Passing For Knowledge

BEH Examines Walkability and Zoning Changes

My old employers (internship) over at the BEH look like they’re on to something with this study:

Advocates for New Urbanism or “active living” often identify zoning as a policy strategy to make cities more walkable. Because zoning regulates both building size and land use, changes in zoning can affect both population density and the availability of shops and restaurants within a walkable distance. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s sustainability plan, PlaNYC, advocates rezoning city neighborhoods to allow higher-density development near subway stops, allowing more New Yorkers to use public transit instead of private automobiles.

However, zoning change can be a politically complicated process. Some communities resist “upzoning” because of concern about gentrification and displacement of low-income families, or about the loss of a distinctive neighborhood character. In fact, population growth in New York City has been accompanied by a wave of “downzoning,” in which neighborhoods seek to limit new, higher-density development.

With summer high school interns Alexa Nichols and Carolyn Ruvkun, BEH is studying zoning change in New York City between 2003 and 2007, with a focus on the more extensive rezonings required to go through the Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP) application process. Using ULURP applications as well as parcel-level data on zoning characteristics, this project will show whether recent zoning change has made the city more or less walkable.

But I’m not so sure they are. I’m willing to bet the answer to their million-dollar question is “more.” If they’re still using the metrics we attempted to validate in 2006, which favored greenspace, tree canopies, non-rectangular buildings, “Transparency,” “Complexity,” et al., they’ll find recent re-zonings — even large-scale ones like those in Williamsburg and Morningside Heights — to be favorable. The developments which followed those (controversial) re-zonings will mesh perfectly with their metrics (even if they lose points on “Human Scale,” the rest will more than offset this).

There are some problems with their metrics. I never quite liked them, and I don’t think I was the only one on that team (among those who actually collected the data/visited the sites) who found them unsatisfactory. They never seemed to be able to get a true grasp of the block being studied. Sometimes it felt like a block’s rating could be skewed too easily by a over-abundance of a single element (there were some terrible blocks which happened to have a lot of trees and “street furniture”).

Other times, I found issue with a coefficient being negative instead of positive. Ask yourself: how would you consider “number of people,” as positive or negative? I always preferred a moderate amount. But the extremes were those which had a real effect on the block’s rating. There was no favoring of the “middle ground” for these metrics. All the variable coefficients were weighted to favor an end (or extreme end) of a continuum, and not the middle ground, which seemed more appropriate in many cases.

Another glaring problem was that commercial diversity had no impact on ratings. Talk to anyone who works for a local BID and they’ll tell you banks/”ATM-only” storefronts don’t generate any foot-traffic or commerce — banks just buy up lots wherever they can, even if that lot won’t generate much revenue, because it helps with their branding/exposure. But banks tend to have nearly all-glass facades, and one of the metrics feeding into “Transparency” was the ratio of “glass/window area” to “facade area.” This is just a small example, but a poignant one. The homogenization of stores in New York City is sickening, and it heavily affects a block’s true “walkability.” But again, this factor has no say in a block’s rating.

I’ll back off at this point because I don’t mean to sound like I’m bashing on these guys. I liked the research they were doing. Without my time there, I never would have found interest in urban planning or statistics. But the entire time, I wished the metrics had a more intimate feel for the study areas.

We’ll see what they come up with, whenever that is. For whatever reason, it’s taken the BEH people an awfully long time to publish works.