Author Archives: legallysociable

First segment of “bike autobahn” opens in Germany

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Following up on an earlier post, the first part of the “bike autobahn” recently opened in northwest Germany:

Last month, Germany opened its first stretch of “bike autobahn,” a cycle route that will eventually cover 100 kilometers (62 miles) between the northwestern cities of Duisburg and Hamm. The autobahn moniker (the German term is actually radschnellweg) may sound over the top given that so far just five kilometers of the route have been launched. But the plan’s ultimate scale and ambition is not to be denied…

The idea nonetheless has real potential for medium-length journeys, pushing the limits of frequent daily bike use out from the (now well-provided-for) inner city into the suburbs and wider regions. Munich isalready planning a network like this one, which will stretch from the historic center out along 14 protected two-lane paths through the suburbs into the surrounding lake land. Germany’s fourth city, Cologne, has a smaller plan for a similar bike highway out into its western exurbs.

When it comes to extending this idea from metro areas to tracks between cities, the new Hamm-Duisburg route is ideal. It will pass through the most densely populated region of Germany, the Ruhr region, where a network of industrial cities lies scattered at only short distances from each other, interspersed with forest and farmland. When complete, the route will bring a string of cities into 30 minutes cycle distance of each other—almost 2 million people will live within a two-kilometer radius of the completed highway…

The main sticking point is cost. The full cost of the new Ruhr highway will be€180 million, funding that is not yet in place for the whole route but which should ultimately come from a blend of municipal and provincial budgets. Elsewhere, not everyone is convinced the benefits of projects like this outweigh the expense. A Berlin bike autobahn plan, which would link the city center with the southwest area, is facing resistance from opponents who say that, as as a link primarily used in good weather, it would do little to relieve pressure on existing rail links.

The portion that just opened – and the planned sections for Munich – seem to be primarily about commuters. If you have several million people within easy distance of these new routes, the bike autobahn could get significant use. It would be interesting to also know the ongoing maintenance cost of such paths; compared to laying down roads which need regular repair (and complete overhauls with several decades), these paths might be relatively cheap in the long run.

I do wonder how the commuters might mix with more recreational users. Perhaps the times of use might be slightly different but paths like these could attract both people who want to get to work and others out for exercise – all at varying speeds. Perhaps Europeans who are already more interested in bicycling around cities could handle this better than Americans who often use bike paths for recreational purposes.

Illinois bans creating new government bodies for four years

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Among new laws in Illinois is one that limits the formation of new government units:

HB 0228: Prohibits creating new levels of government for four years.

The Chicago Tribune interprets this law:

No new units of government can be formed in Illinois for four years.

According to Illinois Policy, Illinois has the most local governments with 6,963, giving Illinois nearly a 2,000 unit lead over Texas. A four year ban presumably slows the growth of these government bodies but I still have questions about the efficacy of this law:

  1. Does this translate into savings for taxpayers? Perhaps it simply slows future costs.
  2. Does this mean that lawmakers were unable to consolidate local governments and this was the best they could do? On one hand, people decry the spread of local governments and taxing bodies but they tend to like local control when it suits their interests.
  3. Are any others states ever going to approach the number of local government units that Illinois has?

What politician would kill the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage?

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The second to last chapter of Shaky Ground: The Strange Saga of the U.S. Mortgage Giants includes this summary of the American housing industry:

But there is widespread agreement among policy makers on at least this element of investors’ argument, which is that you cannot keep a cheap, long-term, fixed-rate mortgage available to the wide swath of Americans through big economic ups and downs without some sort of government backstop. There is a reason no other country has such a product. For all the supposed ideological purity in today’s Washington, no politician wants to be responsible for the loss of something Americans have come to see as a right. Indeed, despite Alan Greenspan’s admonition years ago that many Americans would do better with adjustable-rate mortgages, in November 2014 a stunning 87 percent of Americans who took out a mortgage to buy a house chose a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, according to data from the Urban Institute.

As the rest of the book argues, the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage today the result of particular arrangements involving Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Americans after World War II may have thought they were after owning a single-family home but less attention was paid to what was undergirding all of this: a particular financial instrument – the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage – that made some people a lot of money and helped dictate other areas of policy and social life.

Sociologists provide limited hope for reversing inequality

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Several sociologists, among other experts, provides reasons for hope and despair regarding the shift where “inequality in America has been on the rise. The result is an alarming concentration of wealth among the country’s very well-off.” As they discuss reasons for hope, I was struck that the policy prescriptions provided by these experts tended to be limited: generally smaller programs (like Moving To Opportunity) or local efforts. This could be the result of several factors: maybe an online article this isn’t the sort of venue to get into large-scale policy discussions; perhaps academics aren’t great at operating in the world of policy as opposed to diagnosing problems; or the scope of study among these academics has tended toward smaller-scale studies. An area where some experts did see hope was in the social movement activity of recent years which has pushed some of these issues into the larger public conversation.

It would be fascinating to ask a broader range of sociologists this question and to get specifics from them on what gives them despair or hope. It can be relatively easy to point out large trends – such as concentrated wealth – but it is more difficult to discuss and push for feasible change. I’m also reminded that the period of less concentrated wealth that people often look to as a shining example – the post World War II era – was the result of particular large events that were difficult to foresee (a worldwide depression, the biggest war the world has ever seen) and responses to these changes.

Why are Chicago families fleeing for cheaper homes in the suburbs?

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The Chicago Tribune leads with the story of a Chicago family who left the city for a townhouse in River Forest:

Megan Keskitalo and her husband, Glenn Eckstein, were enthusiastic city dwellers until the suburbs began calling. First it was Chicago’s crime, then it was worry about school districts, and in the end, it was money that pushed them past the city’s edge.

After a long search, the parents of two young daughters packed up their $1,300-a-month three-bedroom Lincoln Square apartment and in September paid $286,000 for a three-bedroom town house in River Forest.

“We were looking (in the city), but we couldn’t find anything in our price range, which was under $350,000,” Keskitalo said.

But, just how many Chicago families are doing this? The story sticks to general trends without any numbers:

They aren’t the only ones. While experts say Chicago’s housing market is sizzling — home sales were up about 8.1 percent in Chicago through November of this year, says the Illinois Association of Realtors — not everyone can afford to buy in the city. That’s because home prices are up too…

It’s not unusual for millennials and Generation Xers with children to flee to what real estate experts call “surbans” — walkable, amenity-rich suburbs — once they get married, have kids and are looking for less party and more quiet.

The implication of this article is that families like this are being priced out of Chicago: they might stay if they could find housing in their price range in attractive neighborhoods. Yet, there is a lot more going on here:

  1. The article also says real estate prices are on the rise in Chicago. This is generally seen as a good thing – unless it pushes desirable people, like young white families (or recent college graduates or older long-time city residents) out.
  2. There are real issues of affordable housing in Chicago and the whole region. However, there is often disagreement about who such housing should serve. Should it help keep wealthier residents in a community or serve those with much lower levels of income? Chicago is building plenty of high-end condos but there is not much action on the lower end of the market with affordable units in decent neighborhoods.
  3. This family had particular conditions for where they were willing to live: less crime, good schools, cheaper housing. Overall, they wanted a particular quality of life. They could have found cheaper housing in Chicago but without being willing to compromise on these particular issues, they left for the suburbs.
  4. How much of this is tied to the ongoing process of white flight? This family left a trendy Chicago neighborhood for an established wealthy and white suburb: River Forest is roughly 85% white and the median household income is over $113,000. Again, they could have found cheaper housing in the city (#3 above) if they were willing to live in more places that might not have been as white.

Hoping to retire the myth of widening roads to reduce traffic

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Eric Jaffe provides a reminder that traffic is not lessened if there were just wider roads:

“Wider Roads = Less Traffic”—The most enduring popular traffic myth holds that building more roads always leads to less congestion. This belief is a perfectly logical one: if there are 100 cars packed into one highway lane, then building a second should mean there’s 50 cars in each. The problem, as transportation researchers have found again and again, is that when this new lane gets added the number of cars doesn’t stay the same. On the contrary, people who stopped driving out of frustration with traffic now attack the road with an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.

While residents of heavily congested metro areas have a suite of four-letter words to describe this effect, experts call it “induced demand.” What this means, simply put, is that building more road eventually (if not always immediately) leads to more traffic, not less. Fortunately, local leaders are starting to distinguish reality from myth when it comes to induced demand. Unfortunately, the best way to address it—congestion pricing—remains all-but politically impossible in the U.S. That pretty much leaves one thing to do: deal with it.

A congestion tax is one way to deal with the issue: make people think twice about driving into heavily trafficked areas. At the same time, broader solutions could be employed: planning communities and regions that don’t rely so much on solo driver trips (such as through denser development); increasing funding to mass transit and providing more regular service and/or more options; and finding other ways to cut incentives on driving such as increasing gasoline taxes or paying per mile for driving. Of course, these broader approaches may be asking too much as Americans still like the option of driving. But, it may take some bold politicians and municipalities to try congestion pricing and show that it can work before it is widely adopted.

In other words, you may be able to show studies that demonstrate how this myth isn’t true but perhaps Americans dislike the truth – and the solutions that go with – even more.

Winfield, major hospital reach agreement for $900k annual grant

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Winfield is a small suburb with money problems; the hospital in town is expanding and has money. Solution? A sizable annual grant from the hospital to the village:

Winfield will receive a $900,000 annual grant over each of the next five years from Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital as part of an agreement finalized Monday, officials said…

“We recognize the unique economic challenges facing Winfield,” CDH President Brian Lemon said in a statement released Monday afternoon. The hospital, he said, “is committed to working with the village to ensure Winfield remains a great place to live, raise families and receive high-quality health care. Our collaboration with the village of Winfield is designed to encourage economic development while stimulating the village’s economy.”…

CDH made the new offer after Winfield trustees rejected the hospital’s first proposal to give the village an annual $500,000 grant. The board was seeking roughly $1.4 million a year from CDH to help pay for the services Winfield provides to the hospital…

Winfield trustees even voted to put an advisory question on the March 15 primary election ballot that would ask voters if the village board should begin taxing CDH’s operations. The village clerk would have submitted that ballot question to DuPage County election officials had an agreement not been finalized Monday, but officials said it’s no longer necessary.

I wonder how common such agreements are. The hospital provides jobs and status yet is quite the growing facility exempt from the local property tax rolls. Here is how the Village of Winfield described the issue in October 2015:

CDH was established approximately 50 years ago as a small hospital in Winfield’s town center. In the 1990’s, the hospital began a series of major expansions of its campus through numerous property acquisitions. The majority of the purchases were commercial properties located in the town center.
The hospital now controls nearly 60% of the property in the Village ’s town center and has expanded its footprint across both of the downtown’s major arteries – Winfield and High Lake Roads.
CDH has benefited from the expansions. It is now a nationally-ranked hospital and by far the most profitable hospital in Illinois according to tax filings compiled by Crain’s Magazine. CDH has averaged a yearly profit of $160 million over the past five years with growing reserves of approximately $2 billion in cash and investments. Meanwhile the Village has continued cutting staff and services to cope with lean budgets and leaner forecasts.

Is this solely the case of the big non-profit hospital dwarfing the small village? However, Winfield has its own issues including very rancorous infighting among local political officials and candidates (I have not seen many suburb with such regular negative interactions) and a limited tax base (as the community debates whether to expand it).

Maybe this annual grant is a decent solution to the issue: the hospital is unlikely to move and the village needs money. I imagine hospital officials appreciate the village threatening to put something on the ballots unless money is provided and the village is probably not entirely happy with the amount of money. In the end, this seems like a payoff. Do these two parties really need each other and how much is this worth annually?

Planning for more micro-apartments in NYC

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New York City may change its regulations to allow more micro-apartments:

Planning officials are proposing to end a limit on how small apartments can be, opening the door for more “micro-apartments” that advocates see as affordable adaptations to a growing population of single people. Critics fear a turn back toward the city’s tenement past and question whether less space will really mean less expensive…

As an experimental project, Carmel Place got city land and a waiver from New York’s 400-square-foot minimum on new apartments, set in 1987. A proposed elimination of that minimum would allow smaller studios in buildings with a mix of apartment sizes, but entire micro-unit buildings would continue to need waivers...

Forty percent of the units have rents set by affordable-housing programs topping out at around $1,500 a month, but market-rate ones rent for $2,650 to $3,150, roughly on par with many studios in the nearby Murray Hill neighborhood. About 20 people have applied and hundreds requested information for eight market-rate units so far, while over 60,000 have entered a lottery for the affordable ones…

But critics see micro-units as a step backward in the city’s affordable housing crunch – still pricey, just smaller.

The demand for any new housing is high in New York City and a number of other major cities like San Francisco. It seems like the trick with the micro-apartments is that there needs to be thousands of them available in a relatively short amount of time to really address affordable housing otherwise. In contrast, if the units just trickle out (whether from regulatory issues or opposition from nearby residents or apathy from developers), the smaller units will barely make a dent and the prices will stay sky high. It is either all in for micro-apartments or they simply become a unique housing option in one of the world’s most expensive cities.

Shadowy McMansion owners

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A letter to the editor in the New York Times suggests McMansions owned by shell companies are a big problem:

Your article on shell companies and real estate highlights a phenomenon not unique to ultra-wealthy areas of Los Angeles. Real estate purchases using the cover of limited liability companies are a significant issue in the San Gabriel Valley in eastern Los Angeles County, where McMansions owned by L.L.C.s sit empty as middle-class home buyers are priced out, unable to compete against those flush with foreign money from unknown and undisclosed sources.

New York, San Francisco, London and Vancouver are also experiencing this influx. In the United States, real estate brokers and agents are not required to comply with customer due diligence and know your customer mandates that banks and many non-bank institutions must follow.

This kind of argument makes McMansions seem even worse then they are typically depicted: they are owned by shadowy wealthy people who don’t care about the normal resident who just needs somewhere to live. The problem with this letter is that it doesn’t provide good data on how many homes actually fall into this category. Wealthy, culturally significant cities like the ones listed above – LA, NYC, San Francisco, London, Vancouver – do attract foreign investors (particularly Chinese investors recently in Vancouver and the LA area) but major cities tend to like this: it keeps new capital flowing into local coffers and it fuels the high-end construction industry (see Miami or London or New York).

In contrast, it is pretty clear that most major American cities don’t really want to talk about affordable housing and/or aren’t willing to do much about it. Affordable housing is needed in many major cities, particularly those along the coasts. Part of the reason McMansions exist in the first place is that Americans were willing to move further out from the city to buy a bigger house (and this has to with state policies and residential preferences to avoid urban life and non-whites). The resources that it takes to construct McMansions in the suburbs could be harnessed to build smaller urban units or at least denser suburban units (see these recent ideas to use the materials from McMansions or to subdivide McMansions into multiple units) but few governments want to mess with the single-family home market and few builders or developers want to limit their profits.

Postwar suburban houses reviewed

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A review of two new books on postwar suburban homes points out some of the idiosyncrasies of the houses:

The one-story ranch loosened its belt and spread out, and the Split Level, that most American hippogriff of house hybrids, took flight. The origins of the split level are murky: it originally offered a small footprint and a means to make better use of sloped northeastern sites. But it soon spread to locations where neither item was a real concern. It was an easy means to reintroduce functional separations that residents soon realized were valuable: locating bedrooms a stairway away from living rooms wasn’t merely Victorian prudishness—it made good sense. Split levels also fueled the rise of that most suburban setting, the rec room, which was usually located in basements or lower levels and almost invariably a more informal children-oriented social space, frequently enabling the relative re-formalization of the main living room.That suburban building sited homes on big lots is not news, but what is worth noting, as Lane points out, is how the houses were designed in relation to those lots. The formal and inward-oriented facades of pre-war homes gave way to houses whose facades were dominated by the living room picture window, affording a glimpse not merely of one’s own yard but those of your neighbors. As Lane comments, “The windows looked out on the new landscapes that formed around them and also enhanced the perception of spaciousness so much desired by this generation.” The scenography was often repetitive, but it was open: As John Updike commented in Rabbit Redux, “now the view from any window is as into a fragmented mirror, of houses like this, telephone wires and television aerials showing where the glass cracked.”…

Distinctive design was rarest from the larger builders, but similar trends characterized a very wide swath of construction, despite an often complicated level of agency. Jacobs cites a National Association of Home Builders study in 1959 indicating that 38.3 percent of builders designed their own homes, 34 percent used a contract or in-house architect, 12 percent hired a designer of some sort, and 6 percent purchased blueprints through a commercial service. Countless independent and uncoordinated actors who end up producing a similar monotony is unfortunately often the story of America.

And my favorite part of this review:

Suburban building has long been reviled by sociologists and ignored by architects. As Lane comments, “scholarship has been delayed and disturbed by decades of neglect and dislike.” Some of that neglect and dislike is warranted: it’s hard to find all that much architectural distinction in the vast majority of suburban homes. Their general interchangeability discourages the kind of design interest that has given us many monographs on vernacular rowhouses and bungalows and only a handful on the ranch home. There are countless books on a dozen homes in New Canaan, Connecticut, but almost no books on the remaining thousands of homes there; that balance is mainly right—and yet.

Simply the sheer number of homes built in the decades after World War II meant that these design choices would be influential. With a massive housing shortage building up through the Great Depression and World War II, homes were needed quickly and the existing economic, political, social, and design forces led to these particular kinds of homes.

But, as a suburban scholar I agree that such homes have either gotten little attention or have been reviled. These homes were incredibly influential, even if they weren’t true Modernist structures or deviated too much from existing vernacular designs or weren’t designed by architects but rather were mass-produced. Much of the scholarship and commentary on these postwar homes is done from a critical, after-the-fact angle and with an implicit alternative vision of how an urbanized America might have turned out. There is some truth in all of these critiques: these suburban communities were racist (in that non-whites were typically not welcome), initially had particular visions of gender roles and family life, promoted consumerism and driving, and took up a lot of land without much thought of the consequences. At the same time, millions of Americans enjoyed their new homes and the opportunities that came with them.