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.

My Train Of Thought Is Going Over Wind Gap, Apparently

Saw this item on Systemic Failure the other day: http://systemicfailure.wordpress.com/2014/02/24/vre-replaces-apartments-with-parking/

Progress on acquiring land in the Crossroads Business Park for the 1,500-space parking lot at the planned station is moving along more slowly. Officials had originally expected the station to be open by now, but numerous issues have popped up, with the most recent problems caused by stalled negotiations for land for the commuter parking lot.

The county had been negotiating with businessmen George Lester and Fitz Johnson, who own the property needed for VRE parking. The businessmen recently gained county approval to build 610 apartment units and commercial space next to the station site.

But the negotiations for the roughly 25 acres for the parking lot have proven fruitless. So the county recently asked the Virginia Department of Transportation to handle the property acquisition.

“They can facilitate it better,” said Spotsylvania County Administrator Doug Barnes. 

Ya think? And what's worse, there are plenty of excellent examples where it's Done Right nearby--in Arlington County, in fact.

But there is another issue buried between the lines here. 610 apartment units on a 25 acre site comes out to 24.4 units/acre. Let us simplify this to 24 u/acr, and consider that postwar "garden" apartment "barracks" are really just attached rows of duplexes or triplexes in "green" settings*. At 24 u/acr, you get (a) 12 dp/acr, or 1 duplex = 1/12 acr, and (b) 8 tp/acr, or 1 triplex = 1/8 acr. Triplexes cover less space, yielding more green space, so this complex would probably be triplexes.

Let us, by contrast, begin with the typical 25'x50' lot found in prewar suburbia, remembering of course the dictum that there is no difference between New Urbanism and prewar suburbanism. Since an acre is slightly greater than 200'x200', this implies that there are 32 lots/acre; triplexing this yields 96 u/acr, or twelve times the density of what is currently being achieved. But this is excessively dense; most railroad suburbs have emergent 50/50 homeownership/rental ratios.

Let us reserve, in line with typical consumption, 20% of our site (5 acres) for infrastructure--streets, a park, and the like. This yields 640 lots on a 25-acre site. Splitting these lots evenly, we have 320 houses and 320 plexes. Splitting the plexes evenly yields 160 duplexes and another 160 triplexes**. Summing these yields 1920 units, a whopping 315% more than the current proposal calls for. And furthermore, neighborhoods built out to this density are often just as green, and charming, as those with more green space. This implies that, past a certain amount, provision of green space is subject to diminishing returns: Just before you hit it, you get charming "green" town environments; past it, house farms.

So provision of green space is clearly not a good in and of itself. Like most anything else, it's how it's used that determines its true value. Green scraps left to fulfill zoning requirements have marginal development value and zero usage value. But modernist planning, in its flawed assertion that green space is an unmitigated good, makes no account of this. This is why house farms and towers-in-parks both tend to have the same overengineered, lawn-softened, bleakly industrial look: They are both people batteries. And because urban dynamics requires a critical mass to spark, while the lawns hide their interiors' aesthetic bleakness, they also push everything too damn far apart to spark emergent urban dynamics.

Anyway. Since the average household size today is 2.6, our 25-acre railroad suburb would yield a population of ~5000, a much fatter prize than the ~1600 the garden apartments would house, and certainly a far fatter prize than a 1500 space lot. Three other similar developments nearby would yield a nice town of 20k on 100 acres...

Modeling, the fact that, past a certain critical point, green space appears to cease to boost urbanism, and indeed, instead diminishes it needs to be considered mathematically. This critical point appears to be tied to an urbanism "critical mass". Since critical masses imply step functions, we can infer Heaviside (either it is or isn't), and can also infer that that function's discontinuity occurs at a certain percentage of green space provision. Since green space provision, by percentage, is (obviously) along the origin from (0,0) to (100,100), all we need to find is at what value green space provision, by lot, definitively hurts the formation of urban dynamics. This implies a Heaviside step from 1 (urbanism is emergent) to 0 (it is not).

Urbanism also has a clear financial buff. We need to find the nature of this buff (is it scalar? vector? etc.) and model it; knowing this information can help develop key Strong Towns tools that are not just descriptive, but predictive as well.
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*By stacking, not by firewalls. By firewalls, you can get du-, tri-, quad-, and hex- (6) plexes. Quadplexes by stacking (octoplexes, or 8 units, per firewall) are rare, but not unheard of; pentaplexes (5 units) by stacking and their decaplex (10 units) cousins by firewall are absent--most likely because elevator regulations start kicking in at that point.
**There are a couple of reasons for doing this. First off, different space requirements. Duplexes have more living area than triplexes in a unit shell. Secondly, this yields a Main Street of duplexes atop commercial units. But it is unreasonable to think the Main Street would consume all of the allotted duplexes.

An Emergent Main Street?

Something interesting is happening in the village of Lafayette Hill. A Main Street is coming to be.

This, despite the majority of this Main Street consists of mid-century strip malls and commercial pads. It's a Main Street in use, though decidedly not form. Take a look.

It runs like this from Joshua Road to Church Lane.

But, since the buildings are aging, the majority of chains have moved out, to newer, shinier digs around the Plymouth Meeting Mall. In their place are more locally-owned stores, more boutiques, more inns, and what are generally considered the two best Persian cuisine joints in the region.

Lafayette Hill is the overgrown agglomeration of two older villages: Barren Hill and Marble Hall, which has led to its bipolar development and a small gap in the middle. But the density, the connectivity, the ingredients are all there--and, as the buildings age and rents come down, the more interesting uses, too.

Which leads to the greatest problem in front of Lafayette Hill: its very autocentrism. Strip malls don't create a pedestrian atmosphere, and despite the fact that it's the same size as e.g. Lansdale, walking rates are much, much lower. So what's to be done?

Brand it. Give it a "Main Street Lafayette Hill" identity; play upon its existing strengths. Have a citizens' day; take over a parking lot and use it for a farmer's market; install sidewalks all the way up and down. Make de jure the de facto parallel parking already in front of the Wawa and extend it all the way up and down Germantown.

And in the long term, change the zoning code to remove setbacks and favor rear parking*. Curb minimums, and encourage walking plans for the bars. Preserve the Manayunk vernacular and Victorian buildings already here, of which there are a few. And allow structures to grow to 3-5 stories.
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* Transit access is relatively poor, unlike Conshy or Paoli or Lansdale.

Feedback Loops

Earlier today I was reading the Atlantic Cities article on whether or not Millennials will stay in the cities they now call home, and through the comments, when I noticed:

What will happen when the baby boomers who are living in suburban mansions they've built over their lifetimes find that their home, which is their biggest if not only financial asset, doesn't have any appeal or demand to younger buyers who prefer city life? If they can't cash in on the value of their home because demand is down it means they can't access what they thought would have been their retirements savings... 

An unasked question? Perhaps, but in the answer we find the driver of a feedback loop: If (a) you can't access your retirement savings, (b) you can't retire, meaning (c) you have to stay in the workforce. Since the workforce isn't growing (in fact, it's shrinking) that means (e) you're taking a job away from a Millennial, which (f) deprives them of the opportunity to buy your home, thereby (g) preventing you from accessing your retirement savings (forcing you to keep working and so on)...

Feedback loops are compounding cyclical phenomena, and what I have just described is a compounding cyclical phenomenon--a feedback loop. Note that this feedback loop assumes the New Geography* status quo, that of continuing unhindered suburbanization (despite the considerable evidences to the contrary).

In the New Geography worldview, living choice is a function of affluence, and suburbanization a function of increasing wealth. But the ideal of increasing wealth assumes unlimited growth--a common tenet of economics, but one that is decreasingly justifiable. Even assuming economic stability (note: not stagnation, although there is no doubt we live in an economically stagnated era), we note that by the rather poor choice of storing your "savings" in your home** you have inadvertently triggered a feedback cycle whose ultimate effects are (a) a devaluing of your home and (b) a mismatch between your home's market and buyers' markets--because, in search of jobs, those who would ordinarily replace you have moved on: in this case, to the cities, because that's where the strongest economic engines are.

Multiply this thousands upon thousands of times and you go from a few people making bad choices to a macroeconomic trigger.

How stunningly naïve New Geography's worldview is! Their entire analytical framework is built on a single aberration in American history, a hopelessly linearized misunderstanding of the rise of American (autocentric) suburbia. To look deeper, which we must, we have to recall that from 1950 to 1990, American cities were locked in a negative feedback loop, one triggered long before their population peaks.

We must understand the Chicago School is a reasonably accurate understanding of prewar urban dynamics, and in all Chicago School models, immigration was the population dynamo. Can you imagine the effect of the Immigration Act of 1924, crowning glory of the nativists? Suddenly, cities stopped having a ready replacement supply for those leaving, as the immigration quota was (and continues to be) far too low for replacement. Worse, the quota failed to solve the problems it claimed to, and produced new ones--illegal immigration and visa fraud wouldn't exist if we didn't have a quota-based immigration system.

Of course, like all feedback loops, the effects wouldn't become apparent for decades. The Great Migration was initially able to hide the dynamo collapse, but it is no coincidence city populations plateaued 1920-1950; worse still, the Great Migration happened at the same time as the nadir of American race relations. Like all poorly-thought-out "solutions", this, unsurprisingly, increased the problems of the city.

The second major trigger of suburbanization was the automobile. Here was this absolutely amazing invention that could whisk you from skyscraper canyons to the Grand Canyon. And, once the opposition movement was quelled (thanks in no small part to astroturfing on a grand scale) it suddenly became--not only ubiquitous, but essential. Every new development after ca. 1930 had garage space--in the beginning, rear-loaded. But cars are the enemy of cities. Everywhere, they push things apart to their own scale, and their scale is gigantic, inhuman. At first, developers applied the living traditions to humanize their streets, their blocks--but to no avail. A pushing-apart is evident beginning in 1930s developments, culminating in exurbia. (There's a reason postwar suburbs are called autocentric.)

What happened is simple. After their fathers were defeated in the great car wars of the first third of this century, the Greatest Generation youth came to adulthood in a society re-forming around the car. And this wondrous new(ish) invention could do great things--but at a price. Worse, those people were all over the place in the places they grew up. What was a fellow of the Greatest Generation to do?

The Baby Boomers were not the first suburban generation--merely the first to grow up there. The Greatest Generation chose suburbia. They were the first "suburban" generation. And in that choice, they set in motion a feedback loop that would eviscerate cities.

In their wake, it wasn't just the middle class shriveling. The collapse of the immigration dynamo three decades previous reared its ugly head: there was no new middle class forming. Tax bases began to hollow out, while at the same time, as a greater percentage of residents remained in poverty, the need for services multiplied. The collapse of cities wasn't just a result of the formation of suburbia--it was as much a result of turning off the immigration spigot. It was the result of rampant social mores that wouldn't begin to change for two more decades. It was the result of an entire finance built around these mores...

And once those gears had begun to move, no matter how many well-intentioned people tried to stop them, they would not stop. The collapse of American cities that has been the defining urban reality for Boomers' lifetimes would further compound on itself by driving Boomers away, ever further away, and would drive their attitudes about the city, the way they viewed the thing.

The nadir of the American city occurred around 1990, and several factors led to the feedback loop stalling--most importantly, bringing the crime rate under control. The maturity of Gen Xers, who did not have the memories the Boomers did, also helped: it was under their purview that urban middle-class populations, particularly around downtowns, finally stabilized and, over time, began growing again. And this was both catalyzed by and further catalyzed the growing idea of downtown as destination: a place for nightlife, fine dining, and culturally important activities***. This middle-class stability, in turn, fuels the only long-term sustainable solution for dealing with what has today become the most pressing urban issue: schools.

It will be on the strength of how well Millennials deal with schools, how much they have the initiative to deal with them, and how much factors-at-large force them to deal with them, that the American city will be said to have stabilized--or will grow again, and explosively.

Schools are at the crux of the Millennial urban feedback loop.
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* No, I will not link to that wretched hive stricto sensu.
** Or, more accurately, your land; the improvements are a constantly depreciating asset--like your car--while the proximity value of the land it's on increases slightly year-over-year; part of the inflation of the housing bubble was an overvaluing of suburban land (combined with a persistent undervaluing of city land).
*** It is also important to note that attempting to isolate elements within a feedback loop has the effect of short-circuiting the whole thing. Arts and entertainment districts fail because of this; "natural" arts and entertainment areas blossom and then are subsumed within the greater system. When they arise, they can be marketed, but they cannot be created out of whole cloth.

The More Things Change....

Source: 1909 G.W. Bromley atlas, courtesy Phila Geo History

Glance at any map of West Philadelphia and there it is, almost a bull’s eye: the massive, ungridded expanse bounded by 42nd and 49th Streets, Market Street and Haverford Avenue. All this used to be the grounds of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane (later the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital) and indeed the western section of the site is still used for its original purpose, a “behavioral health services center” inside the old Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital. Over the course of half a century it was subdivided–first into the monumental, state capitol-like Provident Mutual headquarters and then later into Drexel University’s Vidas Athletic Complex, the West Park Towers, some affordable housing flanking 46th, and most recently, a few pad commercial sites.

As the property was subdivided, each new use was inserted as if in a vacuum. No physical connections were made ... Read more at Hidden City Philadelphia.

Behind Victorians

Parkside is at once one of the city’s most visible and most enigmatic neighborhoods. There are major regional attractions like the Mann Center and Please Touch Museum, the Japanese Tea Garden and Carousel House, and most especially the Zoo. Parkside and Belmont Avenues are critical commuter links into the city; thousands of cars pass by this neighborhood every day.

The part they pass by–the great row of Victorian mansions that feel like ... Continue reading at Hidden City Philadelphia.

Occupy Philly As Spontaneous Urbanism, Part III

As we watch the bulldozer and trash trucks arrive this morning at Dilworth Plaza, and read of a 5AM face off between Occupiers and police on North 15th Street, let’s wander through Occupy during a more bucolic time–last week, in fact.

In the beginning, the encampment had features ... Continue reading at Hidden City Philadelphia.