Last month, Portland, OR implemented a new program to spur the construction of affordable housing in the city and surrounding county. In the simplest terms, market rate apartment developers are being paid by the city to build affordable homes as part of their new communities. By helping fund the construction of these homes, Portland is offsetting the constraint on development cause by their inclusionary housing policy. While the specifics of Portland’s policy are not directly applicable to California (Portland is paying for this partly through property tax breaks for the developers, an option that is not normally available to cities in California), the concept as a whole could provide a significant boost to affordable housing development in California cities with existing affordable housing resources.

Typically, affordable housing in California is funded by a combination of State and local sources of funds. The backbone financing program is the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, administered by the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee (TCAC). These tax credits are then leveraged with local sources of funding from cities, counties, or regional housing trusts. In fact, increasing the amount of local funds, while decreasing the request for tax credits, makes it more likely that a development will receive tax credit award under TCAC regulations. As tax credits have become more competitive in recent years, the amount of local financing going into these projects continues to climb. Combined with the raising cost of construction, cities are getting significantly fewer affordable homes for their investments than they had in the past.

Cities with significant housing resources could adopt an affordable housing funding model similar to Portland’s to increase their return on investment, or in other words, by creating more affordable homes with their available funds.

Last year, of the 181 different developments that applied for 4% tax credits (one of the two types of tax credits, and the only one for which data is readily available), the average cost to build a single affordable apartment in California is $588,000. Depending on the development, the price can range from $250,000 to over $1.1 million per home. Some of this cost is paid through privately financed bank loans taken out by the developer, but a large percentage of every one of these homes is paid for by the government.

The cost of construction for market rate developers is not drastically different than it is for affordable developers. They are certainly able to build homes more economically than the high end of the range of affordable developments, but the average price of a new market-rate apartment is only a little less than the average new affordable apartment. However, under Portland’s model, the City is not funding the entire cost of construction, only the difference between the construction cost and the amount of debt the project can take on based on the restricted rent.

In Los Angeles County, for instance, a two-bedroom apartment restricted to 80% of the Area Median Income could be rented for $2,270. From this gross rent, it might be that $1,500 could be used for debt service. Under current market conditions, that supports approximately $225,000 in debt. If the construction costs for each affordable apartment is $350,000, then the city would need to pay $125,000 to ensure the additional affordable apartments are cost-neutral for the developer.

Creating a cost-neutral program to developers for the creation of affordable housing is key. First, cities must create an inclusionary policy that requires the construction of affordable housing in any market rate development. Then, to counteract the inclusionary policy acting as a constraint on development, create a way for cities to pay for the added cost of income restricting apartments.

This model could be a very effective way for cities to use their existing affordable housing resources to build more homes off the back of market rate developments already being built. It would have the added benefit of reducing competition for tax credits and would allow that program to be more effective, and allow for more certainty in the financing of affordable housing.

Reading The Architecture of Community by Léon Krier, you really get a sense of his outsized influence on New Urbanism specifically and modern urban planning more generally. The Architecture of Community is a collection of essays and drawings by Léon Krier from throughout his career. While this leads to slightly disjointed reading, the essays are grouped into chapter by subject. The first and most robust chapter is on classical architecture and modernity. In fact, the first three chapters all have to do with Krier’s critique of modernity. These chapters are foundational to the rest of the book. The ideas presented here continually resurface throughout.

Unfortunately, the ideas presented in this first section are a real mixed bag. Some of the ideas make a lot of sense, such as the use of buildings – especially unique uses within a city – should be identifiable from the form of the building. However, other ideas seem misplaced or come from personal preference. These first few chapters spend most of the time decrying modernism and modern styles of architecture. Much of this comes from a point of view that the built environment of the past is better, based on the buildings that remain from the past. This ignores the fact that most buildings from the past have not survived to today, which is a common critique of people who advocate for the use of traditional building materials, styles, and practices. Overall, this section feels very much like old-man-yells-at-clouds, but that doesn’t mean the old man isn’t right every once in a while.

The most interesting and relevant section of the book for urban planners today comes about a third of the way in. The chapter titled The Polycentric City of Urban Communities. This chapter introduces many of the germs of ideas that have solidified into the current conversation around the 15-minute city. His definition of an “urban quarter” as an area of about 500-600 meters (1,600-1,900 feet), or a circle in which someone could walk within about 10 minutes, and meet all of their daily needs is very similar to how the 15-minute city is defined today, just about a third smaller. The essays in this chapter are their accompanying drawing help illustrate the historic roots, need, and desirability of having compact communities that meet resident’s needs.

Related to this idea, but not directed tied together in the book, is the idea of expansion of a city through duplication. While this focuses on a city’s initial growth (as urban planners and designers so often do), there are many lessons we can take while growing a city within its existing fabric. In essence, Léon identifies two ways cities often expand, through a horizontal separation of uses (i.e. suburbanization) or through the vertical separation of uses within ever increasingly tall buildings (which he describes as vertical cul-de-sacs). A third way of expanding cities, the one he advocates for, is the duplication of complete cities adjacent to the existing city. As planners today, focused on city building within the city’s existing fabric, we can use these ideas to work towards a series of interconnected complete communities within the city. To do this, we must bring missing uses into the monocultural expanses that are defined by our traditional Euclidean zoning. In other words, add homes to our retail and office centers, and add retail and offices to our residential subdivisions.

As the book goes on, it is filled with more and more drawing and photographs of Léon Krier’s work. While educational if you sit and study them, they are often presented without context or explanation. This feels like a waste of pages. It would have been great had Dhiru Thadani, as the person who conceived of this book and helped assemble it, provided his own words to help bring context and tie everything together into a cohesive whole.

In the end, The Architecture of Community feels like a collection of blog posts stitched together into the physical form of a book. While it is interesting to see the origins and source material for so many of the ideas that permeate new urbanism and modern planning, there are many other books that present these same ideas more cohesively and thought through than what’s in this book.

Since the 1960’s, HUD has defined rent-burdened households as those that spend more than 30% of their adjusted gross income on housing. In California, the California Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD) and Tax Credit Allocation Committee (TCAC) have adopted this same standard for setting rent limits for affordable housing developments funded by their programs. Unfortunately, this simple metric does not quantify the vast differences in cost of living in different places, driving in large part by transportation costs. The affordable housing industry as a whole needs a more useful metric to determine affordability that looks at more than just housing costs.

One such metric that has been proposed in recent years is to use housing and transportation costs to determine affordability, and to define rent-burdened households as those that spend more than 50% of their gross income on rent and transportation costs. This recognizes the fact that cheaper homes are often further away from job centers, and therefore the transportation costs for households living in them are often higher. This is a useful metric because it is almost as simple as the existing metric, and all of the necessary data is readily available.

While commuting costs are not regularly reported at the local level, the Census does ask about travel time and mode of transportation for commuting as part of the American Community Survey. While not exact, it is possible to use this data to estimate the average cost of commuting based on commute time and mode. By using data on the means of transportation to work by travel time to work (ACS Table B08134) at the zip code level, it is possible to make meaningful estimates on the average cost of traveling to work for each zip code. (Unfortunately, there is not enough useful data at the block or tract level, and county-level data doesn’t fully capture the differences in commuting costs in geographically larger counties.)

This could work very similarly to how affordable housing rents take utility allowances into account. When calculating rents, affordable housing developers have to provide a utility allowance to tenants based on the utilities the tenants pay for. This utility allowance gets deducted from their rent. For instance, in LA County, a family of three in a two-bedroom apartment restricted to 60% AMI has a rent limit of $1,702. If that family pays for electricity, gas, and water, their utility allowance would be $190 according to the LA County Development Authority. This $190 would be deducted from their affordable rent, so their rent would be $1,512.

Similarly, a transportation allowance could be provided to households that varies based on zip code. Let’s compare two zip codes to demonstrate how the transportation allowance can be calculated and how it might vary from place to place. Zip code 90012 is in the heart of Downtown LA with easy access to both jobs and transportation options. In contrast, zip code 93535 is on the east side of Lancaster, far from most jobs and completely car dependent.¹

As you might imagine, significantly more people walk and take public transit in 90012 than in 93535, and the people that do drive in 90012 are in the car less than half the time of drivers from 93535. Base on the assumptions that I made regarding the cost of traveling for each mode of transportation, the average cost of commuting in 90012 is $324/mo., while the cost is $878/mo. in 93535. This is based on an average cost of driving is $0.65/mi. (the IRS driving reimbursement rate) at an average speed of 60 mph. The cost of bus and rail commuting is assumed to be $4/day (this number doesn’t make a large difference in either zip code), and the cost of walking and biking are free. These assumptions can surely be debated and changed, but they work well to illustrate the utility of having a transportation allowance.

Using this data, we can re-level rent limits so that households living in rent restricted apartments are paying the same amount of their income for rent and transportation costs, regardless of their access to transportation options or job centers. If rent limits were raised to 40% of gross income with a transportation allowance, the same family we talked about before would have a rent limit of $2,270 instead of the $1,702 today. If they lived in 90012, in Downtown LA, they would have a transportation allowance of $324 and a net rent of $1,946. If, on the other hand, they lived in Lancaster in 93535, they would have a transportation allowance of $878 and a net rent of $1,392. While families living in Downtown would be paying more for rent than they do today, families in Lancaster would be paying significantly less.

One advantage of providing a transportation allowance when determining affordable rents is that it more accurately reflects the varying cost of living caused by transportation costs. A secondary benefit is that a transportation allowance would encourage the development of affordable housing in zip codes with transportation options and in close proximity to jobs. These areas, such as zip code 90012 in our example, will provide more rental income to developers. This would allow them to support higher levels of conventional debt financing and reduce the amount of needed government subsidies compared to developments further from job centers and transportation options. It is already the explicit goal of HCD and TCAC to encourage affordable housing development near job centers and in high quality transit areas. This would simply be another tool to achieve these goals.

Increasing affordable rents to 40% of gross household income and providing a transportation allowance based on zip code would help further California’s housing (and climate) goals and would better reflect the realities of how transportation costs increase the financial burden on households in disproportionate ways depending on location.

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1. I really missed a great opportunity to have a Disneyland easter egg in here by choosing zip codes 90000 and 93599.^{^}

A City on Mars sounds like a futuristic urban planning book, but it’s not. The book is about the challenges humanity will have settling space, whether it’s on space stations, the Moon, or Mars. As a long-time space nerd and urban planner, this book had the potential to be an interesting exploration at the cross section of multiple interests. Unfortunately, the book falls into the same traps as others who envision what space colonies will be like, but in the other direction. Most space settlement advocates describe space as a potential human-made Eden. This book describes space settlements as a potential human-made hell. The truth is probably somewhere in between, but we can’t know because there are no detailed plans for any space settlements and we simply don’t know enough to make an accurate prediction on what space settlements could be like or the challenges in creating them.

The book starts with a look at what we know about the physical and mental impacts of spaceflight on humans. The truth is that we don’t know much, and what we do know isn’t exactly promising when it comes to the long-term settlement of space. The book then goes on to examine each of the likely places for space settlement, including the Moon, Mars, and space stations. In these sections, the authors discuss the reasons for settling each, and the challenges. The book then goes into a lengthy discussion about the current international legal framework for space exploration and settlement, including a whole chapter on create new nations in space. The final section of the book is about the risks space settlement poses to all of humanity, which might have been the most convincing part of the book, but the arguments still ended up falling fairly flat.

After all of this discussion, the authors propose a wait-and-go-big approach to space settlement. Their contention is that space settlement is risky (it is), and that the best way to mitigate those risks is to do as much research upfront as possible, and then send a large colony over a short period of time. The thinking is that a large colony has more resources in the form of humans, which will allow for more specialization of workers and therefore have a greater chance of success. Unfortunately, the authors seem to severely misunderstand the way both technology and the law are developed.

Technology, and law, are developed only through necessity. The law to safely govern space will not be created until an international crisis arises that requires that law. The necessary technology for space settlement will not be created until we try to colonize space and know what tech is needed. There are certainly many unknowns to space colonization, but the only way to identify and solve those unknowns is to attempt to colonize space. A wait-and-go-big approach will never allow us to solve those unknowns, so we will never be ready to colonize space.

Of course, one of the big drivers for entering space is economic growth. The book acknowledges that as a driver, but really questions what it’ll do for the economy on Earth. While this might be true, the promise of wealth was often the driver for exploration and settlement from Europe but it rarely paid off in the near term. However, over the long term, past waves of exploration and settlement allowed for significant economic growth. The problem with the authors’ point of view is that they’re focused solely on Earth’s economy. This is like looking at the colonization of the Americas through the lens of the European economy, while ignoring the American economy separate from Europe. Now here we are, 400 years later, with an economy that dwarfs Europe’s. There is no real consideration of the economic activity between future space colonies that don’t have Earth acting as the middleman.

In fact, many problems described in the book with growing the space economy involve getting things off Earth or back to Earth. Either we’re launching huge amounts of mass into space from Earth, or we’re delivering finished industrial products back to Earth. They don’t really consider using the industrial output of space for use in space. That way we don’t have to deal with the Earth’s gravity well once we’re out of it.

For example, they take on the argument that there are significant amounts of precious metals available for mining in space. The argument goes that returning these precious metals at the current prices for those metals will represent a great increase in wealth for humanity. As a counter-point to this, the authors use the commoditization of aluminum to show how the price of precious material goes down as the metal becomes more common. Basically, even though aluminum was once a precious metal, now that it’s available to everyone doesn’t make us all millionaires. However, think of how much better off our lives are because we have aluminum. In very real ways, the commoditization of aluminum hasn’t made us rich as a precious metal, but it has improved our quality of life. What else is wealth other than the ability to improve one’s quality of life. If extraction of space resources makes gold, platinum and other precious metals common commodities the way aluminum is today, there’s no telling how we might be able to use them to improve the quality of our lives. This won’t make us rich by increasing our bank accounts, but it will make us rich in more important ways.

In fact, the entire first chapter is the authors setting up a series of straw man arguments for why space settlement is a good thing, and then knocking them down. Unfortunately, they don’t spend any real time getting into the details of any of the reasons for space settlement or giving a good faith argument as to why space settlement could be beneficial.

Not only do the authors attempt to cast doubt on the reasons for colonizing space, they spend a significant portion of the book detailing the risks of colonization on the people that go to space. A lot of their concerns about these risks and the well-being of the folks moving to space, ring hollow. It is a personal decision on how much risk and discomfort a person is willing to tolerate. It might be more than the authors are willing to take on, but they can’t dictate what others can do. Throughout the book, the authors seem to come from the view that exploration and settlement are not worth the risk of suffering and death. While this may be true for them, it is hard to say that it will be true for everyone. The exploration and colonization of the world required similar risks and hardships, yet people still did it. It is unreasonable to think that the only way a space colony will be successful is if the length and quality of life for the colonists is the same as it would if those same people stayed on Earth.

The final chapter of the book attempts to make a list of unknowns that that need to be figured out before we can successfully settle space. They then go on to say that we need to continue to slowly enter space with longer duration space flights and research stations on the Moon and eventually Mars, before we begin a colonization effort. This final chapter felt discontinuous from the rest of the book where they detail all of the challenges and problems with colonizing space.

In the end, their recommendation is similar to how NASA pursued the early space program. In other words, create a list of unknowns that need to be figured out and then create a plan to systematically figure them out before we can colonize another planet. Just like with the Mercury, Gemini, and early Apollo programs, where NASA figured out everything the American space program needed to learn in order to successfully land on the moon. Whether that was how to do EVAs during Gemini 4, or how to rendezvous and dock to spacecraft on Gemini 6A/7, and Gemini 8.

At the end of this book, I agree with their conclusions, that to successfully settle space, we will need to identify these unknowns and figure out how to make them known. The only way to do this is by identifying what we can now, and to start chipping away at them, while knowing that there are things we don’t even know we don’t know yet. This will only happen as we enter space, start to have increasingly long lives in space, and slowing start filling the stars. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the main body of the book supports the authors’ own conclusions.

At the end of the introduction, the authors riff on a famous quote by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, “Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot live in a cradle forever.” They say that when humans emerge from the cradle, they are toddlers prone to self-harm and destruction. They go on to say that when humanity emerges from the Earth, it would be better if we did so as full-fledged adults. The problem is that if humans are kept in the cradle to adulthood, they never learn the necessary lessons to be adults. Humanity will no doubt make mistakes as it enters space, but it is through those mistakes that we will learn how to be a spacefaring civilization.

(or how transportation constrains our cities)

The biggest problem for urban planners in America today is that they don’t control the transportation infrastructure. Cities often work in silos, where the planners write the rules for what can be built on private property, while the Public Works Department designs and builds the roads. Unfortunately, the roads we build directly affect the private land uses that are viable.

Often, the priorities and general world view of planners and traffic engineers are at odds with one another. While planners often want to build vibrant communities, traffic engineers want to move the highest volume of traffic possible. Chuck Marohn does a good job of describing this disconnect in Confessions of a Recovering Engineer.

Traffic engineers have good reason to focus on moving high volumes of cars, a topic of many community meetings is the reduction in traffic and the need for more parking. On its face, these community concerns support the traffic engineer’s desire for wider and faster streets. But underneath the comments about traffic is a desire for residents to quickly and efficiently go about their lives. They don’t want to waste their time in traffic, but they also don’t necessarily care if they use their car to travel to whatever their destination might be. Reducing traffic by adding lanes and speeding up traffic is the most direct solution to the real concerns of the community, it certainly is not the only one. However, it is the only solution that destroys what makes a community worth living in.

Roads that are designed to move large volumes of cars at high speeds are disastrous for building vibrant communities. They engender places to drive through, not to travel to. Specifically, high speed, high volume roads are in no way walkable. The result is that the only viable buildings along such roads are served by cars. It is impossible to have successful, street facing retail on a fast, high volume street. It is impossible to get to know your neighbors on a street given over to cars.

Anaheim’s Platinum Triangle is a great example of this type of failure. It was conceived of as a new mixed-use community in the heart of Orange County. Unfortunately, it is bisected by two, ten-lane roads. All of the commercial uses were originally planned to face these roads. To date, very little of the planned commercial was ever built, and what was built is chronically vacant. Despite thousands of homes being built within walking distance, nobody walks here because the roads are not comfortable to walk along. It was a great planning effort that has failed because the planners didn’t have control of the roadway network.

The solution to this disconnect between planners and traffic engineers is a comprehensively planned city to ensure the road network supports the true desires of the community instead of working against them. This requires a city to have a vision and goals for its future, and for the traffic engineers to relinquish their personal priorities of moving high volumes of cars to the community’s priorities as expressed through the city’s vision and goals. It requires other solutions to mobility rather than the car. It requires bringing disparate uses closer together; to bring housing to the city’s retail centers and new retail near existing homes. It requires building transportation alternatives, including safe walking and cycling paths, to connect residents homes to their daily destinations such as schools, shopping, and work.

Unfortunately, finding traffic engineers that are willing to subordinate their professional engineering judgement to the desires of the community can be difficult. The entire traffic engineering profession is oriented towards moving cars quickly. Everything traffic engineers learn in school and all of their professional guidance teaches them is to move high volumes of cars and to reject anything that gets in the way of that mission.

This is where political leadership needs to come in, and where having a comprehensive plan for the city is necessary. In order to achieve the goals of the city, political leaders must reject roadway plans that hinder the realization of the vision of the city’s future. In fact, it takes political leadership to re-exert control of the development of our cities, away from traffic engineers and back to the community where it belongs.

The only way to ensure planners and traffic engineers are working together towards a common outcome for the city is to have a comprehensive plan that articulates a vision and goals for the city, and the political leadership to follow through on realizing that vision.

This week, a few of the folks from California YIMBY – Brian Hanlon, Nolan Gray, and Ned Resnikoff – launched the Metropolitan Abundance Project (MAP). In their own words, they “believe plentiful housing, great transit, and effective governance are the keys to addressing our generation’s most pressing problems.” This echoes strongly of my own beliefs that cities are key to driving happiness and prosperity, that we can do worthwhile work while city building, and that well-planned cities help create models of good governance.

Leading up to the announcement of the MAP, Ned Resnikoff wrote a five-part series about abundance politics and how it is the only real path forward for preserving democracy. Any system of government that routinely increases the quality of life for residents will maintain the support of those residents. Judging by Ned’s writing, at least for him, one of the reasons for the MAP is as a bulwark against the forces of illiberalism pulling on our society today.

Building housing in dense, urban, walkable cities served by frequent and reliable transit would provide the opportunity to greatly increase the quality of life for all city residents. It would strengthen social networks, increase health, and reduce the cost of living across the board. It is this type of societal improvement that the MAP seeks to make through rebuilding our cities.

Looking back over their success with the YIMBY movement over the past decade, I’m excited to see what the MAP can accomplish in the coming decade. City building is a multi-generational process. The best time to start building a better city was thirty years ago, the second best time is now. Let’s get started.