The big New Urbanist confab

Columbus RetroMetro has a couple of articles on the Congress for the New Urbanism which was held last week in Philadelphia. First up is a survey whose results should surprise no one who’s been paying attention to these things:

After doing a survey of a number of TNDs around the country and crunching some numbers to find out what share of the population could afford to live there, she found out that the answers were “a little alarming.” She concluded, “New Urbanists are not building for all classes of people, not all income classes.

There’s a reason Columbus has a plan to recruit “Young Professionals” and not your huddled masses. When was the last time any neighborhood, downtown or suburb or exurb, complained that “There aren’t enough poor people in our community.” (Well, ok, there’s Martin Sheen.)

Robert Fishman had a somewhat different point of view: “I would say the housing crisis isn’t so much a housing crisis as an incomes crisis.” As income inequality continues to intensify, the poorest 20 percent of the population has to get by on 3.2 percent of the national income, he noted.

I think that means that the problem isn’t the New Urbanists’ problem. If only those people had more money.

There is also an article called “A Session on Parking Packs ‘Em In“, which really sets off my ‘let’s screw around with people to get them to do what we want them to do’ alarm bells. Patrick Siegman, principal of Nelson/Nygaard Consulting Associates gave a seven-step program for managing parking:

1. Charge the right amount for curbside parking. That means enough so that there are one or two free spaces on every block at any time of day.
2. Return at least part of the money generated to the local community so that parking meters become a revenue stream for the community rather than just something that’s anti-motorist.
3. Banish minimum parking requirements, e.g., six spaces per 1,000 square feet of retail space.
4. Drop requirements that commercial tenants be required to rent parking spaces as a function of their lease. If employers aren’t required to rent parking, they have less incentive to offer free parking. It’s an indirect connection, but ultimately some employees will figure out how to leave their cars at home.
5. Unbundle the cost of a parking space from the cost of buying a dwelling. If purchase of a parking space is optional, some homebuyers will opt not to buy.
6. Require employers who offer free parking to provide a “cash out” for employees who don’t use the free parking.
7. Continue to subsidize parking where it’s necessary to attract retail tenants, but in a targeted way: 90-minute free parking for shoppers, not all-day free parking for employees.

Actually there are a few good ideas there. It’s probably true that street parking is underpriced. Cities should seek to charge what the market will bear, though I can also see this coming back to haunt politicians who implement it. The public will vote themselves free or cheap stuff after all.

The rest of it is just messing with developers and retailers, forcing them to be the guinea pigs for this social experiment. As a member in good standing of the US car culture, if I have a choice between a limited-parking shopping center in the city and one with plentiful free parking just outside city limits, well that’s really not a choice I’m going to ponder for very long. Who wants to bring all their shopping booty home on public transportation? Developers know all about this.

The Congress’s own articles on these topics are here: poor people and parking.