Every week we read more than we can write about on the blog. To avoid letting good commentary and research fall by the wayside, we’re going to publish weekly excerpts from what we’ve been reading.
Bernard Hickey, “Opinion: A city unmoored“, Hive News:
…the Government and the Auckland Council have to consider more aggressive measures on both sides of the ledger, including supply and demand. Prime Minister John Key has always left open the option of tweaking migration settings if the pressure on infrastructure and the economy generally becomes too much. Auckland’s housing pressure cooker is getting closer to that point.
The Reserve Bank is likely to force banks to progressively hold more capital to back rental property mortgages within a few months, which could push up interest rates for landlords. It is also expected to keep agitating quietly behind the scenes for more Government action to reduce the tax advantages for rental property investors. A brave Reserve Bank would be much louder.
Ultimately though, the bigger fixes on the supply side will take much longer. They could include introducing new types of leasehold agreements and long-term tenancies that make long term rentals more attractive for tenants and institutional investors alike. They could include removing many of the restrictions around building heights, parking and view shafts that reduce the density of housing in the ‘leafy’ suburbs around the centre of Auckland such as Grey Lynn, Ponsonby, Mt Eden, Remuera and Parnell.
Kristy Wang, “Getting to Know Your In-Laws“, SPUR:
Since the Department of Lands and Buildings erected 5,610 “refugee cottages” in camps all around the city after the 1906 earthquake, San Francisco has often relied on flexible housing types to meet the needs of residents, families and workers. Accessory dwelling units (or ADUs; also known as secondary units, in-laws or granny flats) offer a way to increase density while respecting neighborhood character. [1] Given the Bay Area’s housing crisis, in-law units are an important strategy for helping increase the supply of “naturally affordable” housing…
Jolisa Gracewood, “7 Ways E-Bikes May Surprise You (They Definitely Surprised Me“, CAA:
You don’t have to go fast on an e-bike, of course. You can just use the motor for that little bit extra when going uphill. But this was a revelation: at certain times of day, an e-bike can get you there in half the time.
Not just half the time of a regular bike – half the time OF A CAR. Or even a bus. Not to brag or anything, but: the other day I had a meeting in Ponsonby. I was running late, and set off only five minutes before the meeting was due to start. I got door to door from the Pt Chev shops to Ponsonby (4km) in ten minutes.
Angie Schmitt, “Calculating the Big Impact of Sprawl on Cities Bottom Line“, Streetsblog:
When someone builds a new home, does it make the city stronger and more fiscally sound? Or does it drain public resources? The answer depends a lot on where it’s sited and, more specifically, where it lies in relation to other homes and businesses.
Smart Growth America has developed a fiscal impact model that helps predict how developments will help or hurt the municipal bottom line. The tool they developed [PDF] takes into account how density affects the cost of delivering city services, from streets and sewers to fire protection, school busing, and garbage collection…
According to SGA’s model, the higher density development scenarios would have a far better effect on the city’s budget [PDF].
Glen Koorey, “Neighbourhood Greenways: Invisible Infrastructure for Walking and Cycling“, paper presented at 2012 2 Walk & Cycle Conference:
Neighbourhood greenways (aka “bicycle boulevards”) are a form of street treatment where simple measures such as lower speeds, traffic restraints, wayfinding and crossing treatments are used to create an environment that is friendly for walking and cycling.
They are particularly useful for connecting people to community facilities such as schools, parks, shops and other key destinations in a neighbourhood and beyond. Neighbourhood greenways (NGs) are a popular tool in North America (especially on the west coast) but have yet to catch on here in New Zealand, despite many similarities in street environment…
Enrique Martinez, “American cities are designed for cars – which makes life worse for everyone“, Quartz:
Walking, one of the most natural of human activities, has become shockingly rare in the lives of many Americans: Only two-thirds of adults report walking for more than 10 minutes at any time in the previous week...
Our choices about how to get around are largely shaped by our environment and our perception of what it will be like to get from one location to another on foot, in a car, on a bicycle, or via some other vehicle. The main geographic factors that influence people’s transportation decisions are proximity—how close the start and end points of their journey are—and connectivity—how fast and convenient it is to move from one to the other…
Proximity requires a compact mix of a variety of buildings types, so that the spaces for living, working, shopping, entertainment, and other activities are close together.
While proximity is about the location of places in relation to one another, connectivity is about the routes for traveling between those places.
Connectivity increases as there are more—and more efficient—transportation and route options for moving from one point to another. Grid street layouts (i.e. sets of parallel vertical and horizontal roads that intersect at right angles) are ideal for connectivity, since they offer numerous short segments, in the form of city blocks, and frequent intersections for moving from one segment to another. On the other hand, the “suburban spine” pattern common on the outskirts of many sprawling cities—with major roads connecting enclosed residential areas cut off by cul-de-sacs and dead ends—makes moving from place to place more complicated.
Sam Judd, “Opinion: Aucklanders are bad drivers“, NZ Herald:
Never have I seen so many aggressive drivers as here in the city of sails. I agree more with the Danish consultant who called it a ‘City of Cars’. So much of the infrastructure is set up for cars, rather than pedestrians or cyclists, that drivers think that they own the road…
Auckland averages about 50 injuries to cyclists from vehicles each year and the memorial white bikes that are dotted along Tamaki Drive in particular pay homage to wasted lives at the hands of accidents. It is no surprise at all then, that aggressive driving is to blame for the lack of uptake of cycling as transport.
The stupidity of this situation is that (as I have said before) we suffer from road rage, from air pollution and our waterways receive heavy metal pollutants from car use, but if Auckland drivers weren’t so bad, cycling would be an excellent solution.
The fact is that on average, over two thirds of car journeys are less than six kilometres and a third of them are under two.
Colin Marshall, “Subway station toilets: a surprisingly accurate measure of civilisation“, The Guardian. Even if our driving’s bad, our public toilets seem to be pretty decent:
The size of the economy, the quality of the architecture, the activity on the sidewalks, the cleanliness of the streets: we can evaluate a city in any number of ways. But in my travels through North America, Europe and Asia, I’ve found no more telling indicator – and at times, no more important one – than the state of its subway station toilets, the true measure of urban civilisation.
Of course, to use this marker at all presumes a certain degree of development: not only must the city in question have a subway system, but that system must have toilets…
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Global solar dominance in sight as science trumps fossil fuels“, The Telegraph:
Solar power has won the global argument. Photovoltaic energy is already so cheap that it competes with oil, diesel and liquefied natural gas in much of Asia without subsidies.
Roughly 29pc of electricity capacity added in America last year came from solar, rising to 100pc even in Massachusetts and Vermont. “More solar has been installed in the US in the past 18 months than in 30 years,” says the US Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). California’s subsidy pot is drying up but new solar has hardly missed a beat…
For the world it portends a once-in-a-century upset of the geostrategic order. Sheikh Ahmed-Zaki Yamani, the veteran Saudi oil minister, saw the writing on the wall long ago. “Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil – and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones, and the oil age will come to an end not because we have a lack of oil,” he told The Telegraph in 2000. Wise old owl.
[John, who suggested this article, also gives it credit for teaching him the word “ineluctable”. This means exactly the same thing as “inevitable”, but people will probably be impressed when you use it.]
Noah Smith, “Bigotry is expensive“, Bloomberg View. Not about transport or urbanism per se, but it makes some excellent points about how a society that offers people more equal opportunities can be a wealthier society as well as a fairer one:
So if a society bases its decisions of who gets which job on race and gender, it’s going to be sacrificing efficiency. If women aren’t allowed to be doctors, the talent pool for doctors will be diluted, and wages will be pushed up too high, choking off output…
Just how big of a difference does this make? A team of top economists has recently studied the question, and their results are pretty startling. In “The Allocation of Talent and Economic Growth,” economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago Booth Business School and Charles Jones and Peter Klenow of Stanford estimate that one fifth of total growth in U.S. output per worker between 1960 and 2008 was due to a decline in discrimination. From their abstract:
In 1960, 94 percent of doctors and lawyers were white men. By 2008, the fraction was just 62 percent. Similar changes in other highly-skilled occupations have occurred throughout the U.S. economy during the last fifty years. Given that innate talent for these professions is unlikely to differ across groups, the occupational distribution in 1960 suggests that a substantial pool of innately talented black men, black women, and white women were not pursuing their comparative advantage.
And finally, for the Auckland-based readers, the inchoate hivemind on Reddit has compiled a list of Auckland’s secret urban treasures. Full of stuff like:
Yesterday I took the train out to Te Papapa to this ridiculous/amazing Japanese warehouse with hundreds of silk kimono for about $25 a pop, as well as amulets, antiques, etc. (This place, in case you wondered: https://www.facebook.com/asiagallerykimonomegastore)
It was insane, and made me wonder what other bits of Auckland beyond the city centre most people who don’t live in your area don’t know about.
Got any secrets to share about your neck of the woods?
Matt and I can second the recommendation for the Mahurangi Cement Works, a flooded quarry / popular swimming hole near Warkworth.