8 reasons to End West Campus Minimum Parking Rules

May 11, 2016 ~ dankeshet

In West Campus, as in all of Austin outside downtown, there are rules that require new homes and shops to build new parking spaces. Minimum parking rules don’t make a lot of sense for the city in general but make even less sense in West Campus. Here’s 8 reasons those rules should be repealed:

1. Most west campus residents walk, bike, or bus to campus

Grad students in 78705 and their primary means of commuting.

Austin is car-centric. But in the last 10 years since we have allowed dense, mixed-use buildings in West Campus, it has become the shining exception. Only 9% of grad students living in West Campus use their cars as their primary means of commuting!

2. land used for cars is land that can’t be used for homes

Obvious but needs to be said! Tons of students wish they could live in West Campus and walk to school. Many of them end up living much further from campus. If we took the land that’s currently being dedicated to long-term parking and freed it up for more apartments, more students could live in West Campus and walk to school.

3. Building Parking increases the costs of building new homes

Building parking is expensive! An on-site, off-street parking space can cost up to $40K to build. If we let new apartments be built without parking, it’s doubtful we would see rents come down immediately. But in the long-term, reducing costs is the only way to keep rents down.

4. students choose whether to bring cars

In much of Austin, living with a car is a necessity for living a functional life. In West Campus, though, living without a car is a viable choice for most students. Students take into account the availability, cost, and convenience of parking when deciding whether to bring a car to school. When we force apartments to overbuild parking, we aren’t responding to the reality of students taking cars to school so much as creating that reality!

5. there’s already a lot of parking in West Campus

The Castilian in West Campus features 5 floors of parking before you reach a floor of student housing.

Will there still be students who need or want cars in West Campus? For sure! Fortunately for them, even in the very unlikely event that all new buildings featured no new parking, most existing buildings do have parking lots or garages. Students who value on-site parking can choose to live in a building that has it.

6. On-street spaces are metered.

Sometimes, people fear that if new apartments don’t build parking, residents will still bring cars but park them on the street. In West Campus, though, streets have parking meters, so students would be better off either buying off-street parking or not bringing a car.

7. Parking garages are ugly

One of West Campus' ugliest new structures: a featureless parking garage. — One of West Campus’ ugliest new structures: a featureless parking garage.

This one is subjective, but overwhelmingly true. West Campus since UNO has seen a bloom of street trees, sidewalks, and interesting new buildings. The ugliest of those buildings? Overwhelmingly the parking garages.

8. It sends a message

What starts here changes the world

Do we live in a society that understands the bigger picture in which auto-centric design is driving our planet into catastrophic climate change? Do we care?

College isn’t just a place to learn facts; it’s a place where we teach the next generation the values that we hold as a society. Right now, our code is teaching a “can’t-do” attitude about building better places and fighting for our environment. We can and must do better.

Four things City Council could do today to fight the housing shortage

April 18, 2016 ~ dankeshet

Central Austin needs more housing. Prices have been rising, more and more people want to live where they have short commutes but are only able to afford homes near the periphery. We have a long-term plan to alter our land development code that may help with this but our need is now. What options are available to us today?

End Parking requirements in west campus

Every year, West Campus adds more and more dense student housing and along with it, pedestrian amenities like wide sidewalks and street trees. IMG_20160119_142423 A parking benefit district meters on-street parking with proceeds plowed back into neighborhood improvements. Surveys have shown the vast majority of West Campus students get around without cars. Allowing housing for students without parking could allow denser housing, lower construction costs, or allow more creative buildings that take advantage of unique lots. Removing minimum parking rules has already resulted in a few buildings downtown targeting markets that either don’t need cars or have other places to park them; the same could be even more true in student-rich West Campus.

Reduce parking requirements near transit routes

The same logic of reducing parking requirements applies outside the student market to apartments near transit routes. More and more people in Austin want to live car-free or car-light. That is easiest to do in buildings created with that lifestyle in mind–a step that can both reduce construction costs and allow room for improving other amenities. Long-term, if Austin wants to be a sustainable city, parking-free typologies should be allowed everywhere. However, in much of Austin, we wrongly treat scarce on-street parking as an endless “commons” rather than managing it as a scarce resource. This means that it may be the wiser path to improve incrementally–iteratively reducing off-street parking requirements, improving on-street parking management, and improving transportation options. Happily, this may also improve an almost universally disliked aspect of Austin’s largest apartment complexes: their architectural monotony.

Implement the Downtown Austin Plan

New high-rise towers are being constructed in downtown Austin all the time–but downtown is more than just the Central Business District. A sleepy section of downtown known as northwest downtown consists mostly of one and two story offices, with a handful of residences and a handful of larger buildings mixed in. The demand for living in this area is very high: it is adjacent to the university, the central business district, county government, ACC, and Pease Elementary. In 2011, a stakeholder process decided on a measured, middle approach toward developing this area to be more housing-rich, commensurate with the strong demand for downtown living, but without the high-rise towers that characterize downtown. Unfortunately, with no active sponsors pushing for implementation on City Council, this plan has languished. With the heavy lifting already done, it would not be complicated to implement and could result in real gains for those wishing to live downtown but not in high-rise towers.

Implement the South Central Waterfront Plan

The South Central Waterfront has added a modest amount of housing in recent years, with the apartment buildings the Catherine and 422 on the Lake acting as an extension of downtown across the river. However, the area as a whole is a mess, from the enormous Statesman offices to the big-parking-lot-and-a-Hooters near the Long Center. Fortunately, the city has been working on a plan that would clean it up, add significant amounts of park land, improve transportation access by improving the street grid and adding trails, and, crucially, free up some land for more and better housing. Implementing this plan would be a great boon.

And Beyond…

Added together, these plans aren’t nearly enough. Austin is a big city and rapidly growing. Unfortunately, it’s growing in many of the wrong ways right now: our houses are sprawling outward, our towers aren’t affordable to most people, and our apartment complexes are monster buildings dominated by parking garages. But this ship can’t turn that fast and it’s time to get turning.

Austin created a dense student neighborhood—what happened next will warm your environmentalist heart

April 14, 2016 ~ dankeshet ~ 2 Comments

In 2004, Austin adopted a new set of rules and design guidelines allowing developers to build larger apartment buildings in West Campus with fewer parking spaces required, as long as they provided a few additional benefits like better sidewalks and street trees and set some of the apartments aside for low-income students. Unlike the larger apartment complexes Austin allowed on major streets like Burnet or Lamar, these homes are scattered throughout the neighborhood. One of the ideas was to provide a place where students could more easily walk, bike, or bus to campus rather than drive. This is in fitting with ideas of environmental groups like the Sierra Club.

What’s happened since then?

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Nine barriers to building housing in Austin’s central city

March 25, 2016 ~ dankeshet ~ 5 Comments

The Austin area has, for the 5th year running, been in the top two major cities in population growth. Yet, even though everybody knows about the new apartments sprouting up on transportation corridors like South Lamar and Burnet, much of the population growth has been in our suburbs and the more suburban areas of the city. Our city is growing out more than it’s growing in or up.

How come? The desire for living in central Austin has never been higher. But Austin, like most cities, has rules that prevent new housing from getting built in the central city. That makes it easier to buy up virgin land in the suburbs and build new housing out there. It’s worth understanding what some of those rules are.

1 Minimum Lot size

Historically, expensive houses were built on expensive, large lots; cheaper homes were built on smaller, cheaper lots. Austin decided that new houses can’t be built on small lots. Even if you want to build a small, cheap house, you still need a lot with at least 5,750 square feet. In central Austin, that costs a lot of money, even without the house!

In 1999, Houston reformed its minimum lot size laws. Since then, environmentally-friendly central-city urban townhomes have flourished.

If somebody owns a 10,000 square foot lot, they aren’t allowed to split it into two 5,000 square foot lots and build two medium-sized houses, let alone three 3,333 square foot lots with three small houses, let alone three 3,333 square foot lots with triplexes!

2 Minimum site area

For areas that are zoned for apartments and condos, there is a cap on the ratio of number of apartments to lot size known as “minimum site area.”

3 Impervious cover maximums

Impervious cover is any surface that prevents water from seeping into the ground, including buildings, driveways, and garages. There is a cap on the ratio of impervious cover to lot size.

4 Floor-to-Area ratio Maximums

Floor-to-area ratios (aka FAR) maximums are a cap on the ratio of livable space to lot size.

5 Height Limits

Outside the central business district downtown, there are limits on the height of buildings. These limits vary based on zoning category, but except in a few special districts do not exceed 60′. Most residential lots in the city have height limits of 35′.

6 Minimum Parking

Perhaps Austin's most essential and defining architectural genre is the hulking car storage facility. This example is in West Campus, where most students can walk to class. — Perhaps Austin’s most essential and defining architectural genre is the hulking car storage facility.

Outside downtown, all housing must build parking—whether surface parking, carports, and garages. These parking spaces cost money and count toward impervious cover limits. If they are enclosed, they count toward floor-to-area ratio limits.

7 Setbacks

In the central city, setbacks are actually more complicated than stated here, as a building can't reach it's full height even outside setbacks. — In the central city, setbacks actually extend vertically, forming an envelope in which a house must not be built.

Front, side, and rear setbacks are strips of land on the front, side, and rear of a lot where buildings aren’t allowed to be built. Most importantly, side setbacks prevent the construction of rowhouses: single-family houses that share side walls.

8 Compatibility restrictions

Diagram for height limits for buildings near single-family homes.

Single-family zoning and multi-family zoning are different zoning categories with different limits on the variables above. However, if a multi-family zoned property is located next to a single-family house, additional rules limit these variables in the part of the lot close to the house. Multi-family buildings near single family homes in particular are subject to stringent height limits and setbacks that the single-family homes do not themselves have to observe. There are very few properties in central Austin that aren’t next to single-family homes.

9 Site plans

Whether building single-family houses or apartments, one must comply with all the technical rules of development. For apartments, there’s an additional layer of requirements, such as the creation of site plans with detailed engineering drawings subject to detailed staff review demonstrating that your plan complies with the rules. Single-family houses aren’t required to prepare site plans.

Getting site plan approval can add a huge expense to apartment development, and that expense would not be able to be borne by smaller, 3-4-unit apartment buildings. I say would not, because Austin has almost completely regulated 3-4 unit buildings out of existence. In 2015, there were only 76 permits for new 3-4 unit buildings, compared to 11574 new single-family homes.

So what?

In many ways, Austin is headed in the wrong direction. The city is getting more expensive, more sprawled-out, and less environmentally sustainable. This is the result of the difficulty of building central-city housing. The more the city’s population grows, the harder it is for people to find affordable homes with convenient, environmentally-friendly commutes. Many people are finding themselves not drawn to the suburbs, but pushed to the suburbs—car-dependent and stuck in traffic by economic necessity.

Each of our rules were put into place for a reason. Limits on impervious cover regulate stormwater drainage to prevent flooding. Front setbacks can make sidewalks feel wider. Minimum parking rules discourage residents from competing for on-street parking. But when the whole package is put together, the result is that it’s extremely difficult to do the one thing we absolutely have to do for environmental sustainability: build housing with short commutes. Instead of getting the sum of the benefits of these rules, we are getting the sum of the costs, to a bill of environmental destruction, economic hardship, and architectural conformity. And that’s just in the short-term! Long-term, the results could be far worse.

Austin needs more central-city housing. That doesn’t mean that every one of these rules need to be removed completely, but we absolutely need to understand why developers are making the choices that they are, and decide which of those reasons we are going to change and soon.

Developers are required to make car-friendly houses. Read one Coop’s reply!

February 28, 2016 ~ dankeshet

Anybody building housing outside downtown is required to make it car-friendly by building or buying parking spaces. ICC Coops is a non-profit with a social mission for providing affordable, democratically-run housing. They ran into these requirements as they’re building out their new affordable student housing in West Campus. Unlike most developers, they decided to fight the requirement by seeking a waiver from the rules. Some of the reasons they cite:

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5 Things We Learned From City Council’s Vote on Granny Flats

November 20, 2015 ~ dankeshet ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday, City Council voted to make it easier to build a backyard cottage (aka ADU, granny flat, garage apt, etc). Read the details at the Monitor. Here’s the lessons I took from the debate:

1. Party Labels Don’t help Understanding Land Use Politics

Kathleen Hunker from the conservative think thank Texas Public Policy Foundation spoke in favor of the ordinance from liberal Democrat Gregorio Casar.

The granny flat resolution was introduced by Greg Casar, whose main claim to fame before City Council was as a labor rights activist. It was supported by the Republicans on City Council: Zimmerman and Troxclair, as well as Sheri Gallo (who has previously run as a Republican) [edit: I previously listed CM Gallo as a Republican, but now I’m not so sure] and three other Democrats: Adler, Rentería, and Garza. The four democrats who supported are definitely not “conservative” democrats in any meaningful sense. To understand land use politics, it’s best to set aside party labels.

2. The new breed of Urbanist at City Council is the social Justice Urbanist

This granny flat resolution was backed by urbanist organization AURA. It was originally introduced by urbanist Council Member Chris Riley. And it was seen past the finish line by CM Greg Casar.

But CM Casar didn’t come to the Council on a land use campaign with platform planks about zoning or parking restrictions; he was elected to Council on a platform of social justice and equity. Increasingly, though, he and other Council Members have seen many urbanist policies as boons for social justice.

3. There’s a majority for More transit-accessible Housing

This Council has not always been easy to predict. But this granny flat resolution was the second highly-contested land use case that took a long time to negotiate, but ended up in the same 7-4 vote. The interesting question to come is whether this group of 7 will start to see itself as a bloc and introduce more pro-housing ordinances, knowing that they probably have the votes to pass them.

4. Neighborhood Plan Politics Didn’t Work

Neighborhood Plans with and without the secondary apartment infill tool.

One of the major objections to this plan from CM Kitchen was that, by passing new ordinances, City Council was usurping the role of neighborhood planning teams. This was frequently an effective tact in the previous Council, where all 7 Council Members were elected at large and all feared alienating the politically active planning team members.

But while neighborhood plans were of clear importance to CM Kitchen and MPT Tovo, many of the Council Members in the new council pushed back, seeing neighborhood plans as an exclusive tool of the central city, not available to many areas further from downtown or to those who have busy lives and can’t participate.

5. Parking Requirements can be changed near Transit

The Imagine Austin plan includes activity corridors.

Minimum parking regulations are one of the hardest, most expensive pieces of building homes, especially smaller, more affordable homes. Yet, they are also politically hard to change, in part because most adults in the city drive.

To solve this chicken-and-egg problem, the Imagine Austin plan envisioned activity corridors, along which there would be better transit service. In this resolution, Council made use of those planning corridors by reducing parking requirements along them. This may point the way toward more parking requirement reductions for other types of housing near these corridors.

Affordability for the long run

October 26, 2015 ~ dankeshet ~ 18 Comments

The major theme of the 2014 Austin elections was affordability and a major theme of City Council since then has been defining the word. Long-time readers of this blog are no stranger to tussles over the definition. Michael King took on the subject in the Austin Chronicle, taking aim at the Statesman’s editorial board and their false equation of affordability with “low property taxes”. I agree with King’s take here; the “taxpayer advocate” advice to cut, cut, cut has all the wisdom of a business leader saving money by eliminating the sales or R&D departments. Public spending can obviously sometimes offer public benefit.

But the part of the back-and-forth between the Statesman and the Chronicle I find most interesting is the question of growth. The Statesman states plainly that Austin’s growth “is not paying for itself,” while King offers the case that “growth does pay.” I’m a little irked by the question: we build homes for new people because they need homes, not merely because we can benefit as a city. But I think we can shed more light by changing the question a bit to: “What growth pays for itself?”

All growth isn’t equal

CMs Garza and Zimmerman had a debate I blogged about which kind of development imposes more burdens on the city: downtown towers or suburban sprawl?

In order to answer the question, I’m going to break the costs down into three types: building hard infrastructure (streets, sidewalks, water pipes), staffing soft infrastructure (police, firefighters, parks staff), and costs (externalities) we impose on one another through proximity.

The details of these questions can get pretty complicated, but I think the broad sweep actually isn’t tremendously complicated. For the most part, infill development–putting new buildings in places where there are already a lot of them–imposes lower costs and brings higher benefits to existing residents, while greenfield sprawl–expanding the city outward by putting new buildings in places where there haven’t been many before–imposes higher costs and brings fewer benefits to existing residents.

Infrastructure

To the extent that new buildings can make use of existing infrastructure without having to add anything new, this obviously costs the city less in the short and long term. If an old commercial building on Burnet gets replaced with a vertical mixed-use building that holds both a commercial shop and some apartments, the new combined building will benefit more people and pay more in taxes. If that can happen all while the new residents are using existing water and sewer lines, buses, electricity substations, etc., this is essentially free tax money to the city. If some of the new infrastructure needs to be replaced but some of it can be used intact, then we have a partial discount.

But even if all of the infrastructure needs an upgrade, it is still cheaper to provide it in the urban core. Replacing 10 miles of aging water pipes in order to handle new capacity (as happened in West Campus to accommodate the UNO boom) means that you have 10 new miles of water pipes to maintain. Adding 10 new miles of aging pipes to handle new greenfield sprawl means that you have 10 new miles and 10 old miles of water pipes to maintain.

The same is true for many of the city’s resources. Placing new families near existing parks means more kids get to play in the park. Placing new families far from existing parks means that for those kids to have the same opportunities, we will need to build and maintain more parks.

Soft infrastructure

Soft infrastructure is less clear. Until recently, the Austin Police Department based its recommendations on a constant ratio of 2 officers per every 1,000 people in population. This would result in the same costs no matter where growth occurs. If we are to gain (or lose) from growth, we may have to research new policies that change as the profile of our city changes.

Externality Costs

There are certainly costs associated with dense living: more people using the same roads can slow us down; more conflicts over uses of the same park means you may have to reserve the volleyball court in advance. In part, this is the flipside of better resource utilization: a park that only serves a few people will always be available when those people need it, but its costs are spread out over fewer people. The price of having the roads or parks to yourself is paying for more roads and parks.

But there are mitigating factors here. When buildings are close together, people don’t need to drive as far to get to their destinations, reducing the amount of traffic per person. On top of that, destinations that are closer together allow for more travel modes to become practical: walking, bicycling, taking the bus. This can set up a positive spiral: the more people who take the bus, the more frequent the bus can come, making the bus more practical for more people.

Conclusions

Even the analysis above is only cursory: except for those lucky enough to own the last house they’re ever going to buy, the major affordability issues we face are private, not public: mortgage payments or rent, not taxes. A measure to require all new buildings downtown have a pink granite facade to contextually match the Capitol would have enormous private costs but little direct effect on city expenditures.

But focusing in on the public costs, as the Statesman and Chronicle are doing here, we still need better questions than “should we grow?” We will grow as a city if our children want to live here, if friends from Dallas, Victoria, or Round Rock stick around after graduating UT or ACC, and if more folks like me who grew up in the Northeast decide they’re done with winter.

Similarly, the questions we have to ask ourselves about affordability are not simplistic ones about whether taxes go up or down. We can cut taxes and postpone spending for a short period–or redirect taxes in the short term from homeowners to renters and business owners, as this Council has opted for. But ultimately, if we build roads we need to maintain them. If we want a city that doesn’t have potholes, we need to pay for it.

To truly tackle affordability, we need to get beyond the short-term fiscal questions and move into the long-term structural questions about how the shape of the city affects the costs of building and maintaining it. The question is not: “Should we grow?” The question becomes: “How should we grow?” Should we grow together or should we grow apart?

Homelessness, the problem that affects all of us

October 4, 2015 ~ dankeshet ~ 6 Comments

A very small percentage of Austinites are homeless. During the January 2015 count of homeless individuals in Austin, a total of 1,877 homeless residents of Austin were found, or roughly 0.2% — 1 in every 450 Austinites. Yet, homelessness is a problem with an extremely wide reach. The knock-on problems that come from our inability to end homelessness emanate out in so many ways it can be hard to even be aware of all them. These are just a small sample:

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Delia Garza and Don Zimmerman debate density vs. sprawl

August 10, 2015 ~ dankeshet ~ 5 Comments

In this video, Council Member Delia Garza argues that downtown density is better for congestion than suburban sprawl, and Council Member Don Zimmerman argues the opposite. I call the argument for Council Member Garza. Here’s why:

Downtown, destinations are closer, reducing travel distance

CM Zimmerman is right that one reason suburban development causes more congestion than downtown development is that suburban residents tend to drive into downtown. Austin is a downtown-centered city. More people from the suburbs come into downtown for work, business, and entertainment than vice-versa. Placing them near these destinations reduces travel distance.

But even if downtown residents stay downtown and people on the fringes stay on the fringes, the dense development pattern downtown results in less distance spent on the roads. I spent the last weekend up on the edge of Austin, in CM Zimmerman’s district. When I stay at home downtown, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of restaurants within two miles of where I live. When I stay in District 6, traveling 10 miles for a simple night out seems normal and 2.5 miles is super close. This isn’t only about coming into downtown; even staying within the suburbs, trips are longer.

Downtown, destinations are closer, allowing more people to walk, bike, and bus

Reducing average trip distance from 20 miles to 10 miles halves the distance that somebody needs to drive. But reducing it from 10 miles to 5 miles doesn’t just halve the distance; it makes it possible for many people to bike instead of drive, using less space on the road. Reducing trips from 5 miles to 1 mile allows even more to bike and some to walk, using even less space. Bus trips are manageable where they’re short and well-served by transit. Downtown, people can choose to do without a car altogether, using very little transportation infrastructure; in the suburbs, this is practically impossible. Even for those who continue to drive cars downtown, some trips can be made on bike, on foot, or on the bus.

Downtown, uses are mixed, reducing travel distance

Downtown is denser: more buildings, more residents, more offices, more storefronts. But it isn’t only denser, it’s also more mixed. Whereas in some places in District 6, one would literally have to walk miles to get outside of a residential zone; in downtown, picking up the things you need is often as simple as going downstairs or around the block.

Downtown, uses are mixed, which mixes travel times

If you don’t live downtown and merely drive in and out at peak times, it’s easy to believe that streets downtown are hopelessly gridlocked. The truth is, though, that this is more of a function of people entering and exiting the area at peak hours. The Congress Ave bridge is congested northbound in the morning. South Lamar leaving downtown is congested southbound at night. But even the most congested downtown streets are often lightly traveled at other times of the day and many streets internal to downtown are almost never congested. While adding new residents in the Austonian is likely to add more people to the streets, it’s unlikely they’ll be driving into downtown at 8:30 on weekday mornings or out of it at 5. Instead, they may use their cars for errands or entertainment at times of light traffic.

This argument was framed as dowtown vs. fringe development but those aren’t the only two options

In this discussion, CM Garza and CM Zimmerman were only comparing dense downtown development to greenfield development on the fringes of the city. But those aren’t the only options. Moderately dense central city infill development poses many of the same benefits that high density downtown development does.

Density is a tool; Access is the goal

May 18, 2015 ~ dankeshet ~ 2 Comments

I had the good fortune of attending a lecture by Jarrett Walker, a highly-regarded transportation consultant who has worked on, most recently, Houston’s reimagined bus network. Walker makes the good point that ultimately, transit is in the business not just of laying X miles of rail tracks, or even moving Y people Z miles, but of providing people freedom to access the places they need and want to go: work, school, church, restaurants, stores, parks, etc.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swcMC1Talk0&start=660]

Access here is the stuff of life. Can I get to that job interview on time? Can I get home from work in time to see a movie? Can I meet my friends for dinner? Does this okcupid match live close enough to make dating possible? When my daughter asks to play on the traveling soccer team, can she get to practice?

The context of Walker’s talk is public transportation network design. But access is just as much an issue in land use–what buildings, parks, roads, etc get built where. Whether you’re driving, riding, walking, biking, ubering, or whatever, the basic fact is that you can reach more destinations in the same amount of time when those destinations are close together. And more destinations means more opportunities–whether that’s opportunities to work, to learn, to shop, or to meet people. This was the basic lesson I took from living my own life in different parts of Boston.

This shouldn’t be a complicated or counterintuitive concept. Even with a car, traveling from one end of Austin to another is already quite a daunting trip to make more than occasionally. The more people Austin gets, the more destinations there will be–economic, cultural, or otherwise. But the more we spread out, the less access new and old residents will have to each other and to the destinations we create. We are foreclosing options by where we build.

This isn’t to say that density is the only ingredient necessary for access. There’s plenty of ways to build density that doesn’t afford much access. You can arrange your streets so that, even though two places are near each other, the path you must take to get between them is far. You can enforce a strong separation of complementary uses (homes here, shopping there, offices over there), so that, even though there are a lot of people near you, you have to go far in order to go to work or get Indian takeout. You can place density mostly on corridors, rather than in a grid, so that people must traverse the whole length to have access. This is why you often see the same people who argue for more homes in central Austin also fighting for removing gates from streets or allowing restaurants on 45th St. The connection is about removing barriers to access.

I don’t blame anybody for watching city debates and thinking that they’re mostly about abstract concepts they don’t identify with–sidewall articulations, dwelling units per acre, floor area ratio, headways, lane allocation. These are important parts of implementation. But at the heart of the matter is whether we as a city can make room so that everybody has a chance to participate in meeting new people, building a career, finding love, getting an education, seeing great music, and whatever else we want to do. The more distance we put between ourselves, the fewer opportunities we have.