THE CANDIDATES ON URBAN ISSUES
My new blog friend over at Discovering Urbanism has a nice post about the candidates on urban issues.
* On energy, I'm with him on the efficiency of a carbon tax in sorting out who pays and how much gets consumed.
* On transportation, he rightly points out something I'd heard from a colleague of mine who used to work at Amtrak, which is that McCain has been an ardent opponent of Amtrak, much to my chagrin, since McCain is by far my preferred candidate of the three left.
* On housing, he's correct about how the mortgage interest deduction (in concert with massive subsidies of the interstate highway system) is a chief contributor to decentralization by making it cheaper to live farther apart.
Let me reiterate an idea of local interest, which intersects all three of these topics, which is the concept of providing developers with generous density bonuses to construct housing units near transit stops if they sell a percentage of those units at an affordable price. This would seem to be a sensible policy on a number of fronts:
* It properly incentivizes developers to build affordable units, which otherwise won't get built, especially in a down market.
* It fills in some of the inexplicable holes in our built environment near transit stops.
* It provides double affordability to families in need, who not only get a good price on a house but can more easily do without a car and related expenses.
* It costs the City nothing in public dollars.
There's more to this subject, but this level of description will suffice for now. To be sure, what folks decide at the polls in November, and what the man or woman in the Oval Office decides for the next four years, will most certainly affect the viability of these and other local plans; as will the state of the currently shaky real estate market. Regardless, though, I have to think that stacking residences at a variety of price points near transit stops is a sensible, win-win sort of way to go.
My new blog friend over at Discovering Urbanism has a nice post about the candidates on urban issues.
* On energy, I'm with him on the efficiency of a carbon tax in sorting out who pays and how much gets consumed.
* On transportation, he rightly points out something I'd heard from a colleague of mine who used to work at Amtrak, which is that McCain has been an ardent opponent of Amtrak, much to my chagrin, since McCain is by far my preferred candidate of the three left.
* On housing, he's correct about how the mortgage interest deduction (in concert with massive subsidies of the interstate highway system) is a chief contributor to decentralization by making it cheaper to live farther apart.
Let me reiterate an idea of local interest, which intersects all three of these topics, which is the concept of providing developers with generous density bonuses to construct housing units near transit stops if they sell a percentage of those units at an affordable price. This would seem to be a sensible policy on a number of fronts:
* It properly incentivizes developers to build affordable units, which otherwise won't get built, especially in a down market.
* It fills in some of the inexplicable holes in our built environment near transit stops.
* It provides double affordability to families in need, who not only get a good price on a house but can more easily do without a car and related expenses.
* It costs the City nothing in public dollars.
There's more to this subject, but this level of description will suffice for now. To be sure, what folks decide at the polls in November, and what the man or woman in the Oval Office decides for the next four years, will most certainly affect the viability of these and other local plans; as will the state of the currently shaky real estate market. Regardless, though, I have to think that stacking residences at a variety of price points near transit stops is a sensible, win-win sort of way to go.
Comments
By the way, I've had your blog in my reader for a while now and I really appreciate the mix of spiritual insight and practical policy that you showcase.
If you're wondering why TOD hasn't taken off in older, denser cities like Philadelphia, I'd suggest a couple of culprits:
1. Zoning and other regulations that are more auto-oriented. We peaked at 2.5 million in population in 1950 and have slid since; and by the 1970's, we were actively seeking to reinvent ourselves as low-density and auto-friendly. So there's a structural resistance to high-density clusterings, notwithstanding noble efforts like the TOD-ness of the new Cira Centre and Comcast Center.
2. There's also an attitudinal resistance that is borne of a knee-jerk aversion to density, which is really a knee-jerk aversion to "those" people moving into your neighborhood. Insert your favorite "group you'd secretly like to avoid being neighbors with and having their kids in your kids' classroom."
Combine that with low house prices, high construction costs, and bureaucratic nightmares, and you have a situation where it takes a lot of subsidy and a lot of perseverance to make a project work.
All of that said, we're hoping to see our first such project break ground soon, not far from where I live, at 46th and Market Streets, thanks to the efforts of The Enterprise Center, where I used to work. I'll be sure to keep you posted.