The Old(er) Way of City Planning

I've been reading through the 1912 "Plan of the City of Hartford" by the legendary firm Carrère and Hastings, a document which encapsulates some of the best conventional wisdom of that or any era in terms of planning, but which also foreshadows some of the profession's darker moments later in the century.

An ambitious comparison: Saxony's Dresden
as model for Hartford, CT's Capitol area.

There are many noteworthy aspects of the report, most prominently the heavy influence of European
laws and physical plans, and in particular plans of the cities of the German and Austrian Empires, an influence which would permanently fade after 1914.  Many of the cities featured in photographs as models for American cities to be followed were, only three decades later, obliterated in bombing campaigns, resulting in a physical destruction to complement the ideological and academic shifts in focus.

Although the laws of foreign countries provide as much to learn from as ever, as highlighted in Sonia Hirt's latest book, the report is significant to me for its focus on what was once called the street plan, a plan of such antiquity that it preceded zoning plans by millennia, going back to the Romans and further, and which was famously employed by American planners in such cities as New York, Savannah and Washington, D.C.  Rediscovering these plans has been a research focus of planner Paul Knight, who has devoted a website to the subject (I highly recommend his presentation on the subject, along with co-contributors available in PDF here).

The street plan, in antiquity and down nearly to the present day, was considered part and parcel of infrastructure along with sewer needs, fresh water and other necessities.  Not only major arteries, such as the old Roman inter-city roads, were considered as an object of central planning, but minor residential streets as well.  The 1912 plan explains the main rationale for this apparent micro-management as follows:

Reasonable enough?  One can read evidence of the practice of street development in the municipal proceedings of the era in a time before the existence of subdivision regulations, here as it turns out from Hartford's own Common Council Board in August, 1912:

In other words, while the developer would propose a street alignment, this was considered by the city planners in the context of the city plan itself, which at the time would have included a street plan.  Thus, for a developer to obtain approval of his proposed street, it would likely be to his benefit to have it agree with the city's pre-existing plan.  Thomaston Street, which exists today, fits seamlessly into Hartford's irregular, but generally continuous and interconnected, street pattern.  The street would also be a public one, but the plan was in conformity with the city's own plan for growth, and with such extensions happening incrementally, the city was unlikely to be overburdened with long-term maintenance obligations by such a development process.  Note also that Mr. Thomas named the street after himself, or so it seems -- apparently naming rights were vested in the developer, as a sort of added incentive.

Paul Knight's illustration of street-plan led vs. zoning led urban development.

But what of Carrère and Hastings' own plans?  A picture is worth a thousand words in this context, and fortunately the authors left us with some detailed renderings for street grid expansions.  Here the city "general plan," which as can be seen is a street plan, is presented in its entirety:

There is no zoning here, and no historic preservation overlay, although the heights of buildings were automatically limited relative to street width.  Notably are the large ring boulevard, cast as the Ringstrasse or Unter Den Linden of Hartford, but which equally appears to anticipate a grade-separated highway encircling the city.  Overall, the map delineates the public realm of the city: the streets, parks and certain public buildings, those things which were considered appropriate objects for planning.

Note also the newer planned areas to the corners of the map.  In contrast to the irregular grid of existing Hartford, these areas are drawn in a style which is clearly influenced by German neo-medievalist planning fashions of the day, but which again are also anticipating the curvilinear, limited access suburban developments of the late 20th century.  Nonetheless, the areas are drawn in in complete detail, with all, or at least most, subsidiary streets represented.

The planners note that Hartford was undergoing a period of small multifamily development, but are disappointed at the limited options for ownership under current laws.  One wonders whether they had pondered a condominium style of ownership, which at the time was still many years in the future.  In the absence of such laws, the only realistic option was for the freestanding house (common in Hartford) or the rowhouse (very uncommon in the city).

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What is sobering to realize from the vantage point of a century later is how utterly the City Beautiful movement, as represented by this crowning document, failed in its efforts to ape the grandeur of the European city, and how thoroughly it succeeded in anticipating the primacy of the car and the rash of road-widenings and "stroad" construction that would follow in its wake.  After 1914, in fact, much of even the desire for inhuman-scale grandeur would fade, to be replaced by cold engineering and mechanical precision.  Dresden was never again to appear as a serious model for Hartford or, most likely, any other American city, and certainly not after 1945.*  And the street plan?  It was eliminated, either folded into "comprehensive plans" or dissolved into subdivision regulations that, using 1930s FHA standards, encouraged the excessively wide streets that the Hartford planners warned of.  In most cities, only the zoning plan survives, with no separate street plan at all.  Streets, many of them private, take selfish, non-connected forms, with the result that greater and greater volumes of traffic are channeled onto fewer and fewer roads which must therefore take on ever-increasing dimensions to handle the load.

In a few fast-growing American and Canadian cities, such as Toronto and Dallas, something of a street-plan led growth pattern is visible, and in most Mexican cities such a process continues today.  But in other cities, there still may be something to take away from these old plans despite their failures.

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*Dresden's historic center is currently undergoing a major rebuilding project, indicating that Dresden may be built again, from scratch, before the original City Beautiful plans are fully realized in Hartford.

Yet Another Height Act Article

Washington's Height of Buildings Act has been a subject of debate for years now, but lately, with the Act under Congressional scrutiny, the discussion has taken on more than academic significance.  I'm wary of touching the subject at all, since it seems to have become more ideologically polarized than almost any other planning-related topic, generating ample heat but less light (one recent article refers to economists responding to its mere mention with "paroxysms of outrage").  Points of view ostensibly grounded in economics and statistics are supported with flip references to generalized principles, comparative urban study is given short shrift where it is not ignored entirely, and each side accuses the other of using economics as thin cover for aesthetic preferences, whether it be the free marketeer's skyscraper envy or the traditionalist's veneration of the mid-rise city.

A thoughtful article by David Alpert in Greater Greater Washington has triggered a vigorous debate, with Kaid Benfield mustering all available arguments in the Act's defense, and Alex Block and George Mason law professor David Schleicher on hand with rebuttals. Graciously citing an earlier post of mine, transportation planner Dan Malouff has issued a rebuttal to the rebuttals, taking a much-needed big picture look both chronologically and geographically, and touting the benefits of the Act for good urbanism. 

Without venturing into the aesthetic and form-based arguments, which have been covered exhaustively elsewhere, the hard numbers and economic arguments that have been submitted in opposition to the Act are relatively scarce.  I'll attempt to address a couple of them.

This recurrent complaint of high office rents raised by the free market side has made its most recent appearance in Schleicher's article, where he mentions that "[o]ffice space in downtown D.C. is more expensive than in New York's financial district, and 850 square-foot apartments in Anacostia, one of the cheapest areas in the city, now rent for $1300 a month" (yet citing to an article which states that in 2010, DC office rents were higher – barely – than those of New York City, not the financial district).  In response I would note:

• The number appears to be cherry-picked. The same article cited by Schleicher indicates that rents had been much higher in New York during the preceding five years, and a more recent study of Class A office space in the DC and NY metropolitan markets shows DC rents at only 78% of the level of New York.  The 2010 market figure, taken near the bottom of the real estate market, does not appear to be representative of long-term averages, nor is it entirely clear what the geographic unit for comparison was (comparing DC proper to NYC would tend to inflate DC rents relative to NY rents, for instance, as DC is a much smaller fraction of its greater metro area).
• Taking into account median incomes, both DC's office rents and residential rents seem cheap compared to NYC, with office rents the cheaper of the two. In recent years, the DC metro area has had the highest median household and individual income in the country, considerably higher than New York.  Based on this figure, we should expect to see very high housing costs (and probably also office rents) in the DC region, as income and housing costs are highly correlated throughout the United States, and DC moreover has other unique office demand factors related to the presence of the federal government. Washington does in fact have the second-highest MSA housing costs east of California, yet these are still cheaper than New York's, with the result that DC is in housing-to-income terms far more "affordable" than New York.  And yet office rents appear to be cheaper still: DC's housing cost averages 89% of that in New York, while its office rents, averaged over the past several years, seem to be in the range of 70-80% of New York's.  This is the opposite of what one would expect based on the views of the Height Act opponents, whose argument supposes that the Act primarily impedes construction of high-rise office space in the central business district.

Apart from a citation to a number from an Ed Glaeser study, which was partly debunked as regards its application to the Height Act in another Atlantic Cities article, there are no other figures presented in Schleicher's article.  Schleicher does cite, as is common in this debate, to general supply and demand principles, but Malouff counters him, noting that:

"There is currently around 100 million square feet of office space in downtown DC, which makes it the 3rd largest downtown in America after New York and Chicago. Despite no skyscrapers, downtown DC currently has a greater supply of office space than downtown San Francisco, Boston, Philadelphia, or Los Angeles."

So, broadly speaking, we do have a result that complies with supply and demand principles: DC has a larger supply of office space than comparable cities, and has office rents relatively lower than we would expect based on median incomes and other comparative measures.

I would add that, according to a 2006 Demographia survey, Washington's CBD is consistently found to be larger and denser than those of its peers.  For instance, DC's CBD is 1.5 times larger and has 1.7 times the employment density of Houston's. Similarly, it is both 1.3 times larger and denser than Philadelphia's CBD.  In both cases, it achieves this despite having less buildable area to work with, due to DC's exceptionally wide streets and generous allotment of parks.  It is also much more centralized, containing 18.7% percent of metro employment compared to Houston's 8.9%.  Given all this, can we at least allow for the possibility that the Height Act has actually stimulated, rather than impeded, growth and intensification of the downtown business district?  This would of course have implications for the usefulness of height limits to other cities and in other contexts, but it's a topic that deserves greater study.

Whatever the true answer might be in this case, more empirical evidence would be helpful in figuring out  answers to the economic questions at issue here.  Throwing around terms like supply and demand, however, without bothering to investigate what the “supply” is the in the first place, does not greatly contribute to the discussion.  One hopes that the forthcoming Congressional study is up to that task, but with the little evidence-gathering that has been done so far seeming to have been in the service of pre-determined conclusions, I am keeping my expectations low.