Education and Slumlords

From this recent Philadelinquency piece:

Gentrification pressure in Philly affects less than 1/3 of the city’s total surface area and its rate of expansion is mostly kept in check by our horrible public schools above all other things.  And if anything, our public schools now suck more than ever; public opinion regarding the SDP has reached its lowest levels imaginable.

That basically means all of the gentrification we see in Philadelphia is missing a major factor that would cause it to explode here:  schools.   Everyone who has kids here either leaves Philadelphia or finds some other solution around the schools problem in order to stay here—or just doesn’t have kids.  Those with their kids in the School District of Philadelphia are either lucky their children are in one of the few performing schools the District has, or their kids are at the mercy of a system they can’t avoid.  That puts definite limits on the homebuying populations for sure.

You only have to look no further than the Penn Alexander School to see what fixing schools does to house prices:  parents pack into the school catchment which caused the area around Penn Alexander to shoot up a $100K prevailing premium over areas of West Philly just outside the school catchment.

But also consider this:   There are 4.4 million people living in Philly’s collar county suburbs and only 1.5 million living in the city proper.  If schools were suddenly fixed tomorrow, it’s likely that the cheapest homes in Mantua would be $450K.   Chew on that for a minute.  Your cheap house is mostly riding on the back of shitty schools keeping the bulk of parents who have means away.

Also note my response to this quote:

Now, about your suburban slumlord who smells the gentrification coming towards his rental property he was renting out for $600/mo and collecting a string of code violations on for a decade who might decide to sell his house to a rehabber and cash out, leaving that rental at the sake of increasing valuations?  Nobody has come up with a solution for that yet.

The shitty slumlords are the problem. And a major irony of our current land-use policies is that they, perversely, empower shitty slumlords at the expense of conscientious local landlords.

Urban Design Perversions

Comment on yesterday's Plan Philly post:

There *is* a baby in the bath water here.

While I agree Jannie is introducing this bill on behalf of CCPB, and that in its current form prohibits natural intensification (a better term for what's needed than "density"), the idea of cornice-line preservation is a good urban design rule that does not necessarily imply a more stringent build-to line.

Structures like mansards, for example, preserve the cornice line, without demanding setbacks, while permitting natural intensification. So urban design solutions exist for the CCPB's "problems".

The problem is, of course, that this bill represents a perversion of the intent of urban design; it should not be entertained any more than it has to, to yield a definitive "No" vote.

But I'd urge the Planning Commission to draft a series of recommended urban design overlays, both as examplars of good practice and to aid in an eventual transition to design codes from use-based ones.

Comments Extracted

Part of a discussion between Jon Geeting and I on Next City piece "It's Time to Cap and Trade Parking Permits":

Me: Jon, thanks for the excellent article. Since I'm sure the data I've collected on SWCC's parking supply formed part of its inspiration, I'm happy to offer a few comments:

1. My first gut reaction was that it was going to be a bad idea. The image the policy's name conjured in my mind was of what would be a wholesale privatization of the (already subsidized) onstreet parking spaces. Reading through the plan eased my fears somewhat, but I believe it is important that a permit is not tied to the space itself (again, because that would amount to wholesale privatization of street space).
2. An issue going forward would be maintaining a certain amount of flexibility. For example, if a neighborhood wished to convert a street to a woonerf, that would entail the removal of a certain amount of spaces. The system you propose increases the flexibility to do this somewhat relative to the status quo (by changing the cap), but increasing administrative layers and distance from neighborhood concerns would increase opportunities for vetoes of changes. So you could go to the PPA and say "here's a close estimate of the parking inventory in Neighborhood X, cap permits for the neighborhood at that estimate", but later changes to the inventory (either for net loss or net gain of parking spaces) would not be so easily ascertained at a citywide level.

What I am getting at is that, under a good cap-and-trade system, permit control needs to be devolved to the neighborhoods--or, more accurately, neighborhood investment districts. (Cf. Shoup, and his work on parking spaces in commercial districts.) This way, a neighborhood would have a dedicated funding stream*, control over how many spaces are permitted (so as to remove them as it sees fit), and an ability to assess parking demand of redevelopment projects...

No, I am not just saying this make myself more work ;). I am also saying this because it's the right thing to do--devolve power over a commons to the most local "stakeholders" (much as I detest that term).
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*Assuming permits are periodically reissued...this is an idea that needs a bit more work.

Jon: I completely agree that the permit should not be tied to the space itself, and should be free to migrate to the areas of the city where there is more parking demand, and cut car ownership in areas where there is less.

For example, I imagine that some of the most central neighborhoods would tip to a lower car ownership equilibrium under this plan, since many of these folks probably use their cars infrequently, and could get several years' worth of Zipcar membership paid for by selling the permit.

I am torn on the issue of whether we should use the Planning Districts as new permit zones, to make sure they don't all migrate to the more auto-oriented areas of the city, or if I think that would actually be a feature of the plan.

Not sure I agree with your assessment of the political economy of the parking removal example. Suppose that under the cap and trade policy, some group pushes to enact my somewhat radical plan for the Bainbridge Green, which would take away about 175 parking spaces.

On one side, you'd have a lot of people who would not want those spaces to go away. But on the other side, you'd have a group of people whose permits stand to get more valuable if 175 spaces go away, since a tighter market would make the permits more valuable. You might have some people showing up to support the new park just to increase the value of their assets.

Could you also elaborate a bit on what you have in mind for neighborhood control over "how many spaces are permitted" and "assess parking demand of redevelopment projects?" My preference would be to stop printing permits altogether, starting ASAP, and let people work these things out on an informal market. I'd like to get the city out of the business of assessing parking demand altogether, and leave it to housing and parking garage developers to gauge how much parking demand there is, and how much people are willing to pay for it.

I see it as an opportunity to reorient the political economy of development around a much lower car ownership equilibrium. I would expect to see a cycle of more infill development in the high-demand areas, followed by growth in transit ridership, and a subsequent sell-off of permits, with permits filtering outward through the successive neighborhood rings over the years.

Me: 1. I agree with your last paragraph.

2. As you may recall, I found that there is a very physical maximum of possible parking spaces in a neighborhood. Beyond this limit, any further permit you issue devalues the parking space.

3. What I have in mind is for a neighborhood to have local control over its parking. Among other things, this means that I would devolve (onstreet) parking permits from the PPA and into the hands of formally-recognized NIDs (there would be certain basic conditions tied to demonstrations of competency, like paid staff, the ability to maintain space inventory, and a certain amount of liquidity *necessary to hire a certain reasonably-priced consultant, heh*). Because parking permits are thus controlled and managed at the neighborhood level, parking policy--and hence transportation policy--comes to be managed at this level, too.
(This is not to downplay the need for a citywide transportation policy, but rather is meant to reflect that most transportation needs are best locally determined; I imagine we could build the system such that the City can exert its natural claim to street space if they wish to put e.g. a protected cycle track or bus bumpout in.)
This limits "migration" more than your proposal, but I don't see that as a bad thing in and of itself, as neighborhoods like Mayfair and Oxford Circle don't have remotely close to the same kinds of supply/demand issues neighborhoods like SWCC, Fairmount, or Bella Vista do. Heck, even Whitman doesn't have the same level of parking issues.

4. Note that I said that one of the measures of competency a neighborhood organization (usually an NID, although other high-compentency organizations such as SOSNA or NLNA should also qualify) has to show to control its parking is an inventory. This is because (a) a strong, well-maintained local inventory will be able to capture minute changes in parking supply, and (b) the group controlling that inventory can use it to further their own goals.

For example, say that a group wished to make Bainbridge Green green. They could then either (a) organize in a bid to control Bainbridge Green's parking inventory in order to reduce/eliminate it, or (b) work with another group, such as the QVNA or a QVNID, which would have a parking inventory (~2000 spaces as a first-order estimation) including the 170-odd spaces on the "green"...

...At this point I find a particular difficulty between your idea and my work: My work is based on the idea (a long-term policy goal, actually) that parking should be treated as a neighborhood "commons" and thus come under the control of that neighborhood. While this is not directly in opposition to your idea, significant difficulties exist in co-implementation. My hunch is that both of our ideas ultimately result in the same end-state: they just come to it differently. (An NID that derives most of its income from parking permits has a significant incentive to optimally price those permits i.e. make them a scarcer commodity i.e. reduce inventory. This is in agreement with Shoupian devolution of Main Street metered spaces to BIDs; they're the ones with the most incentive to get things right.)

More Cogent than I

While still an undercurrent in urbanist media, people are starting to take note of our fundamentally broken approach to passenger rail safety. This item from the usually-libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute, for example, hits the nail on the head. It's extremely short, only seven pages, and describes more cogently and Steve Smith, or Alon Levy, or I, the challenges facing American rail transportation professionals.

The problem remains that this remains an issue that is unknown, and hence unremarked-on, by most people outside the profession and geeks whose interests tend that way. It also doesn't help that, as Business Insider points out, politics get in the way. This is an ongoing problem with land-use issues: it is very difficult for technocrats to reevaluate and rebuild fundamentally broken regulations when they are opposed by people who know those regulations are broken, and fundamentally just don't care, who would rather leave them in place to laugh at them and say they should be repealed outright* and say "this is why government is broken" rather than pitching in, lending a hand, and fixing them.

All that said, I find myself nodding in agreement with Edmonson and Scribner in their recommendation that

[i]f the FRA insists that the operational environment of the Untied States is uniquely dangerous, it should overhaul its regulatory mandates and take a step back from the prescriptive rules currently in place. Instead, it should create a series of performance metrics that would allow train designers to innovate. It now asks, “Does this train fit our rules?” It should ask, “Is this train survivable in a crash?”

 

This would allow U.S. transit authorities to purchase not only European trains, but also Japanese trains, which are designed to different effective standards. The United States could be a melting pot of train designs from around the world.

It can be done. But do we have the political will to do it?
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* Although, with the current FRA regulations, and the (nonexistent) state of our domestic passenger railcar industry, one can actually argue for its dissolution (as Alon Levy has in the past); European and Japanese products, the bulk of the market, have proven safety records our lemons don't.

What Makes a Good Third Place?

I found this article about stations as third places, and I'd like to offer my comment on it:

The article in question has a bit of confusion: first it starts talking about London Marlyebone (a major terminal) and comparing and contrasting it with like depots in the U.S. (Chicago Ogilvie, D.C. Union...) but then the reference to Kalamazoo--in no way a major urban terminal--throws one off.

The problem with this, I think, is that the level of activity needed to make a good third place in smaller cities and towns, like Kalamazoo, is much less than what is needed in major cities. So the discussion of why Seattle's King Street or Indianapolis Union underwhelms fits well in a context dominated by stations like Marlyebone, Grand Central, Southern Cross, Gare du Nord, etc., but not Kalamazoo.

A second problem is that transportation options alone do not make a third place. Greyhound stations usually have lots of transportation options, for example, but are equally as universally dank, dark, dreary, and lots of other words that begin with D.

Let me offer up an example of a smaller station that is a great third place. Lansdale, PA, is a borough in the Philadelphia suburbs, a smallish town to the north of the city. It is near the edge of the city's extensive-by-American-standards commuter rail network. And it is a good third place. Why?

It has a small café/coffeeshop inside (a good one too). This encourages commuters to stop and get a cuppa, and breakfast and even lunch. It has free Wi-Fi, which should not go unnoticed when we note that Starbucks and Barnes & Noble are frequently cited as good third places. The trains there run half-hourly (at least) from before dawn to midnight, and there are two buses that stop there too. It is along the borough's Main Street, guaranteeing a wealth of other third places nearby (such as the library). And it is in an architecturally excellent and reasonably well-maintained structure--in other words, a building projecting warmth and hominess--something else we need to keep in mind and often don't. It's not perfect, of course--the waiting area and café within close up before dinner hour--but as far as stations as third places go, it's an excellent example of what can be achieved even in a borough of 10,000.

And on the flipside, architectural quality really can make a difference. Market East is one of Philadelphia's busiest stations, and sits right off the concourse of an urban mall, but fails to be a good third place in no small part because of how dreary the waiting area feels. By contrast, the platform area is extremely open and airy, and hence many people favor waiting there instead, which sucks the energy out of the main waiting room(s). 

Does anybody know of any other smaller stations like Lansdale's--stations that function as much as a place to go to as they do a way to get from there to here? I am sure it's not alone: even in the Philadelphia area, I can think of a couple of other stations that come close...

Edit: A prompt reply:

Thanks Stephen. Kalamazoo was meant to depict that you do not have to be a
big city station to be a successful third place. Your description of
Lansdale sounds like another fine example. For mid-sized city status, four
AMTRAK passenger trains a day is a lot here in the U.S., though it would be
even better to have commuter rail to Chicago from there like SE Wisconsin
and NW Indiana do. I think the differing time zones between MI and IL makes
that difficult.

I have been in Market East and agree with your assessment - that is
partially why I did not include it. In addition, not all small city
stations in the UK are great third places - many are just way points, but
the station in Inverness, Scotland is a successful exception. Perhaps it
helps being a tourist town. 

...

The Hidden Order of Urban Organization

I came across this excellent excerpt (p. 157 ff) from F. Donato and L.L. Basili's excellent 1996 text L'ordine nascosto dell'organizzazione urbana (see title), translated ad hoc by my professor, Chuck Dyke:

The urban organism auto-regulates*, in this way, its own development, tapping into a repertoire of solutions already experimented with that become adapted, when necessary, to new exigences. The role of the planner revolves, therefore, around the "collective memory"**, historical and cultural[,] of urban civilization that while renewing itself and evolving always maintains a strong relation of continuity with the past. In contrast to the planner, who checks the validity of the projected idea on the basis of rational analysis of how it responds to the context and to its impact on the future development of the urban organism, the organizing solutions of the collective memory are legitimated by their proven historical efficacy: they are the result of a selection protracted in time. This characteristic situation is at the same time a measure of the power and the limits of the organic city: if on one side it is capable of adapting itself with great flexibility to changing circumstances, on the other side its effective capacity to adapt depends essentially on one factor: the absence of traumatic discontinuity within the external conditions. ...In the presence of a context radically altered, and therefore with exigencies and problematics thoroughly new, which require a creative radical effort and therefore the search for organizing solutions entirely original, the capacity for self-organization of an organic city goes into crisis, and the danger of chaotic degeneration becomes concrete (emphasis mine).

I suggest any of you who can read Italian get this book: it deals expressly with a subject that urban theory has only implicitly dealt with in the Anglosphere.
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* He suggests replacing this translation with self-regulates.
** Cf. Carl Jung.

Drop DROP

I'm sleepy now, but here's an excellent summation of the DROP controversy.

Despite months of controversy, Council President Anna C. Verna - who at least bowed to political reality by scrapping her own reelection as she prepares to collect a $585,000 DROP check - put off grappling with the program until after the decisive May primary. During the campaign, unions representing police, firefighters, and other city workers demanded candidates pledge fealty to DROP, as most Council hopefuls did.

Now that the dust has settled, with Democratic nominees confident of reelection, Council could do the responsible thing and scuttle the retirement program. Voters made clear their disgust by spurning reelection bids by two political stalwarts enrolled in DROP: Councilman Frank Rizzo and City Commissioner Marge Tartaglione.

DROP serves no legitimate management purpose. More important, a city facing one budget nightmare after another - with schools being the crisis du jour - simply cannot afford to sweeten the regular pensions due to retiring city employees. Finally, there is no scenario under which incumbent elected officials should be able to take advantage of such a perk. 

Council members who really want to move the city forward need to face up to the fact that it's time for a clean break. Drop DROP.

 Today's Philadelphia City Council: A body of contentedly corrupt politicians who don't even recognize their corruption. No DROP-enrolled politician in any competitive race stands a chance of winning. Just by making some noncompetitive races competitive, we can further get rid of this cancer on our city's finances.

Soon to be written: a discussion of what demographic shifts mean for Council districts and what each district will likely do to maximize incumbent strength.

FRA Is The Problem With American Railroading

I'd just like to permalink to Alon Levy's latest post. He hits the nail right on the head as regards American railroading and the woeful state of regulation this side of the Atlantic. In particular two passages stand out to me:

Under present FRA regulations, not much more than NEC service levels can be done: rolling stock would have to meet guidelines developed for the steam era, curve speeds would be limited, and the signaling would not provide enough capacity for adequate service levels on shared track. This is independent of the incompetence of every FRA-compliant railroad; in fact part of the incompetence is manifested in unwillingness to try to get waivers, even though Caltrain, a small operator, applied for a partial waiver and got it.

 and:

In contrast, no reform of the FRA is possible short of a complete overhaul. The appropriate passenger rail regulation in the US is that everything that’s legal in Japan or Europe is legal in the US, and the only local task should be a skeletal staff reconciling European and Japanese rules where necessary. A piecemeal approach leads to partial and suboptimal reforms, requiring additional testing of already extensively used trains.

Quoted for truth.