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The Bronx is Next, Ctd.

The momentum just keeps building:

Keep your eyes on the Bronx. That’s the next borough. They’re ready for it. They have land available, and that’s the primary factor.

— Louis Coletti, CEO, Building Trades Employers Association, in TRD.

Today would have been my grandmother’s 99th birthday. She grew up in the Bronx, mainly in the 1920s, and like so many city kids of her generation, she moved out of the city as soon as she moved out of her mother’s house — first to upstate New York, then to northern Westchester, and eventually to a tiny apartment in New Rochelle, where she grew old. But what happened in, and to, the Bronx was not lost on her, or on the other family members or friends who started life there. And if they were living today, I’m certain that they would be pleased to see the old neighborhoods beginning to recover.

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Graffiti as Amenity

IfGraffitiChangedAnything

The New Yorker has a piece about how NYC developers are starting to incorporate graffiti — or graffiti-like façade elements — into their new luxury condo projects. (Think: the Bowery and Long Island City — not Gramercy Park, obv.) Apparently, they expect it to be a selling point with hip buyers in the luxury market. The weirdness continues.

Posted in Art
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Zoned Out: Update

11th-and-V-zoning-map

Are these killing the next generation’s chance to obtain an economic foothold?

Here are two new articles dealing with the relationship between excessive land use regulation and the lack of affordable housing in desirable metropolitan regions: the first, from Reihan Salam, is something of a polemic (in places), but his analysis strikes me as mostly substantively accurate, and he has embedded links to a bunch of other authors (across the philosophical spectrum) who are making similar points. The other is from Next City, and it deals, again, specifically with the housing costs in the San Francisco Bay area, and ties these costs to the low numbers of housing permits that are issued across the region, in spite of stratospheric demand. The attention coming out of the SF region about housing costs seems greater to me than that which is originating in the New York City region, the other very expensive American metropolis. I suspect that this disparity is due to the resigned cynicism of most New Yorkers about the cost of everything.

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How Cities Attract

A Phoenix NPR station, KJZZ, has an interesting conversation with Armando Carbonell of the Lincoln Institute’s Department of Planning and Urban Form. The questions revolve around how American cities are attracting – or repelling – the next generation. It includes some interesting discussion about how housing costs and cultural perceptions may be affecting migration trends; why Austin and Portland are unique among non-major cities; and how the expense and commercialization of New York City and San Francisco are apparently driving young people to more affordable regions.

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On Land Use Regulation and Housing Costs

Source: USGS.

Source: USGS.

Tech Crunch has a very thorough article by Kim-Mai Cutler, focusing on the culprits behind stratospheric housing costs in the San Francisco Bay area and elsewhere: outdated and excessive land use regulations. The sad part of this entire phenomenon, which LT has covered extensively, is that many of the regulations that have become problematic were enacted for well-intentioned reasons, but have evolved and aggregated into political roadblocks that are displacing middle-class residents, foreclosing on people’s opportunities, and entrenching the advantages of those who got there first — wherever there is — versus those who might have something new to offer. Cutler’s piece is good reading, and has nice visuals. So let’s keep belaboring this point until it becomes conventional wisdom: Bad zoning, and its myopic politics, are strangling us. We need to dismantle the antiquated frameworks, and replace them with flexible new approaches that are both more equitable and much more pro-development.