The other day, I had a meeting with Sam Staley and we both lamented the paucity of good empirical evidence about how land use regulations actually affect the built environment. For the ubiquitous minimum parking requirements, the only thing I've seen up until now was this study about the effects for … [Read more...]
Links
1. Systemic Failure praises Gov. (again) Jerry Brown's efforts to do away with California's redevelopment agencies and "enterprise zones" (there's a euphemism if I've ever heard one), which the author claims promote autocentric development with public funds. He then cites a few examples of … [Read more...]
Links
1. A report on (Western) European parking policies. Abstract of the abstract: Big on charging market rates for on-street parking, but also big on capping private developer's ability to build parking. I'd be interested to see an analysis like this done to see if the caps are actually set lower than … [Read more...]
Long weekend links
1. The NYT utterly humiliates itself with a story on how difficult it is for a kid straight outta college from "a prominent Portuguese banking family" to rent a $2,500/mo. studio in a Chelsea coop for less than 12 months. Sounds like the perfect posterchild for Sheldon Silver's rent control … [Read more...]
Yet another town moves from parking minimums to maximums with no stop in between
Despite its ridiculously biased opening sentence ("Fairfax County residents will have a harder time finding a free parking space in some neighborhoods if transportation planners get their way"), the Washington Post actually has a relatively informative article on potential new parking maximums in … [Read more...]
Friday link list
Expect a lot more of these...1. Beijing tries to relieve congestion by...building a quarter-million parking new spaces and 125 miles of new downtown streets?! But don't worry – bike sharing!2. Seattle inches closer to a Shoupian on-street parking policy, and Austin ponders charging for … [Read more...]
Parking lots as tax arbitrage during the Great Depression
I've learned a lot from Fogelson's Downtown, but one thing that I had absolutely no idea about before I read this book was how Depression-era tax policies encouraged downtown landlords to tear down their buildings and replace them with parking lots (emphasis mine): By the mid 1930s the owners of … [Read more...]
Weekend links
1. Lydia DePillis responds. I'm all for upzoning only(/mostly) poor neighborhoods if that's all the extra density we can get (though here at Market Urbanism we're kind of utopians – we don't care much about political feasibility), but I'm not nearly as optimistic about inclusionary zoning as she … [Read more...]