Cascadia Scorecard Weblog

Mossback's Catch-22

Another week, another anti-city screed from the Seattle Weekly's Knute Berger. There's lots to pick apart in this week's column by "Mossback," but I'll restrain myself.

According to Berger, increasing density won't address sprawl on the urban fringe because:

Big growth in downtown Seattle won't be a sponge for regional growth. In fact, it will likely drive additional growth in the region—just look at the San Francisco Bay Area, which has sprawled endlessly despite San Francisco's higher densities and incomes. A Seattle boom will generate more sprawl and more density, in part because we don't have the strict growth controls in place to truly limit it.

Berger's argument is a lovely compliment to sprawl industry flaks whose mantra is: we can't have growth controls because there's nowhere to build in the cities. But Berger doesn't want density because the growth controls aren't strong enough. No density without growth controls; no growth controls with density. This leaves us in a bit of a pickle.

The obvious solution that Berger overlooks is that increasing density can indeed help corral sprawl. Can density solve the problem all by itself? Of course not. Does that mean density is worthless for controlling sprawl? Again, of course not. Growth boundaries on the urban fringe are important too; and so is smart planning. (That is, density is a necessary condition of growth management, but it's not a sufficient one.)

Definitive proof that density reduces sprawl is hard to come by, but I can get close.

Check out this report, using Census data to track growth in 14 US cities during the 1990s. The cities that do best at controlling sprawl are also the ones boosting their density. Take Portland, Oregon. If Portland had grown like a typical city in the study--that is, if newcomers to Portland had spread out in the typical low-density fashion--the Rose City would have swallowed an additional 150 square miles of rural land. How did Portland spare so many farms and forests? A paired combination of density and growth boundaries. Seattle--with weaker growth controls during the period and anti-density Bergers in the mix--did worse than Portland, but not nearly so badly as places like Charlotte or Nashville.

Berger's argument is, in any case, weirdly perverse. He implies that density will actually speed growth into the Seattle region because--why?--people find density appealing? If people like density enough to move here, I suppose one strategy to prevent growth would be to outlaw density. Or we could try a massive urban uglification campaign, perhaps driving away current residents to boot. Even easier, we could just get rid of cops and fire departments and see how the region grows then. That'll show 'em. 

Truth is, I actually agree with Berger sometimes. I just wish he would stick to making claims he can support instead of getting carried away (see here and here, for instance). He's right to caution against damaging Seattle's historic and architectural legacy. And he's right to remind us, in a general way, to preserve the best of the old while we build for the future. But ranting about paying for parking (in urban neighborhoods, fer gosh sakes!) or "privatizing" sunlight by permitting skyscrapers (no, I'm not making that up) sounds less like civic smarts and more like incoherent ranting.

Seattle's Growing Up

Solid article in the Seattle Times today on the rising building height limits in downtown Seattle.

The article even includes a brief historical note on the 1989 voter-approved height cap following the construction of the super-tall and hideous Columbia Center Columbia Seafirst Center Bank of America Tower BankAmerica Tower Columbia Tower. Seattle's thinking on downtown density has changed quite a bit since then. Instead of constricting development, most are enthusiastic about new development in the city's core--development that is revivifying once-dormant neighborhoods.

Seattleites have change their minds partly because of the dawning realization that downtown density is good environmental policy. It's a superbly efficient use of land (among many other environmental benefits). Over the last two decades, residents watched sprawl devour the Cascade foothills and lowland farms and realized that the salvation for natural spaces was partly in the city.

The article does include once curious bit:

There's scant evidence, however, that the changes would curb sprawl over the next 20 years by pulling more people downtown. Under current or proposed zoning, city studies project about 10,000 new households downtown and 29,000 new jobs in that period. [Emphasis mine.]

That's a non-trivial number of households and jobs, but it's odd--at the least--that city growth projections are the same with or without the height increase.

What's going on here? Are the projections mistaken? Or is the height zoning change just a matter of aesthetics, not a substantive policy to increase downtown density?

The True Cost of Home Ownership

City housing is unaffordable. It's cheaper to buy a house in the suburbs, where you can get more for your money. Right?

Not so much, according to a new study from the Brookings Institute, "The Affordability Index," which challenges the conventional wisdom by arguing that the best way to assess affordability is with reference to the costs of both the home and the transportation necessitated by the home's location.

In an analysis of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan region, it turns out that the suburbs aren't nearly as affordable as they first appear; nor are city neighborhoods nearly as pricey. That's largely because suburban residents must spend more on cars ownership and use--they have, on average, 2.1 cars per household--while in-city residents can rely on cheaper forms of transport--they own only 1.2 cars per household. Even when in-city transit is factored in, a city resident spends less than half as much on transportation as a resident of far-flung suburb. That's real money--roughly $500 per month--that can make a big difference when it comes to affording a house.

But in deciding where to buy (or rent, for that matter), few of us assess the transportation-related costs, a factor which surely contributes to buyers choosing far flung developments. If planners can devise ways to apprise buyers (and renters) of the true costs of their housing choices, it would likely encourage residential density and mixed-use zoning. Because living near good transit service and within a short walk of services isn't just eco-groovy--it's smart financial planning.

Below the fold, two maps of affordability in the Minneapolis area...

(Click for larger versions.)

Food vs. Shelter: The Planning Debate

In the debate over growth management, it's easy for the parties to forget that it’s never us against them, it's us against us. For just one example, planners must strike a balance between our needs for food (in the form of nearby farmland) and shelter (in the form of decent housing for a growing population). And promoting density, while important in many respects, is not the whole answer to problems of growth.

Oregon's land-use task force is beginning to study what the state’s citizens want, and The Oregonian is running a good series on planning that addresses the balance between desirable housing and fertile farmland. The articles offer some goods insights and they got me thinking.

Density done wrong does no one any good. Urban village development (and their traditional counterparts) must attract buyers, not be foisted on them. A subdivision crammed with more houses is not a real solution. It’s still auto-dependent and segregates homes from shops and services. It adheres to the letter of planning for density, but ignores the spirit—density ought to empower residents with choices, not just wedge people together. Intelligent planning is required to build attractive homes that also offer privacy and a sense of space, as well as easy access to amenities. The point of smart planning should not to force people into the city, but to create more good places there for those who want it.

Even with good density alternatives, some people may still want a house with a big yard. I think that it’s important to offer a mix of housing types, but these larger more distant lots come with all sorts of hidden costs to society: higher costs to supply public services like water, sewer, and emergency response farther out—not to mention negative externalities like air pollution, road-building, and possible watershed deterioration from the added impervious surface. And it’s also important, as The Oregonian article notes, that we preserve farmland and other green places.

And space is not the only reason people may want to move into rural areas: they also may want to be closer to nature. I think it's important to ask how best to connect people to the natural world without sacrificing the very nature they crave. I worry about getting caught in a vicious cycle as people move farther and farther out until there's scant rural land left and our cities are so sprawling that most people must rely exclusively on cars for transportation.

I favor setting aside space within cities for neighborhood parks, community gardens, and large semi-wild areas like Forest Park in Portland, Discovery Park in Seattle, and Stanley Park in Vancouver. Unlike fenced-off backyards, these areas let people connect both to nature and to their community.

But really, I see growth planning and development disputes as a symptom of a larger issue: population growth. Our grandparents could reasonably expect to build a house on a half acre lot outside the city because land was plentiful, but people weren’t. Sprawl and population growth have reversed that equation to the point where we need to change our housing expectations if we want our grandchildren to have access to nearby farms and local produce.

Just a few thoughts sparked by the Oregonian series. Take a read and see what you think.

Housing Affordability Confusion

From the NY Times yesterday, comes a surprisingly confused article arguing that home ownership has actually gotten less expensive over the last 20 years. Here's the article's upshot (and the part that contains the fishy reasoning):

Nationwide, a family earning the median income - the exact middle of all incomes - would have to spend 22 percent of its pretax pay this year on mortgage payments to buy the median-priced house, according to an analysis by Moody's Economy.com, a research company... it remains well below the levels of the early 1980's, when it topped 30 percent.

But median family incomes ain't what they used to be--and comparing family incomes over more than two decades is a case of comparing apples to oranges. To wit: family incomes today are much more likely to include two incomes (even two full-time incomes) than they were in the early '80s when many families were supported by a single primary breadwinner. So--to be overly simplistic with the data for a moment--22 percent of two incomes buys what 30 percent of just one income used to.

The good news here is that the share of women in the labor force has been steadily rising, as has the share of women working full time. Women are also steadily closing the pay gap with men. And because women earn more advanced degrees than men, there's reason to believe the gap may close or even eventually reverse. But the bad news is that families now commonly must employ both adults to make a grab for the brass ring of home ownership. Among other problems, that means substantially less wiggle room in family budgets because if one of the two wage earners falls on hard times, there's no one who can enter the workforce to help pick up the slack.

And there are at least two other glaring problems with the NY Times reasoning. 

Family income is a lousy metric to begin with. Because more and more Americans are delaying marriage (the percentage of unmarried 30 to 34-year-olds has quadrupled since 1970), a smaller and smaller share of us are counted in the family income statistics. This means that the growing ranks of single Americans are facing homeownership with just one income at a time when two are needed.

The Times article also includes a nifty map depicting places where home ownership has gotten more affordable. The curious thing about the map though is that it doesn't appear to say what the writer thinks it does. According to the map, pretty much the entire states of Washington, Oregon, California, Nevada, Hawaii, Florida, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, and Maryland have gotten more expensive. So have the Chicago and Boston areas, along with much of Virginia. So even by the Times' rather lousy definition of affordability, a huge swath of the most populated parts of the country have actually gotten less affordable. 

To cap it off, the article smirks that the hoi polloi don't really understand their own economic conditions:

In a nationwide New York Times/CBS News poll conducted this month, 75 percent of respondents said they thought most families in their community spent a larger share of their income on housing now than in the 1980's. Only 5 percent said the share was smaller.

The lesson for me is that--at least in this case--it's the people who are right and it's the data analysts who don't seem to understand the economy--or even what their data actually means.

UPDATE 1/3/06: Cleaned up some of the typos and atrocious grammar plaguing the first draft.

Baby Boomer Housing Boom?

By virtue of its size, the baby boom generation influenced consumer trends at each stage of its life cycle. When boomers were younger, suburbs expanded to house all the new (and larger) families. But now that boomers are reaching their senior years, developers should recognize their new housing needs: smaller homes with better access to services.

Census projections suggest that in the next twenty five years Cascadia will gain nearly 2.2 million seniors, an increase of over 115 percent. In contrast, the youth population (below age 15) will increase by only 806 thousand, or around 28 percent (see chart).

These aging baby boomers will need a different type of housing from when they were younger.

Without kids to raise, boomers won't need as much space. And as they age, they may neither want nor be able to take care of a large house and yard, let alone a McMansion. Aging also reduces mobility so seniors often need alternative transportation, such as buses or dial-a-ride. It also helps to have nearby shops and services.

Dense, mixed-use developments inside cities and towns (instead of on the suburban fringe) can meet these needs. An apartment that's easy to clean and has a building manager to maintain, a nearby bus stop with frequent service, and neighborhood shops all serve the booming senior generation and can help keep them independent longer.

Proposal to Legalize Granny Flats in SE Seattle

Good news on the smart-growth front: Seattle's mayor is working on a pilot program to legalize granny flats in southeast Seattle.

Currently residents of single-family neighborhoods can't rent out extra space they may have in "detached accessory dwelling units", such as an apartment above their garage, although basement apartments are legal.

Granny flats provide a variety of benefits. They increase density, supporting better transit and more services for the neighborhood. They increase the housing supply and create affordable housing in the city. They can give homeowners a source of income to help with the mortgage. And, with kids returning to the nest post-college and aging parents needing more care, they provide extra space with a degree of privacy.

The program would limit the impact on neighbors by requiring one off-street parking space per unit and restricting the size of the new units. Reactions to a demonstration project in Magnolia, in which a wheelchair-bound resident added an apartment for a future live-in nurse, were very positive: 65 percent of surveyed neighbors rated the project "good". While some are worried that allowing rental granny flats will turn neighborhoods into "ghettos," (huh!?) that doesn't seem to be the case in cities that already allow them, such as Mercer Island, Kirkland, and Redmond.

Is Seattle the New Singapore?

That's what mossback Knute Berger argues in his latest Seattle Weekly column.

As near as I can decipher his rantings, Berger thinks that density and gentrification in Seattle are tantamount to becoming a police state in the model of Singapore. Also, houses in the city are unaffordable. And, oh yeah, the University Village is--gasp--basically just a tony shopping mall.

Really, it's hard to know where to begin.

According to Berger, increasing Seattle's density is functionally equivalent to gentrification, which in turn implies Singapore-style law and order:

Proponents argue that the [neo-Victorian] laws work, the streets are safe, and that such rules are necessary for dealing with high urban density. As Seattle floats atop a real-estate bubble that increasingly makes the city affordable mostly to the affluent, we can probably look forward to more laws intended to make the whole town more like Singapore (recycle or else!). That is part of the price of urban gentrification, the signs of which are everywhere.

It's precisely these sorts of hysterics that make it hard for me to take anti-density arguments seriously.

Leaving aside the notion that gentrification may actually be a good thing for a city, it's not at all clear why increasing density would imply gentrification or Singapore-style law and order. It doesn't in, say, Vancouver or San Francisco.

Affordable housing is, I think, a legitimate concern. (Incidentally, that's why Berger's repeated lionization of the suburban Eastside in this column is so puzzling. Housing prices there are higher than in the city, so Berger's affordable housing spleen should presumably be vented there.)

I'll hazard one guess why Seattle's prices are a little lower: density. It's easy to bemoan the high prices in once anemic neighborhoods like Madrona and Mount Baker, but it seems to me that the best remedy for high demand and high prices is, well, more supply. The only (slim) hope of keeping Seattle's single-family neighborhoods even moderately affordable is to create an array of other housing choices.

I could go on and on about this week's column. Speaking as a mossback myself (though younger than Berger), I too often miss the "old Seattle," a quiet and unpretentious place with a character all its own. But time does not stop and cities are by nature dynamic. I wish Berger would quit gnashing his teeth and start using his column more constructively--perhaps finding ways to preserve the best features of the old place while we're trying to build something even better.

(Okay, okay, one last jab: Berger's flippant Singapore-bashing is awfully ill-informed. While Singapore is not a good model for liberal Western democracies, it's impossible to understand the place without reference to its geopolitical context and history. That is to say, it's a damn sight better than anything else in southeast Asia. Oppression comes in many guises and Singapore has managed to avoid the oppressive evils of poverty, race-riots, and Islamic fundamentalism that are even now wracking its nearest neighbors. The price of Singapore's freedom is government by a rather benign one-party psuedo-democracy that has built a prosperous and peaceful nation on the foundations of education, multiculturalism, and free trade. That and Singaporeans are denied their inalienable rights to litter and vandalize. The horror.)

The Not-So-Big Way-Too-Big House

A good news update to my previous post on the up-sizing of houses: Americans may have reached their limit. The New York Times reports that the size of new houses may be leveling off. While the average size of new homes grew by around 50% from 1970 to 2001, the past few years have seen very little increase.

What could be causing the trend? According to the New York Times, people are trading quality for quantity. Not only do builders have anecdotal evidence, but a nationwide survey in 2004 found that, for the same price, 63 percent of respondents would prefer a smaller house with more amenities than a larger house with fewer amenities. That's up from 49 percent in 2000. The article also suggests that houses have finally become as large as people say they want them to be -- reality finally matches the American Dream.

I wonder if the housing boom plus the recession curtailed house sizes: people frenzied to buy a house, who don't have the money for the big house they really want, settle for smaller. But optimistically, I'll hope that people's preferences for McMansions have actually changed (not just as a fad) and that they've realized how much more giant houses cost to furnish and maintain. With rising energy prices, size can make a big difference.

Charming 3-bedroom, 2 bath with only 5 pounds of weight gain a year

Obesity has many causes, but current research indicates that sprawl may play a part. So far, researchers have concluded that people who live in sprawling, car-dependent neighborhoods are more likely to be obese, while people who live in walkable neighborhoods are apt to do more walking. But researchers still trying to tease out cause and effect: do walkable neighborhoods encourage people to walk? Or do people who like to walk move to walkable neighborhoods? I suspect it is both.

However, one recently study claims that sprawl doesn't, in fact, cause obesity. The authors, who base their findings on a complex theoretical model, don't dispute that sprawl and obesity are linked. But they claim that people who move to sprawling neighborhoods are simply making a more-or-less conscious choice to put on more weight:

"[R]esidents are willing to accept locations that result in weight gain because they face lower housing prices and can purchase more housing."

In other words, people buying a house don't mind putting on a few extra pounds in order to get the house they want.

But here's the catch: the link between sprawl and obesity just isn't that widely known. Researchers have just been started exploring these connections over the last few years; the literature is growing, but it's still in its infancy. So it's hard to imagine that most home-buyers, over the last several decades, were weighing the concrete effects of neighborhood design on their health. How could they, when the information just didn't exist?

While I haven't worked through the entire model line-by-line, I also have some quibbles with the methods. As with any theoretical model, it's based on a host of assumptions.  And one of them -- that calorie consumption increases as income increases -- clearly poses problems. As Clark blogged about a while ago, food is really cheap, and cheapest foods are the most calorie dense (think greasy fast food). So there's ample reason to believe that calorie consumption could actually increase as income goes down. 

Theory can be very useful; and there may well be some truth to the notion that people who don't like exercise don't mind living in places that discourage walking. But in this case, only studies that track actual people over time as they move among actual neighborhoods will yield reliable answers.

More Urban Development Lessons from the North

As Parke's post mentioned, the Seattle P-I had another interesting article on the lessons Vancouver has to offer on urban development--making the city both an exciting and a family-friendly place to live. Tips include requiring developers to:

• create multi-bedroom apartments designed for families
• provide community centers, playgrounds, neighborhood schools, landscaping, and other public amenities
• design buildings that create a pedestrian-friendly and visually appealing streetscape--not just a barren street canyon. (Buildings on some streets are kept short to make them feel more homey.)

Seattle's mayor is in the midst of unveiling plans to create vibrant, dense urban centers by raising building heights, charging developers one fee of $1-2 per square foot to pay for parks and open space and another fee of $10 primarily to build low-income housing.

Because of differences in the nature of public planning and the current landscape of the two cities, Seattle probably won't ever become Vancouver, nor should it attempt to. But it has plenty to learn from its neighbor to the north.

Here are several other posts on the same topic.

Energy-Efficient Mortgages?

A recent article highlights yet another benefit of energy-efficient homes: they could qualify you for an energy-efficient mortgage (EEM).  Since an energy-efficient house costs less to operate, Fannie Mae, the government-established private company that backs mortgages for low- to moderate-income homebuyers, recognizes that the money saved can be spent on housing costs. Thus, it adds the projected savings to the borrower’s income, raising that income and qualifying them for a larger mortgage.  Built Green has a nice example how this can work on paper.

While the EEM has been around since 1979, it was little used until Fannie Mae reduced the complex paperwork a few years ago.  To qualify these days, a borrower must buy a new energy-efficient home--or commit to upgrading an existing home--and pass a Home Energy Rating System inspection.  The borrower then gets a one-page report to show to lenders when applying for a Fannie Mae-backed loan.

In light of my previous post about the trend towards bigger houses, I'll add the caveat that the efficiency ratings used to qualify for an EEM appear to look at the individual feature of the house--nsulation, efficient heating and cooling systems, etc.--but not necessarily the total energy use of the house. 

Ironically, then, by qualifying buyers for a larger loan, the EEM may encourage the purchase of bigger houses that could use as much total energy as a smaller, less-efficient house.  While this may help Fannie Mae customers buy as much house as they can afford, the EEM may not actually save any energy.  This issue bears considering if energy-efficient mortgages become popular offerings on the rest of the lending market.

As a side note, EEMs aren't the only green options Fannie Mae offers.  Fannie Mae is also piloting the Smart Commute Initiative for borrowers buying a home near public transit.  Similar to the EEM, this option, often called a location-efficient mortgage, recognizes the savings from living in a transit-friendly community.  Seattle is one of the pilot cities for Fannie Mae’s location efficient mortgages, although it looks like a couple lenders may offer them to all customers.  The city of Seattle even has a map showing the most efficient locations.

The Way-Too-Big House

I've been noticing that older houses in my Seattle-area neighborhood are being steadily replaced by much larger mansion-sized structures--one of which is large enough to be an orphanage. Apparently this is a national trend: the size of new single-family homes has more than doubled since the 1940s (from 1,100 to 2,340 sq.ft.), according to a recent article in the Journal of Industrial Ecology (see full pdf here). Combining this with the trend towards smaller households (from 3.67 to 2.62 members), authors Wilson and Boehland find that:

In new, single-family houses constructed in the United States, living area per family member has increased by a factor of 3 since the 1950s.

This has several environmental implications.  Larger houses not only use more building materials, but may also consume proportionally more.  Larger houses that include higher ceilings, complex designs such as extra wings, and other features may mean that material use increases proportionally faster than square-footage.

And building out has more impacts per square foot than building up because the increased impervious footprint generates more storm water runoff, taxing sewer capacity.

Not surprisingly, big houses also require more energy to heat and cool. Good insulation and green building techniques can only do so much for conservation.  When the authors calculated heating and cooling costs for a small, poorly insulated house and a well insulated house twice as large, they found the small house still used almost a third less energy.  So size really does matter, as Clark has also blogged about.

What has caused the trend?  Wilson and Boehland cite several factors.  Some zoning laws and development covenants mandate minimum house sizes (but some now also mandate maximums).  Mortgages for new houses often specify a minimum ratio of house value to land value. And until 1998, tax laws required home sellers to buy a house of equal or greater value unless they wanted to pay capital gains taxes on the appreciated value of their old house.

Wilson and Boehland also suggest that the notion of "bigger is better" may be inflating house sizes (see Alan’s post on up-sizing the American dream).  But a big house can also be lifeless: quantity without quality.  Instead of adding extra rooms, new home builders could invest in the details that give houses their charm (moldings, built in cabinets, granite countertops) and spend more for green details (better insulation, water-saving devices, sustainable materials).  They’d save money on energy bills and reduce their environmental impact.

Personally, I'd rather spend my home time reading in a bay window seat than cleaning an extra 600 square feet of house.

Going Like Hotcakes

Here's hoping I have a few readers left who still want to read about residential development in downtown Seattle...

In case you missed it in today's Seattle Times, here's yet another article on how new high-rise condos are selling like hotcakes -- in this case, nearly selling out a full year before the building is slated to open.  And the brisk sales are making other developers take notice.  One is even consider building some residences amid the office towers downtown -- aimed, obviously, at people who want to shorten their commutes to a brief stroll.  And in a not-so-surprising-to-me turn...

[T]o a degree that has surprised the developers, a significant number of buyers are moving in from close-in Seattle neighborhoods such as Capitol Hill and Wallingford. They want to be even closer to downtown, with a nest of amenities.

That means, I guess, that more housing will open up in the close-in neighborhoods.  If families with kids move in, will Seattle Weekly editorialist Knute Berger knock it off with his anti-density campaign?

Density We Can Afford

Apropos of Clark's density posts. I thought I'd try a new tack. It's a risky one, because I'm disagreeing with my boss. Sort of.

First, I agree with Clark, that supply-side housing policy (increasing density) keeps city housing more affordable than it otherwise would be. But I also believe (with Sheldon Cooper) that market-based mechanisms cannot meet the housing needs of lower- and middle-income people because the market is structurally incapable of meeting these challenges. (And as a matter of practice the market is already failing a sizeable segment of the region's population.)

So I say: forget about the market. Apart from the environmental concerns, the biggest reason to favor in-city density is that the alternative to density--sprawl--is much worse for poor people. It's much worse for the middle-class too, as well as the public's coffers and a whole array of other things that we should care about. Density isn't a magic fix, but it's certainly better than sprawl.

Myron Orfield, at the Metropolitan Area Research Corporation (MARC), has argued convincingly (to me, anyway) that sprawl exacerbates the worst forms of economic inequality. At first blush, this is nothing new: everyone is familiar with the post-WWII suburban housing boom and highway building that abetted white flight from central cities, leaving behind ossified pockets of poverty.

But Orfield argues further that sprawl is still ratcheting up the harm.

Central cities effectively subsidize wealthy and insular "outer-ring" suburbs. Worse, central city gentrification is displacing lower-income people to "inner-ring" suburbs, which lack even the modest services and infrastructure (reliable transit service, for instance) that the central city once did. I won't go into all the details now, except to point out that, according to Orfield, sprawl increases economic and racial segregation, creates perverse tax structures and incentives, and overburdens infrastructure.

(Aside: MARC has conducted Portland- and Seattle-specific studies. You can find the research here, in the context of a larger volume called American Metropolitics (a bit outdated now, unfortunately); and as separate studies, Portland Metropolitics, and a Seattle report.)

The upshot is that, according to MARC's detailed city-by-city analysis, sprawl is bad news even when viewed strictly from a social/economic justice standpoint. And that leads me back to density.

Obviously, increasingly density is not the only remedy to sprawl. We must also mandate careful and rigorous planning regimes that prevent excessive urban-area expansion. But since, as Roy Rogers aptly characterized land, "they ain't makin' any more of it;" and since population will continue to increase, we must increase urban and suburban densities if we are to contain sprawl. Stopping sprawl means increasing density, and there's no way around that problem as long as population keeps rising.

Now, here's the bad news: I think it's entirely possible that increasing density is sometimes bad for low-income people and displaces affordable housing. A few cities have seen anecdotal evidence of this (though, on a national level, the alarm is probably greatly overblown.)  But that's not the real issue. The real issue is whether density is better for low-income and middle-class people than other available alternatives--namely, sprawl. I'd argue, with Orfield and the researchers at MARC, that it is definitely better.

Housing is becoming less affordable and that is rightly cause for much concern. Not only does it create long-lasting and severe burdens for low- and middle-income families, but it erodes the cultural heritage that the Northwest has prized for so long. (As Joel Connelly describes an older Seattle: "a town of funky taverns and down-to-earth places.. largely free from ostentatious displays of wealth and class." Or as Knute Berger put it, a place where, "livability and scale made sense.")

I'm old enough to remember a Seattle that was pretty different than the Seattle we have today (in many ways better, in some ways worse). Today the median sale price of a house is $405,000 (If you include condos, the median home sale price drops to $368,000). At today's interest rates, buying a median-priced house means shelling out roughly $2,500/month, including taxes and insurance, provided you can come up with $40,000 for a down payment. Unfortunately, today's median-income earners in Seattle bring home less than $3,400 after taxes.

There are probably some limited ways to address affordable housing at the margins: housing vouchers or community land trusts, for instance. But addressing the other problems--making home-buying affordable for regular folks--is a tough nut to crack. The only plausible solution--and even this is probably insufficient--is to increase supply. Increasing the supply through sprawl turns out to be terrible public policy (cf. Orfield). Increasing the supply through density, if we're careful, just might create new and vibrant places in the Northwest's cities.

Housing Affordability Rashomon

In two recent posts, I argued that urban high-rise apartments--as are being proposed for downtown Seattle--can be good for housing affordability.   But in a thoughtful comment on one of my posts, Sheldon Cooper from Homestead Community Land Trust argues out that high-density urban redevelopment can crowd out affordable housing, not increase its supply. 

Now, who's right? 

I actually think we both are, since we were talking about slightly different things -- both of which are important, and which (sadly) can be at odds with one another.

Obviously enough, affordability is in the eye of the beholder.  What's affordable for one group -- say, middle-income households -- may be completely out of reach for those at a lower income ladder.  Which leads to a potential problem:  a trend that can make housing more affordable for middle-income earners can, in theory at least, make housing less affordable for the poor.

At the risk of putting words in Sheldon's mouth, I think that he's concerned that high-rise development proposed in Seattle will physically displace some low-income housing close to downtown, while the accompanying gentrification will increase rental costs; and that the market simply won't magically provide decent housing for people who don't have enough money to pay for it.

Those seem like reasonable things to worry about. 

Now, while the broad, structural problems with low-income housing affordability appear to be very real (pdf link), there are some researchers who believe that the problems of gentrification per se are generally overblown.  But in the case of the South Lake Union development in Seattle, I don't know what to think.  I certainly believe that increasing the supply of housing in any city tends to reduce the pressure on housing prices and rents overall.  But for the poor--those whose incomes are so low that what they can afford to pay won't even cover the construction costs for decent housing, particularly in high-rises--the issues may be less cut-and-dry. 

Which leads to the obvious question:  what's the right thing to do to help make housing affordable for those at the bottom rungs of the income ladder?

I just read through this book on the subject -- it's a compilation of papers on smart growth and housing affordability, edited by Brookings Institution scholar Anthony Downs.  Firm conclusions are scarce in the volume.  For example, Sheldon's preferred solution -- which is for city governments to allow developers to build more units than zoning codes would otherwise allow, provided that the developers set aside a certain share of affordable units in their developments -- has been implemented in one form or another in some 600 jurisdictions across the US, but with surprisingly few tangible successes.  The practice seems to have worked fairly well in one jurisdiction (Montgomery County, Maryland), but results elsewhere have been poor, perhaps because of a lack of political will.  That doesn't mean that these kinds of steps are misguided, just that they may not be sufficient to address the problems.

Which is really the point -- while the clearest way to make housing more affordable for the middle class is to create more housing, you need a bunch of different strategies to "fix" housing affordability for those whose incomes are much lower. 

Downs makes some good points in his closing chapter.  First, much of the denser development touted by "new urbanists" and "smart growth" advocates really is affordable to working class and moderate-income households -- those with incomes at least 50 percent of the area's median.  But it's usually unaffordable for those at or near the poverty line.  For those folks, there are two basic strategies that can work to make housing more affordable:  increase incomes (as with tax credits, housing subsidies, and the like) and reduce housing costs.  And you can reduce costs by...

1. making financing cheaper or more available;
2. reducing the costs of producing housing units by, for example, modifying building codes, speeding up the development process, or raising residential densities
3. reducing the size and quality standards for new housing
4. expanding the total supply of housing through new construction.

A combination of strategies might work pretty well -- a city that really wanted to produce housing that's affordable to the poor might take some or all of them.

But the kicker is that there's very little economic motivation to do any of these things.  People who already own homes generally want housing costs to go up, not down; and since homeowners tend to dominate local politics, the goal of most local governments is to keep housing costs high.  Which means, among other things, that governments often create obstacles to creating new housing, whether for middle-income or lower-income residents.

So in that context, Mayor Nickels' support for increasing the housing supply within city limits is a victory of sorts.  An even greater victory, though, would be a public commitment to improving housing affordability not just for the middle class, but also for the city's neediest residents.

Appreciating Portland

I'm always late with this sort of thing, but last Friday's New York Times had some interesting data on rising housing prices in US Metropolitan areas. 

Three things stand out to me as worth noting.  First, even though runaway home prices are a hot topic at party conversations, the gains in greater Portland and greater Seattle aren't too far from the national average.  Across the US, housing prices have grown by 7.7% per year since 2000.  Seattle homes have grown a little faster than that (8.2% per year), but Portland homes a little slower (6.6% per year).  Neither are near the extremes.

Second, the cost of rent hasn't mirrored the house price trends: Portland rents have remained roughly flat since 2000, while Seattle rents have dropped by about .4% per year.  So on average, owning a home has gotten far more expensive, but the cost of housing per se has not.  (Of course, these numbers are averages -- so I'm sure there are some places where rents have increased beyond peoples' means to pay.)

And finally, there's this:  I keep hearing claims that Portland's (and to a lesser extent Seattle's) growth management laws are leading to rapid escalation in housing prices.  That may be so for certain kinds of housing:  houses with really big lawns tend to be more expensive in places where the supply of developable land is limited.  But Portland's overall housing price appreciation over the past 5 years has been very modest -- prices have risen at about the same pace as in El Paso, TX, and just a little faster than in New Orleans, Houston, and Atlanta; but they've gone up less than half as quickly as in Oakland, Tampa, Baltimore, Boston, San Diego, Las Vegas, Newark NJ, and so on, and on.  And this in spite of the fact that some fugitives from the red-hot California real estate markets have moved northward (sometimes with some cash in hand) to try to take advantage of Portland's relatively low-cost housing.

Of course, Portland's lower-than-average appreciation in housing prices may be a result of a tepid economy following the dot-com crash; Oregon's unemployment rates were the highest in the country in 2003, for example.  But it certainly should make one think twice when you see claims that Portland's housing policies are making housing prices go through the roof.  So if you see someone make that claim, make sure you check what years they're using; it's easy to cherry-pick the data, to find a few years or places that support whatever political theory someone holds dear.

I Must Be Dense

Seems like there's been a rash of anti-density columns in Seattle of late. First there was last week's Mossback column in the Seattle Weekly (which I discussed here). Then, on Saturday,  P-I columnist Joel Connelly got into the action with this chestnut in a piece about Seattle's struggling middle class:

Are working families going to move into the higher buildings and downtown condos championed by Mayor Nickels? Not likely. The new living space seems intended for affluent empty nesters.

Granting Connelly his due:  that may well be right.  But if so, it's exactly the sort of thing that would help middle-class families who are being squeezed by high housing prices.

The developers who are planning to build some of the downtown residential high rises are probably hoping, very much, that they will be in demand by empty nesters -- folks who'd like to downsize from the single-family homes where they raised their kids, and are looking for a slightly less expensive and more manageable abode.  In fact, for the developers, it would be a dream come true if that happened, since some empty nesters would have a fair bit of cash on hand if they sold their homes.

But what happens when a lot of people sell their single-family homes?  Well, if the number of single family homes on the market goes up, then their price should go down -- or, at a minimum, not rise quite so quickly. 

Which goes to the heart of the matter:  all else being equal, building more housing tends to make housing less expensive.  And one reason that housing prices are rising so quickly is because there's just not enough of it to meet the current demand. Of course, the supply of single-family homes with yards within city limits is pretty much fixed, which means that just about the only way to build more housing is to build a) small accessory dwelling units (also called grandma flats), b) townhouses, or c) multifamily housing, such as apartments or condos.  (Well, you could also cover Lake Union with houseboats, but let's not get into that here...)

This is all pretty basic stuff, but apparently it's easy to lose sight of. 

In fact, it seems to me that some folks who are so critical of increasing density are confusing cause with effect.  They see the cost of housing going up; they see new condos being built, and proposals to build even more; and they figure the new construction is causing the price increases.  That's sort of silly, when you think about it:  the pressure for high-rises, new apartments and condos, etc., is an effect of high housing prices, not their cause. In fact--and at the risk of anthropomorphising an abstraction--new condo construction may be an example of the market's invisible hand trying to bring housing supply into line with demand.

In terms of affordability, if there's one hidden danger with the new construction, it's this:  if you build intersting neighborhoods with abundant housing, nice amenities and a good mixture of stores and services, you may also be creating the kinds of places where people really want to live.  The sort of neighborhoods that people are willing to pay a premium to be a part of.  So if you do too good a job of creating nice places to live throughout the city, then people will start migrating to Seattle for its high quality of life. 

Which is, in many ways, a nice sort of problem for a city to have.

Moss Backwards

I'm trying my best to give a charitable reading of Knute Berger's Mossback column in the Seattle Weekly railing against urban density. But it's hard.

To summarize as best I can:  Berger doesn't like Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' plan to promote high-rise housing near Seattle's downtown because, well...I guess Knute liked the Seattle skyline just as it was in 1980, thank you very much.

Now, Berger makes at least one really good point -- that Mayor Nickels seems to want to do too much, and that some of his goals conflict.  For example, the mayor supports both massive new transportation spending that could suck life out of downtown, and massive new residential development in the urban core. 

But Berger saves most of his fury for the prospect of residential high-rises near downtown.  He'd prefer that the city follow the example of Copenhagen, Denmark -- which, according to him, means making Seattle's policies family-friendly, so more families with kids can afford to live within the city limits.  Encouraging families with kids to move into the city would increase the number of people per household--accommodating population growth without increasing the need to build more housing. 

And if we do have to increase the housing supply, Berger again prefers the model of Copenhagen and other European cities:  creating small-scale urban villages that are interesting places to live, but aren't dominated by highrises.

I guess I understand his instincts -- building residential high-rises might change the character of the city Berger grew up in.  And, without doubt, Nickels' high-rise plan would forever alter the priceless urban gem that is today's South Lake Union warehouse district (sarcasm intended).

But let's be careful holding Copenhagen up as a model, shall we?

Here are the numbers, from the Jeffrey Kenworthy and Felix Laube's venerable International Sourcebook of Automobile Dependence in Cities and this extremely helpful world city population website.  Between 1960 and 2005, the total population of Copenhagen-Frederiksberg -- basically, the city without its suburbs -- fell from 836,000 to 594,000, a decline of 30 percent.  In Copenhagen's central business district -- the downtown -- population fell faster, from 65,000 in 1960 to 34,000 in 1990.

Copenhagen, in other words, has been emptying out.

Now, to be fair, the population of central Copenhagen rebounded slightly since 1990; central Copenhagen's population is now at about the same place it was in 1980.  But in the meanwhile, the population of the Copenhagen suburbs grew from 772,000 in 1960 to about 1.2 million in 2005, an increase of more than 50%.  In greater Copenhagen, as in greater Seattle, suburban living is now the norm. (Though, doubtless, Copenhagen's suburbs are denser and less sprawling than ours.)

But still, let's say we really should hold Copenhagen up as a model for promoting density by creating urban villages.  That's fair enough -- urban villages can be really pleasant places to live, and we really don't have to accomodate new growth with skyscrapers if there are other viable models. 

But remember, in 1990, after 30 years of population decline, Copenhagen was still two and a half times as dense, on average, as Seattle is today.  Two and a half times.  Now, I'm not suggesting that just because Copenhagen is dense, that Seattle should be too.  But I am suggesting that the European-style low-rise density that Mr. Berger supports would mean changes every bit as momentous, and far more widespread throughout the city, than a strategy of concentrating growth in the middle of downtown.  Urban villages certainly have their charms, but it's hard to see how the politics of that kind of change would work in a neighborhood-focused city such as Seattle.

And that goes to the heart of the matter.  It seems to me that  you just can't prohibit people from moving into greater Seattle.  Legal and moral problems would abound.  There are smart ways to slow population growth -- such as reducing the hidden subsidies for domestic & international migration, discouraging unwanted pregnancies, and the like.  But ultimately, we can't stop people from coming here.  (Moreover, the family-friendly policies that Knute advocates would turn Seattle into a giant population magnet, which would, in turn send housing demand & prices that much higher.)

So if we don't accomodate new residents by accepting higher density within city limits, greater Seattle is going to continue to sprawl at the outskirts, overrunning farmland and rural land at the urban fringe.  This kind of low-density sprawl locks its residents into an auto-dependent lifestyle -- which worsens residents' health, decimates salmon habitat, and increases the region's spending on oil, among other ills.

If the alternative to sprawl is to accept greater density -- whether in urban-style villages, or in skyscrapers, a la downtown Vancouver, BC -- I'm all for it.  And concentrating some of that growth downtown -- where people can drive less -- makes a lot of sense for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which is that there are a lot of people who really want to live in a pedestrian friendly neighborhood near where they work.  Which is exactly what happened in Vancouver, BC, the city that the mayor's "tall and skinny" strategy is modeled after:  the city cleared the way for lots of development in the urban center, which allowed the city to accept many new residents without fundamentally changing the character of all of the city's neighborhoods.

And Vancouver, by the way, has almost exactly the opposite trends from Copenhagen -- an inner city that has grown substantially since 1960, not depopulated -- coupled with a farmland-protection policy that is simply unequalled in the US, and, on net, far less loss of farmland and rural land than in any of the 20 cities we've studied to date.

Now, that's a model I'm in favor of.