Austin Contrarian

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.

CNU looks at Austin's downtown

Blogging hiatus is over.  (Please don't e-mail me to tell me you hadn't noticed a hiatus.)  Sometimes my volunteer legal work gets in the way of my paid blogging . . .

The Congress for New Urbanism held its annual convention in Austin last week.  As is usually the case when something cool is going on -- SXSW, the Austin Film Festival, Jaws at the Paramount -- I was frightfully busy at work, so I only made it to a couple of the Saturday sessions. 

Each time slot had several concurrent sessions with enticing titles.  I picked "Tall Towers:  Purposeful Density or Loose Tower Disease?"  The program guide offered this teaser:

Is the current movement of returning downtown to live in towers promoting livable cities, or are such towers a blight on urbanism? Who is right? Hear and ponder three points of view: No tall buildings; managed districts based on specific criteria, i.e., viewsheds, etc.; and the more density the better.

A Mueller update

Some photos below the fold.

A level playing field for cities

Urban economist Ed Glaeser argues that cities should get a level playing field:

Does the special role that cities play in the economy and society mean that cities need special treatment from state and national governments? No. Cities are strong. Give them a level playing field and they can compete robustly. However, cities shouldn't have to face a policy deck stacked against urban living. Urban firms and residents shouldn't have to pay a disproportionate share of the taxes needed to care for disadvantaged Americans. Suburbanites shouldn't get a free pass on the environmental damage created by a car-based lifestyle.

How are city residents unfairly taxed? For centuries, cities have disproportionately attracted the poor. In the 2000 Census, 19.9 percent of city residents were poor; only 7.5 percent of suburban residents lived in poverty.

Urban poverty does not reflect urban failure, but rather the enduring appeal of cities to the less fortunate. Poor people come to cities because urban areas offer economic opportunity, better social services, and the chance to get by without an automobile. Yet the sheer numbers of urban poor make it more costly to provide basic city services, like education and safety, and those costs are borne by the city's more prosperous residents. Taking care of America's poor should be the responsibility of all Americans. When we ask urban residents to pick up the tab for educating the urban poor, then we are imposing an unfair tax on those residents. That tax artificially restricts the growth of our dynamic cities.

I'm one of Glaeser's big fans.  He's exactly 83.4 times smarter than I am.  Still, I disagree with the italicized sentence.  Urban residents who heft additional tax burdens should be getting value in return.  If they aren't, they have the option of exit (except for the transit-dependent poor).  The higher costs should be capitalized into property value.  Lowering tax burdens would likely just make the fixed supply of urban property more valuable.  Tyler Cowen puts it better:

If there is any unfairness, maybe it is toward the people can't afford to live in desirable cities but would like to.  If we lower the property tax burden in cities, rents will rise and this problem will become worse rather than better.  The more general point is that urban land owners, not all residents, benefit disproportionately from good policy changes.  Urban improvements have unfair distributional effects by the very nature of city land.

Here's my two cents:  Adjusting the relative tax burdens and pricing externalities is not really a matter of fairness to urban residents.  But "anti-city" policies such as free roads and high tax burdens do deflect growth from the cities to the suburbs.  They dampen city growth or, worse, trigger a spiral of decline.  And that's a bad thing because of all of the positive things cities generate.

Our pro-suburban policies may not be bad for city residents, but they are bad for cities.

West Campus development

I've prepared a Google map charting the VMU development in the West Campus area.  It's a work in progress.  Most of the markers have only the name of the project and the number of units.  I intend to update the map with photos and other information.

Until I figure out how to embed a Google map, I will have to content myself with screen shots.  In the maps below, the blue markers/shading indicate the project is under construction.  The red markers/shading indicate the project has been completed.

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North West Campus

South West Campus

A Rorschach test for density

Take a look at this photo of Budapest from The Overhead Wire (republished with permission):

What's your gut reaction to it?

Do you see a place that is visually interesting, energizing, and socially, culturally and intellectually stimulating?

Or do you see congestion, overcrowding, noise, crime, and lack of privacy?

My guess is that you could accurately predict a person's stand on most land-use issues by his gut reaction to this picture.

This might also explain the dynamics of single-family neighborhood opposition to new density nearby.  Most single-family homeowners are highly risk-averse, which makes them anxious about dense development.  Some of these homeowners have a visceral distaste for density.  Others have an equally visceral, positive reaction to it.  You end up with one group that is anxious about home values and that dislikes density, and another group that is anxious about home values but likes density.  The first group intensely opposes the development, while the second (probably smaller) group is more ambivalent, even if it supports it on balance.  Presto!  Neighborhood opposition.

OK, nothing profound here.  I really just liked the picture.

"High density" is a relative term

From The Spatial Organization of Cities: Deliberate Outcome or Unforeseen Consequences? by Alain Bertaud:

Richard Florida says the Internet hurts place-based interaction

I usually agree with Richard Florida's perspective on urban issues, but not here, where he argues that technology (particularly the Internet) tends to curb our interaction with our own neighborhoods and cities: 

If I'm writing this blog (something I love to do), I'm not mixing and mingling on the street, if I order my groceries from an on-line store, I'm less likely to go to the store.  All of these things lessen and limit human interaction.  Of course, they increase the efficient allocation of time. But they also limit real, human contact, and the chance of random happenstance interactions. Heck, my GPS makes it less likely I'll ask for directions; my on-line catalogue and reviews give me little need to ask a shop-owner for advice. Technology makes me more house-bound (something I sort of like) and yes more efficient at work. I can go to the office less, the store less. I can "work" more, interacting with people and commerice on-line.  My main source of human energy are my walks in the ravine. As beautiful as it is, it's certainly not Hudson Street. The internet and the social media, for all the great things they bring, damp down human interaction and certainly limit the chances of random connections. I'm a big fan of all this, don't get me wrong, but I think the effects on places, cities and communities cut several ways.

Face-to-face communication may be richer, but interaction online is still human interaction no matter how one defines it.  The alternative to interaction online is frequently not face-to-face interaction, but none at all.  For example, I'm interested in land-use issues, but my wife just rolls her eyes whenever I bring them up; if I put the TV on the City Council channel, she'll just get up and leave the room.  My two-year-old cares about urban issues only when they involve trains.  My co-workers, at least the ones I see regularly, don't care either.  Without blogs, I wouldn't talk to anyone about this stuff; I would be interacting a lot less than I am.  (And how much more random could the connections you make online be?)   

Plus, it's not like I spent my time before blogs hanging over the fence gossiping with neighbors.  The time I spend online is mostly time I used to spend watching TV or reading.  I go out about as often as before, I just spend my time inside differently. 

But even if the Internet reduces "place-based" interaction, is that necessarily a bad thing?  Don't get me wrong:  face-to-face communication is valuable, and most people crave it to one degree or another.  But there's also a lot of drudgery in having to interact with people just because they're at hand. One of the good things about growing up was getting more control over whom I had to interact with.  I had no freedom at all when I was in elementary school.  Whom I walked to school or shared classes with was dictated by place -- whomever happened to live nearby -- rather than congeniality.  Things were a bit better in junior high and high school when I got a little say over class scheduling and extra-curricular activities, and thus some control over whom I associated with.  Things got even better in college and, for me, better yet in law school and work.

Online interaction is just an extension and intensification of this happy trend.  I interact with people who share my interests, if not my opinions.  I "bump" into strangers who have interesting points of view.  I'm exposed to things that I never knew existed.  If that means one fewer conversation about the weather now and then, that's fine with me.

Update:  Richard Florida's rebuttal.

Density Bonuses II: Why downtown high rises are so valuable

In a past post, I discussed the density-bonus plan being floated around City Hall.  (Council will consider the Downtown Design Commission's recommendation tonight.)  I'll discuss density bonuses in more detail in future posts.  But the gist is that the City is considering charging developers more -- possibly millions more -- to develop high-rise condominiums and office buildings. 

It seems to me that the people who are pushing density bonuses have their analysis backward.  They start by trying to figure out what additional concessions the City can extract from new development.  But I think it's smarter to start by figuring out what downtown high rises already provide.  Imposing millions of dollars of special obligations on new high rises will discourage the marginal ones; we need to know what we stand to lose.   

So let's get to it.  The three main benefits of downtown condos are housing, the property tax windfall, and the development of an urban environment.