Large market-rate housing developments lower nearby rents
Hi all - my favorite urbanism tweets from the past few days below.
Parking cash outs for the win:
"After employers offered the [parking cash out] option, solo driving to work fell 17%, carpooling increased 64%, transit ridership increased 50%, and walking or biking increased 39%."
really feel the need to reiterate this: the original design for this project included a 60,000 sf grocery store (that’s heb size), 17 affordable units, senior housing, and underground parking — we lost all of that because nearby homeowners opposed an additional 35 feet of height
Austin Transit Blog @atxtransitblog
Nice to see that Montreal is still building contemporary versions of the classic three-storey walk-up.
Given the frankly staggering benefits of reduced traffic congestion and VMT it is very weird that there has not been a coordinated policy effort to encourage employers to let people work from home.
I suspect that local politicians are facing a lot of cross-pressures from commercial real estate landlords and developers but the Biden administration and other people managing the national economy should be thinking about this.
Interesting, though I'm skeptical of this conclusion! Admittedly this may be me extrapolating from my own odometer here
Morgan Clendaniel @MClendaniel
@mtsw I wouldn't count on those benefits.
I wrote this a couple months ago. Suburban traffic seems to have gotten much thicker since then (even exceeding pre-pandemic levels in some places).
Visualization of a possible street redevelopment:
What if car centric streets are just a historic anomaly in the long term development of our cities?
What if we call this the #StreetExperiment?
And what if we now stop it?
~Bergweg, Rotterdam by @jan_kamensky #FlyingCarMovement
(Via @tverka: decorrespondent.nl/12574/kijken-z…)
Paris’ 52km of “coronapistes”—the temporary COVID-period bikeways that cross-cross the city—will be made permanent with improved surfaces & landscaping for €80 m over the next few years. https://t.co/Yxu8hkUywp
David Belliard @David_Belliard
Paris is spending $95M to build 32 miles of bike corridors. New York is spending $82M to widen 2 miles of highway.
Yonah Freemark @yfreemark
The ultimate housing speculators aren’t the people building more homes.
It’s the people who buy a single family home in the middle of SF, oppose any new housing near them, and then see their single family home appreciate by millions of dollars.
That’s housing speculation.
Robert Fruchtman @_fruchtose
A new paper studies >50 unit market-rate housing's impact on low income areas in 11 U.S. cities (1483 buildings total) and adds to the almost unanimous chorus by finding it reduced surrounding rents on average of 6% within 250-600 meters and increases low income in-migration
The Review of Economics and Statistics (REStat) @restatjournal
The paper attributes the common misconception of market-rate housing causing gentrification with correlation/causation fallacy as these buildings tend to go up in areas already undergoing gentrification.
Another thing the data shows is that localized rent decreases over 3 years dont actually start until the building starts leasing. Rents still increase during construction. So people see new construction, high rents and associate the two.
Getting hit by a car at 70km/h is like falling from the 6th floor. At 50km, it's like the 3rd floor, & at 30km it’s like the 1st. And that’s before we factored in that vehicles have been getting bigger & deadlier.
Speed kills. Slowing down would literally save a LOT of lives.
Speed limits should be universally lower at night, when 75-80% of pedestrian deaths occur. 30 mph during the day? 20 at night. And so on.
Humans—not us, of course; just the bad drivers—react more slowly in low-light conditions and it’s immoral for non-drivers to bear the brunt.
Advanced modeling consistently finds higher GHG and other pollutant intensity per capita in many suburban neighborhoods when compared to older urban cores, @AdieTomer, @jwkane1, @jenny_schuetz & @CarolineRGeorge write. brook.gs/3w0xf9Y
American cities always banked too heavily on office space in downtowns rather than pairing that with healthy amounts of housing. This has been a huge liability that was heavily exposed by the pandemic. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Seattle is obviously heavily exposed with far too much office and retail. It's not wonder it struggles, but we can change that by rethinking zoning and planning ahead for a healthier mixed city center.