Simon McDonnell

Minimum parking requirements and housing affordability in New York City

Many cities throughout the United States require developers of new residential construction to provide a minimum number of accompanying off-street parking spaces. However, critics argue that these requirements increase housing costs by bundling an oversupply of parking with new housing and by reducing the number of units developers could otherwise fit on a given lot. Furthermore, the requirements reduce the subsequent direct costs of car ownership by forcing up-front, or subsidizing, consumption of parking spaces, which leads to increases in auto-use and its related externalities. Such critics advocate eliminating or at least reducing the requirements to be more responsive to locational context, particularly proximity to transit. In this article, we explore the theoretical objections to minimum parking requirements and the limited empirical literature. We then use lot-level data and GIS to analyze parking requirements in New York City to determine to what extent they are already effectively sensitive to transit proximity. Finally, we examine developer response to parking requirements by comparing the number of spaces that are actually built to the number required by applicable zoning law. Our results indicate that the per-unit parking requirement in New York is, on average, lower in areas near rail transit stations, but the required number of spaces per square foot of lot area is higher, on average, in transit accessible areas. We also find that by and large, developers tend to build only the bare minimum of parking required by zoning, suggesting that the minimum parking requirements are binding for developers, as argued by critics, and that developers do not simply build parking out of perceived marked need. Our results raise the possibility that even in cities with complex and tailored parking requirements, there is room to tie the requirements more closely to contextual factors. Further, such changes are likely to result in fewer parking spaces from residential developers.

Impact of Bus Priority Attributes on Catchment Area Residents in Dublin, Ireland

In many jurisdictions, political and infrastructural restrictions have limited the feasibility of road pricing as a response to urban congestion. Accordingly, the allocation of dedicated road space to high frequency buses has emerged as a second-best option. Analyses of the evidence emerging from this option emphasize the engineering and technical issues and do not systematically interrogate the customers, those in the bus catchment area that use or could potentially use the service. This paper attempts to correct for this asymmetry in focus by analyzing characteristics and preferences of users and non-users through a survey of 1,000 households for a particular quality bus catchment area in Dublin, Ireland. Preliminary findings are encouraging, both for the use of this policy instrument as one which can yield considerable consumer satisfaction, and in terms of modal share analysis, especially because the corridor under scrutiny represents a much higher socio-economic profile than Dublin or Ireland as a whole.

Urban Land‐Use Regulation: Are Homevoters Overtaking the Growth Machine?

The leading theory about urban land‐use regulation argues that city zoning officials are full partners in the business and real estate elites “growth machine.” Suburban land‐use officials, in contrast, are thought to cater to the interests of the majority of their electorate - “homevoters.” A unique database regarding over 200,000 lots that the New York City Planning Commission considered for rezoning between 2002 and 2009 allows us to test various hypotheses suggested by these competing theories of land‐use regulation. Our analysis reveals that homevoters are more powerful in urban politics than scholars, policymakers, and judges have assumed.

A Managed-Participatory Approach to Community Resilience: The Case of the New York Rising Community Reconstruction Program

Research shows that resilient communities are best achieved through active public participation, informed by local input. However, post-disaster strategies in the United States are typically federally led and top-down in nature. We present an exploratory case study of resilience planning in New York State in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, which is a combination of public participation and government supervision. We name this approach “managed-participation” because it emphasizes engaging the public in post-disaster planning, guided by a high degree of state-level leadership. We adapt a theoretical proposition of horizontal and vertical integration framework for an exploratory analysis of the case. We find that New York’s approach contributes to both horizontal and vertical integration of impacted communities by enhancing active participation in resilience efforts, and taking advantage of the state government’s position to connect local needs with federal funding. Furthermore, by utilizing expertise and funding support to guide and translate local knowledge, it produces potentially more viable resilience plans.

Potential Challenges to Targeting Low- and Moderate-Income Communities in a Time of Urgent Need: The Case of CDBG-DR in New York State after Superstorm Sandy

Abstract New York State received

Public Housing Residence and College Performance: Evidence From the Nation's Largest Urban Public University

4.5 billion in Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds after Superstorm Sandy. A major CDBG-DR requirement is to prioritize assistance to low- and moderate-income (LMI) populations. The state is spending two fifths of funds on community-wide (e.g., infrastructure) recovery activities. For these activities to be documented as LMI, a specified percentage of residents benefiting from them must be LMI. We explore the potential tension between addressing community recovery needs and prioritizing LMI assistance. Specifically, we develop a series of scenarios to estimate the likelihood that any community-wide activities will be documented as LMI in New York State. We find that documenting these activities as LMI is largely dependent on the underlying demographics of disaster-impacted areas. Additionally, as recovery activities increase in size, thereby impacting larger populations, they are less likely to be documented as LMI, potentially disincentivizing larger, more impactful investments. We recommend empirically based LMI targets for CDBG-DR grantees.

The Challenges and Benefits of Using Biodiesel in Freight Railways

Despite clear implications for human capital accumulation, there has been little research on the postsecondary educational experiences of students living in public housing. While there is significant and growing research exploring outcomes for public housing tenants, even in the education sphere, little of this work focuses on postsecondary outcomes and what role, if any, public housing plays in human capital accumulation. Our case study, New York City, is home to both the nations largest urban public university system and the largest public housing authority. In this work, we use matching techniques to identify and describe the residential characteristics of students at the City University of New York. We explore how students who live in public housing developments differ from their peers in terms of characteristics associated with success in college, including demographics, neighborhood poverty, and high school preparation. We use regression techniques to test the relation between public housing residence, neighborhood income, and two indicators of early college performance: successful completion of credits attempted and one-year retention. In a naive model (including only residence and high school characteristics), public housing residence is negatively associated with our outcomes of interest, but less so when we control for other factors, including neighborhood income. Specifically, for students pursuing an associates degree, we find a negative relation between public housing residence and credit completion and a less pronounced negative relation with retention. We find no significant relation between public housing residence and either baccalaureate outcome.

Matching Words and Deeds? How Transit-Oriented are the Bloomberg-Era Rezonings in New York City?

The recent history of biofuels, particularly biodiesel fuel, in the United States has been a turbulent one. After an initial boom in the production of biodiesel and a huge expansion in capacity in advance of expected increases in demand, the bottom fell out of the market by the end of 2010. Annual biodiesel production, which had approached 700 million gallons in 2008, fell to just over 500 million gallons by 2009 and reached the lowest point at only 340 million gallons in 2010.1 Since then, however, the boom times have returned; 2011 saw the highest-ever level of production, at almost a billion gallons.2 Much of this ebb and flow has been caused by the policy environment faced by biodiesel producers. Since the 1970s, federal efforts have broadly favoured increased production of biofuels, particularly corn-based ethanol. Since the 1990s, those encouragement efforts have expanded to include biodiesel production.3 The enactment of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 and, more recently, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 have mandated increased biofuel penetration into the transportation fuel market.4 By diversifying the transportation fuel mix, federal policies aim to improve energy security and environmental performance, although the latter is more controversial than the former.5 Together, these actions have created a market for biofuels as a substitute for its petroleum counterparts. Of particular interest is the market for biodiesel, an overshadowed alternative to the more popular corn-based ethanol gasoline substitute.

The most popular tax in Europe? Lessons from the Irish plastic bags levy

Recent years have seen considerable changes in the technology of transportation with the development of high-speed rail networks, more fuel-efficient automobiles and aircraft, and the widespread adoption of informatics in disciplines such as traffic management and supply chain logistics. The contributions to this volume assess transportation interactions with employment and income, examine some of the policies that have been deployed to maximize the economic and social impacts of transportation provision at the local and regional levels and analyze how advances in transportation technologies have, and will, impact future development.