For a couple of years now I’ve pined for an STB for the land-use set: a writer not afraid, as I am afraid, to dive into the technical minutiae of land use code and suggest how it can be steered in a positive direction.
This is an odd thing for a transit blogger to say, but I think land use and zoning is actually more important than public transportation. The kind of transit STB advocates for is meant to support dense, varied, walkable neighborhoods, which serves little purpose if those neighborhoods don’t exist. Unfortunately, land use issues are much more inaccessible to the average person, because while many of us interface with transit in our daily lives, the zoning code is mainly a matter for developers.
I’m happy to say that Roger Valdez appears to have delivered with the new, aptly named blog “Seattle’s Land Use Code.” The posts rely defy description or easy summary, so go check it out.
I don’t think that’s an odd thing to say at all. Land use planning should drive transportation decisions. Not the other way around. Unfortunately, much of the land use planning is merely a derivative of transportation decisions, or are weakened severely by transportation decisions. In defence of suburbs for instance, there actually are a lot of good planners and community activists who are interested in good land use policies and regulations, but these tend to get drowned out by a majority of 1950s-oriented transportation planners who say they cannot accommodate the land use planning activities and hence officials and politicians tend to side with the capital plans by transportation planners.
I don’t think it’s an odd thing to say, either. Land use and zone is very important to us public transit users who walk through the neighborhood on our way to the bus stop or streetcar station.
The fastest, cheapest trip is the one you don’t need to take. Good efficient transit is really a secondary choice to that.
I completely agree that land use is more important. Also, thanks for the heads up regarding this new blog :)
I concur completely. Good transit clearly can be made by having the best land use/zoning choices. Thanks for the small but very important thread. Makes me think more about this now, I admit to not paying as much attention as I should have regarding this.
I write here because I care about land use.
But fighting land use on its own is a losing battle – the immense pressure caused by subsidizing poor land use with highways is not something that can be effectively fought directly, as we’ve seen everywhere in the US, and in some parts of other countries too.
Transit is just a means to battling that subsidy to cars, balancing or even overwhelming it with a subsidy to people. Fighting highway expansion works just as well – the market already wants to make good land use choices when we don’t force cars.
“the market already wants to make good land use choices when we don’t force cars” Perhaps that’s true, but not without removing or reforming building codes. NIMBY’s can do a lot of damage, even without cars. We have everything from sf minimums for housing to setbacks to FAR, not created by car culture but by percieved preferences and stereotypes (respectively: small homes are inhumane, crowding sidewalks is ugly and steals sunlight, we want open areas even throughout cities).
I think we need to work on many fronts. Transit alone won’t fix things. We also need to reduce sprawl subsidies, fix building codes and zoning laws, and price pollution correctly.
I’m saying specifically that trying to fight at that level is a losing proposition, and that in fact as activists, we don’t need to!
These things we identify as problems – restrictive zoning caused by NIMBYism – are fights that developers will fight and win for us just fine. The only reason they’re not effective at fighting right now is that our transportation investment choices have made it cheap for them to go build out in the middle of nowhere instead of having the battles.
These ‘perceived preferences’ you see are *purely economic*. If you present people with the cost of their choices, they choose small homes and crowded sidewalks, because open space is not really as important to them as they say it is. But if you provide people with a subsidy to low density living, they will fight tooth and nail to preserve that subsidy. It’s just like any other form of protectionism – like trade tariffs.
I sound so damn libertarian when I say this, but: fight the subsidy (by eliminating or balancing it), and let the land use market right itself.
The native tribes were the original NIMBYs. Of course they were overrun by the wisdom of your ilk that see their own values as superior to those that currently inhabit the land. Existing use and history be damned, “progressives” know best. I hope someday you establish roots and can understand why generational use opposes massive changes to areas that want to preserve the nature of what brought them there in the first place. Contrary to what you assert, Seattle sucks money to support transit (and therefore density) in the West sub-area. There are plenty of places in the incorporated areas that can support increased density without fundamentally changing the nature of existing neighborhoods; it’s just too expensive. And I’m not talking about “affordable housing”; I’m talking about housing people can afford to buy. Seattle is lagging in GMA goals yet it has huge reserves of land that are unused. It’s not that so much that the outlying areas are cheap as that Seattle is just too damn expensive. Solve that problem before you branch out. Focus before casting a wide shadow.
[Ben] I agree with most of that. But that all hinges on winning the big fight about land use subsidy. I think we will win that fight eventually (starting with peak oil, hopefully ending a few decades later after failed attempts at subsidising oil, maybe much later if we decide to convert to painfully stupid fuel sources like liquid coal). But in the mean time homes and infrastructure are being built in the suburbs/exurbs. Removing sprawl subsidy would be the ideal way to change this tide, but in the mean time relaxing our restrictive zoning rules will also help.
[Bernie] I’ll try to use our smallpox blankets sparingly.
Ben, that’s an over-simplification. Developers WILL NOT fight. In fact, the BIAW consistently works against public transport. The PUBLIC have to fight. The BIAW has a model that works cheaply for them and consumers seem willing to buy into since they have little alternative, because they’re not organised, because they have been deceived.
I agree, removing the huge subsidy there would go to solving a lot of problems, but the developers are actively defending it at all costs. And, even if that problem is solved, our land use codes must be reflective of our values to new urbanism and sustainability. Unfortunately, not even Seattle’s LU code is highly reflective of this.