Market Urbanism

Liberalizing cities | From the bottom up

“Market Urbanism” refers to the synthesis of classical liberal economics and ethics (market), with an appreciation of the urban way of life and its benefits to society (urbanism). We advocate for the emergence of bottom up solutions to urban issues, as opposed to ones imposed from the top down.

Links: A private cable car line for Hamburg, a private downtown for Quincy, Mass., and no adaptive reuse for Brooklyn

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Maybe if the developer was allowed more than two stories, they'd spend more than 10 minutes designing the roof...

Maybe if the developer was allowed more than two stories, they'd spend more than 10 minutes designing the roof...

1. Hamburg’s newly-revitalized port could get a completely privately-funded cable car line, if the city allows it.

2. Quincy, Mass., a few T stops away from downtown Boston, is getting a new downtown from a private developer, replete with infrastructure and dense development. It’s unique, however, in that the city supposedly isn’t giving the developer huge tax breaks and infrastructure subsidies (more here). Here is an article about a previous project by the same developer, Street-Works. Environmentalists, predictably, are perturbed. In any case, the project sounds promising, though I guess the devil’s in the details. Anyone know anything more about it?

3. In Brooklyn, near a bridge, almost 150 years old, doesn’t have a roof! – adaptive reuse opportunities like Dumbo’s Tobacco Warehouse don’t come along too often, even in New York, so it’s unfortunate that developers are only being allowed to build to two stories (if they’re allowed to build at all).

4. Other cities seem to have plenty of people willing to do it for free, but Berkeley’s City Council actually subsidizes its BRT-hating NIMBYs to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars under the guise of the “Community Environmental Advisory Committee.” It’s a shame that every metro area doesn’t have a transit critic like the Drunk Engineer, who I think is the best transit commentator in the blogosphere.

5. Randal O’Toole on TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, and its mismanagement.

6. “A Requiem for ‘High-Speed Rail’,” from New Geography.

  • The issue with the Tobacco Warehouse isn’t the reuse, it’s that they removed two buildings from a state park and tried to convey one of them to a private (albeit non-profit) entity, bypassing a variety of legal processes, with no remuneration back to the public. This happened after much of the park behind the Tobacco Warehouse was dedicated to a quasi-private display for a local developer’s carousel.

    The neighborhood and people behind the lawsuit are perfectly content with having the TW restored to year round use (until this started it was used regularly for events in Spring/Summer/Fall), but not by bypassing established process & law to make it more convenient for the local developer (the developer wants the non-profit to move across the street to the TW so he can build an 18 story building next to the Brooklyn Bridge).

  • The issue with the Tobacco Warehouse isn’t the reuse, it’s that they removed two buildings from a state park and tried to convey one of them to a private (albeit non-profit) entity, bypassing a variety of legal processes, with no remuneration back to the public. This happened after much of the park behind the Tobacco Warehouse was dedicated to a quasi-private display for a local developer’s carousel.

    The neighborhood and people behind the lawsuit are perfectly content with having the TW restored to year round use (until this started it was used regularly for events in Spring/Summer/Fall), but not by bypassing established process & law to make it more convenient for the local developer (the developer wants the non-profit to move across the street to the TW so he can build an 18 story building next to the Brooklyn Bridge).

  • You’re right that the latest challenge has nothing to do with reuse, but I am taking issue with the fact that the building will be capped at two stories, whether public or private.

  • Depending on who is talking, the two story thing is due to 1) not impacting the Brooklyn Bridge view 2) Security concerns 3) historical context. However, until two years ago there was a three story City building directly under the Bridge, opposite the TW (the “Purchase Building”, was perfectly functional but didn’t fit into the then State plan for the park). The building itself used to be five stories, three stories were removed I believe due to a fire (the building has been derelict since the 1960s-1970s). As far as security goes, there’s multiple other buildings which are closer laterally and vertically to the Bridge on the Brooklyn side (on the Manhattan side the bridge approach is swathed in roadways).

    I think most people in the neighborhood would love to see a year round permanent use of the TW, it’s just the political machinations that have been going on around the park it lies in and interactions with a local developer that have pissed people off. In little over a year we’ve lost a great park (on the other side of the TW and Empire Stores) and then this on-the-sly transfer of public property to the non-profit.

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