Planning - Building the Skyline

September 27, 2021 by Jason Barr 7 Comments

Housing Gotham (Part I): The 21st Century So Far

Jason M. Barr (@JasonBarrRU) and Sean Franklin September 27, 2021

The 1970s was New York’s darkest decade. The government nearly went bankrupt. A recession that began in 1969 triggered the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs. Between 1970 and 1980, Gotham’s population shrank by more than 800,000 people, while arsonists burned down entire neighborhoods.

In those years, only a true visionary could have foreseen the city’s rebound. Yet starting in the early 1990s, New York began a dramatic resurgence. New service-based industries grew in place of the old factory jobs. Crime rates fell, and the decay and despair that had marked the previous years were replaced with reinvestment and optimism.

Economic growth and a sense of security drew people back so that by 2000 the population had recovered to its earlier peak. To this day, the population continues to increase to new highs. But the laws of supply and demand, being what they are, suggest that, while the city can hold more people, it cannot build fast enough to keep up with demand. The result has been more homelessness, increasing affordability problems, and greater income inequality.

Despite these issues, the questions remain: How has New York’s housing stock changed over the 21^st century? Has it grown or shrank? If so, where and why? Which neighborhoods are punching at their weight, and which ones are not doing their part in the great housing game? To this end, we looked at changes across the Big Apple over the roughly two-decade period from 2002 to 2020 (pre-pandemic) to better understand how and where New York is housing its people.

The answers might surprise you.

Counting Houses

One of the benefits of being interested in New York City’s housing market is that city agencies have been on the vanguard of providing large data sets to the public. One is particularly relevant—the Primary Land Use Tax Output (PLUTO) file—which is online going back to 2002. The PLUTO file includes information about every tax lot in New York City and tells, among other things for each one, the building type, how many housing units it contains, the building height, and so on. The file allows for a very detailed look at the changes in Gotham’s housing supply.

Housing unit additions can appear in three ways: First is through new construction. The second is from the splitting up of extant units within a building. For example, a one-family house can be subdivided into a two-family house. Lastly is through building conversions, where, for example an old office or loft building is refitted for residential use. The critical point is that we cannot solely rely on new construction measures if we truly want to understand the changes in housing supply. A flexible housing market will depend on all three.

For that matter, there are forces that can shrink supply: Buildings can be demolished, residential units in the same building can be combined, or buildings can be converted to other uses. Thus, the net housing changes across the city depend on both the “adding” and the “subtracting” forces.

Two Decades In

In 2002, the city had about 3.2 million housing units. By 2020, that number was just over 3.6 million units, a growth rate of about 13.5%. In the same period, New York’s total population grew by about 10%. On the surface, this seems promising; the housing stock increased faster than the population.

But the difference of about 3 – 4% is problematic on several fronts. First, a healthy housing market should have a reasonably high vacancy rate, say between 7-10%. The market should have enough available units so that new people coming in and those switching their housing all have enough choices and are not duking it out over just a handful of options. Before the pandemic, the city’s overall rental vacancy rate was 3.3%, and 10.5% of rental housing was overcrowded. Furthermore, the vacancy rate for rent-stabilized units was a minuscule 2.06%, while private, non-regulated units were vacant at a 6.07% rate. Consider that about two out of every three New Yorkers is a renter, and 58% of rental units are regulated or rent-stabilized.

Second, a relatively high number of units—especially in Manhattan—are used as a pied-à-terre or second home, which remain empty for a significant fraction of the year and are not available for residents. One estimate puts that figure at 10,415 units for Manhattan. While that is only 1% of all Manhattan units, it’s another source “removed” from the local market. This issue is likely made worse by Airbnb, where visitors can soak up “slack” housing.

Household Size

Additionally, the “desired” household size has been shrinking over time. As incomes rise, people are less willing to shack up with roommates, and they want more space. Also, the composition of households is changing. The proportion of traditional nuclear families with two spouses with children has dramatically fallen. In contrast, households of couples with no children and single-person households have grown in their place. All these various demand-side changes put pressure on New York’s housing stock.

Given the overall difficulty in building, new construction appears mainly at the higher end of the market. So, the average net difference between the population and the housing stock growth might not reflect housing access across all groups. As a hypothetical example, it may be that the net growth in housing units relative to the population for the upper-income households is 10%. At the same time, for the lower-income folks, it is 1%, leaving an average difference of 4%. And while recent research shows that even high-end high-rise apartment building construction helps reduce prices, its impact on lower-income residents is less direct.

A way to understand the relative growth in the 21^st century is to look at another time in New York history when the population grew rapidly while maintaining relatively affordable housing prices. Census data from 1910 and 1930 reveal that New York City’s population grew by 45% in the two-decade period, while the number of households (our measure of housing units) grew by 78%. Prorating that to the 10% population growth seen in the 21^st century would suggest housing stock growth would need to have been at least 17% to keep prices in check (assuming, as well, that housing is broadly created for those across the income spectrum).

In short, when we consider all the forces as work, a net gain of housing units of about 3-4% higher than the population growth shows that housing supply is not matching demand across the entire income spectrum.

A Tour Across the City

What has happened to New York’s housing stock across different neighborhoods since the beginning of the 21^st century? Using our data set and focusing on the city block level, we created three categories. Category I is “Lost Units.” A block in this group had six or fewer units in 2002 as compared to 2020. Category II is “No change.” Being in this group means that the block was within plus or minus five units over the two-decade period. Lastly, category III is “Gained Units,” which means a block added more than five units. The five-units cut-off is admittedly arbitrary but seems reasonable to understand better changes in units over time: loss, about the same, or growth.

Static New York. A map of New York City blocks that lost units (dark blue) or stayed about the same (light blue). Here “same” means unit counts changed between +/- 5 units since 2002. Source: NYC PLUTO files.

We then created a map of New York City, which shows, for every block, if that block either stayed the same or lost units (the “Gained Units” map is here). In a growing and flexible city, we would expect to see many neighborhoods “share the burden” to accommodate that growth. But in fact, we see something very different. The vast majority of New York City over the 21^st century either lost units or remained about the same. Of the approximately 29,000 city blocks, 75% saw either no change or a loss of units, with 4% of those losing six or more units (14% of blocks lost one or more units–see map below). Only 25% of blocks saw an increase in six or more units. In short, the block-level analysis shows that much of the city is quite static, unwilling or unable to pony up more housing.

Loss Clusters

If we zoom into the clusters that lost housing, we can see that they are mainly in Manhattan and Brooklyn. One set of loss clusters—the Upper West Side, the Upper East Side, and Greenwich Village in Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope in Brooklyn—have many landmarked historical districts. It appears that landmarking residential neighborhoods is a great way to shrink the housing stock.

Likely, because of their charm and the limits to new construction, wealthier people move in and then combine units. Brownstone buildings with, say, eight apartments could be bought and converted to a single-family dwelling, or someone could buy two adjacent apartments and combine them into one. The takeaway is that while landmarking may be a way to preserve the city’s built heritage, it comes with a price: Less housing for everyone else.

The third “loss cluster” is southern Brooklyn, particularly in the Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay areas. Stephen Smith, a New York housing expert and blogger at Market Urbanism, has written on this phenomenon in the Observer. The neighborhood has emerged as an ethnic enclave for Syrian Jews, who are tearing down older two-family homes and replacing them with single-family ones or are combining lots to build one house in place of two.

The Losers of New York. Left: Maps of Manhattan Blocks that Lost More Than Two Units between 2002 and 2020. Right: Same for Brooklyn Note: Boroughs not to scale. Source: NYC PLUTO files.

What Drove Changes in the Housing Stock? A Block Level Analysis

More broadly, besides landmarking, what can help account for changes in the number of housing units, at the block level, across the city, on average? To do this, we performed a statistical (regression analysis) that looks at the factors likely to be driving changes (or not) on each block. The analysis looks at characteristics of blocks and neighborhoods in 2002 to see which are predictors of the relative changes in housing units over the two-decade period. (The data and the statistical results can be found here.)

The analysis shows that historical landmarked residential neighborhoods are “bad” for housing stock growth, as the maps suggest. For example, a block with ten landmarked properties in 2002 lost 2-3% of its housing units two decades later, on average. Interestingly, however, landmarked commercial districts had the opposite effect. Those areas that were formerly retail, lofts, or businesses, and were landmarked, saw their housing stocks grow because the insides were converted to apartments. However, the number and size of residential landmarked districts are much greater than the number of commercial landmarked districts, so the net effect of landmarking was to decrease the housing stock.

A Heavy Lifting Index

The statistical analysis lets us create a “heaving lifting index” that shows the community districts that saw significant construction. The map below shows the community districts in the top quartile for proportionally adding units, all else equal. They tend to be in the densest parts of the city (and in gentrifying neighborhoods, see below).

But within these neighborhoods, most of the increases in the housing stock came from “low hanging fruit” lots, what one might call the non-NIMBYable blocks. That is, most of the blocks that saw housing unit growth had formerly been those with many commercial/non-residential structures or were parking or vacant lots. In other words, residential districts in 2002 were more likely to lose units over the two-decade period than their more commercial counterparts. The results strongly suggest that once a block is converted to residential use, its prospects for adding more housing are bleak.

Finally, the results also show that those neighborhoods with more generous zoning provisions added more housing. Here we look at the average allowable floor area ratio on each block in 2002, where the FAR measures the total allowable building area per square foot of land. We find that, on average, a block with a 10% more generous FAR led to 1.2% more housing, all else equal. Not a huge number, but it suggests that restrictive zoning is bad for the housing supply. (We leave for future analysis the causes and consequences of rezonings on New York’s housing supply.)

“Heavy Lifting Districts.” The blue community districts were in the top quartile for adding units between 2002 and 2020, holding building and neighborhood factors constant. Source: See here.

The Gentrification Effect

One of the most contentious issues for urban America in the 21^st century is gentrification. The renewed desire for young professionals to live in the city has meant that some lower-income neighborhoods have seen an influx of high-educated, high-skilled workers. The demographic shifts in these neighborhoods have generated resentment from the old-timers, who see the newcomers as driving price increases, displacement, and changes in the character and feel of their communities.

We wanted to understand how gentrification might be driving changes in New York’s housing stock. To make matters more concrete, we define a census tract as “gentrifying” based on two conditions. First, in 2000, it had an average income in the bottom half of all census tracts in the city. Second, in the two-decade period, it was in the top half of growth in the share of college-educated residents. In short, the idea was to look at those relatively low-income neighborhoods in 2000 that saw a large influx of higher-education residents during the period (the gentrifying neighborhoods map can be found here).

The census tract analysis shows that, typically, gentrifying neighborhoods were associated with a rise in the total number of units. On average, if a census tract was classified as gentrifying, it saw an increase of about 4-6% in the number of units, all else equal.

Recent research has not found strong evidence of gentrification driving displacement. Since gentrifying neighborhoods tend to be more dynamic, the evidence suggests that higher educated folks replace the residents leaving for reasons independent of displacement. Other research has found the rise of “Yuppy fish tanks”—pockets of new construction within the historic neighborhoods. Our findings are consistent with these.

The View from 1250 Feet

Overall, what does our analysis suggest? First, the total growth in the housing stock appears not to have kept up with the demand and increase in the population. While net housing units grew about 3-4% more than the population, this has not been enough to meet New York’s housing needs.

The second is that many neighborhoods lost units over the two-decade period. Much of this loss was in historic districts. In Brooklyn, several loss pockets came from teardowns of two-family homes replaced by one-family homes. While some housing loss across the city is natural in an evolving and dynamic metropolis, the loss we see does not appear to come from switches to other vital purposes, such as for hospitals, schools, or business. Instead, the disappearance is directly tied to upper-income households removing units from the market.

Across the city, only about one-quarter of New York’s blocks added more than five units in the two-decade period. The rest remained about the same or lost units. Those neighborhoods that added their fair share did so by primarily converting non-residential lots to residential use. And much of the new construction occurred in gentrifying neighborhoods in a ring around the heart of Manhattan.

In the next post, we will turn to the relationship between supply and prices to see how they are linked (or not) in the Big Apple’s housing market.

More posts on NYC housing can be found here.

Thanks to Jenny Schuetz for helpful comments on the post.

August 9, 2021 by Jason Barr 5 Comments

The Birth and Growth of Modern Zoning (Part II): The FARsighted Great Depression

Jason M. Barr (@JasonBarrRU) August 9, 2021

Preface

Today, many cities worldwide regulate urban density by limiting the floor area ratio (FAR)—the amount of allowable building space relative to the lot size. Cities use FAR caps to reduce building bulk, preserve leafy residential neighborhoods, and maintain the historical feel of central cities. The FAR is one of the most important tools in urban planning. This is blog post #2 in a series about the birth and growth of the FAR. (Post #1 can be read here.)

The View from Roaring Twenties

Americans enjoyed themselves during the Roaring Twenties, dancing to jazz, while sipping speakeasy gin, and watching Babe Ruth hit home run after home run. But beneath the heady foam of fun was a stew of urban problems.

These problems—hyper congestion, pollution, extreme poverty, and slum-like living conditions—gave rise to fierce debates about the correct suite of solutions. In 1916, New York City ushered in the nation’s first comprehensive zoning regulations to rationalize land use and reduce urban density, by setting rules on building height, use, and lot coverage for every single property in the city. New York’s zoning program was replicated throughout the country.

However, the regulations were relatively conservative because the zoning Founding Fathers did not know what would legally “stick.” Laissez-faire America felt strongly about the sanctity of private property, and without any precedent to go on, government intervention could not smack of interfering with that right unless it was absolutely necessary and fell within the government’s rights of “police power.”

After about a decade of seeing the rules in practice, urban reformers found the original zoning codes wanting. The city was still too dense, residential neighborhoods remained unprotected from pollution and overcrowding, and supertall Art Deco skyscrapers rose like giant mushrooms. Reformers demanded tighter regulations to de-densify neighborhoods and better separate land uses.

De-bulking

By the end of the Twenties, there was a firm conviction that one of the best ways forward was by limiting building bulk—that is, by limiting the floor area ratio, though the specific formula had not yet been invented. Two well-known and respected planners, Thomas Adams and Robert Whitten, introduced the concept to the world at the end of the 1920s, most notably in the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs. The multivolume survey and plan sponsored by the Russel Sage Foundation offered a roadmap to rationalize the region’s transportation, infrastructure, and land uses.

At the time of the Plan, the FAR was merely a concept—that as buildings became taller, they should be required to be skinnier to preserve open spaces and light around buildings, while limiting the overall building density. But as the Great Depression swept across America, it would open a window of opportunity for reformers to have more say over urban policy.

As a result, architect Robert D. Kohn (1870-1953), along with his colleague, Frederick L. Ackerman (1878–1950)—who were deeply involved in New Deal housing policy—would be the first to launch the FAR into the policy sphere. This would take place in 1935, long before its appearance in the 1961 New York City Zoning Resolutions, which imposed them citywide. In fact, because of Kohn, the FAR would become embedded in a 1940 revision of the 1916 codes.

Strands of Thought

In the early decades of the 20^th century, two groups jockeyed for position in the planning community: call them the visionaries and the practicalists. Both groups shared a common goal of transforming the city and its hinterland into a well-functioning and well-ordered machine, but the visionaries had their visions, and they did not want reality to get in the way.^[1] The realists agreed with the visions but felt that one could not create utopia by simply waving a hand or imposing it from above.

During the Twenties, two organizations were instrumental in pushing forward the debate about where big cities, like New York, should go. One was the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), and the other was the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs, which later became the Regional Plan Association (RPA).

As discussed in an earlier post, the RPAA, formed in 1923 by Charles Whitaker, Robert Kohn, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Frederick Ackerman, Edith Elmer Wood, and Henry Wright, was a loosely organized but influential association of architects, planners, writers, and real estate developers who argued for the Garden City model of urban and regional planning. They were inspired by the work of Ebenezer Howard, especially his book, The Garden City of To-morrow, first published in 1898.

Garden Cities Everywhere

The Garden City-ites felt that density was a plague that needed to be cured with surgical treatment: Cities needed to be deconcentrated and decentralized—to transform the monolith into an octopus. RPAA members spread the Garden City gospel in America after World War I.

One of the first disciples of Ebenezer Howard was Thomas Adams, the manager of Letchworth, the first Garden City project, 35 miles (56 km) outside London, begun in 1903. Over his long career, he promoted the Garden City way of living, but he was also a practical man when it came to planning large cities like London and New York.

In 1923, he was hired to direct the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs, which laid out a relatively practical vision for New York City in forty years hence. It still saw lower Manhattan as the center of the city but offered rationalized routes for transportation routes and demonstrated a path for the coordination of the city with its suburbs to make sure development and growth happened in an organized and healthful manner. Manhattan was to be cleared of slums so it could be a Hugh Ferris-Corbusian island of towers-in-the-park.

Though the RPAA folks vociferously disagreed with this practical vision, there was one thing that the RPAA and RPA could agree on: Current city rules allowed for too much residential density. The route to the good life was through discouraging apartment buildings, encouraging as much free-standing single-family housing as possible, and isolating residences from business and industry that may harm the peace and harmony of the good life. The city was to be like a child’s playset, and all the pieces had to be pre-arranged to tame the chaos.

The Evolution of Chrystie and Forsythe Streets in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Upper left: A model of tenement buildings demonstrating the overcrowding circa 1900. Right: A “slum clearance” proposal for the neighborhood in the *Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs*, Vol. 2 (1931). Bottom Left: The construction of Sara D. Roosevelt Park during the Great Depression, after clearing away the tenements.

The Veblen Effect

Several of the RPAA members and their like-minded colleagues were strongly influenced by socialist ideas discussed and debated in the decades following Karl Marx’s (1818-1883) writings. One influential thinker was Thorsten Veblen (1857-1929), an American economist whose work focused on the harm propagated by capitalists and the broader “leisure class.” Veblen, an enfant terrible of the discipline, spent his academic career debating with mainstream economists and Marxists alike.²

Whereas Adam Smith (1723-1790) argued for the primacy of the free market, and Karl Marx promulgated the inevitable proletarian economic takeover, Veblen rejected both conceptions. During his lifetime, it became increasingly clear that there was not going to be an American Communist Revolution, in part, he argued, because the laboring classes were inspired by, and sought to imitate, the leisured classes, who spent lavishly on florid displays of conspicuous consumption to advertise their wealth.

As industries became larger, more technologically sophisticated, and deeply intertwined, businessmen could no longer understand and run the very system they created. Their desires, helped by the connivance of the labor unions, promoted industrial “sabotage”—the manipulation and slowing down of the “machine process” to increase their personal fortunes. As a result, the industrial system was not run to generate maximum output but rather was operated to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Veblen proffered the notion that only engineers and industrial scientists had the knowledge, rational thought process, and benevolence to oversee the means of production on behalf of the American people. If the engineers of the world banded together and went on strike, they could have the industrial system handed over to them (easily enough since it was already centralized into various interlocking trusts). They would plan and run the economy through a “Soviet of Technicians.”

Technocracy

The publication of Veblen’s The Engineers and the Price System (1921) gave rise to a short-lived organization called The Technical Alliance. Veblen was its “Chief Engineer” and was joined by the RPAA group of Frederick Ackerman, Robert Kohn, Stuart Chase, Benton MacKaye, and Charles Whitaker. Ackerman also joined Veblen as one of the founding members of the Continental Committee on Technocracy. As planning historian Michael Long, writes,

Veblen intended this committee to be “a soviet of engineers”, part of the vanguard of the revolution that would organize a “general strike” to overthrow capitalism. By 1932 this group of scientists and economists was based at the Department of Industrial Engineering at Columbia University and had conducted research into the organizational structure of several hundred American industries with a research staff provided by the New York City Relief Committee. Veblen felt that this research was the ‘indispensable’ precursor to the revolution and that these groups would form the organizational basis of the new society. Ackerman maintained his affiliation with this group after Veblen’s death, writing a series of empirically based articles on technocracy.

The Depression and the Rebuilding of New York

To implement such a program, however, would require much greater government involvement. During the Roaring Twenties, America was growing rapidly, and the free-market spirit was triumphant. Then the Depression hit, and the reform dynamic changed dramatically, as the weight of capitalism seemed to collapse upon itself.

It now opened a window to enact more radical proposals. Nonetheless, implementing these policies would create considerable debate among the visionaries and the practicalists. While the Depression allowed the visionaries to get their moments, their ideas would be constructed on compromised terms.

Attempts to fully reorder the city would ultimately lose to more conservative pushback. However, on the pages of New York’s current zoning codes, one can still hear a faint echo of the RPAA and the Technocracy, through the creation of the Floor Area Ratio, if one presses one’s ears closely to the pages.

The New Deal and New York City

In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt became president of the United States. To help implement his New Deal, he leaned on several RPAA members. Roosevelt, as New York governor, had developed a relationship with the group as he was sympathetic to many of its members positions.

When it came to New York City, however, he saw its government as a cesspool of vice and corruption. It was run by Tammany Hall hacks, who showed more interest in siphoning revenues from the public treasury than in providing good government. During the Roaring Twenties, when times were good, the citizens bothered little with the Tammany side-hustle.

They enjoyed being led by their mayor, Jimmy Walker (1881-1946), bon-vivant, playboy, one-time songwriter, and all-around cheerleader for Roaring Twenties New York. But as the Depression set in, things started to fall apart. Walker was ousted by a corruption scandal in 1932. In his place, Gotham elected reformist Fiorello H. La Guardia (1882-1947), a congressman from East Harlem.

La Guardia campaigned to clean up the city’s government and rebuild New York. Because of his integrity and earnestness, he won Roosevelt’s trust and was able to secure money and manpower to implement New Deal programs. As a result, the city became a laboratory for erecting the visions of the “good city” that had previously only been discussed.

La Guardia and Public Housing

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was established in 1934, with the mandate to build, manage, and own public housing for low-income residents. In that year, the federal Public Works Administration (PWA) released $25 million in funds to get things started. It was a triumph, though limited, for the visionaries.

La Guardia turned to Langdon W. Post (1899-1981) as the first chairman of the NYCHA. Post, a Harvard graduate and veteran of World War I, served as a state assemblyman from New York City from 1928 to 1932. He was a close advisor to Governor Roosevelt and a strong housing advocate. Before assuming his position at NYCHA, President Roosevelt named Post the Assistant Federal Relief administrator, where he helped create the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Robert D. Kohn

The PWA’s influence in New York was aided by Robert D. Kohn. He was born in Manhattan and trained as an architect at Columbia University and the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Beginning in 1895, he established a successful practice in New York. Over his career, he was an active advocate for improving housing and urban conditions among the urban poor. He was a founding member of the RPAA, a firm believer in Garden City planning, and a part of the Technocracy movement.

During World War I, he was chief of housing production for the Shipping Board. The Board oversaw a tremendous increase in shipbuilding for the war effort, and its housing division created homes for more than 28,000 shipyard workers. This experience helped forge his belief that government could successfully erect low-cost, high-quality housing.

At the start of the New Deal, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes hired Kohn as the first head of the Housing Division of the PWA in 1933. However, Kohn soon ran into the realities of politics. As historian Edward Spann writes, it soon became “evident that FDR’s New Deal was not the RPAA’s new deal. In less than a year after his appointment, Kohn was pressured into resigning as housing administrator, and those sympathetic to the regional planning position were soon forced out.”

Frederick L. Ackerman

With money forthcoming from the PWA, Langdon Post filled out the staff at NYCHA. In 1934, he hired a colleague and friend of Kohn, Frederick L. Ackerman, as the authority’s first Technical Director; he was also the chief architect for the NYCHA’s first major project, the First Houses in the Lower East Side. Together, during the Depression, Kohn and Ackerman would work jointly to “invent” the Floor Area Ratio as a zoning policy tool.

Ackerman was born in Edmeston, New York, and graduated from Cornell University in 1901. After studying architecture in Paris, he returned to New York to practice architecture. He designed a wide variety of buildings, including the first centrally air-conditioned apartment building in New York City and large private residences, hotels, museums, and libraries. He was socially engaged and wrote widely on issues of architecture and city planning. A core member of the RPAA, he was particularly concerned about the poor state of low-income housing and the problem of the slums.

He was greatly influenced by the planning programs established in Britain, where he visited the early Garden Cities promoted by Ebenezer Howard and saw firsthand England’s success in building housing for its soldiers during World War I. At the Shipping Board, Robert Kohn brought in Ackerman to be the Chief of Housing of Design. In this position, he oversaw the construction of Garden Villages for the shipbuilders. Fellow RPPA member, Lewis Mumford, said that they “gave a fresh incentive to the housing movement, and pushed it along paths that the older housing reformers never envisaged.” During the 1920s, he played a key role in designing two of America’s earliest privately funded Garden Cities: Sunnyside Gardens, New York (1924) and Radburn, New Jersey (1928).

Among RPAA members, Ackerman was one of the most radical. He was a devotee of Thorsten Veblen and came to see capitalism as a system of greed and corruption that generated cities with too many problems. He believed in socializing private property and of planning both the city and the economy through the enlightened actions of engineers, architects, planners, and scientists.

Ackerman’s Reports

In his position as Technical Director (a title which fit well with his membership in the Technocracy), Ackerman would write reports and create technical manuals to aid in the development of public housing projects, which would lead to the formulation of the FAR.

The Population Bomb

One of his first reports “Population of New York City as Permitted by the Zoning and Multiple Dwelling Laws,” was issued in December 1934 and co-written with William Ballard. The report was an act of fantastic hypothetical speculation. It asked the question: What would resident and employment density look like if every lot was built out to its maximum bulk according to the current building regulations? Its conclusion was that, in theory, the zoning and building laws could accommodate a resident population of nearly 77 million and hold some 343 million daily workers in offices and factories.

In 1930, the city’s population was about seven million. To think it would somehow grow by a factor of 100 in the near future was absurd. The report became something of a manifesto for Ackerman, as it allowed him (in his mind) to advertise the absurdities of free-market housing and the failures of the 1916 zoning codes. As discussed below, in this regard, it helped open the door to the creation of the FAR. The figure of 77 million would resurface in the press and among the planning community and became the rallying cry for why Gotham needed to be “de-bulked.”

The “Note”

In 1937, Ackerman and Ballard issued another report entitled, A Note on Site & Unit Planning (with aid from the WPA), which was meant—directly—as a reference manual for public housing architects but was also a form of Technocracy propaganda (and is rather shocking at that, especially for a report published by a New York City government agency, aided by the federal government).

Much of the Note is technical. It shows the future of low-income housing as envisioned by Ackerman. It provides drawings for various options for public housing project designs, along with facts about daylight penetration, population density, and lot coverage. The purpose was to present the benefits of surgical urban planning and how to construct tower-in-park housing on superblocks. The report does not mention the Floor Area Ratio but rather continues a tradition of presenting housing designs that minimize lot coverage on superblocks.

The Screed

The drawings, however, are sandwiched between a screed on the evils of the free market. Ackerman’s rage oozes onto the pages. In the Preface, he writes:

The note is little more than a syllabus covering the outcome of an inquiry into the nature of the Problem which confronts those actually engaged in planning areas for residential use while working within the framework of an Economy which, by law and by judicial decision, denies the constitutionality of collective action upon a broad front which the technician deems as essential in Planning is to be other than wishful thinking.

Ackerman as FARther?

But to what degree can we assign the birth of the FAR to Ackerman from his writings and drawings? Carol Willis, founder and director of the Skyscraper Museum, suggests that Ackerman was the pivotal man in history. The notes from a fascinating exhibit on the history of public housing at the Skyscraper Museum say as much:

Where did the concept of FAR originate? It is astonishing that the answer to this question, so determinative for the city’s built environment for more than half a century, has been so obscure. Although the idea existed in several precedents in the early 1930s, the specific lineage seems to lie in the work of Frederick L. Ackerman (1878-1950), the head of the Technical Division of NYCHA and his young deputy William Ballard (1905-1993). In 1934, the two authored a little known NYCHA study titled “The Population of New York City as Permitted by the Zoning and Multiple Dwelling Laws.” Their report was the first to explore – indeed to obsessively calculate – the total buildable area of both full blocks and of the city as a whole allowed under the 1916 zoning. Translating that volume (“bulk”) into floor area, and estimating the average floor space needed per person for work and for housing, they concluded that the city could accommodate more than 76 million people. That excessive number proved to them the need for reform.

But my research into the history of the FAR gives me pause with assigning the main role to Ackerman. While it is true that the above-referenced Ackerman-Ballard report imagines a fully bulked-up New York, nowhere does it mention the concept of the Floor Area Ratio, and in fact, its first appearance, as will be discussed below, appears in a 1935 memo signed by Robert D. Kohn. Ackerman and Ballard’s 1934 report, however, was useful propaganda.

Importantly, their Note on Site & Unit Planning was published in 1937, two years after the first mention of the FAR in print, and yet the Note does not describe or measure the FARs of the housing project designs it presents. The Note would have been the perfect opportunity to estimate the FAR of each project (and a 1950 report co-written by Ballard contains FAR estimates in the renderings). Rather, Ackerman and Ballard only present population density, floor height, and lot coverage. If Ackerman had invented the FAR, why would he not also have added FAR calculations to this report?

Ackerman and Ballard’s Note helped to expand the notion that planning can more efficiently create Garden City type arrangements. In this way, their work is a more technical-oriented presentation of what Garden City architects and planners had been arguing for since the 1920s. If one compares Ackerman’s plans to those of Andrew Thomas, the first architect to build Garden Apartments—the precursor to the tower-in-the-park—their drawings appear to be a logical expansion of those concepts, especially in light of new government programs to build public housing (see the figure below).

The Skyscraper Museum exhibition notes go on to say:

Sixteen years later, in 1950, working as a consultant to the New York City Planning Commission, Ballard produced the Plan for Rezoning the City of New York. This major study outlined most of the revisions eventually incorporated in the 1961 law, including the citywide application of FAR formulas and an increase in open-space requirements for residential buildings. The drumbeat of the report, prepared by his firm Harrison, Ballard & Allen, argued that the 1916 zoning law allowed far too much built density. As in the earlier NYCHA study, Ballard keyed the buildable floor area to projections of future population and made specific recommendations for FAR limits.

As this quote indicates, William Ballard, the protégé and co-author of Ackerman, was an important player in the FAR story. He was co-author of a 1950 report that argued for the use of FAR limits as the mainstay of a new zoning policy. However, contrary to common wisdom, his report was not the first to introduce zoning maps with maximum FAR coverage.

Rather, the 1950 report reignited the FAR discussion that had been placed aside because of World War II. In this way, Ballard et al. revive what was worked out during the period of 1935 to 1940. Ballard, who went on to be New York City Planning Commission Chairman from 1963 to 1968, gets credit for popularizing the FAR. And because Ballard was a protégé of Ackerman, the natural conclusion is that Ackerman created the FAR and passed it on to Ballard.

But, as I will argue below, the chain of events appears to be thus: Robert Kohn in 1935, with the aid of Ackerman, created the FAR concept, along with proposed FAR zoning maps for New York. This led to a period of experimentation and “prototyping.” In 1940, because of Kohn, the FAR appeared as law for the first time in a revision of the 1916 codes by adding FAR limits in suburban zones.

Then America became embroiled in World War II, and all talk of rezoning New York was put aside. The discussion was brought back in 1948 when the city funded a study by the architecture firm of Harrison, Ballard & Allen, who borrowed and expanded upon the maps that were first created based on Kohn’s initiative. Kohn’s role in zoning history was forgotten after 1940. We now turn to these events in more detail, which begins with the City Club of New York.

Evolution of New York City Apartment Building Form. Upper left: Footprints of tenement buildings in the Lower East Side. Lower Left: Building footprints for Amalgamated Houses, garden apartments designed by Andrew Thomas in 1927 (both images from *The Regional Survey of NY and Its Environs*, Vol VI). Right: Suggested public housing designs by Ackerman and Ballard, and published by NYCHA (1937).

The City Club of New York and Birth of the FAR

The City Club—still in existence—was founded in 1892 to “promote social intercourse among persons specially interested in the good government of the City of New York, in securing honesty and efficiency in the administration of city affairs, and in severing municipal from national politics.”

The club’s activities have included sponsoring lectures on urban affairs, as well as creating committees and reports to weigh in on vital issues of the day. In the 1930s, many prominent New Yorkers were part of the club, including several RPAA members, such as Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Alexander Bing, Frederick Ackerman, and Robert Kohn. Bing and Wright sat on the Board of Trustees in 1935.

The Housing Committee, 1935

The conception of the Floor Area Ratio began in early 1935 when the Board of Trustees formally created a new Committee on Housing to study zoning reform. They requested that Robert D. Kohn accept the chairmanship.³ Kohn informed the Trustees that he would do so on condition that he was given authority to appoint qualified non-members to assist, which was okayed by the trustees. In turn, Kohn recruited ten additional people, at least two of whom were RPAA members: Henry Wright and Frederick Ackerman, who was listed as “Advisory-Associate,” and was, evidently, not a full-fledged member of the committee.

In September of 1935, the Committee on Housing transmitted to the Board of Trustees a memorandum on zoning. The tone and urgency made it feel like it was written by Ackerman, though Kohn was also capable of using strong language to express his anticapitalist sentiment. The memo references Ackerman and Ballard’s 1934 NYCHA study, though it was signed by Kohn. It demonstrates the authors’ contempt for urban density:

The absurd exaggeration implied in our present zoning regulations presents an immediate and pressing danger, for already apartment house building has been resumed on the same old principle of overcrowding the land to a much greater degree than is safe, necessary or economic. The speculators and lending companies appear to have learned little or nothing from the slums and the holocaust of real estate wrecks that have resulted from the absence of greater restrictions.

The memo requests that the City Club Board of Trustees “appeal to the Mayor and the Board of Estimate and Apportionment for the prompt appointment of a new Zoning Commission.”

In response, the president of the City Club, Richard S. Childs, sent a letter to Mayor La Guardia urging immediate zoning reform. The memo and letter made good copy and was picked up by the New York Times on September 16, 1935. The headline, “City Urged to End Density Building,” quoted Ackerman’s employment population figures of 340 million. The reporter turned to Kohn for a statement, who opined, “We must not allow the present opportunity to escape us to put a stop to such further crowding of land as will make the damage irreparable.”

Though I don’t have a copy of the Childs letter, it evidently, “urged that a blanket amendment be adopted substantially reducing the ratio of permissible bulk of residential buildings to lot area,” as declared in a “proposed report” written in March 1936 (discussed below). We can thus see that the idea of the FAR was created by Kohn’s Committee, transmitted to Childs, and then to Mayor La Guardia by September 1935.

In November, the City Club’s Housing Committee met with the Mayor’s Committee on City Planning. This then led to the creation of a Board of Alderman sub-committee whose membership drew from the City Club (and which included Kohn but not Ackerman), the Mayor’s Committee on City Planning, and other city officials.

A Rezoning Proposal, 1936

On March 1, 1936, this committee submitted its “Proposed Report” to the City Club Trustees and the Mayor’s Committee on City Planning. It recommended that the Floor Area Ratio be incorporated into zoning code amendments. We can say that the FAR was born on March 1, 1936.

The proposed report states, for example,

In substance, the proposed formula if adopted would affect the bulk of any residential building hereafter erected in the city by restricting the sum of its gross floor areas to a certain multiple of the total area of the lot on which it is built. Thus in an apartment housing built in a “two times” A or B area districts the maximum permissible total of its gross floor area would be five times the area of its lot.⁴

In short, it proposed adding FAR limits to the existing lot coverage zones.

A Plan for Rezoning the City, 1938

But this was just one committee’s proposal. Reports and recommendations get written all the time. While I’ve never seen a statistical study that evaluates the likelihood of any randomly written report getting turned into law, one can reasonably say that official committee reports are typically where good ideas go to die. But in this case, the report had legs.

The ideas reappeared in 1938 in “Zoning for the City of New York,” funded by the WPA and prepared for the Mayor’s Committee on City Planning. Kohn was not a member of this group, but its findings were a result of the ones from 1936.

The importance of this report is that it lays out in detail a new method of rezoning the city. Rather than having three separate maps as in the 1916 zoning codes—one for height setbacks, one for lot coverage, and one for building use or type—it urges that use and bulk be regulated simultaneously within prescribed zones—a concept that was eventually adopted citywide in 1961.

Just as importantly, this report included the FAR concept from the 1936 report. It says,

The bulk provisions are very much along the lines explored by the Joint Zoning Committee of the Mayor’s Committee on City Planning and the City Club of New York. Actually, they are an outgrowth of the Committee’s memorandum, resulting from a very comprehensive series of practical tests, which applied the original standards to a wide range of building types on lots of various sizes, abutting streets of different widths….In all cases, the permitted bulk is measured as the ratio of the number of square feet of gross floor area to the gross area of the lot in square feet. (Emphasis added.)

This was the pivotal report that took the FAR idea introduced by Kohn et al. in 1935 and turned it into a proposed new method for rezoning the city.

The Zoning Code Amendments, 1939-1940

A full-scale rezoning, however, would have to wait. Though the concepts were out in the open, the support for comprehensive changes was not yet there. But, in 1939, the City Planning Commission offered a “Proposed Revision of the Building Zoning Code Resolution,” which contained language for updates to the 1916 codes.⁵ In 1940, the city passed it into law. It maintained the use, setback, coverage zones but added floor area ratio limits into two new low-density residential districts—E and F—which were reserved for free-standing homes or garden apartments. F districts had a maximum FAR of 0.75, for example.

After the War: The FAR Grows Up

On December 7, 1941, Japanese air forces bombed Pearl Harbor. Any discussion of rezoning the city would now have to wait. However, after peace was restored, cities across the U.S. revived the discussion of urban planning. In the late 1940s, New York began thinking about implementing the FAR citywide. This would finally happen in 1961, when New York City passed a new zoning resolution. In the next post, we see how cities across America after World War II pushed the FAR much FARthur.

Continue reading Part I of this blog series on the birth of modern zoning during the 1920s here.

Thanks to Maria Thompson for editorial assistance.

—

¹ In this respect, they were both against the ideas of Jane Jacobs, who embraced density and the “IDIC” it produced.

² When at the University of Chicago, Veblen was the managing editor of the Journal of Political Economy, which today is one of the top five journals in economics. Today, the journal would never publish an article in the style or containing subject matter along Veblen’s lines. He remains on the fringes of economic thought for several reasons: He rejected capitalism and the neoclassical economists who supported it. His style was obtuse, his meaning and intentions were often unclear, and he promulgated vague general theories with few testable hypotheses.

³ This recount of the City Club events is based on archival documents housed in the New York Historical Society (NYHS), City Club Minutes Volume 22 (MS116). Though not all the documents are directly relevant to the formation of the Floor Area Ratio, and many of the Housing Committee’s documents are not there, enough exists to prove that Kohn was the lead author of a 1935 memorandum suggesting the city embrace the FAR for zoning policy.

⁴ This report is at the NY Historical Society, though they don’t have the proposed maps.

⁵ The history and early battles of the New York City Planning Commission, formed in 1938, will be taken up in a future post.

October 22, 2020 by Jason Barr 2 Comments

Urban Umami or Urban Appakukan?: The Psychology of Streetscapes

Jason M. Barr October 22, 2020

Pleasure or Pain?

One of the biggest complaints about new construction is that it is harmful to the quality of urban life. For example, architecture writer, Justin Davidson, says that “shiny towers are invasive species and they are choking our cities and killing off public space.” Other critics charge that new, taller buildings don’t mesh well with the older urban environment. High-rises, they argue, destroy the “human scale” and make cities less satisfying. Supporters of this view see neighborhoods like Manhattan’s low-rise, but dense, Greenwich as the ideal. In some respects, I don’t disagree. Strolling through Greenwich Village, one feels a kind of urban umami, an almost unquantifiable sense of pleasure (or “deliciousness”). The old brick townhouses on narrow tree-lined streets offer the pedestrian a kind of nostalgic warmth or calmness.

The belief that newer buildings generate negative emotions is likely driving our current land-use policies. Suppose you feel that taller buildings are inherently ugly, stultifying, or emotionally oppressive. The natural response is to demand that city officials limit what can be built. This is exactly what big cities, like New York and San Francisco, have done—they have created a web of zoning and building restrictions to slow down new construction.

Urban Growth versus Real Estate Restrictions

And yet, the very thing that allowed these cities to become successful and house millions of people, and the companies they work for, was to grow their real estate stocks. If economic growth causes a city’s population and business activity to swell, but is unable, through zoning restrictions, landmarking, or general NIMBYism, to expand to accommodate them, residents are simply cutting their nose to spite their face.

Economic growth without real estate growth leads directly to rising housing prices, greater income inequality, anger and frustration from gentrification, and lower future job opportunities. It turns the city into a kind of game of musical chairs—where one person wins only when someone else loses. A substantial body of research demonstrates that new construction lowers housing prices and allows a city to maintain its growth trajectory of growth and vibrancy.

And so, we have a 21^st-century paradox—urban growth drives people to limit urban growth. How can we resolve this paradox? More specifically, how can we make inroads on the issue that people think that new buildings are ugly and emotionally oppressive? How can new structures bring joy and utility to both the occupants and city dweller alike?

*Umami* or Appakukan? Which building causes pleasure and which causes pain? Left: Small building behind St. Helen’s Bishopsgate Church. Right: Leaden Hall Building (48 stories). Both in London. The buildings were used in the study by Mazumder et. al. (2020).

Measuring Oppression

Over the last few years, social scientists have tried to understand how building form can influence our emotional sense of peace or unease. This research offers some promising leads. A strand in this vein was begun by researchers in Japan in the 1970s, but the work has been revived using modern social scientific and computing methods. The original researchers used the Japanese word, 圧迫感 (appakukan), which translates into “to feel oppression” or “to feel overwhelmed.” And they wanted to know what elements of streetscapes generated appakukan.

Simulated Streetscapes

A 2012 study, “Measuring Oppressiveness of Streetscapes,” tries to recreate, in a laboratory setting, the perspectives of pedestrians viewing a high-rise from across the street (although, in the lab, they are sitting in a chair). The authors began by taking a picture with a fisheye lens of a building on Hongo Street, in a dense residential neighborhood in central Tokyo. The choice of camera lens is an attempt to simulate the actual visual perception of the human eye. Next, they render the image into a computer-generated one. This allows them to alter, add, or remove features one a time.

Then they “covered” each image with regularly spaced dots (like regularly spaced points along “latitude” and “longitude” lines). They then counted the number of dots that fall on the building, on the sky, and other features, such as trees. In this way, they have very specific measures of what fraction of the fisheye/human eye view is taken up by different elements that a typical pedestrian might see.

Next, they brought subjects (mostly students of architecture and urban planning) into the laboratory and had them view versions of the simulated imagines. Some had taller buildings; others had more open space; others had substantial tree coverage, and so on. Each of the subjects was exposed to 48 images and asked to fill out five questions per image. The survey asked subjects to rate on a scale of 1 to 7 their perceptions of oppression, openness, and pleasantness.

In short, they found a strong positive correlation between the response to the oppression question and the height of the buildings. But they found that this oppressiveness response was moderated to some degree by adding tree coverage on the street front. Finally, from their results on the relationship between the oppression question response and the quantitative measures of building and tree density, they create a formula, to measure net streetscape oppression. In theory, this formula can then be applied to any building or architectural rending to assess its likely impacts on people’s emotions. (A follow-up study for buildings Iran further seeks to refine this formula.)

Out on the Street

In 2014, the authors published another study, “Investigating Oppressiveness and Spaciousness in Relation to Building, Trees, Sky and Ground Surface: A Study in Tokyo,” using the same methodology. But in this case, their focus was on having subjects (again architecture and urban planning students) observe actual buildings on the street and fill out a survey about how the views felt. They then looked at the responses versus their measure of building, tree, and sky coverage, which, again, were measured from fisheye photographs of the respective views. Here they find that after controlling for the tree, sky, and ground area coverage, the building coverage variable was statistically insignificant regarding the oppression question. This suggests that people’s perception of unease from building form is moderated by the context in which it appears.

In a similar style paper, “Exposure to High-Rise Buildings Negatively Influences Affect: Evidence from Real World and 360-degree Video,” another group of researchers had two sets of study participants looking at buildings in London. One group was sent to directly view the Leadenhall Building (48 floors, 2014) and then take a quick walk to view an older three story-brick building at the rear of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate Church. Each participant viewed the structures for five minutes and answered questions on oppression, openness, and pleasantness. Another test group in Canada viewed the same scenes with special 360-degree headgear and answered the same set of questions. In addition, all the study participants were given a wearable device to measure heart rates, body temperatures, and other physical measures of emotional responses

They found that while participants, on average, felt the shorter building was more pleasing, there was no statistical difference for the specific question about oppression. The shorter building was preferred, on average, in large part due to the openness of the scene. However, the wearable devices did not indicate any physical response difference between the two views, which suggests further work is needed in exploring emotional perceptions versus actual emotional responses. Interestingly, they found very similar results among the London and Canadian subjects, indicate that either in-person or simulated methods are useful.

Upper Left: View from Hongo Street, Tokyo. Upper Right: Computer-generated version of Hongo Street Building. Lower Right: Schematic of Laboratory Study of Impact of Building Form on Emotions. Lower Left: Actual Laboratory Subject. Source: Asgarzadeh et al. (2012).

The Pros and Cons of this Work

The type of research has both pros and cons, however. On the plus side, it offers a way to conduct highly controlled experiments to better understand people’s emotional responses to different streetscapes. The environment can be changed one item at a time to better isolate cause and effect from what are usually busy scenes. Furthermore, the work can tie individual responses to a quantification of these feelings to generate usable formulas. In principle, they can help guide architects, planners, and developers on how their projects may be perceived by pedestrians.

There are, however, reasons to be cautious when interpreting the results. First is that most of this research was conducted with students majoring in architecture or urban planning. This is hardly a representative sample of society, both because they are younger, and because there might be something about either their training or views about cities that make them respond to questions in ways different from the population at large. Second is the study design. In the name of controlling the precision of the experiments, they all involve a degree of unnaturalness. Participants are asked to sit or stand still for five minutes while staring at buildings or images of buildings and reflecting on their emotions. This is not the typical experience of urban pedestrians.

Furthermore, given that the subjects are viewing only one or two specific buildings at a time, it’s hard to know if the responses are due to the building’s general features or to the specific structures, which might be seen as particularly ugly or extreme in and of themselves. Additionally, if respondents suspect, even unconsciously, that the investigators want certain responses, they may try to answer those questions in that way. This is not to say that researchers give away information about their beliefs, but the nature of questioning can subtly influence participant’s responses, especially if a question is asking you how oppressed you feel when viewing a tall building.

Lastly, each study has several different survey questions, and it can be difficult from these to make sense of what they all mean when taken together. Some studies find taller buildings generate high oppression ratings, while others do not; while yet others find the oppression rating is correlated with building height, but the finding goes away after controlling for other factors.^[1] In short, more work needs to be done to see if this area can produce some generalizable results that can produce precise and insightful predictions.

Computer Vision in Economics

This discussion also suggests the need to study the issue in other ways beyond psychological surveys. Another parallel approach is within economics. Here, economists have used computer programming/machine learning methods to evaluate the “looks” of buildings. Computer software and statistical methods applied to Google Street View images can categorize the different image features in a method known as Computer Vision. The quantification of these features can then be paired with measures of well-being.

Valuing Curb Appeal

In a recent study, “Valuing Curb Appeal,” the authors determine a numerical measure of a house’s “curb appeal” for nearly 90,000 free-standing homes in Denver, Colorado. First, they generate a curb appeal rubric, which is a checklist of elements about a house’s exterior and lot, as viewed from the middle of the street. Next, they download images of the property from Google Street View.

After that, they assign curb appeal scores (from 1 to 4) for a small sample of images based on the rubric’s underlying results. For example, Class 1 houses (the lowest curb appeal) have broken concrete, overgrown or no lawns, etc. Class 4 properties, on the other hand, have extensive landscaping and fully manicured lawns. Next, they “train” the computer algorithm to recognize the features of the property and assign them curb appeal scores. Then they run the algorithm on all of the properties in their data set to get scores for each one.

Lastly, they perform the statistical (regression) analysis to see how the curb appeal score correlates with housing prices. On average, they find that an improvement from one category to the next, say going from a 3 rating to a 4, is associated with a 2% bump up in prices, holding property size and other housing and neighborhood features constant. In short, they come up with a way to measure the value people place on having a house that is more pleasing to look at.

Measuring Curb Appeal: Examples of Street View Images used for Categorizing Curb Appeal. Top Row: Properties with Curb Appeal Score of 1 (lowest). Bottom Row: Curb Appeal Scores of 4 (highest). Source: Johnson et al. (2020).

Curb Appeal in Boston

A similar study from 2018, “Computer Vision and Real Estate: Do Looks Matter and Do Incentives Determine Looks,” uses Computer Vision to quantify the external features of over 16,000 properties in Boston. The authors have the Computer Vision software recognize some 1024 features (such as colors and shapes), and then they reduce this list (using principal components) to 100 elements. Unlike the paper above, these authors only look at how these features as a whole correlate with housing prices and do not attempt to investigate the specific nature of them individually.

The key result of their work is that Computer Vision categories can help better predict sales prices than without them, and it strongly suggests that appearance improves home buyers’ well-being. Future work can expand the analysis to identify the specific coded features that are preferred or disliked, which might include housing color, housing shapes, and the degree of open space.^[2]

The Pros and Cons of this Work

Computer Vision and machine learning software offer great potential in helping us to understand what residents find soothing and what they find distressing. Like the psychological studies above, these techniques allow for matching building elements to measures of well-being, and thus, in principle, one can use Computer Vision methods to determine a formula or rule that can guide architects, developers, and planners about what kinds of building and lot features will enhance the “umami” of the neighborhood.

The two research papers discussed here specifically tie their measures of “curb appeal” to housing prices. Prices are a good measure to use because housing sales data are widely available, and they are a convenient way to ascertain what people value. However, using prices to assess psychological well-being or distress can be problematic because houses are bought for multiple reasons, including as investment, and for shelter as well as psychological fulfillment. Thus, the curb appeal measure may be picking up the value of one or more of these elements.

Regarding investments, people buy houses with the expectation that they will rise in price. The price of a home today is, in large, part determined by its expected future value down the road. Curb appeal may indicate stronger investment reward potential, regardless of whether the new owners like those features or not. If lawn gnomes, for example, are popular because people think they bring good luck to the house and its occupants (and hence make it more valuable), despite them being ugly, a buyer might pay more for a house with lawn gnomes

Second, homes are shelter. Curb appeal might mean “good bones” and lower maintenance. Thus, home purchasers might use curb appeal as an indicator of the home’s quality and assume that it will not need major repairs any time soon. And finally, curb appeal or lack thereof may indicate the degree of emotional oppression or pleasure. The point is that price effects from curb appeal may not be directly used to infer streetscape satisfaction. In this regard, more work is needed to tie Computer Vision to psychological studies by mapping Street View images to other measures of emotional satisfaction.

The Policy Implications

The key reason to discuss these research papers is that if we can determine formulas or guidelines for streetscape “umami” versus appakukan and that the real estate community employ them, it might give residents more confidence in new construction. People want to feel that the changes they see around them are helping to contribute to their life-satisfaction or, at least, are not making things worse. Imagine a kind Rip Van Winkle scenario. A person purchases a home and falls asleep for twenty years, but when she awakens, the neighborhood is immeasurably improved in aesthetics and vibrancy. This is what we want to shoot for. And perhaps these new social science research methods can pave the way.

But it is vital that these formulas or rules, once discovered, are be implemented by government fiat. Housing markets need the flexibility to adjust neighborhood housing stocks based on the demand. Rules today may no longer apply tomorrow or may be found to have unintended consequences that need to be rectified. Any policy that uses this research should use incentives in some way so that developers consider both the costs and benefits of urban umami formulas.

For example, if people are not burdened by tall buildings that have a significant degree of open space up high, then setback rules should make buildings gets narrower as they get taller. Since people enjoy trees on the streets, new projects that provide (native) street trees should get floor area bonuses, for example.

And finally, any formulas or findings from this research needs to be strongly validated and tested in real-world settings before being widely applied. Starting in the 1960s, for example, New York’s zoning rules gave floor area bonuses for developers who provided open plazas. This thinking was based in the belief that pedestrians like open space and need more of it. As it turned out, follow-up studies on these spaces found that they were frequently under-utilized, under-maintained, and oppressive in their own right. The point is that rules and incentives that encourage more pleasing neighborhoods need to be firmly grounded in social science research and well-tested before wide-spread implementation. Recreating the mistakes of the past will only cement people’s beliefs that developers can’t be trusted.^[3]

At the end of day, we want cities that are both affordable and enjoyable. The way to do this is to build new housing across the city, and to make sure it enhances the urban fabric. Computer Vision can help us see the future before it arrives.

—

[1] Additionally, the word “oppression” in English is most usually associated with unjust political control, not the secondary use of feelings of distress. English speaking subjects might be confused about the word in a study about building heights, which might impact the average responses to those questions.

[2] A previous study “trained” these features to predict perceived neighborhood safety.

[3] Ironically, it may be that the zoning and planning rules that have created people’s negative perceptions about developers, who built out cities according to those rules. They provided parking lots and strip-malls when off street parking was required by law, and they built wide open plazas when incentivized to do so.

February 5, 2019 by Jason Barr 14 Comments

Book Review: Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities by Alain Bertaud. The MIT Press, 2018

Jason M. Barr February 5, 2019

Today, just over half of the world’s population lives in cities. By the middle of the 21^st century this figure will likely be near 75%. The future is decidedly urban. Those who care about the well-being of humanity must naturally be concerned with how cities work; for when they function well, people are happier and healthier (and other species as well).

The Dream of Urban Utopia

At least since the early days of the Industrial Revolution, when the skies were black with coal dust, and poor factory workers huddled together in squalid housing, city planners and utopians dreamt of manufacturing the well-ordered city. They envisioned a place where each worker has access to clean air, open space, and roads laid out in a rational manner. They advocated for better living through planning—the imposition of top-down solutions to urban problems.

At the national level, the planning of entire economies has come and gone. Experiments with socialism in the Soviet Union and China, for example, have ended in failure. Yet, the urge to impose plans and rules on cities remains strong—an urge deeply rooted in the DNA of local government, be it through zoning, strict building regulations, or detailed glossy planning documents that seek to dictate the future city form.

Order without Design

But those who study the economics of cities remain skeptical that order can be imposed from above. As Alain Bertaud argues in his masterful book, Order without Design, strict planning doesn’t work for nations, and it doesn’t work cities. Yet, to this day, the planners of the world just don’t trust the marketplace. They observe disorder and conclude it must be bad. Bertaud sees otherwise. The market does create order, but only if we let it.[1]

For over a half-century, Bertaud was a city planner. His first job, in 1965, was as an “Urban Inspector,” charged with issuing (or denying) housing permits in Tlemcen, Algeria. Over the years, he rose to the position of Principal Urban Planner at the World Bank. Throughout his long career, he has helped plan or consult on numerous projects in cities of all stripes and sizes from those in socialist Russia and China to Haiti and India. He has observed much about the way cities work, or not.

3D Rendering of Population Density in Jakarta and London. Source: Alain Bertaud.

The Blind and the Paralytic

During his professional journeys, he also attempted to gain deeper insights about cities by studying economics. As he chronicles in his book, this was an unusual route; most planners know very little economics and they remain uninterested in the subject. For him, however, it was a chance encounter with an urban economist while working in Port-au-Prince that set him on the path. Even so, his research also led him to conclude that while economists have generated deep insights in the into the nature of cities, they are not engaged with the daily problems of running a bustling metropolis:

We are facing a strangely paradoxical situation in the way cities are managed: the professionals in charge of modifying market outcomes through regulations (planners) know very little about markets, and the professionals who understand markets (urban economists) are seldom involved in the design of regulations aimed at restraining these markets. It is not surprising that the lack of interaction between the two professions causes serious dysfunction in the development of cities. It is the story of the blind and the paralytic going their owns ways: The planners are blind; they act without seeing. The economists are paralyzed; they see but do not act. (p. 2)

The argument of the book is thus quite simple: that planners and economists should work together when developing urban policies. That much seems reasonable—who would dispute that two heads are better than one? But the next premise is likely a harder pill to swallow—that the city planners of the world need to learn and understand how markets work. This is particularly difficult because economics says that the planning profession has gotten things wrong. There are only a limited number of reasons planners should intervene. The rest can, and should, be taken care of by the market itself.

Insights from Urban Economics

Bertaud argues that urban economic theorists—through the use of math-based models—have generated several vital conclusions that need to be mastered if cities are going to function better.

The City as Labor Market

First is the need to view the city—fundamentally—as a labor market, as an agora or bazaar where residents can easily find matches between their own skills and the needed skills of employers. Successful matching is the path to higher incomes and the end of poverty.

Maximum Flexibility

Second, the city-as-labor-market requires maximum mobility and flexibility, so that people and businesses can find each other, and they can readjust their matches and housing as circumstances change. Geographic mobility is the route to social and economic mobility.

Population Density Emerges by Choice

Third, people don’t like to commute, and they are willing to pay higher housing costs to live close to their jobs. Therefore, long commutes must be compensated through lower-cost housing in the suburbs. If land markets operate properly, dense living in smaller units in the central city and less-dense living the suburbs is the result of households balancing the tradeoff, and thus choosing what’s best for them.

Sprawl is not Inherently Bad

Fourth, the footprint of the city—how far it extends into the countryside—is a result of the economics. Cities expand further out because residents have higher incomes, a more efficient transportation network, and/or a less productive agricultural hinterland. Sprawl is thus, at its heart, a result of free choice, and can be an efficient allocation of land.[2]

Land Markets are Vital

Lastly, labor markets and residential flexibility must be mediated through a well-functioning land market, where the prices of land reflect the relative demand for different locations throughout the city. When events change, the prices need to change too in order to incentivize repurposing the land for its most productive use.

Planning Reduces Flexibly

The planning profession, however, is more focused on limiting or restricting land uses and housing density. Rules are designed to preserve or prevent “bad” things from happening. Building height limitations are meant to lower density and shadows. Public housing projects are designed to give minimum size shelter to the poor. Zoning rules prevent single-family homes from being converted into apartment buildings. Bars and restaurants are banned from getting too close to residences.

The fundamental problem with these regulations is that, in an attempt to create order, they ignore the need for flexibility and density. Prohibiting or slowing down this flexibly drives unintended outcomes that are often worse than the problems they seek to solve. Bertaud offers numerous examples from his global sojourns. But here I highlight a few.

Cities with No Land Markets

Land use in China and Russia during their socialist eras keenly demonstrate—albeit in an extreme fashion—what transpired when order is imposed from above. Say a factory was originally placed in the city center. But if the factory’s technology became obsolete or its products were no longer needed, what happened to the abandoned building and lot? Not much. As Bertaud writes,

Because the land occupied by a firm was not recognized to have value per se, it could not be recycled for another use or passed to another user, who in a market economy, would have been bidding for it. As Chinese cities expanded, there were pockets of industrial land located close to the city center that could not be reconverted for other uses, because no mechanism existed to do so. (p. 13)

The point is that to function well, a city needs a relatively open market for land. The more restrictions placed on the land the less it can be used to serve the needs of its residents as times change.

Public Housing on the Urban Fringes

After the end of apartheid, the South African government embarked on a program to build affordable housing for the poor. As well-intentioned as the plan was, it ignored the underlying spatial structure of the country’s cities. By placing the housing in the suburbs where land was cheap, it could be built at lower cost, but was far away from employment nodes. As Bertaud writes,

The massive subsidized housing projects may have further fragmented the labor market of South African cities, contributing significantly to lower their productivity….[The] high unemployment rate cannot entirely be attributed to the poor location of the subsidized housing scheme, but certainly, this massive program of building individual housing units in widely dispersed communities with no economic and speedy means of transport did not help. (p. 273)

Master Plan for Hanoi. Source: Perkins-Eastman.

Master Plans

Today, the pull to create master city plans remains strong. Bertaud highlights one from Hanoi, created in 2010, called “Hanoi Capital Construction Master Plan to 2030 and Vision to 2050.” But as scientific and precise as the plan claims to be, it ignores the economic realities that are going to dominate the city in the 21^st century. For example, it calls for a large agricultural belt for rice paddies just outside the western part of the central city. The noble intentions of protecting agricultural jobs and open space by imposing land uses will backfire:

The arbitrary assignment of workers to rural or urban jobs is solely based on planners’ choice and is therefore unlikely to be implemented: no zoning regulations can force people to work in one sector of the economy rather than another! It is very likely that in 2030, owners of rice paddy fields in the agricultural belt will face difficulties finding enough labor to work in their fields, because of competition with better paying urban jobs. (p. 135)

What Should Planners Do?

Bertaud argues that the need for urban planning is still crucial, but just not in the way most planners believe. Their job should be to perform four vital tasks, and leave the market to do the rest.

Create Efficient Transportation Systems

First is to design and manage transportation systems to promote maximum flexibility and speed of movement. The book demonstrates that there is no one best way to do this, and each city needs to develop a method based on its history and the preferences of its residents. Cars can work as well as subways, if policies are correctly designed.

Public Goods

The next intervention relates to so-called public goods, such as parks, streets, and other infrastructure. Here planning is vital, as the city needs to provide them since the market will not. However, the trick is not to go overboard. Creating vast greenbelts that enclose the city and generate more rural space than is needed for recreation distorts incentives, reduces flexibility, and raises housing prices. Planners should be ready to add needed infrastructure as the demand for it emerges.

Externalities

Third is regulating the negative spillovers, or externalities, that arise from concentrated living. Driving, for example, generates congestion and pollution during rush hour, and contributes to climate change. Planners need to focus on how to accurately price the use of roads to minimize the negative impacts. Similarly, with building heights. If tall buildings create shadows, then the solution is not to impose arbitrary building height limits, but to adjust the incentives, say through (Pigovian) taxes, so people internalize their impacts on society at large.[3]

Constant Vigilance

Lastly, planners should maintain constant vigilance about the effects of regulations on cities. Rules that were designed decades ago and are no longer relevant should be removed. Planners thus need to regularly evaluate if the suite of rules and plans remain in harmony with the actual behavior and needs of its residents or if it hinders the market from doing its job. Building flexibility into the planning process will allow planners to solve problems as they crop up, without creating new ones along the way.

Politics is also the Problem

This book is important because it highlights the necessary relationship between economics and planning. Successful cities exist in the balance between the efficiency of markets and the curbing of its excesses or failures. Too much regulation increases housing prices, fosters poverty, and reduces social and economic mobility. Too little management can generate congestion, pollution, too little green space, and excessive uncertainty.

But one can’t but help think that it is not simply enough for planners to understand economics (and for economists to understand planning). Urban policies emerge from political decisions. In democratic societies, for example, policies are the result of a compromise to please—or not upset—as many constituencies as possible. So even when planners can design good policies, bad politics may drive decisions that prevent their implementation, or water them down into irrelevance or even harmfulness. It is one thing to design optimal policies, but quite another to incentivize people to go along with them. Allowing cities to reach their full potential requires flexibility, and flexibility means change. People resist change. Understanding the reasons for this is also vital for urban health.

The Future?

Bertaud’s book, I hope, will have an impact on the way planners see cities. Though I fear this will not be the case. My sense is that the planning profession views economics—the dismal science—as being out of touch with the nuts and bolts of running cities (and too mathematical). While economists feel that economic theory and statistical analysis is more important than the nuts and bolts of running cities.

Each field has its own perspectives and way of doing things, and which continue to be propagated through graduate programs, conferences, and professional and academic journals. To be respected in each profession requires one adhere to the rules of its respective game. The tyranny of disciplines locks practitioners into their own walled intellectual cities. Bertaud’s own path is the exception that proves the rule. His route was idiosyncratic, springing from his personal curiosity combined with a lucky encounter with a friendly economist.

A book like this is crucial, but change must also come from within the academies that train professionals. There needs to be more fundamental shifts in world views about the nature of urban policies and the practice of planning. New interdisciplinary programs that bring economists and planners together so they can learn from each other and allow policymakers to think more deeply about the role of land markets, and the nature of incentives and unintended outcomes would be a good start. It will take a lot more people like Bertaud to build momentum. So much rides on our ability to get cities right.

—

[1] Ironically, Jane Jacobs argued, in her 1960 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that planners should not plan; that markets are the best way to create order. Yet, somehow, today Jacobs is the Patron Saint of Modern Planning. Her words were interpreted to mean that cities should preserve or promote the Greenwich Village neighborhood that she liked and deemed good. Planners have substituted Le Corbusier for Jacobs, but the impact on cities is just as real, albeit in a different way.

[2] As I have argued elsewhere, this issue is made somewhat more complex in the United States because of the heavy subsidies for car use and mortgage deductions which encourage sprawl. Furthermore, there is also evidence that while people like the idea of having big yards and free-standing houses, they appear to systematically overvalue them and undervalue the cost of commuting before purchasing a home. But given the large cost of moving, they often find themselves locked-in to a less desirable situation than they anticipated.

[3] Bertaud is not alone in his feeling that cities have over-regulated land markets. In the words of urban economist, Edward Glaeser, “Almost none of the land use regulations that cities have ardently adopted for over a century have been justified by any serious quantitative work. The existence of even the smallest externality, such as a shadow, has been seen as justification for massive interventions in the housing market.”

Counting Houses

Two Decades In

Household Size

A Tour Across the City

Loss Clusters

What Drove Changes in the Housing Stock? A Block Level Analysis

A Heavy Lifting Index

The Gentrification Effect

The View from 1250 Feet

Preface

The View from Roaring Twenties

De-bulking

Strands of Thought

Garden Cities Everywhere

The Veblen Effect

Technocracy

The Depression and the Rebuilding of New York

The New Deal and New York City

La Guardia and Public Housing

Robert D. Kohn

Frederick L. Ackerman

Ackerman’s Reports

The Population Bomb

The “Note”

The Screed

Ackerman as FARther?

The City Club of New York and Birth of the FAR

The Housing Committee, 1935

A Rezoning Proposal, 1936

A Plan for Rezoning the City, 1938

The Zoning Code Amendments, 1939-1940

After the War: The FAR Grows Up

Pleasure or Pain?

Urban Growth versus Real Estate Restrictions

Measuring Oppression

Simulated Streetscapes

Out on the Street

The Pros and Cons of this Work

Computer Vision in Economics

Valuing Curb Appeal

Curb Appeal in Boston

The Pros and Cons of this Work

The Policy Implications

The Dream of Urban Utopia

Order without Design

The Blind and the Paralytic

Insights from Urban Economics

The City as Labor Market

Maximum Flexibility

Population Density Emerges by Choice

Sprawl is not Inherently Bad

Land Markets are Vital

Planning Reduces Flexibly

Cities with No Land Markets

Public Housing on the Urban Fringes

Master Plans

What Should Planners Do?

Create Efficient Transportation Systems

Public Goods

Externalities

Constant Vigilance

Politics is also the Problem

The Future?

Buy the Book

Credits