Principle and Power in Federal Transportation

The Republican majority in the federal House of Representatives laid down the gauntlet last week in what is shaping up to be a dramatic fight over the future of transportation in the United States. The Transportation and Infrastructure Committee passed their bill along partisan lines, while the House Ways and Means Committee ousted transit funding entirely from the Highway Trust Fund.

These proposals have instigated strong reactions. Transportation Secretary Ray Lahood, a moderate Republican, called it "the worst transportation bill I’ve ever seen during 35 years of public service.” Federal Transit Administrator Peter Rogoff considers it “a huge step backward.” The New York Times and Los Angeles Times issued scathing and unequivocal editorial rebukes.

Whether or not this bill makes it through the full House in its current form, or through a compromise with the much more bipartisan Senate, it's at least serving the useful purpose of drawing widespread public attention to a clear decision before the American public. In the interest of paying attention, I've cobbled together a few principles that have generally been used to evaluate federal transportation policy. I believe they are all sensible, even if they do not fit together as neatly as one would like.
 
User Pays, User Benefits

What makes the marketplace, in general, such an effective tool for allocating resources is the alignment between the costs of a decision and the benefits accrued to the decision-maker. If you buy the stick of gum, you get to chew it. If you want gum, you have to pay for it. Because of this linkage, each of us is able to perform hundreds of tiny cost-benefit analyses everyday, using our own preferences and brainpower, to maximize quality of life and minimize waste. In the aggregate, goods and services are shifted to where they are used most effectively.

Because of monopolistic tendencies, transportation infrastructure cannot be fully handed over to the private market. However, at least since the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, officials have tried to emulate its logic by requiring infrastructure to be paid for directly by those who benefit from it, and in proportion to the benefit they receive. A user fee sends a price signal to the consumer, empowering each person to decide what travel is worth to them, while also sending an investment signal to the government provider, allowing it to allocate more funds when more maintenance and capacity is necessary.

The gas tax, the primary user fee feeding the Highway Trust Fund, has been imperfect. You pay a fixed amount per gallon, whether 100% or 0% of the miles driven are on federally-funded roadways. Hybrid vehicles pay much less than automobiles with traditional combustion engines for the same product, and electric vehicles pay nothing at all. For these reasons and more, transportation analysts are in hot pursuit of a more comprehensive VMT fee. But, for now, the gas tax is the best we’ve got.

The House transportation bill has been criticized from across the political spectrum for breaking the User Pays, User Benefits precedent. The bill expects to make up for a $50 billion revenue shortfall by selling leasing rights for oil extraction in Alaska and off-shore, a move the Competitive Enterprise Institute has labeled “drilling for roads.” Even if (big if), enough money is eventually generated by this scheme, getting the horse back into the barn of a closed fiscal loop will be very difficult politically.

Transportation analyst Alan Pisarski cautioned:

"The loss of the user pays principle would further diminish the trust fund and the whole concept of a balanced relationship between spending and use."

Internalize Social Costs

If we want individuals to be able to set national priorities by making hundreds of tiny cost-benefit analyses throughout the day, then each person ought to be shouldering the true costs attributed to their actions. The fact is that, more than any other mode of travel, driving imposes costs that are not paid by the driver. The Freakonomics guys put it this way:

"What are the negative externalities of driving? To name just three: congestion, carbon emissions and traffic accidents. Every time Arthur gets in a car, it becomes more likely that Zelda — and millions of others — will suffer in each of those areas."

They estimate these costs to be about 10 cents a mile, or the equivalent of a $2/gallon gas tax. As a point of reference, the federal gas tax has stood at 18.4 cents/gallon since 1993. (If you happen to believe that global climate change is an international hoax perpetrated by scientists, then you can feel free to shave 13 cents off their gas tax estimate). On top of this, some other costs forced upon non-users are non-residential parking, air quality, stormwater runoff, and noise and aesthetics. Obviously, reaching an agreement on the exact price of all of these values is difficult, but intangible costs are real.

Sometimes the User Pays, User Benefits principle and the Internalize Social Costs principle are presented as mutually exclusive, as if the gas tax can either be only a user fee or a tax. But it can certainly be both, as long as the funds generated are used to benefit the user as well as offset the costs imposed by the user. There are many ways to offset the costs, spending on transit historically being the most significant.

The Safe Routes to School Program is a good example of an internalization of social costs. There's nothing inherently unsafe about children walking to school, at least since humans neutralized threats from large predators. However, the presence of automobile travel introduces a new threat that either endangers schoolchildren or forces them to shift over to more costly modes. That's why it makes sense for each driver to chip in about a dollar a year to offset this impact. The House transportation bill would eliminate Safe Routes to School, along with all other programs dedicated to walking and bicycling.

Scale to Geographic Range of Impact

Two hundred years after Hamilton and Jefferson argued over federalism, the debate between state and federal power in the United States has never been adequately resolved. At least in theory, the answer to this question for transportation can be determined empirically: the scale of governmental authority over a system ought to match the geographic range of impact from the system. This was essentially the conclusion reached in 1987 by the (now defunct) U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations:

“This concept of the geographic range of highway benefits is a key test to determine which unit of government should bear responsibility for highway finance.”

According to this test, the entire transportation network can be teased apart, from federal interstate and intercity rail to neighborhood roads and trails, and responsibility assigned to the scale of government that matches the particular component. Grey areas can be smoothed out by cost-sharing ratios or various kinds of block grants passed between governments.

The ACIR was right to focus on the geographic scale of the network, but they were wrong in a few ways. First, actually sorting infrastructure by scale is hard to do. They considered the Interstate Highway System the classic case of national interest, but, in reality, many interstate trips made within metropolitan areas will never cross a state line. Motorists use the interstates for commuting, bypassing congested local roads, and various other daily tasks. If the federal role in transportation were selectively limited to highways alone, it would introduce a host of distortions into the regional and local systems, forcing them to accommodate an inefficient overemphasis on driving. The federal government, in this case, would have the responsibility of offsetting its own impacts.

Secondly, they only considered the geographic range of benefits, without considering the geographic range of costs. Air pollution drifts across state lines, all U.S. citizens share the costs of treating crash victims through insurance premiums and medicare/medicaid, and carbon emissions are global. There is certainly a federal interest in keeping these costs down.

The House bill is being sold as a further step toward devolution of federal control to the states, but no spatial evidence has been provided for why the current balance should be shifted in that direction. Scale changes over time. A small metropolitan area may have once had a transportation network that could easily be contained within a state boundary, but the emergence of megapolitan areas might necessitate passing government oversight up the ladder to some degree.

Fix it First

The lifetime costs of infrastructure should be accounted for in the original decision to build. In other words, maintenance takes precedence over new construction, and federal funding formulas ought to appropriately prioritize it. This is simply a manifestation of the broader principle: live within your means. Deferral of maintenance is exactly the same thing as taking on debt. The interest rate may start out low, but it is ratcheted upward exponentially by the bank of physics. And physics cannot be bailed out.

A 2011 Report by Smart Growth America showed that states spent 57% of their federal appropriations on building new roads, while simultaneously accruing a backlog of maintenance on existing bridges and highways. The same organization calls the House transportation bill, unlike its equivalent in the Senate, still short of the mark in resolving this.

Provide Accessibility over Mobility

It’s not about the journey; it’s about the destination. Most of us travel in order to achieve a purpose that has nothing to do with transportation: visit your parents for dinner, work at the office, see Yellowstone, deliver a package to a customer. The old paradigm of transportation planning held that maximizing mobility was the primary purpose of the system, and the metric of success was defined in terms of vehicle miles traveled. But mobility is just one means to an end. The ultimate goal of transportation is to empower humans to meet their own goals by connecting where they are with where they want to be.

The paradigm shift from mobility to accessibility brings multimodal travel options and the interconnections between transportation and land use into sharper focus.Todd Litman says:

"An efficient transport system is multi-modal, encouraging travelers to use each mode for what it does best: walking and cycling for short trips, ridesharing and public transport for travel on congested urban corridors, and automobile travel when it is truly most efficient overall, taking into account all impacts."

The House bill would maintain the current federal funding formulas that reward states for inducing more driving. State A with destinations spread out from each other would be considered more "successful" in providing mobility than State B with dense cores of activity, even if State B actually facilitates more connections between origins and destinations. State A would be apportioned more federal funds.

President Obama's Sustainable Communities Initiative has been a tentative first step toward this more rigorous and robust understanding of transportation. The House transportation bill does not attempt to build upon this discussion in any recognizable way.

Support Household Resilience

Even if the federal government does manage to balance its transportation budget, this achievement would matter little if it has the effect of pushing struggling American families further underwater. There is a broad moral consensus that each individual deserves the opportunity to better oneself through hard work and personal responsibility, but the reality is that holding a job and operating a household are preconditioned upon an affordable and reliable means for getting around.

Americans that live in a place with no options beside driving face constant pressure, what the New America Foundation refers to as the "Energy Trap."

"Every 25 cent jump in the price of gas siphons $90 million a day away from the recovering American economy. Because we have few choices but to commute to work in private cars, we are trapped by high gas prices.

The energy trap is particularly hard on American households. The average family of four making $50,000 a year spends nearly $8000 a year on their cars, maintenance, and fuel combined--more than they pay for taxes or medical care."

It's is important to note that a car-dependent system of transport not only restricts the 9.1% of American households without a vehicle available, but it squeezes those who are able to scramble together the funds to provide personal mobility. Families under pressure are less likely to take risks on their career, and may neglect other important elements of their budget. And one little leak in the hull, maybe a few more dollars at the pump or a "check engine" light, might just sink the ship.

Create jobs

We've come to expect politicians in recent years to tout the job creation potential of their proposals, so it's not surprising that the House transportation bill even includes the word "jobs" in its title. While the primary purpose of federal transportation may be to connect people with their destinations, the bill is also rightfully judged by how the planning, construction, and operation of the sector itself moves money through the economy.

In one sense, all government spending creates jobs (the money has to go somewhere, right?). But not all spending is equally constructive. An analysis of the funds spent on the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) showed that:

"For every billion dollars spent on public transportation projects, 16,419 job-months were created. A billion dollars spent on highway infrastructure projects created only 8,781 job-months."

This is because ARRA transit projects spent less on land acquisition and raw materials and more on hiring labor with a diverse skill set to operate and maintain the system. Another study came to the same conclusion, only adding that infrastructure for bicycling and pedestrians created even more jobs per dollar spent.

Americans are going to eventually grow tired of empty "jobs, jobs, jobs" platitudes. The operative question is how much stable job creation is generated per dollar spent.

Power

The cynic wonders whether any of this matters.

Any bill will result in winners and losers, at least in the short-term before private interests are able to adapt to new conditions. Many of the largest interests are vested in pushing the transportation system along it's current trajectory. The Center for Responsive Politics has tracked over $13.5 million in campaign donations from the oil and gas industry toward candidates in the 2012 election, almost 9-to-1 going to Republicans. Oil executives, who understand the concept of return on investment, will likely be pleased if they can manage to open up new supply fields, solidify their demand from a car-dependent American populace, and even get a new Keystone XL pipeline thrown in as a cherry on top.

Then there are the voters. Yonah Freemark has shown a strong correlation between density and political affiliation, with Republicans much more likely to live in more sparsely populated congressional districts than Democrats. Constituents who may be accustomed to driving are probably less likely to approve investing in alternatives than those who stand to benefit directly from them (full disclosure: I own a house next to a bus stop). Although there are two major caveats here: some suburbanites live in locations that could potentially become transit-oriented and walkable with further investment, and there are some rural and exurban denizens who like it that way and don't necessarily want to see a new highway drop a big box store in their backyard.

Transportation really should be a pragmatic political arena. There are no deep moral conflicts that transcend the purview of reasonable conversation. Democracy functions best when citizens are able to think carefully about the alternatives before them, and the wake up call from last week may be just in time.

Which is denser: New York or Los Angeles?

Your intuitions are correct. New Yorkers live in neighborhoods with much higher density than do Angelenos. But its not obvious how this conclusion is reached, and there's plenty of confusion going around about measuring density. Where you draw the lines on the map can have a significant impact on the results you get.

If you measure density purely regionally, Los Angeles comes out ahead. I've used the Census Bureau's MSA to show the two metro area's population densities in 2010. Sometimes the geography of Urbanized Area is used to capture the region, but that hasn't been determined for 2010 yet. So the MSA will do ...

However, this measurement misses the important story. As Ryan Avent explains,

"Simple population density measures the average density across a particular area. If you have a metro that covers a large area but which features a very dense core, however, you can easily have a situation in which the vast majority of the metro’s population lives at densities above the average population density. I think it’s more informative to focus on weighted-average population density."

  So here's the weighted-average density (by census tract) for the two metro areas:

New York metro goes from being about 30% behind LA in regional density to more than doubling LA in average neighborhood density.

If you were to drop from a parachute flying over the center of a city on a very windy day, the first regional density figure would tell you how many people to expect to see in the square mile around the random place in the region you land. However, if you currently live in the New York or Los Angeles metro areas (or are considering moving there), the latter figure would tell you how many people you would expect to see in the square mile around you. It's tethered to actual human experience, which is usually what we are asking about when we talk about density.

We now know more about the built environment and transportation

According to Reid Ewing and Robert Cervero, the most intensely researched topic in urban planning is "the potential to moderate travel demand by changing the built environment." Just within the last decade there have been dozens of published studies asking this question from many different angles, using different methodologies. So this dynamic academic duo has decided to do the rest of us a favor and consolidate these studies, pull out a common thread of measurement between them, and weigh the variables against each other. They did something like this in 2001 when there were 14 studies to look at. Now they've compiled results from more than 200 and included about 50 of these in their meta-analysis. I think it's fair to say this is the closest we've yet been to answering this complex question.

The study is published in the Summer 2010 Journal of the American Planning Association, and there are already a couple of nice discussions on the internet from Laurence Aurbach and Kaid Benfield. I have to say that one of the things I appreciate about the planning field is the real interaction between the academic world and practitioners. Working professionals and activists really do read this stuff, and most of the journals make every effort to eschew jargon and ask questions that have relevance.

Here are the land use variables that are traditionally considered in relation to travel behavior:

The D Variables	Summary Description
Density	Concentration of a variable of interest (population, dwelling units, activity centers etc.) per unit of area
Diversity	Number of different land uses in a given area.
Design	Quantifiable characteristics of the street network, such as density of intersections, connectivity, or streetscape features.
Destination Accessibility	Measures the ease of access to common trip destinations, usually in terms of distance
Distance to Transit	Shortest route along the street network to nearest train station or bus stop

The impact that each of these variables has on travel behavior, whether it's vehicle miles traveled or mode choice, is referred to as elasticity. It's "the percent change in the outcome variable [like vehicle miles traveled] when a specified independent variable [like density of dwelling units] increases by 1%."

There are two more D's mentioned that have little to do with the built environment. They are Demand Management and Demographics. Demand Management is mostly parking supply and pricing, but I imagine any economic factor could be considered under this category. Economic triggers factors can be considerable, especially if fuel prices are taken into account, but I understand how this is beyond the scope of what they are doing. Demographics are contolled for in all of the studies in the meta-analysis.

The following chart presents the findings in ranked order from the most significant factor to the least in achieving three outcomes. The variables are color-coded according to the categories defined above.

	Reduction in VMT	Increase in Walking	Increase in Transit Use
1	Distance to downtown	Intersection/street density	Distance to nearest transit
2	Job accessibility by auto	Distance to nearest store	% 4-way intersections
3	Intersection/street density	Jobs-housing balance	Intersection/street density
4	% 4-way Intersections	Land use mix	Land use mix
5	Land use mix	Job within one mile	Household/population density
6	Job accessibility by transit	Distance to nearest transit	Job density
7	Distance to nearest transit	Commercial floor to area ratio
8	Household/population density	Household/population density
9	Jobs-housing balance	Job density
10	Job density (no effect)	% 4-way Intersections (negative)

Some additional points ...

•  None of these variables are gamechangers, so don't be a physical determinist. Even the most significant factor, the effect of street density on walking, has .39 elasticity. This means a 10% increase in connectivity would lead to a 3.9% greater probability that someone will choose to walk. That being said, these figures are cumulative, so adding the effects together can make a notable difference. There are no solutions to anything, only means for incremental improvement.

• The findings seem to show that density itself is not as important as some make it out to be. As they put it, "almost any development in a central location is likely to generate less automobile travel than the best-designed, compact, mixed-use development in a remote location." Absolutely. Although I understand how, in the absence of coherent regional planning, an architect would want to do the best she can with the site she's given. Who knows, maybe in the future it will be the next "central location"? Still, even if it takes cleaning up a brownfield site or working delicately with the neighbors, infill seems to always be more effective.

• One of the limitations of elasticity is that it measures relative change only. You could be on the verge of a tipping point, and a tiny little nudge would lead to big outcomes, but these numbers would not tell you that. Can those tipping points be identified empirically and built into the same model?

• A big win for connectivity, which is great because this is something that can actually be done. Some cities and states are starting to write codes to ensure a robust street network in new developments. Even more important is retrofitting connections into existing networks. Hopefully these results will spur localities to look for those odd scraps of land and consider punching a street or multi-use trail through them. Although cycling was not considered in this analysis, I can attest from personal experience that street connectivity is the single most important factor for enhancing safety and convenience. Cyclists would much rather take an alternative back route than ride along a busy road with bike lanes.

Two responses to the terrorism question

Both the New York response and the Washington response to security threats just happen to be on display in the same week ...

The New York response to terrorism has been "see something, say something." These were the words that the T-shirt vendor who alerted a mounted police officer of the smoking SUV told reporters as he stepped into a taxi cab. As Fred Kaplan points out in Slate, this is not unlike the message of the great New Yorker Jane Jacobs.

"Jane Jacobs observed that sidewalks and their users are "active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism" (by "barbarism," she meant crime) and that a continuously busy sidewalk is a safe sidewalk, because those who have business there—"the natural proprietors of the street"—provide "eyes upon the street...

This may explain why busy areas like Times Square aren't attacked by terrorists more often. The crowds make them tempting targets: lots of people mean lots of potential victims and subsequent media attention. But those same crowds—especially the regulars, who are always looking out on the street—make an attack harder to conceal and, therefore, to pull off."

The Washington response is the opposite. It is to keep people out of sensitive areas entirely. This is what happened yesterday when the decision was made to close the front doors of the U.S. Supreme Court. Now the public will have to enter through a secured underground entrance to the side. Justices Breyer and Ginsburg were not amused.

"To many members of the public, this Court’s main entrance and front steps are not only a means to, but also a metaphor for, access to the Court itself.

This is why, even though visitors will remain able to leave via the front entrance, I find dispiriting the Court’s decision to refuse to permit the public to enter. I certainly recognize the concerns identified in the two security studies that led to this recent decision (which reaffirmed a decision made several years ago). But potential security threats will exist regardless of which entrance we use. And, in making this decision, it is important not to undervalue the symbolic and historic importance of allowing visitors to enter the Court after walking up Gilbert’s famed front steps."

I'm not trying to suggest that one is better than the other. How would I know? Times Square is a target because of its many people, and the Courthouse is a target because of its symbolism (and the Justices themselves). It makes sense that different questions would yield different answers.

What is centralized planning anyway?

Witold Rybczynski in his last Slate column critiques public-sector planning, specifically the Obama administration's Office of Urban Affairs:

"According to Carrión, smart planning involves a combination of walkable communities, mass transit, and bicycle paths, and who could argue with that, except that in the last 40 years, our faith in centralized city planning has changed radically. In short, we've lost it."

Planning as a discipline is used to shouldering frequent attacks from libertarians and property rights activists, but Rybczynski's voice resonates more loudly in these circles because of his noted career as an urbanist thinker. His book City Life was one the first I read and reviewed here. When he makes the claim that "a vision of the future city will best emerge from the marketplace," it does make you rethink the value of planning in general.

But this particular piece is fraught with confusion throughout, not, I assume, on the part of the writer but on how its provocative stance could easily be interpreted. He means something much more specific by the word "planning" than most people engaged in the art of planning cities mean by it.

My first instinct, whenever I hear the mention of centralized planning, is to ask: centralized to what? Are we talking about global domination or a neighborhood association cooperating on a shared playground? There's a wide breadth of levels of governance. Presenting the options as either centralized or decentralized with regards to all planning and development activities is not very helpful. The same goes for neatly dividing responsibility into either the public or private realm.

Bus Images used from DragoArt

The best planning policies follow the medieval principle of subsidiarity. The scale of the project matches the level of authority, or better yet the project is divided into levels of detail and passed along the chain of command. So, the federal government opens up some funds for a specific purpose, requiring a minimum eligibility criteria be met to receive them. They pass the program on to the states, who each hold a competitive grant competition among localities to disburse the funds. This is how lots of government programs currently work.

Adolfo Carrión seems to understand this process well, which makes him a strange target for Rybczynski's attack. In an interview, Carrión explains the purpose of the office,

"Our success will be that we encourage local communities to steer their way into the future in smarter ways, that local municipalities understand that they are part of a new complex of regional economies or metropolitan areas, and that they have shared destinies."

I don't see any muscular nationalism here at all, at least nothing reminiscent of the disastrous urban renewal days. All I see is a national interest in strong cities and the goal to help facilitate smart planning among communities.

"The purpose is to go and identify and amplify those creative solutions that communities have come up with."

Sounds more like a cheerleader than the quarterback. Characterizing this posture as too strong of a federal role is simply swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction.

Rob Goodspeed redirects Rybczynski's question in more fruitful direction,

"The more interesting and accurate conclusion to draw from the failures of modernist city planning is to consider which forms of government planning are still active and desirable. In this sense, Rybczynski’s article is a bit behind the times. The tremendous interest in high speed rail, urban transit, green building codes, the government’s role in wind power and broadband, and housing finance regulation has reminded us of the central role of government in shaping our cities."

Review of Foreclosing the Dream

There may been no shortage of monday morning quarterbacking over the housing crash, but University of Virginia planning professor Bill Lucy sits in a unique position to offer a more comprehensive analysis of how the recession may be reshaping our communities. Having studied for over thirty years the spatial ebbs and flows of the housing market, and publishing in 2006 with colleague David Phillips Tomorrow's Cities, Tomorrow's Suburbs, he is prepared to fit this event into the longer view and wider frame of the contemporary situation. His recently released book Foreclosing the Dream tells this story.

Last week's numbers from the National Association of Realtors reveal that home values have turned downward again, dampening hopes that the economy may be out of the woods. We've already heard all of the blame being poured onto predatory lenders, credulous homebuyers, negligent oversight agencies, and maybe a corrupt politician or two, but we're left with the feeling that there must be some deeper undercurrent to all of this. Do we really think a few tweaks in the financial system and legal structure will patch things up for good? Bill Lucy suggests that the "American Dream" itself, or at least how it's currently visualized, will have to be adjusted to thrive in a new economy.

"We are at the threshold of some sort of reversal," Lucy writes.

There's evidence of a reversal of the conventional flight to the suburbs, according to a variety of indicators.

1. Studying the spatial distribution of foreclosures in the 35 most populous metro areas, Lucy found that many of the farthest flung exurbs were hit the hardest. Of course, every city is different and foreclosures were very clustered in certain geographic areas (Nevada, California, Florida). Some inner cities like Cleveland and Detroit were hit hard, but cities such as San Francisco and Washington DC show a clear spectrum of foreclosures emanating outward. More often than not, this is the evident pattern.


2. Sale prices have confirmed a similar pattern in many cities. Washington DC saw an 8 percent increase in home values between 2007 and 2008, while exurban Loudoun County homes lost 17 percent of value. (The difference in sale prices in the DC metro have stabilized slightly in the last year, but that could just be a blip when viewed in context.)


3. For the last couple of decades, the age-old formula of "trickle down housing" has seen a new twist. It used to be the case that homes had their highest value when they were new, and the value dropped through time as they aged. Since the 1990's, this pattern is still the case with the exception of the oldest bracket - homes built before 1940. These are valued, on average, more highly than the newer houses built in the 50's and 60's. Apparently, their location in predominantly walkable neighborhoods closer to an urban center overcomes their age disamenity.


4. The gas price spike of 2008 alerted many homeowners to the volatility of living in a high-mobility environment. Prices may have dropped since, but there is more awareness now of the fixed costs of transportation associated with a particular housing choice.


5. Demographics nationwide are moving toward more households that are elderly, emptynesters, and singles. These are all cohorts that tend to favor urban or inner suburban settings. Perceptions of school quality and safety continue to make suburbs attractive to families of all races, but this may be changing in some places. The Lower Manhattan School Board recently ran into trouble when they grossly underestimated the number of children that would be enrolled in public schools.

However, there are strong entrenched interests that push back against this changing market (and the interests of the planet):

Local governments in metro areas are fragmented, more suitable for the much smaller population centers they once were, and they tend use zoning to protect their tax bases by pushing residential growth to the edges. The federal government has been slow to move away from the preference for highway funding over other transportation options. Many homeowners still don't want density for other people near their own home, and they rally against it. Some developers and corporations have hefty financial interests tied up with continued outward expansion. For these reasons and more, there's considerable friction involved in moving toward a more sustainable urban future.

Yet against all of these forces, it seems to be happening anyway in many cities.

The thesis of this book received some confirmation this January with an EPA study of building permit distribution over that last few decades:

"The permit data showed that, in several regions, there has been a dramatic increase in the share of new construction built in central cities and older suburbs."

Even throughout the housing crisis, many multifamily developments in denser areas remained stable. Urban development was particularly strong in major global cities and medium-sized cities known for smart growth policies. The study sounds a lot like Foreclosing the Dream. They call it a "fundamental shift."

Affordable living data released for 337 metro areas

The Center for Neighborhood Technology has been working on a Housing + Transportation Affordability Index for at least five years. Census block by census block, the index evaluates the cost burden, relative to area incomes, for housing and transportation on the average family living there. They released a pilot project for the Minneapolis-Saint Paul region in 2006, then expanded the analysis to major metro areas all around the country.

The index has made a big splash. It has been used to inform mortgage underwriting practices as well as regional housing public policy. Today they release data for a broader range of metropolitan areas, including the Charlottesville MSA. The newer website also allows users to break all of the data down into owners costs and renters costs, different income classes, greenhouse gas emissions, and a variety of other factors.

Screenshot from CNT Housing + Transportation Affordability Index for Charlottesville region

Andres Duany made the following point about affordable housing ten years ago,

"Affordable housing must be provided in a form and a place that allow for affordable living, even if it comes at a greater cost. Although land may be cheaper on the urban fringe, that location fails to provide residents with easy access to jobs and services."

Working toward the availability of truly affordable living requires a coordinated effort between the various spheres that make demands on the family budget, housing and transportation being the two largest. For too long the affordability goal has been set strictly at spending no more than 30% of income on housing, a rule of thumb based not on data but on convention. (It's also migrated upward over time. No more than 25% used to be advised.)

The trouble is that the old measurement leads to a systematic bias in favor of a low-cost housing/high-cost transportation arrangement, what is known in the real estate business as "drive until you qualify." If you can't afford a home closer to jobs and services, just head outward toward the urban fringe where land costs are cheaper. Or from a policy perspective, outer suburban jurisdictions appear to be performing better on affordability goals because, strictly speaking, housing costs are relatively in line with area incomes.

In reality, transportation costs are not only substantial, about 18% of expenditures, but they are volatile and tied directly to housing choices. One gas price spike can squeeze a budget to the breaking point, and families can only cut back so much with a lifestyle tweak if they've chosen an inaccessible home location.

If housing costs are the only measurement we have to work with, it makes some sense to run with it as a rough estimation of affordability. That's why these CNT numbers are so important. Maybe some day we'll see this model shimmy its way upward into the Census Bureau or coordinated federal agencies and built into policy, like the current convention is. The State of Illinois just adopted the H+T index as a benchmark for their own agencies. The affordability index will become that much more robust and accurate to a finer grain as it evolves.

... then maybe we could start talking about incorporating affordable food access (12% of the budget) into it.

Update: Elana Schor provides a nice outline of how this index is already being used at the federal level.

LaHood announces a "sea change" at the DOT

DOT Secretary Ray LaHood stood on top of a table to address the National Bicycle Summit last week, but he waited until a few days later to reveal on his blog a new federal approach in transportation priorities:

"Today, I want to announce a sea change. People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized.

We are integrating the needs of bicyclists in federally-funded road projects. We are discouraging transportation investments that negatively affect cyclists and pedestrians. And we are encouraging investments that go beyond the minimum requirements and provide facilities for bicyclists and pedestrians of all ages and abilities."

League of American Bicyclists says,

"It is simply the strongest statement of support for prioritizing bicycling and walking ever to come from a sitting secretary of transportation."

I imagine that LaHood enjoyed a little reprieve from press conferences on spontaneously accelerating vehicles. This announcement comes a few days after new numbers were released showing another drop in highway traffic fatalities for 2009, partially attributed to Americans' decisions to drive less. Transitions seem to be happening on a number of levels.

The new policy is available on the FHWA website, and they encourage state and local agencies to adopt a similar statement.

From hope to choice in federal housing

Boston's Maverick Gardens HOPE VI development. flickr: Urban Mechanic

The back incorporates defensible space principles. flickr: Urban Mechanic

Chicago's Henry Horner housing projects before demolition. source: Calthorpe Associates

It's HOPE VI redevelopment by Calthorpe Associates. source: Calthorpe Associates

Back in July of 2009, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan announced the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, which the Obama administration considers the next stage after HOPE VI in the evolution of public housing rehabilitation. Much like the Sustainable Communities program that has been generating lots of positive press, Choice Neighborhoods is intended to create a bridge across federal agencies that had previously been rather insulated - this time also drawing the Department of Education into cooperation with the housing administration. To cite the language of the draft bill itself, the purpose is to:

"transform neighborhoods of extreme poverty into sustainable, mixed-income neighborhoods with access to economic opportunities by revitalizing severely distressed housing, and investing and leveraging investments in well-functioning services, educational opportunities, public assets, public transportation, and improved access to jobs."

That's ambitious. The president is asking for $250 million this year for Choice Neighborhoods, in addition to the $65 million that Congress allocated last year. All of this before the actual details of the grants program have been hammered out and passed through the necessary committees. Housing advocates are waiting in anticipation.

When HOPE VI was launched in 1992, the primary purpose was to integrate households of various income levels into one neighborhood, and from an urban design standpoint alone it represented a major paradigm shift in policy. Most conventional public housing had been notoriously unlikable. Modernist architects, unable to attract willing residents to living in Le Corbusier's vision of towers in the park, were allowed to experiment with people who had no other choice. Streets were demapped into superblocks and abundant common spaces attracted vandalism and crime. Even the Garden-style varieties almost universally turned inward as fortresses on the urban landscape. Without tying into their surroundings, they had a deadening effect on the neighborhood. As Jane Jacobs noted, it wasn't long before there was little adjacent urban fabric left for them to relate to.

To be fair, the lack of resources allocated to design was probably the greater problem. Back to the Housing Act of 1937, Congress put tight limits on per-unit budgets. What seemed to be a financially prudent move ended up being anything but, as the projects decimated property values of everything around them. In Secretary Donovan's words, they become "warehouses for the poor." The median income of residents dropped from 57% of the national median in 1950 to 20% by the time HOPE VI was announced. It was obvious that something had to be done.

Almost two decades into HOPE VI, most evaluations of its success have been positive. Fiscally speaking, it has leveraged about twice as much private investment as it spent. The innovative Main Street branch allows smaller towns to tie affordable housing into downtown revitalization. Most importantly, HOPE VI neighborhoods have shown a successful record in attracting middle-income residents, and evidence shows measurable improvements in the workforce participation and earnings of the original residents and surrounding neighbors. Less tangibly, the face of public housing has changed for the better. In a Brookings report:

"Soviet-style subsidized apartment blocks have been replaced by walkable, diverse, livable communities. Public housing that isolated the poorest of the poor has given way to places where low-wage workers and families transitioning off welfare literally live next door to teachers, police officers, and other professionals."

The Housing Choice Initiative, as it's currently being presented, takes HOPE VI and expands it in at least three ways:

1. HOPE VI was focused entirely on severely distressed public housing, but Choice Neighborhoods seeks to "broaden the scope of the program for broader impact" beyond public housing.
2. Education reform, and early childhood education in particular, are being incorporated into the program.
3. There is an explicit requirement for one-to-one replacement of existing subsidized housing stock. This addresses one salient criticism of HOPE VI, that it resulted in a net loss of subsidized units. (This is a fair point, but the loss in occupied units has been smaller. About a third of the severely distressed housing units were vacant.)
   

As of now, the expanded scope of the program has not been matched by an expanded budget request. HOPE VI began in the 90's with a $300 to $500 million a year and climbed steadily into the latter years of the decade. If Obama gets what he wants, Choice Neighborhoods will start off with approximately half of this.

In the competition for design ideas, there is no doubt that healthy urbanism has won the day through the HOPE VI program, and it will likely translate seamlessly into the next phase of federal housing policy - however it's finally arranged.

Some limits to emergence (or why planners are still needed)

The continued maturation of the internet, from a select set of information-providers to a huge crowd of users who create our own content, has been a defining shift for my generation (well, at least for some of us). We have some real examples of how collective efforts of informally organized actors have successfully developed into highly sophisticated systems. The crown jewel of this era is probably Wikipedia's decisive win over Encyclopedia Britannica. Hundreds of thousands of mostly-benevolent volunteers have incrementally grown a body of knowledge from the bottom up that surpasses in breadth and depth the prevailing institution of experts operating from the top down. This is an amazing feat, and it keeps growing.

Many have made the conceptual connection from this online paradigm shift to the physical world of cities. Steven Johnson's 2002 book Emergence: the Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software has been highly influential in this regard. The concept of the emergence of urban complexity, whether of medieval cities filled with meandering donkey paths or of the slums of Mumbai, has reverberated throughout social media and academia ever since. Australian Dan Hill's recent article on Emergent Urbanism flirts with the idea of the unplanned city:

"One might even argue for the removal of all planning guidelines and structures. After all, most of the world’s great cities are not the product of planning, no matter how enlightened. Certainly some have been well-formed by benevolent dictators or patrons, yet their personality has come from the slow accretion of individual citizens adopting and adapting those spaces, like ficus thriving on béton brut monuments."

I'm fairly sympathetic to these ideas, and I certainly recognize that the self-organizing potential of cities goes back to Jane Jacob's organic metaphors (the last chapter of Death and Life) and certainly well before this. Still - and maybe this is just my personality - I want to reach for the brakes just as the concept reaches a level of exuberance. Pure self-organization can be taken too far.

Equating the bottom-up potential of online networks with the human construction of the physical space of cities has some deficiencies that should be recognized before deciding on a balance between fixed structure and fluid evolution:

1. The internet does actually need a foundational structure to function. Online networks are both dependent upon and shaped by multiple layers of structure that are, at least to some degree, fixed and imposed "from above." There is the hardware of computers. There is the fundamental software (operating systems, programming languages) and the web-based platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Youtube). From the perspective of the end users, it appears as if the operative force is each of us collectively shaping the complexity of networks through individualized actions. But this is only because the underlying structure is much less visible than its surface level expressions. In reality, they both work together.
   
   To follow the analogy, cities would be formed by a similar wedding cake of authority, ranging from a federal government defining loose contours, to local governments refining them, and to individual actors painting within the lines. The relative weights given to each layer will perpetually be debated, but this seems to be how decisions that affect the public realm are actually made. This is planning, as far as I understand it.
   


2. Unlike the internet, physical space is made up of fixed relationships. Our only experience of physical space is through an embodiment in a particular place at a particular time, and movement through space requires energy. Therefore, individual places are fundamentally and immutably connected to each other in a way that nodes on a online network are not. An adjoining website cannot block your sun, cut off your access, influence your property values, pollute your air. You do not have to see, smell, hear the adjoining website unless you choose to. Of course, there is no such thing as an adjoining website. The relationships of an online network are completely voluntary and malleable almost instantly. This is not the case with land.


3. Land is more limited than online real estate. During the era of manifest destiny in United States history, it appeared as if the western frontier was a limitless expanse of land ready to be formed by European settlement. We eventually ran into some hard limits of productive land and natural resources, hence the birth of the modern environmental movement. Although there are technically limits to the capacity of the internet, it is still in the stage of apparent limitless expansion. The emergence of online networks does not necessarily teach us lessons about how to arrange complexity within constrained space.


4. Modern land development happens at a scale and with an irreversible impact that is not necessarily conducive to incremental change. Wikipedia has emerged through the collective action of millions of tiny additions and alterations from thousands of actors, each operating with the benefit of instant feedback from prior changes. The economies of scale and financial structures of modernity compel most development to happen in large chunks: mega-projects, entire subdivisions, shopping malls. Raymond Unwin, back in 1909, noted that this distinction is what makes modern development different than the fabled medieval organic models of growth:

"The very rapidity of the growth of modern towns demands special treatment. The wholesale character of their extension almost precludes the possibility of our attaining that appearance of natural growth which we have admired in the medieval town, where additions were made so gradually that each house was adapted to its place, and assimilated into the whole before the next was added. We already see in the modern suburb too much evidence of what is likely to result from any haphazard system of development. Modern conditions require, undoubtedly, that the new districts of our towns should be built according to a definite plan"

5. Although it seems counter-intuitive, emergent systems online depend upon a civic bargain and mechanisms for self enforcement of these rules. Clay Shirky explains how this works for Wikipedia:
   

   "The basic bargain of a wiki means that people who care that the site not be used for pranks have the edge, because it takes far longer to write a fake entry than to fix it."

   So even the anonymous mobs of the internet have a code of conduct, a shared sense of mission, and a means for enforcing it. Those who construct physical space may have been governed by a similar set of purely social moral suasion at one time, but the scale of modernity once again seems to require a more rigid set of laws to protect the common good. Spiro Kostoff on this point:

   "The structure of city-from - the integration of uses, the concatenation of passages and nodal points - could possess the sort of coherence demonstrated by Old Dehli, and this is in the absence of municipal authority to police and an articulate public space, only because the social structure was well formulated, and tradition stood as the guarantor of a consistent modus operandi. Without the force of tradition and a consolidated social agenda, unsupervised city-making will succumb to disorder."
   

An historic day for Broadway

New York City mayor Bloomberg has announced yesterday that the Broadway public space experiment through Times Square and Herald Square will, after an eight month trial period, be made permanent. From the press conference:

"I think the issue is, are the roads for multiple uses – everybody, pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorists – or are they just for motorists? And in this day and age, if you go around the world, all the other great cities have already tried to reduce the number of cars on their streets and convert some of the open spaces into space for other people."

Janette Sadik-khan, the city DOT commissioner, expressed the intent to "transform the plazas into iconic spaces worthy of their iconic setting."

To show how historic this decision is, I've dug up a couple of Times Square illustrations from previous decades. The first drawing of Times Square is from the the 1974 book Pedestrian Revolution. The source is not cited, so I assume it is the vision of authors:




This 1981 drawing of Times Square is from NY Office of Midtown Planning:



Finally, the illustration released by NY DOT last year:

Shifting the equation of local competition

The New York Times has asked a number of observers to weigh in on the declining national mobility rates. Americans have gradually been moving less for the last two decades, and the rate has taken a precipitous decline in the face of our current recession. Formerly attractive states like Florida are actually losing population. It's interesting to speculate over why this is happening, but what's more interesting to me is how this change may play out in the local planning of communities.

It was fitting that Richard Florida had been invited to contribute, because in many ways his trademark prescriptions for regional economic development are founded upon high mobility. The title of his latest book is "Who's your City?" after all.

In the book, Cultural Creatives are presented with the option to choose a city based on an assessment of the amenities available before moving, and then seek a job and relationships in the location. On the other side of the ledger, localities naturally need to respond by enhancing the kinds of amenities the Creative Class wants in order to attract them. What all of this presumes is not only mobility, but the kind of mobility that is not locked into the best paying, available job (or prior relationship commitments). If these underlying conditions seem to be in question now, do we have to rethink this entire regime of metro competition?

Many have criticized the simplistic formula I've described as over-selling the case for adding some nice amenities to attract the right people, and Florida is presented as a one-show huckster dupping cities into these dubious investments. For better or worse, he has been publicly aligned with his trademark idea, which is usually what happens. However, in this case, Florida does seem to get this trend and is adapting his message to it:

"One consequence of this is a new kind of class divide in America between the “mobile” who have the resources and flexibility to pursue economic opportunity and the “stuck” who are tied to places with weaker economies or where their personal economic prospects are more limited."

Also:

"There is also a group I term the “rooted” — more advantaged individuals and families who choose to forgo economic mobility and reap the benefits of remaining close to family, friends, and community."

One advantage of "rootedness" is that residents who stay in a place longer can build stronger ties with a community. Crime goes down, as neighbors become "eyes on the street" for each other (crime rates have, in fact, been down across the country). And families tend to stay together (national divorce rates are also down). Local government participation goes up.

I don't know if this will change what kind of infrastructure cities choose to invest in, but it could certainly change their reasoning for doing so. Instead of building, say, a bike lane to woo a hypothetical young biotech engineer, they may build the bike lane because a bunch of active residents have asked for a bike lane. Cities may become diverse from each other, not because of marketing strategies to adopt a niche brand of local "authenticity," but because of a genuinely unique culture that swells up from the people who live there.

Miami 21 set to shape the city's future

View from Condo in the Brickell Neighborhood

I've spent the last week staying in downtown Miami and poking around the city. Miami has been in the national spotlight recently because of the the October adoption of the Miami 21 zoning code. After five years of public meetings, the City Council approved a new form-based code that encourages a walkable streetscape to replace the old system that strictly separated uses. Miami is the first big city in the U.S. to make this shift, but Denver and a few others are following closely behind.

Anthony Flint praised the Miami 21 code in the Boston Globe as a "blueprint for sustainable urban form," and many others in the planning community have expressed enthusiastic approval. Last spring, the U.S. Conference of Mayors presented Manny Diaz with an architectural award for Miami 21. Of course, certain elements have been watered down from the original intentions of DPZ, the planning firm leading the rewrite, especially the crucial issue of minimum parking standards around transit stops. However, most of the commenters I've come across think it's a step forward. Even the folks over at New Geography gave some words of approval, albeit couched in skepticism over its implementation.

"New Urbanism won this victory because there weren’t any compelling counter-arguments to their basic argument for urban hygiene. And Miami 21 comes at a time when the city has been egregiously abused at the hands of the free market; its citizens disenfranchised and suffering from an environment of ugliness, traffic and congestion."

Calle Ocho, the Main Street of Little Havana

Not surprisingly, the local reception has been more controversial. Neighborhood groups wanted less intensity, and developers wanted more intensity. Both claim to have been left out of the process. The local AIA chapter opposed the code, claiming it would stifle creativity and put a damper on "world class architecture." This makes a certain degree of sense considering that some mainstream architects have been among the most vocal critics of New Urbanism over the years. Supporters of Miami 21 thought the controversy had been successfuly navigated until the new mayor, who had been the sole opposing vote on Council, was able to pass a 3-month extension on the start date. The can of worms may be opened back up again.

My limited experience with walking around some neighborhoods of Miami revealed to me the need for such a code. The demand for walkable urban living was clearly evident in the recent condo boom, which still clearly has to grow into itself for a few more years. The Brickell neighborhood went from being mostly a financial district to housing over 17,000 people. Local bloggers tell of the dangers of walking in a city oriented around the automobile, but many are trying nonetheless.

The ground-floor urban fabric and pedestrian experience has yet to catch up to this market demand. It's interesting that the public focus during the Miami 21 seems to be mostly about building height restrictions, while the meat of the code deals with what happens on the street level. Some transit is in place, but many of the stops are fronted with empty lots, parking garages with no liner buildings, or stark office towers with little street presence. There seems to be very few mid-rise areas. The downtown is filled with tall buildings that abruptly transition into single-story dwellings throughout the rest of the city.

Whenever the next building boom kicks back in, the City of Miami should be well prepared to shape the new growth into a sustainable and attractive form. And the rest of us have an opportunity to see how it all takes shape.

Public space doesn't matter until it matters

From the Greek Agora to the New England town hall, the public square has always been the place where urban society hashes out its politics and culture. Over the last several decades, the physical public spaces have gradually been chipped away and privatized. The quintessential Main Street has largely been replaced by the indoor mall, and then the lifestyle center. Panera bread and Starbucks have become the primary gathering places of community. The streets are no longer the place to hear and be heard.

There's nothing wrong with Starbucks or commercial establishments in general, but what happens to the activities that get in the way of commerce - the political expression, art and music, religious proclamation, soapbox speeches, private solicitations - all of the messy diversity inherent to democracy? As public as our new third places may feel, they still maintain the legal right to exclusion.

Two unrelated controversies from the Charlottesville area highlight the abiding need for enough truly public spaces in our communities.

The first case is a clash between the ideals of free speech and private property. The congressional representative for Virginia's 5th district, democrat Tom Perriello, has an office near the downtown of Charlottesville. On several occasions, large groups of protesters (yes, tea party) have stood outside his office to make themselves heard. However, since the parking lot is technically private property, and nearby businesses have been impacted by the crowds, the protesters are being required by the landowner to stand 100 feet from the office on the public sidewalk. They have been threatened with a trespassing violation.

The Rutherford Institute, a national civil liberties advocacy group, has publicly asked Perriello to move to a place where he can be petitioned more easily. Founder John W. Whitehead wrote in a letter:

"Unfortunately, it is your choice of office location that has hindered the ability of citizens to effectively communicate concerning issues of the utmost importance to you, Congress and the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia."

Local conservative talk show host Rob Schilling asks for the same thing:

"will the Congressman relocate his office to a “public” site so as not to abridge his constituents’ access to him and his staff?"

But where might this "public" place be?

The second story is less thorny legally, but still important. As we all know, the Salvation Army has a tradition of soliciting for the poor during the holiday season outside of shopping centers. What we tend to forget is that this all happens under the good graces of the property owners of the shopping centers. A few stores in the Charlottesville area have begun to bar the bell-ringers from their property, under the grounds that it disturbs their customers. The space along the walkways that has appeared public all along suddenly becomes obviously not. The local Salvation Army has claimed to take a $22,000 hit as a result.

Charlottesville actually fares better than most places in it's vital public spaces. The car-free downtown mall hosts every variety of speech or musical talent year round and even reserves a special wall to encourage political expression. And, health care debates aside, this era in our country does not happen to be one of extraordinary political tumult. If some people in contemporary Charlottesville are even struggling to be heard, what does it mean for those towns and cities that have long since sold off and moved away from their only public squares.

Eminent domain and the scale of development

The incredibly thorny legal issue of Fifth Amendment takings is back in the spotlight. The U.S. Supreme Court is mulling over the value of beachfront property in Florida, and another very different takings case was decided by a New York appeals court against Columbia University. The University wanted to use eminent domain to acquire a few hold-out properties that were in the way of a campus expansion. The court had a problem with the procedure used to determine that the neighborhood was blighted, and thus struck down the prior condemnation of the properties.

Legal questions aside, David Sucher, of City Comforts Blog, has a fascinating response to the Columbia "loss." He's not so sure it's a loss:

"There is an urban design element to this issue which should not be ignored. All that happens (if this decision is upheld) is that Columbia may not be able to build a "campus." It can certainly build on the rest of the land it has already purchased, (much of it however I assume under threat of condemnation which may be a biter pill for those who sold "voluntarily.") It could build on those parcels as if it was just any other property owner.

Yes, the overall feel would not be of a traditional isolated walled tree-shaded “campus.” It would be much more urban with non-university buildings along the current street grid etc etc. Columbia's building would be interspersed with non-univeristy structures. In fact if the City were smart it would require Columbia to build mixed-use structures so that in appropriate locations there would be commercial uses along the street and Columbia's buildings would be integrated into the neighborhood. That should have been the style of development from the start; there would have been no eminent domain dispute and it have been a much better and safer (in many ways) urban design solution.

Unfortunately most institutional developers think in terms of a nice clean tabula rasa campus and not how the space they need can fit with an existing city. That’s a pity.

In this case Columbia is held hostage to its view that the way to satisfy its space needs (which I do not dispute) is in the form of a “campus” which reads as separate from the surrounding neighborhood. If Columbia could get rid of that antiquated notion it could be under construction immediately as it owns a great deal of land.

Here is another way to look at it: do you want Columbia’s expansion to feel like a Robert Moses “campus?” or a Jane Jacobs “neighborhood?"

Last month the City of New London, Connecticut experienced one of the liabilities of an all-or-nothing urban renewal approach. As an economic development strategy, 8-years ago the city courted the Pfizer Corporation with a brand new office park and plans for surrounding hotels and condominiums. Now the Pfizer Corporation is pulling out and leaving behind the shell of an office park and the still undeveloped land around it. The use of eminent domain from the outset launched the City into the landmark Kelo v. New London Supreme Court case. And they won. Or did they?

The problem with large-scale "tabula rasa" development is that it lacks resilience. One piece falls out and it all comes crashing down. How many communities have bent over backwards for a huge-footprint Walmart or Target, only to be left with the discarded carcass of a building a decade later? Building the kind of neighborhood Sucher is talking about may be a more complicated investment, one not well supported by government policies or the structure of financial institutions, but the long-term payback makes it worth it.