That said, it’s so interesting, speaking as a lawyer and urban planner (I only play one on TV), how entrepreneur/founders like Bird’s and Uber’s have little to no regard for rules, and/or no knowledge of how public policy works and why we have rules in the first place (zoning codes, environmental laws, public health codes, each is a species of the police power, intended, at bottom, to ensure some level of public order and safety). Ask for forgiveness, not permission, is the MO. I wonder if these entrepreneurs ever took a basic civics course, let alone a course in land use law and city planning.

On the one hand, I love their approach. Given how tough it is to break through the status quo (incumbent businesses like taxi cabs and the rules and regs that protect them), this approach seems to be the only way to get traction quickly and at some scale. And the PR effect, while it cuts both ways, at least raises people’s awareness and level of consciousness about what’s possible (Bird founder VanderZanden’s dream of scooters outnumbering cars one day) and what’s currently missing (hard to get people to care about something they don’t see or experience).

On the other hand, it’s a slippery slope, unbridled enterprises flaunting rules at will, rules that, while no doubt imperfect, usually have a very sound rationale (and rule making process) behind them. It’s a variation on Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. . . Each entrepreneur pursuing her own grand vision and road (pun intended) to profitability at the expense of the whole, the common good. Santa Monica’s sidewalks and streets, as currently configured, can only hold so many moving objects, only so many scooters and bikes and pedestrians and skateboarders, to say nothing of cars. At some point, without new rules and upgraded infrastructure, the “commons,” our public streets and sidewalks, will simply be overwhelmed, if not (tragically) destroyed, as city populations grow and the sheer number of vehicles, whether self driving cars or scooters, grows with them (think Kolkata or Beijing).

Which points to, I think, the really hard innovation challenge, which is a social one, not a technological or commercial one: How, in a messy, pluralistic and open democratic society such as ours, can we make smarter, more forward-thinking social policy decisions more quickly, more nimbly, so as to enable commercial innovation to happen in a way that maximizes its benefits while minimizing its risks (think of the flurry of social media platforms like Facebook that have grown so quickly, largely unregulated, and are now the subject, ex post, of so much scrutiny, if not disdain, for their recklessness vis. user privacy).

I don’t think it’s an either/or. I think we can have great, smart rules (think of Smart Codes and form-based codes for city planning) and great, smart technologies that work hand in hand. I’d prefer the rules to come first, myself. This was the great legal historian Willard Hurst’s thesis: our legal order, our constitution and laws, were the great enabler, or as he put it, “releaser,” of American enterprise, of our creativity and entrepreneurship as a people. Laws, on Hurst’s view, didn’t limit or constrain freedom, they made it possible, especially in the area of economic development.

But I guess this is the rub. Chicken/egg, scooters/smart codes. Which came first? My left brain votes for rules first. My right for creative enterprise. I guess the point is, it’s not really linear or binary, and rule making is a kind of creative enterprise in its own right. Rules  are an ancient technology, a core operating system whose many versions span the centuries.

Social change, even something as simple as scooters on sidewalks, is dynamic and messy, like any creative process, and this includes a role for disruptors and transgressors like VanderZanden. After all, I imagine that if he actually studied all the rules and procedures that make it so hard to change urban mobility systems (think about how hard it was just a decade ago to build a dedicated bike lane in most US cities), he probably wouldn’t have started Bird in the first place.

Hurst and Hardin might not have been pleased, but then again, they never sat in LA traffic at rush hour. .

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So it’s no wonder that, having been elected to the state senate in 2016, Wiener is making his mark quickly on the matter of affordable housing, not only in his hometown of San Francisco, but across the Golden State, where affordable housing has risen to the top of the state’s policy agenda.

And for good reason: Between 2009 and 2014, the state added 544,000 households but only 467,000 net new housing units, according to the McKinsey Global Institute. It now ranks 49th in housing units per capita. Seven of the 10 most expensive real estate markets in the US are in California. McKinsey estimates that the housing crisis is costing California $140 billion a year in lost economic output. And the list of horribles goes on.

Which is why Wiener has led the charge on two major bills: SB35, which streamlines the approval process for affordable housing projects in communities that lag behind state housing targets, and a new law, SB 827, known as the Transit Zoning Bill, which would require that all areas within a half-mile of a major transit stop, or within a quarter-mile of a bus or transit corridor, allow minimum building heights of 45 or 85 feet (depending on distance from transit, street width and other criteria), superceding local zoning rules. The bill would also waive any minimum parking requirements and prohibit any design standards that would have the effect of lowering the square footage allowed on a lot.

SB 35 is now state law. SB 827 is pending. Their purpose is the same: to use the power of state action to override local inaction. As with other key social policy issues such as civil rights and environmental protection, many, but not all, local communities have proved that they can’t be trusted to do the right thing thanks largely to restrictive zoning laws and the entrenched power of Not In My Back Yard activists concerned about their property values or views or traffic or simply change itself. In some cases, it’s more insidious, like racism or classism.

Senator Wiener put it more eloquently and strategically: “We are moving past the era where every city in California could view itself as an independent kingdom that could refuse to build any housing. Our cities are all interconnected, and housing decisions in one city affect many other cities, and state law needs to reflect that.”

I think Senator Wiener is pushing California to do what it does best, to lead and innovate for the greater good, to rewrite the rules in the name of progress and change.

I also think, in due course, other states will follow. Or fall further behind.

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How often do we hear New York described this way? A lot. I grew up in the Connecticut suburbs in the 1960s and 70s and count myself among the Big Apple’s biggest fans, but having moved west a decade ago, I experience New York today largely through its airports. So you can understand why “greatest” isn’t the first word that comes to mind when I arrive at JFK or La Guardia for my occasional visits on business or to see family, like I did last week for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Both airports are a mess, a disgrace, really, considering the wealth that’s concentrated in the New York metropolitan area and the importance of both facilities as major gateways to the region for businesspeople and tourists alike. It’s a brutal first impression.

JFK is bad, but LGA, where I was last week, is worse. The airport is decades behind in its planning and operations and is now trying to catch up, all at once. At best, LGA is a case of poor planning. At worst, it’s an example of a metro region that largely undervalues, if not outright ignores, its infrastructure until it’s too late.

The city’s subways and buses, operated by Metropolitan Transportation Authority, are another case in point, with recent headlines declaring the “MTA is completely out of touch,” and the MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota warning that the city’s failing subway system threatens not only the city’s, but the region’s, financial future.

Here’s the thing. Ever since I can remember, the region’s infrastructure has been in a colossal state of disrepair. In my mind’s eye, I can still picture the blighted lots in the South Bronx, the graffiti-covered subway cars, the man-eating potholes on the FDR Drive, all circa 1970s.

Meanwhile, for decades, the area has been gentrifying, with once impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods like Williamsburg and Central Harlem now among the most desirable, and super-luxury, super-tall “pencil” skyscrapers popping up across the Manhattan skyline, their apartments selling for as much as $7,000 per square foot.

It’s the triumph of private over public space, of winner-take-all over the common good, and it’s not unique to New York City. We see it all across the United States but, as befitting the world’s greatest city, the disparity between the gilded and dilapidated is most pronounced in New York.

In his 1982 book, “Shifting Involvement: Private Interest and Public Action,” the noted political economist Albert O. Hirschman described the 20-year cycles in which American society oscillates between intense concern for the public interest and an eclipsing focus on private gain. Hirschman argued that every couple of decades people tire of the pursuit of material things, throw off consumerism and individualism, and turn their attention outward to pot holes and public policy, to civil rights and social issues. In turn, their interest in the common good wanes as their frustration with collective action grows, leading them back to their private preoccupations.

While my experience with New York’s infrastructure would suggest a longer cycle than Hirschman describes, I sure hope he’s right. I hope that the pendulum will shift back to a kind of civic awakening, where investment in forward-thinking, socially-responsible and even beautiful public infrastructure will carry the day, as it did at the turn of the 20^th century with the City Beautiful movement, whose reforms aimed to make American cities not only more attractive but more functional and humane.

That’s over a hundred years ago, or about five of Hirschman’s cycles.

Better late than never.

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Bay Area urban progressives, by fighting new housing in their neighborhoods, cause more sprawl on the rural fringes. I’m a committed environmentalist, and it made me rethink the way I engage with such issues: For example, I was a member of the Sierra Club for a more than a decade. But because of all the unwise battles waged by the San Francisco chapter against smart housing growth in the city, I quit to support other environmental groups.

Just like fires, bad housing policies can carry horrendous social and environmental costs.

The same crisis is afflicting most high barrier-to-entry cities like Seattle, Portland, Boston and Boulder, where I live.

It’s progressivism as parochialism on a regional scale, with global (warming) effects. And it’s got to stop, or at least evolve.

Evolution in this case looks something like the Yes In My Back Yard movement, a loose collection of activists, many in their 20s and 30s, from around the US and the world who want to see more, denser housing and mixed-use, with a strong dose of thoughtful urban design, in cities like Oakland and San Francisco to address head-on the affordability/inclusiveness problem, not to mention the climate challenge, so many communities are facing. The very first annual YIMBY conference was held in Boulder in 2016. The second in Oakland in July.

So there is hope. It’s name is YIMBY.

The post Enrico Moretti, the Housing-Environment Crisis and YIMBY appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

As the Times article describes,

California already had a housing crisis long before the fires started. With strict environmental rules and local politics that can discourage new housing development, the state’s pace of new construction has fallen far short of the state’s population growth.

In the five-year period ending in 2014, California added 544,000 households, but only 467,000 housing units, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, and the deficit is only expected to grow over the next decade. Napa and Sonoma Counties, where the fires did some of the most extensive damage, are among the furthest behind, building less than half the number of units in recent years that the state reckons were needed to keep up with the population.

Napa and Sonoma present a kind of worst-of-both-worlds scenario, according to Issi Romem, chief economist at BuildZoom, a San Francisco company that helps homeowners find contractors.

Those two counties are close enough to San Francisco and Silicon Valley that they have been affected by the heavy demand and soaring prices that have made housing unaffordable for many people in the Bay Area’s dense urban job centers, Mr. Romem said. At the same time, they are far enough away from cities that residents are still fiercely protective of their rural atmosphere and ethos, and they often resist development.

“Rebuilding is going to be tough unless some kind of streamlining is made,” he said.

Unaffordable cities. Rural areas resistant to growth. Wildfire refugees desperate for a place to rent. A warming planet made more volatile by air pollution from traffic jams and long commutes for those who have to drive to qualify.

Everything’s connected to everything else in a place called home.

Also from William Shutkin: Affordability is the New Sustainability and Prologue

The post All Things Are Connected. . . To Housing appeared first on Innovation Network for Communities.

The key to sustainability and social impact, in the most practical sense, is housing. It all starts with “oikos” or “ecos,” the Greek word for house and the root of both ecology and economy, two legs of sustainability’s three-legged stool.

In 2003, when we launched a research project at New Ecology/MIT that culminated in the first comprehensive study of the costs and benefits of green affordable housing, we thought simply greening more buildings was a high-impact strategy.

We missed the point.

Especially now that green building is increasingly mainstream (though honest-to-goodness net-zero energy buildings remain a stretch goal), the real challenge when it comes to creating sustainable communities, and delivering social impact, I think, is building enough housing, of all types but especially for low- to middle-income earners, to achieve the right jobs/housing and supply/demand balance in any given place, which in turn allows for a socially and economically diverse community, to say nothing of a connected, transit-oriented one, without which there is, by definition, no true sustainability, no real smart, responsible, equitable growth.

Whether it’s Portland or Palo Alto, Denver or Detroit, Boston or Austin, affordable housing and housing supply are among today’s most wicked problems. And there will be 100 million more of us living in the US within the next 40 years. Where will we, where will they live?

In places like Boulder, where I live, rents are increasing at four and five times wage growth or more. Meanwhile, the state has a shortfall of 50,000 housing units. And Colorado is no different from any other fast-growing area. Unless and until we get closer to a reasonable balance between jobs and housing, supply and demand, the rest is commentary.

In 2009, I told an audience at the annual Boulder Economic Summit that “Density is the new open space” because I believed then, as I do now, that just as communities like Boulder, the Bay Area, Portland and so many other sought-after places were bold innovators in conserving land for agriculture and recreation 40 years ago, today we need a different kind of audacious innovation, one focused on creating livable, affordable, inclusive communities. In 2016, after I paid my last $5000/month rent check for 800 square feet in the Presidio, I changed my tune just a bit: Affordability, density’s flip-side, is the new sustainability.

More Shutkin: Prologue and All Things Are Connected

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Oh yea, I forgot. I also helped Pete and John launch the Innovation Network for Communities and Urban Sustainability Associates a decade ago, which later gave rise to the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, Nupolis and eventually their latest project, Life After Carbon (I’ve registered my complaint about their title; carbon is, after all, essential to all living things. . . Enough said). Full circle.

When I turned 50, almost three years ago, I decided that, if and when the opportunity arose, and with sustainability now more or less mainstream, at least as an idea, I would try my hand at the for-profit world, take what I have learned and taught and apply it as a sustainable real estate developer, believing this is no oxymoron but instead, given the state of things, a mandate, a call to action. Words into deeds, this time with an equity stake.

My friend and colleague David Zucker, a Denver-based developer whom I had met in 2009 at a conference I co-hosted at CU Boulder on urban development and climate change, gave me my opportunity when he invited me in early 2016 to help him take on an ambitious development project in Boulder, a 15-acre site that lay vacant for decades along East Arapahoe, a major commuter corridor chock full of employers and a morass of light-industrial uses but lacking workforce housing or thoughtful urban design, hardly a problem unique to Boulder.

At East Arapahoe we propose to build 340 units of housing, 40 percent of which will be below-market rate, plus 16,000 square feet of affordable commercial space targeted at small businesses and non-profits who, like so many Boulder residents, are being priced out of the market. Of course, the project aims to be green and climate-friendly, with bike racks and PV panels aplenty. In Boulder, this almost goes without saying.

Some experience under my belt, and only a few battle scars, last spring I helped organize a large team to compete for another Boulder project, the redevelopment of the 5.5-acre, city-owned Pollard Jeep site at 30th and Pearl in the heart of Boulder Junction, the city’s nascent transit village, across the street from Google’s brand-new Boulder headquarters. In August, our team was notified that we won the project, beating out three other teams from around the country.

Like the East Arapahoe project, the Pollard project will be green, transit-oriented, mixed-income and mixed-use, with more than half of the 304 housing units priced below-market and 20,000 square feet of permanently affordable commercial space. We also hope to make the project fossil-fuel free — all-electric with near net-zero building design. From Pollard’s SUVs to Boulder’s showcase TOD. It’s almost poetic.

With two large projects underway, my experiment in for-profit real estate development has begun in earnest. I plan to use this blog as a chronicle of my and others’ experiences, a place to reflect, reveal and occasionally rant regarding what I see as both the challenges and opportunities, risks and rewards, of joining a social entrepreneur’s mission, values and ideas with the hardscrabble reality of getting good projects built in places like Boulder.

More Shutkin: Affordability is the New Sustainability and All Things Are Connected

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