Portland Not the Only Place Subsidizing New Urbanists

New Urbanism, as everyone knows, is morally superior to old suburbanism. So New Urbanists are clearly entitled to huge subsidies to support their environmentally friendly lifestyles. Such as subsidies for parking garages near their subsidized high-density housing.

The Antiplanner has covered such subsidies to Portland developments. But other cities subsidize them as well. An op ed by Jennifer Lang in Saturday’s Rocky Mountain News describes some of these subsidies in the Denver metro area.

This parking garage in downtown Denver was built with a $2.1 million subsidy that planners said was needed so the New Urbanists living in subsidized downtown lofts would have a place to park their SUVs. Photo by the Antiplanner.

Ms. Lang’s op ed is based on her report that was recently issued by the Independence Institute’s Center for the American Dream. The report points out that urban-renewal subsidies were intended to help cities kick-start redevelopment of neighborhoods that were so run down that no developer would dare invest in the area.

Now, however, urban renewal is being used in areas that developers would be glad to redevelop without subsidies. Planners use the subsidies to bribe developers into building New Urban developments that are less marketable than the lower-density developments that homebuyers prefer.

Full disclosure: as director of the Center for the American Dream (a largely honorary title), I edited Ms. Lang’s report. So you know it is good.

Here are a few of the developments subsidized by Denver metro area taxpayers for the benefit of New Urbanists and the planners who love them.

Denver taxpayers spent $8.6 million supporting the conversion of the Denver Dry Goods Building into a mixed-use project with 117 housing units. Such redevelopments received national attention as heralding the return of people to downtown areas, where they could walk, ride transit, and park their cars at subsidized parking garages. One wonders how many people would have moved to downtown Denver without the subsidies. Photo from Denver Urban Renewal Authority.

This complex is part of the redeveloped Stapleton Airport, a 4,700-acre project which cost Denver taxpayers some $300 million. This part reminds me of the housing I saw in the ideal communist city, Halle-Neustadt. The entire Stapleton project will eventually have 12,000 housing units, if they can find that many people willing to live in tiny apartments or houses with no yards, for an average subsidy of about $25,000 per unit. Photo by Jennifer Lang.

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This part of the Stapleton complex, like part of Portland’s Orenco station, seems to evoke Brooklyn, New York. Do planners really think that people move to places like Colorado so they can live somewhere that reminds them of Brooklyn? Or do they think they can fool people into driving less by making them believe they are living in Brooklyn? Photo by Jennifer Lang.

With the closure of Lowry Air Force Base, Denver got a chance to convert another former airport into a high-density development. This one looks really attractive — NOT! As the Denver Post put it, “Row houses? In Denver?” Photo by Jennifer Lang.

Villa Italia was a 1960s shopping mall that needed a massive update. Developers would have gladly rebuilt it with their own money, but they would not have included any high-density housing. So planners spent more than $95 million taxpayer dollars to support Belmar, a high-density, mixed-use development. Eventually, Belmar is supposed to have about 1,300 housing units, for an average subsidy of nearly $75,000 apiece. Photo by Jennifer Lang.

Just in case you can’t read the sign in the previous photo, it says that condo prices start in “the low 300s.” Mmmmm — that’s affordable! Photo by Jennifer Lang.

Whoops! This doesn’t belong here. This is a four-bedroom, single-family home on a quarter-acre lot. It only cost $150,000, less than half what a condo in Belmar costs. Of course, it’s in Houston, and who wants to live in Houston? The Houston metro area is only growing three times faster than the Denver metro area. Perhaps that’s partly because Houstonians don’t have to pay high taxes to subsidize other people’s lifestyles. Photo from the Antiplanner’s collection.

The Denver Regional Council of Government’s (DRCOG) Metrovision 2030 calls for building 70 New Urbanist mixed-use developments in the Denver metro area. In fact, DRCOG’s primary vision for the region — “In 2030, the Denver region will be a dynamic mixture of distinct pedestrian-friendly urban and suburban communities within a limited area” — makes it seem as if everyone in the region will be living in one of these communities.

When Portland began subsidizing New Urban developments, planners said the subsidies were only needed to prove to developers that such developments would sell. Once this was proven, developers would build them without subsidies. That was a fantasy; if anything, the subsidized developments proved that sales in New Urban communities would be slow. In any case, virtually all New Urban developments in the past decade have been subsidized.

Denver will probably be the same. By 2030, perhaps a quarter of the region’s residents (but probably less) will be living in New Urban communities subsidized by everyone else. What will happen to those developments as they age? If the region really builds a huge surplus of such projects, many are not going to do well. Will then the region be forced to spend more tax money either trying to rehabilitate them? Or will they have to implode them like so many of planners’ visions of the past?