It’s hard to disagree with David Apert’s recent post titled “Affordable housing advocates should talk about land use… and land use advocates need to talk about affordability,” but I do. The problem isn’t that the two groups are talking past one another, but that they both make the same mistake, putting too much emphasis on housing price rather than pushing for fewer rules and less regulation of housing production. Obsession with price leads to price interventions that only make things worse. Consider the parable of the hot dog vendors.
After reading my post, the organizers of the City Builder Happy Hour asked me to present my idea for a Neighborhood Real Estate Investment Trust. The following is more or less what I presented on Tuesday night at the happy hour. This market-based approach to “saving” neighborhood buildings was delivered on May Day, not far from the riotous mob of anarchists trashing downtown.
We hear it all the time: “What? That great building with the cool coffee shop just got sold! Damn developers!”
But the truth is that when property changes hands the new owner is making an investment, and an investment is about creating a financial return. Developers aren’t necessarily setting out to destroy existing buildings, but in order to build more housing and make a profit, sometimes they do.
What if all of us pooled our resources to buy real estate and develop it ourselves? Imagine 1200 people in Seattle each contributing $1200 (about the same as buying 1 espresso drink a day for a year) to a Neighborhood Real Estate Investment Trust. That would generate more than a million dollars ($1,440,000) that could be applied to the purchase of that great building with the coffee shop. And if the property is managed well, the funds from operation and increases in equity over time would mean than initial $1000 investment would gradually produce a return, money that could be put back into buying more iconic properties.
In the United States, a Real Estate Investment Trust, or REIT, is a company that owns, and in most cases operates, income-producing real estate. To be a REIT, a company must distribute at least 90 percent of its taxable income to shareholders annually in the form of dividends.
What distinguishes REITs is that they have transferable shares. An investor can by a sliver of a project in the form of a share, get a return from dividends paid from increases in equity or profitable operations, and sell the share later at a profit to another investor.
The beauty of a Neighborhood REIT is that it is market-based preservation that would get neighborhoods into the development game. As property owners, average Seattle residents could decide not to build out the site, but keep the building just like it is. But they’d still have to manage it, collecting rents, making repairs, and taking care of overall maintenance. They could choose not to maximize profits, but focus on maintaining use and the existing structure.
There is an example of this in Great Britain called the Ethical Property Company; they buy properties, sell shares, and keep older buildings in use renting them to non-profits and community based groups.
A Neighborhood REIT could allow everyone to invest in dense, walkable, livable, transit oriented communities so we could get all those benefits plus some of the financial ones as well.
Tomorrow evening is the second installation of the City Builder Happy Hour. Like at the first event, the hosts want to hear about people’s “audacious ideas” to support more growth and sustainable development in Seattle. Last time it was the idea of a gondola from Capitol Hill to Seattle Center. This time you are invited to send your idea in on the back of cocktail napkin. I’m going to put my ideas here, in this post, instead.
When I last wrote about the happy hour, I talked about the “myth of Big Development,” and somebody has done a great job of running with that idea, creating a great visual image. I’m still withholding judgment about whether a happy hour is going to get us where we need to go. “What could it hurt?” you ask.
In my opinion, we’re rapidly approaching the time when doing nothing but talking about things is going to be harmful, even if we have a few beers while we’re doing it. I’ve about had it with meetings, however well intentioned, that don’t lead to creating the political momentum behind the ideas that will fundamentally change our approach to land use in Seattle. Having said all that, here are some “audacious ideas,” parts of which I’ve shared before.
Regardless of income, there are fewer things are more important to young families than being close to good schools. The folk wisdom of the day is that urban schools aren’t as good or safe as suburban schools. I’ve suggested before that this is why urbanists of all persuasions need to make improving the quality of urban schools as no less important than land use and transit policy. But what role can land use policy play in improving educational outcomes? A recent Brookings Institute study offers an answer.
The study suggests that a major reason for the disparate academic performance between poor and wealthier students is linked to land use policies that, in effect, exclude affordable housing near good schools. If more “affordable” housing near high performing schools were allowed, that academic performance of poor students would improve. But it’s a conclusion that doesn’t seem to follow from the evidence in the study or from the practicalities of how land use policy gets made
The study anchors basis its conclusion on the theory that poor, underperforming, students of color do better when they go to school with wealthier, better performing, white students. Since, the argument in the conclusion of the study goes, zoning rules tend to exclude certain types of affordable housing from areas where there are high performing schools, relaxing those rules would allow more poor, students of color to attend better schools; disparity problem solved! Continue reading “Land Use and Education: Adding Schools to the Mix is the Answer”
These days, with hot and heavy public meeting and disclosure requirements, when elected officials have retreats they have something of the quality of watching French royalty eat dinner in the Salon of the Grand Couvert at Versailles: an attempt to have private things happen in full public view. The Sound Transit Board’s retreat this week at Bell Harbor Conference Center was no different. Councilmembers, mayors, and other members of the board talked back and forth, but comments about parking and Transit Oriented Development were probably less candid when aimed at constituents than if they were spoken in private. But I got some good insights on where the board might go on parking and Transit Oriented Development.
First the parking discussion. Seattle City Councilmember Richard Conlin kicked off the discussion with a well rehearsed set of principles he felt should be used when considering the issue of parking around transit stations. Conlin said that the most important issues are “maximizing ridership, ensure the agency is solvent, and that we have happy customers.”
The “happy customers” point was also raised by King County Councilmember Larry Phillips who asked how people driving to transit who can’t find a place to park might adversely affect future funding measures, a point echoed by others who worried that not building parking might discourage ridership. Continue reading “Sound Transit Board Retreat: Who Will Lead on Parking and TOD?”
The Seattle Department of Transportation posted a reminder on its blog about letting buses go first, a good idea but also mandated by law. Buses should go first—but who or what comes before buses, and whom should bus drivers be “letting go first?” The answer is pretty obvious, bikes and pedestrians. But in practice, sometimes, it feels like bus drivers could use a reminder of this. Fortunately, giving pedestrians the right of way is also written down in the Seattle Municipal Code and Washington Administrative code as well. The bottom line is that with more people in the city, everyone needs to be on the look out for everyone else if we’re going to make this density thing work.
Awhile back on Seattle’s Land Use Code, I wrote a response to Dan Bertolet’s posting of a video about riding bikes (or not riding bikes) called “Why People Don’t Ride Bikes.” Bike posts always generate a lot of hullabaloo for some reason from both cyclists and drivers irritated with cyclists. I felt a little left out being a pedestrian. I gave up my bike riding because I found that the distances I was commuting were too short for riding a bike. It took less time to get from point A to point B on foot than it took suiting up for the rain, unlocking and locking the bike, and, as Dan pointed out, it seemed like I was risking my life to get to work.
I wrote a response that included a video as well. I took some phone video of running through Capitol Hill in which I braved people blowing crosswalks, had to run around cars and trucks parking on the sidewalk, and a series of other horrors. My point was to argue for an explicit hierarchy for modes of transit. This isn’t anything really new, but our laws and codes tend to put a lot of weight on protecting cars from people rather than the other way around.
What might happen if we got rid of the code one mile around Beacon Hill, stopped worrying about heights, and, instead, focused on what’s happening on the ground there and wrote a code that reflected that potential? I’m not sure, but when the inevitable criticism came in for my Zero Based Zoning idea for the Beacon Hill station area, I started to wonder, “Maybe a mile is too big of an area around a station.” But after an extensive walking tour, I think a mile is just about right, and there is strong foundation there upon which to build the future.
My drawing skills are certainly not great, but while I was walking and looking at maps here’s what I sketched out. (click here for the big version).
In the center of the bull’s-eye, of course are the station and the commercial district. The circle is roughly a mile from the center out to the edges. As one commenter pointed out, the circle does include seemingly incongruous neighborhoods. But as I experienced the area on foot (I also live there for 10 years) it became easy to see that there are some important reasons to consider such a wide circle.
Zero Based Zoning is a concept like form based code except that it doesn’t start with a code at all, but a process. Can we consider a neighborhood without limits but only potential? Can we stop worrying about adjusting heights, bulk, and scale of buildings in a neighborhood, but consider instead what could happen there with more people? Here’s my view of Beacon Hill with no code, only experience an open mind about what could happen there with the station holding it together.
While reading through some of the response to my last post on Beacon Hill, I couldn’t help but go back to a big influence on my thinking, Kevin Lynch. Lynch, who lived from 1918 to 1984, was a professor, planner, writer and seminal thinker. Many of Lynch’s early writings and notes that influenced his most important work, Image of the City, are available at an online archive, called Perceptual Form of the City.
One of the most interesting documents is called “Morning with a cab dispatcher,” the notes Lynch took after spending a morning trying to understand Boston from the perspective of the guy who sends out and tracks cabs.
I have to credit Lynch for the process underneath Zero Based Zoning, the idea of starting land use planning and code writing with use rather than building form. Planning is not about pushing things around on a map, or bus routes, or zones, or even demographics; what matters is the people. Lynch thought planning started with listening to how people use their city first. Continue reading “Plan for Change: Kevin Lynch’s Morning with a Cab Dispatcher”
Progress toward sustainable land use in Seattle will be measured by whether our land use laws and policies spur innovation, not the height of buildings. Even though contentious discussions about density for Roosevelt centered on building height—with proponents of sustainable growth pushing for 65 feet on the Sisley properties and growth opponents wanting to cap the site at 40 feet—winning that argument only got us 25 feet of progress in what is a 10,000-mile journey toward sensible land use around light rail stations.
The answer isn’t about height at station areas like Beacon Hill; it’s completely getting rid zoning around light rail stations.
I’m guilty, as most of us are, of obsessing about height. Let’s not do it when it comes to Beacon Hill, where the City Council is again considering rezones. If the Council does what I expect, what Beacon Hill will get is some kind of mix of heights that respond to political and neighborhood concerns—including the concerns of people like me who think we need to put more growth in density (density is people!) around light rail stations. That wouldn’t be the best outcome. Councilmembers Tim Burgess and Mike O’Brien should team up to so something different on Beacon Hill.
The obsession with height is understandable, because people like a number to compare one option against another. We pro-growth people tend to push for the bigger number, the anti-growth set, push for the lower number. It’s the closest we’ve come to actually being party-like about growth in this town. It reminds me of the anti-British slogan from the 19th century, “54° 40′ or Fight!” Our version is “NC-65 or fight!” More after the jump.
Does the way we organize our politics and government in Seattle and in our region have any effect on transit and land use? Does the structure of our political institutions result in bad outcomes for transit-oriented development, for example? Would changing that system result in better or worse outcomes? That’s the question we should talk about more actively at urbanist and transit advocacy events, like tomorrow night’s City Builders. Does getting better transit and land use require fundamentally changing the way we organize government and elections?
Since my post at Publicola last week a number of different perspectives and thoughts have appeared in my in-box and in the comments. Here’s a cross section of those perspectives.
Change would make things worse.
This view is best articulated by Frank at Orphan Road, who suggests that tinkering with the way we elect the Seattle City Council could make land use and transit worse. He drills into district elections, suggesting that doing things that way would ensure NIMBY dominance, by giving neighborhood ne’er do wells elected office.
Change would make things better.
There is an odd assortment of bedfellows here. Councilmember Mike O’Brien has been exploring the idea of publicly financed elections, and John Fox has been suggesting district elections. Some commenters in other posts have offered ideas about ways to rig the voting system using proportional voting systems to get better outcomes. The problem is that the outcome of these changes is uncertain.
