Austin Contrarian: Neighborhood activists

November 05, 2013

Complexity and the Land Development Code

Community Impact has a nice write up on the Land Development Code rewrite listening sessions the City hosted in September. It features two contrasting perspectives on the LDC's undeniable complexity:

The last time Austin’s code had a comprehensive revision was in 1984. During a public presentation, city staff pointed out that Apple Inc. introduced its first Macintosh personal computer the year the city’s code was last revised. The current code has grown to include more than 800 pages of information.

Because of its age and the amount of changes made, the code has become a challenging document for city staff to interpret, [City planner George] Zapalac said.

“Our existing code has been amended hundreds of times, in piecemeal fashion, but we’ve never taken a comprehensive look at how all those various amendments impact each other and whether they’re helping to achieve the kind of community that we need,” Zapalac said.

Zapalac said the code is overdue for a comprehensive rewrite. Some concerns that arise from a complicated code sometimes lead to confusion on the part of developers or residents looking to renovate or remodel their homes.

“Sometimes a person can prepare their plans, submit them to the city for review, be well along in the review process and then discover that a regulation they hadn’t anticipated will apply. They will have to redesign, or they may not be able to do what they want to do at all,” Zapalac said.

I think it's safe to say that that's the conventional wisdom at One Texas Center: the LDC is too complex and unwieldy. Even a complex land development code has its defenders, though:

Cory Walton, an Austin resident who lives in the Bouldin Neighborhood, attended one of the public workshops on the LDC rewrite. He said he sees the current complicated code as a positive development because the additional layers of complexity were necessary to address unforeseen problems in the code.

“Those are additional layers of protection that have come over the years because of past oversights or past loopholes or past abuses that had to be patched up,” Walton said.

I was working on a deep, thoughtful piece about the diminishing marginal returns to regulatory complexity, but decided to chuck it. Instead let me simply note that Austin's nice, central neighborhoods managed to develop as nice, central neighborhoods without complicated land-use regulations.

Take the Bouldin Creek neighborhood. Its nice street grid was set and the lots mostly platted even before Austin adopted its first subdivision ordinance in 1946. The neighborhood, in fact, had begun to develop before Austin adopted its original 1931 zoning ordinance, which is all of 20 pages. Most of the surviving original homes and commercial buildings on South First Street were built either under the 1931 ordinance or the 1941 revision which, at 50 pages, is still remarkably lean by today's standard.

By contrast, my copy of the current code devotes more than 23 pages just to the McMansion regulations. That's 23 pages spent doing nothing but regulating the setbacks, sizes and building envelopes of single-family homes. And, yes, you can find people who claim the McMansion ordinance doesn't go far enough and is riddled with loopholes.

The complexity of today's code has little to do with making nice places. It's instead a product of the lack of consensus about how the city should develop. In the 1930s and 1940s, people tended to be on the same page when it came to development. The people who initially settled in the Bouldin Creek neighborhood, for example, had mostly modest incomes, and mostly built modest homes. I doubt there was demand for anything but relatively small single-family homes and small commercial buildings south of the river back then.

You don't need a very complicated code when almost everyone wants to build the same thing. You just write a code that allows what most everyone would build anyway, leave a little margin for error, and you're done. The only time the code will actually matter is when it's used to reign in the owner with highly idiosyncratic taste. But these owners are rare.

By contrast, today we have no widespread agreement on what sort of development ought to be permitted. There are lots of people who want to build things that are not authorized by the LDC, not just the rare, idiosyncratic property owner. Part of the reason is that our zoning code sets entitlements well below market demand, at least in the urban core. Many people want to build much larger structures than homeowners built in the 1930s or 1940s. (That's not a sign of a decline in good taste, or rising greed, or anything of the sort. People just tend to build one kind of structure on a lot that is worth $500 and a different kind of structure when the same dirt is worth $300,000.) The systematic underzoning is not the only reason, though. The city is a much larger, more diverse and more complicated place than it was in the 1930s and 1940s. It's only natural that there is less consensus on development.

This lack of consensus has consequences. We expect our LDC today to keep people from building stuff they really, really want to build. A code that is trying to keep a bunch of people from doing what they want to do will get complicated, fast. When you set the allowable development density or floor-to-area ratio or whatever below demand, then owners/developers will naturally build to the limit, which means they will constantly test the limit. I don't mean by breaking the rules, but rather by configuring their property or using their entitlements in creative ways to maximize their building space. This constant testing triggers a legislative response by those who want to maintain the status quo, which triggers more testing, and so on, and the Code thereby accrues layer after layer of complexity.

Posted at 03:01 PM in Austin, Austin development, Law, Neighborhood activists, Regulation, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (31) | TrackBack (0)

August 06, 2013

Those who live in big, blue boxes should not cast the first stone

One of the things that has interested me about the Taco PUD case is Zachary Scott Theater's opposition.

If you don't read the newspaper and aren't on Save Town Lake's mailing list, you might not know that a CALIFORNIA developer is seeking PUD approval to build a 96-foot tall residential "tower" on the site of the Taco Cabana at Riverside and South Lamar:

Although Save Town Lake is spinning this as some sort of grave affront to the Waterfront Overlay, the obstacle for the developer is actually the base zoning district's height limit of 60 feet rather than the special height limit imposed by the Waterfront Overlay. Were it not for the base district height limit, the Waterfront Overlay for this subdistrict would allow the 96 feet the developer is requesting. The developer is seeking an increase in the maximum base height, among other things, via a PUD, for which it is offering various community benefits, such as $439,000 in affordable housing fees and free space for the Austin Parks and Recreation Department.

The usual suspects have turned out against this. Zilker and Bouldin Creek neighborhood association opposition was predictable. I suppose the Bridges' condo owners opposition was also predictable, even though the Bridges developer left the north face of the Bridges blank in explicit anticipation of future development on the Taco Cabana site.

I was genuinely surprised, however, to see the project opposed by Zach, which just opened its new Topfer Theatre directly across South Lamar from the Taco Cabana. I assumed, based on the orientation of the Topfer Theatre, that Zach does not care much what happens along South Lamar.

Now the Topfer Theatre has a very sleek glass-and-concrete entrance that spills into a sleek plaza and (somewhat less sleek) parking lot. But neither the entrance, the plaza nor the parking lot is visible from South Lamar. All that's visible from South Lamar -- in particular, from the Taco Cabana sidewalk directly across the street -- is the Theatre's 80-foot tall fly tower:

I like a big, blue-tile-and-exposed-concrete box as much as the next guy. But you really have to wonder what specific objection Zach has to a nine-story building being built across a very busy street from a very blank wall. I'm sure that for a couple of hours each morning, the "tower" will cast a shadow on its sleek fly tower, but how will anyone inside the theater know? (There are two short rows of windows at the lower left of the building, but even these appear to be opaque from the outside.)

Things make more sense now that I've finally gotten around to reading through the case backup. Here's Zach's letter of opposition. The most interesting paragraph states:

In 2008, ZACH was approved to build an 80 ft fly tower in the new Topfer Theatre. A copy of that particular ordinance is attached for your reference. In addition, at that time, ZACH agreed to support objections for requests of additional height buildings in the surrounding area, if asked to do so by the surrounding neighborhood associations.

It might seem strange for a theater company to agree in advance to support someone else's objections without knowing whether the objections will have a principled basis. But, assuming Zach has correctly summarized the deal, it makes perfect sense. Exchanging promises to lodge or waive objections is a very cheap medium of exchange accepted as legal tender by all neighborhood groups. Such an exchange could have helped Zach get an 80-fot fly tower while giving the neighborhoods a sort of proxy objection to bolster their moral case againt forthcoming development, whatever that development might turn out to be.

Even if Zach's objection isn't merely a proxy, there's still the question how much weight it should get. After all, Zach chose to present South Lamar with the theater's featureless backside. The proposed development across the street, by contrast, will be a pedestrian's nirvana. What standing does Zach really have to complain about that?

Posted at 04:42 PM in Austin, Austin development, Density, Neighborhood activists, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (25) | TrackBack (0)

April 24, 2013

The dark side of social capital

From the introduction to a refreshingly contrarian article by Stephanie Stern, a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law:

In 2007, accompanied by a firestorm of publicity, Robert Putnam announced that residential racial diversity causes declines in social capital. Social capital is a prominent theory, popularized by Putnam, of the aggregate value of citizen participation in associations and organizations, social ties and networks, civic engagement, trust, and norms of reciprocity. In a study of forty-one U.S. communities, Putnam found that people living in racially diverse communities were less likely to work on a community project or volunteer, less likely to expect others to cooperate to solve collective problems, reported lower trust in others, had fewer close friendship ties, expressed less confidence in local government, and registered to vote lessfrequently. Most provocatively, Putnam found a strong “hunker[ing] down” effect, contrary to both the constrict and contact hypotheses of integration, where racial diversity caused residents of diverse communities to withdraw from social and civic life and report lower trust in members of other races and their own race. Unsurprisingly (to all but Robert Putnam it seems), his research provoked a torrent of political commentary and academic response. Conservative commentators argued that the findings called into question the value of racial mixing, headlines trumpeted the conclusion that “greater diversity equals more misery,” and Putnam’s research featured in a recent amicus brief as evidence against the value of affirmative action in college admissions. Sociologists and economists reanalyzed Putnam’s data and conducted their own empirical studies to assess his findings (these studies indicate that the diversity decrement is statistically significant, but small). Legal scholars accepted, albeit unhappily, the conclusion that racial diversity diminishes local social capital.

Curiously, in the handwringing about the harms to social capital and the ensuing debate, no one questioned whether the problem was social capital. From a property scholar’s perspective, one plausible interpretation of the correlation between high social capital and low diversity is that high social capital reduces the costs of excluding minorities (i.e., the non-dominant race in a community) and maintaining racial homogeneity. Holding preferences for racial homogeneity constant and positive, there may be reverse causation: high social capital, in the form of close social networks and strong tastes for organizational participation and voluntary action, may facilitate community organizing to exclude by race or class through both informal and legal mechanisms. The motivation for exclusion may be preferences for homogeneity, increased property values from exclusionary land use policies, or in predominantly minority, lower-income areas, concerns that white gentrification will make housing unaffordable. Conversely, low social capital may make it difficult for residents to organize to exclude and may result in greater racial fractionalization.

More succinctly: social capital facilitates NIMBYism.

The whole point of social capital, after all, is to facilitate collective action. It's usually bandied as a cure for commons-type problems like littered parks or crime-infested streets, but there's no reason to assume a neighborhood will deploy its social capital only for wise and benevolent ends. A neighborhood that is adept at organizing litter patrols and crime watches will also likely be adept at organizing opposition to real estate developments that threaten to add economic or racial diversity. If this is the case, then we should expect, rather than be surprised, to see high social capital negatively correlated with diversity.

For the last forty or fifty years, American zoning law has drifted in the direction of increasing the voice of local neighborhoods and organizations in the land-use process. But if neighborhood organizations are where parochialism and outsider-paranoia go to breed, this has been a drift in the wrong direction. Too many projects become subject to too many local vetoes, and we end up with too little housing, too much parking, too few shops and businesses, and sterile, drab cityscapes. Perhaps land-use and zoning regulations should be more concerned with protecting cities from social capital rather than enhancing it.

Here is the full abstract:

Social capital has pervaded property law, with scholars and policymakers advocating laws and property arrangements to promote social capital and relying on social capital to devolve property governance from legal institutions to resident groups. This Article challenges the prevailing view of social capital’s salutary effects with a more skeptical account that examines the dark side of residential social capital—its capacity to effectuate local factions and promote restraints and inegalitarianism that close off property. I introduce a set of claims about social capital’s dark side in residential property and explore these points through the examples of local racial purging, land cartels, and residential self-governance. First, contrary to the assumption of a social capital deficit, residential racial segregation and land cartelization, perhaps the deepest imprints on the American property landscape today, suggest an abundance of local social capital and possible unintended consequences of interventions to build social capital. Second, “governing by social capital,” or relying on social capital for property self-governance, may empower factions, breed conflict, and increase the demand for residential homogeneity as a proxy for cooperation. In light of the mixed evidence for social capital’s benefits and its sizeable dark side, the more pressing and productive role for property law is not to promote social capital, but to address its negative spillovers and illiberal effects.

Posted at 02:17 PM in Economics, Neighborhood activists | Permalink | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

September 02, 2012

We don't need another university-area overlay

The Planning Commission has initiated a squirrelly amendment to Austin's Land Development Code to create yet another overlay district in the university area, this one to be called "the Central Austin University Area Overlay District."

This new overlay district would have one and only one regulation: the "group residential use" would become a conditional use in MF-4 districts. That would force anyone building a dorm, cooperative, or fraternity house in an MF-4 district to get Council permission first, subjecting them to the patented neighborhood shakedown and to Council lectures about the need to provide "community benefits." The conditional use permitting process is a great way to slip in surreptitious heightened parking requirements and other things to jack up the cost of these projects.

Obviously, dormitories, cooperatives, and fraternity and sorority houses are an important source of cheap housing for students. Land already zoned for medium-high density multifamily a stone's throw from the university is a logical place for such housing. If we were to make it a conditional use in only some of the city's neighborhoods, these should be the last to get that treatment. But the Planning Commissioners evidently believe it's a good idea to make the cheapest forms of student housing get special permission in the neighborhoods that most need it.

Staff couldn't swallow it and, commendably, has recommended against creating a dopey new district which has the sole purpose of discouraging new cheap student housing in mostly student neighborhoods. It has calculated that it would affect only two tracts in the Hancock neighborhood and none in the North University planning area. But the change would affect 34 of the 59 MF-4 tracts in the West University planning area, which contains the city's densest cluster of student housing. (Group housing was already prohibited on the othe 25 tracts through the neighborhood planning process.)

I suspect that there are only a handful of tracts that pose real concern to the homeowners in the area, if only because there are so few homeowners in the West University planning area. And staff suggests that if there are problems with individual tracts being inappropriately zoned today that they be handled on a case-by-case basis.

But there's the rub. A petition to rezone a given MF-4 property would require a three-quarters Council majority if the property owner objected. The neighborhoods don't have enough reliable water-carriers on Council for that. Better try a stealth down-zoning: create a brand spanking new "overlay district" to do essentially the same thing and try to squeak out a majority Council vote. Although all Council members pay lip service to affordable housing, perhaps enough are willing to ignore it when it matters for this strategy to work.

Council was scheduled to vote on this on August 16 but it was postponed which (coincidentally) has allowed students filing back in to campus to weigh in. They have circulated a petition against this. I encourage people to sign.

Posted at 06:30 PM in Austin, Austin development, Neighborhood activists, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

February 21, 2012

Try the Mueller houses here

In Austin, a lot of the fights over density are really fights against having students nearby. I understand perfectly most homeowners' desire not to live next door to a raucous party house full of college kids. I didn't particularly enjoy that even when I was 19 (when I actually lived in a raucous party house full of fraternity brothers).

But, as a practical matter, there is a limit to how much the City should do -- or even can do -- to control where and how people live.

Take the Old West University Neighborhood Association's protest of a duplex planned for David Street. The homeowners there are worried they'll have to contend with two duplexes overstuffed with boisterous college kids. To block that, they're pushing what I think is a bad interpretation of City code which could have harmful, unintended consequences and which would make duplexes a less appealing option for developers throughout Austin.

It's natural for homeowners to want to maintain the kind of housing stock in their vicinity that will be less appealing to packs of college kids. But we, as a city, have to decide when this makes sense as a matter of policy and when it doesn't. College kids have to live somewhere, and neighborhoods close to campus make the most sense for them.

When should we adopt regulations designed to deflect college students somewhere else and when should we adopt regulations to accommodate them? That's a debatable question. But that's really a debate about how to handle neighborhoods on the cusp of a transition. It is not a debate for a neighborhood that has already made the transition. Once a neighborhood has converted from mostly owner-occupied, single family housing to mostly rental student housing, we should stop devising regulations to deflect the students somewhere else and start planning how to accommodate them.

It turns out that students have more or less claimed OWUNA.

Continue reading "Try the Mueller houses here" »

Posted at 09:21 PM in Austin, Austin development, Neighborhood activists, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

February 20, 2012

You might want to rethink this

Here's a neat idea from a local neighborhood association: let's incentivize the elimination of emergency escape windows in duplexes.

The Original University Neighborhood Association is challenging the city's approval of a duplex on David Street. The neighborhood contends the duplex is an illegal "superduplex" because it contains too many bedrooms. The plans show just three bedrooms per unit, the legal maximum, but each duplex contains two other rooms the neighborhood says could be used as bedrooms.

The problem is, how do you decide whether a room is a bedroom? The neighborhood complains the city just reads what's on the plans.

According to In Fact Daily (gated), the neighborhood association president is proposing a firmer definition:

She argues that such a space "could be reasonably defined" as "any room that meets the definition for habitable space . . . and meets the minimum area requirements . . . and is a private space or can be made private by the addition of a door . . . and has an outside door or window which meets the minimum requirements for emergency escape."

Zaragoza further explained the idea to In Fact Daily. She turned to the example of a study. She suggested that "it makes sense" to have a door that closes in a study, and that a potential remedy, under her proposed rules, would be to have a window that "would bring in light but that would not necessarily meet the egress requirements for a bedroom."

Any room big enough to be used as a game room or living room would be big enough for a bedroom, so a minimum area requirement is useless for discriminating between bedrooms and other rooms. And, as Zaragoza notes, doors are useful things to have in all kinds of rooms. So the crux of the neighborhood's proposed definition really is, "Eliminate the emergency access."

Because we know that no college student will use a room as a bedroom unless it has an emergency escape window meeting city code.

So suppose, God forbid, someone dies in a duplex fire because he couldn't get out a window. When the newspaper reports that city code limited the number of emergency escape windows in the duplex, would the city's response really be, "He must have been using the room as an illegal bedroom. Serves him right."?

Posted at 11:00 AM in Austin, Austin development, Neighborhood activists, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

February 06, 2012

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.)

Posted at 01:20 PM in Austin, Austin development, Density, Neighborhood activists, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

January 22, 2012

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.

Posted at 03:41 PM in Density, Neighborhood activists, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

September 06, 2011

The Gated City

If you generally agree with me that anti-density restrictions hurt cities, you should read The Gated City by The Economist's Ryan Avent. If you generally disagree with me that anti-density restrictions hurt cities, you should read The Gated City to see why you are wrong.

Ryan's central thesis is that tight growth restrictions in the highly-productive coastal markets have inflated housing prices there, driving people to less productive but cheaper parts of the country. Local zoning decisions, when aggregated, reduce innovation, dampen productivity and sap our wealth. Micro decisions have macro effects; there are trillion dollar bills on the sidewalk.

I've tried to make many of the same points here over the years, although with a particular focus on Austin:

Wealthy cities are innovative cities.
Density promotes innovation.
Density increases productivity.
Dense concentrations of people allow richer, deeper, more varied markets.
Anti-density regulations pushed by NIMBYs drive up home prices in high-demand cities.
Anti-density regulations pushed by NIMBYs are bad for the environment because they drive people from cities with mild climates to cities with hot climates, increasing average per capita energy use.
NIMBYism's root cause is homeowner risk aversion.

Ryan does not try to identify the one optimal density, or even claim that there is such a thing. He doesn't argue that we all should live at New York or San Francisco densities. Rather, he argues that cities benefit from rising density, whatever their baseline. That's right.

He's an eloquent writer who backs up his claims with academic studies. I don't have any significant criticisms because I agree with him down the line. I found a couple of nits to pick. In the introduction, he states he has estimated that anti-density restrictions in the coastal markets have knocked 0.25 to 0.5% off GDP growth but didn't return to that point. I would like to see more about this calculation. Any discussion of rising demand for central cities should acknowledge the role of falling crime rates. And he spends little space detailing the many ways cities restrict density. Although it was not necessary to his argument, it would have been entertaining to read about some of San Francisco's more absurd regulations.

The Gated City is a Kindle single but I understand it can be downloaded to your computer or phone even if you do not own a Kindle. It is short. It is half the price of a venti latte at Starbuck's. Buy it. Read it.

P.S. When discussing density, Ryan usually used weighted density rather than standard density, and was kind enough to throw me a cite.

Posted at 12:53 PM in Austin Contrarian, Books, Cities, Density, Economics, Neighborhood activists, Urbanism, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

July 14, 2011

Complaining is cheap

The City is proposing to tighten the standards for its Residential Permit Parking Program. This is the program by which the City transfers to homeowners, for free, effective ownership of a portion of the public right-of-way in front of their houses. The new standards would "raise the bar on documenting need" by, for example, requiring traffic studies.

To the extent this reflects a new-found hostility by City planners to neighborhood demands to exclude outsiders, I'm of course entirely sympathetic. I will also be happy if the new standards make it more difficult for neighborhoods to participate in the RPPP.

But as a matter of policy, this makes no sense. Parking near busy commercial and popular entertainment centers is scarce. It is valuable. The scarcer the parking on commercial corridors, the more valuable the parking spots on residential streets. The City's new standards are simply another way of telling neighborhoods and nearby businesses, "We want to make sure that public demand for parking is really, really high before we ban it." It is as if the City wants to verify that a parking ban will inflict maximum harm.

And parking bans do harm neighboring businesses. It is of course true that spillover parking annoys some homeowners. There is no sense trying to tell them they should not be annoyed -- if you are annoyed, you are annoyed, and that's the end of the matter. But this kind of externality is perfectly symmetric. Banning parking because it annoys a homeowner inflicts a cost on neighboring businesses by stripping them of a portion of their existing, limited supply of parking.

What the City ought to do is minimize the net cost of these externalities. Who cares more? If homeowners value empty asphalt more than neighboring businesses and their customers value parking spaces, then we should assign the spots to the homeowners. And vice versa.

I suspect that in high-demand areas like South Congress, the businesses and their patrons value the spaces more. But there's an easy way to settle this: meter the spaces. The meter income will tell us what value the public places on the spaces. Price the spaces accordingly and then allow homeowners to buy the spaces in front of their homes. The spaces will go to the party who values them the most.

Homeowners would dismiss this policy as unfair because, seriously, who will or can pay a big chunk of money to keep the street clear in front of his home. But that's the point. Complaining is really, really cheap. The City today is transferring property rights from the public to groups of homeowners without any compensation to the public, based on nothing more than cheap talk. We can't tell how much someone really cares until we make him pony up some dough.

Posted at 12:51 PM in Austin, Neighborhood activists, Parking, Regulation, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBack (0)