Agenda Item: URBANIZED at Space Gallery

Showing tomorrow at Space Gallery:

Urbanized (the third part of Gary Hustwit’s design film trilogy, joining Helvetica and Objectified) is a feature-length documentary about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban design and features some of the world’s foremost architects, planners, policymakers, builders, and thinkers.

Over half the world’s population now lives in an urban area, and 75% will call a city home by 2050. But while some cities are experiencing explosive growth, others are shrinking. The challenges of balancing housing, mobility, public space, civic engagement, economic development, and environmental policy are fast becoming universal concerns. Yet much of the dialogue on these issues is disconnected from the public domain.

Followed by Q&A with Noah Chasin, Assistant Professor at Bard College and Mitchell Rasor of MRLD Landscape Architecture + Design.

Doors at 7 pm, film starts at 7:30. See you there.

Portland's Smart-Growth Housing Plan: 10 Year Progress Report

Ten years ago, the City of Portland drafted a new Housing Plan. Recognizing that housing prices were rising out of control and that it was becoming increasingly hard to find a place to live here, the city set out to find ways to increase the number of homes and apartments available here.

The city's housing plan is a crucial smart growth strategy for the entire Greater Portland region. Sprawl isn't merely the fault of outlying rural communities. If people are going to be able to live near the places where they work, drive less, and promote local small businesses in walkable neighborhoods, then the City of Portland absolutely needs to provide more housing opportunities in town. Otherwise, households will be forced by basic financial necessity to find affordable housing elsewhere.

So, after ten years, how are we doing? Not so well, as I outline in my column this week in the Portland Daily Sun. In spite of some minor regulatory improvements, the vast majority of the county's new housing is still being built outside of the city limits, in outlying communities. That means more traffic on local streets, more money being spent on foreign oil, fewer customers for local small businesses, and more regional vulnerability to volatile housing markets.

In this blog post, I'll go into some more detail, looking at three specific Housing Plan goals and how we've so far failed to meet them.

Goal: Encourage growth in Portland; target Portland to achieve and maintain a 25% share of Cumberland County's population.

Reality: In 1960, before urban renewal laid waste to our downtown, 40% of Cumberland County residents lived in the City of Portland. In the 2000 Census, 24.2% of the County's population lived in Portland. By the 2010 Census, it was evident that sprawl had continued unabated for the past decade: Portland's population had grown somewhat, but not as fast as the rest of the county. The city now possesses only 23.5% of the county's population, and only 24.4% of the County's housing units:

	Cumberland County population	Portland City population	% of County population living in Portland	Cumberland County Housing Units	Portland Housing Units	% of County housing in Portland
2000	265,612	64,249	24.19%	122,600	31,862	25.99%
2010	281,674	66,194	23.50%	138,657	33,836	24.40%

This goal drives many of the plan's other objectives: if more and more County residents are living farther away, that creates sprawl, and hollows out the city's local economy. Therefore, the City of Portland needs to add new housing within the city's limits, at an equal or greater pace as the rest of the County's municipalities.

The Census Bureau also tracks building permit data for each year, and from those statistics, it's clear that the City isn't even close to keeping pace with sprawl:

Here's the source data, and a link to the Census site.

In this chart, the red line indicates county-wide housing construction for each year since 2000. The orange line is 50% of the height of the red line: that's where the City's housing construction would need to be in order for Portland's population growth to keep pace with the rest of the county's, in line with the housing plan's goals. The blue line, nowhere near the orange line, shows how much housing actually got built each year.

Instead of providing 50% of the County's new homes, the City of Portland has actually built a pathetic 11% of the county's homes. In other words: in the decade since the city's new housing plan got written, roughly 9 out of 10 new homes in Cumberland County have contributed to sprawl. Ugh.

Outlook: You might suppose, as I did, that the City might have had a rebound relative to the rest of the county after 2008, when spiking gas prices and the foreclosure crisis put the big hurt on sprawl development in the suburbs.

Unfortunately, you'd be mistaken: in the past 3 years, the City's proportion of housing construction relative to the rest of the County has fallen even more, to around 6%. The fundamental issue seems to be that new housing construction in Portland is a lot more expensive than it is in the 'burbs, thanks to more expensive real estate and zoning mandates. The main expense that's under the city's control - its outrageously expensive and outdated parking mandates - was loosened somewhat in 2008, when planners reduced off-street parking requirements somewhat. In hindsight, unfortunately, it hasn't had much of an effect, and planners ought to be asking whether they should be doing more.


Goal: Create 300 new units of housing in Bayside within 5 years [by 2007] and 500 additional units within 25 years, a significant portion of which will be owner-occupied units.

Reality: Cumberland County's Census Tract 6 is roughly contiguous with the Bayside neighborhood. Census data indicates that there were 1,421 housing units in the neighborhood in 2000. By the 2010 Census, there were 1,618 housing units: a net gain of 197 homes.

Census Tract 6 extends only as far south as Cumberland Avenue, which means that these numbers don't include the Chestnut St. Lofts project near Portland High School, completed in 2007. Adding that project in bring brings the neighborhood's total to 234 new homes. So five years past the original deadline, the City still hasn't met the plan's short-term goal.

Outlook: Still, two large apartment complexes from Avesta Housing are currently under construction in Bayside, and will add 91 new subsidized apartments within the next year or so. And the Federated Companies, new owners of the Somerset Street blocks along the Bayside Trail, are tentatively planning 540 additional market-rate apartments in high rises on their land. Along with infill projects happening elsewhere in the neighborhood (including, hopefully, along the new Franklin Street), it seems like the city should be able to meet its 25-year housing goal for Bayside, even if it missed the shorter-term goal by a wide margin.


Goal: Encourage and support the Portland Housing Authority to become more active in development of more housing.

Reality: The Portland Housing Authority hasn't developed a single new home on any of its properties since the Reagan administration. But at least there's plenty of free parking in East Bayside!

Outlook: The PHA owns acres of empty and under-utilized real estate on the Portland peninsula and in close-in neighborhoods like East Deering. In the past decade, the value of that land has increased dramatically, and the PHA also possesses the ability to raise capital through bonds. It's in an ideal position, in other words, to de-stigmatize its run-down public housing complexes, improve its financial standing, and help address the city's housing shortages with new, mixed-income housing complexes.

Unfortunately, the PHA is run by bureaucrats whose timidity and lack of creativity and courage are extreme even by bureaucratic standards. I worked with the agency's director, Mark Adelson, during the Peninsula Transit Study, and he insisted that empty parking lots were more important than building new homes for the homeless.

To be fair, the man isn't so much callous as he is afraid that he might hear a complaint from someone who loses their parking lot. 'Tis better for hundreds of people to sleep on the streets than for a single car in East Bayside to park on the street (somebody translate that into Latin so it can be the Agency's new motto).

As a quasi-independent agency, the PHA doesn't have much oversight from the City Council, which is part of the problem. Still, my guess is that the new Mayor and city manager could find creative ways into getting the PHA to be more involved in addressing the city's housing shortages – putting more conditions on the PHA's Community Development Block Grant applications would be a good first step.

Worthless

Consider this equation:

a - b = c

where a = disgraced Maine Turnpork Authority director Paul Violette's putative net worth, b = the value of his fraudulent hoardings from highway contractors and tollpayers during his tenure at the Maine Turnpork Authority, which hoardings he will be required to return to the public in a recent court settlement.

It follows that the variable c equals Paul Violette's honest net worth.

Now, according to today's newspaper, a, Violette's current wealth, equals $430,000. And b, Violette's fraud, also equals $430,000.

Therefore, the value of c - the honest net worth of Paul Violette, is a big fat Zero. Quod erat demonstratum.

From Franklin Street to Back Cove, on Foot (at last)

The Maine Department of Transportation has almost finished spending $200,000 to build this short section of trail.

Which that it's now possible to take a nice walk from East Bayside to Back Cove, for the first time since I-295 was built in the 1970s (photo by Baysider Alex Landry):

Technically it's still under construction, so you'll need to wait a few more days before you can hold the state legally liable for the substandard crosswalks on Marginal Way and Franklin Street. Nevertheless, it's very much usable, and surprisingly pleasant for the amount of traffic in the vicinity - remember to wave "hello" to the bitter motorists waiting impatiently at the traffic lights.

Parking Isn't "Affordable"

Two weeks ago, I wrote in my column in the Portland Daily Sun about the obscene expenses for parking garages that our city's planners impose on new publicly-subsidized housing construction:

Joe Lewis’s Planning Board, which approves and denies new construction projects, requires every new home and apartment built in our city to also build one parking space. Want to build a triple-decker on Munjoy Hill? You’ll need to make it a quadruple-decker for a three-car garage on the bottom floor. Want to build studio apartments for college students? They probably don’t drive, but you’ll still be forced to build a parking lot that’s bigger than the building itself.

The parking requirement is particularly onerous for builders who would like to build smaller, less expensive apartments, since it requires them to set aside nearly as much real estate for automobile storage (whether or not it's needed) as they do for rentable living space.

That’s the major reason why the nearly every new apartment building constructed here in the past decade has either required public subsidies, or been targeted and priced for the wealthy. The Planning Board’s obsession with building free parking literally makes it illegal for a private-sector builder to create affordable homes for the city’s thousands of non-motorist households.

Community Housing of Maine, a local nonprofit, is currently trying to finance a project on High Street with 38 apartments, at a cost of about $10 million. The high cost has turned the project and its state financiers into a political talking point for the right wing.

It's a worthy project that would add valuable homes for Portland's downtown workforce. And a number of the project's big-ticket expenses - the in-town real estate, the historic preservation elements - can be justified as things that advance the public good.

But the project's $500,000 underground parking garage unambiguously works against the public interest. Aside from jeopardizing the project's financial viability, the parking garage, if built, would only add more traffic and pollution to Portland streets, and decrease the amount of real estate available for the hundreds of car-free households that need affordable housing more than they need affordable parking.

The High Street project is within walking distance of thousands of downtown jobs and every single one of the region's bus routes. Instead of being forced to spend half a million dollars on a parking garage, affordable housing agencies should be spending their money on housing.

While I'm on the subject of expensive affordable housing, I'd also like to highlight this innovative social housing project built in Chile. Residents of a former slum were given new homes on the same site. Crucially, the architects approached the project "as an investment and not as an expense... to add value over time."

Designers from ELEMENTAL designed 100 no-frills townhomes to be built at dirt-cheap prices:



...but crucially, the design included voids between each home, each of which was intended for future home expansion to be funded and built by the residents themselves. Thus, the design actively encouraged residents to provide their own investments into their homes and neighborhood:



And thus, the residents themselves took the financial responsibility (and rewards) of adding new housing space to their homes, and of adding architectural variety to their neighborhood. The project didn't merely produce affordable housing: it provided a platform for low-income families to build financial equity.

Is this feasible in the USA, with our building codes and housing bureaucracies? It certainly ought to be.


Images courtesy of ELEMENTAL via archdaily.com.

Final Ranked-Choice Voting Results

We have a new mayor! And though he wasn't my first choice - though he has extensive experience in Augusta, he hasn't been particularly involved in recent issues in City Hall - I think he'll be a quick study and a good leader.

I'm heartened that the big money of the Democratic machine lost their expensive gamble to exact revenge for the Maine State Pier humiliation (suckas!).

I'm also heartened that candidates Dave Marshall, Nick Mavodones, and Jill Duson will continue their service on the city council, and that Markos will soon be busy leading the next phase of re-connecting Franklin Street.

Some final observations on the ranked-choice dynamics follow below. For the details, check out Jack Woods's tabulation of how the instant runoff reallocations played out, and Seth Koenig's round-by-round tally of the leaders.

• None of the instant runoff rounds rearranged the rankings of the leading candidates. Ballots were reallocated more or less in proportion to the original standings, and candidates were eliminated in the exact same order of their standings in the first round of ballot-counting. The candidate with the 3rd-fewest 1st-choice votes got eliminated 3rd, and the candidate with the 4th-fewest 1st-choice votes got eliminated 4th, and so on.
  
  
• For each eliminated candidate, the majority of their ballots were reallocated to one of four leaders (Brennan, Strimling, Marshall, or Mavodones). Of these, Brennan received the majority the most often, which meant that he broadened his lead as the rounds progressed.
  
  
• Dave Marshall generally did better than Mavodones in capturing 2nd-choice votes, but never so much that he could catch up and capture the 3rd place position.
  
  
• The most substantial boosts in Brennan's lead over Stimling came in round 11 and in round 14, when Miller and Marshall were eliminated. In each case, roughly twice as many voters picked Brennan than Strimling as their next-choice candidate.
  
  Dave Marshall's elimination in the next-to-last round gave Mike Brennan a particularly big boost towards the 50% threshold: 978 of Dave's ballots (which included a number of Miller's ballots, at this point) were reallocated to Brennan, as opposed to just 462 to Strimling.
  
  Before Marshall's ballots were reallocated, Brennan was leading with 36% to Strimling's 30%; after, with Marshall's votes, Brennan had a much wider lead: 43% to 34%.
  

So what's the purpose of a ranked-choice election, when the outcome that included all 15 choices turned out to be the same as the outcome that only looked at our 1st choices?

I can't speak for everyone, but I appreciated the ability to be able to vote for several candidates, to express to the eventual winner that, while I would support him, I liked the ideas and experience of a few other candidates a bit more. Particularly because voters who had picked Markos and Dave Marshall as their first choices contributed significantly to the eventual victory of Mike Brennan, the new mayor ought to be receptive to those guys' smart-growth, pro-housing policy ideas.

OK, election's over. Time to write about streets and better public spaces again...

Polling

Yesterday, the Maine People's Resource Center released a poll (detailed results here) to try to preview the upcoming mayoral election. The poll itself projected a victory for Mike Brennan, and that's been the conventional interpretation coming from the press as well (witness analysis from Mike Tipping, one of the poll's sponsors, and the Press Herald).

However, as I'll illustrate below, the projected Brennan victory isn't statistically supported by the poll's data. The most we can say is that Brennan is a front-runner for 1st-choice votes. That will get him far, but the dynamics of the ranked-choice ballot are too complicated for a poll like this to predict the actual winner with any confidence.

In spite of its shortcomings, this is the only poll we're going to get before election day, so here are some observations:

• The poll decided to eliminate six lower-tier candidates (Bragdon, Lapchick, Dodge, Haadoow, Vail) from poll questions. This group of six received 11.1% of the poll's 1st choice preferences, which means that each candidate from this group received, on average, 1.85% of the vote (some probably got more, some less). Ralph Carmona, who WAS included in the poll, received only 1.4%. So the decision about whether or not to include a candidate in the poll seems to have been somewhat arbitrary.
  
  
• But let's talk statistics. The poll surveyed roughly 500 people (actually 477, but let's use a nice round figure to make the math easier). That, they say, gives the results a 4.44% margin of error. I'm assuming that they're assuming a normal probability function distribution (i.e., your typical bell curve) in calculating their margin of error.
  
  A poll with this sample size would work fine with a regular, one-round election of two or three candidates. But it's much less reliable with nine candidates (plus a big, vague "other" category) in the mix. And it's WAY more problematic when instant runoff dynamics come into play (more on that later).
  
  
• To illustrate: suppose you're blindfolded and instructed to throw darts at a wall that's painted partly red, and partly black. You have a judge to tell you what color each dart hits, and you're supposed to infer, from what he tells you, how much of the dartboard is colored black, and how much is red.
  
  If you have 500 darts, and 400 of them hit a red section, you might reasonably conclude that 80% of the wall is red. And, based on the normal probability distribution, there's a 95% chance that you'd be within 4.4% of the correct answer.
  
  But what if there are 15 different colors, and you still only have 500 darts? Your targets would be much smaller, which means that there's more likelihood for error, and therefore you'd be much less confident in your inferences. There could be a sizeable part of the wall that you don't hit once with any of your 500 darts, for instance, and there might be another tiny section that you accidentally hit fifty times.
  
  The proportion of random error to the to the size of each target is much higher in this case. And that's what's happening in this poll. The poll report would have been a lot more honest if it had included error bars for each candidate, like this (the black bars show where each candidate's bar would be if the estimate were increased or decreased by 4.4%):
  
  


In this view, it's clear that Jed Rathband, Dave Marshall, and Markos Miller (near the center of the graph) might actually be ahead of putative "front runner" Nick Mavodones in terms of 1st-choice preferences: all of their error bars overlap in the 9%-11% range.


So, grain of salt number one: with fifteen candidates in the mix, the margin for error in this poll is very large in proportion to the putative results.


• These error margins become exponentially more problematic when the same poll tries to extrapolate the results of a series of instant runoff reallocations. The pollsters seem to reason thusly: "Carmona gets eliminated in the 7th instant runoff round, and 30% of Carmona's voters picked Rathband as their second choice, therefore, Rathband should get 30% of Carmona's ballots to be boosted from 8% to 8.6% of the voters' top choices."
  
  OK, but let's recall that there were only seven people of the 500 polled who picked Carmona as their first choice. That's way too small a sample size from which any statistician worth her salt would draw any conclusions. If you see seven Canadians at Old Orchard Beach and three of them are smoking, you can't conclude that 43% of all Canadians smoke. Similarly, inferring that 30% of Carmona voters will choose Rathband as their backup is statistically spurious.
  
  But that's exactly what this poll is inferring for all of the lower-tier candidates as the pollsters goes through the motions of a ranked-choice election. In each round of instant runoff possibilities, the pollsters are building on, and multiplying, their statistical errors.
  
  By the tenth instant runoff round, they're reallocating Markos Miller's votes based on a sample size of 35 poll respondents - still way too small, and by then they've more or less arbitrarily re-allocated about a third of the ballots to other candidates.
  
  These conclusions are built on a logical house of cards - and the flimsy logic gets geometrically flimsier as it goes.
  
  So, grain of salt number 2 for this poll: ignore this poll's instant runoff projections. They're worthless and frankly they make the pollsters look silly.

OK, so flaws aside, there are some good things about this poll (and as I said, it's the only poll we're going to get pre-election, so might as well make the most of it). So here are some interesting things that we CAN conclude from this poll, in spite of its flaws:

• Brennan and Stimling are clear front-runners for 1st-preference votes.
  
  
• But both of the front runners will get, at most, about a third of the ballots in the first round. That means that they'll need to accumulate 15% to 20% of lower-choice votes from other candidates as those lower-tier candidates get eliminated in the instant runoff process.
  
  
• Because they're front-runners, it's unlikely to matter whom voters pick as 2nd choices behind Strimling and Brennan, since those guys are less likely to get eliminated in the instant runoff rounds. That's too bad for Nick Mavodones, Markos Miller, Jill Duson, and Jed Rathband, all of whom get marked as choice #2, to no avail, on a lot of Brennan and Strimling ballots.
  
  
• The lowest nine candidates, together, will get about 19% of the 1st-choice votes. Even if all the second-choice votes on those ballots are marked for the front-runner (which is unlikely), it won't be enough to put him over the 50% threshold.
  
  
• Duson looks like a lower-tier candidate with only 2.9% of 1st choice votes. Her 2nd choice numbers look good though: she gets 8.6% of everyone's 2nd-choice preferences (more than anyone save Brennan, Strimling, and Mavodones). That said, most of Duson's 2nd-choice votes seem to come from people who pick Strimling, Mavodones, Brennan, and Marshall as their 1st choice. None of those candidates are likely to be eliminated before Duson, which means that those 2nd-choice votes won't do her any good.
  
  
• Strimling does surprisingly well with 1st-choice preferences, but he drops way behind among everyone's 2nd and 3rd choices. As runoff rounds progress, it looks likely that Brennan will get more and more follow-up choices from lower-tier candidates, and widen his initial lead over Strimling.
  
  [an aside: so apparently Stimling's pessimistic and divisive, "we-should've-let-my-cronies-build-a-hotel-on-the-Maine-State-Pier" campaign style is turning people off. Good. Let this be a lesson to future candidates and a ringing endorsement of ranked choice voting.]
  
  
• Middle-tier candidates Miller, Rathband, and Marshall need lots of lower-tier candidates' second-choice votes to survive elimination in the later instant runoff rounds. Again, the sample sizes for those lower-tier candidates are too low to make any real inferences from this poll about whether that's possible.
  
  
• Accepting that either Miller and Rathband are likely to get eliminated in a later round (which is a disappointment for anyone who cares about the issues I write about in this blog), their voters could deliver another candidate a vital block of 2nd-choice ballots if they chose to coordinate their voters in the last days of the campaign to mark someone like Brennan as their 2nd choice.
  
  If those 2nd choice votes put the Mike Brennan over the 50% threshold, then the new mayor would owe a lot to Markos and/or Jed. It could be a way for those guys to see their policy ideas prioritized, without actually needing to attend to the daily business of mayoring.

Six more days 'till the election. We shall see!