Brooklyn Re-development Deathmatch August 19, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, Design, Planning, Regeneration.add a comment
Over at Environmental and Urban Economics, Matthew E. Kahn links to a New York magazine article describing the controversy over the proposed ‘Atlantic Yards‘ development in Brooklyn. While the scale of the proposed development is vast, the politics are not so dissimilar to arguments over countless much smaller schemes. For example, the article author Chris Smith notes how the development’s promoter “manages to use the phrase “affordable housing” five times in two minutes. Not once does he mention the 4,610 market-rate (unaffordable?) apartments and condos to be built”. And the concerns are about massing, blocked views, “intersections choked with traffic [and] More kids than the local schools can possibly handle”.
Matthew seems a little sceptical about the concerns being expressed:
This looks like a classic case of public choice and heterogeneity. People will disagree over whether this project is good or bad. Mancur Olson would say that a small cohesive pressure group that loses the most from doing the project (i.e white upper middle class hipsters who already live in the community) have the greatest incentive to lobby against it. It will be interesting if the “silent majority” can launch a counter-attack. This Ratner looks quite well politically connected .
The last point is important, because a small cohesive group that has the most to win from doing the project can be very persuasive too while being no more representative of the greater good. In my view, there will always be enormous disagreements over a development like this, because once it’s built there will be no going back for decades at least, and if it goes wrong it could spoil a huge swathe of Brooklyn. The temptation is always to avoid the risk by saying no, but done well a large-scale redevelopment of this kind can transform a whole city for the better. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that it comes down to whether the details are right. And from first glance I’m not sure they are: why must the proposed buildings be so massively out of scale with their surroundings? Why does a development involving several thousand luxury flats and vast office space require over a billion dollars in public subsidy? And what makes the Ratner proposal better than this one? Both may have their qualities, but only one (if that) will be built.
Testing the donut hypothesis August 6, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, London, Maps, Regeneration.add a comment
An interesting project from Radical Cartography:
These maps show the distribution of income (per capita) around the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the US (all those with population greater than 2,000,000). The goal was to test the “donut” hypothesis — the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the “revitalized” downtown, and the poor stuck in between.
This does seem to have some validity in older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but in newer cities it is not the case. Instead of donuts, one finds “wedges” of wealth occupying a continuous pie-slice from the center to the periphery.
Just from visual inspection, it also seems that poverty donuts all tend to have about a five-mile radius, regardless of the size of the city. Perhaps this is the practical limit for commuting without a car?
I can’t do a perfect comparison with London because we don’t have small-area income data available like they do in the States, but this map of unemployment might do the job:
How does this match the theory? Okay, I suppose, if you take the West End and the Square Mile as the ‘centre’ of London. The ‘poor’ band seems to be proportionally wider in London than in the American cities Bill looks at, perhaps because of the artificial limit imposed on London by the green belt – if you looked at the same data for ‘Greater Greater London’, including satellite towns beyond the green belt, you might get a picture more similar to the American one.
Superstar cities July 19, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, Housing economics, Housing inequality, Housing markets, NIMBYs, Planning.add a comment
According to Joseph Gyourko, Christopher Mayer and Todd Sinai, ‘Superstar Cities’ arise when high income households are sorted (or sort themselves) into areas that are (a) desirable, (b) unique and (c) feature low rates of housing construction. Their very restrictiveness makes them desirable, and perhaps their desirability makes them more restrictive. A similar dynamic certainly appears to be happening in some parts of the UK, but will it ever go so far as to make London, for example, the exclusive domain of the rich?
Here’s the abstract from NBER (the full paper is here):
Differences in house price and income growth rates between 1950 and 2000 across metropolitan areas have led to an ever-widening gap in housing values and incomes between the typical and highest-priced locations. We show that the growing spatial skewness in house prices and incomes are related and can be explained, at least in part, by inelastic supply of land in some attractive locations combined with an increasing number of high-income households nationally. Scarce land leads to a bidding-up of land prices and a sorting of high-income families relatively more into those desirable, unique, low housing construction markets, which we label “superstar cities.” Continued growth in the number of high-income families in the U.S. provides support for ever-larger differences in house prices across inelastically supplied locations and income-based spatial sorting. Our empirical work confirms a number of equilibrium relationships implied by the superstar cities framework and shows that it occurs both at the metropolitan area level and at the sub-MSA level, controlling for MSA characteristics.
Housing conditions and educational attainment May 29, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, Housing need, Overcrowding.add a comment
In “A Room With a View or a Room of One’s Own? Housing and Social Stratification“, Dalton Conley (an ‘academic superstar’, according to the Guardian) reports some interesting findings on the relationship between family background, household conditions and educational attainment.
Echoing similar research carried out in France, he finds that “children who lived in crowded conditions … completed almost a quarter year less schooling than those who lived in more spacious conditions”, that home ownership also boosts attainment independently of family background and concludes that “housing plays an intermediary role in the transmission of socioeconomic status from one generation to the next”.
The issue of overcrowding raises interesting questions about ‘absolute’ versus ‘relative’ effects similar to controversies over absolute versus relative poverty. It’s easy to see why crowded accommodation might have direct impacts upon children’s attainment independent of conditions outside the home – Conley cites evidence for higher morbidity, less privacy and less ‘consructive interaction’ between parents and children in crowded homes. But are there relative effects too? Parents and teachers of overcrowded children often describe them as reluctant to bring friends round because of shame over conditions at home, and if they do attach a stigma to their home life they may be more reluctant to spend time there, perhaps increasing their exposure to negative influences outside the home. This is all hard to measure, of course, and if I had to say I’d guess the ‘absolute’ effect dominates, but the fact that we are still picking up clear effects caused by overcrowding measured as over 1 persons per room, even thoguh that was probably considered relatively salubrious in early 20th century London, suggests that relative effects are also important.
Two other findings of Conley’s are interesting, but perhaps more so in the American context of black-white housing segregation. Firstly,
even when a 5-year income measure, education and other demographic characteristics are held constant, blacks and female heads [i.e. lone mothers] suffer from worse housing outcomes
but
when socioeconomic and housing conditions are held constant, Africa-Americans actually demonstrate an educational advantage over their non-black counterparts of almost four-tenths of a grade.
The message is clear – if you want to close the education gap between black and white, you have to close not just the gap in incomes but the one in housing conditions too.
Biloxi Blues for the New Urbanists May 23, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, Communities, Design, Planning, Regeneration.3 comments
Here (and reproduced below the fold for non-subscribers) is a great article in the New York Times on the battle over the reconstruction of Biloxi, the Mississippi resort town devastated last autumn by Hurricane Katrina. It depicts a bunch of New Urbanists, with their elaborate plan for a neat, walkable, picket-fence New Biloxi against … well, against almost everyone else.
I’m not that familiar with New Urbanism, so I found it rather educational. I can see the attraction of aspects of their favoured designs, but when they’re so uniformly applied the effect must be stifling (as Peter Weir recognised). There’s something creepy about how carefully every detail of every building is controlled, and combined with their apparently exclusionary approach to consultation this is surely not the way to rebuild a community.
Link from Brad Plumer’s blog, a rich source of other interesting links, such as this, this, and this.
Tear down the high rises? March 22, 2006
Posted by Brickonomist in America, Communities, Design, Europe, Housing markets, International, Regeneration.add a comment
In an oldie but goldie post over at the AHI blog, David Smith argues that “High-rise public housing never works. Never has worked, never will work”.
Overall he makes a very convincing case, and mostly I agree – high-rise housing filled with poor people has been a disaster here in the UK as much as in America or France. How much of this was down to the physical form of the buildings? Just about all of it, says David, though I think the examples he cites demonstrate that the kind of inhabitants matter too. Maybe high-rise blocks wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t populated with high proportions of bored, workless young men, for example. Here in London, some local authorities have moved the families out of their towers, refurbished them and converted them to 100% sheltered housing for the elderly, for example, so there may be some use for some of these buildings after all. As for the rest, I agree with David – tear ‘em down.
The post raises another issue for me. David quotes this passage from Christopher Caldwell in the NY Times Magazine:
If you don’t vary the housing units in a given neighborhood – if you fill entire quarters of the city with standard-issue monoliths – you condemn upwardly mobile people to constant movement. The only people who develop any sense of place are those trapped in the poverty they started in.
Again, I agree. But doesn’t this apply to the private sector too? Here in London, most new private supply consists of one or two bed flats in high-density developments. There’s plenty of demand for them (for now) and no doubt they do the job for their inhabitants for a few years, but you can’t raise a family in them. So should planning authorities do more to guide the market towards producing fewer, larger homes to keep families in the inner city? Won’t this just drive up prices for everyone? And can we really have ‘mixed communities’ if the only family housing in inner cities is for poor families? I don’t pretend to have the answers to these questions, but I think we need to be asking them.
