Where redevelopment is too costly, create infill sites through house-moving

This house on Wisconsin Ave. NW was demolished by greedy high-rise developers — no, wait, it was merely moved around the corner to face Macomb St. The high-rise is actual infill, in that it fills in what had been a square of grass. Keeping the house (which might have been part of a bargain with the neighborhood) can help to recoup most of the land acquisition cost.

Infill, rather than demolition, was pretty typical of how “missing middle housing” was originally built in its early 20th-century, pre-zoning heyday. It’s also how middle housing development generally pencils in the present day: “the best way to make an infill project work is to avoid demolition.”

Even though houses in locations like Upper NW DC are expensive, houses’ yard space is some of the lowest-valued land in cities. Moving a house on its lot is a way to buy just the yard while leaving the use value of the house intact. (I had hoped to take a similar approach with my Redgrove project by building just within the backyard, but alas couldn’t get zoning permission to retain the house. Instead, the site has to be 100% townhouses, and the original house will be demolished soon.)

A century-old example is the Coolidge Corner section of Brookline, Massachusetts, where my grandparents once bought a triple-decker and where John F. Kennedy grew up. The NPS website for the JFK house includes this Sanborn insurance map slider, which shows how Coolidge Corner’s building stock changed between 1907 and 1919 — including both the Kennedy’s house and my grandfather’s triple-decker.

The maps shows that flats (shown on the fire insurance maps in red, as they were built out of fireproof brick) were usually built on vacant, but already subdivided, house lots. Sometimes, a wooden house (shown in yellow) would be moved on its lot to make room for flats–e.g., the two circled houses at the corner of Harvard and Green Streets were rotated away from Harvard St. to make room for shops on the same lot. A ~1919 photo shows Jack and Joe Kennedy Jr. standing amidst a half-built suburban subdivision. Few houses were demolished entirely to build just flats — though some were for larger buildings, like the mixed-use complex in the obtuse corner.

People like Rose Kennedy, who moved into a new-ish wooden house in Coolidge Corner in 1914, did not approve. In 1973, just after my family arrived, she called the area “built up now… congested and drab” (pg. 33). Keep in mind that Joseph Kennedy Sr. moved there as a bank president. Single lots and detached houses in Coolidge Corner in the 1910s were already a luxury, perhaps because restrictive covenants required a minimum house value.

Despite those covenants, this pre-zoning suburb was demographically mixed—because nuclear-family SFH-owners like the Kennedys were the exception, while extended families & renters were the norm. The 1920 Census found the Kennedys’ block was 68% renters and had 47 unrelated boarders! Roomers and live-in servants were surprisingly common in many urban and suburban neighborhoods into the early 20th century, until early zoning advocates forced them out. In that sense, my grandfather bringing his multigenerational family (and renters) to the area wasn’t anything new, even in a rich suburb like Brookline. Also, every neighborhood has always been changing forever and always will, the end.

How single-stair apartments can improve fire safety

Balconville six-flats, Plateau, Montreal QC
Exterior-staircase flats in Montreal.

Allowing single-stair multifamily buildings has the potential to get more people into safer buildings, by allowing better alternatives to less-safe townhouses and existing houses. Read more in Greater Greater Washington: https://ggwash.org/view/93257/how-single-stair-apartments-can-improve-fire-safety

Reading notes: housing price insurance, VMT & proximity

What I’m reading lately:

1. Lee Anne Ferrell, “Residents Against Housing” suggests an “insurance plan” that pays vulnerable tenants in gentrifying areas if their rent rises, despite welcoming new construction. This seems plausible in some limited scenarios, but I could imagine one where a neighborhood plan that envisions substantial residential growth is being implemented by a local taxing authority (e.g., a TIF, or a suburban town), and where payouts are indexed to regional rent inflation.

This is reminiscent of an insurance-based solution for the opposite urban succession situation: home equity insurance, intended to assuage homeowners worried about house value decline caused by neighborhood demographic shifts.

2. Adie Tomer and Caroline George for Brookings Institute, “Building for Proximity“. The amount that Americans travel is truly bonkers: miles traveled per capita per day doubled from 19.5 1969 to 40 in 2017, distances that are impossible to achieve without a car. “Americans simply travel too far, using cars too often. National trip distances easily exceed global economic peers.” Americans travel further for no good reason, besides the fact that we’ve been doing it this way for decades.

Even Americans living near activity centers travel a lot: almost 24,000 miles (the distance around the globe) per household per year. But those living far (10+ miles) from metro activities travel an extra 17,000 miles, or 2/3 of the way around the globe!

“While individuals have little control over manufacturing processes or electricity generation, where one chooses to live and travel is their most significant environmental decision.” The same goes for communities, and yet trip distances reduction figures into few local government climate action plans.

The graphs in the report show a somewhat logarithmic relationship between proximity and VMT. Too many transit-oriented development plans have hewed too closely to overly narrow radiuses (e.g., 1/4 mile to transit) which don’t have substantial basis in scientific literature. TOD effects are strongest closest to transit, but that doesn’t mean that areas 0.26 miles from transit are automatically “too far” and should be reserved for very low density detached houses. Yet that’s how generations of planners zoned “TOD,” with sharp density distinctions.

GTA: in the foreground is Mississauga. Its skyline bests Phoenix for the number of skyscrapers - yet there's no rail transit, and you've never heard of it.

3. Lida Weinstock for Congressional Research Service, “U.S. Housing Supply: Recent Trends and Policy Considerations” (July 2023). “New housing units… have trended downwards in recent decades.”

“Relatively low housing supply, especially when demand for housing is strong, can cause undesirable frictions in the housing market. One of the main results of low supply has been decreasing affordability.”

“[E]ven if there are technically enough units to house the population, that may not be true at certain price points or in certain locations,” a point misunderstood by “vacancy truthers.”

4. Richard Kahlenberg, “A Way Forward on Housing“. Ritchie Torres: “Exclusionary zoning produces and perpetuates housing segregation by race and class, which in turn produces and perpetuates school segregation by race and class.”

Contrast that to Patricia McCloskey speaking to Donald Trump’s Republican National Convention, warning that ending “single family home zoning” would bring “crime, lawlessness, and low-quality apartments into now-thriving suburban neighborhoods.” [Or, I’d add, Ben Carson and Donald Trump’s co-signed WSJ editorial: “a relentless push for more high-density housing in single-family residential neighborhoods, has become the mainstream goal of the left.”

“Large developers… may actually benefit from a more complicated regulatory structure that prices out smaller operations.” This is attributed to “Boston University researchers,” but fits into the Bruce Yandle-inspired “bootlegger and Baptist coalition” model of how big developers and NIMBYs both benefit from restricted growth.

All low-cost housing is subsidized

The high cost of new houses doesn’t exist due to greed alone. The cost of constructing and maintaining housing is too high for many to afford. Whether we recognize it or not, all low-cost housing has been either explicitly or implicitly subsidized by somebody else: – A new inclusionary-zoned apartment is being subsidized by its neighbors. – A new Habitat house was subsidized by volunteers, donors, and probably the local government. – A new LIHTC apartment was subsidized by the federal government and maybe local/state government; its construction costs may even have been higher than the “luxury apartments” nearby. – An old, cheap house in a declining milltown was subsidized by prior owners who sold it at a loss, and will only remain cheap by deferring maintenance, which means future occupants will pay more. – A cheap house in a distant suburb is directly subsidized by $1T in annual subsidies for US sprawl; these subsidies have declined since their postwar introduction, but they spun up giant industries which can mass-produce sprawl cheaply. Meanwhile, tremendous indirect subsidies make driving, and thereby car-dependent sprawl, unrealistically cheap, with huge costs for human and planetary health. Simply demanding lower-cost housing will not lower the cost of housing, any more than demanding lower-cost groceries will. Somebody has to actually write down that cost. (Notice that we don’t have fights over whether to provide subsidized food, because we provide it everywhere — through agricultural subsidies and food stamps.) Local government CAN do something about the cost of housing, of course. It can reduce all the major costs of housing inputs — land costs, construction costs, and “soft costs”. Upzoning directly reduces per-unit land costs. If upzoning allows smaller, simpler, and more standardized housing units, those can reduce construction costs per unit. If upzoning makes permitting simpler, it can reduce “soft” costs. Best of all, upzoning is entirely within local governments’ control and costs nothing out of pocket. But all of these will only reduce the cost of providing housing somewhat; I can’t promise any silver bullets. Governments also can direct, or redirect, subsidies that directly or indirectly lower consumer housing costs. This is especially important “for low-income families, [as] the only way to bridge the gap between incomes and housing costs is through public subsidies” (Brookings): for the 26,000 households in Raleigh who earn less than $20K, an “affordable” rent is <$500, which is less than it costs to *operate*, much less build, a minimum-quality apartment. But most of those subsidies are beyond local governments’ authority or fiscal capacity; covering rent for just those 26,000 households would cost $156M a year, equal to hiking city property taxes by 50%! So local governments have to do what they can, while also working with other governments and the private sector to get more resources AND reduce costs. (It’s worth noting that in the 1971 law review article where Paul and Linda Davidoff coined the very term “inclusionary zoning”, they noted that it was a tool to be used WITH additional government subsidy: “changes in local land use controls combined with the infusion of new funds and new forms of aid from the federal government to permit the construction of vast amounts of moderate-income housing” [emphasis added]. “Inclusionary zoning” was never meant to shift the burden of funding affordable housing onto developers, but rather to have developers participate in the construction of government-funded affordable housing. The original Montgomery County Moderately Priced Dwelling Unit program only provided low-income housing because the county purchased moderately priced units and subsidized their rental to low-income households.) And yes, a formula of more housing + more subsidies works. It works in many other countries; all the exemplars of social housing build many more units than the US per capita, and spend much more in public subsidies. It even worked in the US during the Great Society era; in 1970, 46% of multifamily housing starts were HUD subsidized! Then Nixon, fearing backlash from white suburban homeowners, eviscerated HUD’s budget, and federal subsidies never really returned. The lowest-hanging fruit, and one that (as others have written) Wake County in particular has been attuned to, is preserving existing lower-rent apartments. Allowing new multifamily houses to be built in R zones will relieve the pressure to redevelop the RX-zoned land underneath existing apartments. Wake County’s new subsidy dollars can be matched with untapped federal dollars (namely, NCHFA bonds + 4% LIHTC). Clever developers can densify around existing buildings, especially with relaxed parking requirements. That’s now happening right now (instead, existing apartments are flipped or torn down for pricier units) because of exclusionary zoning’s evil twin, “expulsive zoning.” Zoning’s original intent was to comfort the comfortable (by surrounding rich and white people’s spacious houses with more spacious houses, aka “exclusionary zoning”) while afflicting the afflicted (by packing apartments, commercial, and industry next to one another, aka “expulsive zoning”). Andrew Whittemore at UNC has researched the history of Durham’s zoning and found ample evidence of expulsive zoning at work for generations. While he’s found matters have improved slightly since 1985, today’s zoning map is almost identical to 1985’s. The twin demons of exclusionary and expulsive zoning still haunt the zoning map today. YIMBYism isn’t about doubling down on the exclusive/expulsive dichotomy. It isn’t “more of the same,” and doesn’t seek to perpetuate the inequality that’s baked into current development patterns – which directly lead to rising costs, displacement, and further inequality. YIMBYism is about abolishing that dichotomy. Adapted from an email sent to a Raleigh listserv 

Back to the future with California Forever

The future is electric!

A common complaint about the grandiose California Forever “new town” project in Solano County is that the site is just too far out there. The few 1970s New Towns that succeeded through to the present day were only 10-20 miles from growing job centers; the Solano site is a good 50+ miles from any major job centers (Berkeley or San Francisco) and 70+ miles from Silicon Valley itself. Distance wouldn’t be such a problem if only transport connections were better.

Ironically, though, the California Forever site is bisected by the remains of the Sacramento Northern Railway, an electric interurban railroad that once shuttled passengers between the Bay Area, Sacramento, and even far beyond Sacramento to Chico. Not only does much of the rail corridor still exist through there, but 21 miles of track is owned and preserved by the Western Railway Museum, which even maintains 5.5 miles (south of route 12) with live 1200V catenary — on which it runs former East Bay interurban equipment.

It’s puzzling that WRM’s track doesn’t seem to figure into California Forever’s plans at all so far, even as some kind of “future connection.” That may be because it’s of little practical use: even though the Sacramento Northern in theory once reached Pittsburg (now a terminal station for BART), it did so via a time-consuming car ferry across the busy, windy Suisun Bay. A new bridge would be prohibitively expensive; a ferry would be both difficult and silly, as both ends now sit in wetlands and some kind of shuttle would still be needed on the Pittsburg end (which is miles short of BART).

(This post began as a LinkedIn comment for Benjamin Schneider’s blog.)

Support Z-92-22, New Bern TOD

(Sent to Raleigh City Council)

I urge you to support Z-92-22, the New Bern Avenue TOD overlay mapping.

As a student at Enloe High School in 1996 (photograph at right), I gained some unpopularity for suggesting that students ought not to complain about parking and press for a costly parking garage, because other options existed — i.e., the city bus. 30 years later, a faster and better city bus could be an option for more residents, but only if City Council lets people live nearby.

In short, this is a vote on whether or not Raleigh transit succeeds. Transit succeeds when it has a mass of people to transport, and without TOD this BRT will fail, just like the many other transit plans that Raleigh has drawn up over my lifetime.

In a 2016 referendum, 262,634 Wake County voters said yes to this specific Bus Rapid Transit line, obliging the city of Raleigh to create a mass transit system — not just to deliver the transit project, but also to ensure its success by making it useful for a mass of people. The federal government, which is funding half of this project, is closely evaluating whether federal taxpayers’ monies are well-spent in places whose zoning laws truly welcome transit. The federal government has made it amply clear that it has learned the lessons of places like Los Angeles and Denver (as amply reported in NPR’s series “Ghost Train”) which wasted billions in federal funds on building empty new transit lines in locations that lacked a mass of residents and businesses.

Raleigh’s failure to federal transit funding in the past was entirely because our land use plans have not supported transit. This has been the story since I was a child, and now I’m middle-aged. You finally have a golden chance to make transit work in Raleigh by passing Z-92-22.

Most of the fearmongering around this rezoning has centered on displacement. TOD overlay zoning is the only Inclusionary Zoning tool that Raleigh has at its disposal, and therefore voting FOR this rezoning is a vote to bring inclusionary zoning here. This rezoning will focus more development on under-used commercial land and large-lot houses, reducing the pressure for flippers who are already displacing residents from nearby neighborhoods.

As Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says, “the reason why people are on the streets isn’t just some elusive housing or market phenomenon. It’s because we’ve chosen not to build.” The voters of the city of Raleigh have risen to the challenge by approving funding for affordable housing, but now we need places to put it – and Z-92-22 does just that. The city has invested mightily to prepare by buying affordable housing sites within this overlay district.

Zoning for housing is the progressive thing to do. Data For Progress analyzed every 2020 presidential platform and found that “every major Democratic candidate for president endorsed an explicitly pro-housing platform, calling for an end to exclusionary zoning,” while many Republican leaders have attacked Missing Middle zoning reforms using thinly veiled racist language. In his final act in Congress, the Triangle’s own David Price passed the Yes In My Back Yard Act grant program as part of the 2023 federal budget.

A “no” vote on Z-92-22 is not a vote for some magical, supernatural, and completely nonexistent perfection that might exist in the future. Instead, a “no” vote on Z-92-22 is a vote to perpetuate an unjust, unsustainable status quo of cars and sprawl: for bulldozing thousands more acres in Wendell, more deadly car crashes on the Beltline, more carbon pollution to drown our precious beaches, to perpetuate the exclusionary covenants that banned both people of color and renters from Longview Gardens.

There has been enough study and delay; the Equitable Transit-Oriented Development Guidebook recommending this rezoning was issued in July 2020, almost three years ago. Now is the time for action.

I thank you for your attention. I look forward to further working with the City of Raleigh to advance our shared vision of a greater Raleigh.

Build this greenway already

I remember being excited about having a greenway between downtown Cary and the subdivision where I grew up (and beyond to Lake Johnson, NC State University, and Downtown Raleigh) back when I first saw it in a town parks plan in the library — in the 1980s, when I was a child. My parents went to some public meeting in the 1990s that they said was discouraging, and for decades I have regretted that I wasn’t there to speak up for the project then.

Walnut Creek Greenway in 1976 plan
Capital Area Greenway plan from 1976, with Cary section highlighted

So here I am, several decades later, to say that this should be completed posthaste. And speaking as a planner, public engagement should include the voices of people who will benefit, far beyond those abutting the project boundary and far beyond today.

Fenton view down to creek

(The above is an email I sent to Cary’s parks planner upon finding out that the trail project is being actively studied again. If only it had been done, decades of development alongside it like Fenton could’ve tied into an existing transportation facility — but instead, no, instead the future trail is fronted by parking lots.)

Water woes won’t save Midwestern cities, and won’t sink Western cities

Route 5

Lake Erie waterfront in winter, viewed from Buffalo City Hall (all photos mine)

When I lived in Chicago, a common line of reasoning among locals (including me) was that Great Lakes cities were destined to triumph in the 21st century for the same reason they did in the 19th — its access to bountiful fresh water. Joel Brammeier, a Great Lakes advocate, notes that “Great Lakes residents like to believe that our water will save us” in CityLab, but also refutes the claim.

Upon further examination, this neat tale seems to be another popular notion that intuitively feels right, but falls apart upon further examination. I’m not post-hoc justifying Southwestern urbanization; I live in the east, because I enjoy looking at trees and rivers. But I’m not kidding myself that humans need those things.

1. The big reason why eastern US cities historically were built around water isn’t because humans drink hundreds of gallons per day, or even because 19th-century industry needed unlimited water; it’s because pre-railroad shipping used to be entirely water-borne, and pre-steam industry was entirely water-powered. Neither has been the case for over two centuries now.

Spillway

The Mississippi’s falls at Minneapolis, useful first and foremost for milling, secondly for shipping, and (a distant third) for drinking – 3/4 of its region’s water is from wells 

The amount of water used in industry has also declined substantially; treatment is a requirement now whereas before the approach was just to rinse everything down the drain. Wastewater recycling is how semiconductor fabrication, one of the most water-intensive manufacturing uses, thrives in Phoenix. Even water-intensive factories employ many fewer people than they once did, and water-borne shipping is mostly important for low-value bulk commodities (e.g., grain) which don’t create large numbers of jobs.

House

The Fox River at Plano, Illinois

2. Even a city the size of Chicago doesn’t “need” Lake Michigan quantities of fresh water, because again, actual in-home water use isn’t that high. Chicago (which also supplies most of its suburbs with water) draws one billion gallons a day from the lake — but that’s about as much water as the comparatively small Fox River, in the western suburbs, delivers (annual average). You don’t need a 3,000 year supply of something that you can simply reuse.

Chicago needed vast quantities of water in the 19th century, when dirty water was simply dumped untreated into waterways. But now treatment technology has advanced to the point where reclaimed water can be sent right back into drinking water filtration plants. It’s even used by Midwestern agricultural and industrial users, as a Wisconsin professor points out. Chicago finally began “tertiary treatment” (disinfection) of wastewater in 2015, and now local municipalities are investigating its use.

Most planning around water resources has shifted from thinking about drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater as separate categories to instead thinking about all three as “One Water.”

3. There’s ample water for urban use in the Southwest. Most water in the Southwest currently goes to agriculture, which seems absurd at first glance but makes sense considering the economics of the early 20th century: all that sun is good for plants, even if water needs to be imported at a then-reasonable cost. Replacing that agriculture elsewhere will require different inputs, like energy.

California Coast Starlight

California vegetable fields

The good news is that food production can and will shift as the cost of agricultural inputs shift. As the cost of water is rising, and the cost of electricity is declining, vertical farms can now provide competitively priced leafy greens (a big Arizona/California export). Lighting was expensive in the early 20th century, but it’s getting much cheaper thanks to LEDs and cheap renewable power; vertical farms use drastically less water and fertilizer, can be mechanized more easily, and are closer to consumers.

Vertical farming

4. Urban water prices would have to be unrealistically higher to dissuade population growth. For a family that doesn’t irrigate outdoors, the spread in monthly water bills from the Rust Belt to the Sun Belt is absolutely negligible. In 2010, a monthly water bill for a family in Las Vegas cost $1 more than in Chicago. San Diego had much pricier water ($16 more each month), but that was just 0.5% of a median family’s budget. (That’s peanuts compared to homeowners’ insurance in Florida, which costs several thousand dollars more per year yet hasn’t done much to dissuade newcomers.)

San Diego already gets much of its water from high-cost desalination, so its water rates are pretty much as high as municipal rates will get. At such prices, it makes a lot of sense to do desalination, water recycling (Las Vegas recycles 99% of indoor water use), extreme water conservation measures (like those that have cut metro Las Vegas’ water use substantially despite population growth), diverting water from irrigation and agriculture (80% of Colorado River water!), or shipping water from far away.

5. With water recycling, even Los Angeles technically doesn’t need to import water: ‘ “It will take a lot of work, but 100 percent local water is possible by 2050,” said Mark Gold, UCLA’s associate vice chancellor of environment and sustainability.’ It’s technically feasible for LA to support its population on rainwater, groundwater, and recycled water alone — not even desalination!

6. Meanwhile, it’s not as if Great Lakes states don’t also have costly drinking-water infrastructure needs, from combined sewerage to lead pipes to agricultural pollution — all of which will require costly infrastructure investments to catch up to Western cities’ water-recycling tech. As Brammeier writes, “The infrastructure, governance and incentives for economic development we swore by during the 20th century are no match for the impacts of climate change.”

Olden days' infrastructure

Midwestern urban water infrastructure, like this elegant but smelly sewage pump along the Chicago River, can’t be taken for granted.  

The Midwest also faces its own own climate change hazards; these aren’t as dramatic as sea level rise or megadroughts, but shouldn’t excuse the status quo. Fierce rainstorms and floods threaten flat, paved-over cities; Houston-esque heat and humidity will make summer unbearable in much of the Corn Belt and especially the Mississippi and Ohio valleys; and “polar vortex” cold snaps will get more frequent and severe during the winter as cold air spills down from the rapidly warming Arctic.

The traffic pattern around Crossroads in Cary wasn’t exactly intentional

NCDOT recently reactivated plans to rebuild Raleigh’s busiest interchange, between I-40, I-440, and US 1/64 on the border of Raleigh and Cary. Much of the plan revolves around trying to fix the troublesome road arrangement that exists around Cary’s largest retail center, Crossroads Plaza. But how did this emerge?

Crossroads Mall was originally proposed in the late 1980s, just a few years after I-40 was constructed around the west/south of Raleigh, by the Australian developer L.J. Hooker. Hooker proposed the Triangle’s largest enclosed shopping mall, just one of many they planned across America. (They only ever completed onewhich did not do well.) The site had been assembled by NCNB (now Bank of America) and an Ohio pension fund, who also planned an office park to the south – hence, perhaps, the names Meeting Street and Columbus (as in Ohio) Ave.

Crossroads Mall was to have been surrounded by a bean-shaped ring road; the outline of its southern half exists today as Caitboo Ave. (Imagine if it arced around the north edge of the shopping center.) Four access roads would connect to the ring road: the largest would align with the existing 1/64-Walnut interchange, and three more access roads would connect the ring road to the west, south, and southwest. Offices, hotels, and more shops would fill in the land south to Dillard Rd.

Crucially, plans filed in 1986 showed Crossroads Blvd. extending east across Jones Franklin, then curving north and ending at its own dedicated Beltline/I-40 trumpet interchange, west of Avent Ferry Rd. This would have balanced access to the mall such that shoppers could approach it from freeways in four directions: US1/64 from the southwest (via Walnut), I-40 from the northwest and southeast (via Crossroads), and the I-440 Beltline from the northeast (via Jones Franklin to Crossroads).

Things went awry quickly. The Beltline interchange would require purchasing land from Raleigh’s Lake Johnson Park, and Raleigh hardly wanted to facilitate such a huge economic boon for Cary. The flyover ramp from US1/64 to Crossroads Blvd. was concocted as a hasty replacement way to get direct freeway access from Raleigh to the mall.

Hooker’s business empire — weighed down not only by boatloads of debt but also the fantastically stupid purchase of several fading luxury department store chains — rapidly collapsed in the early 1990s real estate bust, but not until after the Crossroads site was cleared and roads like Meeting St. and the 1/64 flyover were built.

A new developer bought the site at a bargain price and, recognizing the shift underway from enclosed, full-price malls to “power center” strip malls filled with off-price discounters, redesigned the site for what was at the time the world’s largest power center. Instead of shops surrounded by parking and roads, the new layout required roads and parking in front of shops. But Caitboo and Crossroads had already been built south of the site, and a power line corridor meant that a good chunk of the site’s northern half was unbuildable. The solution was a ring of shops pierced by Crossroads Blvd, with Caitboo treated like a forgotten back alley. Even the vast power center didn’t fill the entire mall site; the cinema site was left undeveloped at first. (Note that what’s now Target and Home Depot was also owned by Hooker at the time.)

The reconfigured Crossroads Plaza was indeed a great financial success and spawned copycat developments all around it, adding to the strain on Walnut St. The road system there was cobbled together from various bits that were originally intended to serve a very different function. The original plan had access from the west and the east; instead, most mall access ended up coming from the west, which overloaded Walnut St. (Traffic volumes on Walnut are >3X higher than on Jones Franklin or Dillard, and ~30% higher right in front of Crossroads than on either side.) Once inside the mall, traffic was to have split up in both directions to flow right onto a ring road, which would distribute traffic around the mall. Instead, cars are mostly funneled onto one route: Meeting, then a left turn to Caitboo and right turn onto Crossroads.

What’s ultimately needed is to rebalance Crossroads traffic from the west to the south or east approaches, and that’s something that NCDOT’s plans make some progress towards by removing several Walnut St. exit ramps and aligning them with Dillard Dr. instead. Improved street network connectivity and improved wayfinding would also disperse vehicles away from just Walnut St.

(Originally posted to City-Data; images via Cary’s site plan archive)

Testimony to Arlington Planning Commission, March 2023

(Italicized sections were cut entirely from the delivered testimony for brevity.)

Thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Payton Chung. After grad school for planning at Virginia Tech in Arlington, I am now a developer of Missing Middle scaled housing. Because that job does not yet exist around here, I mostly work in Raleigh, NC, a prime destination for people who have been priced out of northern Virginia. I can attest that Raleigh’s Missing Middle text changes have made it possible for me to offer smaller, lower-priced houses than the large new houses built across the street just before the text changes. Many of those arriving in Raleigh have been priced out of places like Arlington, which has better infrastructure than Raleigh — much better transit, no water shortages, a regionwide trail network, less crowded schools — but which lacks sufficient housing infrastructure.

The “tall or sprawl” dichotomy of Arlington’s “bulls-eye approach” to planning relies almost entirely on two uniquely high-cost housing types: land-intensive detached houses and capital-intensive high-rise apartments. As a result, it necessarily results in high housing costs. Missing Middle Housing offers a middle ground: less land than detached houses and less materials and labor than high-rises. Yet Missing Middle Housing production, like production of anything else, best achieves lower costs once it achieves economies of scale. It can only reach its full potential for lower costs if it becomes widespread and well-practiced.

Not only does this call for removing artificial zoning limitations, but it also requires related changes to building codes, financing practices, and construction practices.  That means allowing more units, in more locations, and not rationing it with a countywide cap. Redevelopment is already an inherently slow process, since it’s limited by land availability. Only 3/10ths of 1% of Arlington’s single family houses are listed for sale today. Progress towards the county’s equity, affordability, or sustainability goals should not be further limited.

EHO will not solve the affordable housing crisis, but it will make existing subsidy dollars and programs go much further. For instance, Virginia Housing offers subsidized loans to first-time homebuyers up to a cap of $665,000. A house at that price is roughly affordable to the median Arlington household. Right now, there are zero new construction houses available in Arlington to meet that budget. Some older houses are available, but with either maintenance needs or condo fees that would sink many first-time homebuyers. However, there are 108 new homes available under that cap in equally land-constrained, equally highly regulated DC and Alexandria — and 98% are in “missing middle” sized buildings that are basically illegal to build in Arlington today. Instead, new houses in almost all of Arlington are available only for households earning more than the President of the United States — top-3% incomes in America.

The EHO text attempts to incentivize 4-6 flat buildings, but building codes and lending practices continue to favor fee-simple townhouses. I suggest further study to adapt building codes to enable flats, review townhouses’ specific urban design challenges, require public access easements so that driveways contribute to the street network, and allowing townhouse accessory dwelling units– “English basements” are an established pattern for attainable housing in this region.

And last, a quick response to complaints about infrastructure sufficiency. Infrastructure is continually repaired and replaced, for example through Arlington’s $4.4 billion Capital Improvement Program — including almost $1 billion just in water infrastructure. We’ve known since the federal government’s 1974 “Costs of Sprawl” report that expanding existing infrastructure in existing urbanized areas is more cost effective than building it new in rural areas.

Take rail transit, for example: restricting growth here means that Arlington pays WMATA extra to run trains with excess capacity here, while Virginia spends billions to expand rail service for Arlington commuters’ hour or two-hour trips to Ashburn and Ashland. Instead, Arlington should welcome more of those commuters to live here and take the trains built decades ago, when doing so was much cheaper. At a time when new houses are being sold to Arlington commuters in Caroline County, 70 miles down I-95, we need to be cognizant that while infrastructure in Arlington might not be perfect, it’s much better than infrastructure elsewhere.

It’s especially puzzling to hear complaints about strained infrastructure come from neighborhoods where the population has shrunk, rather than grown. Even as Arlington’s population grew by 15% since 2010, CPHD estimates that the population in Old Glebe declined by 13.6%. When Arlington’s low-density neighborhoods were built, life expectancy was still in the 60s; now a typical Arlingtonian lives to 85. That’s terrific news, but it means that Arlington needs more housing units even for exactly the same population — much less a growing one.

I commend the Commission and County for the progress made to date. This zoning change may seem momentous, but even the dry and bitter pill of zoning reform is not a magic pill. It can merely reshape changes that are already occurring to neighborhoods, and hopefully in a way that shifts rather than reinforces the unjust, unsustainable status quo.