Tag Archives: de Blasio

Too Many Parks?

Posted on by

Robert Ellickson has posted Open Space in an Urban Area: Might There Be Too Much of a Good Thing? to SSRN. The abstract reads,

Numerous policies encourage the preservation of open space in urban areas. Two of many examples are large-lot zoning and tax benefits to donors of conservation easements. These policies rest on the plausible inference that an open space can benefit nearby residents, for instance, by enhancing scenic vistas and recreational opportunities. But commentators tend to underestimate the costs of open space. The key advantage of urban living is proximity to other people. Open spaces reduce urban densities, increase commuting times, and foster sprawl. I advance the heretical view that a metropolitan area can suffer from having too much open space, and briefly suggest some reforms, particularly in zoning and conservation-easement policy.

This brief essay is thought-provoking, particularly for those of us in NYC. Mayor De Blasio is embarking on an ambitious plan to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing and there are all sorts of land use debates raging over the appropriate level of density in the city. This essay suggests that we should model the costs and benefits of open space in order to work toward a more optimal amount of it in each community. As Ellickson notes, “Development displaced by the setting aside of open space could be pushed in one of three directions: toward the center city, toward the periphery, and beyond the region in question.” (8) This dynamic plays out differently in a city that is built up as much as NYC. But it is reflected in our discussions about density: low density in the central city pushes development outward, one way or another.

Ellickson’s insights are also relevant to the analysis of the overall land use regimes of broader regions: “Open space provides essential relief from urban asphalt and concrete. But debates over the merits of open space tend to understate the opportunity costs and negative externalities of protecting land from development.” (19) He argues that the archetypal bedroom community near NYC is “ideally situated to house commuters. Its large-lot zoning and unstinting acquisitions of open space have contributed to the further sprawl of Greater New York. There can be too much of a good thing.” (19) The essay does not give too much guidance as to how regions such as Greater New York can best address these issues, but it does raise important questions that policy makers should seek to answer.

Housing out of Thin Air

Posted on by

NYU’s Furman Center has posted a policy brief, Creating Affordable Housing out of Thin Air: The Economics of Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning in New York City. It opens,

In May 2014, New York City’s new mayor released an ambitious housing agenda that set forth a multi-pronged, ten-year plan to build or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing. One of the most talked-about initiatives in the plan was encapsulated in its statement, “In future re-zonings that unlock substantial new housing capacity, the city must require, not simply encourage, the production of affordable housing in order to ensure balanced growth, fair housing opportunity, and diverse neighborhoods.” In other words, the city intends to combine upzoning with mandatory inclusionary zoning in order to increase the supply of affordable housing and promote economic diversity. (1)
Inclusionary zoning, “using land use regulation to link development of market-rate housing units to the creation of affordable housing,” is seen by many as a low-cost policy to support a broader affordable housing approach. (2) There is a limit to the reach of such a program because developers will only build if the overall project pencils out, including any units of mandatory inclusionary zoning.
The policy brief’s conclusions are important:
In many neighborhoods, including some that the city has already targeted for the new program, market rents are too low to justify new mid- and high-rise construction, so additional density would offer no immediate value to developers that could be used to cross-subsidize affordable units. In these areas, inclusionary zoning will need to rely on direct city subsidy for the time being if it is to generate any new units at all regardless of the income level they serve.
Where high rents make additional density valuable, there is capacity to cross-subsidize new affordable units without direct subsidy, but the development of a workable inclusionary zoning policy will be complex. The amount of affordable housing the city could require without dampening the rate of new construction or relying on developers to accept lower financial returns or landowners to be willing to sell at lower prices will vary widely depending on a neighborhood’s market rent, the magnitude of the upzoning, and, to a lesser extent, on the level of affordability required in the rent-restricted units. Where developers must provide the required affordable housing, and whether they can instead pay a fee directly to the city, also bears heavily on the number of affordable units a mandatory inclusionary zoning policy has the potential to generate, but raises other difficult issues. (14-15)
The de Blasio Administration’s housing and land use team is very sophisticated (including the Furman Center’s former director, Vicki Been, now Commissioner at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development), so the City will be well aware of these constraints on a mandatory inclusionary housing program. Nonetheless, it will be of great importance to design a flexible program that can adapt to changing market conditions to ensure that such a program is actually a spur to new development and not merely a well-intentioned initiative.

Housing Affordability Across The Globe

Posted on by

The 11th Annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey: 2015 has been released. The survey provides ratings for metropolitan markets in Australia, Canada, China, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, the U.K. and the U.S. There are some interesting global trends:

Historically, the Median Multiple has been remarkably similar in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, with median house prices from 2.0 to 3.0 times median household incomes. However, in recent decades, house prices have been decoupled from this relationship in a number of markets, such as Vancouver, Sydney, San Francisco, London, Auckland and others. Without exception, these markets have severe land use restrictions (typically “urban containment” policies) that have been associated with higher land prices and in consequence higher house prices (as basic economics would indicate, other things being equal).
Virtually no government administering urban containment policy effectively monitors housing affordability. However, encouraging developments have been implemented at higher levels of government in New Zealand and Florida, and there are signs of potential reform elsewhere. (1-2)
These findings are consistent with Glaeser and Gyourko’s research on U.S. housing markets. Not too many local politicians seem to acknowledge the tension between land use policies that limit residential density on the one hand and housing affordability on the other. The de Blasio Administration in NYC is a refreshing exception to that general rule.
The explicit bias of the Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey “is that domestic public policy should, first and foremost be focused on improving the standard of living and reducing poverty.” (2) Those who favor policies that create more affordable housing should take to heart the call for greater density and less restrictive zoning for residential uses. Otherwise, we are left with subsidy programs that can only help a small percentage of those in need of affordable housing and a lot of empty promises about affordable housing for all. Subsidies have a place in an affordable housing agenda, but so does density.

Economic Segregation in NYC and the USA

Posted on by

Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander have released Segregated City: The Geography of Economic Segregation in America’s Metros. The executive summary reads,

Americans have become increasingly sorted over the past couple of decades by income, education, and class. A large body of research has focused on the dual migrations of more affluent and skilled people and the less advantaged across the United States. Increasingly, Americans are sorting not just between cities and metro areas, but within them as well.
This study examines the geography of economic segregation in America. While most previous studies of economic segregation have generally focused on income, this report examines three dimensions of economic segregation: by income, education, and occupation. It develops individual and combined measures of income, educational, and occupational segregation, as well as an Overall Economic Segregation Index, and maps them across the more than 70,000 Census tracts that make up America’s 350-plus metros. In addition, it examines the key economic, social, and demographic factors that are associated with them. (8)
Although it reads like a jeremiad at times, there is a lot of thought-provoking information in this report. For instance, it examines “the segregation of the three major occupational classes—the creative class of knowledge workers, the even faster growing but lower-paid service class, and the declining blue-collar working class.” (36) It shows that there is a lot of segregation of these classes. This is unsurprising given the correlation between occupational class and income.
As a New Yorker, I immediately focused on the findings relevant to NYC. The report finds that the New York Metro area exhibits a high degree of economic segregation. This is not surprising, but it is interesting to learn where it stands vis a vis other large metro areas — it is sixth highest in the country.
I am not sure what the policy implications are of this report, but it does tell a tale of two cities in one place, one rich and one poor.

NYC, Note 12 Trends in Affordable Housing Design

Posted on by

This story on The 12 Latest Trends in Affordable Housing is a bit different from those I usually post on the blog, but I like the pictures! The story opens,

It is no secret that the world’s urban population is picking up, and, in many cases, urban rent prices are rising with it. Architects are continually inventing new solutions to confront the challenges of maximum unit count paired with minimum budget, all the while incorporating architecture’s latest technologies and trends into the designs. Design, of course, can’t solve it all. Katharine Bristol argued in her 1991 essay “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” that architects must evaluate the social and political structures that define public housing instead of simply agreeing to think inside the box. The following projects exemplify twelve trends architects are using to combat conventional public housing limitations.

It is worth clicking through for the pictures which of projects from all around the world.  The trends include

  1. Sustainable Design
  2. Green Roofs
  3. Atomized Grid
  4. Projecting Facade
  5. Splash of Color
  6. Accessibility for All
  7. Adaptive Reuse
  8. All Wood, All the Time
  9. New Takes on Traditional Materials
  10. Gardens in the Sky
  11. Window Treatments
  12. Low-Rise, High-Density

The difference between a wonderful affordable housing project and a soul-crushing one is often the little details that give character to a building, so that it can feel like a home.  As NYC embarks on an affordable housing building spree over the next ten years, this is something that should be kept at the forefront of the minds of those implementing the City’s housing plan.

HT NYU Furman Center

Reiss on NYC Development Rules

Posted on by

Law 360 quoted me in Looser Rules Pave Way For NYC Affordable Housing Projects (behind a paywall). It opens,

The commissioner of New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development detailed Wednesday how the agency will streamline the development process for affordable housing projects, allowing developers faced with new mandatory inclusionary zoning rules to breathe easier.

Since Mayor Bill de Blasio announced his ambitious plan to create or preserve 200,000 units of affordable housing in the city over the next 10 years, developers and their attorneys have been cautiously optimistic.

Many have seen the positive side of residential projects being allowed in places where they would not have been previously, thanks to planned zoning changes. But with those zoning changes comes a mandate to build an affordable component with any new development, and the administration has been adamant that there will be few — if any — new monetary incentives.

So when HPD Commissioner Vicki Been told attendees at a Citizens Budget Commission event Wednesday that sweeping changes are coming to the way the agency does business that will cut a lot of red tape and speed up the process, many developers and their attorneys were pleased.

“It was great to hear,” said John Kelly, an affordable housing expert and partner at Nixon Peabody LLP. “I think it’s the right first step, and it’s necessary if they’re really going to carry out the plan they want to do.”

Included in that first step will be significant changes to the two elements of the development process that experts say create the biggest bottlenecks: design review and clearance.

The design and architecture review will likely be completely overhauled, Been told the attendants at Wednesday’s meeting, and the HPD will shift to the self-certification system backed up by random audits that has seen success elsewhere in city government, including at the Department of Buildings.

These changes are expected to cut down on the waiting time that many developers often suffer through as they try to get a project off the ground, adding unnecessary costs and — perhaps most importantly for Been’s purposes — dissuading some from seeking out affordable housing opportunities.

HPD staff will still have a hand in reviewing projects, but the changes — which Been said will be explained in more detail soon — are expected to be significant.

“It’s exciting to start to see specifics of the plan, we’ve all been kind of waiting for that,” said Jennifer Dickson, senior planning and development specialist at Herrick Feinstein LLP.

But she noted that the process, even with the proposed tweaks, is extremely complex. As the city attempts to make affordable housing development more attractive and expand inclusionary zoning districts, a growing number of architects and developers with little experience in this arena will be joining the fray.

“I think they will be looking to the city agencies to continue to guide them,” Dickson said.

The specific extent to which HPD officials will remain involved in the process is one of many questions that remain unanswered. Another is exactly how the agency will ensure compliance with a new self-certification process, outside of random audits.

“The risk of self-certification is: What if people don’t certify well? There’s always a balance of government regulation between reducing red tape on one hand, and assuring people live up to the appropriate standards on the other,” said David Reiss, a real estate professor at Brooklyn Law School.

Reiss on Green Bonds

Posted on by

Law360 quoted me in Green Bond Bandwagon Promises Cash Returns For NYC (behind a paywall). It opens,

A New York City proposal to market billions in so-called green bonds could reduce debt costs for the city by enticing investors who have stampeded toward guilt-free returns elsewhere, but buyers must tread carefully lest their money ends up funding projects not seen as environmentally relevant.

New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer put forth a plan last week that would see the city’s capital spending program add municipal bonds for financing environmentally friendly projects to its plans to issue $30 billion in new debt over four years.

The proposal, which Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration is studying, suggests moving quickly while there this still a focus on reinforcing the city after Superstorm Sandy and amid the strong demand for green bonds in the private sector as well as in California, Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. As soon as next year, the city could being to convert a large portion of its Municipal Water Finance Authority debt — some $1.5 billion per year — into green bonds and could allocate up to $200 million per year in Transitional Finance Authority and general obligation bonds to similar use.

“Green bonds should be another example of how New York City leads the nation in finding solutions that work,” Stringer said.

While experts in public debt investment largely see the proposal as a promotional bid to market New York City debt, they note that the city’s high national profile could make such a move profitable amid investor hunger to capitalize environmentally friendly projects.

“The big question is: How much demand would this create? One of the main points of the green bonds would be to increase demand,” said Brooklyn Law School professor David Reiss, an expert in real estate finance and community development. “If there really is pent-up demand, and New York City acts as an early mover, it might get a short-term benefit in the cost of borrowing.”

Stringer’s prediction that New York City could spark others to follow suit would also likely come true, Reiss said.

“If this is demonstrated to materially drive down borrowing costs, you’ll see others doing the same thing,” he said. “I’m a little skeptical, over the long term, that you’d have serious savings. But in the shorter term, you might.”