The height of folly

All eyes this week are on a Washington, D.C. that’s frozen in place over the politics of the federal budget. But the capital is also frozen in place in another way, and has been for over a century: the height of the city’s buildings are fixed by federal statute. The 1899 Height of Buildings Act and its 1910 successor law—both passed on the ostensible rationale of fire safety but suffused with the rhetoric of the City Beautiful movement—prevented Washington from becoming a speculative skyscraping metropolis in the New York or Chicago mold, and kept the city firmly under the shadow, both literally and metaphorically, of the federal government. Its wide boulevards, expansive malls, and squat buildings recalled, at least in an echo or a whisper, the eighteenth-century dream of a rural republic.

For decades, Washington remained a sleepy government town, and the nation’s lust for urban gigantism was redirected elsewhere. But in recent years, Washington has become a hot city, with government jobs and new industries driving turning it into one of the most prosperous metropolitan areas in the country. This influx of dollars and people in hasty pursuit of dollars has now filled the city nearly to its brim, with explosive rents and suburban development the inevitable byproducts. And so many now see the Height Act not as an enlightened protection against commercial speculation but rather a throttle on necessary growth. Onwards and upwards the capital must go, with many a penny to be pocketed in the process.

This is accepted wisdom for many liberal commentators, who, while generally friendly to the regulatory state, tend to get freaky around urban planning laws. The Height Act, in restricting the market for real estate in a highly desirable city, functions as a gatekeeper of privilege, and excludes low-income residents from the very places where transit, amenities, and jobs are most available. It obstinately clings to a late-nineteenth century vision of urban beauty and chokes off the adoption of innovative architectural trends. Worst of all, it directly contributes to the growth of unplanned, environmentally-unfriendly commuter suburbs beyond Washington’s municipal boundaries. Let entrepreneurs entrepreneur, and ease the pent-up demand by building up farther and farther into the Washington sky.

Which, insofar as it is written from the perspective of a rent-tormented Washington blogger, is certainly true. What it betrays, though, is a lack of curiosity about why the market for downtown Washington is so dangerously overheated that hyperdensification is the only option. And here, I think, the answer is not that there has been too much planning, but rather that there has not been enough.

Urban planning in the United States is almost solely carried out by the municipality as a political unit, sometimes with a regional commission as an auxiliary. But in a single market with high labor mobility like the United States, cities and regions and states are closely linked to each other by the easy relocation of people and capital from place to place. What this means is that a city like Washington, though it can plan only for itself, has an urban character which is dictated by the economic and social trends of the nation at large. The crush of people now crowding into Washington isn’t the result of lots of babies being born in Washington; it’s the result of a lot of people moving in from other places who would rather be in Washington then wherever they were before.

So, in a real sense, what’s pushing up so worrisomely against Washington’s Height Act is the urban failure of the rest of America. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States had many hundreds of growing, prosperous urban centers, ranging in size from Pittsburgh to Emporia. This meant that population and economic growth were, for the most-part, well-distributed throughout the country, striking a balance at the national scale between coastal metropolises, heartland industrial centers, and rural market towns. If every European immigrant of the nineteenth century had to stay in New York City for lack of jobs or opportunity elsewhere in the country, the city would have become unlivable long ago.

But we have left that era behind, and now the number of places where one can head for a satisfying career and a decent lifestyle are fewer and fewer between. We have failed at planning a range of urban options at the national scale. What we have left is a small number of dense, highly desirable, and gallopingly expensive urban areas which boast expanding economies keyed to the buzzwords of the twentieth century alongside the most sought-after urban infrastructural amenities; and, dotting the rest of the country, a swathe of dying, emptying-out, and economically inviable cities who can no longer afford even to make the buses run. You can’t talk about D.C.’s rents and the need to repeal the Height Act without taking into account Flint and Akron and St. Louis.

It’s common now to talk about the “winner take all” economy, and to fret anxiously about how to deal with it. The premise is that, in the face of automation, mass communication, and the shift to a tertiary economy, the brightest and best (or, perhaps more accurately, the lucky and well-connected) will live better than ever, while the rump population, now economically outmoded, will settle for a discount-rack existence. It is, I think, one of the most serious social challenges of our time. But we tend to assume it applies only to individuals, when it is just as easily applied to cities. We increasingly live in the age of a winner take all geography, in which a few zip codes, full of tech jobs and coffeeshops and bike-shares, pull far away from the rest. And just as the winner take all economy kind of sucks both for the poor (obviously) as well as the rich (who have to increasingly wall themselves off in Elysium-like fantasy lands), the winner take all geography hurts both Flint (obviously) as well as Washington (which has no choice but to gentrify or massify).

What Washingtonians, and everyone else, should be asking themselves is: how do we plan for widespread urban vitality, rather than cramming more and more people into what are essentially overburdened liferafts hanging off a sinking national economy?