Pinch Me, Am I in Brooklyn?

In general I think allowing people to build densely in big cities is a good thing, all the more so when housing is built near mass transit. And this is especially true given that building new mass transit is prohibitively expensive, so that with rare exceptions we are compelled to live with the existing mass transit infrastructure rather than expanding it. The right response to this regrettable situation is to improve transit access by shifting new housing toward the existing stations.

All of that said, I find myself a little unnerved by the zeal of the upzoners. Several years ago there was an article about how Crystal City was becoming the Brooklyn of the DC area. That prompted this tweet:

Good morning from *trendy* Crystal City. Pinch me, am I in Brooklyn? pic.twitter.com/H8pb9gBzRH

— Anthony Adragna (@AnthonyAdragna) April 22, 2016

The joke of course is that the dreary architecture clearly bears no resemblance to Brooklyn, or at least the parts of Brooklyn that are considered typical of the borough. This hints at something that I think gets lost in the discussion sometimes, which is that Brooklyn really would be a much less desirable place to live if it looked like Crystal City. If you tore down all the brownstones and replaced them with Crystal City-type buildings, rents would surely go down, but partly that would reflect not an increase in supply but a decrease in demand.

Consider the politics of this for a moment. Opponents of upzoning are often portrayed as racist or otherwise motivated by fear of poor people, and surely that is the case some of the time. "I don't want poor people in my neighborhood." But if upzoning means that neighborhoods like Park Slope will look like Crystal City, then a much wider range of people will have legitimate grievances about upzoning. "I like the way brownstones look."

I think the right tradeoff involves selectively upzoning in suitable areas. Park Slope, for instance, has dozens of new apartment buildings along Fourth Avenue, many of them no more attractive than the Crystal City buildings shown above. But that's okay, because by and large they are replacing undistinguished buildings that no one will miss (architecturally at least). (I have mixed feelings about the fact that the first wave of buildings wasn't required to include any ground-level retail, so they are often bare walls. Anyway that has been changed and new construction includes ground-level retail.)

This approach makes much more sense than upzoning further up the slope (that is, to the east), because the R train runs under Fourth Avenue, and so the new housing capacity is very close to transit. (It also seems likely that the new housing is boosting business activity in Gowanus, the old industrial neighborhood to the west, which is probably good although development there is effectively in a flood plain.)

I admit that this is not a perfect solution. When you upzone selectively, you introduce a toxic kind of politics that often results in insufficient building. Probably the right way to do it is to compel each transit-oriented neighborhood to include a certain amount of housing, and then let local politicians allocate it as they wish. That way you aren't forcing development into the least politically connected neighborhoods.

Also, arguably if you upzoned everywhere, prices might fall so far that some brownstones would survive (although probably not in Park Slope). Certainly that's an attractive option, though my feeling is that in the long run prices would rise again as the net flow of people from New York City would drop, increasing demand. For prices to be depressed permanently, it must be made less pleasant to live in the city, and that would involve things like tearing down the brownstones.