Month: February 2013

There is a strong center-left consensus that more dense construction, in the abstract, is good for society. Most obviously, dense construction is more energy-efficient, discourages the many negative environmental effects of driving, and a new housing unit in Belltown is more or less one fewer unit cut out of forest or farmland.

Furthermore, there are huge non-environmental benefits. The associated transportation choices are good for public health. Although individual projects may result in short-term displacement, provision of affordable housing in the long-term aggregate requires increasing supply. More residents place the city in a better fiscal position and new businesses create jobs. And finally, self-identified progressives must realize that increasing the electoral power of cities is good for the liberal project at all levels of government.

Against the enormous weight of these benefits lie a small series of objective concerns: more competition for parking in City-owned right of way, more neighborhood traffic congestion, more low-income housing, and in some cases reduced property values. Residents aren’t crazy to fear and oppose these changes to the status quo, but density advocates are right to dismiss these concerns as either wrongheaded, or inevitable given that we will follow the imperative to put density somewhere. And if climate change, affordable housing, runoff, health care costs, and/or defeating Republicans* are top-level issues for you then that imperative is clear.

Parallel to this cost-benefit analysis is the issue of aesthetics. Some people like leafy neighborhoods with big lawns, and good for them! I certainly have my own tastes in planning and architecture that don’t have any more intrinsic merit than anyone else’s. But that aesthetic preference has to be weighed against the many emergencies that density helps to solve.

Lest you think the prejudice of aesthetics is a solely a creature of the suburban mindset, the archetypical Capitol Hill hipster is equally capable of letting aesthetic considerations overwhelm much less subjective goals. Opposing development because one hates chain stores or doesn’t like the architecture, while understandable, is placing the same personal taste above our continued broadest-sense prosperity. It’s true that de facto taxing development through various requirements for open space, affordable housing, and whatnot might earn revenue for those goals, cutting into developer profits without actually stopping the project in question. But it also raises the threshold for what kind of projects pencil out, and economics tells us taxing the thing we need most is terrible policy.

All this doesn’t mean there can be absolutely no development regulations. But the Council should carefully consider whether any given one will deter the delivery of this city’s future.

* With apologies to the pro-transit Republicans around here! It would be good for America if you won the battle to make your party responsive to the needs of urban centers.

This is part 2 of a series.

In the previous post on this series, I looked at the idea of a residential land footprint – the amount of land each person takes up for their home.  I also created a chart (updated here) that shows the different living conditions in the Seattle metropolitan area.

The best use of this land footprint curve is to have an easy way to compare the land use of our region to other regions.  I chose five metropolitan areas that I thought would be interesting to compare to Seattle.

NYC

New York City stands alone in the US with regard to land footprint.  The average person uses far fewer square feet of land.  This is accomplished by stacking residences, allowing more people to share the same amount of land.  Note that peak of 300 sf per person might be uncomfortable in a single-story world (keep in mind this includes your share of yard, street, and alley), but by building up each person can have as much floor space to live while using the same amount of land.

LA, SF

I was surprised by these two.  I had imagined Los Angeles to be more sprawled the San Francisco, but they have very similar curves.  It’s interesting to see where the curves cross – SF has more very dense construction, then the curves cross at around 500sf/person.  LA has more moderate density units, and at around 4,000sf/person they cross again, leaving SF with more spread out housing than LA.  Of course, LA’s metropolitan area only includes LA County and Orange County – and the sprawl I always think of extends beyond these areas.

Portland, Seattle, Phoenix

Portland and Seattle are similar.  Seattle has more dense housing, Portland had more mid-density housing, and they align again as housing spreads out.  However, the most common living condition is significantly more dense in Portland than Seattle (~3,000sf/person vs. ~4,000sf/person).  I had included Phoenix just to show what I thought of as a large sprawling city, but was surprised by the curve.  Yes, Seattle has many more people living 2,000sf/person than Phoenix, but Phoenix peaks near Portland at 3,000sf/person then stays lower than Seattle up through the higher footprint homes.

My Interpretation of the Curves (I’d love to hear yours in the comments)

Comparing Seattle to these five cities, it’s clear that we have a large land footprint.  In the most common living condition, a Seattlite takes up a tenth of an acre for their share of their home alone.  Add in the roads and freeways to get to your home (road area likely increases with land footprint), your children’s school footprints (there aren’t many multi-story schools around here), your workplace land footprint, the footprint of your grocery store, and we’re talking about a large amount of land per person.  This is wasteful of our forests, our farms, and increases the distance and time needed to travel to any destination.

How do we move the peak of our footprint curve to the left?  One way is through good transit.  NYC started with an above ground railway over 140 years ago, which continued as a great subway system, and expanded from there.  Building good transit that takes up little street space helps encourage development with small land footprints – your commute is shorter the closer you live to a transit stop, so building up allows for more people to live at these valuable locations.  SF and LA had similar histories, except using streetcars and cable cars.   Streetcars aren’t quite as good at concentrating residences as subways, as they stop more frequently.  Seattle and Portland also had streetcar histories, but much of our growth came after streetcars were removed and cars became the standard mode of transportation.  Of course there’s a lot more to land use than transit – for instance we’ll need to allow growth through zoning – but good transit is certainly a strong force in creating a small land footprint.