Austin Contrarian

City dwellers

The Census Bureau has, at last, begun to release urbanized area data. As Nate Berg notes at the Atlantic Cities, the headline that 80.7% of Americans now live in "urban areas" is a bit misleading. Or at least confusing. "Urban areas" consist of "urbanized areas" and "urban clusters." An "urbanized area" is a contiguous area of at least 50,000 people meeting certain minimum density threshholds. An "urban cluster" is, basically, just a small town -- too small to qualify as an urbanized area, but too densely settled to label "rural." That 80.7% includes a lot of people who live in small towns, far from any place one would call "urban."

If we want to count city dwellers, we should stick to urbanized areas. "Urbanized area" is the best fit for our intuitive notion of a "city." Urbanized areas have at least 50,000 people, which is a reasonable threshhold for separating "city" from "town." The urbanized area boundaries are determined by complicated algorithms that measure density and distance from other dense clusters of people; they are a serious attempt to define who lives inside and who lives outside the city. Metropolitan area definitions are not useful at all for counting city dwellers, since they are typically defined by county boundaries and are not a meaningful attempt to determine where the city actually begins and ends.  

What percentage of Texans are city dwellers? 75.35%. Although they comprise three-fourths of the population, the city dwellers occupy just 2.76% of the land. Over half of all Texans live in the urbanized areas of Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. (9.35% of Texans live in small towns and 15.3% in rural environments.)

Urbanized areas are in purple. The urban clusters are represented by the green dots.

Texas is the 15th most citified state by this metric, more urban than all the midwestern states except Illinois, and all southern states except Florida.  And it is more urban than the nation as a whole; nationwide, 71.4% of Americans live in one of the 486 urbanized areas.

Despite the fact that Texas is mostly a state of city dwellers, I'm sure we'll be bombarded soon enough by campaign ads from politicians posing by cow pastures and split rail fences. Because, you know, the real Texas is rural. 

This is how housing markets are supposed to work

Demand for housing has been rising in the Montrose/River Oaks area in Houston, especially from renters. Rents rose there at a 9.1% annual rate in January.

The difference between Houston and a lot of other cities is that it is still easy to add housing in Houston's nice, central city neighborhoods (unless your project has "Ashby" in the title). There are currently 15 apartment projects with 4,300 units under construction in the Montrose/River Oaks area. That's not "announced" units; that's 4,300 units under construction. For point of reference, only 3,089 building permits were issued for housing units of any type in the entire San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metropolitan area in 2011.

Houston has a lot of needless land-use controls, including excessive minimum-space requirements and parking minimums,  but there really aren't many other places in the country where there is both strong demand for infill development and a regulatory environment that freely allows it. 

More fun with population density

Apparently, no matter how dense your city, it is at the cusp of becoming "too dense." Manhattanites feel this way; this New York Times article explores how many people Manhattan could hold. Manhattan's a pretty dense place, so it takes Kowloon Walled City to make the island look sparsely populated.  

Matt Yglesias makes the point that California would hold over 188 million people if it were settled at New Jersey's density. This would be a good thing, he argues, because California is a nice place to live and has a temperate climate.  There are problems with comparing states like this, though, because one state (such as California) might have a lot of inhospitable land.  

But there is no such problem in making comparisons between cities.  The NYT article made me wonder how large Austin would be if it were settled at the densities of some other American cities. 

According to the 2010 census, Austin had 790,390 people on 297.9 square miles, for a (standard) density of  2,653.2 people per square mile.  Obviously, Austin would be gigantic if it were populated at San Francisco's density of 17,170 ppsm (in which case Austin would have 4,327,000 residents) or at New York City's average density (in which case it would have 7,411,000 residents). 

But no one considers Dallas or Houston to be terribly dense places -- they are the prototypical suburban sunbelt megalopoli. Yet both are much denser than Austin. If Austin were populated at Dallas' density, it would have an extra 258,000 people. At Houston's density, it would have an extra 289,000 people.

A lot of the cities we think of our as our peers are much denser. If Austin were settled at Denver's density, it would have an extra 363,000 people.  At San Diego's density, an extra 402,000.  And at Portland's density, an extra 513,000. Columbus, Ohio is probably Austin's true "peer" city - it has almost the identical population, is home to a giant state university, and is the state capital. Austin would have to add 290,000 to reach Columbus' density.

 People around here would raise hell, of course, if the City Counil were to allow the kind of development needed to raise Austin's density to that of its peers. But the question is, Why? Obviously, some of the nicest places in the country are nice places despite significantly higher densities. It may even be the case that they are nice places because of significantly higher densities.  I've always thought it really weird for people to complain that rising density will ruin their quality of life when so many places with an equally good or better quality of life are already much denser.

PS. There's a cool 1989 German documentary on Kowloon Walled City on Youtube. Needless to say, life at a density of 3.2 million people per square mile was pretty strange.  H/t @MarketUrbanism.

Strong Towns

Last Wednesday, I attended a CNU-sponsored "curbside chat" by Chuck Marohn. Chuck is one of the founders of the Strong Towns movement.  He's a civil engineer so, naturally, he mostly talks about infrastructure. His basic message is that suburban sprawl seems cheap to towns and cities because the developers pay for most of the infrastructure. But that infrastructure has a finite lifespan. Eventually it must be replaced. And when the time comes to replace it, the tax revenue generated by the low-density, low-value sprawl pattern won't cover the cost.

Chuck's from a small town in Minnesota, so he has a different perspective on growth than those of us in Austin or other fast-growing places in the sunbelt.  A lot of Midwestern towns and cities stopped growing, or actually began to lose people, a long time ago. They are now saddled with worn-out roads and streets, leaky water pipes, and broken sewer systems that they cannot replace without outside help.  Some cities are deliberately abandoning some infrastructure, or even whole neighborhoods, because they can't cover the cost any more.

Cities like Austin should pay attention. Austin is a very young city. More than half the city was built within the last 40 years.  And it will continue to add new subdivisions a rapid clip, which will hold down the average age of our infrastrcture. But eventually the growth will end or slow to a trickle, and then we'll be stuck with a lot of aging infrastructure, and, thanks to our low-density growth patterns, a high ratio of infrastructure to people.

Obviously, cities should aim to grow their existing neighborhoods. Adding people to an existing neighborhood saves the need for new infastructure and provides more bodies to pay for the existing infrastructure when it wears out.

But my main reaction while listening to Chuck was, What do you think we're going to do about it?

Austin's comprehensive plan assumes the city will add 750,000 people over the next 30 years. I think that's optimistic -- 350,000 to 400,000 is more likely, based on last decade's rate of growth. The metro area will likely add well over a million, though.

Almost all of that growth will be greenfield. There is no political will to allow the kind of upzoning that would be necessary to accommodate even a small fraction of that growth within existing neighborhoods. Consider central Austin. It added just 8,000 people between 2000 and 2010, while Austin proper added 133,000 and the metropolitan area added 450,000 people. The central city did a bit better job adding structures than people -- its housing stock expanded by 15,000 units, or roughly 12%. But the last decade was the decade of condo towers sprouting downtown, the densification of West Campus, the Triangle, Mueller, condos in East Austin, and massive greenfield development in southeast Austin. And all that development lead to a piddly net increase of 12% of the housing stock. 

Don't get me wrong. I think we should let central Austin get much denser, for many reasons. Austin is lucky because people actually want to move to the central city. Lots of cities spend a lot of time and money trying to solve the problems caused by central-city flight. But given the contentiousness of last decade's development battles, I don't see Austin allowing the kind of development we need to house even 50,000 new people in the central city. 

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.

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.)

San Marcos and student housing

I would have rewritten this lede:

Residents cheered as the San Marcos City Council rejected a zoning change Tuesday that would have allowed a controversial high-density development in a predominantly single-family neighborhood.

to this:

Residents cheered as the San Marcos City Council rejected a zoning change Tuesday that would have allowed a controversial student housing development across the street from the 34,000-student Texas State University.  

The proposed development would have been a 42o-unit mixed-use development on 14 acres.  As you can see, there is a lot of undeveloped land on the development's side of Sessom Drive, surrounded by low-density single-family housing.   As you can also see, a very large university does indeed lie across the street.

(The outline shows the general area and size of the tract; I haven't attempted to accurately sketch its somewhat complicated boundary.)

Texas State University used to be a small, sleepy teachers' college.  The area to the northwest was obviously low-value land that developed as low-density single-family housing.  Now Texas State University is very large and generates huge demand for student housing.  Large, vacant tracts across the street are logical places to put it.

San Marcos is off my beat, so I don't presume to understand the politics in that town.  Do homeowners there believe their interests are homogeneous?  They are not.  The homeowners in the immediate vicinity might hate the idea of lots of students living nearby, but those students have to live somewhere.  If they can't live in one neighborhood, they will find another neighborhood.  They'll double-up or triple-up in homes in other single-family neighborhoods.   Rather than walk or bike across Sessom to get to class, they'll pile into a car and clog the city's streets.  If I were a homeowner in San Marcos who didn't live on or near Sessom, I'd be delighted by this project. 

And, as a San Marcos homeowner, I would also recognize that my property's value depends on the long-term health of Texas State University.  San Marcos has no particular competitive advantage over other central Texas locations other than that university.  San Marcos needs to zone its land to accommodate a large, growing university.  If it doesn't, students will be stuck with lower-quality but more-expensive housing, and the university will be a less attractive place.

Cops and water lines

As the comments here and here show, discussions of subsidies for suburban development often become entangled with discussions of the relative cost of city infrastructure and suburban infrastructure, and with density's impact on those costs.

I'd like to focus here solely on the dynamic of infrastructure costs.  The distinctions between capital costs, long-term variable costs and short-term variable costs seem to get muddled in the discussion of infrastructure, so let me use police costs as an analogy.  It will help to make some simplifying assumptions.

Imagine a city hiring its first police force.  It has to pay an upfront cost for training the policemen.  But after it makes that investment, its initial yearly labor expense is pretty low.  Young policemen aren't paid much, their health expenses are low, and their pension payments aren't due for many years.

But as the police force ages, it gets more expensive.  The city has to pay higher salaries.  Older policemen need more medical care.  And, eventually, everyone notices the looming, gigantic pension expenses.  The mayor and city auditor and the local newspaper begin to moan about excessive health and pension benefits and shortsighted politics.

Suppose the city's population is constant.  The residents pay the upfront cost of the police either through initial assessments incorporated into home prices or a tax levy.  But the per capita annual cost of the police force is low at the beginning.  As the police force ages, the per capita cost rises if, as we've assumed, the city maintains a stable population.  If the city's residents are in fact sensitive to their tax burden, though, some will move away rather than pay the higher per capita fees.  This will increase the per capita burden on the remaining citizens, which will encourage more to move, and so on in a vicious cycle.   (Something like this has played out in many aging midwestern industrial cities.)

Allowing density to rise breaks this cycle, or at least slows it, as long as the police costs don't rise as fast as the population.  And there's no reason they should -- there are a lot of fixed costs, and it won't take twice as many officers to patrol one square mile if the population of that square mile doubles. 

The same cycle will play out in any other city, including a suburb.  A young suburb in the early part of the cycle might seem to be in a better position -- and in a sense it is, since its day of reckoning is further away.  But it eventually will face the same reckoning.  Its police force, too, will become an ever-increasing burden, and its tax-sensitive citizens will move in increasing numbers -- unless the suburb attracts more residents over time.

Water and sewer infrastructure works almost the same way.  There is a large upfront cost, low initial expenses because young lines don't require much maintenance, but rising costs as lines age and break and water treatment plants wear out.  These culminate eventually in very large charges for digging up and replacing lines or replacing other infrastructure, which lead to a lot of hand-wringing by the mayor and the city auditor and the local newspaper.

A growing population helps with water infrastructure just like it helps with the cost of an aging police force.  A city cannot simply decree that people move within the city limits.  Most central cities don't enjoy a growing population.  But if there are people clamoring to move into the central city, the incumbent residents ought to realize that as a good opportunity to spread spread long-term costs among a larger population.

What's "The Tree" worth?

This story has generated a lot of buzz and twitter.  On Tuesday, Austin's Planning Commission denied a variance to remove a big tree on a downtown property at Bowie and W. 5th.  The denial might -- and likely will -- obstruct the construction of a tall, dense residential or office tower on a piece of property that City Council just zoned for a tall, dense residential or office  tower.  

The backup packet for the PC agenda item (TP 10617196 Bowie Street (311, 313, 315)) is here (pdf). 

I'll have more to say about this issue in later posts.  But for now, I'd like to focus on just one question:  What's The Tree worth?  We put an implict value on a tree every time we insist the tree be preserved or allow it to be removed.  Insisting that a tree be preserved means we deem the tree's benefit to the community outweighs the cost to the community of lost tax revenue and positive spillovers from the development.   And vice versa. 

It's not obvius how one should value a "protected" or "heritage" tree.  I think the valuation is intrisically subjective, which is one of the problems with the heritage tree ordinance.  But there's no way to avoid implicitly pricing the tree.   The Planning Commission implicitly valued The Tree at more than $90,000 $70,000 because it rejected the developer's offer of $90,000 $70,000 for "mitigation costs."

I'd like to hear from readers what you think The Tree is worth.  How much do you think the City should be willing to pay to buy The Tree outright?  What is the maximum amount of tax revenue the City should forego to preserve The Tree?  If the City were to sell the right to remove The Tree, what minimum price should it demand?  The three questions should yield the same answer.

I'm not interested right now whether you think the project is feasible with The Tree in place, or your estimate of the lost tax revenues, or whether you think PC has the authority to consider a tree's benefits when weighing a variance, or whether you think PC's decision complied with the heritage tree ordinance criteria.

The Tree is a pecan tree.  It is approximately 60 years old.  It is 57' tall and has a roughly symmetrical canopy with a 55' diameter spread.  It has a 32.0 inch diameter at breast height.  The City arborist rated The Tree in "good" condition, and the developer did not dispute that The Tree is healthy and in good condition.  It is set back 90' or so from Bowie Street and approximately the same distance from W. 5th St.

Here are some photos.

These photos were taken from the driveway entrance to the property.  This is the only street-level vantage from which The Tree is visible from root to crown.  I'm sure some residents of the Monarch high-rise just across Shoal Creek have a full view.

Here are a couple of closer shots:

Here is aphoto of the property looking south from the other side of W. 5th.  The small buildings lining W. 5th are not part of the property at issue and would not be torn down to build the project.

What say you?

NB.  Because valuations like this are intricially intrinsically subjective and personal, there are no right or wrong answers.

Another NB.  The Tree cannot be moved to another site because its roots are too deep, if that affects your valuation.

Sentence of the day

[T]he optimal urban area size is about 750,000 people and the optimal density is about 2,000 jobs per square mile–roughly Baltimore or Philadelphia.

That's from Randal O'Toole.

I did not know that.  The Census Bureau has not yet released "2010" census figures for urban areas, but in 2000 there were at least 33 urbanized areas with too many people. 

(The paper O'Toole cites does not, in fact, attempt to calculate the population that maximizes productivity but rather the population that maximizes patent intensity per capita.  See The Gated City for the extensive evidence that productivity rises with density.)

Ryan Avent has a detailed response to O'Toole here.