Parking for Affordability

The Portland, Oregon Bureau of Planning and Sustainability produced an insightful report on the impact on-site parking has on affordability. The study assumes a 10,000 sf urban lot and looks at six different parking scenarios to determine what impact parking has on the viability and affordability the resulting project. The results are telling - a project with no parking is able to achieve the same return on investment at $800/month rental rates as a project with underground parking at $1300/month.

Parking isn’t free. The cheapest option, surface parking, comes with a significant opportunity cost in loss of developable land. Space wise the most efficient option, basement parking, comes at significant cost per space. These costs have to be recouped somehow. It’s logical that these costs will crop up in housing prices.

Although this is just one data point, it poses the question of how much our suburban experiment has increased our housing costs both directly and indirectly. Anecdotally, at some point in the past 100 years a single income household could achieve a comfortable middle class status. This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. Have the hidden costs of suburbia cost us our middle class?

Via Kent Lundberg

Coveting Compact Communities

Christopher Leinberger, writing for the New York Times, on the value of walkability:

Mariela Alfonzo and I just released a Brookings Institution study that measures values of commercial and residential real estate in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, which includes the surrounding suburbs in Virginia and Maryland. Our research shows that real estate values increase as neighborhoods became more walkable, where everyday needs, including working, can be met by walking, transit or biking. There is a five-step “ladder” of walkability, from least to most walkable. On average, each step up the walkability ladder adds $9 per square foot to annual office rents, $7 per square foot to retail rents, more than $300 per month to apartment rents and nearly $82 per square foot to home values.

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It’s important that developers and their investors learn how to build places that integrate many different uses within walking distance. Building walkable urban places is more complex and riskier than following decades-long patterns of suburban construction. But the market gets what it wants, and the market signals are flashing pretty brightly: build more walkable, and bikable, places.

Building walkable places isn’t so complex. We have thousands of years worth of precedent. The decades-long patterns of sprawl are a small blip in the millennia-long patterns of compact, traditional settlement patterns. Sure, there are modern needs that need to be accommodated. But ultimately it’s a question of priorities. Building for people first and letting the car become secondary will go a long ways toward making great places.

Public Shame

HyperVocal has the story of the woman who was caught regularly driving on the sidewalk to avoid a stopped school bus:

Thirty-two-year-old Shena Hardin was instructed to hold a sign that read ONLY AN IDIOT WOULD DRIVE ON THE SIDEWALK TO AVOID A SCHOOL BUS.

Crazy!

Color for Paper

Chris Dannen, writing for Fast Company, has the story behind iPad app Paper’s innovative color mixing feature:

What vaulted FiftyThree over a hot pile of math was a major insight gleaned from two dead German scientists named Paul Kubelka and Franz Munk. In 1931, they published a paper called Ein Beitrag zur Optik der Farbanstriche, or “a contribution to the optics of paints,” which showed that this color-space question predated computing by several decades. The paper laid out a “theory of reflectance” with an equation which could model color blending on the physical experience you have with the naked eye. That is, how light is reflected or absorbed by various colors.

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Moving from a three-dimensional color-space to six dimensions was the difference between old drab color-mixing and absolute realism. “What creates the shades you see between paints is this interplay of absorption and reflection,” says Petschnigg. “Compare red nail polish to red ink: both are red, but the nail polish will be visible on black paper because it reflects light. The ink won’t be, because it absorbs light.”

Details matter.

Seven Years

Fiona Macrae, writing for the Daily Mail, reports on the life extending benefits of walking:

Walking for just two-and-a-half hours a week could add more than seven years to your life, researchers believe.

The study found even half of that is beneficial, with 75 minutes of brisk walking a week enough to extend life by almost two years.

Building walkable communities may well be a matter of life or death for some people.

Faith and Urbanity

Tim Keller, an urban pastor who gets cities, gave an excellent talk regarding the intersection of faith and urbanity. It is lengthy, but well worth the time:

I have been disappointed by Christianity’s lack of focus on both urban issues in general and efforts to reach the people of the city specifically. It is heartening to find a pastor so attuned to the importance of the city to the church and the church to the city.

On a personal note, my brother took a giant leap of faith several years ago in trying to start a new faith community from nothing in the SoMa district of San Francisco - an area vastly under served by the church but teeming with vibrant, energetic professionals. As evidenced by growing interest and attendance, this new church understands what it means to be in an urban context. They do an important work - not just from the Christian perspective of reaching the unreached, but also in caring for the humanity of the people in the city. If you are interested, check them out for more information.

Via Kaid Benfield

The Value of Time

Gordon Price, after exploring two scenarios for justifying transportation infrastructure improvements (one for autos and one for mass transit), points out the discrepancy in how time is viewed in both scenarios:

In these two scenarios, time is treated completely differently. In one, delay is a cost; in the other, delay is a saving.

Why is this?

Using the imagined cost savings of eliminating a few minutes from hundreds of thousands of commutes to justify expansion seems strange. The money isn’t real! And it certainly doesn’t find it’s way back to the funding agency in any meaningful way. Infrastructure is not the magic answer to all our problems. We need to be more critical about evaluating the real value of our projects and only moving forward with those that actually create value.

Advice for Obama

Kaid Benfield has some advice for the Obama administration’s second term:

So, realistically, what to do in the public arena, particularly in the federal government? I have a few principles that I believe the administration should follow in its second term when it comes to its approach to cities, communities, and a clean and healthy environment. They aren’t exactly rocket science, and in fact they are modest by intention.

There are some good ideas in this list but I’d start it with one overriding principle: do no harm. How many of our places have been severely degraded as a result of some large federal infrastructure project? How many times have we thrown billions at projects that perpetuate a system that is fundamentally broken and insolvent with no care for how we will maintain these projects in the future. Kaid has some great thoughts on doing the right things but the first step to doing things right is to stop doing them wrong.

Safe Streets

Greater Greater Washington has an excellent excerpt from Jeff Speck’s new book, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America One Step at a Time:

Contrary to perceptions, the greatest threat to pedestrian safety is not crime, but the very real danger of automobiles moving quickly. Yet most traffic engineers, often in the name of safety, continually redesign city streets to support higher-speed driving.

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As with induced demand, the engineers have once again failed to comprehend that the way they design streets will have any impact on the way that people use them. By their logic, just as more lanes can’t cause more driving, high-speed lanes can’t cause high speeds. Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the second great misunderstanding that lies at the root of most urban degradation today. Widening a city’s streets in the name of safety is like distributing handguns to deter gun violence.

As with everything else in our suburban experiment, our street designs are based on one thing: making things better for cars. We need to get past the idea that cars are fundamental to life and start designing for people again. This doesn’t mean that cars need to go away - it just means that cars need to be tamed through design that doesn’t emphasize the car at all costs.

Burning Community

We recently took my son to his favorite local park - McKinley Park. It’s not our closest park, but it is the best park. It has a large, interesting, and very unique community-built playground structure next to a pond with lots of ducks and geese so it obviously has lots to entertain the kids. So we took my son to the “duck park” and as he started playing we noticed a large portion of the playground was missing - completely gone. What happened? Max Ehrenfreund, writing for the Sacramento Bee, has the story:

One of McKinley Park’s most popular attractions – the beloved playground – was destroyed Saturday by an early-morning fire in what Sacramento firefighters are calling a case of arson. […] Neighbors in east Sacramento and midtown built and maintained the playground, with diminishing help from the city as parks budgets shrank. It was constructed in 1994 with donations and city funds, neighbors recalled, with 2,500 volunteers erecting it in just four days.

It is disgusting and shameful that someone would so senselessly destroy such a community icon, particularly a beloved kids playground. Terrible. Just terrible.