Friday Read: Zoning, Here and in France

 A law journal article on the economic and environmental problems inherent in Euclidean zoning, always beneficial to read even if one is familiar with the arguments, but especially nice for launching a critique simultaneously from all ideological angles, leaving a little something for Randal O'Toole, Ed Glaeser and David Owen to each nod in agreement with:

"Euclidean zoning distorts the real estate market in so many ways that it manages to simultaneously conflict with conservative, libertarian, and liberal values. In addition to increasing the average price of housing, “[t]he fact that a zoning map allows high density housing in some areas, only single family housing in others, only industrial and commercial use in designated locations, and high rise office buildings in downtown areas, creates great disparity in value among a city’s many properties.” While “[a] local regulation imposing a maximum land value would almost certainly be viewed as a [Fifth Amendment] taking, . . . zoning laws that effectively impose a maximum land value have been upheld. . . .”

And because municipal zoning authorities, rather than the market, dictate what housing types will be available and favor single-family homes, “profitable sites for [multifamily housing] are artificially scarce” and thus artificially expensive. Such a situation is clearly incompatible with free-market principles, and since affordable housing often means some type of multi-family housing, it is also hostile to the goal of increasing the access of lower-income families to affordable housing. In addition, Euclidean zoning increases the burden on middle-class families: while the artificial scarcity of multi-family sites might be expected to reduce the cost of single-family homes by increasing the availability of single-family sites, this possibility is nullified by the tendency of suburban municipalities to require large minimum lot and house sizes. That “forces people to consume land and improvements they do not want,” at a higher cost than they would pay were they allowed to buy only the amount of property they want. “This forced consumption is inefficient because the recipient could sell the extra land and improvements on the market for more than what they are worth to the recipient. . . .”

As a bonus, it contains an in-depth comparative look at French and American (specifically, New York and Parisian) approaches to land use and zoning:

"[T]he most recent Paris zoning code divides the city and surrounding greenspace into just four zones, three of which are neither residential nor commercial (those three are Zone N (Nature and Forests); Zone UV (Green Urban), i.e. parks and other public landscaped areas; Zone UGSU (Major Urban Services), i.e. train stations and rail lines, hospitals, waste treatment centers, water reservoirs, riverside ports, convention centers, and major centers of industrial distribution); the city’s houses, apartment buildings, shops, cafés, offices, and other commercial establishments thus fall within a single zone, General Urban."
* * *

As for the relative absence of unsightly buildings, this is at least in part due to the fact that Paris has historically tended to zone for structures rather than uses. Between 1607 and 1902, zoning was used to set maximum building heights, to regulate building materials due to fire risk, and to impose minimum courtyard sizes to promote access to sunlight and free circulation of air. This has continued to the present day, with Paris’s General Urban district subdivided not into use zones but into areas of different maximum heights and structure types."

This is a true comparative look at property rights, much unlike the International Property Rights Index I mentioned earlier this week, and delves into the crucial details that, when applied in the aggregate, have enormous consequences for the resultant urban form.

Sunday Links, and Seaside

For the next week, I'll be writing from near Seaside, FL, where instead of lying at the beach, I'll be biking around to explore and report on the various New Urbanist communities in the area, including not only Seaside and its successor, Rosemary Beach, but also the intriguing Alys Beach, a DPZ project which appears to break from Seaside by embracing really narrow streets, attached houses as a principal design choice, and sharply defined public spaces.  Posts to follow shortly.

In the meantime, commenter Vince has written a critique of Portland's plans to regulate its burgeoning urban gardening movement which he develops into a thoughtful statement on the goals of planning and zoning itself:

"City planning and zoning departments have in mind exactly the sorts of things that ought to happen in exactly which places. They claim to be able to handle and mitigate the messy intricacies of highly complex cities and their inner workings. They seem to know precisely how many shopping centers we need, where they should be located, and how we should get there (exclusively by car.) They take measures to boldly separate people from where they work, dine and play so as to create economic dead zones (residential areas) across great swathes of our cities. The truth of the matter is that no one is able to accomplish the feat of city planning. Cities are a complex accumulation of unplanned human action, interaction and activity. To regulate that is to regulate human nature and civilization itself. At the city level, the best we can hope for is that some shot-gun style regulation doesn’t hit us in the rear end as planners try to make sweeping regulations that effect the lives of half a million people."

For more critical writing on zoning and urban planning, try Bernard Siegan's 35 year old, but still relevant, article.

Friday Reads and Links

Much of Besim Hakim's published work, a highly recommended read for anyone with the slightest interest in emergent urbanism, urban history and architecture, is available here (additional links at bottom of page) and is now added to the permanent links.  More to say about his work in future posts.

Murcia, Spain, offers to accept cars in exchange for lifetime transit passes.  I'd had the chance to visit Murcia, and if there's a country with an overall better and more livable urbanism and urban tradition than Spain, I'd like to hear where it is.

Old but still relevant: Ivan Illich's observations on walking, cars, bikes and the transportation industry.

The front lawn story out of Oak Park has sparked some critical reflection on the American front lawn from a variety of quarters.  Time's Brad Tuttle observes:

"...Space hogs, water suckers and giant leaf collectors that have to be blown, mown and doused in chemicals with a great ruckus to look good, what is the point of a lawn other than to say: we have land, time and money to waste?"

Scrutinizing Seattle's setback requirements, Seattle's Land Use Code asks:

"But I do wonder why do we require yards anyway? Shouldn’t we treat yards like parking? If people want yards then they can pay for them. Why build that in to requirements? ... Yards should be next on our list after parking in terms of code reform."

Chuck Wolfe has a thoughtful article on lawns which graciously links my earlier piece on the American front lawn.  Walkable Dallas-Fort Worth has more to add as well.  I've already mentioned The Case Against the American Front Lawn at Apartment Therapy and The Great (Big) American Lawn at Per Square Mile. 

New World Economics on SFDR in the Traditional Style

Nathan Lewis's latest urbanism post is up at his website, this time dealing with the topic of whether it is possible to create a neighborhood of single-family detached residential (SFDR) with room for cars which nonetheless is dense, walkable and pedestrian-centered on narrow streets:


Seijo neighborhood, Tokyo



"I am rather hesitant to take up this topic, because it is not my goal at all to build some sort of slightly improved auto-dependent suburb in Suburban Hell, but to create Traditional Cities instead where a car is not at all necessary. However, there is a place for this I think. First, the SFDR pattern is also a valid one for the pedestrian Traditional City. European examples of Traditional Cities tend to have a lot of apartments, but Tokyo in fact had very few apartments until the 20th century. The normal pattern was for very small SFD houses on very small plots. In fact, the first Western-style apartment building in Tokyo wasn't built until the 1920s. It was a Western idea they borrowed. ...

Second, although I promote a Traditional City in which cars are entirely unnecessary, and that you can walk everywhere or take a train to another place where you can walk everywhere, nevertheless there is perhaps a need for a kind of transition format in the U.S. For example, let's say you lived in the Washington DC area within walking distance of a train station, that you can take to work in downtown DC. So, you don't need a car for commuting, but still you need a car to interact with the rest of the U.S., which is still car dependent."

Thus, can we think of a pattern which is compatible with BOTH today's need for two to three cars per household, the desire for the SFDR format, and ALSO compatible with the Traditional City pedestrian-centric design including of course Really Narrow Streets? This is a rather touchy design goal, as you can see, since we want to have one foot in two worlds which have a fundamental incompatibility.

Let's formulate some ideas along these lines..."

Read the whole thing, with tons of illustrative maps and photos, here, and feel free to leave any feedback below as Nathan's website doesn't allow comments.

Urban Reads

If you're looking for some new reading for yourself or a person you know who's interested in history, cities and urban planning, a reader has kindly sent along to me a list of 50 of the best books on urban history.  The classics are on there, including Jacobs, Mumford and Reps, but there are many lesser known titles as well covering everything from Chinese urbanism to American infrastructure.

Along the same lines, last month Austin Contrarian compiled a list of recommended readings on urban economics, including the Death and Life follow up The Economy Of Cities, which is worth reading alone for the provocative theorizing about the urban origins of agriculture, but which goes far beyond that to illuminate the economic basis for many of the conclusions in Death and Life.

I could add many others to these lists which I've enjoyed over the past few years, but would invite commenters to share their own recommendations.

Monday Links

Nathan Lewis' latest, on traditional urbanism and ski resort villages.

A previous post here noted how the (un-calibrated) SmartCode does not permit traditionally narrow streets.  Stephen Smith now links a study showing how the DPZ-influenced Miami 21 form-based code slightly increases parking minimums over Miami's previous Euclidean zoning code. 

More from the parking files: Tampa taxpayers cover the city's parking revenue shortfalls even as the city continues to provide free and subsidized parking to its employees. 

Witold Rybczynski puts the High Line in historical context and shows why its success in New York may not be applicable to other cities.

Engineer Charles Marohn at Strong Towns blog: "If there is one thing our current financial situation should teach us about the engineering profession it is this: engineers will bankrupt us if given the chance to build our cities and towns the way they envision them."  Tons of excellent material about the economics of excessively wide streets there.

Links

A timely topic: Witold Rybczynski on density.     

At Citytank, Josh Mahar has authored an excellent post that explores the potential of street narrowing, a favorite subject of this blog.

Streetsblog explains how parking minimums make housing more difficult and expensive to build, but according to developers, they also provide a strong incentive to subdivide large lots into smaller parcels for which parking requirements are waived -- a design outcome which can be beneficial for the urban environment, where it is allowed.

Stephen Smith at Market Urbanism is rightfully skeptical of some of the claims made for green roofs.  I'd lean more toward Quinlan Terry's (and Léon Krier's) take on roofs (the "pitched slate and tile roof ... the architectural expression of every civilized age").   

Winner of the Driehaus Prize for classical architecture?  Who else but Robert A.M. Stern.  The somewhat lesser known Reed Prize is awarded to a person "who has supported the cultivation of the traditional city."

Monday Morning Urban Links

A few to start off the day:

Andrés Duany defends the New Urbanism against the critiques of the "Avant Garde Establishment," Landscape Urbanists, and others.

An editorial piece in yesterday's New York Times attempts to make the case that New York's grid is an environmentally-sensitive, "green" plan, citing in support the factually incorrect statement that the 1811 Commissioners' Plan "conserve[d] 843 prime acres as a Central Park."  Oops.

More from the department of "thinking small:" writing about Bucharest, an author considers the role of the human scale in architecture and planning in making cities worthy of being loved.

Canadian city proposes requiring suburban developers to pay higher fees to better reflect the costs of supplying city services to outlying developments.

Withdrawal of state funding threatens long-planned Cincinnati streetcar.