The Nonexistent War Against Brownstones
The economists have spoken. If you don’t allow your 125-year-old brownstone to be torn down to make room for high-rise apartments, then you hate America. Or that’s what you might think if you’d read recent stories by New York Magazine, WNYC, and The Real Deal. According to them, a new study by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh…
The economists have spoken. If you don’t allow your 125-year-old brownstone to be torn down to make room for high-rise apartments, then you hate America.
Or that’s what you might think if you’d read recent stories by New York Magazine, WNYC, and The Real Deal. According to them, a new study by economists Chang-Tai Hsieh of University of Chicago and Enrico Moretti of University of California, Berkeley can be boiled down to one sentence: “Brownstones cost the economy billions.”
The argument is that the entire U.S. economy would be 9.5 percent bigger if just three cities — New York, San Francisco, and San Jose — increased their housing stocks by knocking down their Brooklyn brownstones and historic San Francisco Victorians, and putting up high-rise condos in their places.
Only that’s not at all what the study said.
Replies to The Real Deal’s Facebook post
A quick search of the actual study reveals that the authors never once mentioned brownstones, townhouses, row houses, or Victorians. Nor did they say anything about the evils of historic landmarking or preservation.
Last summer, in fact, Emily Badger of The Washington Post spoke with one of the authors about their study, and this is what he had to say (emphasis added):
“We’re not talking about doubling the size of New York overnight,” Moretti says. “We’re talking about increasing the size of New York over time, and increasing public services proportionally to population, so you’d have the same New York as now, but larger. This is very, very feasible, certainly in the context of the Bay Area. We’re not talking about building skyscrapers in the hills, or on green space, we’re talking about using developable land that’s already there, building on empty parking lots.“
Now, we’re fighting for audience just like every other publisher. (We just posted a list of Brooklyn’s best pastrami sandwiches, and put a picture of a dog on our Instagram account. CLICK ON IT.) So we can’t pretend to be shocked by this naked attempt to make an economic study on urban planning sexier by pretending it’s about bulldozing brownstones. And we all know how successive reblogging can distort facts faster than children playing the game “telephone.”
Mmm… site traffic.
The thing is, though, the findings of the study are very interesting, even without embellishment.
Their argument is basically this. In economic powerhouse cities such as New York and San Francisco, the housing stock is limited. People who already live there have a tendency to fight against new development. Those who own property do so because they have a vested interest in keeping their property values high, and those who rent because they see newcomers as responsible for gentrification and skyrocketing rents. This in turn discourages a talented workforce from coming to the city, which affects the local and national economies on a grand scale.
However, by increasing the housing stock — even by building luxury apartments — real estate prices stabilize, and local companies attract more talent while spending less. This increases the GDP and everyone sees a difference in their weekly paycheck.
It’s less about bulldozing brownstones, and more about how that factory that’s being converted into luxury apartments could make it more affordable to live in a brownstone yourself. Fighting new development doesn’t just hurt the economy, they say. It also hurts you.
WATCH OUT FOR BULLDOZERS EVERYONE!!! Photo by David McSpadden via Flickr
The authors of the study suggest that one way to remedy this housing shortage would be for “the federal government to constrain U.S. municipalities’ ability to set land use regulations.” This is obviously a pipe dream. (Or pipe nightmare, depending on your views on centralized government.) Somewhat more realistic is their recommendation to modernize public transportation systems, to effectively increase housing opportunities by making it easier for people to commute.
Wherever you stand on this issue, rest assured that no one is talking about bulldozing Park Slope into a pile of rubble in the near future. No economists, anyway.
Update: Richard Florida has weighed in on this, on The Atlantic’s CityLab blog, as has Timothy Lee on Vox.
In fairness to the click bait headline writers, that is the natural conclusion to the study. The study is prefaced on the basic economic notion that more housing supply is necessary to help bring down (or at least stabilize) costs. By not allowing Brownstones to be redeveloped to higher density uses, that does
restrict housing (and the supply of “potentially developable” land, which pushes up prices on the remaining “developable land”).
Sure we can add housing in other areas of the city, but in a heavily built out city there aren’t a ton of places to squeeze in millions of new residents. As the study points out, improving transit to make it easier to commute would help as well.
I would hate to see the West Village and Park Slope redeveloped into the UES. But, let’s not pretend there isn’t a cost to historical preservation. It is a trade off, the question is what is the right balance.
It would be interesting to find out exactly how and why the distortion of this study began, and how and why it is taking place on such a broad scale – and what group or groups, if any, is behind it. Not to offer conspiracy theories, but who benefits from the spread of such a misrepresentation? If the study supported the misrepresentations thereof, it would be a perfect argument for organizations like REBNY and developer’s groups to start lobbying NYC to eliminate landmarking, and potentially de-landmark districts that are already protected – ostensibly for the greater good of all, but actually for the greater good of their revenues.
Here in Flatbush they are not tearing down brownstones but they are certainly tearing down a lot of 100 yr old frame houses.
I have mixed feelings about it. It’s sad to see some of them torn down, especially those that are in good condition.
On the other hand, it’s hard to argue that we are losing some vital historical buildings – Ditmas Park and Midwood has plenty of these and those are going nowhere. The few that remain in Northwest Flatbush are lonely holdouts. Most of their brethren were torn down from the 20s until the 60s to build the many apartment buildings on streets like Lenox and Linden. The builders here are just picking up where they left off, back in the 60s.
The new apartments will be expensive and surely out of reach for long time residents, but owners will see their property values rise and the many independent businesses will get new traffic. Will the owners of the new rental buildings will keep their sidewalks clean?
The neighborhood is already very large and dense. I don’t see how 2000 new people is going to affect an area with over 100,000.
If you have a house that held 6-10 people (which isn’t uncommon in Fbush), knock it down and replace it with a building that has 20 units, even if they are single units that’s 20 ppl where 10 were. Whats more likely is that there will be ~30-40ppl. Mix of singles, couples, and a fam with a kid or two. So the muliplier is much higher, if you throw a dozen or two dozen buildings in an area you can see the population percent jump significantly.
Near me, they knocked down a house that had 6 people, they are replacing it with a 40 unit building, I expect somewhere between 60 and 80 people to move in once they finish it. That’s a lot of new people. There aren’t even 80 people on my entire street. The street population is likely to double.
From what little I’ve seen, it seems like they’re just getting started on Fbush, I’ve seen developers tear down and rezone without building, buy places and just hold them for a year, reno stuff but keep it off the market, etc.. In my immediate neighborhood there are half a dozen houses I walk by on my way to the train that are advertised as tear downs. One was even pitched as a rezoned lot with buildable sq ft in excess of 90k currently there is a garage and empty lot.
“Trickle down economics” was a terrible policy. It was also (in a way) the opposite of the policy suggested by the economists’ study on urban growth. Advocates of trickle down economics asserted that reducing tax rates would cause the economy to expand so much that tax revenues would actually rise. Less is more. It didn’t work. The economists here predict that more is more. If there is more housing–even if it is a kind you don’t like–housing of every type becomes somewhat cheaper (holding the population constant). More housing means more people can afford housing. If you haven’t seen studies proving that, you have not looked. See, for example, studies on the consequences of the elimination of rent control in Boston. Increasing the number of housing units also generates more revenue in the form of real estate taxes (assuming rates are unchanged), which can be redistributed. More is more.
I want to move out of increasingly high-rise Yorkville into low-rise Harlem. The fancy condo building going up across the street from my building reduces the competition I would otherwise face from people looking for family-sized apartments in New York. Let’s have strict historic preservation rules for real estate that deserves it, safety regulations for all, and leave it mostly to the market–driven by people’s individual preferences–to sort out the distribution. Nobody is trying to cram you into a sardine can. On the contrary, replacing empty lots and bad buildings in already dense areas with billionaire pads and sardine pens for baby bankers makes New York’s beautiful low-rise neighborhoods a little more affordable for the regular fishes.
On the alleged fragment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipsis_(linguistics)#Types_of_ellipsis