his wife Elizabeth Moule, heads a top-flight urban-design practice in Pasadena, California--"there's no indication that the system of building in this country is even dented." In other words, sprawl still reigns, and so do the sundry forms of architectural dysfunction afflicting the nation's public realm. The New Urbanists have changed the conversation, but they haven't changed the world. At least, not yet.

One of the things I've always liked about the New Urbanists is their cockiness, their professed willingness to compete in the marketplace.  Their attitude is, "We've got a better product."  It's just a matter of lowering the barriers.

But Polyzoides' statement raises an interesting question:  Why aren't there more New Urbanist projects?

I try hard not to project my own preferences onto others.  But I find it hard to believe that the typical person prefers this:

 

to this (which is not an actual New Urbanist development, but illustrates what New Urbanism is trying to recreate*):

 

There are new New Urbanist projects, especially smaller infill projects, but why aren't new village-scale projects being built left and right in places like Houston or Dallas? 

Here are the barriers I see to large-scale New Urbanist projects:

1. Anachronistic zoning codes.
2. NIMBYism, as colorfully detailed in Witold Rybczynski's Last Harvest.
3. Builder comfort.  It's easier for mass-production and strip-mall builders to develop standard the standard suburban pod.
4. Lender comfort.  Lenders exercise a lot of de facto control, and it's easier for them to pencil out a standard pod development than a complicated beast like a New Urbanist development.  Lenders consequently require less upfront equity for standard developments than complicated mixed-use developments.
5. Complexity.  An NU development has a lot of pieces that must be coordinated in subtle ways.  This requires more design up front and longer lead times.  It translates into higher costs.
6. Subsidies of alternative development patterns.  Special depreciation rules for strip malls, for example.  (Since we're talking about greenfield developments here, I think highway subsidies are less important.)

I'd like to believe that if these barriers were lowered through more flexible zoning and greater neighbor, builder and lender comfort, we'd see more developments.  But, as always with land-use issues, things are not quite so clear-cut.  Here are some arguments why the barriers above might not be as impenetrable as they appear:

1. Zoning codes can be changed if there is popular support for changing them.  Zoning often (but not always!) follows the market.  If people are clamoring for NU projects, then there should be a willingness by governments to change the codes.
2. New Urbanism has been around for 25 years now, plenty of time to grow a crop of specialized NU builders and lenders comfortable with the product.  There are specialists but, for whatever reason, they have remained niche builders rather than become mass producers like Lennar.  
3. There is no way to eliminate the additional complexity.  But many NU principles are capable of standardization and with a stable of builders expert in single-family, multi-family and commercial/mixed-use development, it ought to be easier these days to put together a village-scale development.
4. NIMBYism is hard to eradicate, but it's less of a problem in the suburbs of Houston and Dallas than, say, in Orange County.

Perhaps most Americans don't really care about "place making."  We're a mobile society; the average American moves every six years or so.  That discourages investment in exterior, neighborhood amenities and encourages investment in interior amenities.  Maybe Americans don't want to spend a lot of time with their neighbors.  The New Urbanists assume Americans do, but while you can choose the class of your neighbors, you can't guarantee that you'll like them.  Perhaps for these reasons Americans aren't as willing to invest in "places," which means they're not willing to pay the New Urbanist premium.

My own belief is that development patterns take a very, very long time to change.  As the obstacles to New Urbanist developments continue to recede, we'll see more of them.  There is real demand for New Urbanist development, as evidenced by the prices they command.  In the end, though, we can't control demand; we can only level the playing field.

*I pulled the second photo from a pamphlet on New Urbanist design.  The photo unfortunately was not captioned.  Does anyone recognize the town?

Another feature of weighted density

Another in an occasional series on weighted density.

Below the jump I discuss a rather odd feature of weighted density:  It can fall even as a city's standard density rises.  This is truly a feature and not a bug, though, because it allows weighted density to yield some interesting information about how a city is growing.

Epilogue to the Game Warden Academy re-zoning case: City Council drops the ban on pedestrian/bicycle access

Hyde Park's attempt to bar pedestrian and bicycle access to the neighborhood from a new development on the Game Warden Academy site stirred up something of a hornet's nest.  (Note to neighborhood associations:  never piss off Austin's bicycle community.) 

The uproar evidently convinced the Hyde Park neighborhood association that the provision wouldn't fly when the zoning case went back before Council.  (The Chronicle's coverage is here.)  Rather than relent on pedestrian/bike access, the Hyde Park neighborhood association voted to retract its support for the development.  (See the comments to this post.)   

The case went back before Council last Thursday (May 15).  I missed the coverage on Channel 6, and for some reason the trascript of the meeting has not yet been posted on the City's web site.  City staff has confirmed, though, that Council approved the re-zoning 7-0 without the covenant barring pedestrian/bicycle access from the tract to Hyde Park.

It's good to see that Council did the right thing in the end.  It shouldn't have taken a bunch of angry e-mails, though. 

Ben Wear's Great Race

One of us has a good sense of timing. . . .

Ben Wear of the Statesman has conducted an, uh, "experiment" to determine whether SH 130 is faster than I-35 even in rush hour traffic.  His conclusion, based on what he admits is an unscientific sample of one:  I-35 is faster.

He and a colleague both started north of Georgetown at 7:15 a.m.  She took I-35 through Austin to FM 1327 south of town.  He took the new toll road.  He had to get on FM 1327 for the last few miles since SH 45, which will connect SH 130 to I-35, hasn't been completed.

She won.  She drove 43.3 miles in 45 minutes.  He drove 54.8 miles in 54 minutes, nine extra minutes.  Ergo, I-35 is faster (and cheaper).

Wear admits traffic may have been unusally light on I-35 that morning.  I think that's a bit of an understatement, but I'll leave that to others to pick apart.

I have another problem with his analysis, though, one that makes me think he's trying to stack the deck against the toll road.  It's a subtle thing, but it's annoying.

Wear's colleague describes a fight through stop-and-go traffic from Round Rock to Cameron Road, through one traffic snarl after another.  Wear describes a zip down the Autobahn.  Here's his description:

The drive on Texas 130 is predictably uneventful and stress-free. With only one car visible about a quarter mile ahead and none in the rearview mirror, I set the cruise control to 70 mph.

I will have to tap the brakes only once in the next 46.8 miles of toll road. Much of the time there are no cars within 100 yards of me, and I see less than two dozen 18-wheelers the whole trip. The view is mostly of cows, green fields and old farm buildings.

Wear still lost the race.  By nine minutes.  See?  I-35 kills SH 130 even though you get to fly down SH 130 at 70 mph.

But Wear only describes the first 46.8 miles of his trip, the part where he zipped along at 70 mph.  He doesn't really talk about the last 8 miles. 

Here's an algebra question:  Ben drives his Taurus 54.8 miles in 54 minutes.  He averages 70 mph for the first 46.8 miles.  What is his average speed for the last 8 miles?

Be sure to show your work.

If Okies can do it . . .

Oklahoma City plans to re-route an interstate highway away from downtown:

In Oklahoma City, the interstate will be moved five blocks from downtown to an old railroad line. The new 10-lane highway, expected to carry 120,000 vehicles daily, will be placed in a trench so deep that city streets can run atop it, as if the highway weren't there.

The old highway will be converted into a tree-lined boulevard city officials hope will become Oklahoma City's marquee street.

By tearing down the Crosstown Expressway, the city hopes to spur development of 80 city blocks stretching from downtown to the Oklahoma River — an area that contains vacant lots, car repair shops and a few small homes.

"We've always been a good place to live, but we've never had a city we could show off," Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett says. "Moving the expressway makes it possible for a day to come when hundreds or thousands of people will live downtown."

The project will cost $557 million, mostly federal and state funds. The city will pay to spruce up the boulevard, build parks and put a pedestrian bridge over the new below-ground interstate.

If Oklahoma City can do this, why not Austin? 

Sound familiar?

From the Seattle Times:

For every affluent urban area — whether it's San Francisco or New York or Boston — there comes a tipping point at which the people who give the city its character, who help make it so desirable, risk being priced out of their own creation.

Can Seattle really claim to be a livable city when the median home value is half a million dollars and so many who live here feel they may not be able to anymore?

"We live in the same place as the richest person in the world, and that's pretty unique," says Cone, 35. But with the area's wealth comes a trade-off for anyone whose name is not Bill Gates.

"I'm just glad I was able to buy a house," Cone says. "I feel like I just kind of squeaked in."

WHETHER SEATTLE has reached a tipping point is an open question, but for people like Cone it's a burning one.

A Seattle native and the child of artists, he grew up in the thick of things, hanging out at Pike Place Market, catching $1.50 movies at the old Coliseum Theater on Fifth Avenue.

Cone would go on to co-own World Pizza on Lenora Street between Second and Third avenues, a cult favorite with the same hipster clientele that made nearby establishments like the Crocodile Café popular stops on the then-burgeoning Belltown nightlife circuit in the early 1990s.

People who were fretting about the city's high cost of living in those days — as many who were watching districts like Belltown and Capitol Hill begin their rise to hipness did — surely had no idea how good they had it.

Today the old World Pizza location is a Starbucks, the Coliseum is a Banana Republic, the Crocodile has closed and Cone has fled the city center.

Cone and his former girlfriend, Alyssa Stevens, started an antiques business specializing in estate-sale items eight years ago. They opened in Pioneer Square, but moved the business to the industry-fringed Georgetown neighborhood last year to escape the district's parking woes and high rents.

Entrepreneurs like Cone, creative types and everyday workers are all hoping to make a stand on the cheaper fringes of the city to prevent being pushed out altogether. For some, that tipping point is dangerously close.

When asked about affordability in Seattle, the first thing Georgetown Records saleswoman Tina Forbes says is the story of so many who are disoriented and frustrated by the fast pace of change here: "I'm getting ready to leave — Portland, man!"

"We just keep getting pushed farther and farther south," Forbes says of people like her who've dealt with rising rents and apartments going condo, which has happened to her twice already.

"Seattle's gonna lose all of its cool people," Forbes says. "Developers need to slow... the heck ... down."

Things aren't quite this bad in Austin . . . yet.  I'd give us two, maybe three, years (assuming our economy holds together).   

But maybe I'm looking at things backward.  New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle are ultra-hip places.  There's really no evidence that running off low-income households, or forcing them into crowded housing, has made these cities any less desireable.  Perhaps we Austinites should be trying to emulate their success, rather than wringing our hands over rising home prices. 

Here's the agenda I'd propose for propelling Austin into the "Superstar City" pantheon:  (1) discourage the construction of traditionally affordable housing like garage apartments and duplexes; (2) restrict the amount of land available for multi-family housing; (3) strictly limit multi-family density; (4) limit the construction of upscale condos and townhomes in order to force affluent homebuyers to compete for the scarce supply of close-in housing; (5) ban small-lot and "urban home" zoning; (6) require property owners/developers who build dense developments to shoulder the financial burden for things like affordable housing, parks and infrastructure; and (7) impose onerous design standards to increase the cost of new construction.

We can call it the "progressive" agenda.  We'll be in the superstar ranks in no time.

Swamped

Really, really swamped.

It's frustrating because the Residential Development Standards Task Force is recommending some blog-worthy amendments (pdf) to the McMansion ordinance.

I can only muster the energy to quote.  My favorite recommendation will close that loophole for "massive" carports:

ISSUE

Parking area open on two or more sides:  Currently, if an applicant is proposing to construct a carport, they are allowed to take up to 450 sq ft from the FAR [floor-to-area ratio] calculation.  A carport is defined as a parking area that iS open on two or more sides, but the definition does not specifically state of [sic] how large the opening may be.  Many proposed carports have only partial openings which contribute mass to the structure.

TASK FORCE RECOMMENDATION

Give a specific measurement (percentage) of the opening of the carport.  The ordinance should state that in order to get the carport/parking exemption, the open sides of a carport must be clear and unobstructed by any materials for a minimum of 80% of the area measured below the top of the top wall plate to the finished floor of the carport.  RDCC can waive up to 25% of the required opening (80% can go to 60%).  (Section 2.8.1)

Want to put up a tasteful lattice on the side of that carport?  Nope, not even the RDCC can authorize it.  Get a bigger lot or build a smaller home.  We Austinites evidently prefer clear and unobstructed views of the neighbor's 1977 Gremlin to a little "mass" (a/k/a "a screen").