Austin Contrarian

Reburbia

Jude points to the Reburbia competition, a design competition "dedicated to re-envisioning the suburbs."  From the competition website:

In a future where limited natural resources will force us to find better solutions for density and efficiency, what will become of the cul-de-sacs, cookie-cutter tract houses and generic strip malls that have long upheld the diffuse infrastructure of suburbia?  How can we redirect these existing spaces to promote sustainability, walkability, and community?  It’s a problem that demands a visionary design solution and we want you to create the vision!

"Visionary design" is all well and good when you're working on a blank slate, but it matters very little when you're trying to retrofit whole subdivisions.  Rising energy prices might create demand for denser and more efficient suburbs someday.  That doesn't mean we will get denser and more efficient suburbs, though.   The obstacle will be the homeowners who like things the way they are, and there will always be lots of homeowners like that.  Sure, they might agree that other homeowners should live in denser and more efficient suburbs, but they won't want their own subdivisions retrofitted with greater density, no matter how visionary the design.

As energy becomes more expensive, those who want to live closer to work or to live in smaller, more efficient apartments or condos will move.  Those who stay won't want their neighborhoods to change.  I don't believe that central Austin neighborhoods, for example, will ever welcome greater density in the neighborhood interiors, no matter how high land prices get.  If density can't get any traction in central neighborhoods where density makes the most sense today, I don't see it ever getting any traction in suburban neighborhoods.  Great design won't entice homeowners in suburban subdivisions to cancel covenants, support rezonings, and make the other hundred changes that would be necessary.

Or perhaps I'm just too pessimistic.

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.

Plazas

The national Episcopal church has purchased the block bounded by Seventh, Eighth, Trinity and Neches, where it intends to build its national archives.   The building might be five stories tall, with 70,000 square feet of archive space, a garage and "limited" ground-floor retail.  This would be a big improvement over the surface parking lot there now.

But is it necessary to waste space on a plaza?

This part of town doesn't have enough pedestrian traffic to support a plaza.  These things sit empty most of the time; they're dead space.  (Walk by the "plaza" at the JPMorgan-whatever building at 7th and Lavaca sometime.)

It would be nice to see property owners sell off corner parcels like this for separate development.  Most new developments downtown occupy entire city blocks, giving them a squat, blocky look.  Breaking blocks into smaller parcels would yield more attractive buildings.  It also would be nice to get a new alley every now and then.  (Note that the Austonian and Ashton are welcome exceptions.)

I suppose providing joint parking is too much of a hassle . . . 

Wasted opportunity

Stassney between South Congress and I-35 is apartment-complex city.  Perhaps a half-dozen giant apartment complexes line one half-mile stretch.  None is older than four or five years.

These are the standard suburban set up.  A collection of three-story walk-ups with open breezeways, a pool, a one-story welcome center, and parking sandwiched between the buildings.  All "protected" by a fence and gate.  The private streets are essentially just long, skinny parking lots.  The premium parking spots are sheltered by tin roofs.  (Fancy complexes offer a garage option.)

I've lived in complexes like these.  Renters like them because they know the units will be nice,  safe and professionally managed.  They are especially attractive to newcomers who aren't familiar with Austin's neighborhoods.  But they are walled off from the rest of the world and and far retail and restaurants and convenience stores.

Driving past them yesterday, it occurred to me that this vast stretch of apartment buildings was a tremendous missed opportunity.  With just a little rearranging, these apartments could have been transformed into a pleasant urban neighborhood of 20 or 30 blocks.  

The complexes contain literally scores of individual buildings.  It would have been easy to arrange them in a grid fronting public streets with alleys in the back.  The only significant architectural modification would have been closing in the breezeways/stairwells to create common entrances.   

I doubt this arrangement would have been more expensive for developers.  Certainly, they would have had to build proper streets with sidewalks and streetlights.  Closing in the breezeways would have cost more.   But they would have saved money in lots of other ways.  By building and dedicating public streets, they could have shifted the responsibility for street maintenance to the city.  They could have saved the hefty expense of thousands of feet of wrought-iron fences and gates.  They could have joined other developers to provide a single, decent public park and pool, rather than six.  And I don't think this arrangement would have cost them units.  There is a lot of wasted space in complexes like these -- useless strips of greenery,  too narrow to walk a dog, and pointless spacing between buildings.  

Tenants could have parked on the streets, which is essentially what they do now.  The premium, sheltered spots could have been put in the alleys behind the buildings.     

I have to believe that lots of prospective tenants would have preferred an urban layout.  They would have gotten  pleasant, proper neighborhoods, with a store or two nearby -- the complexes are dense enough to support a couple of small retail uses were they not walled off from one another.

The only drawback -- and I acknowledge it could be a big one -- is safety.  Those tall fences and gates provide a sense of security.  Now, they don't make it difficult  to get into the complex.  In large complexes with hundreds of residents, the gates are constantly opening or closing.  (I freely wandered in and out of one yesterday.)  But the fences and gates do make it harder to get out, which deters criminals.  Complexes like these of course experience assaults and car break-ins, but I'm sure they're safer than similar complexes that lack fences and gates.

Proper urban neighborhoods provide their own deterrents, though.  A short block lined with dense walk-ups has lots of eyes and ears on the street.  Good lighting is another deterrent.  As is steady traffic.

But even if gated complexes are marginally safer, that doesn't automatically mean that prospective tenants prefer them.  Everything involves trade offs.  Urban neighborhoods enjoy high demand all over the country, and often command premiums.  And I'm not sure developers really know what trade-offs tenants are willing to make -- how could they, if they never build this type of neighborhood?  Let's not forget that creating a true grid requires developers to coordinate their actions, a tricky obstacle even in the best circumstances.  

So it seems to me we wasted a great opportunity to add to Austin's paltry stock of urban neighborhoods.  Perhaps the next time Council zones a half-square mile area  of vacant land for dense multi-family, the city could wok with property owners and developers to develop a common grid and modest design standards.  Perhaps the property owners and developers would resist.  But perhaps not.  

"Historic" is not the right word

One of the points Miggy calls me to the mat on is my assertion that the Warehouse District is not "historic":

I would suggest that besides its industrial beginnings it also has a great history as Austin’s original red light district, Guytown (see also the April 1983 issue of Southwestern Historical Quarterly; “Prostitution and Public Policy in Austin, Texas, 1870-1915,” by David C. Humphrey). While most structures are not individually architecturally notable, and nor is warehousing as an activity culturally significant – the buildings as a cluster do represent a unique and authentic value that residents and visitors alike respond to and are attracted to in a city with sparingly few such touchstones – one of the reasons that this is the best case of adaptive re-use in the city today.

All old buildings were used for something once upon a time.  Merely because something happened there does not mean anything significant or noteworthy happened there.  For example (and upon information and belief), Austin has had a number of bordellos and red-light districts over the years.  They might seem quaint in hindsight, but the citizenry probably had a different view at the time.  I doubt the homeowners in the Lightsey area of South Congress in the 1990s thought the prostitution in their area was of historic significance  -- although they might have thought the amount of prostitution historic.

The Warehouse District is something, though.  We just don't have a good word for  that something.  We need a word that means "old, authentic, rooted, gritty, connected to the past, familiar and beloved."  I'll throw the floor open to neologisms.  Something better than "nostalgi-rrific."

By worrying about whether something is "historic," we lose sight of what really matters -- that an area is "old, authentic, rooted, gritty, connected to the past, familiar and beloved." The history of the area will always have some small influence on that judgment, except when the area is genuinely historic, but we shouldn't let it divert us from the things we care about.  The term obfuscates more than it illuminates.

Lifted from the comments: One case for preserving the Warehouse District

I will again draft Miggy as a guest poster by republishing this excellent comment on my Warehouse District post (lightly edited):

[I]n the argument with strict market dogmatism it is easy to quantify only one side of the equation on which one hopes to determine a course of action thus making it an unfair comparison. In other words, if each parcel in the proposed warehouse district were to be developed into just its current zoning allowance it would be X million square feet of rentable space with Y monetary value to the city in annual tax revenue. That has a value you can hang a hat on vs. a straw man argument of only ‘psychological’ or ‘community’ value. Alas many more things could be subject to this treatment than people would rightly be comfortable with. If the trail at Lady Bird Lake were to be developed into similar buildings the same quantifiable side would arise with nothing comparable on the opposite side of the equation. The second most visited site in our city - the capitol - could likewise be monetized – but why would you want to? For starters, neither even makes economic sense compared to the net loss to the city. Allow me to explain…

A couple of years ago, New York Magazine famously estimated the value of Central Park at $529 Billion or $627 Million an acre using the same sort of calculations (http://matrix.millersamuel.com/wp-content/cpval.jpg). The problem is that it didn’t account for the net overall loss of value to the city in losing Central Park. The Upper East Side maisonettes or the Upper West side pied-a-terres would all drop significantly in real and taxable value as would the isle of Manhattan and New York in general as a tourist destination and magnet for permanent talent and business relocation. That kind of value, and its subsequent tragedy of the commons, is far more subjective and far less convincingly quantified. Here in humble Austin we are subject to that same debate… but over just two small blocks in a city where many other parcels remain significantly underdeveloped with surface parking and drive through banks.

I’m very pro-density, much like yourself, but let us also remember that the trade-off we are being asked to make right now is not between a 1-2 story historical structure and a premiere high rise development. The most likely fate/threat for buildings in the foreseeable future is as surface parking lots – just like the last three that were torn down in the area.

I would also argue with your contention that the district has no historical significance. Your assertation was a relative statement to make just as it is for me to argue with it. For my case I would suggest that besides its industrial beginnings it also has a great history as Austin’s original red light district, Guytown (see also the April 1983 issue of Southwestern Historical Quarterly; “Prostitution and Public Policy in Austin, Texas, 1870-1915,” by David C. Humphrey). While most structures are not individually architecturally notable, and nor is warehousing as an activity culturally significant – the buildings as a cluster do represent a unique and authentic value that residents and visitors alike respond to and are attracted to in a city with sparingly few such touchstones – one of the reasons that this is the best case of adaptive re-use in the city today.

In short – there may be a day that the warehouse district, small as it is, becomes an anachronism or petting zoo of architecture – but for right now I see a great deal of value – economic and otherwise – for this city in preserving it. As this symposium you attended was a CNU event, it should also be pointed out that this position falls in line with general CNU guidelines (http://www.cnu.org/charter).

I very much encourage ROMA to explore the policy mechanisms in the DAP that would allow us as a city to preserve the Warehouse District.

I'll put my thoughts in a separate post.

What to do with the Warehouse District?

I've been meaning to write about a forum hosted by the Central Texas Chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism I attended a couple of weeks ago.  Topic:  What do we do with the Warehouse District?  Should Austin try to preserve it from redevelopment?  If not, what are the alternatives?

It was a good crowd.  There were big-time developers (Tom Stacy and Perry Lorenz), architect Sinclair Black, ROMA's Jim Adams and Jana McCann, who are developing the downtown Austin plan, representatives of the Austin Heritage Society, Charlie Betts from the Downtown Austin Alliance, and a bunch of other architects, downtown advocates and new urbanist types.

Steve Sadowsky gave a lecture on the district's history.  It confirmed my prior belief that nothing very important ever happened there; these were simply warehouses and a couple of "homes for young women" (bordellos).  No one -- including Sinclair Black -- claims it is architecturally significant.

View Larger Map

To my surprise, I was probably more sympathetic to preserving it outright than most of the attendees. (I admit I've sort of precommitted myself.  My law partner and I walk past 4th Street on our way to lunch once a week.  Each time he jabs his finger at 4th Street and says "So you want to tear that down"? "No, No," I say.)

There are essentially four options for dealing with the district:

1.  Preserve it as a historic district.

2.  Allow redevelopment but require reuse of the facades.

3.  Allow redevelopment but impose special design/architectural standards.

4.  Allow unfettered redevelopment.

There are a couple of practical problems with preserving it as a historic district.  One is getting the landowners to agree.  It will be hard to cram this down without their consent.  

The second is that much of downtown has stringent height limits thanks to the Capitol view corridors; the properties in the Warehouse District are among the few that don't.  The redevelopment rights are accordingly worth a lot.  By turning it into a historic district, the City of Austin might be foregoing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in tax revenue per block.  And the Second Street area will permanently lose the chance to add a lot more density, which is essential for this part of downtown to thrive.

Near the end of the meeting, one woman (whose name I did not catch) piped up and said to scattered applause that we shouldn't put a price on some things.  We can't help but put a price on things, though.  If we forgo revenue from redevelopment, then we are giving up the things we could have bought with it.  There are always trade-offs.

That doesn't mean the Warehouse District is not worth the trade-off.  Like I said, I was more sympathetic to keeping it than many others in the room.  But we need to be sure to understand the trade off before we make it.

Option 2 -- requiring preservation of the facades -- is a bad one.  The facades are not architecturally significant.  And "facadism" produces funny-looking, awkward buildings.  (Just look at the Goodwill redevelopment at the corner of Lamar and 5th.)

Option 3 is imposing special design standards. Architecture that invokes the character of the area.  That's vague; it would take a long time to work out what that means.  But it's an intriguing idea.

Option 4 -- unfettered redevelopment -- would speed redevelopment and lower the costs.  Although I'm still thinking about this one, I don't think I can support this one.  At a minimum, I'd like to see special architectural standards.

Let me throw out a couple of other thoughts.  One is that there are plenty of parking garages, surface lots, and low-value uses scattered throughout downtown, including many outside the Capitol view corridors.  I want to see these dead spots excised from downtown.  Would a temporary moratorium on redevelopment in the Warehouse District speed this up?  Based on the lack of redevelopment to date, I doubt it.  But it's something to keep in mind.  

My other thought is that this practice of demolishing functional downtown buildings and leaving the lots vacant for months or years needs to stop.  I understand that there's not a lot developers can do when they lose their financing, as some have in the last few months.  But we need some creative thinking here.  There ought to be some way to condition the demolition of functional structures on prompt redevelopment.

The commercial development market is obviously dead right now.  This is still just a theoretical debate.  But expect to heat up once the cranes start rising again downtown.

The new federal courthouse

The difference between architects and artists: No one makes you walk through an art gallery.

Previous discussions here and here.

(H/t Downtown Austin Blog.)

Intersection density is the wrong metric for connectivity

One last point about CNU's proposal to encourage street connectivity.  CNU proposes using a metric of 150 intersections per square mile.  This is the wrong metric.  If we want to mandate connectivity, we should use a metric that guarantees connectivity; requiring a certain number of intersections per square mile doesn't do the trick.

The street plan below illustrates how a developer could meet CNU's intersection-density standard without providing even minimal connectivity.  The box is one mile by one mile. The black lines are streets and the white spaces in between are for houses and green belts.

It's crude, I know, but it makes the point.  A developer could simply cut the interior of the subdivision into disjoint pods and cover each pod with a dense grid. I've drawn in the local streets for the pod in the lower left-hand corner. The blocks are supposed to be roughly 400-feet long, with one half-block. It has 26 intersections, which would scale up to 156 intersections for the entire subdivision.  Even this density doesn't guarantee connectivity within the pod. This pod is divided into four quarters, which are mutually accessible only along the pod's perimeter road.

In this example, there are neither east-west nor north-south routes through the subdivision interior. The only through routes lie one mile apart along the subdivision's perimeter. I don't think is what CNU has in mind when it talks about connectivity.

If we are after connectivity we should use a metric that guarantees connectivity. We could do this by requiring a minimal number of independent routes -- that is, routes without common streets -- between any two nonadjacent intersections.*  (For intersections interior to a street grid, that number is four.)   By also requiring a minimal number of subdivision entrances per mile (say every 400 or 600 feet), we would get the desired through connectivity and internal connectivity without having to worry about creative subdivision street layouts.  On the contrary, developers would get a bit more flexibility in laying out their subdivisions while providing the public benefit that is the point of this exercise.

*It isn't hard to determine the number of independent routes between two non-adjacent intersections.  It's equal to the minimal number of separating intersections -- i.e., the minimal number of intersections you'd have to eliminate to disconnect the original intersections.  This means it's enough to look for choke points.  For example, the intersections interior to the pod sketched above would be disconnected from the rest of the subdivision by eliminating the intersections at the pod entrance.  Hence they wouldn't satisfy a standard requiring more than two independent paths.

Flip flop

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that cities give developers incentives to build dense, connected, local street networks rather than simply mandate them.  After thinking a bit harder about it, though, I'm not sure that's the best solution.

Cities should refuse to maintain subdivision streets that do not provide a minimal level of connectivity for other city residents (as Virginia will now do).  But should a city or state go one step further and mandate connectivity?  Should it pay developers to provide connectivity?  Or should it do nothing, other than leave the maintenance costs on subdivisions with functionally private streets?

Using incentive payments is sound in theory.  Connectivity provides a spillover benefit to residents outside the subdivision because it lowers congestion on major arteries, gives them more alternatives for getting around, and solves a collective action problem.  If bans on mixed-use development were also relaxed, connectivity could also shorten net trip length.  (Connectivity alone won't do the trick.)  The disconnected, cul-de-sac pattern is less expensive than a dense street grid.  But if a city offered developers incentives equal to the value of connectivity to the city, then developers would build dense, connected grids when it made economic sense to do so. 

There are a couple of practical problems with this, though.  One is that no city could afford to do it, at least not for enough subdivisions to make a difference.  The second is that it would be hard for the city to figure out what to pay.  A city could pay for all subdivision streets.  But see objection no. 1 (and cities shouldn't be subsidizing subdivision streets anyway).  A city, in theory, should pay only for the extra street length needed to get up to a minimal level of connectivity.  But that depends on what the developer would have built in the first place, and the city wouldn't be able to determine that. 

That leaves regulation (mandating connectivity) or doing nothing.

Simply mandating connectivity eliminates the drain on the city fisc.  It is more feasible, politically, than simply dumping money on developers, as Virginia has demonstrated.  Regulation is a tricky thing, though.  The cost-benefit analysis does not change merely because the city is no longer paying its share.  And, again, connectivity can be very expensive.    

Perhaps the best solution is a hybrid approach.  Cities could mandate a certain minimal level of connectivity but let developers buy their way out of it.  That might provide enough of a nudge to solve the collective action problem without mandating street designs that cost more than they are worth.