Hartford Connecticut considers a pioneering move to make parking pay its way

A higher parking tax works much like a “lite” version of land value taxation (LVT)

Surface parking lots are highly subsidized polluters

As Donald Shoup lays out in exhaustive detail in his 733-page masterpiece, The High Cost of Free Parking, the subsidies we provide for car storage have shredded the fabric of America’s urban areas.  By giving over so much land to cars, we weaken and undermine the things that make cities work well:  the opportunities for easy interaction. There’s  evidence that the effects of parking are causal:  from 1960 onward, an increase in parking provision from 0.1 to 0.5 parking space per person was associated with an increase in automobile mode share of roughly 30 percentage points according to a study of nine cities.  We have too much parking for many reasons:  we’ve subsidized highway construction and suburban homes, we’ve mandated parking for most new residential and commercial buildings, and we’ve decimated transit systems. But a key contributor to overparking is the strong financial incentives built into tax systems.

Parking is subsidized by our current tax system

In effect, our system of local property taxation plays a key role in subsidizing parking and car use.  In nearly all US cities, the property tax is assessed equally on the value of both land and improvements, so if one improves a piece of property (by constructing or enlarging a building), the owner’s property taxes go up.  The contrary is also true, if a property is unimproved, or just covered in gravel or asphalt, the owner typically pays lower taxes based only on the value of the bare land.  In cities with high vacancy rates, the property tax actually rewards landowners who demolish buildings. The perverse incentives created by raising taxes on those who improve their land with active uses like offices, stores and homes, led Henry George in the 19th Century to propose a “single” tax on land, what is now generally called the “land value tax” (LVT).

The Land Value Tax fixes the anti-development incentives built in to the property tax:  Constructing a new building doesn’t cause the owners taxes to rise.  And those who own valuable property can’t avoid or minimize taxes by leaving it fallow; if a downtown block is zoned for office use, for example, it pays high taxes even if it’s a vacant lot.  But despite its appeal, there’s been little enthusiasm for land value taxes in the US; only one large city, Pittsburgh has seriously flirted with the idea, for a time taxing property more heavily than improvements.  But, elsewhere, it’s been a non-starter.

Higher fees for parking as a “lite” land value tax

The City Council of Hartford Connecticut is considering an expanded fee on private commercial parking lots and structures that mimics some of the important features of a land value tax:  Call it LVT-lite.  In Hartford, as in many US cities, much of the downtown area is given over to car parking, and surface parking lots pay lower rates than those lots with improvements.  The low rate of taxation on parking lots lowers the holding costs for landowners, and makes parking a more profitable use than developing these lots for other more intensive uses. One way to change that dynamic is to raise taxes or fees on parking, which is exactly what the city’s proposed ordinance would do.

As University of Connecticut engineering professor Norman Garrick has shown, Hartford’s downtown has been hollowed out by the construction of parking.  As Garrick explains:

Since 1960, the number of parking spaces in downtown Hartford increased by more that 300 percent — from 15,000 to 46,000 spaces. This change has had a profound and devastating effect on the structure and function of the city (see accompanying maps) as one historic building after another was demolished.

Not surprisingly, the proliferation of freeways and surface parking lots (shown in red) has coincided with a dramatic decline in the city’s population.

The Hartford ordinance would establish a sliding scale of fees for parking lots and structures based on the number of parking spaces.  The fee would start in 2022, and be phased in over a period of years.  When fully implemented, for large parking lots, the incremental fee works out to $125 per parking space per year, which is about 25 cents per working day per parking space.  Hartford’s proposed policy would but in place incentives to better use urban space, and to discourage excessive car travel.  As the Parking Reform Network‘s Tony Jordan told us:

. . . parking stall fees are good policy because they would contribute simultaneously to several important policy objectives. Parking stall fees, particularly surface stalls, will encourage better uses of urban space, which I think is a big consideration in Hartford. Per stall fees internalize more of the costs of someone’s decision to drive and raise revenue that can and should be used to encourage and subsidize other modes. The environmental and traffic benefits from mode shift are obvious.

Is taxing parking fair?  A parable of parking subsidies:  Stormwater

We’ll bet you didn’t know that Hartford had a multi-billion dollar subway system.

Superficially, it might seem like raising fees on parking is somehow “picking on” cars and car ownership.  There should be a rational basis for any tax, and when it comes to parking there are very good reasons to raise fees and taxes to offset for the car subsidies built into our current systems of public finance.

It’s worth stepping back a bit and considering just how much subsidy is extended to parking, and to car travel in general.  Some of the biggest subsidies are not on anyone’s radar.  Take for example the cost of dealing with stormwater.  Hartford, like many US cities, has an antiquated system of combined storm and sanitary sewers; when there’s a heavy rainfall, water from streets, roofs and—wait for it—parking lots, flows into storm sewers, overwhelms the sanitary sewer system, and produces combined discharges of untreated sewage and stormwater into, in Hartford’s case, the Connecticut River.  The city is under a court order to fix the system, and is in the process of spending $2.5 billion to solve the problem.  The solution includes building a four-mile long 18-foot diameter tunnel—essentially a subway for stormwater.  (That’s not hyperbole; single-track subway tunnels, like San Francisco’s central subway are 20 feet in diameter).

To pay for the project, Hartford and surrounding cities are charging their residents a “Clean Water Project Charge” on their water bills.  Local residents actually pay more for the stormwater system, per gallon, than they pay for their domestic water ($4.05 per hundred cubic feet for domestic water consumed, and are charged $4.10 per hundred feet of water used to pay for stormwater).  But keep in mind that the stormwater doesn’t result from domestic water use—it results from runoff from roofs, roads and parking lots.

While some cities charge based on the amount of a user’s “impervious surfaces,” Hartford does not.  As a result, neither cars, nor parking lots pay anything toward the stormwater problems they cause.  And it is these impervious surfaces, like parking lots that contribute enormously to the quantity and (bad) quality of stormwater.  Since they are large and impervious, they create the huge peak flows that cause overflows. And it’s also the case that cars—via pollution from tires, leaking engine oil and gasoline, and brake linings—produce some of the most toxic elements in stormwater runoff.

Charging residential water users, but not car users and parking lots is, in turn, an equity issue:  a Hartford resident who may not even own a car (per the US Census, roughly 23 percent of Hartford residents live in households that don’t own a car) has to pay for this problem through their water bill.  Meanwhile, a suburban commuter from outside the water district area would pay nothing toward Hartford’s stormwater system.  In short, their are good reasons of efficiency and fairness for asking parking lot owners to pay more toward dealing with the costs they impose.

For cities, imposing fees on parking makes fiscal and land use sense.  For too long, we’ve subsidized the assault on urban living by cars, and nothing has been more detrimental to cities than dedicating scarce and valuable urban land to car storage. Many of these subsidies are buried—literally and figuratively—in the way we pay for urban infrastructure, like stormwater runoff.  In Hartford, and many other cities, we have the perverse situation where carless households are taxed to cleanup runoff from streets and parking lots, while road users pay nothing for the damages they cause. Ultimately, an full-fledged land value tax would help correct the perverse incentives in the current property tax, but until then, charging a higher fees for parking lots is more efficient and fairer.

Editor’s note:  This post has been revised to correct a math error in the originally published version.  We originally reported the fee worked out to approximately 50 cents per day when fully implemented, but failed to note that the fee is biennial, rather than annual. The fee at the margin, when fully implemented in several years, will be 25 cents per working day.  The fee is phased in over a period of years.

by Garlynn Woodsong

Editor’s note:City Observatory is pleased to publish this commentary by Garlynn Woodsong. Garlynn is the Managing Director of the planning consultancy Woodsong Associates, and has more than 20 years of experience in regional planning, urban analytics and real estate development. Instrumental in the development and deployment of the RapidFire and UrbanFootprint urban/regional scenario planning decision-support tools while with Calthorpe Associates in Berkeley, CA, his focus is on making the connections between planning, greenhouse gas emission reductions, public health, and inclusive economic development. For more information, or to contact Garlynn, visit this website.

• The Portland region should rethink its transportation vision and explicitly pursue only projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• The climate emergency demands a new regional transport authority, with a clear and objective climate test.
• This should be paired with a new regional infrastructure bank featuring a revolving loan fund for both transportation and housing projects, to provide pathways to opportunity for historically oppressed populations.

With the failure of Metro’s 2020 transportation measure at the ballot, it has become clear that the Portland region needs to take a clear, hard look at its transportation system, and how it can manage it to reduce GHG emissions, build out incomplete transit, walking and bicycling infrastructure networks, ensure that critical regional infrastructure maintenance needs are fulfilled, and address historic inequities.

The solutions that could work for Portland certainly could point the way towards models replicable elsewhere; many others regions are also experiencing the same pressures and needs as Portland and Oregon.

Need for Visionary Leadership

First off, what we need, what each place needs to implement these solutions, is visionary leadership: leaders who have the vision to see the enormity of the challenges we face, and to respond appropriately.

These challenges include those related to climate change, such as the need to reduce GHG emissions, to sequester carbon, and to engage in managed retreat from areas at risk of sea level rise or wildfire burn; those related to inequality, such as historic racial and ongoing economic segregation; those related to the economy, such as the impact of COVID-19 on our local businesses, homelessness, and the housing crisis; and those related to sustainability, including the need for municipal fiscal solvency, and access to clean air, water, and energy.

These challenges must be clearly stated as problem statements for strategic planning events where political leaders and senior staff from local jurisdictions and partner agencies are empowered to develop consensus around strategies to achieve solutions as quickly as possible, given the urgency of the overlapping crises we face. These strategies should guide legislative agendas, work programs, and all other related work, so there is no question as to strategic direction or how day-to-day work fits into the puzzle of implementing change for goal achievement.

The vision that is needed to meet the moment and guide the path forward towards a metropolitan region in 2050 where our goals have been achieved must involve three basic elements:

• A well-managed, adequately funded multi-modal transportation system that produces less than 10% of the emissions of our current system by right-sizing roadway capacity to match the lower total VMT that will be needed to attain goals, allowing for greater mobility through zero-emission transit, complete and safe bicycle and pedestrian networks, and the deployment of hi-tech mobility management solutions including on-demand transportation and ride-sharing tools
• An equitable land use system that reduces demand for transportation system elements and energy in ways that are conducive to meeting our climate goals for 2050, by providing plentiful housing and economic opportunities for people of all backgrounds to live in 15-minute neighborhoods.
• A sense of urgency that powers the quick implementation of temporary solutions that can evolve over time in response to lessons learned through deployment, and is facilitated by visionary leadership engaging in enlightened decision-making to deploy strategies and tools quickly that are supportive of every aspect of the vision, such as a carbon tax with an equity kicker that can serve to provide income to populations in need while taxing activities that produce carbon emissions at levels sufficient to bring down those emissions.

We need leaders who can quickly pivot to articulating and implementing this vision, and abandon the efforts that so many current leaders engage in of defending and perpetuating status quo programs that are not designed to deliver components of the vision, and indeed suck resources away from other efforts that could more quickly implement aspects of the vision. We must stop efforts to defend business as usual for government programs, such as highway expansion, that are antithetical to achieving this vision.

Declare a Regional Climate Emergency

One part of the solution is declare a climate emergency, and, using emergency powers, to re-consider all committed TIP and RTP projects, ranking each one by its estimated effectiveness. Any project that results in a net potential increase in GHG emissions must be eliminated from further consideration for funding. Of those that remain, those that should be prioritized for funding include those that will provide the most benefit to historically underserved communities, those that change the design of facilities to ensure safer outcomes, and those that will produce the greatest decrease in GHG emissions, including the build-out of historically under-built modal networks for bicycles, pedestrians, and zero-GHG-emission transit.

The project assessments that are needed to rank projects by their potential effectiveness at reducing GHG emissions and attaining other elements of the vision must be independent of agencies that have a history of pushing a single agenda, such as state transportation departments that evolved from origins as highway departments without ever shedding a single-minded focus on highways as the only solution worth the lion’s share of transportation expenditures. Project assessment must be science-based, evidence-based, and outcomes-based, and not based on results from travel models originally built for the purpose of sizing freeways to accommodate growing automobile traffic. Empirical evidence must replace model results as the gold standard, meaning that places that already embody the principles and elements of the vision should be studied and replicated.

The vision of places that achieve our goals for climate action and for equitable development is of places that are walkable, with most regular destinations accessible by foot within 10 to 15 minutes, and transit available as a pedestrian trip extending tool that allows destinations further away to be accessed. We can achieve this vision by building more such neighborhoods, by building more housing within the 15-minute neighborhoods we already have, and by ensuring that housing is provided that is affordable for people of all incomes, not just those that can be provided for by the profit-dependent sectors of the market. We can cost-effectively achieve no part of this vision by continuing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars widening and expanding our already-over-built highway system.

Regional Transportation Authority

The Portland metro region, like any metropolitan region, contains a network of arterial streets and railroads that are not currently being managed for their highest and best use: there are many ways to potentially measure this, including the maximum amount of movement of people and goods, or the greatest amount of economic activity, or the most general benefit for the most people, for the lowest amount of carbon emissions. However you measure it, the current system is weighted too heavily towards providing room for vehicles that emit large amounts of carbon emissions to transport relatively few people or goods per square foot per hour.

We can look to Translink in Vancouver, B.C.,, and to the Bay Area Toll Authority (BATA) and the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway, and Transportation District in the San Francisco region, for models that show the way towards raising revenue from transportation system operations to pay for the operations, maintenance, expansion, and system completion of bridges, arterial transportation system elements, transit, and regional bicycle and pedestrian facilities including on and off street trails and facilities.

A proposal that is suggested by these examples would be to create and/or vest regional government with the authority to price and manage the regional arterial road, bridge, and trail system, as well as the regional heavy rail system, so that the right of way and facilities could be upgraded using funds from congestion pricing, tolls, and other sources to provide for a complete regional transit and bicycle/pedestrian system, while reducing the automobile capacity of facilities in line with anticipated VMT reduction goals, under a policy framework that places the highest priority on reducing carbon emissions.

The simplest path forward in the Portland region would be to create a new authority, managed by Metro, and given functions now split between ODOT, TriMet, Metro, and the transportation departments/bureaus of the cities and counties within the region. These functions would include those related to operations, management and pricing of the regional arterial road, transit, bicycle, and pedestrian systems.

Regional Infrastructure Bank

To ensure that transport projects play their part in reducing GHG emissions without causing harm to existing communities, a new regional transportation authority should be paired with a complementary new regional infrastructure bank that is empowered with seed funding for a revolving loan fund for building both new links in the transportation system and new homes nearby, to provide pathways to opportunity for historically oppressed populations to build equity and avoid displacement.

Projects needed to achieve regional goals that would be eligible for funding by a new regional Bank could include housing, transportation, or other eligible projects, such as providing seed funding for Local Improvement Districts and Tax Increment Financing efforts that otherwise would face multiple gap years following their initiation until their tax base began producing expected returns, or seed money for a regional revolving housing loan fund accessible by community land trusts, housing cooperatives, and non-profit housing developers.

Urgent Times Require Urgent Action

Finally, Portland’s Rose Lanes project points the way towards a new way of thinking about quick-build-and-deploy projects that can deliver the most benefit as quickly as possible for the least amount of up-front capital.

Could regional Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) systems be quickly deployed using existing rolling stock (at least to start off with), paint, signs, and temporary platforms, so as we all come out of COVID we emerge into a re-structured world that is hyper-focused on reducing GHG emissions as a part of a comprehensive community-building program?

Could regional protected bikeway networks similarly be completed as a part of the same or similar initiatives?

Could regional commuter rail systems be deployed on existing tracks to quickly add center-to-center zero-emission express transit connectivity, such as downtown Portland to downtown Vancouver, WA, much sooner than would otherwise be possible if dependent on traditional 8-12 year capital project delivery schedules?

A Regional Green New Deal

We need to act like our house is on fire, and this thinking needs to permeate every aspect of our collective decision-making processes. We need a Green New Deal locally, regionally, and nationally. Let’s work together to articulate what that means, and how to achieve it. If capital funds are holding us back from achieving that vision, then let’s put forth a funding proposal, such as an equitable carbon tax, that truly matches the moment.

In Portland and Oregon, much of our current success rests on the shoulders of decisions made by visionary leaders of generations past, including the vision to abandon freeway building in favor of light rail, to institute and enforce metropolitan Urban Growth Boundaries, and to embrace downtown revitalization rather than continued suburban sprawl. Portlanders are lucky to have had such visionary past leaders. It is time for the leaders of the current moment, in the Portland region and everywhere else too, to be visionary in articulating solutions to today’s problems, to build on the vision of leaders from years past in ways that advance the goals of protecting farm and forest land, reduce GHG emissions sufficiently to meet our 2050 targets, and build more equitable communities that offer housing opportunities affordable for and economic opportunities available to all residents.

By all means, Portland should adopt its proposed healthy climate fee, a $25 ton carbon tax

But make sure it applies to the biggest and fastest growing sources of greenhouse gases in the region

The healthy climate fee should apply to freeways and air travel, not just 30 firms who produce 5 percent of regional GHG emissions.

The City of Portland has proposed a new “healthy climate fee” on a range of businesses and organizations that it says discharge more than 150 tons of greenhouse gases in the city.  Like most economists, we’re all on board with the idea of pricing carbon.  The reason we have a climate crisis is we allow everyone to use the common atmosphere as a dump for carbon without compensating society for the damage done.  Economists are unanimous that pricing carbon is essential to avoiding climate catastrophe:  it simultaneously discourages bad behavior, rewards low polluting activities, creates incentives for cleaner investments and spurs the innovation needed to make all this happen.  And, as we’ve pointed out the price needed to trigger these changes is modest—less on a per pound basis than the fee we charge for grocery bags or the deposits charged on soda cans or indeed for disposing of solid waste.

The only objection we have to this proposed fee is that it doesn’t go nearly far enough.  It exempts more than 95 percent of all the region’s carbon pollution.  The proposed climate fee is targeted at those who own or operate facilities that generate 2,500 tons of carbon dioxide or more per year.

The city’s inventory lists 35 such facilities, including steel mills, bakeries, oil storage depots and other manufacturing facilities, but also universities, hospitals, and a wastewater treatment plant.  The city has used air pollution permit data to estimate the tax liability of the firms it thinks will be subject to the tax.  Collectively, it expects them to pay “healthy climate fees” of about $9.2 million annually on 370,000 tons of carbon emissions.

That seems like an impressive number, but in fact only amounts to about 5 percent of the city’s greenhouse gas emissions.  But by its own reckoning, the City of Portland (Multnomah County) produces more than 7.7 million  tons of greenhouse gases per year.  So this measure taxes small  but visible fraction the areas total emissions.  What it leaves out is revealing.

As we’ve pointed out repeatedly at City Observatory, Portland is failing in its effort to meet its climate goals because of the big increase in carbon emissions associated with transportation, particularly from increased driving.  Transportation accounts for 41 percent of county greenhouse gas emissions, and unlike emissions from residential, commercial and industrial uses, which are all significantly lower than in 1990, these emissions are increasing.  In essence, the key reason the city is failing achieve the goals laid out in its 2015 climate plan is due to more transportation emissions. The bulk of the increase is due to increased driving since 2014, when gas prices declined, so this is actually an area where some economic incentives might do some good.

If the region is going to take climate change seriously, it should be focused not just on a handful of institutions that account for less than a twentieth of greenhouse gases, and instead focus on the biggest and fastest growing part of the climate problem.  If we think about transportation as a system, it’s clear that the region’s transportation facilities, its freeways and airports are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions.  If we’re going to charge such a fee at all, we ought to  include in our list of large “facilities” that are even bigger sources of greenhouse gases: the city’s interstate freeways (owned and operated by the Oregon Department of Transportation) and Portland International Airport (operated by the Port of Portland),

Carbon emissions from ODOT Interstate freeways in Portland:  550,000 tons per year

So how much greenhouse gas pollution is produced by ODOT’s interstate freeways in the City of Portland?  We don’t have exact data, but we can triangulate a reasonably good estimate.  According to the Federal Highway Administration, on an annual (Pre-Covid) basis, there are about 2.9 billion vehicle miles of travel on Interstate freeways in the Oregon portion of the Portland metropolitan area.   We apportion this traffic proportional to lane miles of interstate freeway in each county; Multnomah County includes about 53 percent of the tri-county area’s inventory of interstate lane miles, according to ODOT.  We further assume that 80 percent of Multnomah County mileage is in Portland.  This means that driving on Portland’s interstate freeways amounts to about 1.2 billion miles per year, and at a very conservative passenger car average of .445 kilograms of carbon per mile, produces about 550,000 tons of carbon emissions per year.

If ODOT’s interstate freeways were treated as a “facility” and paid the $25 per ton fee for the emissions from the operation of the facility, it would pay the City of Portland about $14 million per year.

Carbon emissions from Portland International Airport:  1.5 million tons per year

Air travel is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, and Portland International Airport (aka PDX), the region’s principal air terminal the facility in Portland most closely associated with those emissions. In 2019, according to Federal Aviation Administration data, nearly 20 million passengers flying out of Portland International Airport logged about 11 billion “revenue passenger miles” of travel.  Air travel produces about 88 grams of greenhouse gases per revenue passenger kilometer, which means that PDX air travel generated about 1.5 million tons of emissions  per year (88 * 11,000,000,000*1.6/1000000).  This calculation suggests that PDX is responsible for about three-fourths of one percent of all US aviation greenhouse gas emissions, which total about 200 million tons per year, a figure roughly consistent with the region’s share of US economic activity.

If Portland International Airport  were treated as a “facility” and paid the $25 per ton fee for the emissions from the operation of the facility, it would pay the City of Portland about $38 million per year.

Parenthetically:  It has to be said that the Port of Portland has a profound blind-spot when it comes to its greenhouse gas footprint.  According to the Port’s environmental report, it only counts emissions from its own vehicles, utility plant and purchased electricity, and not from the travel to and from the airport.  The port owns up to just 50,000 tons per year in greenhouse gas emissions, just 3 percent of the amount attributable to air travel.  Neither does the port count the emissions from the cars that drive to park in its garages.  That’s rather like a gun manufacturer counting as “gun deaths” only those people who were pistol-whipped and excluding those killed by bullets.

Let’s have a fair and inclusive Healthy Climate Fee

Together, these two facilities (ODOT’s interstate freeways and PDX) account for more than five times as much carbon pollution than the 35 facilities inventoried by the City of Portland and included in its proposed ordinance.   (We believe the city’s own inventory of Portland greenhouse gas emissions significantly undercounts greenhouse gases associated with air travel in and out of PDX).

It’s clear that the city believes it has the authority to impose this fee on local, state and federal governments.  It’s proposing to charge the city-owned wastewater plant more than $1 million annually, and also charge state entities (Oregon Health & Science University, the Port of Portland and Portland State University), and even the federal government (the Veterans Administration, which operates a large hospital.  The Port of Portland and the Oregon Department of Transportation both own and operate facilities that emit more than 150 tons of greenhouse gases per year.  They ought to be subject to the healthy climate fee, too.

In our view, it makes perfect sense of the city to implement a carbon tax or “healthy climate fee.”  But if it does, it should do so in a way that applies it to most or all carbon pollution, not just a twentieth of all emissions.  The city’s approach to a carbon tax is indefensibly narrow.  It gives a pass to the biggest and fastest growing sources of carbon pollution in Portland:  transportation emissions.  It’s a kind of “carrotism” the notion that climate change can be dealt with without inconveniencing anyone, when in fact, it is all of our daily decisions, especially of how much to drive and fly, that is principally responsible for greenhouse gases.  It’s politically convenient to tag a few large, visible polluters, but collectively they’re absolutely smaller than just two entities we’ve identified here, and they’re not the areas where we’re failing to make progress.

A carbon tax makes a huge amount of sense, but exempting 95 percent of all the emissions in the region from the tax, and loading its cost on just a few entities is just arbitrary.  If we’re really in a climate emergency, we should apply the carbon fee broadly.

Notes:

1.  An empty soda can weighs 17 grams; several states impose a 5 cent deposit per can; that works out to a deposit of about $2,900 per ton of can weight).  Metro will charge you about $100 ton for the non-recyclable garbage you dispose of, about 5 times what Portland would charge you if you put that same amount of carbon in the atmosphere.
2. Carrotism is a term coined by Economist Guilio Matteoli, it is the idea is that “climate change policy should consist entirely of enticing incentives (carrots) avoiding any restriction, regulation or even monetary disincentives (sticks); I.e. we will just glide smoothly into zero-carbon without anyone being inconvenienced ever.”

Houston’s “Energy Corridor” gets a pedestrian makeover, but just one thing seems to be missing.

Bollards and better landscaping can’t offset the increased danger from wider, faster slip lanes.

Most “pedestrian” infrastructure projects are often remedial and performative; their real purpose is to serve faster car traffic.

Houston’s “Energy Corridor” is a commercial district west of Downtown Houston that’s home to a number of energy companies like BP and Conoco Phillips.  Unsurprisingly, it’s a heavily auto-dominated area.  We read with great interest last week a news report describing a new pedestrian infrastructure project at the intersection of two main arterials, Eldridge Parkway and Memorial Drive.

The Houston Chronicle hailed it in an article titled “The Energy Corridor District unveils west Houston’s first protected intersection.”  Here’s an aerial view of the project.

To be sure, there are wide sidewalks, clearly marked crosswalks, attractive plantings, and new signal lights.  But essentially the only “protection” for pedestrians and cyclists are a series of bollards.  If you step back and consider the setting of the project, its apparent that it remains an auto-dominated and pedestrian hostile environment.

For starters, the inescapable fact is that you have two busy multi-lane arterials–the kind of roadway that’s been consistently shown to be the most deadly to pedestrians. Nearly 60,000 cars a day go through this intersection.  Second, a key feature of the project is two right turn “slip lanes” that slice through the corners of the intersections.  Slip lanes like these allow (and encourage) cars to make faster turns, and also increase the crossing distance for pedestrians.  The slip lanes have marked crosswalks, but they appear to be governed only by “yield” signs, not traffic lights, and Houston drivers are notorious for not yielding even when the law requires it. (We’ve got more detail on these slip lanes, and their problems, below).

Let’s zoom in to street level.

These pedestrian safety problems are apparent when you look at the promotional photographs provided by the project’s sponsors, the Energy Corridor District.  The illustrations show a nice new intersection, but you’ll notice one element conspicuous by its absence:  pedestrians.

Of course the project’s design aimed to be very pedestrian oriented.  You can tell that from the artist’s pre-construction concept.  Like so many such illustrations, it shows roughly as many pedestrians and cyclists as cars (we counted 38 cars and 41 pedestrians and bikes).  The reality of course is closer to all cars and zero bikes and pedestrians.

The big underlying problem though is that the Energy Corridor is a place laid out for cars and car travel. The reason no one walks in Houston, or in its Energy Corridor, as in so many such places in the US, is that there’s very little nearby to walk to.  (Pro-tip:  any area that describes itself as a “corridor” is almost always an auto-dominated, pedestrian-hostile space, a place people travel through, rather than being in).  The Energy Corridor is just a short distance from Houston’s mammoth Katy Freeway, the nation’s widest. A quick glance at Google maps that shows that within a block or two of the intersection you have a single bank, a convenience store, a CVS drug store and a lone Chinese restaurant—and almost no other retail or service businesses.

With 60,000 cars zooming by, with slip lanes that encourage drivers to take fast right turns, and with nothing nearby to walk to, it really doesn’t matter how wide are the sidewalks or how beautiful the plantings or how numerous the bollards.  While this has the veneer and some of the trappings of walkability, it’s just not a walkable area. There’s a lot of loose talk about “retrofitting suburbs” and “walkable suburbanism” but examples like this show just how hollow and meaningless those terms can be. And while we’re picking on Houston here, you can find similar examples of performative pedestrian infrastructure in almost every US city.

As we’ve said, much of what is labeled pedestrian infrastructure is in reality car infrastructure.  In a place populated entirely by pedestrians and bicycles, for example, there’s no need for wide rights of way, grade separations or traffic signals. In even the most crowded cities, people simply walk or ride around one another. If it’s just people walking, there aren’t even lane markings.  Humans have long had the ability to avoid collisions, using subtle visual cues. Pedestrian friendly places don’t need elaborate infrastructure.

When we build a sidewalk along a busy arterial, or put in a traffic signal or some bollards, we may call it “pedestrian” infrastructure, but the only reason it’s actually needed is because of the presence  and primacy of cars.  It is at best remedial, and its purpose is primarily to benefit cars, speeding car travel by freeing drivers from the need to pay attention to or yield to pedestrians (or to only have to do so under strictly limited conditions).

Last year, we highlighted this example from Orlando suburb, Lake Mary, where the  city has constructed two pedestrian bridges over the highway, with a 153-foot span.

These elaborate and expensive pedestrian bridges are at best a remedial effort to minimize the danger this environment poses to anyone who isn’t in a car. They don’t really make the area any more desirable for walking. The real problem is not the infrastructure, or lack thereof, but a built environment that’s inhospitable to walking and cycling.

Much of what purports to be “pedestrian” infrastructure, is really car infrastructure, and is only necessary in a world that’s dominated by car travel, in places that are laid out to privilege cars.

Real pedestrian infrastructure is a dense, mixed use area that shuns or at least slows private automobiles. A place with a mix of housing types (apartments, duplexes or triplexes and single family homes), local-serving businesses, and a grid of streets, rather than the rigid, hierarchical arterial/collector/cul-de-sac model of most post WWII US suburbs.  It’s about neighborhoods where people don’t have to cross multi-lane arterials to shop, attend school or visit a public park. Walkability and pedestrian safety are really about building great places, not piecemeal and largely decorative so-called infrastructure.

More on slip lanes

Transportation for America’s Stephen Davis explains that slip lanes are inherently dangerous because they encourage cars to speed through intersections:

Slip lanes are dangerous because they prioritize vehicle speed over the safety of everyone who needs to use the road.  Slip lanes increase the distance that people have to cover to cross a street, put people into spots that are often the hardest for drivers to see, and encourage drivers not to slow down when approaching an intersection and a crosswalk—the precise moment they should be the most careful.

While advertised as improving pedestrian safety, this project actually widens and lengthens the existing slip lanes.  It also increases the slip lane’s radius of curvature, enabling cars to make the turn even faster than would be possible in the narrower, sharper slip lane they replaced.  Both the wider distance of the new slip lane, and the faster speeds it tends to encourage actually make the intersection more dangerous for pedestrians than before.  Here are two Google Streetview images of the intersection of westbound Memorial Drive onto northbound Eldridge Parkway

Slip Lane– BEFORE (2018)

Slip Lane– AFTER (2020)

What City Observatory this week

1. The Urban Institute gets inclusion backwards. The Urban Institute has released an updated set of estimates that purport to measure which US cities are the most inclusive.  The report is conceptually flawed, and actually gets its conclusions backwards, classifying some of the nation’s most exclusive places as “inclusive.” Highly equal cities are almost always either exclusive suburban enclaves (that achieve homogeneity by rigid zoning limits that exclude the poor) or impoverished cities that have been abandoned by upper and middle income households, leaving them homogeneous but poor. (For example, many of Urban’s Institute’s “most inclusive cities” are suburbs like Bellevue, Naperville and Santa Clara–among the wealthiest 20 cities in the US; while Detroit and Cleveland are also highly ranked for inclusiveness. Small geographies, neighborhoods/cities that have high levels of measured income inequality (90/10 ratio, Gini Index) are generally much more inclusive than comparable geographies that with lower levels of measured inequality.  Rich and poor living closer together produces more measured inequality, but also means greater inclusion.

2. Parking should pay its way:  Hartford’s land value tax lite.  One of the perverse effects of the US system of property taxation is that improving urban property, by say building apartments, offices or stores, triggers an increase in tax liability.  That tends to discourage development and reward low value uses of valuable urban land. Effectively the biggest subsidies from this arrangement go to surface parking lots, which usually pay taxes only on the value of land. While in theory a land-value tax would fix this incentive problem, its politically hard to change the whole tax system.  Hartford, Connecticut has a proposal to up fees on parking lots by a modest amount (about 50 cents per space per day) to fund transportation.  The fee would work like a kind of land value tax “lite.”  This is definitely a step toward making the tax system fairer; as parking lots don’t pay anything close to their full-freight in local finance. Take for example stormwater:  Hartford’s building a multi-billion dollar subway for sewage, largely to deal with the runoff from roads and parking lots.  City water users pay the full cost of this project; cars and parking lots pay nothing for a problem they largely create.  More cities should look into asking parking to pay its way.

Must read

1.  The geography of sedition:  Geolocation of Parler Videos, 6 January 2021.

2.  A roundup of what’s been written about Covid-19 and cities.  At City Observatory, we’ve spent a good deal of time tracking data on the Coronavirus pandemic as it spread, paying particular attention to a couple of themes, one linking density to the virus, something which appeared as a popular theory early on, but which must now deal with higher rates of death in rural areas.  A second theme looks at the future of urban areas in an era of work-at-home for many professionals.  James Brasuell at Planetizen has compiled a comprehensive list of news articles and blog posts on these themes; it’s a useful resource for following the debate.

3. Todd Litman:  Housing first, cars last.  Leave it to one-man transportation think tank Todd LItman to succinctly make lay out the definitive strategy for advancing equitable urbanism.  In an essay at Planetizen, Litman writes:

Our current laws do not mandate housing for people, but virtually all jurisdictions do mandate an abundant and costly supply of housing for motor vehicles. Our zoning codes require that most buildings include numerous parking spaces that are generally unpriced, which is a huge and unfair subsidy for automobile use. This increases housing costs, encourages driving, and forces car-free households to pay for expensive parking facilities they don’t need.

There’s a shortage of affordable housing nearly everywhere, particularly in some of our most livable cities. But at the same time, we’re awash in “free” (meaning un-priced) parking, with three or four or more parking spaces for every car in most metro areas.  Indeed, parking requirements essentially tax housing to subsidize parking.  Reversing this fundamentally wrong-headed prioritization is the key to building better  and more equitable cities.

4.  How Covid-19 debunked one old gentrification myth.  Jake Ambinder, writing in the Atlantic.  One of the most resilient folk narratives of gentrification is the idea that by building more housing greedy developers drive up rents and cause displacement.  Not only has that theory never made much sense, and has been disproven by repeated studies, but the deflation of demand in some previously super-heated urban markets shows that when demand and supply are in closer balance, rents actually come down.  The real cause of the affordability crisis in thriving metro areas isn’t the developers, but the constraints on development fomented and defended by NIMBY homeowners.  The prevalence of single-family zoning and widespread apartment bans wrought by nominally pro-environment homeowner groups constrict housing supply, drive up rents, and trigger displacement.  As Ambinder concludes:

The homeowner-friendly slow-growth activism that marked American cities in the late twentieth century is thus best understood not as the predecessor of today’s anti-gentrification politics but as the progenitor of the gentrification crisis itself. In wealthy coastal cities today, one need not develop skyscrapers or shopping malls to be a speculator in urban property. With widespread housing scarcity, simply owning a modest home in Berkeley or Brooklyn will suffice.

New Knowledge

What City Observatory this week

Institutionalized housing discrimination. A recent study of housing discrimination in Detroit came to a seemingly surprising conclusion:  Fair housing complaints were less likely to be filed in higher income, higher priced predominantly white neighborhoods than in lower income neighborhoods that were predominantly Black.  The study’s authors were puzzled by the finding, but we think there’s a pretty clear explanation. In expensive mostly white suburbs, there’s no need to practice the overt discrimination of turning down applicants of color, or telling them the house is rented (or under offer):  The high price of housing, dictated by restrictive local zoning codes, automatically performs that chore.  Large lot single family zoning and apartment bans reshape the housing market to make it simply unaffordable for low income people to move into some communities, and given the correlation between poverty and race, this has much the same effect as in-your-face discrimination.

In 2021, it’s the case that the most widespread and pernicious forms of housing discrimination are the subtle institutionalized racism embedded in systems like zoning.

Must read

1. Four reasons why public housing isn’t going to solve our affordability problems. Some housing advocates are hoping that the new Biden Administration will embrace the construction of more public housing as one cornerstone of its ruban policy.  The Brookings Institution’s Jenny Schuetz makes the case that public housing is unlikely to be an effective solution.  A central problem is that the same land use restrictions that block market rate housing (apartment bans, parking requirements, arbitrary review processes) apply with equal or greater force to public housing. Moreover, the institutional capacity of public housing authorities to actually plan and build new housing has atrophied dramatically; and most authorities are overwhelmed with managing the maintenance burden of the legacy public housing stock.  Finally, for any given amount of resources, other types of subsidies—like expanding housing vouchers, or acquiring and redeveloping existing housing—may provide more benefits more quickly to more people.

2. Why the linear city is a straight line leading nowhere.  With great fanfare, and fancy animation, developers have announced plans to build a futuristic 100-mile long linear city in Saudi Arabia.

While it’s billed as a startling new idea, it isn’t.  The linear city was proposed, tried, and failed in the 19th Century, as Vice’s Aaron Gordon points out.

This new iteration is wrapped in all the buzzwords of contemporary urbanism:  there won’t be any cars; all transport will be underground, and people will walk everywhere.If techno-futurism has perfected anything, it is the art of unwittingly re-inventing old ideas, inflating them to a scale so epic that it accentuates all of the idea’s flaws, and presenting it in a slick hype video as the Only Way Forward.

Grandiose plans advanced by high priced consultants are common in this part of the world.  Plan’s for Masdar, a smart green new city in Abu Dhabi, are largely stillborn after a decade.  While only a few very wealthy places can really indulge these futurist follies, it’s all too common for urban leaders to hope for a simple technical fix, rather than tackling the more fundamental problems close at hand.  As Gordon explains:

. . . one of the many problems city governments have is they all too often dig deep into the well of techno-futurist ideas like “smart cities” and “artificial intelligence” when much more realistic solutions like zoning reform and elimination of parking minimums and making certain streets car-free are right there for the taking. They may be hard to do and will piss some people off in the process, but at least they will ultimately solve problems and make people’s lives better.

3. Why are US transit construction costs so damn high?  A recent report from the Eno Foundation argues that its a misperception that transit construction costs are higher in the US than the rest of the world.  But Alon Levy, writing at Pedestrian Observations, begs to differ.  Levy, who maintains an extensive global database on construction costs argues that the Eno study is biased for several reasons:  it looks mostly at light rail, not full rapid transit, it leaves out cost estimates for high income Asian countries, and it also leaves out lesser known (and lower cost) light rail and tram systems in smaller European countries and cities.  The point-counterpoint between Levy and Eno provides a useful framework for answering this complex question.

New Knowledge

 . . . it is not choice per se that matters. It is growing up in neighborhoods with lower crime rates and more economically advantaged neighbors and attending better schools with children from more economically advantaged families.

Given the history of housing segregation in America and the funding structure of American schooling, a great many Black children grow up in high-poverty, unsafe neighborhoods and attend underfunded schools that do not prepare them for success in post-secondary education and the labor market. But the studies described above make a strong case that reducing the social isolation in which a great many low-income Black families live and their children attend school are powerful strategies for reducing race-based intergenerational inequalities.

In the News

StreetsblogUSA republished our analysis of Hartford’s proposed parking fees under the title, “How to stop giving parking developers a free ride.”

The Hartford Courant also wrote about our analysis of the proposed increase in parking fees.

What City Observatory this week

1. Why Portland’s Rose Quarter Freeway widening will increase greenhouse gas emissions.  The Oregon Department of Transportation hashas falsely claimed its $800 million freeway widening project has no impact on greenhouse gas emissions.  We examine traffic data produced by ODOT which shows that the widening will increase average daily traffic above today’s levels and produce tens of thousands of tons of additional greenhouse gases. The ODOT numbers are certainly an underestimate because they completely discount the certainty of induced demand:  the scientifically demonstrated increase in vehicle travel that results from expanding freeway capacity in dense urban areas.

2. More performative pedestrian infrastructure.  News reports hailed a new “protected” intersection in Houston, which prompted us to take a close look at the project.  To be sure, as depicted in the artist’s conception, there are wider sidewalks, better lighting, nicer plantings, and even bollards (which we take to be the “protected” part).  But if you step back, the project is just another failed attempt to remediate a fundamentally pedestrian hostile environment. The project actually widens and lengthens two “slip” lanes, which accelerates turning traffic and increases danger for crossing pedestrians.

Pedestrians must still cross two busy, multi-lane arterial streets that carry about 60,000 cars per day.  And the local neighborhood has almost no walkable destinations nearby.  As we’ve said, much of what gets labeled pedestrian infrastructure, is really to convenience car travelers, and does nothing to fix the fundamental problems of pedestrian hostile development patterns.

Must read

1. Will economics support post-Covid cities?  Economist and Bloomberg columnist Noah Smith muses on whether economic forces will enable smart, flexible workers to “zoom it in” from remote locations instead of living and working in Superstar cities.  He discounts some of the key agglomeration economies that the driven city growth in the past several decades, including the productivity of workers in dense urban offices, and the knowledge spillovers that come from proximity and competition.  The most economic enduring factor attracting talented workers to cities, Smith thinks is urban amentiies:

For young people, this means bars, music venues, fun social events, lots of potential friends in their age group, and — probably the most important piece — opportunities to meet romantic partners. For older people this means a large variety of good restaurants and cultural events like musicals.  For this reason, distributed workforces might just mean that knowledge workers live in different superstar cities.

Thus even if some workers are no longer bound to one large city, their most favored alternative may still be yet another superstar city.  Smith relates that his migration has taken him from New York to San Francisco, and his next move, if there is one, is likely to be to Tokyo.  When it comes to urban amenities—and the diverse crowds of smart, discerning and innovative customers that support them—there’s still no substitute for a great city.

2. American’s broadly favor public housing . . . just not in their back yard (or neighborhood).  A new survey from Data for Progress shows remarkably strong public support for the idea of putting more federal tax dollars into building or subsidizing the construction of affordable housing.

That’s encouraging news given that today’s principal low income housing program, housing choice vouchers reaches only about one in five eligible households.  The Biden Administration is proposing ramping up funding for vouchers, but whether we get more affordable housing, especially in desirable opportunity neighborhoods still hinges on whether local land use controls allow its economical construction; apartment bans and minimum lot sizes make affordable housing uneconomical in many US neighborhoods, and there’s little support, and predictable and vociferous opposition any time there’s a specific proposed project that would change this pattern.

3.  Rights of Way.  Houston Architect Christof Spieler has a thoughtful essay challenging the car-centric practices that dominate transportation policy in his (and other) cities.  Texas metro areas, from Houston, to Dallas, to Austin, continue to be caught in an endless cycle of roadbuilding, projecting that traffic will increase in the future, building more roads to accomodate, and than find that traffic still increases further.

The widening of I-35 in Austin is an assertion that traffic will inevitably continue to increase, and that the only way to handle that is to add traffic lanes. This is a direct projection from the past, a continuation of a decades-long strategy used as Austin grew from 130,000 people in the 1950s to 978,000 today. I-35 was built in the 1960s along the old East Avenue, a six-lane road. The original highway had four lanes, two in each direction. . . . The distance the average resident of the Austin region drives increased for decades. TxDOT sees a freeway where traffic travels at 15 mph at rush hour and concludes that the only reasonable response is to add lanes. The question this workshop poses is what the best way is to add those four new lanes, and how to minimize the impacts those lanes will inevitably have on the city.  However, those additional highways have been as much a cause of additional driving as they have been a result of it.

Ultimately, Spieler argues, the answers to the questions about what Texas cities (and others should do) don’t emerge from travel demand models that simply call for repeating past mistakes, they call for us to think about what kind of places we want to inhabit in the future.

New Knowledge

In the News

Willamette Week quotes City Observatory’s Joe Cortright on Portland’s proposed carbon tax for a handful of large polluters—one that unfortunately exempts the biggest sources of greenhouse gases.

What City Observatory this week

1. 2021 is when we have to get real about tackling climate change.  We’ve boiled our analysis of the climate challenge down to four key points:

1. Pledges alone won’t accomplish anything. Saying you support the Paris Accords and plan to emit much less greenhouse gas a two or three decades from now doesn’t count for anything without immediate actions now to lower emissions.
2. We’re falling further and further behind our stated goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, principally because since 2014 we’re driving more.  That’s true in cities around the country, including our own home Portland.  Transportation agencies are particularly complicit in this failure, and are chiefly rationalizing “pollution as usual” in the guise of climate strategy.
3. Cities are central to the climate solution: We need to build more great walkable city neighborhoods, and more housing in the great walkable neighborhoods we already have.
4. Pricing carbon (as well as pricing driving and parking) can go a long way to creating the incentives and leveraging the financial resources and human ingenuity needed to save the planet.

2. If Portland’s going to have a carbon tax, let’s make it apply to the biggest and fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions.  The City of Portland has proposed a $25/ton “healthy climate” fee, which we think is a good idea, but doesn’t go far enough.  The city’s proposal would apply the fee only to about 30 “facilities” around the city that together account for only about 5 percent of the cities carbon footprint.  In our view, the fee ought to be extended to two of the largest sources of greenhouse gases, travel on the Oregon Department of Transportation’s interstate freeways in Portland, and flights in and out of Portland International Airport. Together, these two sources account for several times more carbon pollution than the three dozen facilities singled out in the cities proposed ordinance.

3.  A Green New Deal for Portland?  In the wake of the failure at the polls of a multi-billion transportation proposal, the region could use new leadership and a new direction for metro Portland’s transportation and climate efforts.  We’re pleased to present a guest commentary from planner and strategist Garlynn Windsong speaking to what the Portland metropolitan area could be doing to seriously address the climate crisis.

Must read

1. Streets before trust.  Alon Levy of Pedestrian Observations has an insightful column about the unfortunate paralysis created by insisting that we make community trust a pre-requisite for meaningful changes to the urban environment. In Levy’s view, the way we’re most likely to build trust with dispossessed communities in by tangible actions, not extended if sympathetic conversations.

There’s an emerging mentality among left-wing urban planners in the US called “trust before streets.” It’s a terrible idea that should disappear, a culmination of about 50 or 60 years of learned helplessness in the American public sector. . . . The correct way forward is to think in terms of state capacity first, and in particular about using the state to enact tangible change, which includes providing better public transportation and remaking streets to be safer to people who are not driving. Trust follows – in fact, among low-trust people, seeing the state provide meaningful tangible change is what can create trust, and not endless public meetings in which an untrusted state professes its commitment to social justice.

Nothing Levy says denies the real disempowerment that low income and BIPOC communities experience; it acknowledges that actions speak much louder than words. The problem is that too frequently the processes that are used to simulate trust building via public involvement become a substitute for more direct and tangible measures to redress past injustices.

2. Automobile Dependency and Equity.  The irreplaceable Todd Litman has a timely essay looking at the inherent inequity of our automobile centric transportation system.  One of the key findings:  while owning an automobile can increase a low income household’s access to jobs, on average it ends up costing them more for car payments, fuel insurance and repairs that it generates in increased income.  As Litman summarizes:

. . .  low-income households that obtained a car were able to work more hours and earn approximately $2,300 more per year, which sounds great, but they spent an additional $4,100 annually on their vehicles, so they ended up with less time and less money overall. For many lower-income people, automobiles are an economic trap: they force people to work harder so they can earn more money so they can pay vehicle expenses to commute to their job, making them worse off overall.

There’s nothing equitable about a transportation system that works well only for those who can afford and operate an expensive private motor vehicle.

3. A big fraction of metro moves appear to be short-term.  A key facet of the “urban flight” stories associated with the pandemic was data on people looking to change metro areas. Chris Salviati, who analyzes apartment web search activity at ApartmentList.com reports that a larger than normal share of movers are looking for short-term leases, suggesting that what movement has been observed may be reversed as the pandemic and recession subside.  For example, there’s been a big uptick in searches for short term leases in places like Honolulu:  Who wouldn’t want to ride out the pandemic there?

According to Apartment Lists analysis of millions of searches, declines in some markets like San Francisco have been driven more by a reduction in in-bound moves than an increase in out-bound activity. It appears that the market is reflecting uncertainty about the immediate economic situation, rather than a permanent, long-term shift in location preferences.

New Knowledge

. . .  most models do not include all of the feedback loops necessary to represent the secondary effects of capacity expansion. These models were designed to estimate the effect of capacity expansion on travel times for a given population and employment level for the region. . . . Few models feed the estimated travel times back into the trip distribution or trip generation stages of the model, thereby ignoring the possibility that improved travel times will increase the number of trips that residents choose to make or the possibility that they will choose more distant destinations for their trips. Few models feed estimated travel times back into assumptions about the distribution and growth of population and employment that also influence the frequency and length of trips. In short, the models may do an adequate job of accounting for changes in route and shifts in mode, but they underestimate increases in VMT attributable to increases in trip frequencies and lengths that the capacity expansion will induce.

In the News

Bloomberg CityLab editor David Dudley has a long column, fondly remembering his lengthy pre-pandemic commute to work; in it he quotes our observations about the relative rarity of super-commuting.

The Urban Institute has released an updated set of estimates that purport to measure which US cities are the most inclusive.  The report is conceptually flawed, and actually gets its conclusions backwards, classifying some of the nation’s most exclusive places as “inclusive.” 

We all want our cities to be more inclusive. While it’s an agreed upon goal, measuring inclusiveness turns out to be difficult and complicated. A set of measures developed by the Urban Institute in 2018, and updated late last year, unfortunately paint a picture of inclusion that is misleading and incorrectly portrays wealthy suburban enclaves as inclusive.  In this commentary, we present our analysis of the problems with the Urban Institute’s measures of inclusion, published at its website “Measuring Inclusion in America’s Cities.”

If we’re going to make real progress in addressing community inequities in the US, we need a system for defining and measuring “inclusiveness,” both so we can identify those places that are doing well, and which need most to improve, as well as to to learn from more successful places about what policies and practices support inclusion, and to enable everyone to measure their progress toward greater inclusion over time.  Absent such definitions and metrics, it’s difficult to figure out what works, and what doesn’t.  While well intended, the metrics offered by the Urban Institute are actually a step in the wrong direction, obscuring our understanding of which places are most inclusive, and what policies it would take to expand inclusion.

Two years ago, when this ranking system was first published, we released a five-part review and critique of its approach, definitions and conclusions.  We found:

• The Urban Institute’s definitions rest on the conceptually flawed idea that cities that are more homogenous are more inclusive; in fact, homogeneity is usually a sign of exclusion, not inclusion. This leads the report to get inclusion backwards and classify some of the nation’s most exclusive suburban enclaves as “inclusive.”
• The Urban Institute methodology ignores metropolitan context, treating racially homogenous cities in segregated metro areas “inclusive.” For example, both the city of Detroit and several of its suburbs are rated as highly inclusive, even though the metropolitan area is among the nation’s most racially and economically segregated.
• The Urban Institute methodology classifies a series of high income suburban cities with restrictive zoning policies as inclusive. Urban Institute claims that the nation’s most “inclusive cities” are a series of high income enclaves in the nation’s large metro areas, such as Naperville, IL, Bellevue, WA, Plano, TX and Sunnyvale, CA; all places with median family incomes of over $100,000.
• City boundaries are an inappropriate and misleading basis for estimating inclusiveness; because of their widely varying size and composition, municipalities are a poor choice for computing and comparing equitable outcomes.
• City boundaries change over time; The Urban Institute did not adjust its estimates over time to account for annexations and mergers, treating growth through annexation as an indicator of economic prosperity.

If you take the Urban Institute report literally—which you shouldn’t—you will believe that the nation’s most inclusive communities are mostly a bunch of the toniest suburbs in the nation’s large metro areas—Sunnyvale, CA, Plano, TX, Bellevue, WA, Torrance, CA, Naperville, IL and Carlsbad, CA—all places with median family incomes in excess of $100,000 per year.  Here we’ve taken the Urban Institute’s latest data, which ranks cities from most inclusive to least inclusive.  Median family incomes are shown for each city.

The problem is that instead of measuring inclusivity, UI’s metrics actually measure homogeneity.  They look only at the demographics within a city’s boundaries, and rate a place highly if all its residents have similar levels of income, poverty, employment and homeownership. It’s true that there are very small differences in homeownership, employment, and poverty by race in many expensive suburbs, but that’s because their high home prices exclude low income people generally, and assure if people of color live there, they too have high incomes and high rates of homeownership and low rates of poverty and unemployment.

Similarly, that’s also why some very economically distressed places get rated highly for inclusion—if all or nearly all residents are equally poor, their measured disparities are small. But while these places are homogenous, they’re not inclusive.  In fact, just the opposite.  High income suburbs exclude by having extremely high housing costs, and those high housing costs are created and enforced by local land use policies, especially single family zoning. Low income cities exclude by having too few amenities or opportunities to retain households with high incomes:  When middle and upper income households move away, a neighborhood of concentrated poverty is more homogenous, and by the Urban Institute formulation, “more inclusive.”  We think that’s just backwards.

To its credit, the Urban Institute makes all of the data and formulas it used for ranking cities easily available.  They present detailed city level data on population, income, employment poverty, racial and economic segregation, and other key demographic indicators.  But this is a case of negative synergy:  the end product (the composite inclusiveness measure computed by Urban Institute) is less informative than sum of its parts (all of the data points).  The ranking system actually conceals and misrepresents the inclusiveness (or exclusiveness) of cities, rather than providing useful and accurate information.

As a consequence, the report is a poor guide, both to who’s doing well in achieving inclusion, and what cities (and policies) might be thought of as means to advance inclusion.

As we’ve stressed at City Observatory, building more inclusive metropolitan areas, and in particular, reducing the amount of racial/ethnic and economic segregation is critical to building a more equitable nation.  Unfortunately, the metrics and conclusions offered in this report about which places are inclusive are simply wrong, and consequently provide no useful guidance to local or national leaders about the way forward.

The Urban Institute Report:  Measuring Inclusion

In 2018,  the Urban Institute released its report, “Measuring Inclusion in America’s Cities.” The study presented  a series of metrics of racial disparities, income disparities and economic performance of the nation’s 274 largest cities, and examining how these have changed over time. It aims to benchmark where cities stand on inclusion, understand how inclusion relates to economic growth, and provide lessons for policy makers.

We’ve taken a close look at the report, and while well-documented and certainly well-intended, we’re concerned that some of the metrics it offers and some of the findings it presents make an already tortuously difficult policy area even more confusing.

The paradoxical relationship between inclusion and equality 

Paradoxically, at the very local level equality is fundamentally at odds with inclusion

On its face, it seems like defining inclusion would be simple. It ought to be the absence of disparities in a community. But the reality its much more complicated. Measured economic disparities in a city can be very small, if for example, everyone is rich or everyone is poor.

Urban Institute’s report measures two different dimensions of inclusion, racial inclusion and economic inclusion. In the case of racial inclusion, they look at segregation (whether the white and non-white residents of a particular live in different or similar neighborhoods), and whether there are disparities in educational attainment and home-ownership between whites and non-whites. They also look at the total fraction of the population of a city that is non-white.

In almost every case, the Urban Institute report defines inter-group disparities as an indicator of a lack of inclusion. If, for example, homeownership rates differ greatly between persons of color and whites, that suggests an area isn’t inclusive.

With each of these measures, cities score highest if they have very little inter-group variation.  If white and non-white incomes, unemployment rates, and homeownership rates are very similar, the Urban Institute defines an city as “inclusive.” For example, if everyone in a community is high income, regardless of race or ethnicity, then it is “inclusive.”  Similarly, if everyone in a community is low income, regardless of race or ethnicity, then it is also “inclusive.”

There’s some merit to this idea, but it’s really focusing on “equality” rather than “inclusion.”  It’s entirely possible for a community to be “equal” without at all being inclusive.  In fact, communities that are exclusive tend to be highly equal.  If, for example, you have a community where all housing costs at least $500,000 and there are no apartments, it’s unlikely that you will have many poor, or unemployed, or renters. And it may be that there are very limited economic disparities between residents of different racial and ethnic groups (everyone who can afford to live in such a community, regardless of race or ethnicity, almost certainly has a high income).

Conversely, very inclusive places, where people of widely varying incomes reside, almost by definition have high levels of inequality. A community composed of equal measures rich and poor, homeowners and renters, and with a wide variety of housing sizes and types, including mansions and public housing, will have larger measured disparities in incomes, in homeownership rates, in poverty and so on. It’s a seeming paradox: a place that is truly diverse and inclusive, whether measured by income or race and ethnicity, by definition needs to unequal.

This is not the first time this issue has arisen: We’ve pointed out that applying a broad standard of equality to small geographic areas produces a kind of weird parallax effect: places that have low levels of measure income disparity tend to be homogenous (usually all rich, or all poor), meaning that they are either exclusive or failing.  The geography of inequality is anti-fractal:  high levels of measured inequality at small geographies mean exactly the opposite of what they mean at large geographies.

The bottom line is that a truly inclusive place may in fact have high levels of measured disparity. As a result, there’s an important conceptual flaw in metrics that focus solely on the localized presence of disparities to discuss inclusion.

To summarize:

• Cities don’t generate income distributions among their populations, so much as they include (or exclude) different income groups. City inequality is not a linear microcosm of national income inequality.
• Highly equal cities are almost always either exclusive suburban enclaves (that achieve homogeneity by rigid zoning limits that exclude the poor) or impoverished cities that have been abandoned by upper and middle income households, leaving them homogeneous but poor. (For example, many of Urban’s Institute’s “most inclusive cities” are suburbs like Bellevue, Naperville and Santa Clara–among the wealthiest 20 cities in the US; while Detroit and Cleveland are also highly ranked for inclusiveness.
• Small geographies, neighborhoods/cities that have high levels of measured income inequality (90/10 ratio, Gini Index) are generally much more inclusive than comparable geographies that with lower levels of measured inequality.  Rich and poor living closer together produces more measured inequality, but also means greater inclusion.

We want to stress that we have enormous respect for the researchers at the Urban Institute: over the years we’ve learned tremendously from their work. We and everyone who cares about cities has a huge debt for their scholarship and advocacy. They’ve provided powerful evidence of the huge economic and human toll continuing racial and economic disparities in their report “The Cost of Segregation.” Our own report on concentrated poverty Lost in Place, draws liberally from the canonical work by Urban Institute scholars. The critique presented here is meant to advance our shared understanding of how we can build more inclusive cities. We conferred with the authors of the report in 2018 after it was released and shared these concerns with them. The analysis presented here remains solely the responsibility of City Observatory.