Austin Contrarian

The social function of NIMBYs

Matthew Kiefer is a Boston real estate and land use lawyer who obviously has spent a lot of time in the trenches of the development wars.  The man knows NIMBYs.  Newgeography has published his piece on the social function of NIMBYism, and it contains one of the best clinical descriptions of NIMBYs that I've read.  Read the whole thing, but here is a sample:

There are good reasons why NIMBYism is so pervasive (more about that later), but it is hard to witness firsthand, say at a neighborhood meeting about a proposed condominium project. First, people complain that they did not get notice of the meeting – yet they are in attendance, so what are we to make of that? Others voice complaints that seem embarrassingly trivial to air in public in a voice quivering with outrage: the developer’s trucks are muddy or the project description misspells the name of their street. General complaints emerge about neighborhood-wide conditions that are somehow now the developer’s responsibility to address. These throat-clearing denunciations are a way to limber up for the main event, which is to dismantle the actual proposal and its proponent in any way possible.

The project-specific complaints follow familiar patterns too. The traffic in every neighborhood is, apparently, already intolerable, no matter what the transportation consultants say about “level of service.” The project will only worsen it, infringing upon residents’ inalienable right to uncongested streets.

For large-scale urban projects, the second most prevalent objection is against building height, which often becomes the currency in which trades are made. For the neighbors, height is a signifier of all other impacts. For the developer, height is directly proportional to financial feasibility. So it rapidly becomes a zero sum game, which in turn leads to gamesmanship. The developer leads with a proposal which is taller than needed, to have something to trade with; the neighbors come to understand and even expect this and accuse the developer of duplicity. Sometimes the developer overplays the opening hand by asking for a height which is deemed scandalous, thereby lighting a fire that can never be extinguished.

A third leitmotif is view. Virtually all residents believe that the Constitution protects the view from every window of their homes. Sometimes the developer (or a public official in attendance) will note that views generally are not protected as a matter of property law or by zoning ordinance, but this only further inflames the aggrieved party. The neighbors often elevate their personal views and lifestyle preferences to universal policy imperatives and are incensed if public agencies do not vindicate them. They view public officials as complicit if they express support for the developer’s position, so the officials retreat to the sidelines until the combat subsides.

Length of tenure in the neighborhood often shapes the neighbors’ advocacy. Longer-term residents will recite their credentials: “I was born and raised on _______Street” or “I’ve lived here since____.” to give their views more weight. Their opposition is often poignant: they seem to want to preserve their immediate surroundings in the condition in which they first encountered them, maybe in childhood. Newcomers, with the zeal of recent converts, are often the most vocal in resisting change to the neighborhood they have just discovered.

Some projects attract attention from advocacy groups concerned about affordable housing, historic preservation, open space, waterfront access, or sustainable design, but most opposition comes from those with a close geographic interest. While issue-oriented advocates tend to be progressive in their politics, NIMBYs come in every political stripe. Some are progressives who see their advocacy as a form of environmental protection they are bestowing on their unempowered neighbors. Some are middle-class burghers protecting the safety and stability of the neighborhood. Even libertarians justify opposing development as an infringement on their right to be left alone. It is rare to encounter vocal neighbors whose political views or personal values counteract the visceral sense that their very way of life is being threatened. Nobody, it seems, is precluded from principled opposition, no matter what their principles are.

But Kiefer ultimately concludes that, despite its ugliness, NIMBYism serves an important social function by mediating between new and old development:

In an improvised and very democratic way, it forces mitigation measures to be considered, distributes project impacts, protects property values, and helps people adjust to change in their surroundings. It is a corrective mechanism that, if allowed to function properly, can even help to preserve a constituency for development.

He argues that giving neighbors some control (where feasible) of project design, in order to mitigate the worst impacts, and requiring developers to provide neighbors in-kind compensation (e.g., park improvements) is the best way to assuage NIMBYs' fears.  

This is where Kiefer and I part ways.  NIMBYism would be efficient in a world where developers enjoyed all the benefits and neighbors bore all the costs of new development.  In such a world, bargains between developers and neighbors would ensure that only projects with a net benefit got built.  When a project's benefits to the developer exceeded the cost to the neighbors, the developer would modify the design as necessary and offer compensation to the neighborhood.  When the project's costs to the neighbors exceeded its benefits to the developer, the neighbors would reject all offers, and the project would not get built. 

We don't live in that world.  New development often has important social benefits that are not captured in the developer's pro formas.  A steady supply of new housing keeps homes cheap, or at least keeps home prices from spiraling upward.  New development means more room for more people.  More people means a larger, deeper market that permits more specialized retail, restaurants, music and arts.  More office space means more room for firms and workers to cluster together; these cluster make both firms and workers more productive.  A software developer will be more productive in Austin or San Jose than in San Angelo because a lot of learning takes place just by hanging around with other people in the same trade.

There are increasing returns to growth.  This isn't to say that all growth is good.  But there is good evidence that some cities are much smaller than they ought to be, thanks to the limits on growth imposed by institutionalized NIMBYism.

Developers worry about their bottom line.  That bottom line does not include the spillover benefits to the city of an additional office building, warehouse or housing development.   If we rely soely on bargaining between developers and neighbors to decide what gets built, we guarantee that too little gets built.  This is how a city like San Francisco ends up with a median home price of $750,000 (even in 2008's market).  Cities like San Francisco and New York (and probably Austin) are too small, and institutionalized NIMBYism is mostly to blame.  

Big-box experiments

Wendy Waters recounts Costco's attempt to break into the Manhattan market. A coalition of neighborhood activists, labor groups and (almost certainly) local businesses are trying to repel Costco's foray. While their agendas are transparent, the arguments they've trotted out are mostly of the, "It won't work here, so don't try" variety. Wendy does a nice job dissecting them.

I once thought that these fights in far-off cities didn't really affect me. I felt a little schadenfreude, but that was about it.

But now I think differently. And not just because Austin jumped on the bandwagon, or the Northcross Supercenter fight. As Tory Gattis has cogently argued, perhaps the real obstacle to New Urbanist development -- really, the development of a lower-case "u" urban city fabric that can attract a more diverse range of households -- is the lack of large-scale, big-box retail that offers people the variety and bargains they want. One doesn't even have to believe in the virtues of a denser urban environment.  Nor does one have to believe (wrongly) that people will walk or bike to them. No, it's simply a matter of "I want what the suburbanites got, but I don't want to move to the suburbs to get it." The city needs to offer the conveniences of the suburbs.

Costco and Wal-Mart and Home Depot don't know how to build urban stores -- yet. They need to experiment to get it right. They have to learn how to handle parking, how to build up rather than out, how to cater to the slightly different tastes of urban dwellers. They have to learn how to fit a big store in a dense city.

They are trying to experiment.   But they need to experiment in the right places.  Wal-Mart evidently pulled the plug on its Austin experiment, despite beating the neighborhood opposition, because it wasn't confident the urban model would work at Northcross.  It and the other big boxes first need to learn how to build urban stores in truly urban places.  So now, when I hear that San Francisco or Chicago or Manhattan has fought off another big box, I think, "Another experiment squelched before it hit the lab." If Costco or Sam's Club could get enough chances, in enough dense cities, they just might bee able to figure out what works. The cities that ought to be hosting the experiments, unfortunately, have closed the labs.

Photoblogging Guadalupe's parking lots

At the Congress for the New Urbanism in April, Stefanos Polyzoides described Austin's downtown as "scarred."  Austin's downtown is littered with parking lots and parking garages that have turned large swaths into dead space, hostile soil for a lively cityscape. 

I was reminded of Polyzoides's comment the other day driving down Guadalupe.  Guadalupe, one of downtown's principal corridors, has 11 parking lots between 3rd and 13th (and that's generous:  I didn't count two drive-through banks or another parking garage with office space above it).   

View Larger Map

Some glum photos below the jump.

What can we do about it?  Probably nothing (so maybe there's no real point to this entry).  There is only so much demand for retail and residential downtown.  They complement one another so, for now, it's good that they are clumping together along Second Street and Congress Avenue. 

New Urbanist NIMBYism

A reminder that NIMBYism really has nothing to do with homeowners' preferences for one kind of development over another.  It's all about managing threats to property values: 

Remember Seaside, the famous New Urbanist development by Andres Duany on the Florida panhandle -- symbol of the new approach to development and community?  Another developer had the idea to create the same thing on a site next door, to be given the unfortunate name Watercolor but to be built according to the very same principles of New Urbanism that made Seaside so successful . . . In keeping with the spirit of connected streets -- versus dead ends and cul-de-sacs -- Watercolor sensibly proposed running its streets right up to the end of Seaside's streets, creating a seamless flow in the fabric and the grid.  But the residents of Seaside wanted nothing to do with the idea.  They didn't want their streets connected with Watercolor's streets.  They were perfectly happy in their isolation, as a stand-alone community that had functioned internally quite well before this unwanted new neighbor came along.  The paragon of density saw its mirror image and was resolute:  not in my backyard.

This from Anthony Flint's This Land:  The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America.

The only way to interpret this sad little anecdote is that the Seaside residents were afraid the new development would dilute the Seaside "brand," and reduce their property values in the process.

Update:  An apparently knowledgeable commenter says it wasn't NIMBYism at all, just that Watercolor wasn't going to be a very good development.

Fire James Kunstler*

A couple of days ago, Freakonomics' Stephen Dubner hosted a round-table on the future of suburbia.   As happens too often, James "sackcloth-and-ashes" Kunstler got a seat.

Kunstler doesn't like cities, suburbs, or any other large agglomeration of people so he fantasizes that high gas prices will extinguish them.  He's a jumble of apocalyptic prophecies, loony economics, and . . . Well, I could tell you, but it is better just to show you.

Here is Kunstler's Freakonomics piece; my comments are in bold.  

There are many ways of describing the fiasco of suburbia, but these days I refer to it as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.

Personally, I would have gone with World War II — trillions of dollars allocated to the slaughter of 50-60 million people.  But, sure, I can see how building lots of tract housing would be a close second.

I say this because American suburbia requires an infinite supply of cheap energy —

I suspect that Kunstler actually hails from one of those isolated New Guinea tribes discovered in the 1960s who use the word “many” for any number greater than three.  Kunstler doesn’t know any meaningful way to describe how much energy our suburbs actually use, so he just says “infinite,” which is the Kunstler tribe’s word for “too much” —

. . . in order to function and we have now entered a permanent global energy crisis that will change the whole equation of daily life. Having poured a half-century of our national wealth into a living arrangement with no future — and linked our very identity with it — we have provoked a powerful psychology of previous investment . . .

“provoked a powerful psychology of previous investment”?  Jimmy’s been reading Derrida, or somebody.  Maybe this person.

. . . that will make it difficult for us to let go, change our behavior, and make other arrangements.

Compounding the problem is the fact that we ditched our manufacturing economy . . .

We certainly wouldn't be in the mess we’re in if most of us were still employed manufacturing automobiles, refrigerators, and barbecue grills. 

. . .. for a suburban sprawl building economy (a.k.a. “the housing bubble”), meaning we came to base our economy on building even more stuff with no future.

We now have cold, hard evidence that Kunstler doesn’t know what he's talking about.  The “suburban sprawl building economy” is not “also known as” the “housing bubble”; the sprawl-building economy has been around for decades while the housing bubble is a phenomenon of the last few years.  And the housing bubble was least pronounced in some of the places that have the most suburbs (Dallas, Houston).  This man is deeply confused.  And about suburbia, the only thing he writes about.  

This is a hell of a problem, since it is at once economic, socio-political, and circumstantial. 

“Circumstantial?” He's lost me.

Here’s what I think will happen: First, we are in great danger of mounting a futile campaign to sustain the unsustainable, that is, of defending suburbia at all costs.

In fact, it is already underway. One symptom of this is that the only subject under discussion about our energy predicament is how can we keep running all our cars by other means. Even the leading environmentalists talk of little else.

Kunstler’s not reading the same environmentalists I am.  The environmentalists I read range from the sensible (impose a carbon tax) to the fringe who gleefully welcome the demise of the automobile.  I guess they are talking about the automobile, but they’re certainly not mounting a campaign to save it, which is what he implies.

We don’t get it. The Happy Motoring era is over. No combination of “alt” fuels — solar, wind, nuclear, tar sands, oil-shale, offshore drilling, used French-fry oil — will allow us to keep running the interstate highway system, Wal-Marts, and Walt Disney World.

Of course no combination of alt fuels can save us.  It takes an “infinite” amount of energy to run the highways, Wal-Marts and Walt Disney World, and we all know that the amount of energy in the universe is finite.

Does Disney World use that much energy, anyway?  I figured Disney would be leading the parade of green-washing corporations.  Anyway, it’s compact and walkable, which is what Kunstler wants.  Sure the rides use energy, but roller coasters use energy for only half the ride; the other half is free, courtesy of gravity.  We need more transportation that’s half free.  (I know this is bogus, folks, but Kunstlerites will never be able to figure out why.)

The automobile will be a diminishing presence in our lives, whether we like it or not.

Really, I don’t see why Disney World is a big problem.  Unless you believe that in the near-distant future, all interstate travel will be impossible, why would Disney World disappear? 

Further proof of our obdurate cluelessness in these matters is the absence of any public discussion about restoring the passenger railroad system — even as the airline industry is also visibly dying. The campaign to sustain suburbia and all its entitlements will result in a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources and capital.

I admit I haven’t been to Disney World in twenty-five years, but I liked it OK.  There’s supposed to be lots of cool new stuff, but I assume Epcot still sucks.

The suburbs have three destinies, none of them exclusive: as materials salvage, as slums, and as ruins. In any case, the suburbs will lose value dramatically, both in terms of usefulness and financial investment.

Usefulness and financial investment, surprisingly, are correlated.

Most of the fabric of suburbia will not be “fixed” or retrofitted, in particular the residential subdivisions. They were built badly in the wrong places. We will have to return to traditional modes of inhabiting the landscape — villages, towns, and cities, composed of walkable neighborhoods and business districts — and the successful ones will have to exist in relation to a productive agricultural hinterland, because petro-agriculture (as represented by the infamous 3000-mile Caesar salad) is also now coming to an end.

That particular salad’s notoriety was richly deserved.  On its 3,000-mile joyride from Los Angeles to New York, it looted two banks, robbed three post offices, and terrorized the citizens of Topeka, all while burning 200,000 gallons of fuel and emitting 3.5 million metric tons of CO2.  But I think Mr. Kunstler is unfairly implying that all Caesar salads are bad actors; I've known lots of salads who've gone about their business conscientiously, day-in and day-out, and never strayed more than 100 miles from home.  Mr. Kunstler owes our produce an apology.

Fortunately, we have many under-activated small towns and small cities in favorable locations near waterways.

My home town in Mississippi was activated last year; it got stationed in Karbala.

This will be increasingly important as transport of goods by water regains importance.

We face an epochal demographic shift, but not the one that is commonly expected: from suburbs to big cities.  Rather, we are in for a reversal of the 200-year-long trend of people moving from the farms and small towns to the big cities.

Right.  Because the first thing people will do when the cost of transportation rises is move farther apart.

Oh, and I assume that’s a misprint in the second-to-last line; “200” should read “4000.” 

People will be moving to the smaller towns and smaller cities because they are more appropriately scaled to the limited energy diet of the future.

Energy ultimately matters because people use it to generate something of value to themselves or to others.  What we ought to care about is the amount of output one person can generate with one unit of energy, a concept I’m sure is totally out of Kunstler’s reach.

Big cities offer economies of scale that make people more productive.  That’s a fundamental reason why people live in them.  For example, Californians — large-city dwellers — have a per capita GDP about 50% higher than that of Mississippians, who mostly dwell in small towns.  Californians are much more productive than Mississippians, and a lot of that edge comes from living in big cities.

Thus, for Mississippians to generate more output per unit of energy consumed, they have to use much less energy per capita than Californians.  Now, there’s no reason to expect this to be true because there is no reason to expect small towns to be more energy-efficient than big cities:  (1)  small towns are less dense than big cities, and thus require more infrastructure — particularly roads – per inhabitant; (2) there’s no mass transit in small towns, and it’s not economical to install it; (3) there are fewer economies of scale in small towns — it doesn’t take 10 times as much energy to treat water for 10 times as many people.  About the only thing you can say for small towns, from the “circumstantial of energy conservation psychology,” is that they’re less congested. 

And, surprise, the data bear this out.  In 2005, California had more than 12 times as many people as Mississippi, but California as a whole consumed only 8 times as much energy as Mississippi.  This means that Mississippians used 50% more energy per capita than Californians.  The city-dwelling Californians’ superior energy efficiency and their superior productivity combine to make them twice as productive, per unit of energy, than small-town-dwelling Mississippians.

When a resource like energy becomes more expensive, the market automatically directs it to more productive uses, not less productive.  More productive uses outbid less productive uses.  If Kunstler knew the first thing about economics or cities, he’d know that rising energy costs will encourage people to move from small towns to big cities, not the other way around.

I believe our big cities will contract substantially — even if they densify back around their old cores and waterfronts. They are products, largely, of the 20th-century cheap energy fiesta and they will be starved in the decades ahead.

No, suburbs may depend on cheap energy, but our cities are largely products of economies of scale.  See above.

One popular current fantasy I hear often is that apartment towers are the “greenest” mode of human habitation.

Harvard urban economist Ed Glaeser is one of these fantasists.  Glaeser is a lot smarter than me, and all evidence indicates that I’m a lot smarter than Kunstler.  With a nod to the principle of transitivity, my money’s on Glaeser.  (Glaeser at least knows what “infinite” means.)

On the contrary, we will discover that the skyscraper is an obsolete building type, and that cities overburdened with them will suffer a huge liability — Manhattan and Chicago being the primary examples. Cities composed mostly of suburban-type fabric — Houston, Atlanta, Orlando, et al — will also depreciate sharply.

Structures depreciate.  Cities grow or shrink.  “Fabric” doesn’t do either.

The process of urban contraction is likely to be complicated by ethnic tensions and social disorder.

Kunstler apparently views denser, better-integrated neighborhoods as apocalyptic. 

As petro-agriculture implodes, we’ll have to raise our food differently, closer to home, and at a finer and smaller scale.

Speaking of fantasies, this one is popular among the peasant wing of the environmentalist movement.  As energy becomes more expensive, it will become more important, not less, to take advantage of economies of scale in agriculture.  Serfs with scythes and oxen aren’t very productive.  There’s a reason urbanization has always been tied to agriculture productivity.

This new agricultural landscape will be inhabited differently, since farming will require more human attention. The places that are not able to grow enough food locally are not likely to make it. Phoenix and Las Vegas will be shadows of what they are now, if they exist at all.

I’ve explained before why the “local food” movement is misguided, at least when energy efficiency is the concern.

These days, an awful lot of people — the production builders, the realtors — are waiting for the “bottom” in the real-estate industry with hopes that the suburban house-building orgy will resume. They are waiting in vain. The project of suburbia is over. We will build no more of it.

If I can point him to a subdivision now under construction, do you think he’ll agree to go away?

Now we’re stuck with what’s there. Sometimes whole societies make unfortunate decisions or go down tragic pathways. Suburbia was ours.

I think I'm beginning to get this guy.  Kunstler, I think, has turned himself into a cottage industry by making flamboyant, absurd predictions that he frankly has no interest in verifying.  He’s less interested in his claims' veracity than their sound-bitedness.  That sells more books.

People like Dubner should stop giving this guy a platform.

*See here for the reference.

Hypescore

There's a lot of buzz over Walk Score, the site that rates neighborhood walkability.  Using a Google-sitic algorithm, it first tallies the restaurants, coffee shops and other destinations near a given address and then gives them a numerical weight based on their distance from the address.  Neighborhoods with interior retail tend to score high; neighborhoods without interior retail tend to score low. 

 

Walk Score has been around a while, but it has gotten a lot of publicity recently over its "most walkable cities" list.  (As Forbes, Men's Health, and Maxim have shown, you can't go wrong with a "top American cities" list.)  Austin ranked a mediocre 29th among the 40 largest American cities.  Cue anguished nail-biting.

While I agree that Austin is not very walkable, I don't think Walk Score provides a meaningful metric.  Take its ranking of Austin's neighborhoods.  Downtown and West Campus, not surprisingly, get the top scores, and both are quite walkable.  But a neighborhood's Walk Score doesn't really tell you anything about whether the neighborhood is a decent place to walk because it doesn't account for sidewalks, shade, or traffic.  Ignoring a neighborhood's urban form can yield some funny ratings.

For example, Walk Score's map of Austin paints the neighborhoods along Research Boulevard a walkable green:

I'm pretty sure no one's walking to the restaurants and strip malls on the 183 frontage roads. 

My neighborhood (South Lamar) scores a "somewhat walkable" 61, which sounds low for an older neighborhood just a couple miles from downtown.  But it's really too high.  None of my neighborhood's three main interior streets -- Clawson, Del Curto, or Thornton -- has a sidewalk.  Even if you make it to South Lamar, there is precious little on our side of the street -- and God help you if you want to cross the street.  Unless you're walking to Taco Xpress, Walgreen's or the bus stop, you've got slim pickings. 

The best advice is probably on the site's FAQ's:

You should use the Web 3.0 app called "going outside and investigating the world for yourself" before deciding whether a neighborhood is walkable!

Freeing up space for others

Katherine Gregor at the Chronicle covered the opening of the 360 condos in downtown Austin last week.  Embedded in the ogling coverage of the "thirtysomething lovelies" was this interesting fact:  75% of 360's buyers are Austin residents.   360 has 430 units, which means that Austin residents have taken around 320 of the units.  

This confirms a point I have made before.  It's a counter-intuitive point, I admit, but then it's usually taught only in courses on quantum mechanics -- and, in fact, was  confirmed just last year after exhaustive high-energy particle experiments at the Fermi supercollider:  Downtown condos buyers don't vanish into another dimension when they can't get a loft downtown. They remain corporeal.  They continue to occupy space.  They live somewhere else. 

For 320 of 360's buyers, that "somewhere else" has been Austin.  Where in Austin?  We don't know for sure, but my guess is that condo buyers who can afford $300,000+ condos and condo association dues of $0.33/s.f. probably haven't been living at the Bachelor Arms.  Given their their proven willingness to pay for being near the action, most probably haven't been living in the 'burbs.  More than likely, they are vacating housing in central Austin.   

The new supply 360 has brougt on line will open up at least 320 other units in the Austin market, either owner-occupied or rental.  That is a lot of new housing.  If you want something to measure that by, there were fewer than 300 home sales in all of central Austin in March 2008 -- and that includes 10N and 10S, which most people don't consider "central" Austin.

The best thing you can do for young families is to give their competition -- the affluent singles and couples without kids -- options for other housing.  That automatically gives families with children a better shot at getting into central Austin. That's a better strategy for getting families into central Austin then mandating affordable housing in condos that cost several hundred dollars per square feet to build.   Thus, even if the sight of a thirtysomething hipster makes your leg twitch and triggers an autonomic sneer, recognize that these condos help the housing market (unless you think housing should be more rather than less expensive).  Welcome the condos.  Don't bash them. 

PS:  I know there are plenty of singles and couples who want a single-family home and would never, not in a million years, not with a gun to their heads, ever consider buying a condo.  That's OK.  Really.  This isn't a criticism of individual preferences.  I'm talking about aggregate effects.

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?

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.

Baby steps toward new urbanism

The City Council has shown that it will spend money on new urbanist projects.  It is about to commit itself to investing millions of dollars to the Seaholm redevelopment.  It's spent who knows how much just planning for transit-oriented development around Cap Metro's commuter rail stations; it will take millions in infrastructure investment to spur the development the city wants.  Then there are Mueller and the Domain.  New urbanism can be expensive, but Council is willing to spend the dough.

Let me suggest my own new urbanist project (again).  It might not be as glitzy as the ones listed above, but I think it will yield a good return on investment (and I'm pretty sure that Andres Duany would approve):

Break up the super-blocks on South Congress and South Lamar.

Neither street may appear to have many super-blocks if you go solely by nominal block length.  The nominal block lengths are misleading, though.  When a street carries 38,000+ cars a day (S. Lamar) or 30,000+ cars a day (S. Congress), it is almost impossible to walk across it without a traffic light or signaled cross-walk.  The effective block length is the distance between street lights.  (And, no, the pedestrian "islands" on S. Congress made of giant tinker-toys don't count.)

Here are three of the South Lamar super-blocks:

• Lamar Square to Hether/W. Mary:  0.45 miles
• Oltorf to Bluebonnet:  0.45 miles
• Barton Skyway to Panther Trail:  0.54 miles

If you want to cross the street from the middle of one of these super-blocks, you have three choices:  (1) walk at least 0.4 miles out of your way to cross at a light; (2) dash into the center turn lane and hope you aren't run over before the traffic slows to a trickle; or (3) don't cross the street.

These aren't suburban frontage roads; these are South Austin's core streets and the gateways to downtown.  It is absurd for the city to treat them simply as commuter arterials. 

I'm not arguing that the City should interfere with rush-hour traffic; these are important commuter arterials.  Feel free to synchronize the new lights to maintain traffic flow.  But it's time to recognize that these streets serve not only commuters, they serve -- or ought to serve -- pedestrians as well.  Let's pick some of the low-hanging fruit.