Opinion: Upzone Now To Improve Future Commutes

[M II A II R II K]

More Housing Is The Answer To Less Transit


August 5, 2020

By MICHAEL HENDRIX, JOHN KETCHAM

Read More: https://www.cityandstateny.com/artic...s-transit.html

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Unlike the traditional mixed-use neighborhood, which satisfies residents’ basic needs for food, work, and leisure within close proximity, sprawling post-war cities and suburbs require the typical American to work in one place, shop in another, and live somewhere else entirely. The separation of business districts and housing has social costs. For years, studies have shown that commuting harms physical and mental well-being. One even found that adding 20 minutes to a commute makes workers as miserable as a 19 percent reduction in pay. Writ large, these effects are a matter of public health. Long commutes also disproportionally affect America’s black communities and the working poor.

- New Yorkers face the worst commutes in the country: an average of 35.9 minutes one-way and 89.4 hours stuck in congestion each year. In the densest, least car-dependent metropolis in the nation, how is this possible? One reason: not enough housing has been built in areas where jobs are growing. An October 2019 report by the New York City Department of City Planning found that from 2009 to 2018, 700,000 new jobs were added in the city, compared with only 197,000 new housing units permitted. In certain areas, the mismatch between job and housing growth is striking. — SoHo, among the wealthiest areas in New York City and accessible on foot to tens of thousands of Lower Manhattan jobs, has not witnessed a single new unit of affordable housing built during Mayor Bill de Blasio’s tenure, despite the mayor’s goal to build or preserve 300,000 such units. — While New York – including the suburbs on Long Island and in Westchester – have faltered, Northern New Jersey has experienced a residential construction boom. During the 2009-2018 period, North Jersey added 88,000 jobs and issued 183,000 residential unit permits. The result: more people living in New Jersey and commuting to work in New York City, which further necessitates the transportation infrastructure that moves them around.

- “We need to bring hous­ing to com­mer­cial dis­tricts if we’re go­ing to have a stronger neigh­bor­hood fab­ric and make peo­ple less de­pen­dent on pub­lic trans­porta­tion and long com­mutes,” Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of Partnership for New York City, toldThe Wall Street Journal for an article touting the Financial District as a model. She’s right. Mixing housing and commercial uses in the same area should reduce commuting times without requiring new investments in transportation infrastructure. — Areas that are home to more job growth than new housing should be upzoned. In New York City, SoHo could add 1,500 units, even while keeping historic preservation protections in place. East Midtown has an enormous concentration of employers, yet caps residential use at 20 percent of each building’s total square footage. — Relaxing or eliminating these restrictions would help create a more resilient, thriving neighborhood in one of the most dynamic job centers in the world. Even historic districts have parking lots and newer commercial buildings that could be redeveloped to the historic density of surrounding buildings all without destroying landmarked sites or the essence of the neighborhood. Allowing more housing near jobs also makes cities work better. Cities are best defined as labor markets.

- The goal is not to replace jobs with housing in urban cores, but to allow the two to grow together. A similar outcome could occur with job growth in suburban housing centers, but there are costs to “employment sprawl”: a resident of Long Island could face an even more torturous commute for a job that jumps the Hudson to Jersey. Labor markets also become more dynamic when they can bring people together easily and are allowed to adapt over time. Downtown Brooklyn’s 2004 rezoning led to the creation of thousands of new homes in an area filling up with office and retail jobs a short walk or bike ride away, all of which was built atop a host of subway lines reaching the rest of New York City. — Carving apartments out of underperforming spaces in commercial districts, for instance, can alleviate the still-high cost of housing and avoid a glut of vacant offices from depressing the market and hampering municipal tax revenues. With the right policies, this time of crisis can give way to more neighborhoods where we live, work, and play. Second, we can do away with the arbitrary use restrictions and density controls that prevent spaces from being adaptively reused.

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[Crawford]

I'm sorry, but good luck trying to build lots of new housing in SoHo. It's landmarked, has height limits, and essentially no parking lots or potential development sites.

Yeah, this article makes sense in theory, but there are practical reasons why certain neighborhoods aren't gonna see lots of new housing absent massive paradigm changes.

And even if you could somehow get a super-popular mayor to expend massive political capital to override all opposition, what would be the point? There are much lower hanging-fruit (rail yards, industrial zones, etc.) that can be more easily developed.

[M II A II R II K]

Then perhaps also build more employment around housing as well.