A thought experiment on Urban Corridors

Tory Gattis over at Houston Strategies was talking urban corridors a few days ago, and had this to say:

Had a conversation this week with Josh at HRG about the Urban Corridors initiative moving forward at the Houston Planning Commission, which involves encouraging dense development near Metro rail stops. There are debates about the right standards, but the real issue is mandatory vs. incentives. Another big issue is who will pay for needed infrastructure upgrades, like wider sidewalks, landscaping, utility moves (and burials), public space, and street parking (ideally diagonal).

Here’s an interesting compromise solution we came up with:

1. The Planning Commission describes their “ideal” development standard around rail stops.
2. Landowners near each stop have the option to voluntarily join together to put deed restrictions on their property meeting something close to this standard (although it does not have to be exact, if there are certain “ideals” that don’t make sense for their specific case).
   If the Planning Commission signs off on the voluntary group deed restrictions (i.e. they’re close enough to the ideal), a partial TIRZ gets created around that stop where some (but not all) of the tax increment gets reinvested into infrastructure upgrades around that stop. This is a strong incentive for the landowners to come to a voluntary deed restriction agreement: their value goes up, and that tax increment goes directly into improving the public assets around their land.

   He then cites the merits of this concept over the idea of a standard ordinance being applied to the areas surrounding transit stations:

   Property rights are respected and everything stays voluntary.
   No “one size fits all” standard is forced on everyone. The landowners around each stop have the flexibility to craft specific standards that work in their context.
   Landowners get improved land values, rents, and adjacent public infrastructure investments.
   Development gets maximized because no onerous regulations drive developers away (i.e. no “dead zones” near rail stops), which is also raises the city tax base.
   It creates money for the needed infrastructure investments.
   The city gets some dense, new urbanist neighborhoods attractive to a certain young creative class demographic that is more likely to ride the light rail rather than add to traffic woes.
   The citzens and taxpayers get maximum benefit from their expensive rail investments by increasing density and ridership near the stops. (aside: this is not an argument for rail – I’m just taking it as a given and asking how we can get the most out of it)

   Tory is a smart guy, and I think he gets things right most of the time. This is an instance, however, when he and I disagree. I don’t think that deed restrictions are a wise choice for the long-term, due to the difficulty in removing or changing them later on, and I do think that some portions of the urban corridors standards would need to be mandated in order to have any positive effect.

   - – - – -

   Here’s some background:

   I strongly defend the principle of free-market land use. My contention is that Houston doesn’t even come close to practicing it. We don’t have zoning, thank God, but we do have form-based code. That’s actually not a bad thing. Form-based code allows the market to determine how a property should be used, and helps unify the city with design standards that prevent one property owner from building something that negatively affects the value (by restricting access, for instance) of neighboring properties.

   The basic stipulation for the City of Houston is a significant setback between the building and the Right of Way, and a very high parking requirement. When filing subdivision plats there are also extensive engineering requirements related to the dimensions and geometry of new streets. This controls things like turning radius, paving width, and intersection spacing.

   Now, my entire problem with Houston is in the one-sided nature of these standards. We advocate so strongly here for “free market”, but we have no freedom of transportation! I get really frustrated with “property-rights” advocates who loudly complain that we must protect property rights, when what they often mean is protect the kind of development they like (suburban), or the way things are now (auto-only), and restrict things that they aren’t familiar with or don’t like (urban, human-oriented). That is the exact opposite of a free-market!

   The standards that the city has now (Code of Ordinances, Chapter 42, Article III) mandate automobile transportation for all. We require property owners, by law, to accommodate significant automobile traffic through their property in the public right-of-way, but we do not require any accommodation of pedestrians.

   The urban corridors effort is, in essence, an attempt to remedy this in critical areas where accommodation of pedestrian traffic is essential to realizing the benefits of a major infrastructure investment: light-rail.

   Here is my point: if we go to such lengths to define the requirements for the accommodation of automobiles in every part of the city, we have the precedent to apply pedestrian standards to the city as well. At a MINIMUM, the standards should be applied to any area where dense development is occurring. The entire purpose of mass transit is to connect points of high-density, thus the Urban Corridors initiative is focused on applying pedestrian standards to the rail corridors (follow the link to the City’s overview of the UC program). For some reason this idea is seen by some as a radical infringement on property rights.

   - – - – -

   Now, back to the argument: is it better to enforce these standards through ordinances covering specific areas, or to try and get property owners to incorporate them into deed restrictions.

   Here’s the thought experiment… is it better to have to learn one set of rules, or 100 sets of rules? That is the problem with voluntary incorporation of deed restrictions as our only way of modifying the city’s land-use regulations. In our office we deal with Houston developers all the time, and one of their most common complaints is the hodge-podge of deed restrictions they run in to. Try assembling land for redevelopment when each parcel you acquire has a different set of rules governing it’s future use!

   For that reason, I don’t ever think that deed restrictions are the right way to govern infrastructure design issues. Deed restrictions create complex baggage for property that becomes more and more of a headache over time as the market demand and neighborhood character change.

   I do like the idea of voluntary adoption of the urban corridors standards. I think that if an “urban corridor” designation is created in the ordinance it could be a fusion of a few minimum standards, and primarily voluntary recommendations with incentives for adoption.

   But it is important to define what areas constitute an urban corridor, however, and minimum sidewalk standards need to be mandated as they relate to the creation of a continuous street. The design of the sidewalks needs to be consistent across all properties to have any positive effect.

   If you’re walking down the street and the sidewalk doesn’t run continuously from one property to the next and so on it doesn’t help you very much. That would be like driving on a road that was designed by the individual property owner to their liking and nothing else. Consider driving on a road the with a constantly changing number of lanes, different numbers of lanes and different widths, and even different paving material as it passes by each building. The street would be a mess! If that’s not acceptable for our cars, why is it acceptable for humans?

   I think the critical decision we have to make, as a people, is to choose to value pedestrians as we value cars. Cars are expensive, and we can’t build our cities on the assumption that every individual needs to own one. That’s terribly limiting to our economy (think of all the wealth that is lost on these rapidly depreciating machines!), and to our individual freedoms! Machines come and go, technology changes, and while I expect that something like cars will still be around in 100 years, we don’t know. What we do know, is that as long as human beings still inhabit the city we’ll still have feet. After all the history of time, all the changes in technology, all the machines that have come and gone, walking is still an important part of life. Wouldn’t our city be better if we acnknowledged that fact as we built it?

   
   
   Posted: Monday, December 22nd, 2008 at 11:39 am
   Categories: Uncategorized
   Tags: corridor, design, Houston, light-rail, multi-modal, planning, transit, transportation, urban, Urban Corridors
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