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Paul M. Weyrich, the long-time head of the Free Congress Foundation, was one of the great, if unsung, heroes of the conservative movement. Paul's main work was behind the scenes. When he was a staffer for Sen. Gordon Allott (R-Colo.), he saw how liberals organized to promote legislation they wanted, so he taught and organized Capitol Hill conservatives to do the same. Paul created and was first president of the Heritage Foundation. He convinced Jerry Falwell to found the Moral Majority, and he gave it its name. His campaign schools taught generations of conservative candidates and campaign organizers how to win elections.

Paul Weyrich was also a strong supporter of New Urbanism, as well as the high-quality rail transit successful cities require. New Urbanism is the movement to return to traditional, pre-World War II towns, cities, and urban neighborhoods as an alternative to automobile-dependent, postwar sprawl suburbs. I worked with Paul for more than 20 years at Free Congress, and we both knew our cities and towns were on the whole better places 80 years ago than they are today. We had watched them hollow out throughout our lives. Now a movement was trying to bring them back. How could conservatives not support such an effort?

Paul thought they should, and for years I attended the annual Congress on the New Urbanism as an official representative of Free Congress. In his last book, The Next Conservatism (which I co-authored), Paul endorsed New Urbanism strongly.

It is easy enough to identify good things New Urbanism offers conservatives. At the top of the list is stronger communities. Community is a highly important conservative value because it is through community expectations and pressures that traditional morals are best upheld. People in communities care what their neighbors think of them. If they don't, they feel the community begin to exclude them. Because most people find isolation unpleasant, they are led to amend their behavior, to return to living by traditional middle-class rules. Those rules reflect what many generations have learned works best to create order, harmony, and prosperity. If community is too weak to enforce the rules and their enforcement must be left to the state, the battle for the traditional culture is already largely lost. More, the state soon becomes overly powerful.

New Urbanism benefits conservatives in other ways. Making towns and cities attractive places where those with disposable income want to spend time, and money, boosts local prosperity. We have seen that in a number of cities that have adopted aspects of New Urbanism. Successful, thriving cities have reduced crime rates, always a conservative goal. People who have long been on the dole are able to find jobs and become self-supporting, relieving the burden on the taxpayer. Investment that might have gone overseas is made instead in our own cities.

Paul Weyrich was so convinced of the conservative merits of New Urbanism that a few years before his death he joined with Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU) founder Andrés Duany and myself to co-author a study, "Conservatives and the New Urbanism: Do We Have Some Things In Common?" The conclusion is that we have quite a lot in common. New Urbanism's charter lays out 27 principles, each of which the study examines from a conservative perspective. We had problems with only a few; most we thought conservatives could support enthusiastically.

So far, so good. But looking at what New Urbanism offers conservatives raises another question: what might conservatism offer New Urbanism? Some answers are obvious. We offer the understanding that traditional middle-class values work. Without them, no city, neighborhood, or town, however well designed, is likely to function. We point out the reality that order, safety of persons and property, is the first essential. Duany said to me at a recent CNU meeting, "I'm beginning to understand that we design beautiful public spaces to which no one dares come." Indeed. Conservatives understand that for New Urbanism to succeed, it must create an arena where businessmen can make money. Urban areas that are not market-friendly will remain poor.

Beyond these, my observation over the years of New Urbanism's strengths and weaknesses leads me to identify three important things conservatives can bring to New Urbanism. Those three things are beautiful architecture, dual codes, and streetcars.

Although many of New Urbanism's founders recognize the need for beautiful buildings and know there is an objective, traditional canon going back to the Greeks that tells us what is beautiful and what is not, New Urbanism officially is neutral about architectural style. The reason is ideological. Like the rest of academe, academic architecture is dominated by cultural Marxism, the Marxism of the Frankfurt School, particularly by the thinking of the Frankfurt School's most creative mind, Theodor Adorno. He argued that because, by Marxist definition, life under capitalism was alienating, all art, including music, architecture, and sculpture, must be alienating to be "true." The ugliness that has dominated all the high arts since World War II has been intentional, thanks principally to Adorno.

Several years ago, a Washington-based architect invited me to lunch. An Israeli, he still designs buildings in the time-blessed neoclassical style. He wanted to know why, at conferences of academic architects-whose comfortable tufts free them from the need to get commissions-he was called a Nazi. I told him about the Frankfurt School and its baleful effects on beauty. He replied, "So that's why they are always talking about Adorno!"

Conservatism rejects cultural Marxism and all its works, which frees us from the spurious need to be "neutral" about architecture. We demand beautiful buildings. That demand leaves architects with wide choice, ranging from the neoclassical-usually the best for monumental buildings-and Georgian to the Romanesque and the Gothic.

A good way to think about beautiful urban buildings is to consider the monumental core of Washington, D.C., and especially my favorite building there, magnificent Union Station. Union Station is neoclassical, a style inspired the Greeks-think of the Parthenon. Usually characterized by careful proportions, columns, white marble, and other elements that harken back to Greek temples, neoclassical architecture is often the right choice for buildings in a city's downtown. It has echoes in housing designed in the Federal or Greek revival styles, which is what you find in many New England towns. Take a walk through Boston's Beacon Hill or Alexandria, Virginia and you will see what conservative New Urbanists want to build more of.

Beautiful architecture does not include the cold, repellant International Style, much less the efforts of too many modern architects to plop a steel-and-glass excrescence into a setting of traditional buildings, as a monument both to Adorno and to their own massive egos. The proper setting for such buildings and their designers is in the pillory next to the fruits market.

Some decades ago, while heading west on board the Super Chief train, I got into a discussion about architecture with a fellow passenger in the first-class lounge car. While I expounded on the many sins of I.M. Pei, a woman at the next table interrupted and said, "I live in a house designed by Pei." I asked her, "Is it unlivable?" She thought for a moment and replied, "Yes."

If conservatism can free New Urbanism from the absurd requirement to be "neutral" between beautiful and ugly architecture, it will have done the movement a vast favor. The academic architects are irrelevant to New Urbanism. Leave them to howl to other academics and instead give the public what it wants in its cities and towns: beauty. The public will repay New Urbanism with a desire for more.

To this contribution to New Urbanism's substance, conservatives can offer two valuable mechanisms that can help New Urbanism spread and succeed. The first is dual codes.

With few exceptions, today's planning codes demand sprawl. Developers build sprawl because they have to. To deviate from the codes is expensive. One developer told me, "In order to build one small Traditional Neighborhood Design [TND] development, I have to get 150 variances." Each of those cost him time and money.

Left-wing urbanists seek to promote urbanism through government regulation. The prime example is Portland, Oregon, and its famous "growth boundary," which is intended to compel high-density, presumably urbanist development. Not surprisingly to conservatives, it doesn't work. Much of what you find inside the growth boundary is sprawl.

New Urbanism does not need government compulsion to succeed. It will do far better if it relies on the free market. The mechanism that opens New Urbanism to the free market is dual codes. Every urban area should offer developers two codes, one sprawl, the other intended to facilitate Traditional Neighborhood Design. The sprawl codes are already in place; they are the only codes in most of America. They demand separation of home, shopping, and work by distances too great to walk, and the suburbs they create, with large lots and often no sidewalks, depend completely on the automobile. (As New Urbanist founder Andrés Duany says, "If a Martian came to earth, he would conclude that the first article of the U.S. Constitution states, 'Cars must be happy'.") Sprawl promotes "strip" stores dominated by parking lots and, from sea to shining sea, as ugly as anything this country ever built. Sprawl usually forces long commutes on workers, during which they must spend hours daily sitting in traffic. The assumption behind sprawl, as well as one of its effects, is that individuals or families live isolated lives, having little or nothing to do with their neighbors.

New Urbanist codes, of which there are several, share an intention of walkability. People should be able to walk from their homes to their schools, churches, shops, and workplaces, or to rail stations where they can take fast, comfortable public transportation to and from work. This is called "mixed use" development, and it is what you see in old towns and "trolley suburbs," near-in neighborhoods that grew up along the trolley lines. People still have cars, but they are no longer dependent on them, nor does every member of a family have to have his or her own automobile. You can shop at a downtown you can walk to, and those downtowns look like old towns and cities, not strip malls.

With dual codes, it would be up to the developer to decide which code he wants to use. In many situations, he stands to make more money if he follows the New Urbanist code. Why? Because houses designed to a New Urbanist code usually sell for substantially more per square foot of space. Duany's beautiful TND development of Kentlands in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., sells for about $30,000 more than a same-sized house in surrounding sprawl developments. People looking for houses see Kentlands and say, "Here's where I want to live!" Beauty, proportionality, human scale, walkability, all the things New Urbanism offers, are marketable goods. They do not require government compulsion to prevail over sprawl. They just require that government, in the form of sprawl-only codes, get out of the way.

Conservatives have something else to offer New Urbanism: streetcars. Paul Weyrich and I met, in the early 1970s when we were both Senate staffers, through our mutual interest in trains and streetcars. We knew that trains and streetcars offer the best, most comfortable, most enjoyable way to travel, the one between cities and the other within them. Cities, if they are to have the large number of middle-class people downtown that they need to live, require streetcars. It is not mere coincidence that our cities' declines began when the streetcar lines were ripped out.

Streetcars benefit cities because cities need pedestrians and streetcars are pedestrian facilitators. They stop at every street corner, their tracks show clearly where they go, and they are easy to hop on, ride a bit, and hope off to do some more walking. People like riding streetcars, unlike buses.

Not surprisingly, streetcars are making comebacks in a growing number of cities. They have repeatedly shown an ability to spur urban redevelopment, which is one of New Urbanism's basic goals. In one city after another, a few million dollars spent to build a streetcar line has brought billions of dollars worth of new development-and growing tax revenues.

Conservatism is about preserving or restoring good things from our past, and streetcars are an example. Regrettably, some conservatives have been misled by libertarian transit critics into thinking streetcars are a boondoggle. Those critics oppose all rail transit, always promoting buses instead-which in fact require higher operating subsidies than does rail transit. Why do they do this? Because what they are really promoting are automobiles. Few people, if offered a bus, choose it over driving. Many will take rail transit instead of driving, which makes rail a threat to the dominance of the automobile. So some libertarians smear streetcars with false accusations, based on wrong facts and bad numbers-see the website of The American Conservative Center for Public Transportation for some dramatic examples.

Instead of opposing streetcars, conservatives should promote them. The most effective way to promote streetcars, to bring them back to more cities, is to reduce the cost of building new streetcar lines. Here is where conservatives have something to offer New Urbanists, most of whom know cities need streetcars but understand little about costs.

Streetcars are a simple technology. Those built in the 1920s can still provide good service today, as they do on New Orleans's St. Charles Avenue line. In the first streetcar era, the tracks were light, the overhead wiring uncomplicated. It was all inexpensively built. There was then, and there is now, no need for costly "high-tech" for a successful streetcar line. One of conservatism's most basic rules applies: what worked then can work now.

Instead of allowing ourselves to be misled by autophile libertarians into opposing an effective tool for economic development, streetcars, let us both help our urban areas and protect the public purse by serving the honored conservative function of being cheap. Conservatives should lead an effort to keep the construction cost of streetcar lines down. Remember, with streetcars, the cheaper they are per mile, the more miles we can build.

Conservatism and New Urbanism make a natural marriage. Each has objectives that are served by the other, and each has things to offer the other. At root, New Urbanism is an attempt to bring back good things from the past that we have lost. That is what conservatives also seek to do, on a broader scale. New Urbanism offers conservatism a new venue, one where we can couple our desire for traditional culture and morals with a physical environment that supports both.

William S. Lind is director of the American Conservative Center for Public Transportation. This article was supported by a grant from the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation.

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Paul M. Weyrich, the long-time head of the Free Congress Foundation, was one of the great, if unsung, heroes of the conservative movement. Paul's main work was behind the scenes. When he was a staffer for Sen. Gordon Allott (R-Colo.), he saw how liberals organized to promote legislation they wanted, so he taught and organized Capitol Hill conservatives to do the same.

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Last week, Los Angeles's Metro board, which oversees the second-largest transportation system in the country, discussed a proposal to charge drivers to use LA's busiest and most traffic-clogged roads, a concept known as congestion pricing. One by one, the board members voiced their opposition to such a policy.

"I am deeply concerned." "It seems punitive." "I, too, am really uncomfortable."

Critics have long deemed congestion pricing a regressive policy that charges car-dependent people more to drive. A well-timed new report-Pricing Roads, Advancing Equity- out today by TransForm and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), explains how congestion pricing can be employed as a tool to right engrained injustices in the U.S.'s current transportation system.

"What used to sound radical now sounds like common sense-road pricing is urgently needed to address climate change, traffic, and inequity in the transportation system," said the report's co-author Stuart Cohen, executive director of TransForm. "We believe road pricing can be a transportation equity solution. It can speed buses and carpools while providing revenue to make mass transit more affordable."

Congestion pricing can be implemented in a variety of ways, according to the Pricing Roads, Advancing Equity report. But the one that hasn't yet been tried by a U.S. metropolitan area is "cordon" pricing, which would charge drivers to access a designated part of the city, possibly with prices that fluctuate based on the time of day.

Although cordon pricing has been successfully introduced in cities like London, Stockholm, and Singapore, LA's vote is the first time a major U.S. city has seriously entertained the concept. Previous attempts to introduce comprehensive road pricing-New York City is resurfacing a plan this year, Seattle is still exploring the idea, and San Francisco has studied it in the past-have all been met with sentiment similar to Metro's board.

But it's not about punishing drivers. It's about making sure more people can get more places faster and more affordably, with less environmental impact and less stress.

Done right, notes the report, road pricing has generated revenue to fund better transit service, built out better walking and biking infrastructure, and subsidized fares for students, older adults, and people with disabilities.

Plus, with fewer cars traveling along busy corridors, road pricing can speed up vehicles that get stuck in traffic, improving travel times for drivers and increasing ridership for transit. Even for those who do need to drive long distances, congestion pricing will create less arduous commutes in the short term. In the long term, it would also fund more car-free options.

It's not about punishing drivers. It's about making sure more people can get more places.

In fact, those ideas are central to LA's plan. Metro's CEO Phil Washington first announced congestion pricing as part of an even grander transportation proposal-using the funds collected from drivers to accelerate critical infrastructure projects, reduce the carbon pollution known to cause climate change, and make all transit free in time for LA's 2028 Summer Olympics.

"We're talking about saving mankind here," he said at a recent meeting. "This is no small thing."

Of course, the key to making a congestion pricing strategy work for all is to make sure it works best for a city's most vulnerable communities. In other cities, according to the report, this has been achieved with exceptions for people with disabilities, refunds for trips like medical appointments, and subsidies for low-income workers who rely on vehicles for jobs.

In LA, the Metro board ultimately voted to study the equity issues, but only one board member, board chair Sheila Kuehl, floated the idea that perhaps LA's current car-centric system was the more inequitable alternative. "If we want to think about equity, we ought to consider the cost of driving," Kuehl said. "It would be better for people's budgets if they could have the option of public transit."

The cost of driving is about much more than people's personal transportation budgets. Yes, lower-income families spend a higher percentage of their income on transportation. Lower-income families are also more likely to be killed or injured in vehicular crashes. Lower-income families, and particularly people of color, are more often targeted and ticketed by traffic enforcement officials. Lower-income families are more likely to suffer health issues related to roadway pollution. Lower-income families are more at risk in the climate disasters accelerated by carbon emissions.

When those factors are included, the way we get around now doesn't sound like a system that any leader can possibly consider sustaining.

At the state level, congestion pricing is being championed by New York City state senators and California legislators like Asm. Richard Bloom, who first introduced the idea of testing Go Zones-perhaps a much more palatable name than congestion pricing- last year.

"My constituents spend over 100 hours a year stuck in traffic," Bloom told NRDC. "This timely report helps ensure that any pricing pilot that moves forward starts with a commitment to improve social equity and create more transportation choices for those who need them the most."

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Earlier this month, the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) created a tool for U.S. cities to measure transit accessibility for residents. The indicators examine how close people live to transit, and how effectively transit provides access to jobs. In many major cities, a majority of residents live near frequent or rapid transit.

Yet no major U.S. city has greater than 25 percent of its jobs accessible by a one-hour transit trip, in part due to housing affordability issues which have forced people to live further from job-creation centers.

In Los Angeles, the number of low-skill jobs that can be reached by a 60-minute walking, biking, or public transportation trip is only 5 percent, according to ITDP's data. That means if you have a high school education, getting to virtually all the jobs in the city requires riding a bus or bike for more than an hour, or spending an average of $5,900 per year purchasing, maintaining, and storing a car.

"For households making less than $20,000 per year, reliable cars are a pipe dream: a huge expense that they can't afford," said Joe Chestnut, author of the ITDP report. "Without adequate transit, they will remain stuck in place."

The average annual income of LA's bus riders is around $15,000. It's impossible to look at those numbers and claim that the status quo is fair.

Today's study by TransForm and NRDC has essentially done the homework for any U.S. city that wants to finally address the true historical inequities in its transit networks. It's time for leaders everywhere to change the conversation around road pricing and get serious about building out a transportation system that truly works for everyone.

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Streets will only work for everyone when drivers pay their fair share to use them

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Last week, Los Angeles's Metro board, which oversees the second-largest transportation system in the country, discussed a proposal to charge drivers to use LA's busiest and most traffic-clogged roads, a concept known as congestion pricing. One by one, the board members voiced their opposition to such a policy. "I am deeply concerned."

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As decades of mismanagement continue to wreak havoc on the city's transportation infrastructure, congestion pricing has once again been touted as a viable solution, both for the crumbling subway system and for the gridlock that clogs the city on a daily basis.

Back in January, a traffic advisory panel appointed by Governor Andrew Cuomo-which includes a number of former city and state politicians, the chairman of the Regional Plan Association, and the mayor of Yonkers- released a report outlining how congestion pricing could be implemented in New York City. The biggest takeaway: It could generate between $810 million and $1.1 billion annually, which could then be used to fund critical repairs to the New York City subway.

Now, the state legislature has until April 1 to decide whether or not to adopt that plan, known as FixNYC, as part of the 2019 budget. It's far from a done deal-in February, Crain's suggested that it could "be stuck in neutral"-but it's gaining steam, with high-profile supporters such as Uber, the Partnership for New York City, and Transportation Alternatives joining the effort to get the policy passed.

For those still struggling with the concept or looking for a briefing on its history and application, read on for a handy reference guide.

What is congestion pricing?

The concept is quite straightforward: Congestion pricing asks drivers to pay a surcharge to enter certain heavily-trafficked zones-typically a central business district (CBD)-during a particular period of time. (In New York City, that would mean a one-time surcharge in Manhattan south of 60th Street and north of Battery Park between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m..) The revenue generated could then be put toward other infrastructure repairs-e.g., the broken subway system.

How has congestion pricing worked elsewhere?

London, Singapore, and Stockholm are often cited as success stories, and the policy has been implemented in a number of smaller cities, too (though none so far in the United States). London began its program in 2003, and now, drivers pay £11.50 (around $16) to enter its CBD from 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. Stockholm's program, which began in 2006 as a pilot, operates similarly, though drivers are charged a rate (between $1.10 and $2.68) depending on what time of day they enter the CBD.

In most cases, the surcharges were initially met with hostility, but the positive effects have been hard to deny: Immediately following the initiation of zone charging, London saw congestion reduced by a quarter, average speeds increase by 30 percent, and carbon dioxide emissions decrease by 20 percent, per the Fix NYC report.

A similar story played out in Stockholm; the city's transportation director, Jonas Eliasson, noted recently that "If you survive this valley of political death, and people actually see the benefits, and also realize that, in addition to the benefits, it's actually not as bad as you thought-it's not so hard adapting to this-then support starts going up again."

How could it work in New York?

The Tri-State Transportation Campaign, an advocacy organization, has recommended four key principles New York should implement based on other cities' systems:

"significant investment in transit before and during the implementation of congestion pricing; reinvestment of revenues generated directly into public transit; dynamic tolling that changes commuter behavior; and information campaigns that generate broad public support for congestion pricing."

The Fix NYC panel recommended a phased approach that takes these concerns into account. The first phase requires that existing public transit systems brought up to a state of good repair, which-as commuters well know-could be a challenge with the current state of the subways. But this "is only fair," the report states, particularly to the outer boroughs and suburbs, where subway and bus access isn't as robust as Manhattan.

In the second phase, a congestion surcharge (which could be anywhere from $2 to $5) would be imposed on for-hire vehicles -Uber, Lyft, and their ilk-and taxis, which have added significantly to New York's traffic in recent years. In phase three, the full pricing zone would be unveiled. Per the Fix NYC report, personal vehicles would be charged $11.52 to drive during peak hours, and trucks-which contribute more traffic to the roads-would be charged $25.34. The first phase could be rolled out this year, with phase two in 2019, and phase three in 2020.

The argument for congestion pricing

Those in the pro-congestion pricing camp argue that the policy is good for city streets, good for the environment, and good for the city's economy. It's estimated that it could generate between $810 million and $1.1 billion annually.

In a recent study, the Partnership for New York City found that congestion costs the city $20 billion annually in lost time and revenue; if nothing is done to "discourage cars and trucks from crowding the streets and highways of the region during the busiest times of the day," that'll be a staggering hit of $100 billion to the city economy over the next five years. (In terms of time, that's 113.3 million lost hours annually, all due to out of control traffic.)

Reports have also found that the majority of NYC drivers won't be negatively impacted by congestion fees. TSTC also released a traffic pricing analysis for New York State legislative districts, which determined a single-digit percentage of residents in every district in New York commute into Manhattan's CBD-in other words, not many upstaters will be impacted.

Cuomo is seemingly on board with the idea; so is Andy Byford, the new president of New York City Transit, who recently told City and State that if congestion pricing can "help expedite the pace of improvements and make the system work better" then "I'm all for it." Transit advocacy groups (including the Riders Alliance and Transportation Alternatives) are, of course, on board, as are some surprising groups, including REBNY and Uber.

What about arguments against congestion pricing?

Mayor Bill de Blasio may be coming around to the idea now, but that hasn't always been the case; in 2017, he explicitly said that he "does not believe" in the policy. One concern: that congestion pricing revenue may be allocated to the suburbs. To ensure that doesn't happen De Blasio recently demanded a "lockbox" to ensure amassed funds go exclusively to city transit. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams supports the idea of a lockbox, too.

The mayor has also argued that surcharges will unfairly burden low-income and outer borough residents-a concern shared by many elected officials who represent those districts. Some also believe the plan will hurt small businesses. Detractors include Assemblyman David Weprin, who represents eastern Queens; City Council member Barry Grodenchik, for neighborhoods on the Long Island border; Thomas Grech, executive director of the Queens Chamber of Commerce; and assembly member (and former mayoral candidate) Nicole Malliotakis, repping south Brooklyn and Staten Island.

Critics have also argued that the plan will unfairly impact New Yorkers with physical limitations that make using public transit harder, i.e. seniors and those with disabilities. (In London, those who fit the bill can apply for an exemption.)

What comes next

The state legislature will release its FY2019 budget on April 1, and advocates are hopeful that congestion pricing will be a part of it-particularly since, as Next City points out, the Fix NYC plan came from Cuomo's office.

"It's a plan whose time has come," Dani Simons of the Regional Plan Association told Next City.

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How congestion pricing could help fix NYC's crumbling subway system

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As decades of mismanagement continue to wreak havoc on the city's transportation infrastructure, congestion pricing has once again been touted as a viable solution, both for the crumbling subway system and for the gridlock that clogs the city on a daily basis.

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Lean Urbanism is small-scale, incremental community-building that requires fewer resources to incubate and mature.

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Lean Governing is not government reform. It is the action-focused exercise of collective will by local elected officials and citizens. It is a process of discovery, of robust experimentation and learning by doing.

How might Lean Governing be applied in places where local leaders believe in Lean Urbanism and want to support it? The term Lean Governing is used here to connote a network of distributed leadership among public entities, citizens and businesses, focused not on a massive, long-term reform of government, but rather on robust experimentation with alternative models through a set of opportunistic partnerships.
Read the full paper

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Lean Governing is not government reform. It is the action-focused exercise of collective will by local elected officials and citizens. It is a process of discovery, of robust experimentation and learning by doing. How might Lean Governing be applied in places where local leaders believe in Lean Urbanism and want to support it?

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A surprising way to increase property values: build affordable housing

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A surprising way to increase property values: build affordable housing

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A surprising way to increase property values: build affordable housing

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Despite the lawsuits, media spotlight and conventional wisdom, affordable housing developments built in poor, heavily black communities can lead to greater racial and income integration, according to new research by Stanford economists. Such housing, funded by federal tax credits, also raises property values and lowers crime in surrounding neighborhoods as higher-income white residents move in, the researchers found.

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Low-income housing doesn’t affect nearby property value, says new study

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Low-income housing doesn’t affect nearby property value, says new study

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A new report suggests that, contrary to long-held beliefs and popular assumptions, low-income housing doesn't decrease the property value of nearby homes, buildings, and offices.

Conducted by Trulia, the study focused on the 20 most expensive metro areas of the United States, cities that have a need for additional affordable housing but often face significant local opposition to constructing more low-cost housing. Researchers looked at 3,083 projects financed using the federal low-income housing tax credit program between 1996 and 2006, and compared property values of buildings nearby (within 2,000 feet) with a control group located further away from the LITC projects (2,000 to 4,000 feet).

Drawing upon data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) as well as Trulia home value data, the analysis found no significant difference between the two groups. When taken in aggregate, low-income units did not depreciate or devalue nearby property.

According to lead researcher and senior economist Cheryl Young, these results call into question a standard talking point, one often echoed by NIMBY groups.

"There's a lot of myth and rhetoric that people hold onto," she says. "But when we look at property values in general-and to be fair, these are expensive markets-it doesn't really affect the value of surrounding property. You're just adding supply."

Young felt the research suggests that similar results could be found across major metro areas, not just the high-priced neighborhoods in cities such as New York and San Francisco. While there was some variation-in Denver, LITC developments increased the value of nearby properties, while they slightly decreased the value of nearby buildings in Boston-the report suggests that was due to local factors. In Denver, for instance, many of the LITC projects were near recently revitalized and fast-growing neighborhoods, such as the areas adjacent to Coors Field, while in Boston, the clustering of low-income projects tended to push out other development activity.

"We want to engage in this discussion," she says. "What are these ideas and opinions about low-income housing based on, empirically? We're based in San Francisco, and any time affordable housing is uttered, it's like a pejorative term. We wanted to look into why."

Young sees this as the beginning of more research diving into pressing policy issues. This study, which looked at a time period during which prices were stable, sets up a good baseline for additional studies. Issues surrounding housing and segregation are especially important, she says, as the incoming administration begins setting policy and potentially rolling back Obama-era policies.

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Low-income housing doesn't affect nearby property value, says new study

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A new report suggests that, contrary to long-held beliefs and popular assumptions, low-income housing doesn't decrease the property value of nearby homes, buildings, and offices. Conducted by Trulia, the study focused on the 20 most expensive metro areas of the United States, cities that have a need for additional affordable housing but often face significant local opposition to constructing more low-cost housing.

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Affordable Housing Has No Impact on Nearby Home Values

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Affordable Housing Has No Impact on Nearby Home Values

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Corrected Nov. 29 at 2 pm ET. See below.
Some of the nation's least affordable markets are also ground zero for the fight against building affordable housing - which opponents say, among other things, depreciates nearby home values. Resistance to affordable housing development has surfaced in tight housing markets across the country such as San Francisco, New York, and Seattle.

Given low inventory and high prices in these tight markets, we set out to uncover how much homeowners really have to fear.

We define low-income housing projects as those funded through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program administered by the U.S. Department of Treasury. Data on these low-income housing projects are collected by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Using Trulia home value data, we examined changes in nearby home values before and after a low-income housing project is completed. Based on the location of low-income housing projects and completion dates,[1] we determined whether or not these projects impact home values. We found:

In the nation's 20 least affordable markets, our analysis of 3,083 low-income housing projects from 1996 to 2006 found no significant effect on home values located near a low-income housing project, with a few exceptions.

Among the cities where there was enough data to measure, San Jose, Calif., was the most aggressive in adding low-income housing units (7.81 per 1,000 people) during the decade. Meanwhile, Oakland, (0.52 per 1,000 residents) added the fewest units per capita.

Of the 20 markets examined, Denver was the only metro area where homes located near low-income housing projects registered a positive effect in terms of price per square foot after a project was completed.

In Boston and Cambridge, Mass., however, low-income housing projects had a negative effect on nearby homes in terms of price per square foot, suggesting a region-specific market effect for these two geographically adjacent metros.

We focused on the time period prior to the start of the housing bubble in 2007 in order to ensure that prices reflect consistent comparisons around the time a project is completed and ready for occupancy.

[1] HUD uses the term "placed into service" to denote when an eligible household can move in. For purposes of this report, we consider this the time at which the project is complete and ready for occupancy.

To test for spillover effects of low-income housing, we tracked home values in terms of price per square foot at two different distances from the low-income housing project from 1996 to 2006. For the neighborhood, we identified properties within an inner ring of 2,000 feet of a given low-income housing project as close enough to be impacted by the project. Properties located 2,001 to 4,000 feet from the low-income housing project were used as a comparison group.[1] The chart below illustrates how properties are placed into inner (light blue) and outer (green) rings around a low-income housing project (orange).

[1] Using distance measures as a way to compare potential effects of housing projects on property values proximate to a project site to those in surrounding neighborhoods is common in the academic literature. See Ellen et al. (2007)'s analysis of the effect of subsidized housing projects in New York City on property values by comparing price changes of properties within a 2,000 foot distance ring to those in similar surrounding neighborhoods. Ellen, Ingrid Gould, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Ioan Voicu and Michael H. Schill. 2007. "Does Federally Subsidized Rental Housing Depress Neighborhood Property Values?" Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Vol. 26, No. 2, pp. 257-280.

If there was an effect from the placement of a low-income housing project into a neighborhood, we would expect to see a drop in prices in the inner ring (red line) compared to the outer ring (blue line) after the project is completed (year 0). In terms of median price per square foot, the inner and outer distance buffers track closely together as shown in the figure below.

There is no statistically significant difference in price per square foot when comparing properties near a low-income housing project and those farther away when examining projects across all 20 metros. Likewise, at the metro level, the majority of markets yield no significant difference in prices between the inner and outer ring after a project is completed. However, a few housing markets revealed significant differences in price per square foot near low-income housing projects after they were placed into service.

Why did values diverge in some places?

Homes near low-income housing projects in both Boston and Cambridge saw a negative impact on per square foot property prices. Post-project prices near low-income housing projects saw an estimated $18 and $19 drop in prices per square foot relative to the outer ring. Given that these estimated effect in these two markets are geographically adjacent to one another, this effect might be attributed to a region-specific market effects that reflect where low-income housing projects were placed. Concentrating subsidized housing projects in particular areas such as Roxbury and Dorchester in Boston, or Cambridgeport in Cambridge in a short time period, for example, might have the effect of crowding out other development activity.[1] The chart below shows that in neighborhoods like Roxbury, prices were indeed depressed compared those of the greater Boston metro area.

[1] Indeed, the concentration of affordable housing development in certain areas seems to have exacerbated an unequal geography of where low-income residents have settled in the Boston area according to a recent report by the Boston Globe.

Unlike Boston and Cambridge, the effect of low-income housing projects in the Denver metro area were associated with a $7.35 per square foot increase in property values for the neighborhood versus the region. One possibility: parts of downtown Denver around where low-income housing projects were built saw a renaissance in the 1990s driven by the development of LoDo (Lower Downtown Denver) and the construction of Coors Field. Some of these neighborhoods in downtown Denver are now the most sought real estate in the metro area. Indeed, as the chart below illustrates, neighborhoods such as Central Business District and Five Points, where low-income housing projects were concentrated in our study period outperformed greater Denver in terms of home values per square foot.

What does it mean?

Again, these are exceptions to the finding that low-income housing projects largely have no effect on home values. The bottom line for NIMBYs who fear that property values will take a hit when a low-income housing project locates nearby is that their anxiety is largely unfounded - at least in cities where housing is either expensive or in short supply.
This post has been corrected to reflect that it is the U.S. Treasury Department that administers the LIHTC program. An earlier version of this post said HUD administered the program.

Methodology

LIHTC project location, unit count, and year placed into service data are accessed from the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development's LIHTC Database. While LIHTC projects do not cover the entire universe of affordable housing, they constitute the large majority of subsidized rental housing development in the nation. The precise location data of these projects also allows us to estimate their potential spillover effects on nearby property values.

Using the latitude and longitude of these projects, we constructed two distance buffers-one up to 2,000 feet from the project, and another from 2,001 to 4,000 feet. We then identified homes within these buffers and captured Trulia home value data for each of these homes from 1996 to 2006. Trulia home value data is collected as an annual snapshot on June 1 st of each year. In order to avoid large shifts in prices from new construction, we only include homes with property records for the entire time period under study. The analysis in this report uses home value per square foot in order to control for changes for housing quality and mix as well as potential changes in value from renovations during the study period.

We use a basic differences-in-differences regression framework to estimate the difference in home values in the inner ring compared to the outer ring after the LIHTC project is placed into service. Differences-in-differences offers a way to identify the effect of a policy by examining relative changes in outcomes in treatment and control groups. In this report, the treatment group consists of those homes located in the inner ring, or nearby the LIHTC projects, and the control group are those in the outer ring. The assumption is that these homes, on average, only differ in terms of their relative proximity to the LIHTC project. Note that after plotting the median home value per square foot of the two distance rings before and after the project, we felt confident home values between distance rings prior to the time projects were placed into service shared common trends. The treatment occurs once the project is put into place, so the differences-in-differences reflects the difference between the treatment group and control group (a proxy for the counterfactual) in the post-treatment period compared to the pre-treatment period.

In order to control for idiosyncratic differences in home values within years and different metro areas, we include year fixed effects (and metro fixed effects for regressions containing projects across all 20 metros). Additionally, we implement cluster-robust standard errors on individual LIHTC projects in order to correct for likely correlation of errors terms within the clusters. Our results yielded differences that were statistically significant in three metro areas. In Boston and Cambridge, the estimated effect of living near LIHTC projects was -$18.05 and -$19.05 per square foot. In Boston the effect was significant at the 99% confidence level and in Cambridge at the 95% confidence level. In Denver the estimated effect was $7.35 and significant at the 95% confidence level.

Affordability is defined as the percent of a median household's income in that market that would be needed to afford a mortgage payment on the median listing price of a home in that market. These median listing prices reflect Trulia listing data from Q3, 2016. Population figures in this report come from the 2000 Census.

Cheryl is a Senior Economist at Trulia. Prior to Trulia she was a consultant with the World Bank's Urban Development Unit. She has also served as an associate with Bankable Frontier Associates' housing finance practice, led a housing research program... See more

Affordability

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There Doesn't Go the Neighborhood: Low-Income Housing Has No Impact on Nearby Home Values - Trulia Research

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Corrected Nov. 29 at 2 pm ET. See below. Some of the nation's least affordable markets are also ground zero for the fight against building affordable housing - which opponents say, among other things, depreciates nearby home values. Resistance to affordable housing development has surfaced in tight housing markets across the country such as San [...]

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Over the holiday season, a local newspaper from Rochester, NY ran two articles headlined: " Owners need $1.3 million by Nov. 30 or the Rhinos are extinct for 2018 season", and " Liberty Pole lighting captures spirit of the season ". The first article explores looming doubt over the future of the Rochester Rhinos, a professional soccer team, and why the city may soon find itself with a vacant stadium. The second article describes a more cheery subject, the annual lighting of the Liberty Pole, a prominent sculpture downtown. While seemingly unrelated, the two articles push a similar anti-urban narrative.

The piece about the Rochester Rhinos documents an unfortunate story, albeit one that any Strong Towns enthusiast will find all too familiar. In 2005, Rochester welcomed a new soccer stadium, built on speculations of growth in attendance and economic redevelopment in the surrounding neighborhood. As the article points out, the heavily-subsidized stadium failed to result in any such thing, and the city finds itself with a massive vacant venue going into 2018.

What's notable here is not the failure of another taxpayer-subsidized white elephant (or rhino, as the case may be); it is the underlying narrative presented to explain why the stadium failed. Jeff DiVeronica explains, "Saddled in part by the perception that the stadium is in a troubled neighborhood and lacks sufficient parking, the Rhinos have never drawn crowds there like they did at Frontier [Field]." So why did the stadium fail? While lots of factors may have contributed, the neighborhood and lack of parking apparently make the top two.

On a much lighter note, the second article highlights the great success of the lighting of the Liberty Pole in downtown Rochester. Steve Orr captures the spirit of the event beautifully: "Everyone, seemingly, was smiling, nodding at each other, dancing a step or two to the music that came from the stage by the base of the pole. Costumed mascots roamed the crowd. Santa Claus gave children high-fives." It's wonderful to see any event getting people outside to enjoy the city's recovering downtown.

Related stories

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Over the holiday season, a local newspaper from Rochester, NY ran two articles headlined: " Owners need $1.3 million by Nov. 30 or the Rhinos are extinct for 2018 season", and " Liberty Pole lighting captures spirit of the season ".

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Great Articles on new Economic Structures 

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Great Articles on new Economic Structures 

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Form-Based Codes Institute

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Form-Based Codes Institute at Smart Growth America

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FBCI gathers the best examples of form-based codes from communities across the United States and abroad. The codes represent a variety of community types and applications of form-based standards. Click on the Show Search Options button to search the library by phrase, location, Driehaus Award recipients, and the categories described below.

Physical Context: size or type of government entity

Organizing Principle: underlying organization for the code standards

Implementation Method: how the code standards operate within the zoning ordinance

Development Type: development types impacted by the code standards

Special Features: unique code attributes or awards

**Driehaus Award Recipient**

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Library of Codes - Form-Based Codes Institute at Smart Growth America

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FBCI gathers the best examples of form-based codes from communities across the United States and abroad. The codes represent a variety of community types and applications of form-based standards. Click on the Show Search Options button to search the library by phrase, location, Driehaus Award recipients, and the categories described below.

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Michigan Economic Development Corp. - Resources Page

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Michigan Economic Development Corp. - Resources Page

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Massive curated library! "We've gathered all our research, documents, and toolkits and put them all right here."

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We've gathered all our research, documents, and toolkits and put them all right here. So whether you want to learn more about what placemaking is, researching State investment programs, or looking for a specific document, this is where you'll find what you need.

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Municipal Support for Community Land Trusts

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Municipal Support for Community Land Trusts

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The community land trust (CLT) movement is young but expanding rapidly. Nearly 20 community land trusts are started every year as either new nonprofits or as programs or subsidiaries of existing organizations. Fueling this proliferation is a dramatic increase in local government investment and involvement.

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Online input tool for residents to review and comment on PC and city council actions.

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Many of us care about what happens in our community but don't have the time to participate in person. This site allows citizens to review and give input on public City actions without needing to attend public hearings.

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Bicycle Parking Solutions - Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals

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This 4-webinar series covers all aspects of bicycle parking, beginning with an overview and discussion of basic principles, followed by three focused discussions on applications and techniques used by different entities to accommodate bicycle parking demand (municipal, transit and campus).

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In most cities, municipal services - be they fire protection, schools or streets - are paid for (in part) by property tax revenue, and the amount that every property is taxed is based on its assessed value.

For parking lots, that value is very little. When we multiply this calculation across our cities where parking lots are required by law for most properties, what we find is an enormous loss in tax value. This translates to fewer police officers on the roads, fewer teachers in the classrooms, fewer potholes patched, street lamps fixed, parks planted... and so on.

As our friend Josh McCarty, who has studied the tax value of parking in depth, writes, "Ultimately parking is the single most important design feature that dilutes the tax productivity of development. Municipalities for whom property taxes are lifeblood should treat parking for what it is: dead weight."

2. They hinder small business owners, homeowners, developers and renters.

That's right, parking minimums are bad for just about everyone. Here's a quick break down:

Small business owners are forced to spend their precious, hard-earned dollars paying for designated parking spaces for their customers instead of spending that money on supplies, space to sell products, etc. Or they're excluded outright from locating in certain areas because of a lack of parking.

Homeowners are prevented from taking on basic projects like adding a small rental unit in a basement or backyard because parking minimums would mandate the provision of a parking space for the tenant of that unit (and the typical single-family lot doesn't have room to add that).

Developers are unable to execute projects because (similar to homeowners) a lack of space on a given lot may prevent them from constructing the required parking to accompany it, or (similar to business owners) they are forced to spend a large portion of their development budget on storage for cars instead of units for paying tenants. (For more on this issue, listen to our interview with developer Monte Anderson.)

Renters end up losing many housing opportunities because spaces that could be filled with homes are, instead, filled with parking.

3. They fill our cities with empty, useless space.

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In most cities, municipal services - be they fire protection, schools or streets - are paid for (in part) by property tax revenue, and the amount that every property is taxed is based on its assessed value. For parking lots, that value is very little.

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Chapter Eight: Resource Directory - Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise

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Tactical Urbanist's Guide to Material & Design

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Tactical Urbanist's Guide to Material & Design

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High-quality design and materials guidance for citizen-led demonstration

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Tactical Urbanist's Guide to Materials and Design v.1.0

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The only materials and design guidance for Tactical Urbanist demonstration, pilot, and interim design projects. Funded by the James L. Knight Foundation.

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At the Strong Towns Summit in Tulsa, I was lucky to lead a group of enthusiastic Strong Town supporters through a quick traffic calming demonstration. The purpose was to inspire people to use tactical urbanism in their own communities to promote traffic calming by showing how changing the street can change behavior.

Though there was not much traffic, we did slow the street temporarily with only 26 cones. I hope my partners-in-calming left with a better understanding of how to do demonstrations; I know I got ideas and suggestions to improve my traffic calming work.

After the demonstration, I promised to share a list of my favorite resources for planning and executing pop-ups with everyone who helped, and with the Strong Towns audience in general. The following resources are all available for free online.

Slow Your Street- a How-To Guide for Pop Up Traffic Calming by Trailnet is a comprehensive guide to figuring how and why to do a traffic calming demonstration. The guide covers every aspect of the process, from identifying your goals and engaging your community to setting up a demonstration. The section on data even has a sample survey you can use for gathering feedback to analyze the success of your event. (Full disclosure: I helped with this guide and I work for Trailnet).

Intrigue & Uncertainty: Toward New Traffic-Taming Tools by David Engwicht is the e-booklet that first opened my eyes to the potential of temporary traffic calming and the impact of neighborhood activity on driving speeds.

The Tactical Urbanist's Guide to Materials and Design by Street Plans Collaborative is an essential and practical guide to what materials you can use when you are redesigning a street.

offers downloadable patterns for building street furniture and traffic calming tools with plywood. I just learned about this at the Strong Towns Summit and I am excited to test out the designs.

Tactical Urbanism 2 by Street Plans Collaborative is an inspiring look at ways to improve your community through temporary projects of all sizes.

The National Association of City Transportation Officials has design guides covering traffic calming and bicycle facilities. The design guides are written for permanent infrastructure, but they can still offer insights into temporary projects as well as ensure that your temporary project has the possibility of one day becoming permanent.

The United States Access Board has guidelines and standards for making streets accessible. When planning your temporary demonstrations, look for ways to make sure that everyone in the community can enjoy it.

Finally, your biggest resource is your community: it takes a team to make a pop-up successful and push for lasting change from a temporary demonstration.
Please share your favorite resources for pop-ups and tactical urbanism in the comments and let me know what I am missing. (Top photo from Strong Towns Summit traffic calming demonstration. Source: Evan Lowenstein)

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These resources will help you host a pop-up traffic calming demonstration in your town.

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At the Strong Towns Summit in Tulsa, I was lucky to lead a group of enthusiastic Strong Town supporters through a quick traffic calming demonstration. The purpose was to inspire people to use tactical urbanism in their own communities to promote traffic calming by showing how changing the street can change behavior.

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city & town planning - architectural aspects

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public policy - city planning & urban dev.

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This book pioneered the concept of townscape. 'Townscape' is the art of giving visual coherence and organization to the jumble of buildings, streets and space that make up the urban environment. It has been a major influence on architects, planners and others concerned with what cities should loo...

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Christopher Alexander: A Pattern Language 

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Christopher Alexander: A Pattern Language 

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construction (center for environmental structure series)

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architecture / urban & land use planning

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art & architecture | theory & criticism; aesthetics

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city & town planning - architectural aspects

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A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)

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You can use this book to design a house for yourself with your family; you can use it to work with your neighbors to improve your town and neighborhood; you can use it to design an office, or a workshop, or a public building.

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Camillo Sitte: The Art of Building Cities

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Camillo Sitte: The Art of Building Cities

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the art of building cities: city building according to its artistic fundamentals

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The Art of Building Cities: City Building According to Its Artistic Fundamentals

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2013 Reprint of 1945 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Camillo Sitte (1843-1903) was a noted Austrian architect, painter and theoretician who exercised great influence on the development of urban planning in Europe and the United St...

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Great opportunity to have CNU in another southern City! (Two years in a row!)

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Louisville today is a dynamic global transportation center with growing cultural diversity and a storied bootstrap ethos. Adding heart to its hub, Louisville adopted the Charter of Compassion in a commitment to a future of inclusion and kindness. Louisville is home to gracious historic neighborhoods, walkable New Urbanist communities, and a beloved "emerald necklace" parkway system.

The 27th annual Congress for the New Urbanism welcomes you to enjoy the hospitality of this conscious and compassionate city. In its forward movement, stunning greenspace, and growth challenges at the city's edges, Louisville embodies the quest to blend the very best of old and new urbanism.
Mark your calendars for CNU 27.Louisville June 12 - 15, 2019. Better yet, join our mailing list for frequent updates.

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Louisville today is a dynamic global transportation center with growing cultural diversity and a storied bootstrap ethos. Adding heart to its hub, Louisville adopted the Charter of Compassion in a commitment to a future of inclusion and kindness. Louisville is home to gracious historic neighborhoods, walkable New Urbanist communities, and a beloved "emerald necklace" parkway system.

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Chatt Design Studio Area 3 Historic Homes Resource

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This website provides guidance to homeowners located in the neighborhoods near downtown Chattanooga who are interested in fixing up their existing home, building a new one, or landscaping their yard.

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Indianapolis Teacher Housing Program Report

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Indianapolis Teacher Housing Program Report

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Best practices for subsidized housing for teachers (opportunities for Area 3 schools?)

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The Case Against Minimum Parking Requirements

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The Case Against Minimum Parking Requirements

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Presented in terms of transportation, density and design, economic development, sustainability, and city administration.

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In a recent post, we referenced Richard Willson's book Parking Reform Made Easy, specifically the second chapter, "Case against Minimum Parking Requirements." We have yet to find a more complete summary of the detrimental effects of legally-mandated parking, an issue that we and many other architects and planners believe is central to the pursuit of creating more enjoyable and sustainable urban environments. Willson and Island Press were kind enough to grant us permission to share this chapter, in the hopes that access to these ideas might increase understanding of how parking requirements undermine nearly every positive aspect of urban space. We encourage you to read Willson's book in its entirety; it can be found at http://www.islandpress.org/parking-reform-made-easy.

From Parking Reform Made Easy by Richard W. Willson: Case against Minimum Parking Requirements (pages 23-33):

The following summarizes the case against conventional parking requirements, presented in terms of transportation, density and design, economic development, sustainability, and city administration. Conventional parking requirements encourage private vehicle use, adversely impact alternative travel modes, ignore cost effectiveness, reduce density, create inhospitable project design, thwart development and economic activity, hamper affordable housing production, hamper infill and adaptive reuse, cause direct environmental impacts, cause indirect environmental impacts, disadvantage nondrivers, lower physical activity, and imprecisely represent actual parking utilization. Each is described in the paragraphs that follow.
Encourage private vehicle use and lengthen trips
Parking requirements compel developers to invest in automobile access, often as the only mode of site access improvement required. By forcing the use of so much land for vehicle storage, parking requirements indirectly shield drivers from the cost of parking while at the same time providing them with a high level of convenience. This encourages driving over other travel modes. Shoup (2005) calls parking requirements "a fertility drug for cars." The parking supply and associated road system demonstrate a clear priority for moving and storing private vehicles, favoring them over other modes. The one-dimensional nature of that type of access system is evident in the journey-to-work travel mode for residents of the city of Ontario, California (shown in fig. 1.1). In that suburban community, 91.6 percent of work trips are in private vehicles as a driver or passenger (U.S. Census Bureau 2012a). Ironically, parking requirements intended to reduce congestion on streets around a development have the effect of lowering achievable density because a given level of population and employment will spread out and use more land on a regional basis. This sprawled arrangement increases regional vehicle miles traveled per capita because places are farther apart.
Adversely impact transit and alternative modes
Research tells us that travelers consider comparative travel time and costs as well as convenience and safety in selecting travel modes. Minimum parking requirements make parking charges unlikely because they interfere in the supply and demand interaction that would yield a market parking price. The lack of paid parking furthers the economic advantage of driving and parking. Why pay a transit fare if you can park free? Why consider arranging your household with one less vehicle if two spaces are bundled with your apartment rent? Parking requirements also affect site design and the feasibility of using modes other than the private vehicle. When buildings are set back from the street behind the parking, serving these sites with transit is difficult because buses cannot get close to the front doors. When density is lower, transit service is less economic, and when transit is less economic, service frequencies are low. This makes transit less competitive. These site design issues also lower the likelihood of walking or bicycling to the site. Finally, parking requirements enable a high level of private vehicle use, which results in wide roads that create an unpleasant or unsafe environment for pedestrians and bicyclists. The roads shown in figure 1.1 meet conventional engineering standards, but their width discourages other forms of transportation- East 4th Street and North Milliken Avenue are 145 and 165 feet from curb to curb, respectively. East 4th Street has a speed limit of 55 miles per hour, creating an environment that is unfavorable or impossible for buses, neighborhood electric vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians.
Ignore cost effectiveness
Parking requirements ignore the cost effectiveness of parking as compared with alternative travel modes. Requiring parking imposes costs related to land, construction, and parking operations and maintenance (O& M). Rarely is the cost effectiveness of parking compared to other feasible travel modes. While actual parking costs vary from place to place and site to site, the following provides an order of magnitude of those costs, combining amortized capital costs with O& M costs: ¹

Suburban surface parking: $ 2.42 per space per day ($ 200,000 per acre land, $ 5,000 per space capital cost, $ 200 per space per year O& M).

Urban three-story parking structure: $ 7.44 per space per day ($ 500,000 per acre land, $ 23,800 per stall capital cost, $ 300 per space per year O& M).

CBD (central business district) underground structure: $ 11.16 per day ($ 0 land cost, $ 40,000 per space capital cost, $ 500 per space per year O& M).

Parking requirements ignore that these costs may be higher than the per-unit costs of alternative transportation modes, such as providing bicycle parking, pedestrian facilities, or ongoing subsidies to transit. For the urban three-story parking structure example, the developer/ owner could offer a $ 7 per day incentive for using transit, walking, or bicycling for every parking space reduced. If parking requirements require the overbuilding of parking, then the cost per space used is even higher. If, for example, a development is required to build twice as much parking as is actually used, then the cost per parking space used is doubled.
Reduce density
Although zoning code provisions such as setbacks, height limits, and floor area ratios directly affect development density, parking requirements have a surprisingly strong influence on density. At about 325 square feet of area per parking space, including drive aisles, parking consumes large amounts of site or building area devoted to a single, low-intensity use. The primary impact is determining the amount of land available for the building footprint after the parking requirement is fulfilled. In some settings, land required for parking may act as more of a limitation to project density than building height, floor area ratio, or setback requirements. In urban areas, the high cost of parking structures reduces building size if it is not economic to build the amount of required parking; the resulting high cost of development thwarts infill development and therefore limits core area density. The phenomenon of excess parking supply limiting density is shown in the case of Ontario Mills Mall shown in chapter 1, figure 1.1, where the parking is sized for peak shopping days in November/ December, not a typical weekday or weekend day.
Create inhospitable project design
Projects shaped by parking requirements often place parking at the front of the facility with the building set back from the street. This is intended to increase the desirability of the building by making the parking supply highly visible, but the practice makes the street inhospitable and makes bus, walking, or bicycle access more difficult. Figure 2.1 shows the view a pedestrian sees of Citizen's Bank Arena. Designers of this project were attentive to the patron's experience once within the arena but require those arriving on foot or by transit to traverse a long distance to reach the facility. Even those who drive must walk through a large parking lot. The impact of lower site density and locating the project in the middle of surface parking lots makes shared parking more difficult- walking distances are long and connection between sites is difficult. In fact, the Citizen's Bank Arena and the Ontario Mills Mall are perfect candidates for shared parking but they are so far apart that the feasibility of sharing is limited. Referring again to figure 1.1, walking from the multifamily residential development to Ontario Mills takes fifteen minutes at a moderate walking pace, including crossing two very wide arterial streets. Would not residents of that development be tempted to drive to the mall and thereby increase its parking utilization?
Thwart development and economic activity
While parking may add to the overall value of a development project, it is usually dead weight on the development pro forma. As shown previously, parking adds land, construction, and operating costs but provides little or no direct revenue. To be fair, if tenants or owners are willing to pay higher rents or prices for projects that have lots of parking, there is an economic value. But often, parking requirements are higher than what developers would build in gauging the market and the financial feasibility of development. The cost associated with fulfilling parking requirements may cause the return on investment to be too low for the development to proceed, thereby thwarting otherwise desired investment and economic development.
Figure 2.1. The pedestrian experience in parking-first environments
A commercial parking requirement of four spaces per 1,000 square feet requires 1,300- 1,400 square feet of parking area for every 1,000 square feet of building area. Obviously, both the building and the parking can be in multistory structures, but that is only feasible when the combination of land costs, construction costs, and rents pencil out. When land prices dictate that parking will be provided at grade, parking requirements affect the amount of site required for a given-sized building or limit the size of a building given a fixed-sized site. These costs affect return on investment directly through project costs, and indirectly through achievable density and therefore projected revenue. The general result of parking requirements and their associated costs is an urban form that is more parking lot than building, and a low economic productivity of the land. In addition, excessive parking requirements lower land value since less rent-generating uses can be built. Lower density, lower value developments produce less property, retail sales, and hotel tax revenues, and fewer business license fees.
Make the construction of affordable housing more challenging
Parking requirements increase the development cost of housing. They also increase the land cost per unit by lowering achievable density. Both impacts make housing less affordable. In larger, high-end housing units, parking is a small proportion of total square footage and building cost, but it has a greater relative impact on affordable housing (Jai and Wachs 1998; Litman 2011; Manville and Shoup 2010). In addition, parking requirements may prevent households from choosing lower cost units that do not have parking. By hampering the production of affordable housing and increasing rents, parking requirements act as an indirect form of exclusionary zoning. This issue is explored further in chapter 6.
Hamper investment in infill development and adaptive reuse in core areas
Parking requirements reduce investment in built-up areas, small sites, brownfields, and sites that have awkward lot configurations. In the first case, land for parking is not available in many built-up areas. Furthermore, an efficient lot layout cannot be achieved on small or irregularly shaped sites, so more land area per parking space is needed. These sites may be in places where investment, rehabilitation, and small business formation are most needed. This is illustrated when a business startup wants to reuse a vacant building that has no room to provide parking. Many of these reuse opportunities are historic buildings. An additional economic development distortion is that because land prices are lower in suburban areas, the cost of complying with parking requirements is lower than in urban infill areas. Finally, parking requirements can skew the business mix in a retail area and hamper the development of new businesses on sites that do not have parking on each parcel. This is the case with restaurants, which are often an economically feasible use but cannot meet the high restaurant parking requirements on-site. This effect on the business mix may harm a traditional retail area that needs restaurants but ends up with clothing resellers because only they can meet the parking requirement.
Directly harm the environment
Parking requirements increase hardscape area, causing urban heat island effects, increased rainwater runoff, and reduced groundwater recharge. Parking surfaces collect polluted runoff because of leaking oil and other fluids from parked cars. Site hardscape reduces opportunities for groundwater retention, open space, tree planting, playgrounds, and other amenities on the site. To the extent that parking and roads are codetermined, the pollution and landscape impacts of parking and roadways have impacts on habitat, flora, and fauna by affecting contiguous wildlife areas, native species, water resources, and the like. Private vehicle transportation systems usually have a larger noise footprint, especially around major facilities. For pollutants such as fine particulates, there are concentrations around parking and transportation infrastructure. Finally, there are pollution and greenhouse gas emissions associated with parking construction activities.
Indirectly harm the environment
When parking requirements encourage driving over transit, walking, and bicycling, the result is more VMT and more traffic congestion. Private vehicle travel usually involves more energy use, more air pollution, higher greenhouse gas emissions, and more vehicle-related accidents. There are also environmental consequences associated with the extraction of fossil fuel energy used to power transportation systems and the energy and material extraction to build vehicles and facilities.
Disadvantage nondrivers
Parking requirements inhibit the emergence of market pricing because mandating a parking supply preempts a market process that would provide and price parking at the intersection of the supply and demand curves. The cost of parking, therefore, is hidden from the consumer. Instead, it is passed on in higher prices, more expensive housing, less business opportunity, and lower salaries at work. One might think that free parking is a boon for low-income drivers, who benefit by saving out-of-pocket costs. That is true, but those who walk, bicycle, or take transit pay higher rents, higher prices for goods and services, and receive lower salaries at work, to pay the costs of providing parking that they do not use. A socially inequitable cross subsidy is created, redistributing from those imposing the least environmental impact on society- those who do not drive- to those who create the greatest impact by driving. Furthermore, those without a car or who are unable to drive one have an access disadvantage. This includes worse access to jobs, especially from the center city to suburban jobs, fresh food, child care, medical care, educational opportunities, and other types of trips that contribute to social mobility. Cities with balanced, multimodal transportation systems provide a smaller penalty to those without private vehicle transportation. Zoning was initially championed as a progressive cause; it is ironic that parking requirements allocate some of the cost burden of accommodating those who park to those who do not park, such as those who access the site using transit, walking, or bicycling travel modes.
Lower physical activity with consequences for public health
To the extent that parking requirements favor private vehicle use they contribute to public health issues such as asthma, through air pollution, and personal inactivity, which is tied to obesity. Frank et al. (2004) found a positive association between each additional hour spent in a car each day and obesity (as measured by Body Mass Index, or BMI), and a negative relationship between each additional mile walked each day and BMI. That study also showed that mixed land uses are associated with lower obesity levels.
Imprecisely represent actual parking utilization levels
The ratios in parking requirements are often devoid of local empirical evidence and are not appropriate to local context and project characteristics. Local jurisdictions infrequently ask, "How much parking is actually used by existing land uses in the community?" Imprecision can occur in two ways. First, ratios may inadequately consider local area factors such as land use/ transportation conditions, parking pricing, income, economic objectives, and the like. Second, they may ignore issues about whether the land use category being considered has characteristics and parking utilization levels that are the same as an average land use of that type. In other words, is there something different about the use or class of uses being considered, such as differing employee density in office buildings or resident income levels in housing?

National averages are sometimes used to create parking ratios, but even the most commonly used source, the Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE) Parking Generation handbook, cautions that the rates they provide are not ITE recommendations for parking requirements and counsels that the users of the information need to be "cognizant of the unique characteristics that can affect parking demand site-by-site" (2010, ix). The ITE authors note that "most of the data currently available are from suburban sites with isolated single land uses with free parking" (2010, 2). Most ITE rates have a suburban bias, and if used uncritically, they perpetuate parking oversupply. Shoup further complains that using national averages is "the misuse of precise numbers to report statistically insignificant estimates" because the sample size for some land uses is small (2003, 1).

An example of variability associated with local context is shown in the data provided in the Parking Generation handbook (2010). A medical office building (categorized by ITE as land use 720) would seem to be a standard use, with consistent parking utilization across many observations and locations. The ITE peak period parking rate is 3.2 vehicles parked per 1,000 square feet of gross floor area (GFA) (2010, 210). The ITE calculated this rate by averaging eighty-six studies of medical office buildings across the United States, completed from 1963 to 2009. The problem is that the range of observations is from 0.96 to 5.65 vehicles per 1,000 square feet of GFA, with a standard deviation of 1.22. This large variation means that there are large differences among the individual projects used to compute the average, whether it is the land use and transportation context or the project's individual characteristics.

Another example of parking utilization variability relates to housing. The U.S. Census American Community Survey (ACS) asks households about their vehicle availability (U.S. Census Bureau 2012b). The results of this annual survey are differentiated by geographic area and by subcategories. Vehicle availability is not the same as parking utilization, but it is a predictor of parking utilization because it indicates the maximum vehicle accumulation if all available vehicles are parked at once (not accounting for visitors). Figure 2.2 shows the vehicles available per occupied housing unit for owner-occupied and renter-occupied units in the United States and five counties in New York State. These include the county that is New York City and nearby counties, encompassing a range of environments from high density to suburban. The range is striking, ranging from less than one-quarter vehicles per rental household in New York County to slightly over two vehicles per household in Nassau County owner-occupied, single-family homes.
Figure 2.2. Household vehicle availability in the USA and New York metropolitan area. Source: US Census data
The ITE Parking Generation handbook provides rates by five housing types, with some differentiation between urban and suburban areas. The rates are more uniform than the census data suggest, ranging between 1.03 and 1.83 vehicles per unit. Clearly, local variation in density, land use mix, transportation systems, and transportation costs influence household vehicle availability, and therefore parking utilization. Chapter 6 provides more detail on how this data can be used to develop residential parking requirements. As mentioned, parking utilization rates also vary by the characteristics of the occupants, whether that is by type of employee in an office building or the characteristics of residents of housing units. Figure 2.3 shows that household vehicle availability varies by household income, indicating that higher incomes predict higher levels of vehicle availability. Using the National Household Transportation Survey (US Department of Transportation 2009), the figure shows that the vehicle availability rate is less than one vehicle per household for incomes under $ 10,000 and then rises steadily with income. If parking requirements treat different forms of housing in the same way, regardless of income, projects that serve lower income residents will be forced to provide more parking than is used, which adds to project cost and harms affordability for this cost-sensitive population.
Figure 2.3. US household vehicle availability versus household income. Source: 2009 National Personal Transportation Survey

Examples illustrated with 350 square feet per space (including drive aisles and ramps), 5 percent cost of money, thirty-year amortization of capital costs (land plus construction cost), 260 days of operation per year. No land costs are attributed to the underground parking example. Costs per space vary depending on landscaping requirements, soft costs, parcel configuration (affecting the efficiency of the design), site and soil conditions, local codes, and many other factors.
From Parking Reform Made Easy by Richard W. Willson. Copyright © 2013 Richard W. Willson. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C.

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Read: Richard Willson, "Case against Minimum Parking Requirements"

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In a recent post, we referenced Richard Willson's book Parking Reform Made Easy, specifically the second chapter, "Case against Minimum Parking Requirements." We have yet to find a more complete summary of the detrimental effects of legally-mandated parking, an issue that we and many other architects and planners believe is central to the pursuit of creating more enjoyable and sustainable urban environments.

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Decatur, GA Unified Development Ordinance

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Decatur, GA Unified Development Ordinance

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Includes cottage courts, ADUs and other missing middle types

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The New Urbanism is a design movement toward complete, compact, connected communities—but it is also a generator of ideas that transform the landscape. Communities are shaped by the movement and flow of ideas, and the New Urbanism has been a particularly rich source of the currents that have directe…

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2. Map Parking Supply

Load up Google Maps, search for your local area, and do a screen capture. Paste the image into MS Paint or a similar program. Start highlighting the open surface parking lots and parking garage structures.

Don't spend a lot of time doing this. If you know your downtown, it should be straight-forward. Be honest, but don't nit-pick; this isn't a scientific peer-reviewed study. I've demonstrated this on the left with a map of downtown St. Paul. (This was created in 2013 so it's a little outdated, but still largely accurate).

This visual can be shocking. The blue spaces represent only off-street surface parking lots and parking garages, but do not highlight on-street or underground parking. Also, they represent only, to the best of my knowledge, available public parking and don't include private parking spaces.

Make this map, share it on social media and email it to your local council member.

3. Document Unused Supply

Walk around your selected area during normal conditions and take photos. By "normal conditions," I mean you shouldn't document supply the evening of a Rolling Stones concert, nor should you snap photos at 4am on Monday morning.

I did this in St. Paul's Lowertown neighborhood. I decided upon an early Thursday evening and a Saturday mid-afternoon. I figured these times would capture both commuter parking during the weekday and out-of-town visitors on the weekend. So as to avoid being accused of cherry-picking locations, I encourage you to be fair and also document areas that have cars parked.

As a final bit of advice, make sure to also snap photos of people out and about.

4. Use Yourself as a Case Study

Do-it-yourself advocacy is as simple as parking. I recommend getting a cheap dashboard camera (or mounting your phone) and recording yourself trying to park. I did this and you can see the results in this video (below).

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4 Easy Steps to Squash the "There's No Parking" Argument

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Load up Google Maps, search for your local area, and do a screen capture. Paste the image into MS Paint or a similar program. Start highlighting the open surface parking lots and parking garage structures. Don't spend a lot of time doing this. If you know your downtown, it should be straight-forward.

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A year ago I was appointed to serve on the planning commission in my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. It's been an interesting year of getting to (kinda) know how things work under-the-hood in my city. Contrary to what some of you might think, being thought of (at least in some circles) as an influential urban thinker means very little here in my small town. Getting positive things done requires the same stuff here as everywhere else: time, relationships and endless meetings.

In the latter half of 2017, the school district came to our meeting and presented their plan for an upcoming bond referendum, including potential changes to each of the district's neighborhood schools. There is a lot to discuss there, but one thing that stood out was the district's passion for off street parking facilities. Their extensive slide deck showed their proposed amount of parking as well as the city's requirements. Sometimes they wanted more than we require, but sometimes we required more than they were asking for.

Anticipating some detailed discussion on this in the coming months, I felt it was important to sideline the city's parking mandate. I and some of my fellow commissioners did not want our code - which is arbitrary and excessive like most parking requirements - to set the floor for the conversation. After some discussion, we proposed an ordinance amendment to repeal that line item - just the minimum for schools - and forward that recommendation to the council.

As part of the conversation at the planning commission, I made a presentation in what is becoming my second language (powerpoint). I gave the same presentation this past Tuesday to the city council. I'm sharing it here so you can see how I'm approaching this conversation in my own community. It's a slow, difficult conversation that I hope picks up momentum in time.

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A year ago I was appointed to serve on the planning commission in my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. It's been an interesting year of getting to (kinda) know how things work under-the-hood in my city. Contrary to what some of you might think, being thought of (at least in some circles) as an influential urban thinker means very little here in my small town.

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design for social diversity (routledge equity

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justice and the sustainable city series)

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architecture / urban & land use planning

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city & town planning - architectural aspects

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city & town planning: architectural aspects

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Design for Social Diversity (Routledge Equity, Justice and the Sustainable City series)

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The most successful urban communities are very often those that are the most diverse - in terms of income, age, family structure and ethnicity - and yet poor urban design and planning can stifle the very diversity that makes communities successful. Just as poor urban design can lead to sterile mo...

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Edmund N. Bacon

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How Regulations Affect Urban Form, Emily Talen

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City Rules offers a challenge to students and professionals in urban planning, design, and policy to change the rules of city-building, using regulations to reinvigorate, rather than stifle, our communities. Emily Talen demonstrates that regulations are a primary detriment to the creation of a desirable urban form.

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"Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice."

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"Food Trucks, Cultural Identity, and Social Justice."

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Form-Based Codes for Re-inventing Districts. 

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Form-Based Codes for Re-inventing Districts. 

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Dublin, Ohio, recently broke ground on its Bridge Street District , an urban and walkable neighborhood that will complement its village center. The largest redevelopment project ever in Dublin, the Bridge Street District is the first step in transforming part of the town into an urbanized, walkable neighborhood, providing housing, dining, retail and office space that appeals to a talented young workforce-as well as seasoned professionals.

A suburb of Columbus, Dublin has 44,000 residents and 50,000 office workers. As recently as 1970, Dublin's 681 residents lived on farms and in a small historic village center. The city now is built in sprawling housing pods and office parks, shaped by conventional suburban zoning and wide, 20th Century thoroughfares.

In order to meet a changing market, the city adopted a form-based code for a redevelopment area and committed resources to build walkable thoroughfares and infrastructure. The city brought in new urban planners, including Goody Clancy of Boston, to help with the transition. The developer interest has been strong.

Phase 1 of the $350 million project includes the redesign of Riverside Drive, a US highway, and a mixed-use development on urban blocks once occupied by parking lots and a shopping center. The initial development provides 271 apartments, restaurants, shops, and two parking garages, scheduled to open in 2016. A pedestrian bridge will cross the Scioto River to connect to the old village center.

"This is going to be a dynamic, vibrant neighborhood," Dublin City Manager Dana McDaniel told The Columbus Dispatch. "I think it's a bit of paradigm shift" for the suburb, which had been more oriented toward driving than walking over the past few decades. The success of the city's historic village center, which is packed with restaurants, shops, and people, inspired the new plans.

The first phase includes more than $155 million in public improvements, of which the city will contribute $43.1 million-$32 million for parking garages and $11.1 for thoroughfare changes.

Phase Two will include a new hotel, an events center, a performing-arts center and an office building - and is slated to open in late 2017.

That's just the beginning. The Bridge Street District comprises about 6 percent of Dublin's land area-or 1,000 acres. A whole new downtown could provide investment opportunities for a half century. The city is planning a new street grid that is well connected to existing thoroughfares:

The Bridge Street District is a purposeful response to market demand. People want to live and work in urban centers, "whether its Short North (a neighborhood in Columbus) or Dublin or other places outside of the main city," according to Jonathan Barnes, an architect working on the development.

The new $17 million pedestrian bridge is expected to a major part of the appeal of the Bridge Street District.

The move toward mixed-use, compact development has been encouraged by the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), which owns about 80 acres in Dublin. OCLC, with about 1,000 employees in central Ohio, is looking toward compact urbanism as a tool to attract more high-tech, educated employees.

Goody Clancy studied the Bridge Street corridor-including the small core of an old village-and presented concepts four years ago for developing much of the corridor outside the village at much higher than current densities. In some areas, the firm proposed 40 to 50 housing units an acre. That was startling "for a community that used to think of 5 dwellings an acre as high," said one city official, but it seems to have helped Dubliners re-envision the future.

Robert Steuteville is editor and executive director of Better Cities & Towns.

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Dublin, Ohio, recently broke ground on its Bridge Street District , an urban and walkable neighborhood that will complement its village center. The largest redevelopment project ever in Dublin, the Bridge Street District is the first step in transforming part of the town into an urbanized, walkable neighborhood, providing housing, dining, retail and office space that appeals to a talented young workforce-as well as seasoned professionals.

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powerful book on the built environment as emotional infrastructure. Often planners will site data and demographics without getting to the deeper meanings of place attachment that links people to their communities.

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Sequel to High Cost of Free Parking.

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Helpful tips for engaging community members online, Uses language from urban design to help planners think about creating web based groups around collaborative community decision making.

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A Pattern Language is a book about architecture that was written in the 1970s, before the Web as we know it was even conceived. But the book provides hundreds of valuable patterns for community planning and architectural design, many of which can easily be applied to online communities and social networking websites.

Niche social networks are popping up online all the time, with many designers and developers taking advantage of pre-built social network platforms and making little modification. It makes sense, after all: why reinvent the wheel when perfectly good ones are available?

You may want to take a look at the following related posts:

But if you step back and really consider how your social network or online community is set up, you might be able to improve the user experience and overall user satisfaction by leaps and bounds. Looking to other fields, such as architecture and civil engineering, is one way to gain new ideas without having to reinvent the wheel.

Overall Community Design

We'll take a top-down approach here and look at broad aspects of community design first. The concepts below cover everything from the actual and perceived size of communities to how your communities should be structured and the types of interaction they should enable.

A Community of 7,000

Communities that are too large are not effective. While this doesn't mean you should limit the size of your overall website, you should consider ways of creating smaller sub-communities within the website if it is big.

Creating sub-communities within the larger whole is one way to go about this. Another option is to limit exposure to the full membership (such as by not having a membership directory, but only showing members via search). The main goal here is to make the community feel more intimate and manageable to the casual user.

The purpose here is to make each member feel as though they matter in the grand scheme of things. If the user sees a membership roster that includes a 100,000 names, they'll feel like a tiny fish in a huge pond. But if they're one of only a few thousand, they'll feel like their voice might actually be heard.

Identifiable Neighborhoods

People need to feel part of a group, a neighborhood. In the real world this is often done by physical boundaries between actual neighborhoods. Online, it can be a bit trickier, and the need doesn't go away.

Designers and developers can accomplish this in a few ways. One is to allow members to form groups and allow each group to have its own identity. This can be done through customizable pages, banners, badges or other means. These groups over time will start to feel like neighborhoods and small communities within the larger network.

Main Building

Think of the main building as the focus of your website. Even a cluster of buildings should have one primary building, where new visitors will start.

Think of the main building as your home page. From here, visitors should be able to access the most important parts of the website. They should be able to get a feel for what the website contains and where to go next. Most of all, your home page should be welcoming and unintimidating to new and old visitors alike.

Four-Story Limit

The four-story limit refers, in architecture at least, to the oppressive feeling that taller buildings have on occupants. In Web design, this is relevant to the way information is structured on your website. Think of your layers of navigation as stories.

Regardless of the structure of your website, keeping the navigation to four levels is user-friendly and makes your entire website seem streamlined and responsive. While the four-level rule is rather arbitrary (similar to the three-clicks rule), keeping your navigation streamlined and simple makes a huge difference to the user experience.

Activity Nodes

Group like activities together. For example, messaging tasks should be grouped together so that users can communicate in a variety of ways (private message, public message, chat, etc.) from a single control panel. Similarly, games should be grouped together, as should tasks dealing with media.

This is definitely a usability challenge for many community websites. For example, Facebook has three basic types of messaging: chat, private messages and wall posts. All three are done in different areas of the website (chats are in the footer, private messages are accessed from the header or a person's profile page, and wall posts are done on individual profiles). While separating these tasks wouldn't necessarily be a deal-breker for most websites, clustering them together would definitely improve usability.

Promenade

In a city, a promenade is a central gathering place, a place to see and be seen. Online communities need similar venues. For many websites, this would be a forum or chat room. These are places where members can gather in "public," discuss issues in an open environment and meet other members.

These public spaces are important to growing an online community, especially a niche community in which users don't know each other but likely share common interests. They foster a broader sense of community and help members forge deeper relationships.

Old People Everywhere

This one always makes me smile. While it sounds a bit arbitrary, it means that you should make it easy for people from different walks of life and with different backgrounds to interact. Encourage a diverse membership, and you'll have a more vibrant, active community.

Local Town Hall

In the real world, a town hall is where citizens go to voice their opinions on matters of public concern and to interact with their government. Online communities should have similar forums for their members to give suggestions, ask questions and interact with those who govern the website.

On some websites, this could be an official support forum, while on others it could just be an open support form. Open forums are especially effective in large communities because fellow members can often answer questions faster than official community leaders. In any case, support forums should always be moderated and monitored to ensure that questions are answered correctly.

Necklace of Community Projects

Unofficial community-based projects should be encouraged. The grassroots movement is alive and well in many social networks and communities, and members are often quite adept at organizing themselves for common causes. This should be fostered within communities and encouraged when appropriate.

Patterns For Neighborhoods And Groups Of Buildings: Group And Subgroup Design

While the organization of groups within your community will, to a certain degree, mimic the overall community structure, there are special considerations. These include subgroups for teenagers and how to encourage interaction between users.

Teenage Society

If you're building a website that will have teenage members, you'll need to make special provisions for them. While there are certainly legal and ethical considerations when dealing with minors (such as putting in place reasonable protections from predators), there are also social considerations.

Teenagers are neither children nor adults. They're stuck in the middle, which can often be uncomfortable and frustrating for them. Build features that allow them to express themselves and interact in a way that's safe but still gives them a sense of freedom.

Also consider segregating teenagers from adult members of a community to some extent, depending on the nature of the website. Depending on the content, this may not be necessary on some websites, but on other websites having teens-only and adults-only areas, as well as some open to both, would help.

Building Complex

Buildings work best when they're part of a larger complex of buildings, which is made up of big and small parts. To be most effective, a complex of buildings should be based on the social interactions that take place there: small buildings where they're appropriate, and large buildings where they make sense. And there should be cohesion, too.

A website is similar. It should have a complex of interconnected parts, some large and some small, to make it feel more human. And its structure should make sense, with parts only as big as they need to be. This particularly applies to groups.

Circulation Realms

Circulation realms refer to the navigational structures in buildings that reduce the sense of disorientation one feel when moving through a large sterile building. These circulation realms should grow progressively smaller as one goes deeper into the building, and they should be named appropriately so that you can direct someone by telling then which realms to pass through.

In Web design, this applies specifically to the navigational structure. Create realms that members pass through to reach one area of the website or another, with progressively smaller sections and pages. The main difference with a website, though, is that you will also want to create shortcuts to the inner parts that are used most frequently, bypassing several realms in between.

Common Areas at the Heart

Every group needs a common area where they can congregate. This space can be semi-public or restricted to group members. But it should serve as a common meeting place for group members.

Communities as a whole need these types of spaces, too. That's generally accomplished through fully public areas, such as the promenade mentioned above.

Eating Atmosphere

In a home or small group, the atmosphere in which people eat is important. An uncomfortable eating atmosphere makes people rush through their meal so that they can relax. A more inviting and comfortable eating atmosphere encourages people to linger. People often bond more easily if they are able to break bread together.

The "eating atmosphere" on your website is important. Are the communal areas for groups comfortable? Do they foster communication and make people want to linger? The atmosphere you create, both in terms of design and overall user experience, has a direct impact on how long people linger on your website. While some of this is accomplished by the members themselves, consider ways to make these common areas more inviting and enticing to your members.

Something Roughly in the Middle

A public space without a center stays empty. People need a place to congregate. They need a center of activity where they can interact with one another. It's only logical that this place should be roughly in the center of their community.

By "center", I mean it should be easily accessible from pretty much anywhere on the website or within the group. If it's easily accessible, people will use it more. If they have to navigate 15 other pages to get there, it won't get used.

Main Gateways

There should be main entrances to different areas of your website. These gateways let visitors know that they're transitioning from one area to another. A gateway in Web design is often a landing page. It's a marker that tells visitors what they might want to do in that particular section or what they might find.

Think of how you would transition visitors from one area of the website to another. Having clear transitions that let visitors know they're moving from one place to another is helpful, just as natural and man-made landmarks and gateways do in the real world. They prevent confusion, and people feel secure when they know where they are.

Building And Interior Patterns: Profile Design

The design of individual profile pages on your website is often an important part of community design. If members aren't pleased with how your profile pages are designed and how they function, they'll likely be unhappy with the website as a whole. After all, these pages represent users to other members and the world. If they can't represent themselves how they want, they'll feel insecure about the community as a whole and may leave in favor of websites that give them more control.

Your Own Home

Everyone should have their own home in the real world, a place they can go to at the end of the day that's safe and secure. In the online world, this would be the profile page.

People want to customize their home, make it their own, host friends there, put their mark on it and let people know that this is their space and that it reflects their personality.

In the online world, people want to do the same thing. While you don't have to let your members go crazy with profile page customizations (a la MySpace), you should allow members to choose the information they share with other members. Remember that some members will be more private than others, just like in real life. One person may have no problem letting everyone in the community see all of their profile information, while another may prefer to limit it to their friends (or even sub-groups of their friends). Implement options that allow this, and you'll have happier members.

Small Services Without Red Tape

Members should be able to make changes without having to jump through hoops. While certain changes should require verification (such as changing an email address or password), changes that are easy to reverse or undo should be simple to make in the first place.

Don't make members go through endless verification and confirmation simply to change their "About" information or to upload a photo. Make these things easy to do, with minimal verification required if they're logged in.

Intimacy Gradients

We've already hinted at privacy a bit, but let's go a bit deeper into it. In an online community, people will have different groups of contacts. Some contacts will be close friends from real life, some family members, others work colleagues, still others acquaintances they've met online.

We usually don't want to share all of our information with all of these groups. We might want to make our phone number available to close friends and family members but not to acquaintances we've met online. But what often happens is that we have to hide certain details from everyone because we can't restrict access to certain groups.

So, allow your members to customize their privacy settings so that they can fine-tune the access their contacts have. Let them categorize contacts according to their own standards and then include or exclude groups from certain areas as they choose. This is already being implemented on some social networks, Facebook being the most well-known example.

Opening to the Street

While many people choose to keep most of their profile information private on a network, most people want to at least be findable. In other words, they need a public face. They need an opening to the street.

Again, let members choose what to open to casual passers-by and what to restrict to friends. The more power you give to members, the more satisfied they'll be with your website.

Short Passages

Moving from one profile to another should be quick and comfortable. You want members to interact with one another, and so the pathways between them should be inviting.

Think of ways to encourage interaction between members along these passages. One way to do this is through comments on the activities of others. These comment areas could serve as passages between profiles. In the best implementation, these passages would be quick to travel and would encourage members to communicate with one another and move between profiles.

Patterns For How To Build Things: Overall Design And Information Architecture

We've talked a lot about the design and front-end architecture of community websites. But this doesn't mean that the back-end of the website-the stuff under the hood-is any less important. A Pattern Language offers plenty of guidelines on internal construction, too. Here are a few of the most pertinent concepts.

Paths and Goals

Every pathway on your website should lead to a specific goal. Think through why you're linking one area to another, and figure out whether it makes sense. Don't put a navigational pathway somewhere just because you can. Do it because it makes sense and because it leads to some greater goal or purpose for the website.

Main Entrance

The main entrance to your website (usually the home page) should invite visitors to stick around. This page must serve a few different functions. It should encourage new visitors to sign up for an account. It should point new members in the right direction. And it should give long-time members access to the places they want to visit.

One way to accomplish these varied tasks is to adjust the home page to different visitors. If a visitor arrives and is not logged in, give them the option to log in or sign up (emphasizing the latter in most cases). If they arrive and are already logged in, you could direct them to certain areas depending on the length of their membership or other metrics. In fact, one of the best ways to welcome established members is to let them choose where to go upon arrival. This way, they can go immediately to their favorite area without having to go through unnecessary navigation.

Structure Follows Social Spaces

The structure of a building should be based on the building's purpose and the social functions that will take place within it. The same is true of a social network.

Think of how your members would likely use the website, and then build the structure accordingly. If the main functions will revolve around profiles, then structure the website around those profiles. If the main functions will revolve around a forum, then build the website around the forum, making profiles and other areas secondary.

Root Foundations

Trees have a better structural foundation than any other natural object. A tree's structure simply continues underground. If you dig up a tree and shake off the dirt, you'll have a hard time figuring out exactly where the ground came up to. The root structures that lie below ground to some extent mimic the branch systems above.

Image Credit: victoriapeckham
The best websites transition smoothly from front-end to back-end structure. And your back-end should mimic as much as possible the front-end's structure. This simplifies maintenance and makes it easier to train new users.

Good Materials

Solid buildings have to be constructed with good materials. This means not only materials of high quality, but also materials that suit their purpose. You don't need 10" beams for a house that's 10' square. Likewise, even the highest-quality 2x4 wood won't stay straight across a 30' span.

Think through what your website needs to accomplish, and then choose the materials that will effectively accomplish those functions. For one website, you might be able to use an out-of-the-box platform with few modifications. On another, starting from the ground up and building a completely custom platform would be better. In either case, use good materials, and don't take shortcuts if you want your website's architecture to stand over time (and grow).

Gradual Stiffening

When a building is constructed, the basic frame usually isn't very stiff relative to its overall size. But gradually, as sheathing and finishing materials are added, the overall structure stiffens. By the time the building is completed, it's as stiff as it needs to be.

The same is true of websites. Your basic frame should be as flexible as you can make it, while still providing the necessary structural components. Then, as the website grows and evolves, stiffen things up as necessary. Think of the framing phase as beta testing, when things might change. The website will eventually grow into a solid building, as the kinks are worked out.

But remember, even a finished building needs to be able to change if necessary. Applying a new coat of paint (a new design) or tearing down a wall (bridging two sections) should be possible.

Conclusion

Sometimes stepping back from the way we've always approached design and looking at it from a different angle leads to better patterns and ideas. Taking principles from architectural design and community planning and applying them to Web design and online communities is only one example. Look at things from a different perspective the next time you're stuck on a design or development project. You may find a completely new way to approach what seemed an insurmountable problem.

Further Resources

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Applying "A Pattern Language" To Online Community Design - Smashing Magazine

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A Pattern Language_ is a book about architecture that was written in the 1970s, before the Web as we know it was even conceived. But the book provides hundreds of valuable patterns for community planning and architectural design, many of which can easily be applied to online communities and social networking websites.

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Grassroots Community Planning and Design 

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Grassroots Community Planning and Design 

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A Case Study

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Using a mix of social media, apps, and planning sessions, a coalition of urban designers and residents are planning their neighborhood from the ground-up.

As social media evolves and urban design evolve, are there possibilities for the two to cross-pollinate and offer new, more democratic paths in city-making? This question was the starting point for The Hackable City, a research project now six years in the making. Initiated in 2012, The Hackable City is a partnership between the firm I founded, One Architecture and Urbanism (based in Amsterdam and New York), and the Dutch independent research group The Mobile City, as well as a number of embedded researchers at universities across the Netherlands.

Since its founding, our Hackable City initiative has become increasingly focused on a development close to home-the unassuming neighborhood of Buiksloterham, which stretches across a formerly industrial waterfront just north of Amsterdam's historic core. The site in question had long been in development limbo; the 188-acre reclaimed brownfield, once home to an airplane factory, an oil refinery, and shipbuilding spaces, was slated for redevelopment by the city in the early 2000s. However, in 2008, the Dutch economy crashed. The developers pulled out, project funding folded, and Buiksloterham's fate was thrown into uncertainty.

Soon after, an informal group of planners, urbanists, and Hackable City members collectively called Beleef Buiksloterham ("Experience Buiksloterham") pitched a new direction to the city for the site's development. Our angle was: what if, instead of letting the highest-paying developers take the reigns, Buiksloterham became a living laboratory for the idea of a circular economy -an approach in which resources such as energy, water, building materials, and peer-to-peer knowledge sharing are thought of as circular systems? Another central tenet of the proposal focused on accessibility and self-building. What if-in this one neighborhood-locals, residents, and engaged citizens were given the agency to directly participate in the design-build process using everyday social tools like Facebook and Twitter?

Idealistic though it may sound, Circular Buiksloterham, as the district has come to be called, is inching toward reality. With the City of Amsterdam's endorsement and the hard work of many invested coalitions, the brownfield has become a long-term experiment prototyping the potential of organic, bottom-up planning. This new model involves long-term, public-private partnerships putting design into the hands of residents and small collaboratives.

Throughout Buiksloterham's development, Hackable City researchers have used the site to create programs, games, and publications around the idea of "hackable city-making;" i.e. the use of "hacker" techniques in urban design. In 2014, our researchers and Hackable members created a phone app allowing self-builders (residents organizing the creation of their own homes) in the neighborhood to share lessons learned about building design and construction, interactions with contractors, and more. Our researchers also created a series of games exploring topics from energy efficiency to water management. Public workshops with residents and designers have become part and parcel of the planning process, rather than a box to check off a grant application-this is both what makes Buiksloterham so unique and has also allowed it to secure municipal backing for the long haul.

"It's a long process, but it goes gradually, and you grow with it," said a Buiksloterham resident, in conversation with Bart Aptroot, director of One Architecture and Urbanism's Amsterdam office. "It's nice that there's time to learn, for example, that you can develop ideas and desires for your new home even in the pressure cooker housing market of Amsterdam. Though we originally wanted more space, we ended up in a smaller house with a garden. I always wanted that garden, but forgot it was a possibility."

At present, the entire district of Buiksloterham is slated for an estimated $2.5 billion in funds for future development, including $55 million in construction costs for a 180-unit apartment complex designed by Beleef Buiksloterham in partnership with future residents. The entire district should eventually facilitate about 4,000 housing units, of which about 10 percent have already been built. Among those completed is ELTA, a 16-unit apartment tower designed by our core team at One Architecture and Urbanism, Bot Bouw Initiatief, and co-developed with the building's tenants.

In current estimates, the neighborhood is projected to grow from 200 to around 10,000 residents, with current zoning regulations allowing for around 3.7 million square feet of additional commercial space and a half-million square feet of communal and recreational space. Besides One Architecture, DELVA Landscape Architects has also assisted in the design of public infrastructure and greenways. Most other projects have been initiated through smaller collaborations among self-builders. The neighborhood is already home to an informal bar named Café de Ceuvel that also serves as a major social and organizational hub. The district also includes a public school for children with mental disabilities, a primary school, and medical practice, all of which are housed in temporary structures until permanent accommodations are constructed.

The creation of all these institutions have been community-led initiatives. Under current market conditions, the neighborhood's overall revenue for development, generated from taxes and outside investment, will quadruple. We hope that Buiksloterham can set an example of the power of grassroots planning practices for iterative neighborhoods as well as the successes of long-term investment in community partnerships across the world.

The Hackable City recently released a series of informal toolkits on collaborative urbanism and grassroots citymaking, 'The Hackable City' Cahiers 1-3, available on the collective's website. In Fall 2018, stay tuned for the forthcoming Springer edition The Hackable City Edited Volume: Digital Media and Collaborative Citymaking in the Network Society.
Matthijs Bouw is the Founder and Principal of One Architecture & Urbanism, an Amsterdam and New York-based design and planning firm, as well as Rockefeller Urban Resilience Fellow for PennDesign at the University of Pennsylvania. The Hackable City is a project by One Architecture and Urbanism, The Mobile City, the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Utrecht University, the Netherlands Ministry of Internal Affairs, Pakhuis De Zwijger, and Stadslab Circulair Buiksloterham. Their work has been funded, among others, by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Special thanks to Martijn de Waal and Michiel de Lange for their collaboration. You may also enjoy "How Architects Can Fight Climate Change During the Midterm Elections."
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This Tiny Amsterdam Neighborhood Is a Prototype for Grassroots Urban Planning

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Using a mix of social media, apps, and planning sessions, a coalition of urban designers and residents are planning their neighborhood from the ground-up. As social media evolves and urban design evolve, are there possibilities for the two to cross-pollinate and offer new, more democratic paths in city-making?

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Bridge Street District City of Dublin, Ohio

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Bridge Street District City of Dublin, Ohio

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Strong public/private investment in the creation of a new walkable mixed use district. Capital projects, form based code, private investors.

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