Urban3: The Value of Downtown

[@vilanobeachmainstreet6911]

Joe was a great speaker at the Florida Main Street Conference held in Vero Beach last week. Good data, common sense and coherent story translation of data. Thank you, Joe, for your insights.

[@radhrion_1199]

I've see the 3D modeling on your website, where I would be able to see the data and figures beyond the summarised model?

[@ericb.4358]

Do you use any matrices like those found in Ian McHarg's "Design With Nature" book? Old book but great ideas.

[@josephminicozzi3830]

We do a lot of that. I wrote a blog post about it back in 2010ish (I can't find that piece) but I did find this from 2015. www.urbanthree.com/blog/mchard-revisited/ Also, this is worth watching all the way through, though the first 5 minutes are awful until Mcharg shows up. kzbin.info/www/bejne/a5-ld553h6iDZqs

[@mayfieldmanor5344]

Do parks, schools, natural areas and hospitals have a value attributed to them in your model?

[@MrCamilloSitte]

It depends on the models we're doing, but for a regular property tax modeling, the answer would be "no" because they are non-taxable. This isn't to say that they don't have merit or value per se, but more to show the cash flow of taxable properties.

[@mayfieldmanor5344]

How do the municipal cost of on-street parking and municipal parking garages in downtowns fit into your cost analysis?

[@MrCamilloSitte]

That's not a simple thing to answer, as it depends on the city and if they charge for parking.

[@teddybruscie]

From what I've researched, parking is generally a tax drain. It's just a plot of land saved for cars and even if it's paid parking it doesn't make up for the cost of it's existence. If you have low density population, road side parking is ok because there's not enough people/ traffic to cause any congestion. As the population grows, road side parking becomes irrelevant. It can only park so many cars. That's where transit comes in.

[@operavin]

I’ve always wondered why parking is free at night and on weekends in downtown areas where these are the most popular times.

[@TheNoerdy]

So this entire company is designed around telling people that cities are good for the economy? Like, duh?

[@LucidFL]

If you know anything about American urban planning, you should know this is actually an extremely difficult thing for the country to understand…

[@lcjackson1665]

You don't account for TRAFFIC and congestion. Look at Miami Beach which is a vertical city- they are strangled with traffic: it takes an hour to go 2 miles on Collins Ave. Tax-based income is not the only thing to factor. Quality of Life. Everyone in Florida needs a car- where are they going to park? I'm a 30-year Miami resident that has seen the growth, without accounting for the traffic.

[@federicofigueroa2776]

Well, the answer is quite simple: build transit infrastructure and all problems of traffic congestion will gone

[@LucidFL]

Traffic is coming from suburbanites forced to drive, not from urbanites. Mixed use, walkable downtowns with transportation reduce traffic by removing people from motor vehicles. Miami’s increasing congestion is a classic case of urban sprawl caused by structural forces that promote car dependency and low density. Unique to Miami is how the metro area hasn’t expanded Tri-Rail, Metrorail, Metromover, Metrobus or build light rail to account for the doubling of its 1985 population.

[@Basta11]

Traffic and congestion primarily come from people driving private vehicles. In a dense city, the ratio of car owners to non car owners is less. Those non car owners aren't creating congestion. Even car owners living within the city use their cars much much less than people in the suburbs or rural area. That being said, the better the public transit infrastructure, the better the bike lane network, the less congestion there will be. Its called the Downs-Thompson paradox. HongKong, London, Singapore, Tokyo, NYC are incredibly dense cities where people have no issues getting around and accomplishing their daily tasks. The majority of the traffic in the city is actually from people living outside of the city driving in.

[@AllenGraetz]

Property tax is the outcome of a political process. It's not a measurement of economic value. This meaningless twaddle results in cities overlooking some of their greatest economic assets.

[@jasonstein216]

This ignores all the jobs generated by sprawl and the economic impact of those jobs. Jobs such as yard service, roofers, handyman, etc. If 100 family's live in a 100 homes that generates a lot of support jobs versus 100 families in 1 building.

[@papimason-95]

Most cities don’t collect income taxes

[@darkisato]

U build a houseing community with 20 to 100 ppl and takes 8 months.... after that then what? Look tol build more?

[@LucidFL]

The generation of these few low-wage jobs is nowhere near worth a city’s economic cost.

[@vitamaltz]

This seems to be an argument that we should build inefficient infrastructure on purpose because maintaining it creates jobs.

[@re14437]

collect property taxes forever@@darkisato