The Carnegie Library in Washington, D.C. is now home to the world’s newest Apple Store following an expensive rehabilitation funded by the retailer. Originally built as a public library in 1903, it reopened its doors to the public on May 11, 2019 following decades of disuse, neglect, and a slew of failed attempts to repurpose the building as a museum. While some are fretting that a historic building owned by the city has been turned over to commercial use, we can rest assured that the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., the current leaseholder to the building, made the right decision.

More than fifteen years ago, Niskanen Center founder Jerry Taylor and his then-colleague at the Cato Institute, Peter Van Doren, had a novel proposal to solve an intractable political dispute about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a wilderness area in northeast Alaska that is home to large populations of wildlife and vast, untapped petroleum deposits.

In the early 2000s, the Bush Administration proposed opening the refuge to oil drilling in the wake of rising crude oil prices. Naturally, the usual suspects came out in favor or against the proposal.

Environmentalist detractors worried that a pristine wildlife area could be ruined by any drilling and the possibility of leaky pipelines. Advocates, on the other hand, claimed only a tiny sliver of land was needed to extract billions of dollars of oil and the refuge would remain largely untouched. The benefits of oil drilling, proponents argued, would be widely shared because oil is used in so many parts of economy.

Taylor and Van Doren’s proposal was simple: the federal government should give ANWR, in its entirety, to the Sierra Club or some other environmentalist group, including full rights to use or transfer the land as they see fit. While the Sierra Club lobbied for zero drilling when the issue was decided through the political process, assigning the group transferable property rights to ANWR might have led them to reconsider.

Since they would receive most of the revenue generated by oil drilling in ANWR, the Sierra Club would be in a position to carefully weigh the potential costs of drilling against the billions of dollars of oil revenue they could use to support environmental causes worldwide. To boot, they would also have the ability to personally oversee oil production to ensure that it would be handled in an environmentally sensitive manner. Drilling might have some environmental costs, but would they really allow none whatsoever?

The economic issue at stake in the ANWR debate was whether or not the oil was made available to the market. In terms of efficiency, it didn’t really matter who profited from the oil, just that it was made available for sale in global markets. By assigning ownership to a group concerned with protecting ANWR and who also had global environmental interests, the federal government could be assured that the right decision would be made.

Congress unwittingly tried out a version of Taylor and Van Doren’s proposal with the Carnegie Library when, in 1999, it appropriated $2 million to create the City Museum of Washington, conditioned on the District of Columbia leasing the building to the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. for 99 years for $1 per year. While the money Congress authorized was tied directly to creating a specific museum, the Society was essentially given the historic building for at zero price and, eventually, free to use it as they saw fit.

The Historical Society was never able to successfully convert the library into a functional museum open to the general public despite multiple attempts and tens millions of dollars spent. Their efforts never attracted nearly enough visitors to support a budget sufficient to maintain the large and expensive building, and, for most of the past two decades, the building has primarily been empty save for a few private events and the Society’s offices. Despite operating rent-free from the library, the Society itself has been hemorrhaging cash in the last few years.

In the wake of their continued difficulties, the Society decided to partner with a business to revive the building and fund their educational mission. Apple agreed to spend more than $30 million to refurbish the building and signed a lease for the first floor that will provide the Society with $7 million of revenue over the next ten years. The basement and second floor of the library are now home to historical exhibits, and the building will receive hundreds of thousands of visitors per year.

This outcome is almost certainly better than any feasible alternative. Even if the local government found a way to fund the rehabilitation and operations of a museum centered on Washington’s history, the Society knows that, despite their best efforts, they could only expect a handful of visitors. Given their long tenure in the building, their strong interest in promoting education, and their multiple attempts to open a museum on the site, the Society is in a unique position to determine whether the public is best served by devoting the entire building to historical exhibits.

By partnering with Apple, the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. was able to successfully leverage the first floor of their building in a way that will allow a much larger share of the public to use one of the city’s great buildings and simultaneously increase the number of patrons that will be able to enjoy their collection of artifacts and photographs. Historical buildings need not be cleansed of all commercial activity to be great, and the Carnegie Library is a prime example.

The post The Carnegie Library Apple Store is Fine appeared first on Market Urbanism.

During his last days in office, former Representative Jason Chaffetz must have forgotten he is supposed to be a fiscal conservative. His recent comments that members of Congress need $2,500 stipends to afford housing in DC reflect a complete ignorance of both the reasons for high housing prices and the best ways to lower those prices. Instead of treating the symptoms of skyrocketing housing prices, policymakers should be striking at the root: rent control, height limits, and burdensome zoning restrictions that discourage development.

All of this turns on basic economics. Markets drive prices of goods and services down, but only if they are competitive. In many cases, existing interests try to prevent others from entering markets in order to protect their own bottom lines. Zoning regulations are often manipulated by interest groups, who hope to limit the allowed uses of land within a city and prevent future developments. Zoning essentially fixes the amount of available housing by discouraging developers from building more housing, ultimately driving housing prices up.

Academic research places much of the blame for high housing costs on zoning––and this isn’t just limited to a single city or state. Edward Glaeser and Raven Saks of Harvard and Joseph Gyourko of the University of Pennsylvania examined Manhattan’s housing market estimate that new construction costs for housing are only about $300 per square foot, but that square foot tends to be rented out for $600, twice the cost at construction. Glaeser, Gyourko, and Saks write, quite intuitively, that “this would seem to offer an irresistible opportunity for developers.” But it’s zoning regulations that prevent developers from coming in to build more homes (which ultimately lowers housing prices), despite market incentives. Even though there is a deafening clamor for more housing, as evidenced by rising prices, building takes so long in many big cities like DC, San Francisco, and New York, so prices simply continue to balloon.

The ramifications of high housing prices hit the entire economy. A paper released in May by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, two economists with the National Bureau of Economic Research, concludes that housing constraints like zoning have lowered aggregate economic growth by at least 50 percent from 1964 to 2009. By making it more difficult to move resources like labor between cities, zoning hurts the United States’s competitiveness in a major way.

High housing costs hurt everyone, but they actually hit those in need the hardest. Researchers at the Mercatus Center have documented how onerous zoning laws hurt the poor, who spend relatively more on housing than richer households. These regressive rules also follow the trend of most regulations and primarily reflect the preferences of high-income people, since they have the time and resources to play a part in crafting the laws. Economist Diana Thomas notes that this is how regulation redistributes wealth from lower-income to higher-income households. Many people, on both sides of the aisle, are unaware that zoning laws play such a role in keeping families entrenched in poverty.

Rent control, which attempts to provide affordable housing to the poor by limiting how much can be charged for rent, isn’t helping either. Rent control is common, despite a clear consensus among economists that it does not help provide affordable housing. In a 2012 poll of some of the most respected economists in the US 81 percent disagreed or disagreed strongly that rent control, “had a positive impact over the past three decades on the amount and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have used them.” To add perspective to the statistic, no one strongly agreed and only two percent agreed, and the rest either had no opinion or were uncertain.

Price caps like rent control generally lead to shortages and rarely help those they are meant to. In this case, it makes investing in housing unattractive for developers because they can’t expect to recoup the costs of building. This creates a shortage of housing and ensures prices never fall. Worse still, research shows that rent control not only deters building projects, but also discourages landowners from investing in home maintenance. The decision facing landlords is simple: if a nicer home or apartment can’t be used to attract higher rent, why spend time repairing the units? This problem is compounded by the lack of alternatives for renters – with nowhere else to go, they have to settle for poorly-maintained apartments and lower standards of living.

Perhaps the main limit on housing supply in DC is the height limits imposed by Congress in 1910. Building heights allowed in DC are based on the widths of the street they are on with the highest cap only allowing buildings to be 160 feet tall. DC is a growing hub for professionals and as more people try to enter the city, they bid up housing prices. As the New York Times reported in June, even those with large budgets are struggling to find homes. Real estate prices for the average house in Washington has ballooned 40 percent since 2009.

It’s not just housing prices, but hotels that are more expensive in DC than the average city. Scott Beyer, a writer specializing in city planning and land use issues, reported in 2016 that the nightly hotel room rate in DC is more than twice that of other cities. All this, Beyer notes, is largely rooted in the height restrictions created by Congress.

DC’s height restriction is meant to protect the character of the city, but there are areas available for development that would not detract from the city’s personality. It’s certainly true that having a New York City-esque concrete jungle lining the National Mall would not be ideal. Beyer, for example, notes there are many areas south of the Mall that might benefit from height limit changes.

Access to affordable housing in cities is crucial for the poor. Since urban areas usually contain the best and highest paying jobs, having access to cities means having access to the means to improve their own lives. That’s part of the reason comments like Chaffetz’s should induce a collective eye roll. It’s simply not good policy to subsidize housing for the rich and connected when the poor face steep housing prices. This is especially true because the root of the problem is something Congress can fix itself, unlike most zoning problems. Efforts should be made to liberalize zoning regulations, reform DC’s draconian height restriction, and cut back rent controls so developers have the ability––and the incentive––to build additional housing.

Josh T. Smith is a Master’s student in economics at Utah State University and works as a policy analyst for Strata, a public policy research center based in Logan, Utah.

The post Congressional Housing Subsidies Won’t Lower DC Housing Prices, But Liberalizing Zoning Will appeared first on Market Urbanism.

“Relaxing” zoning won’t do the trick in a city where prices are high enough to justify skyscrapers with four to ten times the density currently allowed

Over at Greater Greater Washington, Ms. Cheryl Cort attempts to temper expectations of what she calls the “libertarian view (a more right-leaning view in our region)” on affordable housing.  It is certainly reassuring to see the cosmopolitan left and the pro-market right begin to warm to the benefits of liberalization of land-use.  Land-use is one area the “right,” in it’s fear of change, has failed to embrace a widespread pro-market stance.  Meanwhile, many urban-dwellers who consider themselves on the “left” unknowingly display an anti-outsider mentality typically attributed to the right’s stance on immigration.  Unfortunately, in failing to grasp the enormity of the bipartisan-caused distortion of the housing market, Ms. Cort resigns to advocate solutions that fail to deliver widespread housing affordability.

Yes, adding more housing must absolutely be a part of the strategy to make housing more affordable. And zoning changes to allow people to build taller and more usable space near transit, rent out carriage houses, and avoid expensive and often-unnecessary parking are all steps in the right direction. But some proponents go on to say relaxing zoning will solve the problem all on its own. It won’t.

Well, if “relaxing” zoning is the solution at hand, she may be right – relaxing will only help a tad…  While keenly aware of the high prices many are willing to pay, Cort does not seem to grasp the incredible degree to which development is inhibited by zoning.  “Relaxing” won’t do the trick in a city where prices are high enough to justify skyscrapers with four to ten times the density currently allowed.  When considering a supply cap that only allows a fraction of what the market demands, one can not reasonably conclude “Unlimited FAR” (building density) would merely result in a bit more development here and there. A radically liberalized land-use regime would deliver numbers of units several times what is permitted under current regulation.

Ms. Cort correctly concludes that because of today’s construction costs, new construction would not provide housing at prices affordable to low income people.  This will certainly be the case in the most expensive areas where developers would be allowed to meet market demands by building 60 story skyscrapers.  Advocates of land-use liberalization who understand the costs of construction would not claim that dense new construction will house the poor.  But if enough supply is allowed to come to market today, today’s new construction will become tomorrow’s affordable housing.  And this brings us to the more meaningful discussion: filtering.  Here’s where Ms. Cort’s analysis completely falls apart.

It is true that increasing supply eases upward pressure on all prices. But the reservoir of naturally cheaper, older buildings runs out after a while.

Tragically, Ms. Cort is using the current radically supply-constrained paradigm to analyze a free-market counter-factual.  If development at levels several times the current rate were allowed over the past few cycles, the reservoir of cheaper, older buildings would have remained plentiful and affordable.  If the market were allowed to meet demand for high-end units in the form of dense new construction, there would be little or no market pressure for unsubsidized market-rate units to be converted into luxury units.  The 1400 Block of W Street NW example she gives would almost certainly still be affordable.

On a larger scale, the increased supply of housing in the area helps absorb demand for more housing, but it’s not enough to stem the demand for such a sought-after location. Between 2005 and 2011, the rental housing market’s growth added more than 12,500 units. But at the same time, $800/month apartments fell by half, while $1000/month rentals nearly doubled. Strong market demand will shrink the availability of low-priced units. That’s what has happened over the last decade as DC transformed from a declining city into a rapidly growing one.

But, 12,500 units is the amount of supply added under the current over-regulated regime.  This amount of development is minuscule in a large city. (see diagram below)  What if DC allowed as much supply growth as Austin or Miami?  The 12,500 figure would triple.  Further, since Austin and Miami are far from free-market, the development rate in a truly free-market DC would certainly exceed a tripling.  If you consider the amount of supply that would have been added over the last several decades in an unlimited FAR DC, Ms. Cort’s position starts to sound quaint.  Conservatively assuming 50-100,000 units of rental housing would have been developed over the last few decades of DC’s growth, rents certainly would not have doubled.  I’ll go out on a limb and estimate that average rent growth would be close to inflation.

Chart by the Citizens Budget Commission (via NYYIMBY)

Ms. Cort wants housing to be less than 30% of gross income for nearly all residents.  Will the market provide new housing affordable to minimum wage earners at the most expensive intersection in Georgetown?  Probably not, and I hope she isn’t setting the bar that high.  While nobody is wise enough to know whether a free-market in land use would accomplish this, a free-market DC could be affordable to 50-100,000 more people than the zoned-to-death DC of today.  Will stock of units deemed affordable to low wage earners be of the quality, location, and size acceptable to Cort?  The necessity for further intervention is a subjective preference.

While acknowledging the validity of liberalization in her critique of supply-and-demand denialism, Cort’s conclusion fails to look at supply and demand wholistically:

Supply matters, but it’s not the whole story

Wrong. Supply really must be part of the whole story.  A city is only affordable to the number of residents it houses affordably.

Failure to recognize this only shifts the burden from one demographic to another. (and it won’t be the rich who pays the price)  If a zoning-plagued city fails to provide 1,000 units demanded, 1,000 people can no longer afford to live there.  Even if that city chose to subsidize housing for 2,000 people at 50-80% of AMI, that doesn’t change the fact that 1,000 people who wanted to live in that city must leave.  Any viable solution (free-market or otherwise) must involve increasing supply significantly, either through creating supply directly or subsidizing demand through vouchers, which induces new development.  But, this simply can’t happen if overall supply is capped through zoning.

A city is only affordable to the number of residents it houses affordably.

Twitter

The post Urban[ism] Legend: The Free Market Can’t Provide Affordable Housing appeared first on Market Urbanism.

And here’s one other reason to be on Cap’n Transit’s side: no new bill means no federal regulation of rapid transit.

Right now, the federal government only has the power to regulate safety on rail lines that feed into the national mainline network, and could therefore, at least in theory, run into a freight train. This includes all intercity trains (Amtrak and possibly All Aboard Florida), commuter trains (Metro-North, Caltrain, etc.), and the occasional light rail line using an older right-of-way that’s still connected to the national network (e.g., New Jersey’s River Line). Self-contained “rapid transit” networks – subways, elevated trains, and new light rail and streetcar lines – are beyond the feds’ reach.

To many legislators, the Fort Totten crash on DC’s Red Line in 2009, operated by WMATA, was evidence that federal regulation is needed. (WMATA’s MetroRail is actually one of the most technologically advanced systems in America – or at least it was, until after the crash when they turned the ATO off, which drives the train while the operator opens and closes the doors.) There was a big outcry about it right after the crash and a few times since then, and the debate seems to be coming up again.

But despite the liberal leanings of most transit enthusiasts, you’d be hard pressed to find one who thinks that federal regulation will do WMATA – an admittedly heinous agency that needs to be reined in – any good. The main reason to be suspicious is the incredibly poor job that the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) has done in overseeing mainline rail safety, which has been in its regulatory portfolio for decades.

In the words of Eric McCaughrin, the FRA is “regulating passenger rail out of existence” with its insistence that trains be bulked up to survive crashes. Instead, he suggests that instead safety regulators should focus on preventing crashes with technology like they do in Europe and Asia – for example by installing automatic train protection and operation systems, which, at least outside of DC, have very good safety records. The FRA’s idea of safety, he contends, drives up costs, power consumption, and track wear-and-tear, while driving down reliability and performance (namely, acceleration and deceleration).

The FRA (or whatever body would be charged with the new regulatory tasks) may not make exactly the same mistakes with subways as they did with mainline trains, but many are fearful that they’ll screw up in some other way, such as not keeping up with future technological advances.

Democrats are likely to follow the president’s lead on the matter, who proposed expanding federal oversight to rapid transit and light rail back in 2009. Most Republicans are against giving more regulatory authority on this matter to the feds, though their opposition seems to be based in ideology. I would love to be proven wrong, but I doubt any of them are actually aware of the FRA’s regulatory misdeeds.

In any case, the issue is tied up with the larger highway bill which is of course mired in its own controversies. So luckily for those leery of federal oversight in this matter, Politico says we probably won’t see the feds regulating rapid transit this year:

But with House and Senate negotiators still far apart on the bill, many are predicting another extension of current policy. That would mean no changes in the transit safety structure.

I do have to take issue with Politico’s headline, though: “Transit safety still lags.” It’s not safety that lags – in fact, rapid transit has an impecable safety record, even taking into account the deaths at the hands of the the fools at WMATA. Rather, it’s federal regulation over safety that’s lagging. The Democrats argue that the two are the same thing, but most Republicans and transit advocates clearly don’t see it that way.

The post Transpo bill gridlock staves off federal transit regulation appeared first on Market Urbanism.

He has little patience with dissenters. Stanley goes so far as to accuse them of being “rich, white women…spreading fear.” He says they stalk his appearances before community groups, sowing discord. He claims they refer to themselves as “the coven.”

Most Americans still don’t think of Calgary as a very urban place, but it’s been holding its own against Vancouver and Toronto lately when it comes to urbanism in Canada (which is generally much more advanced than urbanism in the US), even without true rapid transit (the C-Train, while impressive as light rail, still has to cross streets). Calgary’s skyline’s been booming, and as the Calgary Herald writes, the city also has an urbanist mayor:

Stanley’s approach somewhat resembles that of Mayor Naheed Nenshi, and beyond his unconventionally frank yet also high-reaching rhetoric. Nenshi, too, deplores suburban sprawl and the financial challenges it brings for government, and praises more walkable districts and transit.

While Nenshi avidly uses social-media site Twitter, Stanley blogs prolifically with long rhapsodies on everything from master plans and neighbourhood walkabouts to census data and criticism.

Here’s his old Montgomery County blog – does anyone know if he’s keeping one in Calgary? Or if maybe we could lure him to Twitter?

There appears to be a general political consensus – that thing Alon Levy’s always talking about – towards urbanism in Calgary, so Calgary will likely get good urbanism:

While the developer sector in Calgary is well-organized, there’s not as professionalized and unified community movement against smart growth principles here, although Watson had warned as he left about community resistance to the coming changes.

In fact, Stanley has showered praise on Calgarians’ support in helping shape the Plan It and Imagine Calgary long-range blueprints.

“That is not something that happens in a lot of places because it cannot happen in a lot of places, so instantly that tells you something,” he said in a brief interview after being announced as planning GM on April 23, the provincial election day.

Anyway, the whole Calgary Herald article is great. But if you don’t have time to read it, here’s another interesting bit about his relationships with private developers in Maryland, and how those in Calgary perceive him:

The Ontario-born Stanley’s outspokenness has caught the attention of the development industry here, curious about the successor to David Watson, the general manager of planning who retired last month.

“We have this sprawling landscape, and it’s what people want. So how do you not provide what people want?” asked Shane Wenzel, president of Shane Homes, which is building in new communities in all four Calgary quadrants.

“You’ve got to hold out some hope that Rollin’s at least open to conversation and what’s been written about in the past is maybe taken out of context. Maybe he’s never really experienced a place like Calgary to this point.”

There may be little choice in the matter, with years’ worth of land already planned for new suburbs and more in the hopper – though their density creeps ever upwards with fewer single-family homes.

Stanley got along just fine with the development industry in Montgomery, who shared his desire to maximize their land’s value by building up and building attractive.

“I was really sad and I think most of the business community was really saddened when he left because he’s a strong advocate for smart growth and developing our spaces in an urban way,” said Evan Goldman of Federal Realty, one of the companies behind White Flint.

It looks like Shane Homes is a suburban, greenfield, single-family builder – it’d be interesting to see how the land owners and developers downtown feel. The article also notes that the Canadian prairie city “is still building anew on almost all its fringes.”

A nice compromise would be for Rollin Stanley’s planning department to continue to allow continued sprawl, while at the same time trying to counteract it by liberalizing infill growth. With the exception of maybe Chicago, it would be the first city to allow density without at the same time restricting sprawl.

Again, the Calgary Herald article.

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The bigger question, it seems to me, is whether we need competition at all. The inaugural auction led to Zipcar losing 80 percent of its curbside parking spaces. That doesn’t dramatically impact the total number of spaces available to Zipcar users, since most of them are on private land. But it definitely lessens the utility of the service. Furthermore, I presume that the new players in the market will be going after private spaces as well, which will confine Zipcar’s ability to expand, and likely drive up the prices of those spaces.

The thing is, car-sharing isn’t like many other markets, where you’re free to choose between a bunch of options that have equal access to resources. There’s a finite number of spaces, so the convenience of belonging to any one service—and let’s face it, nobody wants to pay membership fees for more than one—decreases with the number of companies they’re split between.

Sure, it’s never a good idea to allow one company to have a complete monopoly. But governments have long coped with this problem by creating regulated monopolies, like power utilities, that are subject to price restrictions and have an obligation to provide equal access to services.

First I’d like to address the argument that “car-sharing isn’t like many other markets” because “there’s a finite number of spaces.” But isn’t this true of all real estate ventures? How does car sharing differ from, say, ATMs in this regard? Sure, it can sometimes be a pain when you’re in a strange neighborhood and can’t find your bank’s ATM, but I don’t think anyone would argue that we should regulate ATMs like public utilities, restricting prices and mandating that they put up machines in poor neighborhoods. Decades of off-street parking minimums have made potential car sharing spaces plentiful throughout the District, and if these spaces aren’t enough, the city should raise the price of on-street parking to market-clearing levels, do away with the time limits, and work out a procedure for billing car share companies for the use of these spaces. (Well, they should do that anyway, but that’s a topic for another day.) And what’s to prevent non-monopolies from having interconnection agreements, like ATMs (you can use other machines, but it’ll cost you) and Japanese railroads?

Secondly, turning car sharing into a regulated monopoly seems like a bad idea for a number of reasons. But chief among them: How is the District of Columbia supposed to have any clue how to set car sharing rates? The industry is in its infancy, and as far as I know, no government on the face of the planet has ever attempted to regulate car sharing rates, much less been successful at it.

Let’s not forget what happened the last time American municipal governments tried to regulate complex private transportation businesses as public utilities: They quite literally regulated the private streetcar and rapid transit businesses out of existence. The artificially low fares (five cents, at the time) and mandates that the companies continue to operate unprofitable lines are both things that Lydia wants to see applied to car sharing services. What’s to stop this from happening with car sharing, where there’s far less history for regulators to drawn upon for inspiration? How long until the city is using Zipcar’s government-granted monopoly as an excuse to demand that cars be manufactured in America, adhere to stricter emissions rules, etc., like American cities did with profit-sapping labor rules a hundred years ago?

This isn’t to say that all forms of price regulation are inevitably spectacular failures, but even in Japan, where yardstick competition is used to set prices on private train lines, the result is not obviously better than the market equilibrium alternative – Japanese trains are insufferably crowded during peak periods, something which the private rail companies could alleviate with higher peak fares, which could then be reinvested back into capacity upgrades. If the solution is lacking even with relatively efficient Japanese regulators, what hope is there that DC will get it right?

The post Car Sharing as a Public Utility – What Could Possibly Go Wrong? appeared first on Market Urbanism.

But despite planners’ reticence to talk about the problem, it needs to be addressed. Throwing money around is what governments do best, and while it might be an easy solution to problems in the short run, the money is running out. Some will surely quibble that we can afford to raise taxes and do more deficit spending, especially for something as vital as transit, but whether or not that’s true, the fact is that voters are increasingly doubting that it is, and so politicians are going to become stingier about doling out money for transit.

Anyway, the most obvious area for savings is in actual wages and benefits, but many mainstream conservative and libertarian publications have written a lot about this issue, so I want to focus on just inefficient work rules. These are rules that are written into union contracts hashed out in a political process, and management doesn’t have the authority to overturn them. I found surprisingly little on the issue in the academic literature, but there’s plenty on it in newspapers, and so here’s a round-up of the major issues that I found with various American transit unions. The list is by no means comprehensive – either of all the cities that have these problems, or even of the different types of problems – and I encourage people to share any knowledge they have on the subject in the comments. (I’m also interested in something that I suspect Alon may know a thing or two about – international comparisons. Do the notoriously union-happy French have these same rules?)

So, without further ado…

1. Mandatory eight-hour workdays and no part-time hiring. This one may surprise some since the eight-hour workday is one of organized labor’s most prized achievements, and indeed it works out well with most workers. But transit isn’t “most work,” and trying to force an eight-hour workday on it is problematic. Transit service has huge peaks during the morning and evening rush hours, so when transit agencies are forced to schedule workers for eight-hour shifts (or longer with overtime), some people end up sitting around doing nothing for part of each day. With train and bus operators, this leads to them doing nothing during the middle of the day when there aren’t as many routes to run. (At San Francisco’s Muni, there are apparently six divisions where drivers spend more time waiting for assignments than they do actually working.) With maintenance workers, it means people being scheduled for work during at least one rush hour per shift, during which they don’t have access to tracks and can’t really work. And of course management often isn’t allowed to hire part-time workers to solve this problem. [Berkeley Planning Journal, SF Bay Guardian, SF Weekly, NY Daily News, City Journal]

2. Seniority. Unions are run on seniority, and people who have been with the union longer often get to pick what work they do. A commenter from Portland explains:

Here in Portland, being a train operator (MAX or Streetcar – WES is staffed by employees of the shortline railroad on whose tracks the service run, not by TriMet employees) is considered a “senior” position; one that bus drivers with seniority may aspire for. Given that operation of trains is a different set of skills than operation of a bus – does this state of affairs make sense? By the same token, it’s frequently the case that experienced bus drivers (with lots of seniority) get to choose the easiest assignments – and frequently will pick suburban social-service routes; leaving the inexperienced drivers to haul crushloaded inner-city busses through rush hour traffic. Easier work assignments are frequently considered a “perk” of seniority. In the (nonunion) private sector one frequently observes the reverse – more experience and skill (and more pay) implies more difficult assignments. [Market Urbanism comment]

And then of course there are the infamous problems with escalator repair in DC’s Metrorail stations, which according to Unsuck DC Metro’s three–part series, are also the result of a seniority system. The “pick” system lets the most experienced employees choose which escalators they work on (or at least the general area), and they often pick the stations whose escalators are in least need of repair, leaving the really bad escalators to the less-experienced workers.

3. Tons of time off and little-to-no advanced notice required. Here’s someone who claims to be an operator with Muni, San Francisco’s public transit authority, who’s actually defending Muni workers’ sick day allowances:

I wonder where the one shift in six missed numbers come from. I am a Muni operator, and I certainly don’t miss that much time. I don’t have enough sick or vacation hours! I also wonder if that includes training/retraining time. The absenteeism rates are higher than for office workers, but there are some crucial reasons. As my wife (a high school teacher) pointed out, if she goes to work with a cold, she can still function. She can give her students desk work and try to relax a bit. If I work with a cold, an unexpected sneeze can kill someone. Working in transit ops requires full attention every second you’re moving. There isn’t an opportunity to zone out, massage your temples, take a coffee break. So our sick policies are a little looser than office workers are. How loose? I can call in sick three times a quarter (Jan-March, Apr-Jun, July-Sept, Oct-Dec), up to five days at a time, for a total of ten days a quarter without consequences. Mind you, I don’t have forty days of sick time a year! If I go over any of those limits, then I have to have doctor’s notes clearing me to come back to work and I can’t work any RDO (regular day off overtime). I have never been on the sick abuse list, and most of the operators I know who have been were there because of some family emergency.

We are expected to show up for work. All this reminds me of the miss-out kerfluffle from several years ago. (Muni operators don’t have to call in – they just don’t show up!) What the public wasn’t told was that I could (and still can) be charged with a miss-out if I am one minute late to work! I start today at 11:43 am. If I’m there at 11:44…

In addition to the unusually large amount of sick days, the way that the work rules handle operators missing work is problematic. Because workers don’t even have to notify management when they’re sick, the run is often delayed, and when someone is finally called in to do the job, they have to be paid overtime to do it. [Streetsblog SF]

4. Cross-utilization of labor not allowed. Some of the aforementioned problems (especially the constraints of the eight-hour work day) could be mitigated if workers were allowed to do other tasks, even menial ones, when they’re not needed with their primary job, but union contracts generally disallow this. Drivers can’t take tickets or work in information booths while they’re not driving, and maintenance workers can’t do either of those things or operate trains when they’re not able to work on the tracks. [Berkeley Planning Journal]

5. Overtime abuse. Overtime is already given out very liberally to unionized transit employees compared to private sector jobs, but one trick that they use at Muni to “monetize” their overtime is to call in sick on a day you’re scheduled and then work a day you’re not scheduled, for overtime pay, which you get even though you haven’t worked 40 hours that week. In the case of DC’s Metro employees, pensions are calculated based on the highest four years of income, which gives workers incentives to wrack up tons of overtime in order to boost their (already very generous) pensions. [SF Weekly, GGW]

…so, there you have it. Are there any work rules that I missed? How common are these rules – did I just find some isolated instances, or is this a deep, systemic problem?

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2. Bronx <3 parking: “This community wants a moratorium on any more building until we get a parking lot.” “We don’t want any bigger buildings and we want parking space for everyone.”

3. Do people realize that “I don’t mind modernist architecture” and “All new buildings must have decorative cornices and intricate brickwork” are fundamentally incompatible statements?

4. Witold Rybczynski on density. Nothing you haven’t already heard a million times before, but, Witold Rybczynski!

5. DC’s zoning code finally allows building owners to enclose the once-encouraged outdoor arcades.

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