I-670 hides below this building in Columbus, Ohio.

Whether I’m biking down F Street and running headlong into it, or dodging its construction equipment on the infrequent occasions when I have to drive through the I-395 tunnel, it’s hard to miss Capitol Crossing — now the largest development underway within downtown Washington, DC. I knew that this was an unusual project, but it turns out that it’s incredibly unusual: the only instance of a privately financed freeway deck anywhere in the country.

The “Ponte Vecchio” example that everyone points to is The Cap at Union Station: two narrow retail buildings alongside the principal spine of Columbus, Ohio, all built on a bridge over a freeway. It is a marvelous example of a place connector, one that seamlessly unites two emerging neighborhoods to one another.

However, these caps aren’t exactly something that can be replicated everywhere, since it’s an incredibly expensive way to fix a place. The Columbus example was funded by the federal government, as a mitigation measure for widening the freeway below. Most other recent cap proposals resulted from similar mitigation measures — and thus most are parks, both because that’s what the government builds and because their relatively light weight keeps the cost of building a deck down. Klyde Warren Park in Dallas is one example; 70% of the money came from the federal and state governments.

Three things to keep in mind when evaluating a freeway cap:

The future site of Capitol Crossing, on a rare car-free day (Inauguration Day 2009). Photo by Bossi, via Flickr.

1. The price of the structure is only justifiable if you’re surrounded by very high-value land — namely, a high-rise, high-rent CBD of a high-cost city. This limits the situations where these caps make economic sense to premier sites. For instance, a few blocks of air rights over the Massachusetts Turnpike in Boston’s Back Bay are currently in the planning/proposal phase, having seen prior plans fall apart during the Great Recession.

Capitol Crossing’s developers paid the District $60 million for air rights and are sinking another $400 million into constructing a platform over I-395 just east of Union Station, yielding a cost per “FAR-foot” (square foot of potential development) of around $150-200. That’s substantially higher than the $75 per FAR-foot seen in recent transactions for development sites at the periphery of downtown — but comparable to the $190 per FAR-foot paid for “dirt” within downtown DC, which is pretty much extinct. The net result of this scarcity and high prices is that only the very highest value land uses, namely office and retail, are economically feasible at this development — residential just doesn’t pay enough.

(Calculation based on pre-construction cost figures and final buildout of 2.2 million square feet. Post building calculation doesn’t include demolition costs.)

The economic feasibility line might also be teased out from the RFI responses that Virginia DOT received regarding two sites over I-66 in Arlington — one at the edge of Rosslyn’s high-rise core, and another in low-rise East Falls Church (actually within Arlington County). Almost none of the responses deemed the EFC parcel economically feasible, but many of the responses indicated that the effective “land cost” for the Rosslyn parcels, including cost of construction, at nearly $100 per square foot of FAR.

Unlike private development, a park’s feasible land value is set off-market and is thus completely subjective. In a neighborhood in dire need of a park, or on an irreplaceable waterfront site, the value of a new park may indeed justify the cost of construction.

2. It’ll be much easier, and cheaper, to build a cap if the freeway is completely closed for a while — say, for a major reconstruction. Staging construction over an operating freeway is risky, dangerous, and ultimately costly. Hence, many existing freeway-lid projects, like the Prudential Center and Copley Place in Boston, were constructed before the road underneath them opened to the public. Columbus’ lid was built during an 18-month closure of I-670, for example.

Even at Capitol Crossing, the developer realized the folly of trying to keep the freeway open during construction, and proposed to close 395 entirely for 15-18 months. The closure eventually came to naught due to politics, but would have “cut in half the construction time,” according to the Post: “Building the deck requires installing about 150 caissons along the median to support a network of steel girders… installing the caissons while the highway is in use would be hazardous and disturb nearby residents.”

3. A more entrepreneurial approach that governments can take to such a project is suggested by Matthew Kiefer, who worked on an earlier iteration of the MassPike deal:

MassDOT should adjust its expectations about the revenue potential of these difficult sites to reflect economic reality. It should rely more on rent derived from the net profit of a stabilized real estate asset – percentage rent or a share of proceeds of future sales or refinancings – and less on initial land value, which can be illusory. The Commonwealth will be around for a long time to realize patient returns.

In this PPP structure, the state “speculatively” builds the platform, then executes a “ground lease” for the air rights while keeping the property under state control. This may require a more entrepreneurial attitude towards monetization than most state DOTs are willing to take, but well-located center-city land is a great long term investment. If you really believe in the quality and long-term value of the place that you’re creating, a percentage-rent ground lease is a great way to discount the rent up front but to participate in the long-term gains.

Interestingly, Brandywine Realty Trust also suggested the same net-lease arrangement in its response to VDOT.

4. There are lower-cost alternative to a full bridging project while minimizing the freeway’s footprint and impact. In many cases, the most expensive bit will be bridging the through-traffic lanes — but even sunken urban freeways usually have lots of other spaces. Embankments are usually excessive, and building platforms can be cantilevered out over their edges. Lower-traffic ramps and shoulders are easier to close temporarily for construction. Skybridges can be assembled off-site rather than in-situ, providing more connectivity across the site while minimizing closures of through lanes.

ULI sponsored a governors’ advisory panel study about another downtown Boston air rights parcel in 2012; it recommended a lighter approach than a full-on deck, with buildings surrounding the interchange and bridges over it. (Ironically, the parcel was created through the Big Dig project!)

5. Railroad air rights have also seen active development in recent years, e.g., Hudson Yards in NYC, River Point in Chicago, and 30th Street Yards in Philadelphia. However, the costs aren’t truly comparable to freeway decks: the column spacing can be much closer for railroads than for freeways, and the vehicle movements are rather more predictable.

“Can Our Cities Survive,” Jose Luis Sert’s provocative 1942 treatise on the future of Western cities, posed this set of “embarrassing” questions to residents of the era’s cities. Those who claim that rowhouses are uniquely well-suited for families might recall that, not that long ago, they were widely seen as “gloomy” and unfit for family habitation unless extensively modified — and that most of America still thinks so.

Of course, Sert was largely wrong — in particular, the automotive menace should be solved by restricting the cars, not the children — and the Modernists were never quite successful at convincing families that high-rises were worthwhile.

Attitudes had softened just a bit by 1950, when the regional chapter of the AIA issued a report called “Of Plans and People.” Washington was then in a frenzy over the need to house its exploding population. Rowhouses were merely “disreputable,” rather than intrinsically awful:

Home owners have insisted on increasingly severe restrictions against apartment buildings and row-houses–this despite the fact that for many families they are the most suitable forms of housing. Part of this opposition results from the crude design of these buildings. The ugliness of the typical Washington row-house with its two-story back porches has done more than anything else to bring the row-house into disrepute. If builders were more concerned about good design, the public might feel less need for “protection” against apartments and row-houses.

Monument Avenue at Belmont, Richmond, Virginia: one, two, and six-family houses, side by side, on one of America’s most famous residential boulevards

Many of America’s most celebrated urban neighborhoods, like the Fan in Richmond, have a fine grain of different residential densities. Neighbors might live in buildings of broadly similar sizes, but at substantially different densities. But the entire premise of American zoning, as established in Euclid vs. Ambler, was to maintain uniformly single-family districts — uniquely among any country, as Sonia Hirt as shown.

The world’s best loved cities are the way they are not because of zoning bylaws but in spite of whatever zoning may now be in place… Serendipity, complexity, conjunction, anticipation, surprise and delight: these very human experiences are what great cities offer. But zoning is a blunt, inflexible tool. Zoning is by definition exclusionary, limiting things to a preordained set of possibilities. It determines what cannot be done, rather than what can be It does not anticipate nor nurture new, untried forms of city-building or habitation. It does not, in short, encourage the city of desire.

So little of the [American] city was built before zoning was introduced that its more deleterious effects are much magnified. There is very little evidence of the organic city, the intricate web of urban spaces and built forms that rose before the heavy hand of zoning was applied. There is no “old town” core of narrow lanes and multiple layers of use. And there is very little unpredictability, no edge. At the risk of sounding simplistic, it is boring.

— Lance Berelowitz, “Dream City” (Douglas & McIntyre, 2005), pg. 223.

Bonus: down the street, an illegal mix of uses. Orchid shops and churches, oh my!

“Missing Middle Housing” refers to a broad spectrum of smaller-scale multifamily building types that occupy the middle ground between single-family detached and large apartment buildings. At its edges, the term can cover rowhouses and 5+ unit apartments, but in my mind, the core of the “missing middle” are “plexes” — two, three, or four flats on a single city lot. Small apartment buildings like these line the side streets of most of America’s walkable urban neighborhoods: two- and three-flats in Chicago, Polish flats in Milwaukee, three-deckers in Boston, or brownstones in New York.

Census data show that 2-4 unit buildings have almost evaporated over the past generation. As recently as the early 1970s, over 1/4 of multifamily units built were in small buildings. Now, it’s only about 4%.

Despite the steep mid-1970s recession, over 10X as many units were built in small multifamily buildings as today. In boom years, 14X as many were built. It was during the Reagan era that these buildings broadly fell out of favor.

2-4 unit buildings have been a relatively small share of all multifamily construction in the postwar era. Since the 2008 recession, they’ve practically disappeared — with only a few thousand units built nationwide every year:

Next up: Wait, you mean today’s apartment boom isn’t actually that big?

Findlay Market in Cincinnati, where a nonprofit market manager and CDC are working alongside private developers to create a mixed-use destination based around small, local shops.

Our earlier lunchtime conversation in Dallas quickly morphed into some constructive criticism of the community development field. We’re doers, so we delved into some of the mechanics of how a community could control its destiny, and ensure affordability over longer time scales.

In theory, Community Development Corporations have tremendous capacity to manage community change, but even where good CDCs exist — as in Boston and Chicago — their efforts are often quickly overwhelmed by the monstrous quantities of capital involved in gentrification. CDFIs were started to help leverage greater sums of capital, but never quite seemed to move beyond a little niche.

The work that community development organizations do is so labor-intensive that it doesn’t end up being very scalable. Some of that is good — community organizing and small-scale development in disinvested neighborhoods is tough. Some of that is bad — there’s so much bureaucracy involved in securing grants or tax-credit financing (or securing property for a Community Land Trust), and in complying with restrictions on spending that money, that staff capacity gets stretched thin.

(As a side note, why don’t we at CNU talk more often with the community development sphere? Sure, there’s some buy-in when individuals from CDCs get invited to present, but otherwise there’s scarcely any overlap. Perhaps siloization is to blame: CDCs/CDFIs have their own conferences, their own language, their own processes.)

Yet surely there are other vehicles that can provide a middle ground of financing for community development. In a gardening analogy, LIHTC-funded, CDC-built subsidized housing is like a trickle of water from a hand-carried watering can, and Wall Street money is like turning a fire hose onto your flowerbeds. Surely there’s some happy medium: a way to use local capital within a neighborhood, to fund incremental, community-positive projects that make a solid but uneventful return, over the long run.

There’s recently been a lot of renewed buzz about low-profit corporations and B-corps. Richard Plunz’s magisterial history of New York City housing shows us that many of the most innovative efforts at community-building there stemmed from just such endeavors, many underwritten by philanthropists or unions who sought investments with steady returns.

We discussed some of the innovation going on with cooperatives — the most established of low-profit, broadly-owned corporations. I talked up some experiments in the Upper Midwest, like the River West Investment Cooperative in Milwaukee, the considerable excitement around the Northeast Investment Cooperative in Minneapolis, and efforts to minimize business displacement along the Central Corridor light rail. In both cities, local capital is fostering communities of cooperative businesses in “emerging” neighborhoods. And unlike the Mondragon cooperatives, these coops are focusing on serving neighborhood needs, rather than exporting. Nationwide, a few credit unions (like Self-Help in North Carolina) have built substantial commercial-lending businesses, even in real estate.

But as much as we liked the idea of cooperatives, not everywhere has the fertile legal or cultural setting of Minnesota or Wisconsin. While cooperatives are great for certain kinds of businesses, they’re not for everyone: They can raise modest sums of capital, but struggle with large sums; their structures aren’t always flexible enough to accommodate multiple capital classes; their plodding, consensus-based nature makes them resistant to entrepreneurs’ bold ideas. Big-money equity investors (aka venture capital) are critically important to getting small businesses going, and are rewarded with high returns and an outsized say in governance — neither of which can be accomplished with a co-op’s flat structure.

The history of Minneapolis’ West Bank neighborhood is an instructive example of co-ops’ promise and limitations. Uniquely among the ’60s hippie havens, federal urban renewal was leveraged to place most of the neighborhood’s housing stock within limited equity co-ops or Section 8. Alas, idealism and local control proved unable to adapt to either obsolescence or succession [PDF]. Photo: Michael Hicks, via Flickr.

Which brought us to the big small-business finance innovation of recent years: crowdfunding. Numerous “community investing” vehicles have been floated, like direct/P2P lending, lending through community financial institutions, conventional Kickstarter-style rewards (perhaps with interest paid in-kind), equity investments, etc. Crowdfunding has become almost de rigeur in certain popular, high-growth businesses. It first swept thin markets for trinkets that would typically be distributed online — e.g., board games. As the dollar amounts have grown, and as regulators have gradually warmed to the idea, platforms specializing in more capital-intensive bricks and mortar projects have sprouted for sectors like breweries and restaurants. Business models that defy categorization, like the McMenamin’s brand of alcohol theme parks, might be particularly well-suited to crowdfunded equity.

Several new platforms have emerged within this space. I’m most familiar with Fundrise. It’s evolved its primary offering away from common equity investments and towards what it calls “project payment dependent notes,” a hybrid of mezzanine debt (it’s debt, with a promissory note) and preferred equity (even though there’s a pre-determined target return, dividends are only paid when there’s adequate cash flow). For small developers, crowdfunding — even in the currently half-baked, accredited-investors-only form — holds significant advantages, namely cheaper, slower money, plus broader community buy-in.

Interestingly for our purposes, at least one nonprofit community development institution has begun to use Fundrise as part of its capital stack, and in particular in an attempt to save a for-profit community institution. The San Francisco Community Land Trust used Fundrise to raise its 38% equity stake (a local nonprofit offered the other 62% as equity) in an attempt to buy a mixed-use building housing the nation’s oldest African American bookstore, in a neighborhood otherwise ravaged by urban renewal. (Alas, the attempt foundered when the landlord changed the offering price.) All that the city could do was to landmark the building, perhaps in an attempt to reduce its market value, and to offer the business inclusion on a “legacy business” roster.

Mezzanine debt seems to also be the sweet spot for small business-oriented lenders like ZipCap. Their business model mirrors the built-in customer base of a cooperative, “recruiting an ‘Inner Circle’ of customers who pledge to spend a set amount of money in a fixed period of time.” Instead of relying upon just that circle for funds [as a co-op would do with equity memberships, or Member Loans], ZipCap uses those pledges as collateral for outside loans.

Combining all of the above vehicles — not-for-profits, low-profit cooperatives, and crowd funded for-profits — into interrelated entities might solve the scalability problem by allowing each entity to contribute its own strengths to a capital stack:

We called this entity a Place Corp, which has the ability to construct a capital stack from various tranches of capital, while keeping control within the community. (Outside investors and developers can help to build pieces, with the Place Corp hopefully maintaining some control via equity, but are treated merely as means towards an end.) Investors can choose from a wide variety of risk/return combinations, and can invest either time or money, choosing negative returns (gifts, grants), zero return (co-op equity), or modest returns. The Place Corp is diversified across property types, but not in location — like the family firms or community banks of yore. The durable, long-term returns of placemaking will create financial rewards for some investors — but for most, the place itself will be the return.

Next in the series: Where? And what sort of services might a Place Corp provide beyond just financing?

Thanks to some of those who contributed to this series of conversations: Karja Hansen, Matt Lambert, Russell Preston, George Proakis, Padriac Steinschneider, Seth Zeren

A case study (quite literally) about the struggle to maintain authenticity through small-scale retail operations is profiled in this week’s Economist. In Singapore, the government somewhat inadvertently nurtured one of the world’s most exciting food cultures through its “hawker centers.” Anthony Bourdain explained their history in “The Layover“:

The hawker centers of Singapore were a shrewd strategy to incorporate and control what was once a chaotic but pervasive culture of street carts. To control the health, safety, and traffic aspects, vendors were brought inside these covered structures still open to the air, but in stalls with regulated running water, refrigeration, and strict rules of food handling.

In short, they’re food courts with one key twist — they’re government-owned, often located within HDB public housing estates. Today, rising rents and rising living standards both threaten the culinary treasures that are so integral to Singaporean culture:

The main problem is that Singaporeans have grown used to paying prices that the market can no longer bear… The government, says Dr [Leslie] Tay, “has committed to providing cheap food for the masses”. With tiny flats and cramped kitchens, and with the number of two-working-parent families steadily rising, plenty of Singaporeans count on hawker markets for their sustenance. But with the first generation of hawkers retiring and their replacements paying market rents, food prices will certainly rise.

And as the masses change, so will the food. Some Singaporeans lament that a recent influx of immigrants from northern China has made their traditional Teochew or Hokkien [ethnic groups from southeastern China] favourites harder to find.

The article arose from a blog post by Dr Tay where he recommended instituting non-market mechanisms for allocating space in the government-owned markets: “Wouldn’t it be great if the officers can just recognize his status as a Heritage Hawker and help him get a stall at pioneer hawker prices?” (Pioneering stalls were subsidized in an attempt to entice hawkers off the streets, and today those rents are 90% below market rate, according to the 2015 case study by Tan Shin Bin for NUS’ Lee School.)

Indeed, but would you necessarily trust a government to make good decisions about what constitutes “good food”? Perhaps not, but plenty of America’s most successful public markets (like those in Milwaukee and Seattle) are run by nonprofits. An early effort at a nonprofit hawker centre in Singapore failed, but the government has signed new management agreements with cooperatives and “social enterprises,” as recommended by a 2012 panel.

A prior experiment in renting out a hawker center to a for-profit operator failed, and won’t be repeated; Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, whose ministry runs most centers, maintains that “Hawker centres are social infrastructure – and not an opportunity for property speculation or rent seeking by commercial entities.” Instead, nonprofit managers will get the opportunity to reinvest surpluses into social development and entrepreneurship, and prioritize operators that provide affordable food and heritage cuisines.

“Social infrastructure,” as Minister Balakrishnan put it, provides a useful frame for talking about “authenticity.” Cities are living things that require supporting infrastructure: physical infrastructure, social infrastructure, green infrastructure. They also need room to grow and change.

How can cities simultaneously build physical infrastructure (transportation, housing, workplaces) while also supporting and fostering social infrastructure, and regenerating ecological infrastructure? The answer might seem simple, but unlike physical infrastructure, social infrastructure is itself also living — and a somewhat fickle, slow-growing, and slow-rooting species at that. These make them tremendously resilient, but also slower to adapt than other forms of infrastructure.

As Singapore’s experience indicates, the answer probably lies with the social enterprise sector. How could those be structured? One potential answer’s coming up.