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The ‘Champs-Élysées of the Bronx’

A Deco doorway on the Concourse. Source: NYC Landmarks Comm.

Let’s hear it for the Grand Concourse, one of America’s greatest concentrations of Art Deco and Late Victorian apartment buildings.  Truly, some of New York City’s most amazing apartments are located there.  The Concourse, itself, also has the potential to become a great public space.  (At present, it has largely been paved over and is very underutilized.)  A large swath of the southern Concourse (between East 153rd and 167th Streets) has just been designated as a new historic district by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.

And, yes, it’s true: There’s been a lot of the Bronx on this page.

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‘The Gated City’: Land Use Laws and Price Distortion

Reason‘s Peter Suderman recently interviewed Ryan Avent about his new piece, The Gated City. I’m looking forward to finding some time next week to read the book.  Judging from Avent’s interview responses, his analysis sounds accurate: Land use laws are distorting the costs of housing in older, denser, and more desirable US cities. That is to say, because of the restrictions that zoning, massing, preservation, and other rules have placed on the supplies of local housing stocks, demands cannot be met, and the prices of land in high-demand regions (New York City, San Francisco, Boston, etc.) exceed those that would naturally arise from the strengths of their local economies.

By itself, the consequence of higher regional housing costs isn’t a reason to gut local land use laws.  High housing costs have driven a lot of redevelopment, and have created a good amount of new wealth.  Furthermore, the benefits of land use regulation in the realms of aesthetics, logistics, historic preservation, and the environment can be priceless.  But the dilemma does suggest that policymakers should be cognizant that they are engaging in a balancing act.  On the issue of such mixed incentives, I liked this:

Reason: You argue that density has a lot of benefits for residents. But if greater density lowers housing prices, then don’t local homeowners have a pretty strong economic incentive to keep density low?

Avent: Yes—up to a point. Limits on development are somewhat like cartels or unions in this way: They allow insiders to capture rents, but only to the extent that they don’t put themselves out of a job in the process. In the short run, productive agglomerations are fixed, but in the long-run they’re mobile. If development rules in Silicon Valley drive enough people to other, more affordable agglomerations, then other innovators may eventually find it advantageous to follow, and the region may lose the unique factor that created the opportunity for rent-seeking in the first place. And in general, this dynamic is one reason why it’s a bad idea to subsidize homeownership. Renters are happy for … costs to stay low.

Avent advocates institutional reforms that would make allowances for greater overall densities by offsetting new development restrictions in certain areas with more lenient guidelines in others. I think a good aesthetics framework can also play a role in successful upzoning.  85 years after Euclid, and much longer since the introduction of local building codes, it should go without saying that, done wisely, land use regulation can be a public good.  But Avent is wrestling with what has become a more urgent topic: In the choking of the present economy, bad land policy has been, and continues to be, an unnamed culprit.  It’s a point that needs to be made.

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Land Use Links: 788,000 BC to the Future

I randomly came across this article in Science, from 2009.  If you aren’t at a campus library, or otherwise privy to an academic-journals subscription, the full text will be tied up behind the paywall.  But Jayne Wilkins, a Toronto Ph.D. student who writes at Suite101, offers a nice synopsis.  Meanwhile, closer to our own setting, New York magazine has dedicated much of its current issue to global trends in urban planning, with a focus on the design of cities.

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Rebuilding the South Bronx

The Times‘ Michael Kimmelman takes a walking tour of the Melrose section with Amanda Burden, director of New York City’s Department of City Planning, and a video of their interview highlights some striking examples of new development that is ongoing in the South Bronx.  Some of these blocks are the same ones that were infamously devastated by arson, property abandonment, and street crime in the 1970s and ’80s.  Among my earliest memories of New York City, I remember riding through parts of the city that looked like scenes from a war zone: shells of buildings, flame-scorched, hollow, scattered among vacant lots, and defaced with neon-colored graffiti.  And, of course, people on the streets reflected a human version of the same desolation.  Fortunately, most of that Dante-esque nightmare is now gone, but the vacant parcels have persisted for a long time.  Notably, the Bloomberg administration’s strategic focus, according to Ms. Burden, is centered on the construction of high-density affordable housing, and on rebuilding the area’s traditional fabric of standard blocks and mid-rise, mixed-use buildings.

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After-Market Towns in the Suburbs

The Times has a story in its Real Estate section about the self-conscious construction of a town center in the Long Island hamlet of Coram.  It sounds conceptually similar to a development that is now mostly completed in my own vicinity.  It’s a trend.  My main gripe about such after-market urbanism, if you will, is its tendency to produce results that are very aesthetically monolithic when compared to town centers that develop, organically, from the smaller contributions of diverse landowners working on the varied canvases of multiple land parcels.  Also, like ambitious redevelopment projects, the insularity of these after-market towns may or may not cause them to spawn similar development in the surrounding blocks; they may become, simply, islands amid a sea of sprawl.  But, at the end of the day, these projects are moving the building vocabulary of suburbia in a good direction: one that includes consciously planned streetscapes, smaller housing units, walkable blocks, and a vibrant commercial-residential mix.  To that, it’s hard to object.  And so, the conversation goes on.

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A Subway Map of French Wines

c. Dr. David Gissen

A clever idea.  I think that the use of maps to depict the spatial relationships by which we organize complex, non-spatial concepts is still vastly under-explored.  This is especially true in light of the tedious nature of linear narratives that seek to explain complex relationships among multiple subjects.  A lot of legal concepts, for example, could probably be better explained with maps than by treatises, but the tyranny of the printing press goes on.

This map, showing French wine regions and their signature grape varietals as stops along a series of fictitious subway routes, bridges an attempt to map what are primarily nominal relationships with the more traditional subject matter of cartography.  Typically, the sample JPEG from the publisher is very reduced: You would have to purchase the full-sized print to enjoy most of its details.

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The White City of Tel Aviv

Bauhaus architecture, Tel Aviv.

The world’s largest collection of Bauhaus architecture makes up the White City of Tel Aviv.  Planning students will remember that Sir Patrick Geddes, the eccentric godfather of 20th century regional planning, was retained by a forerunner to the Jewish Agency to plan the new city’s physical layout during its first period of rapid growth, in the mid-1920s.  Between that time and Israeli independence in 1948, Bauhaus became the architectural style that filled out much of Geddes’s plan.  Recently, I came across an Israeli website, Artlog, that catalogs some of the city’s most significant structures with photographs, architectural drawings, and descriptions.  There really is a striking aesthetic to the clean geometry and smooth curves of these buildings, set against the bright skies and sun-starched land of the Middle East.  Artlog seems to be a work in progress, but its work on Tel Aviv is already quite thorough, and worth a look.

Tel Aviv and the Mediterranean. The ancient seaport of Jaffa is on the horizon.

I found versions of both these photos on multiple websites, without apparent attributions or copyrights.  But if they’re really yours, just let me know, and I’ll either provide appropriate credit, or take them down.

Meanwhile, here’s a schematic map, reproduced in Dwelling on the Dunes: Tel Aviv, by the architect Nitza Metzger-Szmuk (2004), from the cover of Geddes’s 1925 report; and a Google satellite pinpoint map, for comparison: