Austin Contrarian

My new blog

Urban Returns.

I started Austin Contrarian to write about Austin land-use issues.  Land-use fights are bloodsport in this town; I enjoy writing about them and will continue to do so.  

But over the last three years, I've branched out.  I'm now as likely to write about urban economics, demographics, New Urbanism or some other topic that has nothing to do with Austin in particular.  Lately, I've been writing about these other things more frequently because development has dried up in Austin.

Today, about half of my readers are out-of-towners.  I don't imagine they care one jot about Austin's noise ordinance, the Waterfront Overlay Ordinance, the McMansion Ordinance or the VMU Ordinance.  On the other hand, I doubt most of my Austin readers care about the more esoteric economics or demographics I like to write about.  They started reading this blog for detailed coverage of zoning disputes.

It's gotten harder and harder to juggle these two audiences without alienating one or the other.  So I will divide my blogging.  In this blog, I will write exclusively about Austin -- zoning disputes, water rationing, city politics, congestion and all the other Austin-related topics I've covered over the years.  If an entry has a significant Austin angle, i will post it here.

At Urban Returns, I will write about everything else.

There will be some overlap.  If I think one of my Austin entries will interest out-of-towners, I will cross-post.  An example would be my entry on cul-de-sacs.  I will err on the side of cross-posting.

So:  If you read my blog for the zoning coverage or other local issues, don't go anywhere.  If you don't care about Austin zoning disputes or ponderous exigeses of the noise ordinance or the land-use code, go to Urban Returns.  You won't miss anything here.

If you're one of those who likes both, then you'll just have to add another blog to your feed reader.  Sorry.

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One bit of housekeeping:  I don't want separate comment threads when I cross-post.  When I cross-post I will close comments here and include a link to the cross-post at Urban Returns.  Urban Returns will have threaded comments, though (if the software is working right).  I hope that's some compensation for the inconvenience.

Why help build someone else's web site for free?

Kevin Brass at the Chronicle has a piece questioning the start-up Austin Post's business model, which is, "Write for us for free in exchange for exposure."  Spike Gillespie, a professional writer, understandably takes exception: 

"If I want exposure, I'll hop up on the bar and take my shirt off, thank you very much," wrote Gillespie, the author of several books and a columnist with national credentials. "And how soon will the promised exposure net me invitations from still more websites willing to not pay me for my writing in exchange for still more exposure?"

I'm occasionally asked to write for other websites, and occasionally I agree.  And sometimes I agree but later regret it.

I'm not a professional writer (except when I'm writing for stuffy old judges), and I've never made any money off my blog.  I write just to be read.

So you might think that I view any exposure as good exposure.  I don't.  Exposure costs.  It takes time to write a piece -- sometimes, a long time.  Even if I'm doing little more than cross-posting, I have to rewrite my entries for the site's specific  audience.  The exposure has to be worth this cost.

The kind of exposure matters.  Obviously, the size of the other site's audience is important.  But it also has to have a bunch of readers who care about the type of stuff I write about.  Mine is a niche blog.

And exposure is not the end all and be all.  I want people to be exposed to the sum of my work, not a stray entry that they might scan for 15 seconds before the next click.  If I can't entice them to my blog with back links, I won't waste my time.   

It took me nearly three years to settle on these criteria.   But they have helped and will help me ration my time wisely.  They tell me that writing for free for a start up with a small circulation is a bad use of my time budget.    

If every blogger had my callous attitude, of course, there would be no start ups like the Austin Post.

Shrug. 

At Urban Returns

Back and forth.

Red Bird Lane

This isn't CWS versus Save Town Lake, but it does exemplify what is wrong with  Austin's zoning process.

Developers Leslie Moore and Magdalena Rood want the city to rezone a one-half acre lot near Stassney and South Congress from SF-2 to SF-3.  (Moore and Rood redeveloped the small cottages across from the Texas School for the Deaf into the eclectic shopping area there now.)

This shouldn't be controversial.  Almost all of the single-family properties in the area are zoned SF-3.  SF-3, in fact, is the predominant single-family district in Austin.  This neighborhood is fairly central these days -- a little over one mile south of Ben White.  The area is close to three major arterials and several bus stops.  It is a natural place for denser development.

View Larger Map

But the neighbors are having none of it.  SF-3 allows minimum lot sizes of 5,750 sf for single-family homes rather than SF-2's 10,000 sf minimum.  Even worse (from the neighbors' perspective), SF-3 allows duplexes.  The neighbors object to the upzoning because it would allow Moore and Rood to subdivde the property into three lots and build as many as five units (two duplexes and one single-family home).  They object even though there is a duplex next door and a duplex across the street.

They cite that old standby, "neighborhood character."  Go with what's worked elsewhere, I guess.  But In Fact Daily's coverage (gated) suggests they're worried about something else:

“We met with some of our neighbors and listened to their objections. The things that they were concerned about were things like not wanting to have renters in the neighborhood. They want people who are going to be homeowners in the neighborhood,” Moore said. “Well, I don’t think there’s ever been anyone of us who can guarantee that that’s going to happen, and, besides that, I think that there’s a lot of us out there who are renters, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

Homeowner Andrea McCartney, speaking on behalf of her neighbors, said her neighbors did not oppose growth as long as it was controlled growth. In this case, the lot was located on a block in her neighborhood where duplexes and condominiums have stayed on the market for months.

The Planning Commission has already approved the rezoning.  The case came before City Council on June 18, but it apparently is so controversial, so contentious, that Council postponed it to July 23 so the neighbors and Moore can continue to negotiate (despite the apparent impasse).  And, because the neighbors have filed a valid petition in opposition, approval will take a Council super-majority.

And so we are handed a nice illustration of all that is wrong with zoning in Austin:

1. Systematic under-zoning.  Our zoning districts are gerrymandered, sometimes block by block.  This allows each district to be zoned for the least intensive use compatible with the surrounding uses.  Larger districts require more intensive zoning in order to accommodate a broader range of uses.  For example, the city had to carve out this tiny, six-block "neighborhood" in order to give it SF-2 zoning; a larger district would have required the city to stick to the SF-3 zoning in the surrounding neighborhoods.

2. Neighborhood groups that exploit zoning regulations for improper purposes.  Zoning was not intended to regulate a neighborhood's mix of renters and homeowners.

3. A zoning process that dissipates enormous resources on every trifling dispute.  By the time this is over, this one single-family lot will have consumed a ot of Planning Commission and City Council time, not to mention the time of city staff and the property owners themselves.

4. A zoning process that gives undue weight to neighborhood objections.  Because the neighbors have filed a valid petition, simply changing this parcel from  one single-family classification to another will require a Council super-majority.

Austin is growing.  All central neighborhoods face -- and will continue to face --nearly constant development pressure.  Our goal should be to help our neighborhoods gracefully transition to denser, more urban places.  Our zoning regime does the opposite, though.  It encourages neighborhoods to object to every upzoning, no matter how flimsy the pretext.  Council approves upzonings in a scattershot manner, embittering one side or the other.  We're left with gerrymandered districts that are themselves pockmarked with stifling overlays, covenants and spot zonings.  And the property owners are guaranteed another trip to Council whenever they want to change the use.

We're number six

Smarter Cities (NRDC) has released its ranking of the most sustainable cities.  Austin is sixth!

Of course, like most city rankings, this one is based on an arbitrary weighting of an arbitrary list of factors. For example, they include "standard of living" as a category. What does this have to do with sustainability?.   Unless the goal is to jack up the ranking of wealthy California cities.

They omit a variable for land-use patterns. If you're worried about open space -- and I'm sure NRDC is -- this omission is inexplicable. I'm more sanguine about suburban development than many, but even I am surprised by this omission.

But mostly the problem is how they weight the factors. If climate change is the most pressing problem facing us today, then shouldn't energy consumption get the most weight?  I think it should.  And Austin fares very poorly on energy consumption.  It's 100+ degrees here in the summer.   My air conditioner runs virtually non-stop, and will until late September.  Adding a relative handful of low-energy buildings to the existing housing stock won't budge our average energy consumption.

Ditto with transportation. TTI just yesterday released a report identifying Austin as one of the most congested cities its size. I don't know what NRDC means by "sustainable" (I think the word has essentially lost all meaning through overuse), but does NRDC really believe that spending an inordinate amount of time in traffic, burning extra fuel, is a sustainable transportation pattern?

I could go on. Water. Yes, we've got pretty stringent water controls. But then we live in an area that is frequently parched. Each Austin resident puts a greater strain on local water resources than each resident of, say, Cleveland.

This will piss a lot of Austinites off, but probably the greenest Austinite is the one who moves to a city with a milder climate, more water, and less congestion.

Punching above its class

The Texas Transportation Institute has issued its annual report on congestion in American cities.  As usual, Austin doesn't do well, punching well above its class.  Tthe average Austin traveler experienced an annual delay of 39 hours in 2007.    That's up from 32 hours in 1997, although no worse than 2006.   

Ryan Avent puts the Austin figures in perspective:

The average traveler in the New York metro area faces 44 hours wasted per year, for instance, while the average traveler in Los Angeles loses 70 hours per year to congestion, even though New York’s metropolitan population is much, much larger than LA’s.  More interesting still, Austin and Raleigh aren’t that far behind New York with 39 and 34 hours wasted annually, despite the fact that both metro areas have less than two million people while greater New York is home to 20 million people.

TTI also calculates the percent of peak period travel that is congested.   Austin again fares poorly -- its roads are congested for 70% of the peak travel period: 

By comparison, Dallas's roads are congested for only 66% of the peak travel period.  Houston is marginally worse at 73%.   Austin's peers include New York (69%), Detroit (71%) and Baltimore (69%).  

One has to wonder what damage Austin's congestion has wrought to downtown.   Businesses want to locate where their employees can get to them, and high peak-period congestion means that commuters must fight traffic to get to work most of the time.   I suspect Austin's downtown suffers more heavily from peak-period congestion than any other employment center in the area since MoPac and I-35 -- downtown's principal commuter routes  -- are the two most congested roads in the area.     Eventually we must recognize that our congestion will stunt downtown's growth, if it hasn't already.   We wil lose the economies of scale and agglomeration benefits that a vibrant downtown would  yield.

You know, of course, that there is only one solution.

Skilled cities II

While I'm in this nerdy mood, let me point to this paper by Jaison Abel, Ishita Dey and Todd Gabe:

We estimate a model of urban productivity in which the agglomeration effect of density is enhanced by a metropolitan area’s stock of human capital. Using new measures of output per worker for U.S. metropolitan areas along with two measures of density that account for different aspects of the spatial distribution of population, we find that a doubling of density increases productivity by 10 to 20 percent. Consistent with theories of learning and knowledge spillovers in cities, we demonstrate that the elasticity of average labor productivity with respect to density increases with human capital. Metropolitan areas with a human capital stock that is one standard deviation below the mean level realize around half of the average productivity gain, while doubling density in metropolitan areas with a human capital stock that is one standard deviation above the mean level yields productivity benefits that are about 1.5 times larger than average.

This is a little technical, so let me translate:   Cities tend to become more productive as they grow denser.   On average, a city's workforce becomes 10% more productive when the city doubles in density.   But that average obscures the importance of skills.   Less skilled cities benefit a lot less than skilled cities from densification.   In fact, skilled cities, on average, enjoy three times the productivity gain from denser growth than less skilled cities.   This is yet more evidence of the increasing returns and agglomeration benefits from density.

This is a nice complement to the Glaeser and Resseger paper.  Glaeser and Resseger found that workers in skilled cities become more productive as the city grows, while workers in unskilled cities do not.   Abel et al find that workers in skilled cities become more productive as the city grows denser; workers in unskilled cities, less so.

The authors also test their conclusions using a variant of weighted density. They find even greater productivity gains (20% on average) when a city doubles its weighted density.

The authors use a coarse form of weighted density.  They weight urbanized area density by county subdivisions.  But how you chop up a city matters when calculating weighted density.  In order to calculate weighted density, you first divide the city into a bunch of smaller regions.  You then assign each region's density a weight equal to its share of the populations.  In general, weighted density increases as you chop up the city into smaller regions.

I used census tracts for my weighted densities.  There are many more census tracts than county subdivisions.  I thus got a lot more stratification than they did -- e.g., their top weighted density was 19,000 ppsm, while mine was 33,000.  How you divide a city for calculating weighted density is somewhat arbitrary, but I think using census tracts makes more sense than county subdivisions, which are more or less arbitrary.  I suspect the authors would have found even greater returns to density had they weighted density by census tracts rather than by county subdivisions.  

H/t Richard Florida.

$160 per trip

That's the social cost that Charles Kamonoff, an NYC environmental/transportation analysist, believes each driver who enters Manhattan's central business district imposes on other drivers.  Via Felix Salmon: 

After crunching the numbers, he calculates that on a weekday, the average car driven into Manhattan south of 60th Street causes a total of 3.26 hours of delays to everybody else. (At weekends, the equivalent number is just over 2 hours.) No one car is likely to suffer excess delays of more than a few seconds, of course, but if you add up all those seconds for the thousands of affected cars and trucks, it comes to a significant amount of time.

Many of those hours are very valuable things, especially when you consider big trucks, staffed with two or three professionals, just idling in traffic. Komanoff calculates (check out the “Value of Time” tab) that the average vehicle has 1.97 people in it, and that the average value of an hour of saved vehicle time south of 60th Street in Manhattan on a weekday is $48.89. Which means, basically, that driving a car into Manhattan on a weekday causes about $160 of negative externalities to everybody else.

I can't vouch for Komanoff's numbers or his methodology. Given the sheer complexity of the traffic dynamics in Manhattan -- which are much more complicated than the traffic dynamics of a single highway -- I would treat his estimate skeptically.

That said, his estimate doesn't seem outrageously high to me. The basic point is sound:  we severely underestimate how many people we delay when we enter a congested network of roads.  If you've ever tried to make the trip crosstown Manhattan in the middle of the day, you understand just how much delay one driver can cause.

Komanoff recommends congestion pricing.  A good idea.  But he also proposes making buses free, which is a bad idea (and one floated in Austin occasionally). 

One problem is that a free bus would be a magnet for the homeless looking for a cool place to hang out.  That sounds callous, I know, and perhaps it is, but in that case you'd never see a large switch from cars to buses, so what would be the point?

The other problem is that both bus and rail can be congested, too.  If you've ever taken a packed No. 3 around ACL, you understand this perfectly well.  There is a cost to standing up on a jerky bus for 20 minutes, squeezed in among a bunch of strangers who may or may not practice good hygiene.  This is a genuine cost of congestion.  In fact, it is probably too high a cost for most of the drivers around here, who would much rather be stuck in traffic in a cool, comfortable car.

If we price roads but not buses or trains, then the buses or trains will be too crowded (at least in Manhattan and DC, if not in Austin) and we simply will have shifted the cost of externalities from drivers to bus and train riders.  This certainly does not mean that buses and trains must pay their own way.  But it does mean pricing them with the interests of both drivers and non-drivers in mind.

Skilled cities

Ed Glaeser and Matthew Resseger have a new paper out examining how worker productivity varies with city size.  They find that workers in skilled cities become more productive as the cities grow; workers in less skilled cities do not:

There is a strong connection between per worker productivity and metropolitan area population, which is commonly interpreted as evidence for the existence of agglomeration economies.  This correlation is particularly strong in cities with higher levels of skill and virtually non-existent in less skilled metropolitan areas.  This fact is particularly compatible with the view that urban density is important because proximity spreads knowledge, which either makes workers more skilled or entrepreneurs more productive.  Bigger cities certainly attract more skilled workers, and there is some evidence suggesting that human capital accumulates more quickly in urban areas.

No one is quite sure exactly why (skilled) city growth makes workers more productive (Glaeser and Resseger included).  One theory is that workers learn more quickly from one another in larger cities; there is more trade-specific information "in the air."  For example,  software engineers and musicians develop their skills more quickly in a city with lots of software engineers and musicians.

The other theory is that a large city has a deeper pool of entrepreneurs and others with "high human capital" (i.e., smart, creative people).  It generates more innovations, which make the city's population more productive, which attracts more workers, who generate more innovation, etc. (This one better matches Jane Jacobs’ theory.)

These are genuinely different explanations. If the first is accurate, then workers’ pay should rise more steeply with experience in large, skilled cities than in small, skilled cities.  The second is a sort of “creative destruction” theory; it means that workers in large, skilled cities face a higher risk of being displaced by the latest innovation.  I think both are true, which (partly) explains why big cities attract some highly skilled people while repelling others.

What does blogging crowd out?

Matthew Kahn wonders whether blog reading crowds out book reading.  He believes there are two types of blog readers:  the nerdy "Wikipedia" types who like variety and suffer from slight attention deficit order, and the "deep readers" who want to dig deep in a few subjects.  He speculates that books are substitutes for the Wikipedia nerds and complements for the deep readers.

I read more books since I've started reading blogs.  I don't buy more books, but I read more of the books I do buy.  I've always bought books on impulse but then let them sit on a shelf.  The real reason I read more books now, I think, is that I blog myself.  Books stimulate ideas for new posts, of course.  But, more importantly, I can only say the same thing a few times without getting bored.  I long ago exhausted my own stock of ideas so I have to rip off others'.  

What does my blogging crowd out?  Baseball.  Football.  I used to watch two or three baseball games a week.  I don't anymore.

Some TV, but, honestly, not that much.  My prime TV watching time has always started at 10 pm with the Simpsons.   I used to watch TV before 10, but I can't really remember what I watched, so I guess I'm watching TV more "efficiently."

Blogging crowds out some work.  I used to hustle harder for new business when I was slow.  I haven't sat down to estimate my lost earnings from blogging -- that might make me quit (blogging, that is, not work).  Still, work is work; there hasn't been too much to take from there.

I think my blogging has mostly crowded out dead time.  I don't know whether I used to just sit around staring blankly at a wall or what, but when I do the math, the time I spend on blogging and reading exceeds -- by a lot -- the time I used to spend on activities since crowded out.

City growth

The Census Bureau has released its July 1, 2008 city population estimates.  Note that Texas has three of the largest eight (Houston, San Antonio and Dallas) and six of the largest 21 (add Austin, Fort Worth and El Paso).  Houston now trails Chicago by just 600,000, a gap that Houston could close within 20 years if the last decade's growth rates hold.  This is a surprising statistic as long as one ignores metropolitan populations, which are what really count when calculating a city's heft.  Chicago's metro population is still much larger than Dallas and Houston's, which are probably now the fourth and fifith largest metro areas.  And, in general, Texas cities have large boundaries and aggressively annex surrounding areas, which partly accounts for their rapid growth.

What's going on with Fort Worth? It had the fastest growth of the top 25, both between 2007 and 2008 (3.6%) and between 2000 and 2008 (29%).  No other city in the top 25 was close; Charlotte and Phoenix were the closest at 21% and 18%, respectively.  Fort Worth has grown twice as fast as Austin since 2000.  I haven't heard much about Fort Worth's explosive growth.  Strange.

One surprise on the other end:  Philadelphia contracted at a faster rate than Detroit between 2000 and 2008.

The most noteworthy fact here may be that, as the WSJ points out, central cities did very well between July 1, 2007 and July 1, 2008.  

The central-city population in U.S. metropolitan areas with more than one million people (excluding New Orleans) grew at an annual rate of 0.97% between July 2007 and July 2008, compared with a growth rate of 0.90% in 2006-2007, and growth rates around 0.5% in the years between 2002 and 2005.  By contrast, U.S. suburbs in metro areas greater than 1 million people grew at a 1.11% annual rate in 2007-2008, down from growth rates between 1.29% and 1.48% between 2002 and 2005.  Central cities are closing the gap.

The WSJ attributes the shift in growth rates to the recession.  We have a short memory.  2007 was the year of the historic spike in gas prices.  Central cities -- especially older, monocentric cities like Chicago -- began to look a lot more attractive to commuters.  I imagine this played a much bigger role than the nascent recession.