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October 28, 2012

Sheltering in Place

Dear Shelterists:

Yes, themail is a day late. Blame the wind and rain. Hurricane Sandy has shut down everything else in the city — Metro, the city government, the federal government, the schools — so why shouldn’t themail be late? You’ll be at home, sheltering in place, all day today and tomorrow.

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Greg Beato, in Reason Magazine, urges "Bring Back the Flophouse," http://tinyurl.com/8w7ogh5. Beato rhapsodizes about the "microunits" promoted by Mayor Bloomberg in New York and Director of Planning Harriet Tregoning in DC. Beato is nostalgic for the "good old days" before urban reformers cleaned up flophouses. "In the days before extensive housing codes and zoning laws, when developers had relatively free rein to meet the needs of the market, New York City’s housing stock, like those of many other metropolitan centers in the US, was far more diverse." Beato decries the zoning regulations that created the monotony of single-family houses, and praises in their stead the vibrant, exciting, dense neighborhoods where flophouses provided tiny units for singles to live in alone.

He yearns to recreate the slums of yesteryear. The slums, after all, were the complete opposite of the clean and spacious housing that the suburbs provided. Urban dwellers who felt trapped in the slums fled for the suburbs. Now, in reaction, the children and grandchildren of suburbanites flee the boredom of the suburbs for the excitement of the city. And how better to welcome their return than by reviving flophouses? Microunits alone, Beato writes, aren’t creative and inventive enough. "Indeed, while architects and designers are eager to explore new possibilities, regulations regarding building materials, density calculations, and other factors continue to stifle the innovation that once arose naturally. Waiving minimum footprint size requirements to create micro-units is a good start. But as efficient and affordable as 300-square-foot domiciles may be, they’re full of redundancies too. This is, after all, the age of Zipcar, the urban-oriented car-sharing company, and of digital networks that, in theory at least, allow us to allocate resources in flexible, easy-to-track ways. In such an environment, where urban space is scarce and sustainability is in vogue, yesteryear’s residential hotels seem remarkably relevant, especially if updated with today’s consumers in mind. Imagine, for example, a building where each unit is even smaller than Bloomberg’s micro-apartments. But along with one’s own space, one could use a variety of shared spaces. Some of these spaces (restaurants, laundry room, gym) would serve the whole building. Others would serve a smaller number of users. For every four units, say, there might be a private media room or luxurious spa, which residents could utilize privately, by reservation, à la Zipcar. If the micro-unit experiment goes well, the mayor’s office has suggested, the city may consider waiving other regulations. With a little luck, there’s a good chance that the residents of New York City in 2020 will have almost as many housing options as their predecessors had in 1920." The 1920’s — the golden age for developers, when their profits weren’t limited by such terrible burdens as minimum parking regulations or minimum spaces for housing.

Is this the logical endpoint of "smart growth" urban planning? Or is this just nostalgie de la boue, the yearning for the mud, the romanticization of the lowest of the low? Of course, advocates of the new flophouses will say these units will be entirely different, new and shiny instead of dirty and dingy and drab and dismal. The flophouses used to be new and shiny, too, when they were first built or first divided and then further subdivided into miniature rooms. They just didn’t stay that way. Flophouses never do.

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Must-read: "DC Council Ethics Is All Illusion," by Jonetta Rose Barras, http://tinyurl.com/8fx3hyy and http://tinyurl.com/8v25rdn, and "DC’s Cloudy Election," by Colbert King, http://tinyurl.com/8okl46q. Must not read: you know how, in their April 1st issues, newspapers write funny stories, and include one statement so outrageous, so over-the-top, that even the densest reader, the one least sensitive to satire, will finally get the joke? Well, the Washington Post editorial board did that in its editorial endorsements for city council candidates, and tipped off readers that they’re not taking their jobs seriously, and don’t give a damn whether DC is represented by good, honest politicians or not: "In Ward 7, the better choice is Ron Moten, the former Peaceoholics head who is running as a Republican in a spirited challenge of Democratic incumbent Yvette M. Alexander. Ms. Alexander’s tenure on the council, since 2007, is best described as listless. While Mr. Moten, as he freely admits, is ‘not the perfect candidate,’ he offers refreshing energy, community insights and an appealing independence," http://tinyurl.com/8q2x8o9. ROTFLMAO.

Gary Imhoff
themail@dcwatch.com 

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Office of Planning Zoning Rewrite Data Distorted, Conjectural
Allen Seeber, allen.seeber@gmail.com

[Based on testimony to the Committee of the Whole and a posting to the Chevy Chase listserv] In support of its proposed reduction of off-street parking requirements for developers, DC’s Office of Planning (OP) has documented its positions with evidence that is distorted or conjectural. Testifying October 5 before DC Council’s Committee of the Whole on the status of the Zoning Regulations Review (ZRR), OP Director Harriet Tregoning showed a slide purporting to demonstrate that minimum off-street parking requirements have forced developers to overproduce a significant, number of costly, unused parking spaces in their DC projects. OP therefore has proposed to grant to developers matter-of-right permission to reduce or eliminate off-street parking spaces if certain generic conditions are met, without any input from affected neighborhood ANCs, the DC Zoning Commission, or the Board of Zoning Adjustment. Such draft zoning regulations would drastically reduce requirements for developers of multifamily residences to provide off-street parking for occupants, not just near Metro and major bus routes, but also for new or expanded multifamily structures in other locations.

As a matter of fact, OP has no direct evidence to substantiate its assertions that parking spaces have been overproduced as a result of minimum parking requirements in the DC zoning code. In response to my direct request for number and addresses of affected buildings, OP states the following: "The slide you refer to in Ms. Tregoning’s presentation was not making a claim about specific buildings. In fact, parking utilization data is very hard to come by, since many property owners have viewed that data as proprietary. . . . The point on the slide was more general. We know that, anecdotally, there are parking facilities with unused spaces."

In addition, DC parking management officials sponsored an October 4 Parking Think Tank at Wilson High School during which a slide generated by OP asserted that the number of "private cars" has fallen dramatically over the years. The slide asserted that in 2010 there were only 150,000 private cars in DC, about half the number counted by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) in 1980. In response to my direct question, OP confirmed that FHWA is the source of DC vehicle data.

OP ignores the fact that FHWA has not, since 1985, included sport utility vehicles (SUVs) or minivans in the statistical universe of passenger cars in DC, even though such vehicles have become an observable modern transportation standard for families. Both FHWA and DC count SUVs and minivans as trucks. The decline in an FHWA graph of automobile registration over the last three decades is accompanied by a sharp increase in the number of SUVs and minivans. Both FHWA and DC data include only vehicles that are legally registered in DC --which exclude cars with diplomatic plates, cars with reciprocal parking permits, and cars whose owners, while resident in DC, have retained their plates from other states.

The potential for distortion may explain why the US Census Bureau collects and computes data on "vehicular access" by households throughout the US. The Census Bureau approach focuses upon uses of vehicles for private transportation and the number of vehicles available to every household.

In my testimony regarding off-street parking at the October 5 hearing, I presented census data that produced an estimate of 231,395 passenger vehicles in DC – not 150,000. When I saw the DDOT slide the night before, I was most concerned that I had made a terrible mistake in my research. For hours and hours, I researched the numbers at the census bureau and on commercial web sites and found the current census vehicular access number to be approximately 270,000 — indicating my testimony to be conservative.

This matter raises questions about the acquisition and use of demographic and related data in DC generally, and by DC OP in particular. The manner of use of such data by DC agencies raises substantially greater questions.

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Speed Cameras
Matthew Forman, Matthew.Forman2@verizon.net

As Jack McKay so elegantly noted in his prior postings on October 10 and 17, there appears to be scant evidence to support the District government’s assertion that the purpose of the speed and red light cameras is not revenue, but rather safety. As he noted, the logical fallacy employed by the city is known in Latin as post hoc, ergo propter hoc, i.e., even if there were a reduction in fatalities occurring at the same time the cameras were installed, it wouldn’t mean that the one was the result of the other. Yet the Washington Post commits the same fallacy in its October 24 article, http://tinyurl.com/9opcnxo.

This is hardly the first time the Post has failed to understand fundamental concepts of statistical analysis, so I must rename the Latin phrase as "Washington Post hoc ergo propter hoc." Many of the nearly five hundred online comments on the article on the Post web site questioned how speed cameras in tunnels and highways could be reducing pedestrian safety in locations where there are no pedestrians. Given the relatively small number of annual fatalities, I wonder how hard it would be for the Post to analyze what caused them. If most cases involved drunk driving or other explainable causes, then the reduction was not likely attributable to cameras. Could the Post not analyze whether the cameras reduced speeding in the very places where the cameras are located? If the ticket revenue has been dramatically increasing, as the Post reported, wouldn’t that indicate that more people are speeding and running red lights, meaning that the cameras are not effective at all? If so, I think it’s something of a stretch to suggest that cameras in a handful of locations lead to reductions in speed/accidents throughout other parts of the city.

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Living and Driving in the City
Tom Grahame, tgrahame@mindspring.com

Gary, this subject, and Megan McArdle and Harry Jaffe’s thoughts on it, are something I’ve thought about for quite a while. I think Megan is partly right, that it isn’t Democrats’ moving into the city spurring the increase in housing prices. But I think she is partly wrong on the virtuous cycle part of her theory. When Mr. Barry was mayor, I know from several personal experiences that people in Virginia were scared (very unreasonably) to set foot in the city. My wife’s boss, to take one example, often questioned her sanity in the 1980’s, for living in DC, because of his perception of crime (no, he wasn’t very politic). They read the headlines and didn’t have any ability to give themselves perspective. But since Mr. Williams became mayor in 1998, real estate prices tripled on Capitol Hill in about eight years. All of a sudden, DC had a different public face. All the people who wouldn’t have considered moving to DC, but who hated traffic jams driving in from Reston or wherever, now gave DC a second look. We have some of those refugees from the burbs on our block. Megan left out the part about people hating the worsening traffic jams in the suburbs as an incentive to move to DC. And, yes, crime has come down, but I would argue that the change in how DC was perceived is a more important part of the turnaround. And now that DC is "cool," I don’t think we will be going back. Yes, crime is down, but crime rates didn’t drop off a cliff in 1998, and it is still (and always will be) an issue in big urban areas.

And it isn’t just lobbyists with money (McArdles’ thesis), although I agree that lobbyists’ largesse is certainly part of what is keeping DC prices high. On our street, there are several new, young two income households, with kids, who have far more disposable income than we do, but aren’t lobbyists. Some work at think tanks. One worked in biotech. Some are entrepreneurs, with advanced degrees from California universities, who are pushing new high tech service ideas. This is the social media part that folks over 60 (like some of us) might not see right away, but it is a large part of future economic growth — even in DC.

This now takes us to Harry Jaffe and Harriet Tregoning. First, to Jaffe’s view that creating bike lanes on some of the most important commuter driving arteries will drive people to the suburbs. It certainly won’t drive lobbyists to the suburbs, in terms of where they need to work, but I think the actual big money lobbyists are a small minority of the people who work downtown. Younger people , on average, really don’t like cars as much as the older generations, and if they need one, there is always Zip car. So to an extent, I think that the city is just accommodating their new demographic with new bike lanes. (As an aside, when I see cyclists after dark, biking with no lights and dark clothing, I’m certain there are going to be accidents in which cyclists will be hurt. Shouldn’t they take more care than they do, to be seen? In my brief life of cycling to school, forty years ago, I always wore a white windbreaker.) The people that will be really affected by taking away car lanes on L and K streets are commuters from the burbs. Perhaps, then, some of these erstwhile commuters might then chose to live in one of the many thousands of new condos near Metro stops? People who ten or fifteen years ago might have chosen to live in Maryland now will chose to live in DC because it takes less time and hassle to get around, by Metro, bike, and on foot? Is it possible that DC has tried to figure out how things might all work together — make it easier for those who live in DC to get around, make it harder for those who commute by car from Maryland to get around, thus incentivizing people to move to DC?

One added thought. I’ve walked to work or school for forty-five years, in different localities, I’ve chosen my residences in relation to where I need to be during the day. Nothing ideological, I just feel better when I get there, if I’ve had some exercise. But knee and back issues may soon limit my lifestyle somewhat. An inclusive city, hopefully, won’t see people with limited mobility, and the need to use a car, as people whose needs are contrary to ideas of progress, but will instead seek to accommodate everyone’s (different) needs.

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Ballot Language Imprecision
Timothy Cooper, worldrights2008@gmail.com

As I’ll be out of the country on election day, I mailed off my absentee ballot the other night. However, I found the language of the 2012 ballot to be somewhat misleading. It also misses an opportunity to educate DC voters about their low slung political status as disenfranchised American citizens who’re far removed from the political fray. For instance, under the "Federal" column of the ballot, various candidates for "Delegate to the US House of Representatives" are listed. While this subsection title is technically correct, it’s more precise, and far more politically meaningful, to describe the DC delegate’s position as the "Non-voting Delegate to the US House of Representatives." It certainly makes a necessary political point. Perhaps, in 2014, this ballot language could be changed. Further, under the "District of Columbia" column of the ballot, a myriad of candidates are listed for "United States Senator" and "United States Representative." This language is highly inaccurate. Clearly, these two positions were designed to lobby Congress on matters related to obtaining DC statehood. They’re certainly not offices held by genuine Senators and Representatives endowed with the right to vote in Congress, as the names "Senator" and "Representative" most certainly imply. Perhaps, in years to come, the DC Board of Elections could consider changing this language to reflect more accurately the true nature of these posts. Why not, for instance, call these ballot positions, "United States Statehood Senator" and "United States Statehood Representative" instead? That way, DC voters will never be confused about their most unfortunate political status when confronted with ballot language that suggests otherwise. Indeed, they’ll be reminded each Election Day that until their rights are recognized, there’s much work to do.

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