Austin Contrarian

Not quite stagnant (on average)

Central Austin, that is.

The region outlined in blue below is what I usually mean by "central Austin."  It's roughly the area afflicted by the original McMansion ordinance.  (The map was prepared by the city demographer, Ryan Robinson, but the blue outline is mine.)

It's a little awkward to label tracts bordering Highway 183 and Capital of Texas as "central," but that's the convention.   And although it might seem that this definition of "central" is so expansive it covers most of Austin, that is not true.  "Central" Austin had 308,826 residents on April 1, 2010, just 39% of Austin's total population of 790,390, and only 18% of the metropolitan area population of 1.716 million.

"Not quite stagnant:"  Austin added 133,828 residents between 2000 and 2010 for 20+% growth, but central Austin added only 7,672 residents, or about 2.5%.  Central Austin's standard density increased from 4,311 ppsm to 4,421 ppsm.¹

"On average":  Most (47 of 76) tracts lost population.¹  Most of these did not lose much, at least -- only two lost more than a thousand.  Tract 23.11 (now split into tracts 23.17 and 23.18) gained the most; downtown (tract 11) gained the second most in absolute population but had the largest percentage increase, more than doubling.

Central Austin's weighted density increased from 6,117 ppsm to 6,512 ppsm.³   This was not an inevitable consequence of the (slight) rise in population.  Rather, a handful of quite large, dense tracts experienced strong growth.  In fact, if the two tracts in the University Neighborhood Overlay had merely maintained their population rather than growing like gangbusters, central Austin's weighted density would have dropped from 6,117 ppsm to 5,972 ppsm, even though total population still would have grown by 1.3%.

Notes:

¹ There are slight, but consistent, discrepancies between the Bureau's reported land areas for the 2000 and 2010 tracts despite no change in the boundaries.   The difference may be due to a change in software, but I'm not sure.  I used the land areas reported in 2010 for all calculations.

² Four  of the 2000 tracts (2.01, 3.01, 3.03 and 23.11) were split into new tracts for the 2010 Census (so there were 80 tracts in the 2010 census).  To maintain consistency with the 2000 data, I recombined the split tracts.

³ The Census Burea still has not released the urbanized area data.  If it does so before the next census, I'll re-calculate the weighted densities of large American urbanized areas.  Based on the above, the weighted density of Austin's urbanized area probably dropped.

I forgot about Cap Metro's interests

Last week, I concluded that the plan to add two tolled lanes to MoPac would make everyone better off than either maintaining the status quo or adding two free lanes.  But it occurred to me that I haven't considered everyone's interests.   Cap Metro's, specifically.  Isn't it likely that Cap Metro will be worse off?

As I noted last time, congestion-pricing will be a boon to bus riders.  They will get much shorter, more predictable rides.  But these buses run from the stations (Leander and Lakeline) that provide the bulk of Cap Metro's morning boardings.  Cap Metro is to some extent competing against its own buses for its rail riders.   (Cap Metro's surge in rail ridership last year occurred after it scaled back its express bus service from Leander and Lakeline.  The reduction in bus service might not have been the sole cause of the bump in ridership, but it surely played a part.)  

The shorter, more reliable bus trips will inevitably attract some current rail riders.  What's more, Cap Metro will be under a lot of pressure, I predict, to expand express bus service when the tolled lanes open.  The benefits for express bus riders are one of the big selling points of congestion pricing.  Free-flowing lanes will make it possible to offer reliable express bus service during the very the peak of the peak of the morning commute.  Cap Metro will be in the difficult position of either providing great, new express bus service at the cost of its rail ridership or refusing to provide great, new express bus service to preserve its rail ridership.

Perhaps it's not useful to frame this in terms of Cap Metro's interests.  Cap Metro's mission is to provide quality, cost-effective public transit.  If changes occur to the transportation network that allow Cap Metro to provide better public transportation, then we should count that as a win, even if it puts Cap Metro in a difficult position institutionally. 

So perhaps this is a better way to frame the point:  adding congestion-priced lanes to MoPac will put more pressure on the Red Line.  Cap Metro is running the Red Line today at an unsustainable subsidy of $33.98 per rider.  I don't know how Cap Metro plans to reduce that subsidy to a reasonable level.  I'm pretty sure, though, that improved bus service on MoPac will make the path more difficult. 

Unplanned Cities (paper)

This paper by law professor David Schleicher (George Mason) is pertinent to my argument against SMDs:

Generations of scholarship on the political economy of zoning have tried to explain a world in which tony suburbs run by effective homeowner lobbies use zoning to keep out development, but big cities allow relatively untrammeled growth because of the political influence of developers. Further, this literature has assumed that, while zoning restrictions can cause "micro-misallocations" inside a metropolitan region, they cannot increase housing prices throughout a region because some of the many local governments in a region will allow development. But these theories have been overtaken by events. Over the past few decades, land use restrictions have driven up housing prices in the nation's richest and most productive regions, resulting in massive changes in where in America people live and reducing the growth rate of the economy. Further, as demand to live in them has increased, many of the nation's biggest cities have become responsible for substantial limits on development. Although developers are, in fact, among the most important players in city politics, we have not seen enough growth in the housing supply in many cities to keep prices from skyrocketing. 

This paper seeks explain these changes with a story about big city land use that places the legal regime governing land use decisions at its center. Using the tools of positive political theory, I argue that, in the absence of strong local political parties, land use law sets the voting order in local legislatures, determining policy from potentially cycling preferences. Specifically, these laws create a peculiar procedure, a form of seriatim decision-making in which the intense preferences of local residents opposed to re-zonings are privileged against more weakly-held citywide preferences for an increased housing supply. Without a party leadership to organize deals and whip votes, legislatures cannot easily make deals for generally-beneficial legislation stick. Legislators, who may have preferences for building everywhere to not building anywhere, but stronger preferences for stopping construction in their districts, “defect” as a matter of course and building is restricted everywhere. Further, the seriatim nature of local land use procedure results in a large number of "downzonings," or reductions in the ability of landowners to build "as of right", as big developers do not have an incentive to fight these changes. The cost of moving amendments through the land use process means that small developers cannot overcome the burdens imposed by downzonings, thus limiting incremental growth in the housing stock. 

Finally, the paper argues that, as land use procedure is the problem, procedural reform may provide a solution. Land use and international trade have similarly situated interest groups. Trade policy was radically changed, from a highly protectionist regime to a largely free trade one, by the introduction of procedural reforms like the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, adjustment assistance, and "safeguards" measures. The paper proposes changes to land use procedures that mimic these reforms. These changes would structure voting order and deal-making in local legislatures in a way that would create support for increases in the urban housing supply.

I'd call this an argument for a weak version of "ward courtesy."  The "deal" he proposes would fail in Austin due to the sizable block of voters who lack even a weak preference for an increased housing supply.

By the way, pages 18-30 is a very nice, readable introduction to the law and economics of zoning.

(Aside: My land-use professor, Robert Ellickson, features prominently in the discussion.  He was one of the first to recognize, way back in the 1970s, that the growth controls just then beginning to flourish in places like California not only make housing unaffordable, they are economically inefficient.)

(Aside to the aside:  I participated in the landlord-tenant clinic one semester, as a law student.  We represented poor tenants in New Haven, almost exclusively in eviction proceedings.  In practice, this meant going through the paperwork and finding small technicalities to force the evicting landlord to reissue notice and recommence the proceedings.  Delay offered the opportunity to extract a concession for our clients.

Thanks to the success of prior generations of students, most experienced landlords hired from a small stable of lawyers in New Haven, who charged through the nose but who didn't make stupid paperwork mistakes.  We could still usually find non-frivolous arguments to warrant a hearing, even if the loss rate was pretty high.

We had a weekly seminar as part of the clinic.  Ellickson came to speak once.  He told us that, while we had good intentions, we were just driving up housing costs for the average low-income tenant in New Haven.  We, a bunch of leftist idealists, were skeptical.  But, in retrospect, he was probably right:  in New Haven circa 1990, the standard security deposit was two full months rent.  That's a lot of liquidity for a renter, and I'm pretty confident it was due to the difficulty of evictions.  There would be a lot more people in Austin looking for housing if that was the standard here.)

 

Zilker isn't under siege

I fear that this piece in today's Statesman is a prelude to some sort of an initiative by a Council member to put a moratorium on VMU development in the South Lamar area.

This deserves a longer response than I have time for right now.  But whenever you hear a central Austin activist spin fantasies of a looming density doomsday, remember this:

Most of Central Austin is less dense today than it was in 2000.  Most census tracts in South Austin actually lost population between 2000 and 2010, including the neighborhood supposedly "threatened" by the new apartments:

This decline in population is mostly driven by shrinking household sizes in these neighborhoods rather than declining demand.   Given the demographic trends, though, it takes a fair amount of development just to maintain the status quo.  If everything proposed is built, Zilker might show a small gain in population in the 2020 census.  The neighborhood is not in danger of being overwhelmed by people.  

Handwringing over new VMU projects in Zilker is particularly unwarranted because the Zilker neighborhood is severely underzoned for multi-family:   only 11% of the Zilker neighborhood's residential property is zoned multi-family,  and of that, only 2.6% is zoned at the reasonably dense MF4 or MF5 levels.  The VMU designation added some theretofore off-limits commercially-zoned property to Zilker's miniscule stock of multi-family-zoned property.  Given the pent-up demand for multi-family housing in South Austin, it is no surprise, and should cause no alarm, that some is being built and more is being proposed.   

And if the new developments ultimately require us to make improvements to South Lamar or other area streets, so what?  We need to make improvements to South Lamar today.  The street historically was a commuter arterial catering almost exclusively to the automobile.  But it is urbanizing.  South Lamar has seen a lot of positive redevelopment since I wrote this in 2007.   Several small strip malls have been renovated recently.  The street has added restaurants and bars.  We've lost a handful of used car dealerships the last few years, one to an Amy's Ice Cream with a small playground.   The street needs some attention from the  city today, including more stoplights, crosswalks and better sidewalks.   If new vertical mixed use developments force the city to add stoplights and crosswalks, that should be a plus, not a negative, for those of us in the South Lamar neighborhoods. 

(Update: Original map updated with more recent, accessible version.)

The Freeway Congestion Paradox

I've gotten some pushback on my claim that adding two congestion-priced lanes to MoPac will increase capacity more than adding two free lanes.

This is the Freeway Congestion Paradox:

Chen and Varaiya, in their article entitled "The Freeway Congestion Paradox," have demonstrated that, once freeway vehicle density (measured in vehicles per mile) exceeds a certain critical number, both vehicle speed and vehicle flow (measured in vehicles per hour) drop precipitously.  They have demonstrated the phonemenon with actual data from a section of westbound I-10 in Los Angeles.  Until 5:10 am, a flow of 2,100 vehicles per lane per hour is maintained, at a speed of 58 mph.  As density increases after 5:10 am, speed steadily drops, until at 7:00 am speed is a stop-and-go 15 mph, and flow decreases to 1,300 vehicles per lane per hour.

The Federal Highway Administration commissioned a study in 2008 that looked at data from Washington, DC freeways.  From the summary:

Highway studies have determined that once traffic volumes exceed the capacity of the roadway, the system can rapidly "break down" to the point where all traffic slows markedly, and the capacity and throughput of the roadway drops precipitously.

They produced neat graphs depicting the drop in capacity caused by stop-and-go traffic, like this one:

This chart pairs vehicle speed and total volume carried (see pp. 15-16 of the report for more discussion).  The dots are connected in temporal sequence, so it's possible to follow the evolution of the traffic jam.  The graph has a a random-walk component, but basically it confirms two things.  First, low throughput volumes are associated with low speed (i.e., stop-and-go traffic).  Second,  after the critical threshhold is passsed, it takes traffic a long time to recover. 

Here is the same chart, except I have drawn over some of the line segments in red.  This shows that once the tipping point is reached, traffic speeds and volumes drop and take a long time to recover.   (Just trace the red line segments starting at "A").

Congestion pricing would have prevented congestion from reaching the tipping point, effectively increasing the highway's capacity.

Rush-hour traffic on MoPac today is the stop-and-go 15 mph type.   Adding a new, free lane would probably shorten the period when the highway is clogged, but it would still be clogged for long stretches of time.  During these periods, a new, free lane would carry less traffic than a tolled lane.

When congestion is not bad, the toll should be low.  That's one of the attractive features of variable congestion pricing -- the price, in fact, should be zero when the marginal cost of congestion is zero.  (According to the Statesman, CTRMA might charge a nominal amount like a quarter to avoid confusing people.  Which confuses me.)  Put differently, the new lane should "act" like a free lane when traffic is not bad.

Congestion, envy and equity

The Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority plans to add two lanes to MoPac between Lady Bird Lake and Parmer Lane.  The cool part of the plan is that it intends to use dynamic congestion pricing -- i.e., the toll will fluctuate as necessary to keep traffic in the the tolled lanes flowing at 50 mph.   The six existing lanes will remain free.

This is how we ought to add new capacity.  It will make everyone better off.   The people who choose to pay the toll will be better off because they value the time savings more than the cost of the toll.  Bus commuters will be better off -- they might be the biggest beneficiaries, in fact -- because they will get a suddenly much shorter commute for (I presume) the same bus fare.  Drivers who continue to use the free lanes will endure slightly less congestion, even if it's just a narrower period of peak congestion.  Finally, taxpayers, if not better off, will be no worse off because they won't have to pay for the extra capacity.  The capacity will be paid by those who value and use it.

Everyone will not only better off compared to the status quo, but . . . and this is the key point . . . they'll be better off than if the two new lanes were free.   Adding two free lanes would reduce congestion, too, but they would reduce congestion less than two new tolled lanes.  Tolling congested lanes increases their capacity.  A congestion-priced lane can handle 1,800-2,000 cars per hour; an unpriced lane during peak congestion will handle less than half of that.  Somewhat counterintuitively, perhaps, charging for a congested lane is a sure way to get more cars through it.

Obviously, drivers happy to pay the tolls to skip congestion would be worse off if the new lanes were free rather than tolled.  Bus riders who would lose out on a faster commute would be worse off if the new lanes were free.  Taxpayers stuck paying for capacity that they might not value would be worse off if the new lanes were free.   But, because tolling lanes increases their capacity, even the drivers who would not use the toll roads anyway would be worse off if the new lanes were free.  They would have to contend with more congestion.   

Congestion pricing is a no-brainer.  So I was puzzled when Ben Wear raised the equity angle in a companion column.   After pointing out that all drivers would benefit from the congestion reduction from the new lanes, he concluded:

Undoubtedly however, those with money will be able to use the variable-price lanes more often than those on a budget.

It may become something of a spectator sport for those caught in MoPac congestion to count the number of Lexuses, Mercedeses and Escalades that fly by in the express lane.

It ain't necessarily fair. But in the words of John F. Kennedy (who certainly could have afforded to use this lane), life is unfair. And it will help pass the time.

It's strange to complain about fairness when everyone will be better off with new tolled lanes than new free lanes.  

But it's especially strange to complain about fairness because, once the lanes open, the only people on MoPac who will be causing a net social loss will be the drivers in the free lanes.

 This is basic congestion theory but most people still don't get it.  When you enter a congested highway, your mere presence inflicts a cost on everyone else.  Every car behind you is delayed just a little bit, maybe only a few seconds each, but the delay affects a bunch of cars.  Getting in everyone else's way imposes a social cost.

There's not a lot a driver can do about that today.  We can't even say for sure what cost each driver is imposing on everyone else.  But once the toll lanes are built, we'll know.  We'll know because the congestion cost each driver imposes on his fellow drivers will be approximately equal to the price of driving in the congestion-free lane.  That's one of the quirks of the economics of congestion -- it turns out that the cost of congestion a driver imposes is equal to the congestion-clearing price.

Once the toll lanes are built, drivers will have a choice.  The people who enter the tolled lane will be precisely the drivers willing to pay the cost of their congestion.  The toll lane will allow them to pay that cost and get out of the way of everyone else.

The people who don't pay the cost are people for whom, say, 15 minutes in time savings isn't worth the $3 toll or whatever it turns out to be.  That's most people, presumably.  But saving 15 minutes is worth something to them.  If you value the time savings at $1, you would incur a $2 loss by taking the tolled lane.  But you will impose a $3 loss on your fellow drivers if you stay in the free lanes, because we know the cost of your congestion is equal to the toll.  Staying in the free lanes produces a net social loss of $1.

Congestion is socially-sanctioned selfishness.  It's ok only because everyone does it.  But if we'd get used to thinking in terms of costs we're inflicting on everyone else, there'd be less moaning about those paying for the cost they're imposing while we mooch our way down the free lanes.  

Keep Austin Wonky on SMDs

Julio Gonzalez Altamirano at Keep Austin Wonky disagrees with my dire prediction that single-member districts will degenerate into a system of ward courtesy:

While it is certainly possible that on many minor zoning and planning issues an SMD representative’s constituents will be essentially indifferent, it seems that in several of the new districts the newly empowered median voters would have strong preferences about packing density into the center city on either affordability (boost supply) or environmental grounds (reduce transit footprint). A ‘strong’ version of the ward courtesy hypothesis just seems too deterministic and statistically implausible. For example, look at how many 4-3 votes there are on recent Austin City Councils – and these folks are elected by essentially the same voter universe!

It just seems highly unlikely that the new set of SMD median voters (and whatever policy entrepreneurs they unleash) will be utterly homogenous in their indifference to planning and zoning to the point that a perpetual tit-for-tat amongst legislators is possible.

Read the whole thing.

The model I have in mind is Chicago's, where the practice is called "aldermanic privilege."  I suppose where Julio and I disagree is on the degree of suburban voters' indifference to central Austin zoning matters.  If suburban voters had much of a preference they would turn out to vote now, but they don't.  In my experience, only a very small percentage of the population takes a big-picture view of zoning matters.  Most people don't care unless a zoning decision affects them directly.  This leads to a natural parochialism.  I don't see SMDs improving that; on the contrary, I think they will make it worse. 

Making corruption easier won't make it less likely

Critics of Austin's current system of city-wide Council elections are correct that Council elections are dominated by a "white, liberal, central city power base" a/k/a central Austin homeowners.  I think this is a bad thing.  Central Austin homeowners are a parochical lot and they elect parochial Council members who adopt policies that stifle new housing and development and run up the price of existing housing.  Central Austin has fewer residents, more expensive housing, and lower-quality housing than it should have, thanks to a system dominated by central-city voters.

And I will support an alternative system as soon as someone proposes a better one.

From where I sit, parochialism is the City's principal problem.  Single-member districts are not a cure for  parochialism.  On the contrary, they institutionalize parochialism.  A Council member whose district will be affected directly by a particular vote will have an incentive to consider only the effect on his or her district, rather than the broader harm or benefit to the City as a whole.  Council members whose districts will not be affected  directly will have an incentive to defer to the affected Council member; they will want and expect that deference to be reciprocated.  That is the genesis of "ward courtesy."

SMD proponents argue that city-wide elections are corrupted by money, but it is the SMD system that is prone to corruption.  In a ward courtesy system, you only need one vote for zoning changes as a practical matter.  That makes corruption a more feasible proposition, both economically (fewer people to buy off) and logistically (fewer people on the take means less chance of getting caught).   And for those who really believe that money has been buying Austin's elections, note that switching to single-member districts will make elections cheaper to buy.  SMDs won't rid politics of money; they'll just stretch the money a bit farther.

If someone can convince me that Austin won't degenerate into ward-based politics, I'll switch my support to SMDs.  I'd like to see a larger Council representing more diverse viewpoints.  But I don't like the incentives created by single-member districts, and I think incentives are a better predictor of the system we'll get than banal assurances that our new Council members will act for the common good.

Sometimes parking regulations don't matter

I think minimum parking requirements are bad policy.  If I had my way, the City would abolish its minimum parking requirements tomorrow. 

I'm a Shoupie.

But it's worth reminding oneself every now and then that the regulations on the books -- even the bad ones -- don't always matter. Minimum parking requirements don't matter when the market demands (or, at least, the developer perceives the market to demand) more than the minimum.

Greystar's proposed mixed-use project at 1200 S. Lamar (the South Alamo drafthouse site) is a case in point. According to the parking calculations on the site plan, the project will provide almost 60% more parking than code requires.

I'm sure this demand for parking is being driven by the Alamo Drafthouse. Anyone who's been to the South Lamar Alamo -- or tried to get take out from Suzi's China Kitchen -- on a Saturday night knows that the Alamo gobbles up parking.

There is good evidence that parking regulations do matter in general. They can matter a great deal in specific instances. How much extra space do we reserve for empty asphalt thanks to city regulation? We don't know and we can't know unless the city gets rid of its minimums. But it's important not to be seduced into believing that every massive parking garage or expansive surface lot is a manifestation of bad city regulation.

Jaywalking

The City of Austin is enforcing its ban on jaywalking.  Yes, jaywalking sometimes poses a high threat to drivers and the pedestrians themselves.  No pedestrian should cross a high-speed freeway like I-35, for example -- people are really bad at estimating the closing speed of a vehicle traveling the length of a football field every three seconds.  Pedestrians who misjudge traffic not only risk their own lives, but the lives of the drivers who swerve to avoid them.

But if the City really intends to enforce a ban on mid-block crossings of interior, arterial streets, it needs to give pedestrians a reasonable option.  The City leaves them with no reasonable choice on many of its "urban" streets -- unless one counts forsaking the walk altogether and hopping in a car as a reasonable alternative.

Take South Lamar.  It is one of the two main arterials through south Austin.  It is one of the busiest arterials in Austin, with (2009) weekday traffic counts of 36,000-40,000 along the main segment.  It is a major bus route.  It has a dense concentration of businesses both small and large on both sides of the street.  Property owners along the street have been investing in their properties, refurbishing and remodeling old stores or tearing them down for new, more pedestrian-friendly buildings.  New restaurants, bars, barber shops, coffee shops and pharmacies are springing up on either side.

But the street is still signaled as if it were a semi-rural county road.  The 2.5 stretch of South Lamar from Barton Springs to Panther Trail has just nine stoplights, including the lights at Barton Springs and Panther Trail.   Stoplights -- and thus crosswalks -- are spaced an average of 1,650 feet (0.31 miles) apart.  In some places, the lights are spaced nearly half a mile apart:

A pedestrian who wants to make a "midblock" crossing between, say, Hether and Lamar Sq. has a choice:  he can wait for a break in the traffic and dash the eighty feet across the street, or he can walk 1000 or so feet to the nearest light, wait through the signal, and trudge the 1000 feet back.  A 10 second dash or a 6-7 minute, roundabout walk?  It's an easy choice, particularly when its 105 degrees.   For those whose walk would start and end mid-block, a ban on jaywalking is a ban on walking.

The City is spending or plans to spend millions of dollars on grand plans to refashion East Riverside Drive and Airport Boulevard as pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use thoroughfares.  That's great, but it shouldn't irngore the low-hanging fruit.  It needs to begin treating urban arterials like urban arterials.

More:

South Lamar's spontaneous redevelopment (3/22/07)

Baby steps toward new urbanism (4/21/08)