Tag: Transportation

Access in the City

Access for residents to employment is critical to boosting city productivity. This has been demonstrated by researchers such as Remy Prud’homme and Chang-Woon Lee of the University of Paris, David Hartgen and M. Gregory Fields of the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Generally, city productivity (economic growth and job creation) can be expected to improve more where employment access is better . Access is measured in the number of jobs that can be reached by the average employee in a certain period of time, like 30 minutes.

Generally, US cities have seen strong productivity gains as they have become more accessible. In 1900, before the broad adoption of the automobile, US gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was $6,900 (2015 dollars). By 1930, when there were 90 percent as many motor vehicles as households in the nation, GDP per capita rose to $10,600. Now, even factoring in the economic reverses of the last decade, GDP per capita is more than five times that amount (Figure 1).

Further, American metropolitan areas tend to have shorter work trip travel times and less traffic congestion than their counterparts elsewhere. Much of this is due to their more decentralized employment bases than elsewhere in the world, where decentralization has increased at a slower rate.

Public officials and planners now have been given an important new tool for assessing access and improving metropolitan transportation. Researchers at the University of Minnesota Accessibility Laboratory have been studying accessibility in US employment markets (metropolitan areas) in the most detailed terms yet. The first report, in 2013, was authored by Professor David Levinson (on autos) and since that time Andrew Owen and Brendan Murphy have collaborated with Levinson in reports on autos, transit and walking. These modal reports measures access by the number of jobs that can be reached in a metropolitan area by the average employee in 10 minute intervals (from 10 to 60 minutes).

This article summarizes access in the 30 and 60 minute travel times in 49 metropolitan areas (Note 1). The 30 minute trip is used because it is close to the average one-way work trip travel time in the United States (26.4 minutes in 2015). The 60 minute trip is used is the longest commute considered. This “one hour economic circle” has also been adopted in Chinese cities, such as Chongqing for urban area planning, as recommended by former World Bank principal planner Alain Bertaud.

Access by Automobile

As one would expect, more jobs can be accessed in the larger metropolitan areas. New York leads, with 2.6 million jobs accessible to the average employee within 30 minutes by auto. New York is closely followed by Los Angeles, only 12 percent lower at 2.3 million. With a population 35 percent below that of New York, and with the worst traffic congestion in the United States, this is a surprising result. The greater dispersion of jobs in Los Angeles certainly helps. In third position, Dallas-Fort Worth surprisingly edges out much larger Chicago, in fourth position. This undoubtedly is the result of DFW’s superior freeway system, which along with its arterial system has resulted in the best traffic congestion in the world for any metropolitan area over 5 million population. Washington (Note 2) and Houston rank fifth and sixth.

Employment access by autos in 60 minutes is the highest in New York, and Los Angeles, with Chicago third (ahead of Dallas-Fort Worth), probably due to its larger overall labor market (42 percent more jobs than Dallas-Fort Worth). Washington, San Francisco and Dallas-Fort Worth have around 3,000,000 auto accessible jobs (Figure 2).

Access by Transit

Transit access is dominated by New York’s 200,000 jobs within 30 minutes access by transit. This is nearly three times that of second place San Francisco. The top five include three of the other metropolitan areas with the largest central business district (CBD or downtown) areas, Chicago, Washington and Boston, while Philadelphia, with the sixth largest CBD ranks seventh. Los Angeles ranks sixth. Seattle, Portland and Denver round out the top ten, well above their 15th, 24th and 21st population ranks. These high rankings may be a measure of their transit system quality, though access by transit is a mere fraction of their auto access.

New York leads in 60 minute transit access, at more than 1.2 million, followed by Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington and Chicago (Figure 3).

Access by Walking

New York also leads in 30 minute walk access, more than doubling that of second place San Francisco, at 47,300, followed by Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington. New York also leads in 60 minute walking access, at 157,100, followed, again, by San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington (Figure 4).

Modal Comparisons

The job accessibility differences between autos and transit are significant. On average among the 49 metropolitan areas, 30 minute access by car is 783,000 jobs, compared to only 18,000 for transit and 7,000 by walking. At 60 minutes, autos reach nearly 1.7 million jobs, compared to fewer than 130,000 for transit and 28,000 by walking. Thus, at 30 minutes, the accessible auto market is 43 times that of transit and 115 times that of walking (Figure 5).

The ultimate transit city in the United States is New York. There, the average employee can reach 2.6 million jobs by auto in 30 minutes, compared to 205,000 for transit and 157,000 by walking. Auto access in 30 minutes is 13 times that of transit and 56 times that of walking (Figure 6).

Portland is a metropolitan area often cited for its urban transport policies, especially its extensive light rail system. Further Portland has a comparatively strong, traditional central business district (downtown) and has implemented policies intended to reduce car use and encourage transit and walking as well as increase urban densities. The average Portlander can reach 687,000 jobs in 30 minutes by car, 19,000 by transit and only 7,000 by walking. That’s only slightly better than the national average, with autos providing 37 times the access of transit and 97 times that of walking (Figure 7).

Raleigh (Note 2) is certainly not a new city, but its explosive growth has given the metropolitan area a post-World War II urban form, with comparatively low density (one-half that of Portland) and very low transit ridership. The average employee in Raleigh can reach 567,000 jobs by car in 30 minutes, compared to 4,500 by transit and 4,300 by walking. Raleigh’s auto access is 125 times that of transit and 132 times that of walking, both higher than the national average (Figure 8).

Extending Auto Mobility to All

It is clear from the data that access to an auto provides unique advantages in comparison to transit or walking. Professor Robert Gordon, in his seminal The Rise and Fall of American Growth says that" "Much of the enthusiastic transition away from urban mass transit to automobiles reflected the inherent flexibility of the internal combustion engine—it could take you directly from your origin point to your destination with no need to walk to a streetcar stop, board a streetcar, often change to another streetcar line (which required more waiting), and then walk to your final destination."

It might be asked, “how can it be that this is so in view of the many billions spent on new urban rail lines?” The answer is that transit cannot be competitive with the automobile in the modern urban area. Professor Jean-Claude Ziv and I concluded that it could take all of an urban area’s gross domestic product each year to build and operate such a system.

At the same time, transit moves a large share commuters to the largest central business districts in the transit legacy cities. This is an important niche market, but not a large percentage overall.

With the practical impossibility of replicating auto mobility for people who cannot afford cars, new thinking is needed. One approach could be auto ownership programs, according to Evelyn Bloomenberg and Margy Waller in a 2003 Brookings Institution paper. This could require shifting transit funding priorities toward employment access and the longer term economic growth that would produce.

Note 1: The latest reports cover 50 metropolitan areas. This article deals with 49, because no transit data was provided for Memphis.

Note 2: Some metropolitan areas are virtually adjacent to others. This can increase the jobs accessible because there is significant employment outside the metropolitan area, in an adjacent metropolitan area. Examples are San Francisco and San Jose, Washington and Baltimore, and Raleigh and Durham.

Photo: Suburban Employment Center: Chicago (by author)

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the "Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey" and author of "Demographia World Urban Areas" and "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life." He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

January 27, 2017
Are America’s Cities Doomed to Go Bankrupt?

I’m a fan of Strong Towns and share their thesis that the biggest sustainability problem with much of suburbia is its financial sustainability.

A recent article there about Lafayette, Louisiana has been making the rounds. That city’s public works director made some estimates of infrastructure maintenance costs and which parts of the city turned a “profit” from taxes and which were losses. Here’s their profit and loss map.

The obvious conclusion that we are supposed to draw is that dense, compact, traditional urban development is profitable and good, but low density sprawl is a money loser and bad.

There’s some truth in this, but taking that simplistic view can give a misleading impression. For example, let’s consider why high density central business districts tend to have such density of development and high property values per acre (and thus taxes). It’s obvious that these districts derive a great part of their value from the overall scale of the community, i.e., sprawl.

Let’s do a quick thought experiment. Lower Manhattan below 59th St. is certainly incredible valuable property. However, if the rest of the metro area were some how chopped away leaving only this super-valuable part, how much value would that land retain? In part, Manhattan is valuable because it’s the center of a vast megacity region where tremendous amounts of human capital that lives in dispersed communities can be concentrated in a small area for commercial purposes.

This article says that only about five cities in America don’t suffer from a fatally flawed financial model. I seem to recall that elsewhere they said NYC and SF are the only two cities that can survive in the long run financially.

But it wasn’t that long ago that NYC nearly went bankrupt and had to be rescued. A recent study just said that its structural finances are the second worst of any major city in the country, primarily because of its gigantic liability for retiree health care. NYC looks good now because its economy has been booming. Let’s see how it does it a major downturn, particularly without a strong fiscal hand like Bloomberg at the tiller.

San Francisco is unaffordable to all but very high income residents. It’s a de facto gated community. It may well be that pricing everybody but the rich out is a viable strategy for financial sustainability, but that’s obviously a path foreclosed to most places, even if they wanted to try it.

We also need to consider that there’s infrastructure we have maintained. By and large our telecommunications infrastructure and electricity infrastructure are in very good shape, for example. For telecom especially we’ve made vast investments to not only maintain, but dramatically upgrade our infrastructure. How did we manage to pull that off if it’s financially impossible to maintain and upgrade infrastructure? What lessons could we learn from that?

In short, I agree with the general Strong Towns thesis that we need to look at the long run “total cost of ownership” of sprawl. In many cases, the math just doesn’t add up and some cities are in an infrastructure hole so deep they’re unlikely ever to get out. But they are overstating their case here.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Photo "Downtown Lafayette, Louisiana" by Patriarca12 (Own work) [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

January 20, 2017
World Automotive Sales Setting New Records

The world has come a long way since 1929, when 80 percent of the world’s car registrations were in the United States, which also manufactured 90 percent of the vehicles. Now China produces the most cars and its annual sales rank top in the world. China overtook the United States in vehicle sales during the Great Recession. But it’s not like Americans are no longer buying cars; the US broke its own record last year. In 2016, sales records were also set in nations as diverse as China, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and Mexico.

China

China has emerged as the world’s largest automotive market. In 2016, China’s sales of passenger cars, light trucks (including sport utility vehicles, or SUVs) and commercial vehicles reached 23.9 million. This is 6.5 million more cars than were sold in the United States. This gap is likely to grow, because China’s large population offers greater opportunity for growth. The United States has about eight times as many vehicles per 1,000 population as China. The US leads in total vehicles with 260 million compared to China’s 140 million, according to OICA, the international vehicle manufacturers organization (Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d’Automobiles),

From virtually the beginning of motorization more than a century ago, the United States dominated world automotive production but during the Great Recession China assumed sales leadership. As sales dropped precipitously in the US, Chinese sales rose 47 percent in 2009.

Sales in 2016 were aided by temporarily lower taxes on small engine vehicles, which ended on December 31. Still, analysts expect another four to five percent growth in vehicle sales in 2017.

As in a number of other nations with rising volumes, SUVs took an increasing share of total sales figures. SUV sales were up 44 percent, eight times the increase in passenger car sales. Now, nearly three-quarters as many SUVs as passenger cars are sold in China (Note).

Buick was one of the international pioneers in China’s automobile market, from agreements after US President Richard Nixon’s early 1970s visit. Buicks had been favored by some government officials. and were the first American cars built in China (in a joint venture with local SAIC ). China’s Premier Zhou Enlai, who served from 1949 to 1976, owned one before World War II (Photo: Premier Zhou En Lai’s Buick, Museum in Nanjing). Today, 80 percent of the world’s Buicks are sold in China.

In recent years the Chinese market has become more diverse. Virtually all of the international players sell in China and there are a number of local manufacturers. Sweden’s flagship brand, Volvo, now owned by Chinese interests, who now ship a “made in China” model to the United States (the only Chinese import).

China’s infrastructure is well prepared for its record breaking sales. China leads the world in its length of motorways (freeways or controlled access expressways), with 123,500 kilometers (76,700 miles) as of the end of 2015 (Photo: G4 Expressway between Zhengzhou, Henan and Wuhan, Hubei). This compares to the latest available US total of 104,500 (64,900 miles) in 2014.

China’s cities are served by extensive freeway systems. In Beijing there are five freeway ring roads and a sixth partially opened. But cars have become so popular that the high city densities have predictably created both horrific traffic. Further, despite effective emission controls, the high density of traffic contributes to the country’s severe air pollution problems . The plan for a more decentralized Beijing and environs (Jin-Jing-Ji) is aimed at least partially at reducing traffic congestion.

Photo: Zhou En Lai’s Buick, Zhou En Lai Museum, Nanjing

Photo: G4 Expressway between Zhengzhou, Henan and Wuhan, Hubei

United States

A record 17.6 million light vehicles were sold in the second largest market, the United States, which broke last year’s record of record of 17.4 million. Light duty truck sales captured nearly 60 percent of the market, with an annual increase of 7.2 percent. This included SUV’s, (and “crossovers”) with 38 percent of the market and a 7.4 percent increase. Passenger cars continued their decline by 8.1 percent, to 40 percent of the market.

Western Europe

The core European Union 15 nations, along with Norway and Switzerland taken together account for the third largest car market. . There was no new record there last year but the strongest volume since 2007. Nearly 14 million light vehicles were sold, approximately six percent below the record set in 1999.

The United Kingdom set a record, with sales of 2.6 million vehicles, up two percent from 2015. Fifteen of the seventeen nations had sales increases. Italy, Portugal and Ireland had the greatest gains, at 17.5 percent, 16.2 percent and 15.8 percent respectively. Spain also exceeded a ten percent gain (10.9 percent), while Finland gained 9.3.

Strong gains were also posted in Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Belgium, with increases of from seven to eight percent. However, neighboring Netherlands had by far the largest drop, 14.7 percent. Large markets France (up 5.1 percent) and Germany (4.5 percent) contributed importantly to the higher Western Europe sales number. Sales were down 2 percent in Switzerland.

A More Mobile World

In 2014, world vehicle sales reached 89 million (Figure 1). Between 2004 and 2014, world car sales rose at a rate of 3.3 percent annually. Even with the reverses of the Great Recession, this was a more than one-quarter increase from the 2.6 percent rate of the previous decade. If the trend of recent years continues, production will exceed 100 million by 2020.

According to OICA, international vehicle manufacturers organization (Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d’Automobiles), there were 1.2 billion vehicles in the world in 2014, 180 per 1,000 population.

It might be expected that the greatest motorization would have been reached in the United States, the most affluent of the larger nations. That would be partly right, but not the 50 states, rather Puerto Rico is the most intensively motorized geography in the world, with 892 vehicles per 1,000 residents, according to OICA (Puerto Rico is routinely reported separately, for cars and other data . This is surprising, given that Puerto Rico’s median household income was only one-third of the 50 states in 2015, and less than one-half that of 50th ranked Mississippi (Figure 2).

The United States has to settle for fourth position, following Iceland and Luxembourg. Even that may seem high, especially in view of data in The Economist’s The World in Figures, which says that the US ranks 36th in cars per 1,000 population. But in the United States, cars aren’t even half the story. In the US, peak sales of traditional passenger cars was reached in 1974 and sales have dropped nearly 40 percent. Consumers have been buying SUVs and pickups instead. Motorization is measured by personal vehicles, not cars. According to OICA, in 2014 86 percent of Western European vehicles were cars, compared to 47 percent in the United States, In fact, in 2016, the top three selling vehicles in the United States were pickups, led by the Ford F Series, which is also the top seller in Canada (photo: Ford F-150 Pickup), where nearly two-thirds of 2016 sales were pickups and SUVs.

Photo: Ford F-150 (2017 model)

World motorization continues to grow strongly. The cars are cleaner , safer and will continue to get more environmentally friendly. The mobility they have facilitated has made an important contribution to the continuing improvements in the quality of life and will continue to do so, despite efforts of governments and planners to discourage their use.

Note: Vehicle types may not be standardized in national reporting and thus caution is required in interpreting this data.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy and demographics firm. He is a Senior Fellow of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism (US), Senior Fellow for Housing Affordability and Municipal Policy for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy (Canada), and a member of the Board of Advisors of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University (California). He is co-author of the “Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey” and author of “Demographia World Urban Areas” and “War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life.” He was appointed to three terms on the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission, where he served with the leading city and county leadership as the only non-elected member. He served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers, a national university in Paris.

Photo: Chang’an Avenue, Beijing by Australian cowboy at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL], via Wikimedia Commons

January 14, 2017
New Year, Same Old Streetcar Named Disaster

On December 30 the city of Atlanta began Year 3 of operating its much-ballyhooed Atlanta Streetcar System, and so far, all that can be discerned is a lot of bally hooey.

This month, the Atlanta City Council approved the final payment to URS for the design-build of the 2.7-mile Atlanta Streetcar project, making the total payment $61,630,655. That was, according to Public Works Commissioner Richard Mendoza, “$6 million less than URS originally submitted.”

Not exactly. The 2014 URS contract authorized by MARTA (the transit authority designated to receive the $47.6 million federal grant for the Streetcar), was $59 million; the original URS contract, based on the preliminary design, was $52.2 million.

Asked about the project’s full cost, Mendoza told councilmembers, “The entire project came in a tad under $97 million, which was within the original budget.”

Not really. The original budget for the project, as listed in the TIGER federal grant application in 2010, was a capital cost of about $72 million. Annual operation and maintenance (O&M) costs in 2013, when it was originally slated to start running, would be about $1.7 million.

Later, the city projected a cost of about $3.2 million a year to operate the system. Then in February 2016, the city revised that cost to $4.8 million – a 52 percent increase. The city’s FY2017 budget includes nearly $5.3 million for the Streetcar O&M.

As for revenues: The grant application projected $420,000 in farebox revenue for the expected first year of operation (2013), making up 20 percent of O&M costs. In fact, the farebox recovery ratio is just 5.2 percent, as Mendoza told councilmembers on December 14 during his quarterly update on the system.

From January through November 2016, tickets brought in $177,580; by extrapolation, the 2016 farebox will bring in less than $195,000. That’s less than half (46 percent) of the grant application projection.

There were 809,000 passengers in 2015. From January through November 2016, there were just 348,043. The grant application listed projected average weekday ridership at 2,600; but this year (without breaking out weekend ridership) it is 1,462, just 56 percent of that original estimate.

The Streetcar had a late and spotty start, too. After construction and testing delays, operations began on December 30, 2014. It was supposed to offer free rides for three months; in March 2015, the mayor declared it would be free for the entire first year.

Ridership plunged after the $1 fare was implemented on January 1, although it did help reduce the number of homeless riding the vehicles. Fare evasion is a problem: The city reports 53 just percent of riders are paying the fare; hopes are better policing and a newly launched app will improve revenues.

State and federal audits found safety and management problems; in May, the Georgia Department of Transportation threatened to shut down the Streetcar unless corrective action was taken. This month, Mendoza told the Transportation Committee that nine (14 percent) items of 66 on the “Corrective Action Plan” had been completed.

This week, the city announced reduced Streetcar hours for the holiday weekend, “a modified schedule for New Year’s Eve to accommodate large crowds expected to attend holiday events in the downtown area. On Dec. 31 the streetcar will operate from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and then will resume normal operating hours on Jan. 1, running from 9 a.m. to 11 p.m.”

Reducing hours when tourists are most likely downtown is a far cry from the hype in the grant application: “[I]t will provide connectivity and circulation for the core of the Downtown area of Atlanta, improving accessibility and making it possible to conveniently travel from key destinations and event venues without a car and connecting tourists, residents, students and workers to attractions, jobs and public amenities.”

Unfazed by the dismal results so far, the city has another 22-mile phase under environmental review, planning to leverage November’s transit sales tax proposals that won 72 percent voter approval. Apparently, the project is nowhere near big enough to fail yet. The biggest tragedy, however, is that in an era of rapidly changing technology, Atlanta residents will be stuck with this transit from a bygone era for another 40 years.

This piece was originally published by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation on their blog, The Forum.

Benita Dodd is vice president of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, an independent think tank that proposes market-oriented approaches to public policy to improve the lives of Georgians. Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the view of the Georgia Public Policy Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before the U.S. Congress or the Georgia Legislature.

© Georgia Public Policy Foundation (December 30, 2016). Permission to reprint in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided the author and her affiliations are cited.

Photo by Spmarshall42 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

January 3, 2017
Advancing the Texan City-Building Model

Reading the recent report “The Texas Way of Urbanism” promptly reminded me of my status – twice a migrant; from small town to big city (Athens) and from big city to another country. These moves were propelled by a singular motivation: seeking opportunity to better my lot. I knew next to nothing about the cities I moved to: their shape and history, their culture, their social divisions and even language were absent from my viewfinder. All that mattered was the chance for a new start. And that’s how Texan metropolises emerge from the report’s pages – gates to opportunity. I carry this typical migrant perspective as a fact-checker to all discussions about cities – magnet-cities.

It also rekindled an irritation about how warped the conversation about cities often is; as if a group of dilettantes in a pageant give cities points and declare winners. Points are given for: “urban/suburban”, “dense/spacious”, “compact or not”, “grid or not”, “beauty/ugliness” and so on. These arbitrary, spurious abstractions do not register with the migrant – the city’s wealth generator. A professor moves to a post away from home, a multinational corporation executive to another continent, and an oil rig specialist to a small-town with black gold – they are all wealth generators; they move to pursue a goal and, in the process, they build cities unwittingly. They shape them by their actions.

In admitting that Houston “[….]is not beautiful upon first blush, nor does it offer the charm of pedestrian fancy that denser cities boast”, the report affirms that Texan cities have the right approach: first mind how to generate wealth, then empower citizens to achieve the good life. What follows is a city like no other in history, one that reflects its time, culture and values. It is not Paris, or London, or Tokyo, it is Houston or Austin. The model works. And just as all its predecessors, the new city is never static, not a stage set, it’s a movie in slow motion – it evolves.

Evolution means adaptation to new pressures. It does not have a destination, a preordained ultimate goal, or shape. In that light, it is a reactive process, constantly responding to emergent conditions.

   The pressure for movement space and its distribution in cities like Barcelona is intense

From that perspective, the model that builds Texan metropolises is neither final or complete. It inevitably misses unanticipated, emergent factors that today play a role in a functioning city. It has, for sometime, incorporated responses to the pressures of a motorized economy by building infrastructure sufficient to move people and goods to their destinations and it does that better than other U.S. cities. But as the combined effects of automobility are tallied up, a new pressure point has built up. It demands an adaptation to the nature and function of non-motorized mobility and its realm – the foot realm. The pressure is not about more “beauty” or “charm” or a nostalgia for old times, it is about space: redressing the imbalance between space assigned for speeds exceeding 20 miles and space for those below. These two spaces are incompatible. A response to this pressure would add functionality to the Texan model of city making.

   Redistribution of space with controls

Adaptations to rectify this imbalance need not be invented; they already exist mostly in older cities but also in Texan urban areas. However, they have been mostly sporadic and unsystematic. Nevertheless, all these case-by-case changes nurtured an appreciation for the vast improvement in the quality of the daily city experience, the heightened sociability and the intensified economic activity. In turn, this new appreciation generated greater demand for spaces and places endowed with these qualities.

Two systematic, universal versions of a layout model – call them “hybrid” grids – have appeared; one in Barcelona, Spain and the second in Calgary, Canada. One for fixing built-up areas and the other for greenfield development.

That the city of Barcelona would propose a model for transformation might have been expected. It has an expansive, regular grid that is under perilous pressure: extremely dense, congested, mired in emissions and all its surface space taken for motorized movement and parking. The only option was to reallocate the available space. And that reassignment is now underway.

A team of Barcelona planners have started the implementation of the “superilles” (superblock) model to the classic Barcelona square grid, (see drawing). The principles underpinning the concept are simple and intuitive:

     •  No through motor traffic means that streets at the walking scale (400×400 m) serve as capillaries only; they occupy the lowest rank in the network hierarchy, where circulation essentially stops. They serve the residents of a “quadrant” (or “quartier”) only, are unmistakeably local and, thanks to lighter traffic, can be made narrower, freeing up space for other functions.

     •  Full accessibility for active transport within the quadrant: people circulation is switched “on” while motorized transport is “off” by means of looping cars back to its perimeter. This preferential filtering manages the permeability of the quadrant to its residents advantage. Additional switches, such as card-activated bollards and the scheduling for entry, parking and deliveries, would add accuracy and flexibility of the “on-off” switching and refine the filtering.

     •  Surface space gained from the circulatory function is then assigned to nature and to recreational/social activities thereby strengthening cohesion within each quadrant.

These typical modular layouts are then applied to the entire grid of the city with appropriate modifications for circumstantial conditions.

Houston and Austin are two among many U.S. cities that sport square grids just like Barcelona’s. Houston in particular has inherited exceptional 80-foot right-of-ways that offer considerable design flexibility for rearrangement.

The adaptation that will address the imbalance between vehicular and non-vehicular space in a city is here awaiting adoption. Texan cities can advance their already effective city-building models to a higher state of completion and of responsiveness to current pressures.

Fanis Grammenos heads Urban Pattern Associates (UPA), a planning consultancy. UPA researches and promotes sustainable planning practices including the implementation of the Fused Grid, a new urban network model. He is a regular columnist for the Canadian Home Builder magazine, and author of Remaking the City Street Grid: A model for urban and suburban development. Reach him at fanis.grammenos at gmail.com.

Top image: Augustus Koch (1840-?). [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

December 15, 2016
San Francisco Observations

I made quite a few trips to San Francisco during the late 90s into the early 2000s, but hadn’t been back in a very long time – probably close to 15 years.

Recently I was there for a conference and a long weekend and got to spend some time exploring the city. I won’t claim a comprehensive review, but I did have a few takeaways to share.

1. Fewer homeless than expected. Based on the rhetoric you read in the papers, I expected SF to be overrun with aggressive homeless people. This wasn’t the case. There were visible homeless to be sure, but no more than I remember from 15 years ago and no more than I see in New York. And they were not particularly aggressive in any way.

2. A curiously low energy city. It’s tough to judge any American city’s street energy after living in New York, but San Francisco felt basically dead. Tourist areas around Union Square and the Embarcadero were crowded, and the Mission on a Friday night was hopping, but otherwise the city was very quiet. Haight-Ashbury was nearly deserted and many neighborhoods had the feel of a ghost town. It’s very strange to be walking around a city with such a dense built fabric but so few people.

3. San Francisco is too small to support a centralized economy. The Financial District has a number of skyscrapers, and SOMA is awash in construction – the biggest changes I observed were in this district – but central San Francisco is too small to serve as a global city business center. And the city as a whole is not big enough to support that kind of a resident base. The bottom line is that San Francisco’s constrained geography renders the construction of a CBD in the style of a Chicago or New York very difficult. Also, at only around 856,000 people – an all time record high – the absorption capacity of the city is limited. Contrast with NYC at 8.5 million, LA with 4 million and Chicago with around 2.7 million in much bigger geographies. Also, the transport geography of San Francisco does not include the type of massive commuter rail system that NYC, London, Chicago, etc. have. In short, I don’t see SF having the capacity for a much greater degree of employment centralization.

4. Major construction is undesirable in San Francisco. As I’ve written before, San Francisco is one of America’s most achingly beautiful cities with a very unique building stock. It’s also, like Manhattan, mostly fully developed. So new construction in most places would involve demolition of the existing building stock. No surprise SOMA is where the construction is, because there’s room to do it and/or lower quality buildings to replace. To make a serious increase in the quantity of residential or office space would involve significant damage to the character of the city and would not in my view be desirable. Nor, given the point above about its small size, is it likely to make much of a difference anyway. It’s hard to see how the city of San Francisco itself changes its trends without an economic pullback.

5. San Francisco doesn’t feel like it has the services of a high tax city. Taxes are high in San Francisco, but it many ways it doesn’t feel like it. In New York, our taxes are high, but the level of services is highly visible, at least in Manhattan. Just as one small example, SF’s storm drains were often partially blocked with leaves, and there were pools of standing water even on Market St. In NYC, BID employees or building supers regularly clear storm drains and sweep water into sewers. Our parks are in better shape. I was surprised to see that SF still has curbs with no ADA ramps. In short, while the city is beautiful and such, it doesn’t radiate the feel of high services.

6. Barrier and POP transit system. I ran into a curious situation while riding transit. Muni, the city’s transit agency, has a light rail system called Muni Metro. It runs as a subway under Market St. Because it runs on street elsewhere, the trainsets are pretty short. I rode the subway portion, which has a barrier system. But then on the train my ticket was checked again by a conductor. Why have barriers if you are running a POP system on top of it? I’m glad I saved my ticket.

7. San Francisco Opera. I attended my first opera in San Francisco. The San Francisco Opera is a very globally respected company. The opera, Janacek’s The Makropulous Case, was very good. It was well-patronized but there were plenty of empty seats too. It has the feel of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where the majority of attendees are subscribers. The average age was very high – much higher than the Met Opera, which although suffering a serious attendance problem draws quite a few young people. The SF Opera’s patron base is getting up there. I also took a look through the program. I did not see a single tech company on their list of corporate sponsor, nor did I see any tech names I recognized on their major donor list. Opera in San Francisco appears to be an old money affair, with the emphasis on old. This doesn’t bode well for the future of this flagship cultural organization if it can’t find a way to tap into younger attendees and donors. I’d have to caveat this somewhat given that my investigation is very limited. But this is a trend affecting many similar organizations.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

November 18, 2016
Cat and Mouse in Frogtown

A friend recently expressed an interest in how some cities are reforming their land use regulations. “I mean, there are places like LA that say they’ve thrown out the code books and are rewriting their zoning.” My short response was… No. The reality is that the city plays an expensive and byzantine game of cat and mouse with each individual neighborhood.

There’s a little sliver of brassiere shaped land wedged between the Los Angeles River and the Golden State Freeway that sums up a lot of what constitutes the land use regulation process in LA. When poor Mexicans were forcibly removed in order to build Dodger Stadium in the late 1950’s they resettled in this inexpensive semi-industrial zone called the Elysian Valley, which is also commonly known as Frogtown.

It’s been a solid working class neighborhood for decades. Families have long managed to own modest homes and live in respectable obscurity among the auto body shops, plumbing supply warehouses, and municipal maintenance facilities.

In recent years the adjacent neighborhoods of downtown Los Angeles, Echo Park, Silver Lake, Atwater Village, and Glassell Park (all previously ignored and undervalued) have become newly fashionable and prohibitively expensive. Pent up market demand acts like a balloon – if you squeeze the middle the ends bulge. In this case home buyers, renters, and businesses have scoured the area looking for alternatives. Frogtown is a centrally located and relatively affordable compromise.

Design firms, architects, photographers, tech incubators, high end specialty fabricators, and other such enterprises have moved in to the nondescript buildings of Frogtown. If you’re willing to celebrate concrete block walls and corrugated steel as honest industrial materials you can create the trendy Dwell look with paint and landscaping on the cheap. Compare this process with the expense of restoring a more exotic historic property in a tony neighborhood.

Art Yanez is a Los Angeles native and the son of immigrants. He’s also the principal of FSY Architects. He purchased three contiguous parcels in Frogtown and created a campus for his firm.

The space incorporates pre-existing industrial warehouses as well as new construction with shops and offices that are now rented for supplemental income. The architecture firm’s own offices are currently oversized to accommodate anticipated expansion as business continues to ramp up. But construction is a cyclical industry, so the space can be subdivided and rented during future downturns.

The new building achieves the legally required off street parking standard as well as the fire marshal’s demand that a full size fire engine be able to drive around the entire structure in an emergency. The parking is convenient (this is Los Angeles after all), but the outdoor space does double duty as a plaza for human activities on occasion. Strings of cafe lights, movable furniture, potted plants, and people transform the place quickly and easily.

Part of FSY’s strategy was to create a place that would activate the entire community, not just a building containing offices. The initial concept involved repurposing shipping containers and pressing them into service as small shops. The building code wouldn’t permit that so a stick built version mimics the container look and scale. Actual containers are parked in back and are used for low cost storage. Local artists were invited to install distinctive motifs for the exterior of the corner cafe. All of this was as-of-right construction within the established city code.

For the last century the Los Angeles River has been a concrete industrial drainage canal sealed off by barbed wire fences and cinder block walls. Most people in LA have no particular relationship to the “riverfront.” But that’s changing as city officials have announced a billion dollar program to transform the river into a ribbon of green and blue public amenities lead by none other than starchitect Frank Gehry.

The success of small infill developments in Frogtown along with the city’s plans to transform the river have attracted large scale production developers. Previously ignored sites began to sprout upscale apartment buildings and condo complexes on dead end streets at the river’s edge.

This process was viewed with scorn by existing property owners and community organizers who haven’t forgotten how their families were bulldozed to make way for Dodgers Stadium. So they lobbied for new regulations to make it harder to build anything new and to work around the perception that political figures are corrupt and on the take for developer’s money. The new regulations now make projects like Art Yanez’s building non-conforming and subject to special review processes for height, bulk, and so on.

The result is that now only very small projects can be built as-of-right, and only very large and expensive projects can overcome the newly implemented regulatory hurdles. All the incremental in-between projects that might have been built are now much less viable and far more expensive to push through. This is what land use policy actually looks like on the ground.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He’s a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

Top photo: John Sanphillippo

November 5, 2016
Were Urban Freeways a Good Idea?

It’s almost a truism in urbanist circles that construction of urban freeways was a bad idea.

Indianapolis Monthly magazine takes a somewhat more charitable view in its retrospective on the 40th anniversary of the completion of the downtown “inner loop” freeway.

“But even before its grand opening, the inner loop—31 miles of interstate within I-465, built at a cost of nearly $300 million—had begun paying downtown dividends. Real estate values around the superhighway increased in the early 1970s, reversing a 35-year decline, and Mayor Hudnut also credited the road with stimulating such projects as the Hilton Hotel, the Indiana National Bank building, and the $150 million expansion of Eli Lilly & Co.

Hudnut predicted the new freeway would spur 20,000 new jobs, and state legislators embraced the spirit: In 1973, when a federal reimbursement slowdown threatened to add 10 years to its completion date, they fronted the money for the last leg of I-65/I-70.”

The conventional wisdom is that downtown freeways were unmitigated disasters. It says they destroyed vast tracts of urban neighborhoods, with a racist targeting of black ones, then remained as huge barriers to redevelopment.

The Indy Monthly article acknowledges the downsides of the construction:

“But little relief awaited the neighborhoods that were carved up for the inner loop. The project displaced a total of 17,000 residents, including 6,000 from Fountain Square (one-fourth of the population).

Linda Osborne, owner of Arthur’s Music Store, remembers Fountain Square as a vibrant full-service community during the 1950s and early ’60s. “There were theaters, grocery stores, shoe stores—all the things you have in a small town,” says Osborne, whose family business opened in 1952. Interstate construction, however, dug a wide channel that isolated Fountain Square from downtown. Then as now, a Virginia Avenue bridge carried traffic over the chasm, but the commercial district soon tanked, Osborne says.”

I previously posted an article documenting the destruction in Fountain Square. It features pictures from Historic Indianapolis, including this one showing the scale of the destruction.

I don’t have Fountain Square’s demographics at the time, but what evidence I do have suggests it was a largely white community, which it remains to this day. So in this case the place with the most destruction wasn’t a minority area.

Indy Monthly also points out the example of downtown Ft. Wayne. That city decided to go with a bypass option rather than a downtown alignment. The result was that they did indeed prevent neighborhoods from being destroyed, but those neighborhoods and the city’s downtown severely declined anyway. While there are some interesting things going on downtown Ft. Wayne to be sure, it’s unarguable that Indy’s downtown is on a completely different plane of development, though to be sure Indy is a much larger city.

In fact, this is the pattern we see. Urban decline happened pretty much everywhere, urban freeway or no. When there’s a downtown freeway to blame, people do that. Where there’s not, people blame the bypass. Hence most attributing of blame for decline to urban freeways is simply incorrect.

Indy Monthly argues that the freeway system provided for convenient access to downtown. Without that access. businesses would have fled, it would be impossible to host large events, etc.

There is something to this, I think. If there were no freeway access to downtown Indianapolis, it seems likely it would be a much diminished urban center. Keep in mind, there was limited transit access and no real prospect of creating it.

But we should separate two things, the freeways that provide access to downtown and the ones that run through it. It’s certainly possible that freeway spurs could have been built into the center of the city without building them as through-routes. This is the idea behind much of the boulevarding advocacy movement.

Twice within the last decade, the state implemented multi-month closures of the Indianapolis inner loop to through traffic. This was a good real world test of whether it was needed at all.

I wasn’t living there at the time but did do some driving around rush hour during one of the closures. The best alternate route for through traffic is to use I-465 to the south. This did get heavily congested, suggesting that this road would need to be widened prior to removing the inner loop. Some folks did say some surface routes near downtown were more congested during rush hour. But there didn’t seem to be any show-stoppers to permanent closure.

In my view, removal of the inner loop is feasible, though highly unlikely to ever occur. But it goes to show that the benefits of freeway access to downtown could have been implemented in ways that were less invasive, using freeway spurs and boulevard distributors. In this scenario, the inner loop itself would no longer be a barrier, and the demolition associated with its construction could have been largely avoided. The freeway spurs could have been build with lower capacity, since no through traffic need be designed for. Some interchange complexes would have been eliminated.

Removing or never building the inner loop would indeed likely add to peak of the peak congestion. The extent to which this dominates local thinking is hard to overstate. It’s revealing that the biggest source Indy Monthly used for quotes was Bill Benner, a sports columnist, and sports and events loom large.

“To fully appreciate Indy’s middle-aged expressway, imagine 65,000-plus NFL fans spilling out of Lucas Oil Stadium and heading home on the stoplight-laden likes of Meridian Street, Washington Street, Kentucky Avenue, and other prime thoroughfares of yesteryear. Or don’t imagine it—because without this key piece of infrastructure, there might never have been a Lucas Oil Stadium.

“It was a series of dominoes,” Benner recalls. “Without the interstate, it would have really held back downtown development. So maybe you don’t have the Hoosier Dome, or the Indianapolis Colts, or the Super Bowl. And maybe you don’t have Circle Centre or Victory Field.”

Designing a transport system around sports event peaks, particularly low-frequency ones like NFL home games, illustrates the Faustian bargain Indianapolis made to revive its downtown.

Indianapolis made its downtown America’s most friendly to major events. So you can get people to and from the Super Bowl the one time the city hosts it. (I would suspect getting people to and from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for so many decades powerfully shaped this mode of thinking).

But the design of the transport system is very hostile to almost everything else, whether that be residential uses or pedestrian access. This has changed somewhat with the Cultural Trail, Georgia St. and others. But to truly change the game would require a major change in psychological orientation to be able to care less about peak of the peak congestion after Colts games and more about the average ordinary experience of the city. I suspect a similar dynamic is at play in many other places.

Aaron M. Renn is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and an economic development columnist for Governing magazine. He focuses on ways to help America’s cities thrive in an ever more complex, competitive, globalized, and diverse twenty-first century. During Renn’s 15-year career in management and technology consulting, he was a partner at Accenture and held several technology strategy roles and directed multimillion-dollar global technology implementations. He has contributed to The Guardian, Forbes.com, and numerous other publications. Renn holds a B.S. from Indiana University, where he coauthored an early social-networking platform in 1991.

Photo: By reddit user MikeSanborn. Cf. https://www.reddit.com/r/indianapolis/comments/3jx7n5/my_favorite_view_of_indianapolis/cut6n4k?context=3 (https://imgur.com/oJLlvTS) [CC BY 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons

November 4, 2016
Suburban. Comma. Transit.

I explored the Orange Line Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system that runs for eighteen miles across the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. The Valley is a profoundly suburban city-within-a-city and home to 1.8 million people spread out over 260 square miles. Attempts to upgrade public transit by the central authorities in LA proper have been fought tooth and nail by folks in the Valley and illustrate why transit just doesn’t work when the local culture doesn’t want it. I’m not sure why LA keeps pushing on this particular string.

Transit works best when one compact highly productive walkable neighborhood is connected to another compact highly productive walkable neighborhood. Manhattan or Hong Kong isn’t required. A plain vanilla Main Street with two and three story buildings works just fine.

Suburbia is the exact opposite. Everything is spread out and oriented around private space, leisure, and consumption. Public space is an afterthought and any hint of density is anathema. Transit is believed to attract “the wrong element.” If this is the kind of world these folks want to inhabit… I say walk away and let them all enjoy the Jiffy Lubes and drive-thru burger joints without transit.

This is the standard suburban environment with its sad begrudging crumbs of half assed bus service. It’s a monumental waste of scarce public funds to attempt to operate public transit here. The land use pattern and culture are in direct conflict with efficient cost-effective transit. And it’s punishing for the people who have no choice but to walk or take the bus: the young, the elderly, the infirm, and the poor.

Here’s how suburban communities typically deal with transit. To the extent that it’s tolerated at all the transit station is hidden away behind a row of self storage facilities and plumbing supply warehouses. The entrance is treated as if it were an office park. There’s an enormous amount of surface parking. The assumption is that people will drive to the bus or train station since transit is a bridge between the comforts of the private automobile and the necessary evil of commuting to a more congested urban destination.

The Park and Ride model of transit like this Metro stop in Chatsworth (the terminus of the Orange Line) is moderately acceptable to middle class suburbanites so long as the station is properly landscaped. Absolutely nothing can be built anywhere near the station. Loitering must be prevented at all costs. Theoretically it’s possible to walk to and from the station, but the location and design of the place ensure it isn’t a common practice.

I followed the entire route of the Orange Line and found the stations themselves are well designed, convenient, and efficient. The fully segregated busway disguised in a tunnel of greenery mean buses are never stuck in the same traffic that afflicts cars and trucks. The buses come frequently and predictably and travel is comfortable and fast. BRT simulates the benefits of a light rail system, but at a tenth the cost.

But each station was built in a spot that makes it unlikely that transit will live up to its full potential. This is the De Soto stop. The buses do a great job of getting passengers from one isolated station to another. This isn’t an accident. It’s the only set of arrangements the locals would tolerate – and the locals have a lot of lawyers. Transit is associated with the lower class and home owners here want no part of it. So they litigated for years until the proposed rail line was beaten back to a bus route and some decorative shrubbery that didn’t go anywhere too offensive.

Here’s the Balboa station. Abundant surface parking, plenty of landscaped strips, and a location that doesn’t infringe on nearby private property lets people drive to the bus. Unfortunately the effectiveness of good transit is negated by the barren surroundings. If you had access to a car and could drive to the bus… you wouldn’t really need the bus.

Here’s the Sepulveda station. Notice how the pattern repeats. In the Valley it’s now possible to take a highly effective bus trip from the Costco parking lot in Van Nuys to a strip mall a dozen miles away in Canoga Park. That’s progress of a sort since the BRT is so much better than traditional suburban bus service. But the public investment in infrastructure isn’t being complimented by the required private investment near any of the stations. That’s because the culture rejects the kind of infill development that would make the stations economically meaningful.

Bicycle and pedestrian paths parallel the BRT busway along many miles of the system. This allows people to get from Point A to Point B in a way that doesn’t rile up the locals quite as much as the proposed light rail did. Fenced in landscaped bike paths follow the suburban “Sunday in the park” model of leisure that’s at least borderline socially acceptable in the Valley. The fact that low income people also use the paths to peddle to work is an unfortunate and much lamented side effect. I noticed more than a few Spandexed guys on $4,000 bikes yelling at slow moving folks to get out of the way.

The eighteen miles of Bus Rapid Transit in the Valley cost $324 million dollars to construct. That’s $18 million per mile. Compare that to the recent $1.1 billion road improvement project on a ten mile stretch of freeway in the Valley. The freeway was already ten lanes wide so adding slightly better on and off ramps and tweaking the car pool lanes did exactly nothing to relieve traffic congestion. That’s $110 million dollars per mile. The same people who lament the waste of taxpayer money on transit think the city should be spending more to upgrade the roads.

Over the years community groups and their elected representatives in the Valley have created legislation that forbids the construction of light rail or the use of sales tax revenue to fund a subway. Other local groups created rules that mandated a fully underground subway system because they objected to surface or elevated rail lines in their neighborhoods. And the ubiquitous anti-infill and anti-density brigades continue as always.

Personally, I don’t see the point of fighting locals who don’t value transit. I say give this part of the city no transit at all. But also require the locals to fund their own road projects from their own immediate tax base as well. Actually, I would love to see things taken a step farther. Cut the Valley loose from the City of Los Angeles altogether as so many folks in the Valley have attempted to do for decades. Let the Valley keep its own tax revenue and pay for its own services and infrastructure as an independent city. And let Los Angeles be free to focus on projects that actually make sense in the coastal communities that actively want transit and more intensive development. If that means the region is less integrated as a result… I don’t see how things could be worse.

John Sanphillippo lives in San Francisco and blogs about urbanism, adaptation, and resilience at granolashotgun.com. He’s a member of the Congress for New Urbanism, films videos for faircompanies.com, and is a regular contributor to Strongtowns.org. He earns his living by buying, renovating, and renting undervalued properties in places that have good long term prospects. He is a graduate of Rutgers University.

October 27, 2016
How to Make Post-Suburbanism Work

Are you ready to become a “real” city yet, Southern California? Being “truly livable,” our betters suggest, means being “infatuated” with spending more billions of dollars on outdated streetcars (trolleys) and other rail lines, packing people into ever small spaces and looking toward downtown Los Angeles as our regional center.

Our cognitive elites dislike the very idea that Los Angeles, as Dorothy Parker once supposedly described, has long been “72 suburbs in search of a city.” Yet, Southern California, as I discuss in a new Chapman University report, has from its early emergence grown around a “post-suburban” model of dynamic, smaller clusters. This urban form has become common in many major metropolitan areas as automobiles have replaced transit as the primary means of getting around.

This model worked here brilliantly for most of the last half century — until planners, real estate speculators and California bureaucrats decided that we needed to emulate New York City and other older monocentric core cities. Like the provincials they consistently prove themselves to be, our leaders have generally complied.

So, after nearly 15 years spent in pushing this direction, what have we accomplished? A transit system that barely serves as many people as it did before we started building trains, housing prices among the highest in the nation, super-high poverty rates and a population that continues to seek to go somewhere else, including some 1.6 million net domestic migrants who have left the L.A. and Orange County area since 2000.

The density mirage

Some see densification as necessary to meet the demands of an expanding population. Yet, both L.A. and O.C.’s populations are growing slower than both the state and national average. Nor has the pro-density regime relieved any of the pressure on housing and rent. For one thing, high-density housing is far more expensive on a per-square-foot basis, either for townhouses or detached housing. It can only accommodate the poor at the cost of massive subsidies.

The drive to re-engineer our post-suburban form assumes that downtown Los Angeles can become like the more historic central business districts of New York, Chicago and San Francisco. These CBDs have from nearly double to 10 times the employment levels as downtown L.A. Suffice it to say, downtowns in New York, Chicago and San Francisco have retained regional significance, as others, including Los Angles, have declined in relative influence, with little growth in their share of regional employment. Even the most generous definition of downtown Los Angeles encompasses considerably less than 5 percent of the metropolitan area’s employment, and that share has not grown appreciably since 2000. All the net job growth has been in newer suburbs and exurbs.

Fundamentally, in “post suburban” regions like southern California, the “sell” is a different one than in places like New York. It is based on a largely suburban quality of life. This does not mean we need to lag economically. Many of the most successful high-tech regions — notably, Silicon Valley; Austin, Texas; Raleigh-Durham, N.C., and the northern reaches of Dallas —– are largely suburban and less dense than the L.A. area. Certainly, densification policies so far have not turned Los Angeles County into a high-tech haven. The county suffers from below-average tech employment, while more suburban Orange County remains 20 percent above average. The fastest increases, albeit from a low base, are occurring in the Inland Empire.

Read the entire piece at The Orange County Register.

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book, The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us, will be published in April by Agate. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.

Photo by Thomas Pintaric (Pintaric) [GFDL or CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

October 10, 2016