Who's your Suburb Buddy?

Adam Hengels had a good post about fighting rising rents back in 2015. He points out that while "gentrification" battles are almost always fought on the neighborhood level, the problem is actually regional:

The battlefield is not in the gentrifying neighborhoods. It is in the more wealthy neighborhoods where empowered residents fight to keep new people out.

Hewlett Bay Park. Photo: Paul Seligman / Flickr.

There are tons of pretty suburban towns, and even small cities, that could be cozy, hip, dense alternatives to Manhattan or Brooklyn, but they've got zoning that keeps apartment buildings out and stifles nightlife, giant parking lots surrounding the commuter rail stations, infrequent train service and parking requirements that drive foot traffic away. If they got their act together, a lot of people would be moving there instead of here.

Here's an example: I live in Woodside, Queens. Per capita $24,399, population density 44,500 per square mile. We've got a decent commute to Manhattan (30 minutes to Grand Central), and a nice mix of shops and restaurants (a Walk Score of 94). I'd be happy to have more people here, but if they went someplace else that'd be okay too.

If I walk down to the Long Island Railroad station, I can get a train to Hewlett and take a short walk to the village of Hewlett Bay Park, which Wikipedia lists as the wealthiest per capita place (city, town, village) in the New York metro area at $113,320. Hewlett Bay Park has a population density of just 1,382 people per square mile, and a Walk Score of 42. It's an hour and thirteen minutes to Grand Central: a beautiful walk to the LIRR Far Rockaway Branch station, then change at Penn for the 3 train to the Shuttle.

The population of Hewlett Bay Park is estimated at 437 people, which is about a third the population of my co-op. Their zoning requires that every building be built on a minimum lot size of one acre, which is about a third the size of the lot my co-op is on. If the whole village were the same density as Woodside, it could hold about 17,800 people. Think how rents would go down across the metro area!

Last year we had a huge fight over a ten story building that would have added about 200 units to the neighborhood. That building would have fit on a single one of Hewlett Bay Park's 256 acres. Or if Hewlett Bay Park allowed townhouses near the train station, those 200 units could be spread across ten or twenty acres. My neighbors and I couldn't agree on whether we wanted it here, but I'll bet none of them would have been energetically opposed to putting it in Hewlett Bay Park.

Of course it's unfair to put all the burden on Hewlett Bay Park for accommodating the million or so people who want to live in New York. Right next door is Hewlett Neck, per capita income $88,049, population density 766.2 per square mile. There are a bunch of other wealthy villages and towns that are keeping people out with exclusionary zoning.

So why, even since Adam's post appeared three years ago, do people keep fighting at the neighborhood level? I think there are two reasons: first, the spatial segregation strategy of moving to the suburbs does effectively put a lot of distance between the wealthy and the crowds, not just in terms of raw travel time, or even in terms of social networks, but in terms of migration pressure. My wife and I did look at apartments in Scarsdale, but we're the exception in our class and income bracket. Most of the people moving into our neighborhood have been priced out of Inwood or Ridgewood. The people moving into Ridgewood got priced out of Williamsburg. The people moving into Williamsburg got priced out of Greenwich Village. The people in the Village got priced out of the Upper East Side, and the people there got priced out of Scarsdale. So even if we yell at the people in Ridgewood and Williamsburg it's not going to help much.

The second reason people don't fight Scarsdale is fragmentation. There are lots of wealthy, exclusive suburbs that are keeping people out who then chain-bid my mom's rent up. Why blame Scarsdale for my troubles and not Bronxville? How do I pick one?

It might be possible to do some kind of multilayered market research and find out exactly which set of racist NIMBYs to blame for the migration into your neighborhood, but that's probably not worth the trouble. We can do this quasi-randomly, keeping to a set of basic principles:

1. It should have a good transit commute. I do not want to take decent car-free Manhattanites and ship them out to Yorktown Heights where they'll all buy Volvos. There are in fact many New York suburbs where you can walk to shopping, walk to the train, walk to everything. If you can't walk to shopping, we'll have to zone for shopping when we zone for apartments.
2. This should be a place that can sustainably absorb lots more people. That means probably not low-lying areas like Deal or Centre Island. Hewlett Bay Park is on the bay, but it's mostly out of the flood zone and didn't do too bad during Sandy.
3. Everybody pile on the favored quarter. New York has some suburbs that are not wealthy. Some of them are already changing, like Newark and Rutherford. Others are too poor to be attractive to people who already live in Brooklyn Heights, like Freeport. Let's focus on the top of the food chain.

With that in mind, here are the ten places in the New York area with the highest per capita income where Google Maps gives a transit commute time to Grand Central, with their densities and their walk scores. Next time your local NIMBYs come out in force against a building, pick a town from this list. I've already claimed Hewlett Bay Park for the people of Woodside, so spread things out by picking a different town. If you've already heard someone else using a town, pick a different one. If they're all taken, pull up the next twenty. Make a bunch of buttons saying WHY ISN'T THIS BEING BUILT IN DARIEN? and hand them out. Let's see what happens!

Place	State	County	Per capita income	Density	Walk Score	Transit line	Transit commute to Grand Central
Hewlett Bay Park	NY	Nassau	$113,320	1,382	42	Far Rockaway	1:13
New Canaan	CT	Fairfield	$105,846	322.7	86	New Canaan	1:09
Darien	CT	Fairfield	$105,846	203.9	27	New Haven	0:59
North Hills	NY	Nassau	$100,093	1,543	27	Port Washington	1:01
Westport	CT	Fairfield	$97,395	503	23	New Haven	1:08
Sands Point	NY	Nassau	$95,647	222.4	23	Port Washington	1:26
Plandome	NY	Nassau	$95,102	857.6	15	Port Washington	0:58
Matinecock	NY	Nassau	$93,559	118.1	5	Oyster Bay	1:25
Greenwich	CT	Fairfield	$90,087	1,278	94	New Haven	0:44
Scarsdale	NY	Westchester	$89,907	873.2	36	Harlem	0:32

They can't go back to Ohio

One of the nastiest aspects of NIMBYism in New York City is the scapegoating of people who moved here from somewhere else. For years I've heard complaints about "people from Ohio" or "from the suburbs," and a veneration of "native New Yorkers." I can sometimes escape these complaints because I was born here, but if they say "lifelong New Yorkers" I don't qualify because my family yanked me out of here when I was a toddler, and apparently it doesn't matter if I came back as soon as I could. My father, who moved here when he was in his twenties and never owned a car, would not have qualified either.

Even Jeremiah Moss, who rages against the "suburbanization" of the city, acknowledged that he comes from the suburbs, and got a "dose of my own vitriol" in 2008 when Danny Hoch raged "Go home!" at non-natives. Moss gives a list of non-lifelong New Yorkers who have made the city great (to which I would also add Billy Joel, Donald Fagen and Jane Jacobs), and ends with a great quote by E.B. White about "three New Yorks," with the greatest being that of the non-natives: "the settlers give it passion."

Parking crater, Akron, Ohio. Photo: Bing Maps.

In typical No True Scotsman fashion, Moss's commenters leap to draw a distinction between White's "person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something," and the "moneyed masses" that they were yearning to hate. Some people call them "hipsters," Moss previously called them "yunnies" for "young urban narcissists."

I think the difference is mostly exaggerated. Moss asks, "while there were probably always normal tensions between natives and newcomers, today it feels like a war, soaked in hate. as a long-timer, i look at newcomers with, at the very least, suspicion. so what happened between e.b. white's days and today?" I'll tell you what happened, Moss: now you're on the "long-timer" side of the war. The hate runs mostly from the long-timers to the newcomers, and at worst the newcomers regard the long-timers with contempt. Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg weren't narcissists? Gimme a fucking break.

And yet there is a kernel of truth there. While my dad, and Patti Smith, and Lou Reed, came to New York because it was the center of the world and they wanted to be there, a lot of people who are here now would be happy in other places. But they are here in New York because there are no other places for them.

A lot of the people I know would be just as happy in Saint Louis or Schenectady or Syosset or Saugerties. They wouldn't mind living in another big city, or a medium-size city, or a suburb, or a small town. But despite the breathless articles about suburbanites driving in Manhattan, most of them want to live someplace where they don't have to drive everywhere, or at all.

Here's what life is like for most people outside of the city, especially parents: drive the kid to school, drive to work. Drive to pick the kid up and bring them to soccer. Drive to shopping. Drive to the doctor's office. Drive to dinner. Drive to visit friends. Drive home. Drive drive drive. This is life for both parents, and for the kids (if they don't kill themselves driving drunk), and for the grandparents (if they don't kill themselves driving while disabled).

All this driving is killing us, and it's killing the planet. We want people to stop driving. We want them to live in walkable neighborhoods. But my wife and I tried living in walkable neighborhoods in two other cities, and we still felt the constant pressure to drive. Even if we could walk to work and to some restaurants, the stores and offices and friends were still far away and not well served by transit. So we moved back to the city, along with thousands of others.

This is the thing that pisses me off the most about the vicious scapegoating from Moss and his friends: these people are doing what we want them to do! They walk to shopping, and to visit friends. They walk the kids to school. They take the train to work. They take the bus to the doctor's office. So what do we do? In San Francisco people throw rocks at their buses. In New York we call them dirty hipsters and tell them to go back to Ohio.

They can't go back to Ohio. As Chrissie Hynde pointed out, their cities are gone. Even if they manage to find a reasonably safe place where they can walk to work and their kids can walk to school, there are hardly any jobs, and those jobs are an hour's drive out in the suburbs.

If we really want to keep the people who come to New York because it's New York and get the rest to go away, bringing rents down, we need to give them what they want elsewhere. That means bringing jobs back to the downtowns of Saint Louis, Schenectady, Syosset and Saugerties. It means tearing down their bypasses, reconfiguring their one-way pairs, reforming their zoning and undoing all the other changes that have turned their centers into parking craters. It means reconnecting them to the rest of the country with trains and buses that go downtown.

It means solving the underlying problem instead of wasting a bunch of people's time in a counterproductive attempt to stop the symptom. It means looking at these "hipsters" and "yunnies" as people making more or less rational decisions, instead of as faceless monsters. Are you up to the challenge, Jeremiah Moss?

NYCHA and the fetishized green space

Today the Daily News published a hyperbolic "EXCLUSIVE: NYCHA selling off green space to developers!" As one person remarked on Twitter, this was a bait-and-switch: the headline now says "NYCHA quietly selling off parking lots, green space, playgrounds to help ease budget woes." In the diagrams accompanying the article, it looks like mostly parking lots.

Green space in the Marlboro Houses, Gravesend.

The "selling to developers!" framing suggests that these developers would build for-profit "luxury" housing on these parking lots in between the projects, but if you read deeper, it's quite a bit less sensational. The article says that since 2013 the Housing Authority "has sold vacant or what it deems 'underutilized' land to developers to build affordable or senior housing." The News asked the NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye about future sales, and she said that they would be announced in May, "promising to sell land exclusively for affordable housing and spreading the projects across the boroughs."

News reporter Greg B. Smith was even unable to frame the article as "Community protests city initiative," because a lot of residents supported the plan: "Some tenants are angry that the limited open space they enjoy will soon be displaced by towers of apartments. Others are ecstatic, hoping much-needed senior housing will rise on what they see as wasted space."

Okay, so it's not really "NYCHA selling off green space to developers!" Instead, NYCHA may sell some parking lots and maybe an occasional ball field or "leafy triangle" to people who want to build low-income housing, and a lot of people who live in the projects can't wait for it to happen. Oh, the scandal! But there's more.

If you've ever walked around a NYCHA project (go ahead, these days you're pretty unlikely to get shot), you know that they have some of the shittiest "green space" you can imagine. If it's not fenced off, it's a big empty lawn or a grove of trees with no place to sit. If it's on the way between two places that people want to get to, it still probably doesn't get that much traffic because of its high-crime reputation.

How often do you see project residents actually hanging out in the "green space"? Usually they're on the edges of the project where they can interact with the rest of the world, the world that doesn't feel welcome in their green spaces.

One of the most hilarious things for me was seeing this posted by certain people who like to invoke Jane Jacobs, because Jacobs absolutely hated the "green space" in the projects. Over and over in The Death and Life of Great American Cities she lambasts the projects for their despotic design, and contrasts their failure to the success of human-scaled, organic streets. Here is a quote from Page 90 (with an unfortunate comparison to "savages") about the general uncritical love of what was then called "open space":

In orthodox city planning, neighborhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerate magical fetishes. Ask a houser how his planned neighborhood improves on the old city and he will cite, as a self-evident virtue, More Open Space. Ask a zoner about the improvements in progressive codes and he will cite, again as a self-evident virtue, their incentives toward leaving More Open Space. Walk with a planner through a dispirited neighborhood and though it be already scabby with deserted parks and tired landscaping festooned with an old Kleenex, he will envision a future of More Open Space.

More Open Space for what? For muggings? For bleak vacuums between buildings? Or for ordinary people to use and enjoy? But people do not use city open space just because it is there and because city planners wish they would.

And here is a quote from Page 15 specifically about open space in NYCHA projects:

In New York's East Harlem there is a housing project with a conspicuous rectangular lawn which became an object of hatred to the project tenants. A social worker frequently at the project was astonished by how often the subject of the lawn came up, usually gratuitously as far as she could see, and how much the tenants despised it and urged that it be done away with. When she asked why, the usual answer was, "What good is it?" or "Who wants it? "Finally one day a tenant more articulate than the others made this pronouncement: "Nobody cared what we wanted when they built this place. They threw our houses down and pushed us here and pushed our friends somewhere else. We don't have a place around here to get a cup of coffee or a newspaper even, or borrow fifty cents. Nobody cared what we need. But the big men come and look at that grass and say, 'Isn't it wonderful! Now the poor have everything!'"

Yes, the poor have everything, including "green space." But they don't want it, the silly things. They want places where they can live when get old, so they don't have to move too far away from their families and friends. And the city may "quietly sell off" some land to developers so they can build that senior housing. Oh, the scandal!

There is no luxury housing

I've noticed lately that it's become popular to scoff at "luxury housing." The people who scoff tend to do it as proof that they’re not one of those middle-class people. Or that they’re one of those poor people who’s mad as hell. "Luxury housing! That’s the last thing this neighborhood needs! Where are all the poor people going to live? They don’t need fucking granite countertops!"

The ultimate in luxurious living, with music by Muzak. From Columbia University's awesome New York Real Estate Brochure Collection

I don’t think the people who scoff at luxury housing are particularly dense, but they must be willfully blind, because they’re not seeing something that’s pretty obvious to me: "luxury" is bullshit. A good deal of the housing that’s called "luxury" is not actually luxury housing, but the people selling it pretend that it is, because that’s what they do to sell stuff. They play to people’s class consciousness, tell them how pampered it will make them feel to live in Luxury Housing in the Classe Toweres with granite countertops and hardwood floors and a concierge.

Even the people who are selling these apartments know it’s bullshit. Yes, maybe they should try a different approach, the Salt of the Earth Solid Working-Class No-Frills Apartments. Maybe you’ve got a hit there, Mr. and Ms. Populist. But maybe not. Maybe there’s a reason they’re in real estate and you’re in journalism or real estate. They know how to bullshit. You know that. Why are you taking them at their word?

Some luxury is not quite bullshit. I lived in “luxury housing” once, with high ceilings, parquet floors, a sunken living room and an eat-in kitchen. It did feel a bit luxurious sometimes. But the intercom didn’t work, and there were rats in the hall and people smoking crack outside our kitchen window. Salsa music blared late into the night on Saturdays. And yet it had been built as luxury housing seventy years before.

Today, in 2015, you can get a one bedroom apartment in my old building for $1200. Meanwhile, a one bedroom apartment where I live now, in a plain brick building built for "workers," can run you over $1800.

There are a lot of factors that go into the rent or sales price of an apartment. The quality of the housing stock is only one of those factors – and the hype that goes into it is only one more. The rents and prices, in turn, are only one factor that determines whether people who currently live in the neighborhood will be able to continue to afford it.

So next time you see an ad for a new "luxury housing" development, and you’re getting ready to roll your eyes and sigh dramatically about What This Town is Turning Into, please do us all a favor. Spare us the fake piety and spend a little time thinking about what really causes displacement.

Where is the roads and bridges settlement?

It was a big con game, and many of the biggest con artists believed their own hype. "It can never go down!" they cried. They delivered something valuable to people who couldn't afford it, told them it was even more valuable, took a hefty cut for themselves, and left their victims on the hook for billions. But the government has been slow to make them pay.

In part that's because many of those responsible are in government, and many others in government are their friends. In part it's because most of the government regulators were asleep on the job. But mostly it's because so many in the public were asleep too. A lot of them still don't think anybody did anything wrong.

Your tax dollars paid to widen the LIE and pump up housing prices on Long Island.
Photo: Doug Kerr / Flickr

I'm talking about the housing bubble, yes, but not the mortgage fraud. You see, it's hard to tell how much of the bubble came from hype about loans that pay their own interest, and how much came from empty promises of roads and bridges that pay their own maintenance.

Tales of endlessly rising demand for housing and fantasies of endlessly rising demand for driving fed off each other: the new housing pumped up traffic measurements, prompting governments to build and widen roads and bridges, and the new roads and bridges pumped up housing prices, prompting developers to build more housing. In 2008 it all crashed, and if the stimulus hadn't been so focused on "roads and bridges" a lot of it would have stayed crashed.

There's a little good news on the mortgage front: this year the state has brought in over five billion dollars in settlements with several large banks. But when will we see a similar settlement for the road-and-bridge fraud? When will the government sue the people who got us to pay hundreds of millions for these projects that left us on the hook for decades of maintenance?

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.

Could we build another Park Slope?

Do you like the modern towers of the Upper East Side?

Photo: Peter Cigliano / Flickr.

How about a nice gigantic Upper West Side prewar apartment building like the Ansonia?

Photo: wallyg / Flickr.

Or the brownstones of Park Slope?

Photo: Beyond My Ken / Wikipedia.

Or is all that too dense and urban for you? Maybe you'd prefer the lovely Victorians of Irvington, NY?

Photo: June Marie / Flickr.

Gorgeous places to live! Of course, you and I are not the only ones who think so. These are some of the most desirable locations in the country. There are millions of people who would love to live in places like these.

So why don't we build more?

Why not buy up a block of crappy 1960s Stately Homes in Woodside and replicate the Ansonia? Or raze some raised ranches in Massapequa and build a block of brownstones? Build a new Victorian main street leading down to the Croton station, where now there are strip malls?

It turns out that there are some attempts to do this. Andres Duany is involved in a project in Jersey City that looks pretty cool. If you know of any others in the New York area, please let me know!

Unfortunately, those projects are a drop in the bucket. Zoning rules across the region make it next to impossible to build big modern towers on the Upper West Side, or a new Ansonia in Park Slope, or a block of brownstones in Irvington, or a new Irvington in Scarborough. The Municipal Art Society's recently released zoning envelope map confirms that the massive downzoning conducted across the city by Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Burden reinforced this prohibition. And people wonder why rents keep going up...

Unpacking gentrification

Transit advocates, pedestrian advocates, urbanists and in general all the people who are trying to improve the quality of life in cities need to talk about gentrification. Not because improvements to transit or walking or urban quality of life lead to gentrification, but because some people think they do. Others, bizarrely, are scapegoating the people moving to urban areas, as though their migration were the result of either nefarious conspiracy or a spontaneous coincidence of individual greed. Some of these demagogues are willing to attack the transit and quality of life improvements, the people promoting those improvements, or the migrants themselves, in a desperate attempt to prevent this change.

Graham Avenue, Williamsburg. Photo: Telethon / Wikipedia

The fact of the matter is that the transit and quality of life improvements are largely the effect, not the cause, of the move back to the cities. The suburban growth ponzi scheme and the hippie back-to-the-land fantasy have run out of money, and the jobs are leaving. As the jobs leave the suburbs and the country, the quality of life goes down, and people flee for the cities.

These migrants may be a bit insensitive, but they are not conspiring amongst themselves to take from city dwellers, and they are not acting out of greed and jealousy; rather, their own dislocation from their homes deserves as much sympathy from anti-gentrification activists as that of the people they are displacing.

This migration is much more powerful than the anti-gentrification demagogues. Even if they manage to keep cities as inconvenient as they are, people will keep coming. The only way they could stem the tide is if they somehow manage to bring the cities down to the level of the suburbs. Short of bringing back the crack epidemic and setting the South Bronx on fire again, I just don't see it.

The demagogues may not succeed in stopping the migration to the cities, but they can do some damage, and make cities, suburbs and country miserable places all around. Fortunately, some of them are motivated by a heartfelt desire to help others that has been twisted to scapegoating and destruction. They may be amenable to reason, and that is why we need to be prepared.

Really, it is the concept of "gentrification" as a thing that leads to this misradicalization. Gentrification may seem to be a neat, easily identifiable phenomenon - uh oh, there's a new coffee bar over here, and a vintage record store over there! - but the effects that people complain about are hardly that simple.

Even though some people may complain about restaurants and "hipsters," these are not the substantive concerns that others take seriously. The worst effects of gentrification are (a) rising prices and rents, which squeeze the budgets of old-time residents and businesses whose incomes have not risen, (b) displacement as those residents move to cheaper areas, (c) loss of services as the businesses close or move away, and (d) disconnection as people and businesses that are displaced may move to different areas and have difficulty keeping in touch.

In general, I'm not really swayed by the loss of services argument. I may mourn the passing of Big Nick's Burger Joint or Shakespeare and Company, but I actually think the Shake Shack burgers and the browsing experience at Barnes and Noble are better than their predecessors.

I'm also not troubled by displacement in itself: migration is a fact of life. The idea that the children of African Americans or Puerto Ricans who moved to the neighborhood forty years ago have more of a right to it than the grandchildren of Jews and Italians who moved there eighty years ago is just bizarre. The problems come when the displacement is too fast and too extreme, and scatters people who otherwise want to be together.

The real question is not whether to avoid or stop "gentrification," it's whether we can slow or ease the displacement, and make it so that when people do get displaced, they wind up in places that are almost as nice as the places they left.

In order to do that, we need to further unpack "gentrification." This migration is not a simple one: in fact, it is at least three migrations combined, and not all of them equally necessary. We need to do what we can to reduce that inmigration. The displacement is not automatically necessary: we need to increase the amount of housing and jobs in the city, so that the old-timers can live alongside the newcomers instead of being forced out. We need to make sure that poor city dwellers aren't simply being displaced to the same dangerous, unpleasant, disconnected suburbs that the middle-class migrants are leaving behind - with less ability to afford cars.

Will this convince the misguided radicals who see gentrification in black and white terms? Hard to tell. Will it help me feel better promoting transit and urban life? Yes. I'll talk more about these issues in future posts.

Cheap housing with els

Two years ago I wrote that for truly affordable housing we not only do we need an adequate supply of living space, as Matt Yglesias explains so nicely, but also a decent range of quality. I mentioned that this pricing distribution could be achieved in several ways, some of them very unfair:

To prevent segregating the poor into inconveniently located bad housing with crime and pollution, we need to make some safe, solid housing available closer in, integrated with the rich people's housing. that is still affordable. In order to do that, we need to allow housing that's cheap in the non-dangerous, non-segregated ways. That means housing that's small or ugly, with crappy views and no doormen. Maybe housing that allows loud music if it doesn't bother anyone else. Regardless, it should still be well-built and well-maintained, and safe from pollution and crime.

Stephen Smith is fond of saying that "filtering" will keep prices low on a large enough portion of the available housing. Filtering is the idea that the price of older housing will be lower, reflecting the aging of materials and changes in consumer tastes. Jane Jacobs memorably said it about commercial space: "New ideas require old buildings."

This filtering hypothesis would make sense, all else being equal, but all else is not equal. There has been a serious decline in the quality of building since World War II, with the result that many buyers and renters will choose a prewar apartment with its amenities (hardwood floors, high ceilings, attention to detail, solid construction) over a postwar one with "modern" amenities (Stephen recently mentioned central air conditioning and laundry on premises).

A lot of postwar construction is also anti-urban, even in the hearts of cities, whether through tower-in-a-park architecture like Stuyvesant Town or excessive auto-oriented design like big driveways. Some, like the Big Six towers in my neighborhood, combined the two for that classy tower-in-a-parking lot ambiance. Some, like Wesley Grove in Asbury Park, have their de facto primary entrances and exits facing away from the street and towards the parking lot.

Because of this, it helps to have other ways of generating a range of quality options in the housing market, and one of those is elevated trains. I may have picked this idea up from something Stephen wrote; he certainly likes els.

Now, the el in my neighborhood, the Flushing Line, is really not that nice. In addition to blocking out all the light on Roosevelt Avenue, it makes so much noise that you can't talk when it's clanking over you. And if you look at estimated rents on Zillow, you'll find that two-bedroom apartments facing the train tend to rent for several hundred dollars cheaper than those around the corner.

Els that are built nowadays are much quieter. They're not unpleasant to live near, but they aren't as nice as a subway. The result is a less extreme range of rents, but still enough to provide affordable housing, especially when combined with other factors.

Elevated trains are not only cheaper to build than subways, but when combined with zoning that allows for substantial amounts of housing to be built for relatively low cost (i.e. highrises without parking) they can provide genuine affordable housing, and thus be a real tool in fighting gentrification.

In 2013, subways raise property values

Suppose that you live in a detached single-family home a block from the old Brooklyn Manor train station in Woodhaven. Your neighbors are selling a house a lot like yours, containing about 2000 square feet of floor area on a 5,000 square foot lot abutting the Rockaway Beach Branch railroad embankment, for $439,000.

That's one of the few houses that can even be sold; Zillow says that 20-30% of mortgages in this area are underwater. You want to see your property values go up. Maybe your mortgage is underwater; maybe you just want to get a good price when you're ready to sell. What can you do? Reactivate the railroad.

Your house is currently an hour door-to-door from downtown Manhattan on the rickety, unreliable J or Z tracks. If you're trying to get to Midtown, where there are more jobs, you would have to change for the F or M trains, adding another fifteen minutes. But what if you could cut that travel time to forty-five minutes, say by running the R train on the Rockaway Branch tracks? We don't have to imagine; we can just look at a very similar train line.

This 15000 square foot house, 2163 East 15th Street in Brooklyn, is currently for sale at $489,000. That's $50,000 more than your neighbor is asking, for a house that's a little smaller. Okay, your neighbor's house has termite damage, but it also has a huge back yard with no trains running on the tracks.

If you compare properties along the Q train in Sheepshead Bay and Homecrest you find that they're typically $100-200,000 more than you would get for "comparable" properties along the Rockaway Branch, like this 1600 square foot semi-attached house asking $729,000. And according to Zillow, only 5-10% of mortgages are underwater. That 15-30 minute difference in commute time makes a big difference in home prices. Crime is lower, too.

This may be a surprise to you. You may remember the sixties and seventies, when properties near active train lines went down in price and properties near highways went up. Things have changed. People can't afford to drive, and they're realizing that the train and the city aren't so bad.

What about the opposite problem, gentrification? Well, I took a walk through Sheepshead Bay yesterday, and let's just say I didn't see any creative facial hair or skinny jeans. Don't take my word for it; go look for yourself.

Reopening the Brooklyn Manor train station would be a huge boon to people who live nearby. But you can only do it if you get out of the 1970s mental traffic jam and ride the train into the twenty-first century. Please, sign the two petitions to reopen the Rockway Beach Branch, on change.org and on Assemblymember Goldfeder's site.

The difference a lane (or toll) makes

Stephen Smith has a great piece in the Observer showing how the Bloomberg administration has adapted its development strategy to avoid clashing with long-term residents, many of whom live near subway stations. The resulting disconnect between housing capacity and transit has encouraged high-rise towers near the Williamsburg waterfront, far from the overcrowded Bedford Avenue L station and even further from the Marcy Avenue J/M/Z station.

In the long term, NIMBY fears of "overdevelopment" are primarily based on fears of competition for scarce car space. To overcome it, we need to allow developers to build without encouraging people to keep cars, and we need to as convince the long-term residents that parking spillover is not as likely as they think, especially now when everyone is driving less.

In the short term, many of these highrises are already built, and more are in the works, so we need to improve their transit access to keep their residents driving as little as possible. Everyone wants to run ferries because hey, waterfront, but the ferries require large subsidies to compete with free bridges. It's hard to build subway stations right by the waterfront: the fabled South Fourth Street station is still five blocks from the river at Driggs Avenue. You could build an elevated subway or a streetcar, if you could convince people to build something that hasn't been built in this city in at least eighty years. You could also run buses.

Four years ago I mapped out some possible destinations that a Midtown Tunnel bus could get to from Penn Station in ten or fifteen minutes without traffic. The idea was that the tolls keep traffic from getting too congested in the Midtown Tunnel, and the 34th Street bus lane would give the buses priority. The way the 34th Street bus lanes have been executed leaves a lot to be desired, but the principle is sound.



What if we put an Exclusive Bus Lane on the Williamsburg Bridge and down Delancey and Chrystie/Forsyth streets to the Grand Street station? We could run the Nostrand Avenue Select Bus across it, and the Chinatown vans would be significantly faster.

But you could also run buses down Broadway to the waterfront. I agree with Jarrett Walker that loops are generally a bad idea, but Kent Avenue is now one-way, so you could have a South Kent Avenue loop going down to Flushing Avenue, and a North Kent loop going up to Greenpoint. In ten minutes (without traffic) from Grand Street in Manhattan, you could get to Morgan Avenue in East Williamsburg, either along the BQE or along Grand Street. You could go down Broadway to Flushing Avenue, or down Bedford and up Nostrand as far as Myrtle Avenue. And in fifteen minutes you could go further.



This is no longer serving existing high-rises, but rather improving service to long-established neighborhoods. That in turn could lead to people in those neighborhoods no longer thinking that cars are the only route out of poverty. But its usefulness lies in the dedicated lane for buses on the Wiliamsburg Bridge. That's what allows these buses to be competitive with driving.

How much of "density" is just less space for cars?

There are many benefits from living and working in dense environments, but there are plenty of people who are against density, and come out in large numbers to protest any large development or increase in zoning allowances. Today, for example, David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington wrote about a full-on NIMBY freakout over small houses in alleys. Often this is couched in some half-baked argument about "quality of life" or "preserving the character of the neighborhood." As I wrote before, it's worth listening to NIMBYs, but NIMBYs are people, which means that you can't take everything they say at face value.

ADU with finger. Photo: Linda Schmitt via Greater Greater Washington.

When I first heard phrases like "quality of life" and "the character of the neighborhood" I had no idea what they meant. I couldn't understand why Rudy Giuliani claimed to care about quality-of-life issues, but didn't seem to care that hot dogs come in packages of ten while hot dog buns come in packages of eight.

I got a lot of help understanding the anti-density mentality from StongTowns's Ian Rasmussen, who laid out his "party analogy" in this podcast with Chuck Marohn. Ian points out that at some parties, the guests bring more than their share of alcohol (and food, I would add), so every guest increases the fun.

In recent years, however, urban development has been more like a bad party full of stingy guests who don't even bring enough alcohol for themselves. "Every time someone shows up at the party, the party gets worse," Ian says. In the experience of residents, "Virtually every time a shovel went in the ground in the last fifty years, things got a little worse."

How did things get worse? Kaid Benfield talks a lot about access to "nature," and how often "dense" developments reduce the amount of parkland per capita. Others have talked about similar competition for resources like schools. While schools and parks are definitely important, I'm not convinced that they're the primary motivators for most NIMBYs. I think racial and social prejudice is definitely a factor for some people, but I'm not going to go into that in this post.

Ian Rasmussen paints a picture of the first arrivals at a new suburban development who are "fifteen minutes to downtown, fifteen minutes to the lake." But as more people arrive, congestion increases on the roads, and our suburbanites are now "more removed from the nearest pasture because there's another ring" of development beyond theirs. Both Benfield and Rasmussen point to congestion as a big factor. Others talk about competition for parking.

I'm leaning more and more towards the idea that in a lot of cases "density" just means less space for cars. A comment from "Bob" on Alpert's post lays it all out:

So, if these dwelling units become matter of right and are located where garages usually are, where will new residents park their cars? More vehciles flooding onto the streets? I know a family in AU Park that has a sub rosa 2 story ADU on an alley with several adults living in it. (Looks a lot like the photo, actually). Trash flows into the alley because there's no place to put it and the number of people living there. Plus 5 or so vehicles now squeeze onto the street in front of the house from this one property. And I thought that all ADU hipsters walk, bike or use Zipcar....

As in most cases, the threat from these cute little houses has nothing to do with parks or schools. It's about the value of allocating land for parking and driving. For David Alpert and most of the Greater Greater Washington readership, parking is a nasty scourge that separates people's homes from each other and from businesses without adding anything pleasant or interesting. For Linda Schmitt and Bob, parking is a scarce resource that is being gobbled up by the unwelcome new residents.

For the most part, "density" is an unhelpful, unenlightening way of thinking about neighborhood conflicts. Most conflicts about "density" are really conflicts about parking or road space. Try it yourself. Next time you're thinking of using the word "density" in this context, try replacing it with "competition for parking" or "competition for space on the road." I bet you'll find it clears some things up.

Party out of bounds

Okay, so you're having a party. You call a bunch of friends and put the word out on Facebook. None of you have much money, but you cash your paycheck and pick up some twelve-packs of Coors Light. Your friends bring what they can: a bottle of vodka, a bottle of rum, some soda, and a couple 40-ouncers of malt liquor.

But the drinks start to run out after a few hours. Of course you don't blame your cousin Jimmy who got laid off, or Jenny's ex-boyfriend who just got out of prison. There's a few moochers in the place, but everybody else deserves a good time, and they brought what they could afford.

Photo: Jay Woodworth / Flickr.

You and Jimmy are getting some air outside and you say hi to a couple walking past. They're definitely not from the neighborhood. They dress wild, and the guy might be gay. But they look like decent people. Then they hear the music coming out of your place, and the woman stops. She says, "Is this Billy's Fun Cave? I saw on Twitter that you're having a party." Before you can answer, the guy says, "I got beer!" and he holds up a six-pack. Well, all right then.

These new people are kind of fun. The woman has a whole bunch of songs on her Ipod that you loved dancing to when you were a kid. The local microbrew they bought is definitely an acquired taste, but it beats Night Train and you might actually acquire a taste for it if you could afford it. They're texting their friends, so you tell them the friends can come too.

The friends show up, and most of them bring beer, so you and your friends are happy. But not that much beer, and you're wondering if you're going to run out again when you hear someone shout, "Alex is coming? Tell him and his gang to bring booze!"

You're polishing off the next-to-last Sam Adams when Alex and his gang show up. They bring booze, and lots of it. One lady even shows up with a box of wine. They're dressed very classy, not the same funky crowd that you first invited in. They start blasting oldies on your stereo and complementing you on keeping your apartment's original trim.

All of a sudden you realize that you don't know any of the people in your own living room. The funky crowd is hanging out in the kitchen. All your friends have either left the party or retreated into a back room. Even Alex and his gang have moved on to find a new party.

And that, folks, is the party analogy applied to gentrification. Not a perfect fit, but no metaphor is.

Trainwreck at the edge of the water

Today I took a little trip up to the Mitsuwa Marketplace in Edgewater, New Jersey, and picked up some Pocky, instant iced green tea, and river views. This large Japanese supermarket, with in-house cafes and nearby bookstore and chatchka shop is definitely worth a visit; I've been going every few years since 1996, when it was called Yaohan. The Kennedy Boulevard jitney providers have taken over the shuttle service, which now costs three dollars each way and leaves from Gate 51 of the Port Authority Bus Terminal every half hour on weekends. But do yourself a favor and wait upstairs, because the jitney drivers don't shut off their engines when they're in the terminal.

It made me sad to look out the window as the van went down River Road, though, sad for what is and what might have been. Of all the missed opportunities for urbanism, this is one of the most extreme that I know.

I'm not sure what was at the foot of the Palisades when the Dutch arrived in the area; probably just some scree like in the Palisades Interstate Park further upriver. Ferry docks were built at strategic points, and the railroads dug tunnels through the ridge to the docks. In this stretch of the river, the West Shore Railroad had a tunnel through to Weehawken, now used by the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail, and the New York, Susquehanna and Western had a tunnel to Edgewater, now abandoned. Tracks were built connecting the mouths of the two tunnels to the terminals of other railroads further south, and a series of piers were built along that railroad to ship various materials.

As the railroads cut back in the 1950s and 1960s, the shipping business migrated to other parts of the port area like Newark, or other parts of the world. Many of the piers were abandoned for years. Since the 1990s the area has experienced a huge construction boom. I'm sure there were several factors involved, probably including a significant rezoning, but it was also in part due to Arthur Imperatore's successful revitalization of the commuter ferry service, and the arrival of the light rail line.

Much of the ride down River Road in 1996 looked similar to what you might have seen in 1966, but it's unrecognizable today. Almost every pier, every plot of waterfront land, hosts either a shopping center or luxury housing. Many of the old buildings further inland have middlebrow stores and restaurants on their ground floors, and are being infilled with other shops and gas stations.

So this is infill development, really close to Manhattan, instead of way the hell out in Suffolk County or the Highlands. Why does it make me sad? Because it might as well be in Suffolk County. There are almost no walkable streets in the area. River Road has hardly any pedestrians and you can't blame people because it has wide car lanes, too many of them, and narrow sidewalks, and virtually none of the shops, restaurants or residences engage with that sidewalk. There is a semi-continuous riverwalk, but it zigzags around the piers and buildings, past windows and terraces that do not interact with it. Despite all this development, River Road does not make the frequent network map because you're very likely to wait more than fifteen minutes for a bus.

River Road is one of the reasons I'm so skeptical about "density" being an important factor in transit use or walkable streets. It's got density, or something resembling density. I don't know the numbers, but all of this new construction is apartments and townhouses, with no detached single family houses that I could see. But all that development was designed for driving.

Vela Townhomes. Photo: Hobokencondos / Flickr (be sure to check out the photostream for more waterfront goodness)

Every housing complex has tons of parking, often obscured by an overhanging apartment or townhouse ... structure (it's hard to call them buildings because the architecture is so fragmented). Sometimes the parking is in its own big ugly building, and sometimes it's designed so that it's immediately adjacent to the apartment or townhouse of its occupant. The new shops and restaurants are all the same kind of strip development, overloaded with surface parking that would be equally at home in Scottsdale, Arizona as on Tonnelle Avenue on the other side of the Palisades.

So here we have dense infill development a short distance from one of the most walkable job centers in the country, and still it's just as car-oriented as Phoenix. I'm guessing that the two biggest factors involved are the zoning code and outdated standards followed by the New Jersey Department of Transportation, which together have built one of the densest driving-oriented suburbs I've seen.

I call this a "trainwreck," because I've been watching it for years, powerless to stop it. Of course I didn't have this blog back in 1996, and I was only just beginning to grasp connections between transportation and land use. I had no way to talk coherently about this, and nobody who would listen to me if I had. So I've had to just sit and watch for sixteen years, as one unwalkable waste of space went up after another.

How many Jakriborgs is that?

Earlier this year, the Small Streets Blog introduced us to the planned community of Jakriborg, founded in 1990 on 12.5 acres of farmland between the cities of Malmö and Lund in southern Sweden, next to a frequent commuter rail line and a bus stop. It has "parking on the outside," as planned for the Piscataquis Village Project in Maine, but there are very few - I count less than a hundred spaces for a population of over 500 families.

(There's also a disturbing lack of people on the street in most of the photos you see of Jakriborg. Maybe the photos were taken in the height of winter, but I always thought the Swedes were out getting fresh air in the height of winter.)

Building on my post criticizing park-and-rides, the Small Streets crew imagined replacing part of a park-and-ride with a dense, walkable village like Jakriborg or the Czech town of Telč. They astutely observe that if you build at Jakriborg densities, you get more riders than if you used the land for a park-and-ride, and these riders all live within walking distance of the station.

Phil LaCombe from Small Streets takes the example of the park-and-ride in Greenbelt, Maryland, which holds 3,399 parking spaces. Those 37 acres can fit almost three Jakriborgs, which can house over 4,000 people in total, including children. That's a net gain of 701 people over the park-and-ride. If the 701 additional people are children they probably wouldn't pay taxes, but their parents would pay taxes and shop at the local stores.

Inspired by Phil, whenever I see a large parking lot near a train station, I think to myself, "How many Jakriborgs is that?" The Metro-North parking lot at Croton-Harmon is 1.3 Jakriborgs, I believe. The parking lot planned for the North Tenafly station on the Northern Branch is 0.68 Jakriborgs.

I thought of this today when I read that the New Jersey borough of Dunellen has been accepted into the state's Transit Village incentive program. Acceptance is based on a detailed application where the municipality specifies land within a quarter mile of a transit station that can be developed into walkable housing and shops.

It would be really nice if the state put all of its accepted applications up on its website so that we could see what's being planned. We could then monitor the progress of the various municipalities and see how much they live up the the hype. No such luck.

Mayor Robert Seader, however, specifically mentioned the 19-acre Art Color site, a printing plant right next to the train station that was abandoned in 1968. That's a Jakriborg and a half right there.

All across New Jersey I've seen shitty "condo" developments where you can't go anywhere without walking across endless parking lots, like this garbage across the tracks from the planned North Tenafly parking lot. That's not transit-oriented, and its walk appeal is zero. With no train service I can kind of understand them building these parking lots, but otherwise no. I hope that whatever goes in the old Art Color site is more like Jakriborg and less like Daibes Park Residences.

Another quick note: Dunellen was originally formed from the township of Piscataway. Piscataway, in turn, was founded by Quakers and Baptists who didn't want to live under the Puritans along the Piscataquis River in Maine. So if Dunellen builds a Jakriborg-type carfree village with small streets on the Art Color site, it could end up being a Piscataway Village Project. And as I said, Really Narrow Streets need good trains. Of course, then it would help if the Raritan Valley Line were as frequent a train as the line that serves Jakriborg.

Why do we care about Willets Point again?

For years I've been reading about various plans to redevelop the Willets Point area, each worse than the last. Each time I wonder why everyone's so convinced that Something Must Be Done. It's not a slum where people live in close quarters and can die of diphtheria or something. On its own terms, it's a successful business district. Why do people care about this forlorn corner of the borough? And why the urgency?

There are some people whose goals are obvious: those who have a direct financial interest. The Related Companies and the Wilpon family are the main investors in the current scheme, and they stand to make a profit in rent and property sales. In addition, the Mets could get more business from residents and customers, who figure they might as well take in a game while they're in the area.

There may be some other business owners who see themselves as "on the way" to Willets Point, and hope to make some money that way. And then there are all the "economic hunters" (like the Queens Chamber of Commerce and Deputy Mayor Robert Steel) who see this as a way to bring jobs and tax revenue to the city.

I have a lot of trouble relating. First of all, I have no direct financial interest. Second, I'm much more of a fan of economic gardening than hunting. What that means, as Chuck Marohn describes, is finding a way to help ten small businesses add ten jobs, rather than a single business adding a hundred jobs.

For existing small businesses in Queens to benefit from this new development, they would have to be perceived as "on the way," and I just don't see that with the current plans. Maybe some drivers would think about getting off the highway to shop or dine, and maybe some would think about getting off the number 7 train, but most of the proximity boost comes from walking. The current setup actively discourages walking, and none of the plans would do much to improve that.

Photo: oracle monkey / Flickr

So why is Willets Point so urgent? It's not like it's the only industrial area in the city with crappy streets. After thinking and thinking, I believe I've finally figured it out: you can see it from Citifield. It's even closer and more visible than it was from Shea Stadium. It's right across the street, staring you in the face: junkyards! unpaved streets! grimy brown people in work clothes!

I'm guessing that someone has a box seat in Citifield with a grand view of the junkyards behind the field, and the Wilpons look out at the thing every day. They got ahold of the politicians and the Queens Chamber of Commerce, and there you go.

Of course, it's not your problem or my problem. To paraphrase the office proverb, lack of tolerance for muddy streets on their part does not constitute an emergency on our part. But it looks like they've got enough clout to make it an emergency for us.

Price drops aren't always forever

A few months ago I came across the notion of "filtering" on Charlie Gardner's Old Urbanist blog. It's an idea that's fairly well established in real estate economics, based on the observation that a lot of cheaper buildings are old and run-down. The theory is that the older a building is, the harder it is to maintain. The owners don't maintain it all that well, so it deteriorates, and no longer fetches as high a price or rent. The notion is usually the basis of an argument that adequate affordable housing doesn't require subsidies or mandates; we just have to wait for the housing to age and the market will take care of it.

As Charlie pointed out, this doesn't make any sense. Filtering is a very nice theory, but it really doesn't seem to match the data very well at all, and I expect that it will match it less and less well as time goes on. Charlie suggests that "the process of filtering, at least for initially high-income older neighborhoods, was a temporary result of rapid suburban dispersal in the 1940-1970 time period, and since that time has been steadily reversed."

Take the Grand Concourse in the Bronx for example. It was "the Park Avenue of the Bronx" when it was built, lined with large luxury Art Deco apartment buildings. Real prices and rents declined after World War II, and in 2000 you could get a two-bedroom apartment with hardwood parquet floors and a sunken living room for under $800 a month. Now those apartments go for $1500-2000.

It's true that most of those buildings were not well-maintained, but the causation is more likely the other way around: the landlords didn't put a lot of money into them because they didn't bring in much rent. So why were the rents so cheap? I'm guessing that there were several related factors: racism, city services, crime, noise, fads and the suburban ponzi scheme.

First, there are a lot of racists out there who don't want to live near black and Puerto Rican people, and if anything there were more fifty years ago. That reduces prices and rents anywhere near where black and Puerto Rican people live, which can be a good deal if you're not a racist. The problem is that the city was run by racists and by people who spent money where the rich and powerful people lived, and when the rich and powerful people moved away from the South Bronx, the city cut back on street sweeping, garbage pickup and other services. Most notably, it cut back on policing. At the same time the drug booms fueled by crack and other substances brought money and power to criminal gangs that lived in those neighborhoods. Some people (usually poor) seem to mind less when there's a lot of noise around from amplified music and other activities, but when the people who do mind move away, that lowers home prices and rents even more.

Finally, at that time it was "the thing to do" to move to the suburbs and buy as big a house on as big a piece of land with as big a car as you could afford. The suburban ponzi scheme described so well by the StrongTowns crew made housing cheaper in the suburbs than it needed to be to cover the amount of services that the municipalities were providing. All those factors made housing cheap in the Bronx, in Harlem, in Williamsburg and in Fort Greene.

Now those factors are reversing one by one. The suburban ponzi scheme has mostly burnt itself out. "The thing to do" is now to move back to the city and live in an apartment. The drug boom has subsided, and crime is much more under control. People may be less racist. So middle-class white people move back to the city, the noise levels go down, the city starts spending more money in the neighborhoods and the black and Latino people can't afford to live their any longer. Prices go up.

A lot of the anger over gentrification comes from the fact that the poor black and Latino people who lived in these neighborhoods for fifty or sixty years thought that the change was permanent. They thought that this was now their territory. Sure, they had to put up with crime, noise and dirty streets, but they got big apartments with parquet floors in Art Deco buildings on the Grand Concourse, and brownstones in Fort Greene and Harlem. They never thought anyone but them would want to live there again.

Is it fair that poor black and Latino people can't afford to live in these neighborhoods any more? Probably not. It wasn't fair when the neighborhoods were built and their grandparents couldn't afford to live in them. But the solution is not to keep the neighborhoods dirty, noisy and dangerous. As Matt Yglesias says, the best way to bring down the price of housing is to build more of it. And as I said last month, the best way to make sure that we have affordable housing that isn't dangerous or inaccessible is to build lower-quality housing alongside the high-quality housing.

Not all housing is equal

Last weekend I read Matt Yglesias's concise 76-page critique of housing policy, The Rent is Too Damn High. I agreed with pretty much everything he says, and I think everybody who's interested in these issues should read it. I want to pick up on a couple of the points Yglesias made, but then to go in a different direction. Yglesias is mostly talking about the average price of housing relative to average incomes, and that's important, but I want to talk about the distribution of housing prices: how and why some houses and apartments are more expensive than others, and what that means for access (and therefore for justice and equal opportunity), for society, and for our other goals: increasing efficiency and reducing carnage and pollution.

Suppose that tomorrow there's a revolution in New York City. Zoning and rent control are abolished, and every member of the City Planning Commission and the community boards is sent off to the reeducation camps. Spreading out from the Empire State Building, developers cover the New York area in parking-free high-rises until there's enough housing for everyone, at affordable prices. Sounds great, right?

Almost. But all housing is not created equal. Some apartments are bigger, some have better views, some have are more conveniently located. Some come with relatively superficial amenities like pools and package services. Some are dangerous or bad for your health, from crime, pollution, bad construction or neglect.

Some housing differences are a matter of taste, like neighbors who play loud salsa music or cook Indian food. Some people choose their housing out of racism, moving out if a Black family moves in. Some people want to live near people like them. Some people want to live where there is ethnic diversity, with no single group dominating.

All these factors affect the price of the housing. People who can't afford higher rents will necessarily have to put up with some undesirable features, like bad views, loud music, crime or a long commute. And that's where issues of fairness arise.

Even though I sometimes talk about market solutions to various problems, I am not a libertarian. I believe that some people are poorer than others through no fault of their own - including twentysomethings and creative types as well as members of stigmatized minority groups - and therefore need something to balance out the inequality of opportunity that comes with inequality of wealth. I also believe that some people are less wealthy than others because they've chosen a career that benefits society in some way - like teaching or cleaning toilets - and society should compensate for that. I believe that it's good for people to live near others of different economic backgrounds, and for kids to grow up with other kids who come from different walks of life.

One way of accomplishing this is through a top-down program like subsidized artist housing or Section 8 vouchers. A similar method is the "inclusionary housing" programs, which are very problematic. There is a more market-oriented solution, though: build more cheap housing. And cheap housing is bad housing. The next question is: bad in what way?

If the only determinant of an apartment's price is its distance from job centers, then the poor and the young will all wind up living on the outskirts of town, paying for their poverty with long inconvenient commutes. If the only determinant of price is proximity to a hazardous waste dump, or neglected housing stock, or gang activity, then the poor and the young will wind up in substandard housing, exposed to toxins and victimized by gangs. If the only determinant of price is proximity to "the right people," then the poor will wind up clustered together, having little contact with other social classes.

To prevent segregating the poor into inconveniently located bad housing with crime and pollution, we need to make some safe, solid housing available closer in, integrated with the rich people's housing. that is still affordable. In order to do that, we need to allow housing that's cheap in the non-dangerous, non-segregated ways. That means housing that's small or ugly, with crappy views and no doormen. Maybe housing that allows loud music if it doesn't bother anyone else. Regardless, it should still be well-built and well-maintained, and safe from pollution and crime.

Housing is about access

BBC Radio had an interesting documentary about the role of nonprofits, also known as "NGOs," in India. I was particularly struck by the story (starting at 14:50) of one nonprofit, SPARC, whose solution to the problems of the "pavement dwellers" (people who live in shacks on the sidewalk) in the Mumbai neighborhood of Byculla was to "resettle" them in new houses way the hell out in the suburbs (near a nuclear reactor, a fact not mentioned in the story).

Pavement dewllings in Byculla. Photo: Patrick Wakely / Community Planning

A woman named Famida said that the new housing came with its own problems. "My life is very happy," she starts out, but it turns out it's not so happy. "There's no 24-hour water supply, so we have to wander around for water. We order water tanks, but the water is contaminated. A lot of people get sick from drinking it. The electricity bills are too high. There's no work either. We have to come here to work. In Mankhurd there are no hospitals, no schools. Everything is so far away. There are no facilities for kids, no playgrounds. There's nothing good there."

The new housing in Mankhurd isn't much better. Photo: Bhimani et al.

Housing is not just about shelter. It's not even about shelter and utilities. If it were, we'd have no problem housing everyone in the world. In fact, it's my understanding that most of the pavement dwellers came from rural villages where they had decent houses and sometimes even clean water and places for the kids to play. What they didn't have was work, hospitals or schools, and that's why they went to Byculla in the first place.

The housing problem is about access: access to jobs, but also to shopping, to government and private services. It's also about access to education, to social networks and to the levers of government. If you don't believe that last one, compare the cleanliness of streets in the South Bronx with those on the Upper East Side.

As the old real estate motto goes, "Location, location, location." But of course access is not just about location, it's location plus transportation. If the location is less convenient, as Famida tells us, you need to spend more money and time on transportation for the same level of access.

Our friends at the Center for Neighborhood Technology have added those up to put a price tag on access for most of the United States. The results show that "drive till you qualify" was a misguided myth. More about access and housing soon.

From tragedy to farce in Bushwick

Today Streetsblog had a post about a few blocks immediately to the east of the Knickerbocker Avenue el station in Bushwick, where development is hostile to pedestrians.

Sprawl development in Bushwick. Photo: Christopher Taylor Edwards.

I was curious, so I pulled up the zoning for the area on City Planning's handy new ZOLA map (also on this PDF). The block with the military recruiter is zoned R6 with a C2-3 overlay, and the equally sprawly Burger King across the street is in a C4-3 commercial district. The C4-3 zone allows a floor-area ratio (FAR) of 3.4. The C2-3 overlay only allows a commercial FAR of 2.0. Both allow a residential FAR of up to 2.43, depending on setbacks. The developers could have built taller on both blocks.

These two zoning categories have identical parking requirements, and if the Burger King qualifies as "Refreshment stands, drive-in," it would have to have one parking space for every 400 square feet of floor area, with no waiver (PDF). The Burger King is about 5000 square feet, meaning that it's required to have thirteen spaces. In the parking lot there are about sixteen. The phone store is a bit more of a mystery, because when the amount of parking required is less than 25 spaces per lot, it is waived, but the developer built the parking anyway.

Noah Kazis writes, "Zoning may not be the chief culprit here. Head a block west along Knickerbocker, or follow the elevated subway tracks along Myrtle, and you’ll find vibrant commercial corridors with stores facing the sidewalk, not a parking lot. Even so, this seems like a location crying out for an intervention from New York City’s planners and economic development officials."

So if the zoning created that sprawl to the east of the el, why is there multistory mixed-use urban development under the el and to the west? The key is that the zoning code only covers new development, and all the buildings to the west were built in the 1930s, before the current zoning code was adopted in 1961.

The All Hands Fire. Photo: FDNY.

The next question is, why were the block with the Burger King and the block with the phone store new construction? What happened to the buildings that were there before 1961? To find that out, I found the area on the Digital Tax Map, and plugged the Block Number into ACRIS. There were some records referring to a "Bushwick II Urban Renewal Plan." And that led me to the fire. In 1977 the All Hands Fire was started by three boys playing in an abandoned knitting factory. It destroyed several blocks of stores and apartments. For years, not much was built except the ugly sprawly police station.

I haven't found much about the history of the Burger King block specifically, but the block with the military recruiter and the phone store was sold by the City in 1983 to a guy named Ralph Goffner. The deed contains the interesting clause that "The development and use of the subject property is limited to off-street parking purposes only, and any successor in interest shall not use the premises for any other purpose." Clearly, Goffner is now using the premises for other purposes as well as parking. I'm assuming that the City relaxed that covenant at some point, but I haven't found documentation. If so, they may have required that Goffner continue to use some of it for parking.

The bottom line is that it's not 1961 in Bushwick, and it's not 1983. It's 2011, and we now know that large curbside parking lots are anti-urban and anti-pedestrian. Single-use single-story buildings are pretty out of place next to a train station as well. The City should rezone the area to allow for denser development without required parking - C4-5A or something like the R6N district that I proposed in July with a C2-5 overlay.