Rebuilding Place in the Urban Space

"A community’s physical form, rather than its land uses, is its most intrinsic and enduring characteristic." [Katz, EPA] This blog focuses on place and placemaking and all that makes it work--historic preservation, urban design, transportation, asset-based community development, arts & cultural development, commercial district revitalization, tourism & destination development, and quality of life advocacy--along with doses of civic engagement and good governance watchdogging.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Shaw Metrorail Station entrance on the 700 block of R Street NW is an illustration of the opportunity to develop housing above certain stations

Shaw Metrorail Station entrance on the 700 block of R Street NW is an illustration of the opportunity to develop housing above certain stations

It's not Hong Kong and their MTR system which is known for integrating large scale real estate development into their business model, but in the city and certain other locations, there are opportunities for development above Metrorail station entrances that would add a bit of money to the revenue stream for the Metrorail system as well as more housing to the city.

More housing, eventually, results in lower housing prices, and in the meantime residents spend money in their neighborhood, contribute to the social and civic life of the city, and generate income and sales taxes, while rental property generates property and income taxes on the part of businesses.

While I just revisited the Hong Kong story, this post from 2014 is better.

-- "The success of Hong Kong Transit as "the exception" that proves the rule," 2014

From the piece:

Transit's success in Hong Kong is the result of having (1) a densely populated place; (2) constrained by geography, making automobility and sprawl difficult; (3) "mixed land uses" rather than separation; (4) tight links between transportation planning and land use planning; and (5) a commitment to building and extending a multi-modal transit system to simplify mobility.

... Transit failure isn't hard to figure out. Deconcentration of land use, population, and employment centers with a focus on separating uses are all of the conditions that militate against successful transit. That's why Hong Kong is a good example for us.

Of course, New York City is an exception to the post-WWII general trend of US transit failure, which proves the rule about concentration, mixed use, and transit.

WRT NYC, the book Green Metropolis provides a good overview of the environmental advantages that are derived from these characteristics. New York City is the "greenest" city in the US in terms of lowest per capita energy use, lowest car ownership, lowest use of gasoline, lowest GHG per capita, lowest waste production per capita, etc.

DC's transit success is based on job concentration at the core. That transit does reasonably well in DC in a land use paradigm that still preferences automobility comes down to three things (1) concentration of jobs at the core, required by law (federal agencies); (2) the federal transit benefit which pays for a goodly portion of getting to work for many people; and (3) the proximity of DC residential districts comprised of attractive historic building stock to the employment centers in the core, which has allowed much of DC to revitalize [and intensify, relatively speaking] despite sprawl.

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7 Comments:

At 8:49 PM, Anonymous Alex B. said...

There are some practical concerns with building over a Metro entrance like this. It's not cheap to do at all. Meaning you need very high value uses (probably office) to make it worthwhile. You also need the rest of a site, since the Metro station takes away your ground plane.

If you look at a lot of the existing in-building entrances, they were often built in the same era as the surrounding building (L'Enfant Plaza, Farragut North, etc). Metro had some success in inserting entrances into historic buildings (Farragut West, McPherson Sq, Federal Triangle).

Look at 55 M St SE, Above Navy Yard. There's a huge truss there, required to carry the building load over the station entrance and escalator shaft. That kind of structure isn't cheap, and requires a lot of value to make it work. And in that case, they were making major modifications to the entrance anyway to support baseball crowds.

Contrast that to 7th and H in Chinatown, where they built a structure above, but clearly did not maximize height above the entrance itself because of the structural challenges therein.

It's notable that the other entrance to Shaw avoided building over the entrance, likely because they couldn't make it pencil out.

All of that is to say: it's not easy to make it pencil out.

 
At 11:58 PM, Anonymous h st ll said...

https://seekingalpha.com/news/3445847-jpmorgan-pay-nyc-transit-improvements#email_link

JP Morgan to pay for station improvements in NYC

Also, any discussion of transit success elsewhere w/o mentioning the complete ineptness of construction and operations in the US is misleading.

 
At 10:52 AM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

1. Alex B., thanks for these points. This Shaw entrance probably isn't a good example, because it's small.

The other one, on 7th Street, with the building around it, is better. Same with the building on U Street around the station there.

Not being an engineer type, would this be "easier" to do if the stations were constructed in particular ways to better accommodate building above?

2. h st ll -- sure, but I don't think construction is uniquely inept here wrt transit. The problem is that the project cost tends to be underestimated deliberately for political reasons and then goes up later.

But NYC is a special case. Larry Littlefield (Saying the Unsaid blog) argues that the high costs of construction in NYC besides union featherbedding (as disclosed in a big NYT piece) is that this is to provide indirect funding of the otherwise historically under-funded construction union pension funds.

But I don't think WMATA messed up on the "construction" of Metro system.

On not maintaining it, sure. And that was a political decision. I remember articles in the Post in the early 1990s about the planners saying that as the system aged they'd need more money for refurbishment, and that money wasn't provided, until the system was past the point of needing maintenance.

Are there negative reports on the construction of the system in LA, now that you are there?

In December, I rode the Expo Line to Santa Monica and back and I was impressed with the number of riders.

I like Metrolink too.

 
At 11:28 AM, Anonymous charlie said...

Almost as if we need more restrictive zoning to drive up land prices to the point where it makes sense to build up and more expensive.

The "other" Shaw entrance is progression place, roadside was being very cheap when they built it. Partly timing (2009?) partly financing (they got a deal because UNCF was a tenant) and partly because they are cheap.

 
At 8:49 PM, Anonymous Alex B. said...

The short answer is yes, it is a lot easier if the entrance is built with the expectation of construction above.

At Navy Yard, you can see the giant truss and large columns required to carry the building load above a vent shaft and the escalator hoist way. That allowed them to build a full height building above that land, but that requires a lot of engineering.

And then there’s the issue of maintaining access during construction.

 
At 2:05 PM, Blogger Richard Layman said...

charlie -- cf. "decking" over freeways and railyards...

Alex B. -- thanks as always. Although with station entrances, as long as they are multiple, you can just close one. It's inconvenient sure, but it happens elsewhere.

 
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