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Market Urbanism Profile picture
Market Urbanism
@MarketUrbanism
Tweets by @smithsj / smithsj at gmail dot com
Jul 8 • 10 tweets • 6 min read
This morning the New York Times published my guest essay about my research on elevators in North America: why we have so few of them, why they cost so much, what that does to our buildings, and how we can fix it nytimes.com/2024/07/08/opi… Elevators in the US are extraordinarily expensive to buy & maintain – pricing on 4-stop installs in Switzerland vs. NYC. We're at 4.5x Swiss prices! As a result, we have few elevators – I couldn't find a high-income country with fewer per capita. Spain has more in ABSOLUTE terms

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Nov 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
“A three-alarm fire erupted in a Midtown apartment building on Saturday, leaving more than 40 people injured, with some in serious and critical condition…‘the occupant was repairing [electronic] bikes in the building’ ” gothamist.com/news/e-bike-fi… The city should do something about these e-bike fires, they’re becoming quite common. Unfortunately the city’s already demonstrated that it doesn’t have the capacity to deal with much simpler problems like the huge number of e-bike shops selling 100% illegal mopeds, or the…
Oct 30, 2022 • 15 tweets • 7 min read
I'm trying to take the NJT 62 bus today from Newark Penn Station to the airport, and holy shit, NJT just does not want people to ride the bus. The schedule and fare information is nearly impossible to find! If, by some miracle, you have discovered that the 62 takes you from Newark Penn to the airport (good luck figuring that out), you search Google for "njt 62 bus schedule." You get this: mybusnow.njtransit.com/bustime/wirele… ...uhh, where is Newark Penn? It's not even listed!
Sep 13, 2022 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Since you people will NOT shut up about it, I’ll do it: here’s a thread about a sidewalk shed I saw today on my way to the grocery store to buy yogurt and bananas and pasta The reason it’s there is clearly because there was some sort of failure with the weathering steel (“COR-TEN”) balconies and flower boxes. That rusty stuff. It was dripping and rusting a bit too much. They tried something, it didn’t work out. It’s a nice building otherwise
Sep 11, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
It's so interesting to look at the architecture-related Wikipedia pages. Normally the English-language pages are the best, but in architecture – especially floor plans – you can really tell that America is living in poverty For example, the German Erschließung page. It means something like access or circulation, or a way of laying out a plan (my German kind of sucks, somebody can correct this). We get these single-stair layout diagrams, each with their own names de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erschlie%…
Aug 10, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
INCREDIBLE encapsulation of the Nonprofit Industrial/Consultant Complex approach to planning. Ex-Nelson\Nygaard employee visits Amsterdam and London and seems to conclude that America does transpo planning better because we prioritize equity and they don't mass.streetsblog.org/2022/08/10/gue… ImageImageImage I feel like she might've misunderstood the intent of this statement, and what the speaker meant is that everybody is a pedestrian on some level, so they don't consider them separately? Image
May 26, 2022 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
It’s not great that the NYPD let all of these unlicensed mopeds proliferate – this is not something that happens in developed countries. But it doesn’t seem like they’re really going about this the right way. I don’t think most people who drive them even realize it’s illegal It seems like there’s been no education campaign. Vendors are allowed to keep selling them out in the open. There was no announcement of a coming crackdown, info on how to get plates and legalize (is it even possible…?), no info campaign. Just sporadic, half-assed seizures
May 24, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Riding the B48 through South Williamsburg and I cannot believe the number of Hasidic school buses. How does this make any sense at all? This is a small, walkable, dense neighborhood – is there no better solution for getting kids to school than completely gridlocking the streets? The city (as far as I know) pays for these buses. If the city had any sense and ability to build for reasonable prices, you’d think it would make sense to just pay to build a bunch of schools in the middle of the neighborhood so they don’t have to bus kids all over
May 24, 2022 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Not at all surprised to see that this sinecure is at the School Construction Authority. And we wonder why it costs NYC government 5x what it should to build anything The corruption and ineptitude is so bad that she doesn’t even try to share with the world what qualifications he has for a $115,000/year “senior management specialist” job at the School Construction Authority
May 24, 2022 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
This headline got a ton of clicks but it's bullshit and is ignoring the real issue, which is the MTA's slow OMNY roll-out. They really can't do all-door boarding on buses until MetroCard is gone and I don't know why Aaron is pretending otherwise vice.com/en/article/dyp… You can't have a proof-of-payment system where you *also* have a board-at-the-front option that doesn't issue any sort of proof of payment! How would the fare inspector then know who actually paid the driver??
May 23, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Listening to a podcast episode with Catilin Martusewicz at Cycle Architecture (@TD_Cycle's firm) and there are SO many interesting things in it. But one thing that stood out to me: she says they wanted to build a Brooklyn passive house building using panelized methods, but... @TD_Cycle ...because it's not "repeatable," it didn't make sense. This is so important to understand why industrialized methods haven't caught on for multifam in the US the way they did in the '60s and '70s for trailer homes, or roof trusses today for stick-frame sprawl: not enough scale!
May 23, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Uhhhhhhhh Doesn't sound like the victim's family is as thankful as Eric Adams is that Eric Adams is mayor nypost.com/2022/05/22/fam… Image
Nov 28, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Pretty weak article on US infrastructure costs in the New York Times. No attempt at a real cross-country analysis, Ron Tutor inexplicably gets quoted defending the costs without mentioning his nickname as the "change order king" nytimes.com/2021/11/28/us/… First excerpt massively understates the issue. And the Bent Flyvbjerg quotes are tired – talking about overruns on "scores of projects...around the world" is not getting at the real issue
Oct 30, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
A relatively short synopsis of waste collection in Spain and Greece, both places typically having communal containers. Spain is privatized, Greece is public (for fear of the unions striking if it's privatized) ategrus.org/images/stories… Looks like the Netherlands has Europe's best trash collection, with urban collection being largely in communal underground bins. Southern Europe has the simplest – above-ground communal containers. Given NYC's inability to build anything, southern method seems most appropriate
Oct 29, 2021 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
This is the endgame of an American planning regime that privileges the views of single-family homeowners over residents of apt bldgs having windows. Windowless rooms are unfortunately becoming common – but it isn’t developers’ and designers’ faults site constraints are so tight Check out the floor plan here. It’s an exaggerated version of what you find from Texas to New York – “shared light” bedrooms, lightless interior living rooms
Sep 8, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is a very interesting bill – establishes a minimum allowed FAR of 1.5 for lots zoned for between 2 and 10 units (presumably doesn't apply to the recently passed duplex law or the ADU laws) Hard to say the impact, since there are a zillion other ways to restrict development, every local zoning code is different, and California tends to be bigger on other limits to development than FAR (in NYC, this would be a game-changer, because the code is heavily FAR-based)
Sep 8, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
I’ve noticed that in NYC, when you see tower cranes on construction sites, they tend to be luffing jib cranes (first picture), whereas in Europe they usually use hammerhead cranes (second). Anybody know why? @JuliaManhattan @uscranerigging This says that luffing cranes are better when you have multiple cranes on a site since they interfere with each other less, but that’s not an issue in NYC – there’s very rarely more than one crane bq-cranes.com/industry-infor…
Sep 6, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
There’s research that construction lowers housing prices generally, but also questions about whether luxury housing filters down and improves low- and middle-income affordability. A paper tracks moving chains and answers that question for Helsinki: aalto.fi/en/people/cris… Image They’re replicating @EvanMast2’s moving chain paper, who had a similar finding in the US. They note a difference though: housing causes faster filtering in Helsinki, possibly due to lower inequality. They also find social housing causes faster filtering than market-rate Image
Aug 9, 2021 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
This community district is 49% Latino, 10% Black, and has a median age of 39. This crowd is about 90% white and has a median age somewhere in the 60s The far East Bronx is changing fast (here's Schuylerville-Throgs Neck-Edgewater Park, now a few years out of date). This isn't the white neighborhood it once was. Keep that in mind with the talk about the "fabric of the neighborhood" and property values and the police
Jun 25, 2021 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Re: Will’s piece, one thing that’s surprised me in doing research on NYC’s 1916 zoning code for a person project is that there really isn’t even a hint of anti-Black racism in it. It’s all class bias and anti-Jewish garment worker stuff. I’m not quite sure what to make of that I looked high and low for people like Ed Bassett saying racist things. You can find a LOT of inhumane ways that people referred to immigrant garment workers swarming Fifth Ave., but the intense changes roiling Harlem don’t seem to be on anybody’s radar
Jun 24, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It was going to change anyway. Rent freezes were justified by rising rents on deregulated units covering higher total operating costs. But post-2019, no more deregulation...so stabilized tenants cannot depend on market-rate tenants to shoulder the whole burden of higher expenses Rent hikes are also about to get way more complicated. Stabilized buildings in Chelsea and the Bronx are very different – in Chelsea, there are lots of market-rate units to cross-subsidized stabilized ones. Not in the Bronx. How is the Rent Guidelines Board going to handle that?