Placeblogs and the Nonplace Urban Realm

Communications technologies were supposed to doom urban community. After all, with high-quality, free, instantaneous communication with people from around the world, who cares about talking over the fence with the neighbor, or joining the local bowling league? Ironically, the Internet, the world’s most widely available communications medium, has sparked some of the most narrowly focused local forums that have ever existed: community or placeblogs, listservs and hyperlocal journalism projects focusing on specific neighborhoods, blocks or buildings. Although many thinkers predicted the collapse of urban community, planner and theorist Melvin Webber had a more nuanced view. In his prescient 1964 essay, Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm, he predicted the growth of new urban realms, but also the persistent importance of urban places that may explain this resurgent localism. (1)

How did communications transform urban life? To Webber, urbanity is participation in cultural, social, and economic transactions. In the future therefore, “urbanity is no longer the exclusive trait of the city dweller … increasingly the farmers themselves are participating in the urban life of the world.” Webber concludes, “as accessibility becomes further freed from propinquity, cohabitation of a territorial place [...] is becoming less important to the maintenance of social communities.”

Webber defined a set of loosely geographic realms. The local realm, defined by in-person interaction is the world of our physical neighborhoods, grocery stores, and other people we encounter personally. People with more specialized interests participate in higher realms, perhaps a metropolitan realm through a citywide organization, occasionally the national realm during professional meetings, even, for the example of the business leader or the elite scientific researcher, the world realm. All this would fundamentally transform urban place, creating an entire nonplace urban realm that had barely existed before. “The place-community represents only a limited and special case of the larger genus of communities, deriving its basis from the common interests that attach to propinquity alone.”

In the early days of the Internet, it looked like this was happening. Common-interest communities formed on chat rooms and listservs, regardless of the actual location of participants. The term cyberspace itself suggested an ethereal place both everywhere and nowhere, a sort of alternate universe to place-based community.

Was Webber right? After all, he predicted social changes “are expanding the range of diversity in the average person’s associations and are inducing a parallel reduction in the relative importance of place-related interests and associations.” The dissolution of tight bonds around physical community is real, and documented by research in the vein of Robert Putman’s Bowling Alone. American’s don’t live in tight-knit, clannish urban neighborhoods anymore. Although perhaps partly caused with by less sociability, a major cause must be our growing involvement in interactions at other realms: staying in touch with family spread around the world through Skype, keeping up with professional networks through email or conferences, even forging online-only interest-based communities.

Then something unexpected happened. Just as the Internet became more ubiquitous and widely used, it began to work to reinforce place-based communities. People with similar interests could find each-other through services like Meetup.com. Although made famous by its effective use by political campaigns, the most dynamic Meetup groups have interests more narrow and permanent than politics: knitting, beach volleyball, classical music. Thousands of local blogs, termed placeblogs by Lisa Williams, have popped up in cities across the country, and forums and listservs connect neighbors.

Why the interest in the local? Webber hypothesizes that even the world leader must work in the local realm at least some of his time, and some people still live their lives in the local realm, rarely interacting with people outside their neighborhood. If you added up all the aggregate person-hours, he speculated, you’d find still by far the majority expended in the local realm, even if time expended at higher realms has increased significantly. Thus, even in a postmodern world of global communications, local, place-based communities remains an important locus of activity. After all, Webber points out, “Those who live near each other share an interest in lowering the social costs of doing so, and they share an interest in the quality of certain services and goods that can be supplied only locally,” including traffic on the streets, garbage collection, children’s facilities, and public nuisances. I would argue that as a realm of deliberation and disagreement, the local realm is different than similar-interest networks at higher realms. After all, if you get into a disagreement with professional contacts you can simply quit the group. The place-based community, by virtue of the difficulty of moving and the necessity for close interaction, is difficult to quit and difficult to change. Most significantly, unlike the others its participation is not voluntary; everyone must live somewhere, and cannot easily escape the positive and negative attributes of their surroundings.

Furthermore, place-based communities have unique characteristics. Ignoring issues of segregation, they’re the urban realm where you’re most likely to encounter people different from yourself. The small physical scale of the local community also means its one where an individual can have a tangible impact, whether lobbying city government to install a streetlight or conducting a simple neighborhood cleanup. The national and global realm seems more difficult for the individual to change than ever, with its swarm of politicians, policy experts, corporate and special interest groups. The place-based community, on the other hand, offers the individual a refreshingly tangible venue in a fragmented world to make a difference. In addition, the great personal stakes combined with greater say provides increased motivation for participation.

45 years later, the theories of Melvin Webber seem more relevant than ever. Even in the face of growing nonplace urban realms, the place-based community retains the role as an important venue for interaction, consumption and conflict. However, paradoxically, the Internet can be used to form or reinforce local, place-based communities even while it facilitates the growth of nonplace urban realms.

(1) Webber, Melvin M. “Urban Place and the Nonplace Urban Realm.” In Explorations into Urban Structure, ed. Webber, et al, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1964.

On Small Step for Social Data?

When swivel.com launched in 2007 I was excited: at last, a company set themselves to creating a user-friendly platform for exploring data. However, something disappointing happened: the core software of the website hasn’t evolved much. The problems I identified in an early blog post, such as not highlighting user-created charts and the limited customization of the visualizations have not been addressed. Growth of the user community has been modest, with apparently 14,287 users today. Recently the company has launched Swivel Business, which I explored after requesting an invitation. Sadly, this application works more like a web-based version of Excel, with less emphasis on visualization and data sharing – what made the original tool unique. In April the company announced they’ll be merging both tools into one website – let’s hope it captures the best parts of both.

IBM’s Many Eyes, a similar website, has been somewhat more successful. It boasts some 70,000 datasets and allows users to experiment with a variety of sophisticated visualizations. However the site’s navigation and interface seems a bit clunky, and seems to obscure the best quality data. The site also lacks the ability to easily download or extract data, or compare between datasets.

The newly-renamed Socrata.com stands to finally crack the difficult space of social data sharing and exploration tools. For one, the website has de-emphasized visualizations and focused on data access. Ironically, even in the data exploration business I think this is a good move. In the rapidly evolving world of visualizations, developers are working on a host of platforms and approaches. Google has purchased some outright (see Gapminder) and quickly rolled them out as gadgets. By avoiding the visualization fray, Socrata can focus on a robust and flexible platform for storing and sharing tabular data.

The tool allows users to upload datasets with basic metadata, download it in a host of formats (CSV, PDF, EXL, XML, JSON) and embed it in a webpage. The embeddable applet includes the all-important search and sort functions, required to explore any dataset extending beyond one or two screens deep. Here’s an example of the embeddable applet, using a dataset I analyzed for a previous post:

The system automatically recognizes several type so fields: text, number, money, checkbox, percent, and boolean (?). The site’s not perfect, but provides for the first time a robust, free platform for sharing tabular data. Although very new, you can already find Socrata widgets sharing White House salary data on WhiteHouse.Gov, or Oklahoma’s suburban growth. Only time will tell whether Socrata stands to become the go-to website for sharing data.

Planetizen Post: The New Normative Planning

Read my newest Planetizen post: The New Normative Planning

Opening the Archive of ‘Fake Omaha’

The online magazine Triple Canopy has published an article by my friend Neil Greenberg about his “Fake Omaha” project. Illustrated with photos of some of the street maps of the fictional city, the article includes “transit schedules, redevelopment reports, internal memoranda, intra-office communications, and remarks prepared for public officials … in order to provide a sense of the city to outsiders and illustrate its redevelopment efforts …”

I profiled the project in an interview with Neil in December 2007, and as this passage describes the project isn’t so much about a simple street map of a fictional city, but an entire fictional planning scenario:

[Neil Greenberg:] … Like you mention, real cities are not perfect. They do contain disappointments and mistakes and challenges. For 50 years, millions of people blithely accepted the idea that suburbs would flourish forever and cities would all die. Let us not underestimate the demise of that conventional wisdom. It’s a very exciting time to be involved in planning. Today, we have a unique chance to re-create vibrant, sustainable cities and regions.

That won’t, however, happen in one step. What intrigues me is the transition. How do we come to terms with decades of poor planning? Where do we make the best of existing infrastructure – and where do we have to start from scratch? How do we learn from prior attempts at redevelopment? What do we want our cities and regions to look like in the future? Why is the need to think ahead so obvious to some and so lost on others?

The “flaws” built into Fake Omaha are exercises in dealing with these questions. In transforming our metropolitan areas — particularly stubborn ones like Detroit — we’ll have to face challenging and unpredictable circumstances. It will take a portfolio of small victories before an entire metro area turns the corner. That’s exactly what I’m doing in Fake Omaha. At 60th Street and Fallbrook, what was once a faltering strip mall is now a farmers market. Along Bishop Street and Charlotte Street, neglected four- and five-story buildings are being renovated into mixed-use commercial and residential space, in the same neighborhood that used to bulldoze those very buildings to make a few more parking spaces. Through all of this, the transit system has risen to the forefront: what was formerly a bus service for the poor and the weak has become an indisputable driving force of smarter, more valuable regional development.

Read my interview of Neil or his article in Triple Canopy: “Boom, Bust, Burn, Blame: Fake Omaha”

Detroit and the Limits to Urban Decline

Since the middle of the 20th Century, no American city has experienced the severe economic shock experienced in Detroit. Analyzing the housing of the city, I found the city’s shrinking housing stock has declined at almost precisely the same amount per year, every year: 1% of the existing stock lost. This underlying regularity, independent apparent yearly fluctuations, created the current landscape of the city and shape possible responses.

The numbers quantifying the cause of urban decline in the American Rustbelt are staggering. Between 1980 and 1990 alone, the Northeast and Midwest lost 1.5 million manufacturing jobs and $40 billion (in 1998 $) in aggregate manufacturing worker earnings. During the same time period, central counties of the 28 metro areas in the Midwest and Northeast regions lost 1 million manufacturing jobs. (Kasarda, 2001) The industrial jobs, generally secure and good-paying, constituted the core of the urban economy. Their departure was magnified many times as it rippled more broadly through the economy, as the service jobs supported by the core industries disappeared. African Americans were particularly hard hit. Millions of jobs left, but new jobs were not easily accessible and often required high education levels. These so-called spatial and skill mismatches resulted in skyrocketing jobless rates among central-city blacks. One economist found that by 1990, four fifths of young inner city school dropouts were unemployed. In Detroit, by 1990 Detroit was 79% black and the surrounding suburbs 79% white. For the uninitiated, Thomas Sugrue’s excellent Origins of the Urban Crisis contains a detailed history of the origins of economic decline.

Metropolitan Context

Before I plunge into an analysis of the City of Detroit’s housing stock, it should be noted that the majority of jobs and people in the metropolitan area live outside of the city limits, and also that within the city there exists many middle class and even upper class neighborhoods. Although containing vacant land and buildings, the city presents the visitors a strange combination of energy and investment with decay and abandonment. (Captured well in this blog post) The map to the right, produced by the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG), shows the vast scale of the metropolis — only the green central municipality is the City of Detroit.

Housing in Economic Decline

Economists theorize that the rate of urban decline is largely determined by the durability of the housing stock. In short, even if the jobs are gone the physical persistence of homes mean people will continue to live there. In a shrinking city, first the households size decrease as the declined population is spread more thinly among the surviving buildings. After reduced household sizes, the market begins to abandon houses. Homeowners may move to the suburbs or out of state, retaining title to the property. Some default on mortgages or fail to pay taxes, resulting in thousands owned by various units of government. In Detroit, tens of thousands of vacant buildings and lots are owned by the city, state, county, and other public agencies.

The vacant structures are dislike by the remaining population. They shelter criminals and drug users, packs of feral dogs, and pose a physical hazard through collapse and lead paint. A strong demolition policy has become an article of faith for city politicians. “Unbuilding has surpassed building as the city’s major architectural activity,” quipped one architect. Between 1978 and 1990, the city issued 9,000 building permits and 108,000 demolition permits. All told, between 1970 and 2000, over 161,000 houses were demolished, a figure one journalist points out constitutes more than the total number of occupied dwellings in the city of Cincinnati today. Nonetheless the city’s severe lack of funding meant demolition could never keep up with abandonment. The U.S. Census estimated in 2006 that fully 23% of the housing stock still standing, or 85,951 units, were vacant. Since 1970, the city has had a net loss of housing units every year according to SEMCOG permit data:

Economists Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko observed in a 2005 paper that the maximum rate of decline for housing seems to be about 1% per year. Without speculating the causes of this speed limit to housing decline, they observe that no matter how fast the jobs disappear, the housing stock rarely declines at a faster rate. I created a graph showing the number of housing units from 1970 to 2008. The U.S. Census counts show a greater decline than is reflected in the construction and demolition permits, a discrepancy caused by unpermitted activity, record-keeping error, and perhaps different definitions of housing units. However, I defer to the U.S. Census to establish starting and end points. The annual net changes from housing permits are inflated 11% so that the total matches the observed change from U.S. Census data over the same period. This method captures the variability shown above, while ensuring the starting and ending points match the Census. Superimposed on the results is a fixed 1% annual decline from the 1970 housing units.

The correlation is striking. If we extend beyond, we can see what the formula predicts. Again, this is not a projection, but simply an extrapolation of a 1% rate of decline from the 1970 Census. The true rate of decline may vary from the formula thanks to public policies, such as public demolitions, or arson. Of course, at any point if the city started growing again we would expect the actual number of units to level off or even increase.

Planning For Decline

How public authorities can plan during decline is an important and under-studied issue. The Shrinking Cities project has sparked discussions around this topic, and officials in Michigan have become leaders by virtue of their unique circumstances. The Genesee County Land Bank in the Flint area (which has experienced similar decline, albeit at a smaller scale) has become a national leader. Their approach is that a government agency should obtain full title to abandoned properties, demolish or stabilize them, clean the lots, and then sell them back to the private market in a controlled way. By limiting the supply the government can realize market, or above-market prices for vacant land and buildings. There have been discussions for creating a similar land bank for Detroit, or Wayne County, and this 2006 report by students at the University of Michigan is an excellent examination of the issue. Of course, for the land bank model to work some private-sector demand must exist for land, and revenues from property sales must cover the costs of program administration. In the absence of a demand for land for new housing in Detroit, any hypothetical land bank would have to find buyers interested in land for commercial, agricultural, or other purposes.

Another approach with a lot of energy is urban agriculture. One of the most ambitious plans for large-scale urban agriculture was developed by students at the University of Detroit-Mercy. Their Adamah plan proposed resurrecting a buried stream, and creating a dairy, tree farm, vegetable gardens, shrimp farm, and wind power. Although nobody has attempted it as the scale envisioned by the plan, today in Detroit 220 family gardens, 115 community gardens and 20 schools participate in the city’s Garden Resource Program. When BLDG Blog’s Geoff Manaugh published a conceptual proposal for converting vacant property in Philadelphia into agricultural land, it provoked this comment:

“i live in west philadelphia, where there are already dozens of ‘abandoned’ lots in my immediate neighborhood that are being used for both small and large-scale gardening. they have it going on up in northern liberties, too. these were started up without the benefit of instructions from some blogger in his ivory tower. it seems that some things just aren’t brilliant ideas until some mouse-pusher who has never stepped out from his/her fluorescent office ‘imagines’ it.”

The same is true to a lesser extent in Detroit, where even un-planted fields can begin to resemble cultivated ones:

Most troubling is the relationship between economic decline, physical abandonment, and social problems. Economists argue the low housing prices in the city will attract those with low levels of “human capital,” creating a cycle of decline. “If low levels of human capital then create negative externalities or result in lower levels of innovation, this becomes particularly troubling because a self-reinforcing process can result in which an initial decline causes concentrated poverty, which then pushes the city further downward.” The barriers to overcome this cycle of economic decline are great, and renewal in Detroit will mean not only increasing numbers of jobs and residents but a reversal of decades of compounding problems.

Resources
> LOST Magazine: Dissapeared Detroit
> Southeast Michigan Council of Governments
> Planning for Detroit’s Tax-Reverted Properties: Possibilities for the Wayne County Land Bank

(Cited: Kasarda, John D. “Industrial Restructuring and Changing Location of Jobs.” in State of the Union: America in the 1990s, Volume I: Economic Trends. R. Farley, ed. (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2001). Glaeser, Edward L. and Joseph Gyourko. “Urban Decline and Durable Housing.” Journal of Political Economy 113:2 (2005).)

Book Review: Rybczynski’s Last Harvest

Witold Rybczynski’s 2007 book Last Harvest: From Cornfield to New Town is truly a unique book: an accessible, detailed narrative of the process of real estate development. The book describes the construction of a subdivision named New Daleville in southern Chester County in suburban Philadelphia. Or exurban, rather, since the development is over 45 miles from downtown Philadelphia. (More on that in a bit) The subtitle, “Real Estate Development from George Washington to the Builders of the Twenty-First Century, and Why We Live in Houses Anyway,” suggests the second major component to the book. Interspersed with the story of New Daleville is variety of asides describing the history of residential real estate development and drawing upon Rybczynski’s extensive expertise on the topic. (He is also the author of a history of homes and biography of Frederick Law Olmsted.)

The book features an account of the wrangling with local officials over the subdivision’s site plan, trade-offs on architectural design, technical challenge of providing utilities in a rural area, and the ever-present developer’s bottom line. This rich detail makes it a particularly good introduction to the topic of land development, and it’s little wonder the author is one of the keynote speakers at the American Planning Association conference in Minneapolis this spring. I’ll leave further description of the book to the many reviews that have already been published, whether by the Where Blog, Business Week, or The New York Times.

Despite the good things about it, I have three main concerns about the conclusions it draws about American urbanism in the 21st Century.

First, the book falls victim to selection bias, presenting a distorted view of the American city and traditional neighborhood design. Although Rybczynski describes New Daleville as “neotraditional” and takes great pains to draw links with well known New Urbanist communities like Seaside, Florida or the Kentlands, Maryland, his subdivision shares little with these famous places. Miles from retail amenities, jobs, water and sewer infrastructure, and any of the myriad of other practical ingredients to actual traditional communities, New Daleville is nothing more than a glorified rural subdivision. It’s much-ballyhooed density (the plan was more dense that other area subdivisions) isn’t very impressive either — 125 homes on 90 acres. Although the developer has proven traditional neighborhood development credentials, this is not the project that embodies them. Furthermore, while I appreciate Rybczynski’s impulse to move beyond the over-studied urban core, he’s far overshot his mark. Located in a rural area far from any city, New Daleville is not characteristic of most residential development.

View Larger Map

Second, Rybczynski omits the powerful role of public policy in shaping the form of American cities. He claims the preponderance of single family homes in America reveal a cultural preference, citing neighborhoods with single-family homes around the world and a cultural tradition traced back to Britain and the low countries in Europe. While I agree that culture has played a role, our policies have shaped urban development in powerful ways. The Interstate Highway System (which at one time meant the federal government funded 90% of state’s cost of new interstate highways) made low-density suburbs an option for urban workers. The federal government single-handedly created the “plain vanilla” 30-year fixed rate mortgage. Before FHA subsidies enforced the type, commercial home mortgages required substantial down payments and short payback periods. The federal government also created the secondary market for mortgages, adding a further incentive for home ownership to the substantial tax benefits. An anecdote in Rybczynski’s chapter on Levittown illustrates this precise issue:

“… at the urging of local government officials, the Levitts offered a two-bedroom rental unit for sixty-five dollars a month. Since the monthly mortgage payment on a Levittowner was sixty dollars, there were few takers, and the so-called Budgeteer was soon discontinued.” (165)

He omits the reason the mortgage was cheaper: FHA insurance. I don’t intend to resolve the culture/policy chicken and egg problem, but a quick international comparison can show how policy can influence the form of housing. The U.S., Britain, and Australia are all relatively wealthy countries sharing historical and cultural ties. As we would expect, they share similar homeownership rates (around 66-69%). However, the profile of their housing stock is quite different: a whopping 31% of housing units in Britain are row homes or semi-detached units, compared to just 5.6% in the U.S. On the other hand, Australia outstrips the home-loving U.S. in its popularity of single-family homes. And the percentage of Americans living in multifamily buildings is a healthy 26.3%, so clearly single-family homes aren’t the full story. Here’s the full table:

These differences are the result of a range of forces: approaches to public housing, transportation policy, geography, environmental protection, and yes, culture.

Lastly, the location of his project means the only form of transportation is the automobile. Although it is true the car is king for most American transportation, the absence of any choice whatsoever is artificial. The American Public Transit Administration estimates only 20% of the country are without some form of public transit service. New Daleville’s residents fall into this minority.

The irony is that I think Rybczynski knows all this, describing in chapter nine in detail why many wouldn’t consider New Daleville “smart growth,” concluding “for hardcore, transit-first, rebuild-the-center-city, regional planning advocates of smart growth, New Daleville is merely more of the same, what they don’t want.” (89) He immediately follows this with a description of how the form of the neighborhood will encourage socialization, reduce stormwater runoff, encourage walking, protect open space, and include shared play areas and public space. These attributes, he writes, “will be small reminders to the people living there that they are not only private homeowners but also members of a community. That will be smarter growth indeed.”

In his 1987 book, historian Robert Fishman described suburbia as “bourgeois utopias,” arguing their cultural origins lay with evangelical Christian men in 19th century London who sought to combine proximity to the city’s jobs with an idyllic, urban residential life free of urban vice. Fishman argues the modern movement of jobs and industry to the periphery has meant the end of true suburbs under his definition. Perhaps Last Harvest is part of the suburban tradition: holding up an idealized, rural, economically unsustainable lifestyle as the best way to live, even if the reality of American cities tells a more complex story.

Fishman observes, “the bourgeois utopia rested on a frighteningly unstable economic base. The bourgeois utopia depended for its survival on market forces that even the bourgeoisie could not control.” It is on this note that emeritus urban planning professor David R. Godschalk closes his generally positive review of Last Harvest in last October’s Urban Land:

It is ironic that Rybczynski, with his magisterial grasp of American development history, did not anticipate fully the impact of the current development downturn. Perhaps the five years that he devoted to studying the project blinded him to the cruel force of the boom-and-bust cycle, especially on vulnerable rural subdivisions remote from an urban real estate market. Today, according to Web and news reports, Ryan Homes is offering a cash-back bonus and up to 60 percent off chosen options, and New Daleville is only about half built out with prices halved to get homes off the market.

In the end, these criticisms aside, Last Harvest opens up the largely mysterious process of land development to a popular audience, laying bare the complex factors that produce urban space. By provoking a dialogue and explaining the contrasting viewpoints of the story’s different actors, Rybczynski does urbanists a service and elevates the conversation around residential development. If it provokes an urban planner to build on the work started by Christopher Leinberger in The Option of Urbanism and pen an equally complex and compelling accessible book in reply, so much the better. That at least is the view of this, “transit-first, rebuild-the-center-city, regional planning advocate of smart growth.”

> Amazon.com: Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville

The Paradox of Cheap Parking, in Real Time

Last spring, I heard about an interesting dataset about Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I lived for four years as an undergraduate student. Busy with the flurry of activity leading up to my completion of graduate school, I stored it away to look at later. After all, real-time information on cities is hard enough to come by, let alone on the simultaneously ubiquitous and fascinating topic of parking.

The Data
The parking lots and structures in downtown Ann Arbor are operated by a quasi-public organization, the Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority (DDA). Together with their parking vendor, last April they implemented a system that provides real-time information about the number of parking spaces available in several lots and garages through digital signs at each garage and through their website. An old Ann Arbor friend Brian Kerr wrote a simple script to scrape that page every 20 minutes and record the number of spaces available at each facility. After letting it run for about two weeks, he posted the data file online. Subsequently a local blogger interviewed the DDA’s IT manager about how the system was implemented, and even posted some charts encouraging visitors to match the chart with the garage. The data sparked a bit of interest on local blogs but the conversation soon died out.

At the time of the completion of a recent parking study in 2007, the DDA operated lots and structures containing 5,770 parking spaces in downtown Ann Arbor. These facilities are concentrated in a relatively small physical area, as shown in this map from the study:

For my first pass at the data I thought I’d look at just one garage, indicated by the arrow above. As is shown, the Maynard Street structure is near two movie theaters, a busy commercial district, and one block from the University of Michigan Central Campus Diag, with many classroom buildings and a large auditorium. The first chart is the number of spaces available in just one day – Monday, April 7, 2008:

The first thing to notice is that the garage is never full during any 20-minute measurement. Although the technical capacity of the garage is 797, the garage flat-lines at 618 (perhaps due to long-term permits or construction). The garage is only filled over 90% of this reduced capacity for one 40-minute period, from 1:40 p.m. to 2:20 p.m, or roughly 2.7% of the entire 24-hour period.

Expanding the time frame for the next 7 consecutive days reveals this pattern:

The spikes correspond with the midday rush, and the garage only fills once, around 1:00 p.m. on Friday, April 11th. This seemingly dry data can tell a rich sociological story; everyone rushes in just after nine, with various people lingering around into long into the evening. In a sense, the curve represents a unique DNA of the local land uses and the preferences and customs of their auto-using patrons, residents, and visitors.

Observations
Based on the data we can make a couple observations. First, the vast majority of the parking lots and structures are almost totally empty the majority of the time. This means they represent a huge amount of inactive urban space. A common rule of thumb is each structured space takes up 300 square feet of floor space for the bay and associated aisles and ramps. If we use this standard, the same floor area in this garage could be 239 apartments (assuming they average a generous 1,000 square feet). Certainly good design would demand a residential structure be taller or configured differently on the site. However, given the extremely fickle use of the garage now, a residential use would mean more people physically at the site on average than are now.

Second, from the chart above we can see that parking demand at the DDA’s prevailing price structure is very spiky, with extremely high demand only at limited times. (This garage costs $.80 an hour, or $175 for a monthly permit) It would seem logical for the DDA to use variable or tiered pricing to create a market incentive for a more efficient use of their space. For example, parking overnight could be inexpensive given the very low demand, with parking around the midday peak much more expensive. Even a modest form of performance parking may change this observed pattern.

Overparked?

Despite nearly 5,800 spaces the DDA continues to develop more parking, this October publishing on their website details about a proposed underground lot near the library boasting green design. How will the city know when they have enough parking? After all, parking policy guru Donald Shoup points out one can rarely provide enough of something that’s under priced. The proposal for the new garage advises readers to “review the findings of the 2007 Parking Study to learn why vehicle parking is needed even with extensive investment in alternative transportation.” Unfortunately the 2007 Parking Study doesn’t exactly settle the matter, including as one of its final recommendations “Maintain a formalized process for determining when new supply is needed.” The study, by the alternative transportation experts Nelson/Nygaard, is chock full of state-of-the-art policy suggestions (including variable pricing discussed above) but avoids the sticky question of determining how much is necessary. Perhaps it’s because like other seemingly scientific questions in urban planning the answer is not scientific but value-laden and political. (A similar question: How many freeways and/or lanes do we need?) And in Ann Arbor, the people want more parking.

Parking in the Real-Time City
In another vein, publishing this real-time data (especially on a still forthcoming mobile format) could itself have profound implications for the transportation system. Could real-time data allow people to avoid full structures and make use of the resource more efficient? The Washington, D.C. suburban rail station lots tend to fill up early, and I’ve heard stories of people driving downtown stopping at each station to look for a spot. What if the space was beamed to their home computer or car? (The more important question might be, “How much parking should they provide to begin with, and what should it be priced?” One suggestive study I saw of San Francisco’s BART concluded replacing parking with offices would boost the agency’s riders and revenue) If the DDA makes summary data available on the website, it would make costly data collection unnecessary for this data point. All citizens would know exactly how full or empty the garages were, and the DDA would be able to observe the impact of pricing or policy changes in real time.

> Previous parking posts: The Urbanists’ Panacea: Parking Reform, Are Expensive Parking Meters Fair?, more
> Homeless Dave’s Interview with the DDA’s Stephen Smith
> Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority