Did you bring enough housing for everybody?

When I was a kid, one of the things the teachers told us was that if you bring snacks or candy, you have to bring enough for everyone. If you don't, it winds up going mostly to your friends and excluding a lot of kids, which isn't fair.

I realized recently that this also applies to people who want to keep rents down through rent controls, not increasing the supply, like Tom Angotti:

At bottom, developers typically argue, the housing problem is all about supply and demand. Let us increase the supply, they say, and there will be more housing to go around for all. This, not rent regulation, will keep rents from rising. That’s good old trickle-down economics, which never works. Indeed, we’ve just come through a couple of decades in which the total housing supply has grown dramatically, and so have rents, but there was also a huge loss of low-rent housing. Over the last 20 years almost 250,000 units of rental housing were deregulated.

I want to give Angotti props for two things: unlike many rent control advocates, Angotti actually listens to people who advocate increasing the supply, and he takes the time to write an articulate response. So even though I'm criticizing his arguments, the same criticism is even more true of other people's arguments.

First of all, one sorta-valid question that Angotti raises: if total housing supply has increased (I don’t have the figures, but I’ll assume that it’s true), and rents have also increased, doesn’t that falsify the supply-side argument?

Well, no, because Angotti’s representation of "what developers typically argue" is inaccurate. I honestly don’t know what developers typically argue, because I’m not one and I don’t spend much time listening to them. But if the problem is all about supply and demand, then Angotti left out the demand side. A fairer statement of the argument would be "Let us increase the supply to match the demand, and there will be enough housing to go around for all."

If we phrase the proposal this way, we have to look at demand, and all signs point to a huge increase in the demand for New York’s walkable urban spaces and its well-paying jobs. But Angotti does not want to look at demand. Instead, he shrugs it off as a “speculative real estate fever.” He acknowledges that “the plan claims the city’s population is bound to increase in the next decade,” but argues, bizarrely, that the projected increase is not based on evidence of real demand but of demand induced by “the development of smaller housing units.” That is all he says about the demand side.

To people who currently rent in the city, Angotti’s blustering about "gentrification" and displacement may be comforting, but for me it rings hollow. I’m a fourth-generation New Yorker, but after college (two decades ago, which is as far back as Angotti goes in his piece), I couldn’t afford to live in the neighborhood I knew best, the Upper West Side. Even now, with a solidly middle-class family income, four of the neighborhoods that my family has called home are now out of my range.

Things might have been different if my parents had not done the back-to-the-land thing in the seventies. They might have been different if, when I spent a few years to go to school in another state, I had played the illegal sublet game instead of giving up my rent-stabilized apartment. They might have been different if one of my family members had gotten a bigger apartment for me to illegally inherit when he died. But as it is, my family has given up several rent-regulated apartments, and I am displaced, one of the victims that Angotti and his fellow rent-regulation advocates cry for, and the Upper West Side community is poorer because the studio I inherited there was too small for my family.

Except that I’m not one of the victims that Angotti cries for. My family didn’t live in any of these places for "decades and generations," but instead migrated around the metropolitan area, chasing dreams of suburban comfort, rustic peace and creative success across the generations. Because we left our rent-regulated apartments semi-voluntarily, I don’t count as one of Angotti's displaced. I have no right of return.

You know who else doesn’t matter in the world of the rent-regulation advocates? Immigrants from other countries, looking for cheap places to settle in the U.S. The talented and ambitious from other parts of the country, looking to make it in New York. The queer and the weird and the non-conforming, chased out of their tight-knit communities in small towns and suburbs. Anyone who wants to live without a car and not be part of a small, oppressed minority.

There is no housing for us, because the rent-regulation advocates didn’t bring enough for everybody. They only brought enough for their friends, those fortunate enough to be currently benefiting from rent regulation and subsidized housing. If I were their kindergarten teacher I would have a quiet talk with their parents after school.

Honestly, I’m fine: I have a nice co-op in Queens. But it’s the thought that counts, and the thought that we don’t count is pretty damn offensive. It leaves this old lefty fuming at the cozy club mentality that Angotti tries to dress up as justice.

Trains are not planes

I want to post an explanation for my last post, and an elaboration of some of the points I raised in it. Recently our senior senator has been making a push to increase "security" on intercity trains and buses. I haven't written very much on this topic before because frankly it makes my blood boil, and I'm afraid I'll wind up TYPING IN ALL CAPS and all my frustration will burst out in one big incoherent rant. The satire has helped me to vent a bit.

What is it that has me in this state? Mainly it's the combination of idiocies: delays and frustrations from security theater joining with monitoring of private activities to discourage transit ridership. It's a perfect storm of evil.

The first reason is that, as Adron explains, most "airport security" is actually ineffective. The biggest improvement in airline security since September 11 has been reinforcing the cockpit doors. John Gilmore made an excellent case that requiring identification to fly on airplanes is both ineffective and unconstitutional. The shoe inspections, backscatter machines and body cavity searches are unnecessary, ineffective and intrusive. Their main point is to convince us that the Government is Doing Something.

The next point is that trains and buses are not planes. By their nature they require much less security, and the kind of security is different. Anyone who acts like they're the same is an idiot, and Chuck Schumer regularly embarrasses the state of New York when he opens his mouth about transit security and lets the whole world see what an idiot we elected.

There's one major thing to keep in mind when anyone makes a comparison between trains and planes: it's easy to crash a plane into a building; you just have to take control. It's much harder to crash a train into a building. Not completely impossible, but almost. It's relatively easy to crash a bus into a building, but they tend to be smaller than planes and not filled with tons of kerosene, so they don't do as much damage.

Of course, it is possible to carry out mass murder on trains, as was done by Al Qaeda affiliates in Madrid in 2004, and in London in 2005. But there have not been any similar attacks since, and my guess is that the terrorist leaders didn't feel they were worthwhile. 191 people were killed in Madrid, and 56 in London; compare that to the 2,996 deaths that immediately resulted from the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. In fact, if you glance over Wikipedia's list of terrorist incidents involving railway systems, the numbers of dead and wounded are all really tiny in comparison to the World Trade Center attacks, despite requiring as much planning and coordination.

Similarly with buses, Palestinian suicide bombers carried out a series of widely reported attacks on buses from 1989 through 2008, and only managed to kill 804 people. Their biggest year was when they killed 237 people in 2002 - but it was done in 46 separate attacks, most of which were in cafes and markets, not on buses. These attacks have had an effect, but they required a lot of coordination and numerous operatives over a nineteen-year period. Most importantly, the attackers felt that they were defending their home territory, and did not have to travel far to do it.

So that's why the current airline security measures are ineffective, and why they would be even less effective applied to trains and buses. In a future post, I'll discuss how the current security measures are discouraging people from using transit, and why the proposed ones would be even worse.

Schumer calls for horse "no ride" list in wake of terror plot

Sen. Charles Schumer called today for the creation of a "No Ride List" for American horses to prevent suspected terrorists from targeting the US equine system.

Photo: John Haeger, Oneida Daily Dispatch

The move follows reports from intelligence gathered at Osama bin Laden's compound that showed the Arabian Horse Association was considering attacks on US horses.

In a press conference at his New York City office, Schumer said he will begin pushing congressional appropriators to increase funding for rectal inspections of commuter and passenger horse systems, as well as heightened monitoring and support for security at local horse stables throughout the country.

The Democratic senator said he also asked the Department of Homeland Security to expand its Secure Flight program to stables, which would essentially create a "No Ride List" to prevent suspected terrorists from mounting horses.

Intelligence analysts who examined the documents seized from bin Laden's compound in Pakistan concluded that al Qaeda was considering attacks on high-profile dates, including the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the conclusion of the State of the Union address and high traffic holidays such as Christmas and New Year's Day, Schumer said.

"We must remain vigilant in protecting ourselves from future terror attacks, and when intelligence emerges that provides insight into potential vulnerabilities, we must act with speed," Schumer said.

Under the current program for airlines, travelers' names and other identifying information are cross-checked with the terror watch list to select passengers for enhanced screening and prevent possible terrorists from boarding planes.

Schumer wants that program to be applied to stables when passengers purchase their passage before mounting the horse.

Schumer noted that the nation's horse system transported 90,000 passengers in 2010 and carries 90,000 passengers every day on 90,000 different horses.

Not all horseback riders were enamored of the plan. "Sounds like a big load of horseshit to me," said noted equestrian 'Cap'n' Ignatius R. Transit. "Like something you'd read in the Post."

The cost of sucky outreach

And the parson made it his text that week, and he said likewise
That a lie which is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies,
That a lie which is all a lie may be met and fought with outright,
But a lie which is part a truth is a harder matter to fight.

-Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Grandmother's Apology

Opponents of the Prospect Park West bike lane accuse the Department of Transportation of undermining the community review process in numerous ways: fudging the data, colluding with supporters, bait-and-switch tactics, disguising permanent changes as temporary trials, and other dirty tricks. Opponents of other changes, like the 34th Street Transitway, the Midtown pedestrian plazas, and various other bike, pedestrian and transit projects around the city have made similar accusations. Some committed transit, cycling and pedestrian advocates have even bought into this, echoing the idea that Commissioner Sadik-Khan is haughty, dismissive and contemptuous of the community.

This is a lie which is part a truth, which makes it a harder matter to fight than an outright lie. As I've written, the "fudged" data are actually perfectly sound, but not in the way usually presented by the DOT or its supporters. The Prospect Park West bike lane was developed in response to pressure for traffic calming and safer bike routes from a large bloc squarely in the mainstream of the community. The 34th Street Transitway was designed to serve the walking and bus-riding supermajority of the street's users. The DOT has gone out of its way to meet with stakeholders, holding meeting after meeting and offering incentives and compensations.

And yet... I don't know about you, but to me the DOT's process does seem top-down, offering a pretense of discussion while steering the group towards a pre-determined goal, and treating any concerns or objections as annoying obstacles to be cleared away. I had a discussion recently with a woman who knew very little about Prospect Park West, who was convinced that the DOT was imposing the project on the community. It "felt right," whether it was factually correct or not.

I think there are a few interconnected reasons for this perception. Part of it is that the DOT has a history of this kind of dissembling. Anyone familiar with the DOT's history knows that over the years it has come out with plans to suspend bike lanes on bridges, convert avenues to one-way traffic, narrow sidewalks and other nastiness. Once these plans are formed, only overwhelming opposition can stop them.

This is not Richard Malchow's DOT, or Chris Lynch's, and it's not Iris Weinshall's either. But it takes time to turn a battleship, and I'm sure the agency still has tons of dedicated, knowledgeable staff who hate public participation. One reason they hate it is that it's really, really hard. Many of them never had any training in how to do it right, and they're used to just barreling their way through. So they may try to start a discussion, but then when things get outside their comfort zone they retreat to what they know: rigidity and lip service.

Another reason the DOT sometimes seems unresponsive to the community is that "the community" isn't really the community. Go to any neighborhood in New York and you'll find half a dozen arrogant alterkockers who think that everyone in the area drives a car, hates any kind of noise and wants to preserve detached single-family housing for all eternity. If you ask them what the community wants, you'll get one answer. Poll the residents of the area, and you're likely to get a completely different answer. But these "community leaders" are so certain they represent the community that they feel no need to consult with anyone outside their own little echo chambers.

DOT planners know this very well by now. The ones who really care about community input will listen to a broad spectrum of voices in the neighborhood, and come up with a consensus plan that addresses the needs of all. But nothing pisses the "community leaders" off like bureaucrats not giving them special treatment, and they will actively work to undermine the consensus process. Jaded, impatient DOT planners have figured this out and will simply ignore the "community leaders" and barrel ahead with the plan.

The lie about the DOT ignoring public input is part a truth, and as Tennyson's parson said, it's a harder matter to fight. More democracy at the local level can help, and the City Council term limits have made a dent in this, but in the end the retired homeowners who have lived in the neighborhood for years have an advantage. Better trained planners at DOT will help too, but it will take time for the staff to turn over. In the meantime, the real community has to keep coming out over and over again and showing their support.

Rigorous data

Last week, fellow bloggers Brooklyn Spoke, Aaron Naparstek and I traded tweets with Daily News reporter Adam Lisberg over an article he wrote about the difficulty of "reporting rogue bikers." Aaron took Lisberg to task for making it a story about "bike wars" and not police enforcement or 311 reporting in general. Brooklyn Spoke and Howard Wolfson pointed out the skewed perspective of Lisberg and his source, Nancy Linday: 1800 pedestrians have been killed by cars in the past ten years in New York, and only seven by bicycles.

It is very much to his credit that Lisberg chose to engage with four random guys on Twitter about his reporting. Aside from a little snark and defensiveness, he was generally polite and focused on the issues. I think I speak for Aaron and Brooklyn Spoke when I say I want to be constructive and supportive. I think Lisberg is curious about transportation issues and cares about the people of this city, and wants to see fairness and justice prevail. I am confident that he will produce a lot of quality reporting about the city's transportation issues in the future.

It is in that spirit of constructive engagement that I will now tear apart Lisberg's article. In summary, he says that the quality of the data that the city provides is inconsistent and favors its pro-cycling agenda. As evidence, he presents a breakdown of the calls to 311 and the reports of a Chinatown resident named Nancy Linday, who spent a lot of time reporting unlawful behavior by cyclists.

Let's start with the data. Lisberg writes:

That's because while the agency installing bike lanes is tracking their benefits closely, the agency that runs 311 doesn't even distinguish between complaints about bicycles and roller skates.

In other words, in the city's bike wars, the downside of cycling isn't counted as rigorously as the upside.

Uh, no. It's just not necessary to distinguish between skates and bikes in this context. I've traveled at least as many miles on skates in this city as on a bike, and I used the same infrastructure. I skated in the street, and when there was a bike lane I used it. If the Prospect Park West bike lane had been there fifteen years ago, I would have been in it.

I've also been hit by a skater, and it wasn't fun. I was waiting to cross Seventh Avenue on foot one evening in Midtown, against the light, and looking uptown for cars. This jerk going against traffic body-checked me and knocked the wind out of me. If I hadn't been so stunned I would have grabbed his backpack and knocked him off his skates.

No, I wasn't seriously injured. In fact, I wasn't injured at all, just rendered uncomfortable for about thirty seconds, and a bit shaken for an hour. In fact, that was a lot more than happened to Linday, as Lisberg reports: "When she dialed 311 in October to complain that a bike almost hit her on the sidewalk at 58th St. and Fifth Ave., she said her call was transferred to 911 and back again."

The best response to that came from Gothamist commenter Tom Giebel: "The city needs to start a new system, maybe 211, for people who feel the need to report things that almost happened." When I was hit by that skater, I didn't call 311. I've been almost hit by bicycles tons of times and haven't called 311. I would say that pretty much every day I almost get hit by a car, but I don't call 311.

My overall point here is that skaters and skateboards use bike lanes and endanger pedestrians, so it makes perfect sense to lump them together. This is not a sign of lack of rigor; if anything, the fact that the DOT only measured cyclists using the Prospect Park West bike lane on one day is less rigorous. Combining complaints about cyclists and skaters only seems odd if you have a particular axe to grind against cyclists, as Linday clearly does.

This brings me to my second major criticism of Lisberg: he doesn't consider the source. He identifies Linday only as someone who "lives in Chinatown, works in midtown and says both places are full of out-of-control cyclists." Linday has a very uncommon name, and a few minutes googling revealed that she's a professional urban planner who's worked with Fred Kent and Holly Whyte on placemaking, and concluded that bicycles ruin the pedestrian environment. Note that Kent had the opposite conclusion, and that another Project for Public Spaces alumnus, Andy Wiley-Schwartz, is now working for the Department of Transportation, incorporating bicycle facilities into public plazas among other things. Linday is also a runner, and maybe she doesn't like sharing the Central Park loop road with cyclists.

There are three possibilities. The first is that Lisberg didn't bother to do that search, which means he was sloppy and got played. The second is that he did the search but didn't think it was worth reporting, which means he didn't grasp what was going on. The third is that he thought it was worth reporting but withheld that information, which means he was dishonest with his readers.

How then to interpret these paragraphs:

The next day, she took careful note of every lawbreaking cyclist she saw near her office. A day later, she said, she dialed 311, demanded the operator take notes and dictated them for more than an hour.

It got a response: A sergeant from the Midtown North Precinct called her within days, gave her his direct line and told her to call him anytime with bike problems.

To me all that says is that if you've got an agenda and are willing to harass a 311 operator, you will be rewarded by the police. Thanks, NYPD! And then, Lisberg reveals Linday's agenda: "That may sound like an example of 311 working - but Linday said she wants those complaints to be tabulated by the people who set bike policy in the city, not just the cops who have to stop the rogue bikers."

Let's connect that with an article written by Deputy Mayor Goldsmith, who oversees both the cops and the people who set bike policy. Interestingly, he just released a website where you can track 311 calls, including "Bike/Roller/Skate Chronic" (it's under "Public Safety"). Goldsmith writes, "The citizen with a thoughtful idea is not always the loudest. Many citizens with legitimate concerns or constructive suggestions may not enjoy either crowds or microphones. Avenues for their civic engagement ought to exist too."

So a well-informed professional with an agenda to distort the city's decision-making process spends a lot of time compiling data and harassing the city, and gets an NYPD sergeant's attention. She then calls up a Daily News reporter, who runs with her angle and fills in the David vs. Goliath script with a token quote from the heartless bureaucrats. Lisberg takes no time to consult a single cyclist, even though he considers himself a fan of Aaron Naparstek's work, or to situate Linday's concerns in the overall context of threats to pedestrian safety. Again, here's hoping he'll do better next time.

I want to end by pointing out that many citizens with legitimate concerns may not enjoy spending a day tabulating lawbreaking, or even an hour haranguing a hapless 311 operator. I personally have gotten discouraged reporting cars parked on the sidewalk and given up, but I would note that the 311 map includes a lot more examples of "Illegal Parking" (which lumps sidewalk parking in with blocked hydrants and a lot of other issues) than of "Bike/Roller/Skate Chronic." There are many reasons why legitimate complaints do not go reported, and counting complaints doesn't give you a real sense of how much people care about the issue. Complaint counts should be taken with a huge grain of salt, and definitely not used as the main basis for policy decisions. I don't have a solution, but Linday's goal is a recipe for disaster.

What you get when you make hasty generalizations

On Monday I pointed you to a Times op-ed by Elliott Sclar and Robert Paaswell, and observed that they chose to focus on the private transit systems of third world cities like Calcutta (which in that particular spelling is practically shorthand for crowds and squalor to most Times readers) and ignore the reasonably clean and safe vans in New Jersey and Chinatown. Last night I showed how this guilt-by-association game leads to a number of erroneous conclusions.

First, I want to discuss one bizarre point in the op-ed, the parenthetical aside in this paragraph:

Indeed, even though the van companies are already operating on the former bus routes, the Taxi and Limousine Commission has not added enough personnel to cover its new regulatory responsibilities. (It’s worth asking why, if such funds were available, the city shouldn’t reinstate some of the bus routes instead).

Sure, it's worth asking. There are no dumb questions. But an answer comes to my mind pretty quickly: one TLC enforcement agent can monitor several routes. One agent is a lot cheaper than the number of bus drivers needed to run all those routes. So it's worth asking why, if I answered this question right away, the guys who run two prestigious academic institutes couldn't come up with the answer before their op-ed went to press. My guess is they didn't want to know, and they thought it would make them sound clever. Not exactly.

Here are a few more of their erroneous conclusions, which happen to result from applying their selective methods to perfectly accurate observations. Sclar and Paaswell are correct that appropriate regulation is necessary for transit to be an effective tool for achieving our goals. But they make a mistake in conflating public ownership and regulation. In reality these are not the same thing. You can have poorly regulated government enterprises; the MTA is often said to be one. You can also have well-regulated industries that are privately owned, like restaurants. If the authors are Communists who believe that everything should be run by the State, they don't say that upfront, and if they're not Communists they don't make a good case for transit being treated differently from food preparation.

Once established, Sclar and Paaswell argue, transit providers can become organized and entrenched, protecting their interests at the expense of the public. They are correct here: I can think of one city in particular where a "cartel" of transit operators has jealously guarded their monopoly even though the public winds up paying more money for less service. Unfortunately for their argument, it happens to be our city, and the cartel is the Transit Workers' Union. They may not engage in the kind of violence that the authors breathlessly related, but they are certainly succeeding in stifling innovation and impeding efficiency measures.

In this op-ed, the argument I'm probably the most sympathetic to is the one about employee wages and hours. I strongly believe that everyone deserves a job with decent pay for a reasonable workday. But it doesn't make sense to fight this battle in every workplace. Transit cannot shoulder the burden of social justice by itself. There are other social goals that I consider more important than maintaining the wage levels of unionized public-sector transit workers. What does it matter how much you're earning if you spend most of it on Metrocards, or if you're obese, your wife gets run over, your kid has asthma, or your house gets flooded.



I am also troubled by the hours worked by van drivers, but I'm equally troubled by the amount of overtime racked up by MTA workers. I don't want to see anybody overworked, no matter how much they get paid for it.

In contrast, Sclaar and Paaswell don't seem concerned at all about the amount of overtime that MTA operators are working. That makes me think that they don't really care about the hours anyone works. They just know that other people might care, so it's a handy thing to throw at the vans.

And I think that's the bottom line. This op-ed isn't science, and it's not journalism. It's a couple of cranky old guys who've been doing things a particular way their whole lives: publicly owned, unionized transit. That way is running into some difficulties, so someone tries a different approach: private jitneys. This also happens to hurt their friends in the union.

Do Sclar and Paaswell actually go try the vans? Do they ask around to find out how vans can be successful? No, they start from some prejudices they formed on a cramped bus ride in Rio, and brainstorm all the bad things they can think of about jitney service. They edit it (sort of) into an op-ed, and presto! Top of the Times opinion page. Yay.

More ivory tower nonsense

Yesterday I told you about a very sloppy Times op-ed by Elliott Sclar and Robert Paaswell. The authors link private jitney service to third-world cities, suggesting that they're necessarily dirty, dangerous and foreign. They ignore the jitneys that ran on New York streets in the early part of the twentieth century, which were emphatically not foreign, the Brooklyn and Chinatown "dollar vans" that may sometimes be dirty and dangerous, and the New Jersey vans that are fairly clean and well-regulated, but are not particularly foreign.

You can see how silly Sclar and Paaswell's guilt-by-association game is if you think about other things that exist in third-world cities. For example, Bamako has open-air food markets that stink to high heaven, so if we have open-air food markets they'll stink to high heaven. If we had followed that logic twenty years ago we wouldn't have any greenmarkets.

As I wrote back in January, there is nothing inherent in the concept of private transit, or the jitney service model, that makes jitneys dirty, crowded or dangerous. They are that way because lots of people in those cities are desperate enough for transportation that they'll put up with danger, crowds and filth. Most New Yorkers are not desperate, and we won't put up with that level of danger or discomfort. Go to West New York and you'll find private vans (and buses) that are clean, well-maintained and pretty safe. They need to be in order to attract customers. They're also fairly well-regulated by New Jersey authorities.

Another area where Sclar and Paaswell ignore well-known facts is their assertion that the vans are bad because they don't take Metrocards. I agree that this should be changed, but it wouldn't be that difficult. Metrocards are currently used by the Airtrain, the PATH train, Bee-Line buses, and the Roosevelt Island Tram (currently out of service). From 1996 through 2006 they were accepted by the seven private companies that offered bus service under franchise agreements with the Department of Transportation.

Metrocards - or whatever technology replaces them in the future - could even be used to regulate private van operators. Want to accept Metrocards? You have to show a recent inspection certificate. Too many moving violations? We'll deactivate your Metrocard account. But Sclar and Paaswell aren't trying to find solutions, they're trying to find reasons to reject the vans.

Stay tuned, there's more to come.