In This Issue:

– Connecticut Housing Bill Could Be a Model for the Region

– Skyscrapers and Rock Are Not So Important

– Calendar

Linking Affordable Housing and Smart Growth in Connecticut
Imagine you are a mayor of a small town suburb with a half-vacant downtown and several neighborhoods of increasingly expensive large houses. Housing is so expensive that you know of many families whose children graduated from high school or the county college and moved away, never to return. Your voters want your town to be a place where people can stay their whole lives, and find housing for each part of their lives. You and your staff would like to see the downtown revitalized with new restaurants and shops (and tax revenue). You even know developers who would like to build the housing downtown.

Yet your budget keeps you from adding any more housing that might bring with it school children. Why? Because you rely on property taxes to fund your local schools, and each additional school-aged child that moves into your town means your costs grow faster than your tax base. Each year you face the same dilemma - - raise property taxes or cut services - - and if you build more housing, you might even have to do both.

Now imagine that there is a way for your town to receive $4,000 for each housing unit built downtown, with half the money available to you upfront. Plus, if any school-aged children move into the housing units, you will be reimbursed for the cost of their education. All you have to do is ensure 20% of the housing units built are affordable to lower income households, and create housing at a higher density than your town may be used to, say 10 unit-per-acre duplexes (your town will retain total control over design of the housing).

You quickly get out a calculator: the more housing built under this program, the lower your school costs will be in the long term. And with more people living downtown, you can expect businesses to flourish and tax revenue to follow.

The Connecticut State legislature is now considering a bill that would give exactly that option to the hundreds of mayors and zoning boards facing the same dilemma. The bill would create “Housing Incentive Zones,” where the state reimburses municipalities for the cost of educating school children that move to town as a result of new housing and provides per-unit financial incentives. It is modeled after legislation that has already spurred new downtown housing in Massachusetts. Permitted densities range from 6 to 20 units per acre, depending on the housing type, and housing must be in ‘smart growth’ locations such as near train stations and in town centers. In short, the bill would reward municipalities for building the kind of housing the state needs, and remove the sting of education funding at the same time.

The zoning overlay is voluntary; municipalities can choose to adopt it or ignore it altogether. It is expected to be popular in places where there is pressure for more reasonable housing choices from residents and advocacy groups, and of course from developers. Funding has so far been a sticking point. The bill is projected to cost the state relatively little in the short term, but more and more into the future. Initial funding of $60 million is to come from a variety of state sources including, appropriately, the State Housing Trust Fund. Supporters say that the program will generate revenue over time: as new residents move into the developments, and as housing costs stabilize, sales and income tax revenue will increase.

This can only be described as taxpayer money well spent. High housing cost suburbs throughout our region – from Long Island and the Hudson Valley to much of New Jersey – have a struggle in common. They fear that the next generation will not be able to live where it was raised. They see statistics pointing to a declining number of young adults. They see a loss of disposable income as more and more has to be spent on rent or property taxes. They see more workers driving longer distances to fill service jobs in areas where they cannot find low cost housing.

The Connecticut bill is clearly worth emulating. If similar bills were passed in New York and New Jersey, the fiscal zoning problem in our metropolitan region could lessen year by year, balancing housing prices and promoting sustainable development, one neighborhood at a time.

Of course, fiscal zoning – the exclusion of higher density housing to prevent school costs from increasing – is not the only inhibitor of smart growth. In many communities, zoning and planning decisions are still based on fear, racism and an underlying aversion to change. Another benefit of providing Housing Incentive Zones is that towns would no longer have a fiscal rationale available with which to reject new residential growth. This could give affordable housing advocates the boost they have long needed.

- Alexis Perrotta, Senior Policy Analyst

Rail Matters More Than Rock
Everyone knows that saying what’s going to happen in the future is difficult, but saying why something happened in the past can be almost as challenging. For example: why are skyscrapers where they are in New York? And why are there so many of them?

For decades, a common explanation heard around town and between the covers of books has been that the big buildings bloomed in Manhattan in large part due to the presence of skyscraper friendly rock beneath them called Manhattan Schist. This hard rock is found in lower Manhattan and in Midtown, the central concentrations of skyscrapers. Between these two places, the Schist is much lower down, hundreds of feet below the surface.

On this evidence, the geology-is-destiny folk rest their case. Here’s how one writer on a travel web site, away.com, put it.

“Two words explain why New York City is a living museum of the Golden Age of the Skyscraper: Manhattan schist. Though it may sound like a new Woody Allen film, it's even more integral to the city's character than that. Without this prosaic-looking gray bedrock, New York City would never have become the great city, the world powerhouse, that it is today. Manhattan schist formed this island in the Hudson river and gave it plenty of waterfront, which made it an important port city. But it goes deeper than that, literally, for Manhattan schist makes a solid anchor for buildings that touch the sky. Instead of having to spread out, the city could reach up.”

It’s not just travel writers. Even prominent folk like Sidney Horenstein, retired geologist and environmental educator emeritus of the American museum of natural history, concurs.

“Skyscrapers are related to the bedrock,” Horenstein told me in a telephone conversation. “Where the bedrock is close to the surface, you have skyscrapers. Where it’s deeper down, like in the 20s, there aren’t any.”

These explanations are convincing and almost entirely wrong, I assert. Skyscrapers bloom in Lower Manhattan and at Midtown not for reasons of rocks, but for reasons of people. At Lower Manhattan and at Midtown you find central transportation hubs that allowed the maximum number of people to get there in the easiest amount of time. And in such places, it made sense to build large office buildings that depended on people wanting to rent space in them. Historically, commerce has always located around central transportation hubs, be they ports, train stations, or interstate exits. And the same holds true for skyscraper construction.

The transportation hub in Lower Manhattan historically was the port of New York, which in turn influenced where the early subway lines met. The transportation hub in Midtown Manhattan was Grand Central Terminal and Pennsylvania Station, which shifted the city’s center of gravity uptown, and with it the principal place of skyscraper construction. It’s these rail stations that prompted midtown skyscraper construction, not Manhattan Schist. It’s possible that the hard rock could have made it easier or more economical to build skyscrapers. But the main reason why these were built in Midtown and Lower Manhattan rather than, say, So Ho, is because the former locations had better access to the regional labor market.

There’s an interesting historical footnote here. Grand Central might have been further downtown, and thus skyscrapers too, except when it opened in 1871 the New York City Council prohibited the passage of steam-driven trains below 42nd Street for safety reasons. They sometimes blew up. Thus, Grand Central was built at that legal line, and there it stayed as the decades passed. Eventually, a new city grew around it. As Robert Yaro of RPA says, Midtown Manhattan was the original Edge City.

Of course, the real way to settle this question would be to talk to an expert who had actually interviewed and studied developers and financiers, who knew why they placed buildings where they did. That’s just what Columbia University professor Carol Willis did. Willis was doubly credentialed, having written the book Forms Follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago, and as founder and director of The Skyscraper Museum in Lower Manhattan.

So I was particularly delighted when Willis, in a lunch recently, backed up in full my theory that Schist had little to do with where skyscrapers are located. Like me, she thought Chicago made a telling comparison.

This windy city pioneered construction of skyscrapers more than a century ago, and it did so on swampy, waterlogged soil with little or no rocks. Rather than letting this deter them, engineers and architects like Louis Sullivan designed something called “raft foundations,” where tall buildings literally floated on a lattice works of wooden beams and other materials that rested on the poor soil. I talk about this in my latest book, Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities (Carroll and Graf 2006), which is about what is underneath twelve cities around the world.

Some might ask whether the whole subject is worth caring about. Yes, it is, even if ultimate answers are difficult. There are things to be learned from teasing out the actual from the fictitious threads of cause and affect. And in the debate over rocks versus rail, I go for rail.

– Alex Marshall, Editor, Spotlight on the Region

Questions or comments on what’s in this issue? Send them to the editor of Spotlight On The Region, Alex Marshall at alex@rpa.org

Thursday, March 15, 8:30 – 10:30 a.m.
How Can We Finance Improvements to Our Aging Transit Infrastructure? Panel Discussion. The New School, Tishman Auditorium, 66 W. 12th Street. Introduction: Daniel Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding. Moderator: Chris Jones, Vice President for Research, Regional Plan Association (RPA). Panelists: Charles Brecher, Professor at NYU's Wagner School; Research Director, Citizens Budget Commission; Allison L. C. de Cerreño, Ph.D., Director, Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, New York University, Robert F. Wagner Graduate School; Robert E Paaswell, Distinguished Professor of Civil Engineering, Director, University Transportation Research Center; Gene Russianoff, Senior Staff Attorney, Straphangers Campaign, New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG). Info: info@planyc.nyc.gov or at www.nyc.gov/planyc2030.

Thursday, March 15, 11:15 a.m. – 1:15 p.m.
Meeting the Challenges of Growth – Annual Meeting of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council (NYMTC). Daniel L. Doctoroff, Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding, NYC; Astrid C. Glenn, Acting Commissioner, New York State Department of Transportation; Elliot G. Sander, Executive Director and CEO, Metropolitan Transportation Authority. NYU Kimmel, 60 Washington Square South, New York City. Info: Andrea Miles-Coles, 718-482-4551, AMiles-Coles@dot.state.ny.us

Thursday, March 15, 6:00 p.m.
Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate, Economics, gives the Fourth Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on “The Urbanity of Calcutta.” The Great Hall at Shepard Hall, 138th and Convent Avenue, City University of New York. Free. No reservations required. Sponsored by the Graduate Program in Urban Design.

Friday March 16, 7:00 p.m.
Transit Movies presentation – Electric Railroaders Association New York Division. Includes movie on NYC Subway System, Queens Route. Children welcome. At St. John’s University Manhattan Campus (formerly the College of Insurance) building, at 101 Murray Street. Info. 718 784 – 3643; furlong@erausa.org; www.erausa.org NY Division.

Tuesday, March 20, 6:30 p.m.
The Best Laid Plans: Planning New York’s Future from Moses to Bloomberg. At the Museum of the City of New York. Panelists include Rohit T. Aggarwala, Director of the Mayor’s Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability; Robert Fishman, Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan; Sandy Hornick, Director of Strategic Planning, New York City Department of City Planning, and Ron Shiffman, Professor of Urban Planning, Pratt Institute. Robert Yaro, President of Regional Plan Association, will moderate the discussion. Info: www.mcny.org/public_programs/all/559.html.

Friday, May 4th, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Regional Plan Association’s 17th annual Regional Assembly: A Bright, Green Future: Climate Change, Energy and Growth in the Tri-State Metropolitan Region. More information will be available soon at www.rpa.org. A distributable save-the-date card (PDF) can be found here

LINK: http://www.rpa.org/pdf/RPArasavethedate.pdf