Anchor Projects

It always made a kind of sense that some parts of the downtown Christchurch rebuild were being help up while property owners waited to see where the "anchor projects" might land: hotels would want to wait to see where the Convention Centre might sit before deciding where and whether to rebuild. Bars might want to know whether there'd be a downtown sports venue.

But I hadn't caught this angle: expropriation risk. From this weekend's Press:

So the CCDU [Central City Development Unit] was set up as a development agency to do it the other way around - begin with the project and then design it to achieve the masterplan's objectives. Let the building heights, parking access and other details flow from the logic of the intended outcome.

Elder says this is what surprised him - the boldness of the new approach.

The CCDU design consortium, led by planning consultant Boffa Miskell, has been told to forget about land ownership, road grids and other restrictions, and simply put anchor projects, such as a new conference centre or sports stadium, where they make most sense, he says.

The city's problem is that property is split into thousands of individual titles, so any rebuild was always likely to be a disjointed, piecemeal affair.

However, the CCDU, backed by the power of Cera, can now come in over the top. Land can be amalgamated, by force if necessary. Owners are even being warned that new buildings that get in the way may get knocked down.

Elder says there is a clear determination to develop areas of the city as a coherent package.

"Getting the right result is more important than being constrained. We will fail through being timid."

It is the only way to bring in the corporate-scale investment needed - the offshore money from Australia and Asia, he says.

"They're saying we will put out a proposal call on two city blocks for this type of development in there - whether it's a health precinct, residential, business, a convention centre and hotels - and get people to come and bid.

"And if we have to get rid of a landowner or two, or close streets to do that, then we will if the quality is good enough and the business case is good enough."

There will be property owners who will complain, says Elder, but for most it will be a better deal. They will end up with shares in a larger land-owning company. [Emphasis added]

How much work would you put into planning what to do with your property if, on top of the insurance and regulatory hassles, this kind of thing loomed?

You don't need compulsory acquisition to amalgamate lots of small titles. Just buy options on the properties you think might be needed for any project. Any of the option contracts can specify a schedule of compensation prices that rise with how far any owner's gotten through redevelopment when the government wishes to exercise the option. Do it right, and there's no incentive to sit around waiting to see if you'll be expropriated.

There's a great case for buying out landowners to make way for big projects so long as those projects are worthwhile. But I'd be awfully nervous about this kind of language if I were a downtown land-owner and wondering whether I should bother rebuilding.

Free advice

We've hit the point where the perception of a rental housing crisis in Christchurch probably matters more than the underlying stats.

Gerry Brownlee points to aggregate figures on rental prices in Christchurch to argue that our increases haven't been astronomical relative to those elsewhere in the country, but aggregates can conceal a lot. A forty dollar a week increase in average rental prices implies very different things about overall affordability if it comes from large increases at the bottom end of the market and minor increases at the top than if it comes from proportionate increase across the board; I suspect the former is what's going on.

Every time I read the comments sections on The Press's reporting on the housing crisis, I see evidence of strong heterogeneity across the market. Lots of people report large rent increases and trouble finding anything that's liveable within their budget; a few landlords report problems in finding tenants for decent sounding properties at reasonable prices. Location matters in housing though - people have jobs in fixed locations, kids in schools, and might need access to public transport.

Even if Brownlee were right and my hunch were wrong, he still comes across as heartless. And Brownlee is right about one thing: proposed rental subsidy schemes will just push up the price of rental housing absent supply moves.

Some supply moves are coming. Housing New Zealand's stock of social housing seems almost ready to come back on-stream. I expect that the biggest part of the delays here have been insurance related - Housing NZ owns a lot of properties and I'd expect that their insurance coverage is split across multiple insurers. If different insurers covered different portions of the burden of costs coming from different events, as would have been the case, for example, if some insurers wanted to reduce their exposure subsequent to the September event, then there were almost certainly fights among the insurers about what proportion of damage across the hundreds of Housing New Zealand owned houses were caused by September, Boxing Day, February, June, and other events. Rushing to repair before the insurance were sorted would make it impossible to sort out which insurer were liable for which portion of costs and likely would have wound up costing the government rather a lot in forgone insurance payouts for repair costs.

My free advice to Big Gerry. Get some data on rental availability at the bottom tail of the distribution: stop looking at averages. One place you could look is bonds placed with the Tenancy Board.* Separate bonds out by quartile and look at the movement in the bottom quartile of bonds placed over the last five years. Then say something like the following.

When we look at aggregate changes, Christchurch's rental price increases have been higher than elsewhere, but not alarmingly so. But averages mask a lot. There has been a substantial reduction in the number of rental properties available and, in particular, at the lower end of the market. While we applaud the sentiment behind some proposed initiatives, like rental subsidies, these do not really address the core problem: lack of available housing options at the bottom end of the market.

Then announce that you have instructed Christchurch Council via your Powers As Grand Poo-Bah to allow home owners to build self-contained flats into their current properties. This is the single best thing you can do to get properties on-stream quickly and at reasonable cost. Why?

• You need to sort out insurance messes to build new houses. Anybody building a flat into his currently owned and insured property already has insurance; the coverage just extends.
• Building new greenfield or substantial brownfield developments requires sorting out infrastructure. That takes time. A whole bunch of individual homeowners each putting in a small flat spread out across the city does not. 
• If I'm right about heterogeneity mattering, then who is better placed to figure out which parts of town need more rental accommodation than homeowners in those parts of town who can see what's going on with rents and availability in their neighbourhood?
• It is a policy that costs nothing if there actually is no housing crisis. I'm sure that more than a few folks in government remember the big push last winter that led to a pile of unused rented caravans meant for the homeless. 
• It's scaleable and only scales to the extent that property owners expect there to be real demand for the properties. 

It's a policy that works if it's needed, isn't a bad idea even if it's not, and is a good political move in either case relative to denying the existence of any kind of housing availability problem. 

* Landlords charge up to four weeks' rent as bond; this money is placed with the Department of Building and Housing. Surely they know how much money has been put up as bond over time and the number of weeks' rent it represents. Advantage: this gets you current rental cost for folks switching houses - the people who are displaced and are seeking new accommodation. Average rents might not have increased by as much as rents on those shifting properties if landlords worry about long term relationships with existing quality tenants. 

Downtown awesome

Rebecca Macfie's must-read article on Christchurch redevelopment highlights some of the grassroots downtown awesome going on in Christchurch. Case in point: the Dance-O-Mat:

“The response was overwhelming,” says Reynolds. “They [supporters and volunteers] said ‘you have to keep doing it’.” Since then, Gap Filler has become a charitable trust, Winn has become the paid co-ordinator, and many more gaps have been filled. One of the most outrageously successful was the Manchester St Dance-O-Mat – an open-air dance floor and a coin-operated washing machine converted to provide 30 minutes of light and power to an iPod and speakers. Reynolds: “People said Christchurch people wouldn’t dance in public. Well, Christchurch showed us.”

On one freezing Friday night in late May I learnt ceroc, salsa and swing moves among dozens of strangers; suddenly, it didn’t matter that we were surrounded by demolition sites and that the central city was gone. Based on the number of $2 coins pushed into the slot over the project’s two-month life, Winn calculates the floor was danced on by 2000 people. Although the dance floor’s now been packed away for winter, she says the Christchurch City Council is keen to re-establish it permanently. “So we may gift it to the council.”

It’s hard to overstate just how powerful and invigorating this is: young, clever creatives with little money but a huge appetite for trial and error are doing urban design on the fly, and proving that small-scale, inventive spaces will draw people out and restore life to a wasteland. And, says Just (who is also a Gap Filler trustee), it’s radical on another level, too. “It’s turning private space into public space. So a 60-year-old becomes an urban activist by dancing on the Dance-O-Mat.”

We hit the Dance-O-Mat one Friday night, along with a colleague and her family. Two economists, two econ-spouses, and three kids, dancing to the Hayek-Keynes rap. Was excellent.

Macfie points to some of the problems in routing through the bureaucracy for the Smash Palace bar:

Eventually, he alighted on a bare section at the corner of Victoria St and Bealey Ave, and came up with the idea of parking an old bus on the site and converting it into a relocatable bar. There’d also be a caravan where his sister Rosie would run a cafe, and a couple of temporary buildings for toilets and kitchen. The wind and dust would be kept out by plastic sheeting attached to scaffolding around the perimeter of the site.

The city council’s planners were enthusiastic, as was business support agency Recover Canterbury. Lots of people lent moral and practical support. He started working on the site in October, with ambitions of having the new bar, called Smash Palace, trading by Christmas. Then began a protracted Kafkaesque battle with the Christchurch City Council’s consenting division. Because the bus was judged to be a building, it needed building consent. That meant concrete foundations had to be laid, and the body of the bus tied down.

The handrails had to turn down 90 degrees at the end, and the way they connected to the decking around the bus had to be drawn up by an architect. The wheelchair ramps had to be at a gradient of 1:12. A near-enough 1:10 was not good enough. Then it turned out the scaffolding was also classed as a building. Moore mounted futile protests before complying with the consent department’s demands to provide engineering certification – only to be told the council needed to farm out the approvals to a consultant in Auckland. At his cost.

... But Moore believes the whole process cost him an extra $50,000, and it drove him to his wits’ end. “Personally and mentally it broke me down. I got to the point where I was seethingly angry. I’d go to bed angry and dream hateful dreams towards the council and I’d wake up hateful.”

He found himself drinking and smoking too much, losing sleep and chewing his nails. Without more pragmatic interpretation of the rules for temporary outfits like his, quakehit businesses will be driven from the city, he says. “The Building Act is fine when it’s business as usual. In Christchurch at present it’s not business as usual.” The council’s building operations manager, Ethan Stetson, is unapologetic. Yes, he says, post-quake Christchurch needs creative entrepreneurs like Moore, who are “the life-blood of the city.” But building quality, fire protection and disabled access still matter.

Read the whole thing. If the son of the former Mayor can't get through the bureaucracy except at massive personal cost, what hope is there for others?

Meanwhile, Christchurch's new "Ministry of Awesome" is trying to encourage fun new projects for downtown. Lots of the ideas there highlighted are patently absurd, and one is just a bit too goatse. Update: somehow, I lost the last line: But it's great to have a way of getting ideas out there!

Paternalist visions

Will Wilkinson and a colleague at The Economist have been sparring over paternalism. Where M.S., Wilkinson's colleague, argues paternalistic policy is an acceptable democratic way of getting towards desirable social goals, Wilkinson reminds us that a liberal democracy tries to leave a lot of decisions about the good to the individual.

Notice that we may convert any paternalistic argument into a benignly "democratic" argument simply by asserting that the intended subject of the proposed law is the character of society as a whole. Well, do we want a society in which the influence of heretics is left wholly unchecked, threatening public spiritual health? Torquemada didn't. The Taliban doesn't! Suppose we concede, just for the sake of argument, that this sort of public-spiritedness isn't paternalistic. Is it better than paternalism? It may be democratic. But is it liberal?

Liberal democracy is liberal in the first instance because it removes the protection of basic rights from the domain of collective deliberation. Do we want to be the kind of society that allows people to worship any way they like? That allows poor people to vote? That lets folks say sexy things, communist things, impertinent things, stupid things, Thomas Friedman things. Yes, yes, and mostly yes. Indeed, we think this stuff is so important, we mostly agree it ought to be illegal to put it up for a vote! My colleague suggests that there's something downright anti-social in making a principled argument against limiting the scope of peaceful individual choice. But I love society. Especially liberal ones.

The liberal society allows the existence of a personal sphere that's outside of the political sphere; I really like bright line rules keeping the two separate.

But I share Wilkinson's concerns about "Thomas Friedman things".

Brian Wansink and David Just, two of the academics on whose work Bloomberg leaned when pushing his ban on big soda cups, warn that their work really can't justify Bloomberg's ban; people forced to consume less than they'd like tend to compensate on other margins. Canada's Dan Gardner disagrees, suggesting changes in social norms coming from the changed cup size can, in the longer term, change consumption:

It wasn’t so long ago, remember, that no one expected to be able to buy 64-ounce soft drinks. Or even conceived of such a thing. If “mega jugs” were to go the way of leaded gasoline, the banning of which was also fought and resented, they would some day be forgotten. Like leaded gasoline.

It's an empirical question whether the ban winds up affecting anything. But there's a categorical difference between bans on leaded gasoline and bans on large soft drinks. Leaded gasoline increases concentrations of environmental lead and imposes harms on others; bigger drinks at the cinema might make a bigger mess if spilled on a non-drinker but otherwise only really affect the drinker.

If the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, why does it get a seat beside me in the theatre?

Happiness and process

The Economist notes that rising incomes in China in the last two decades haven't increased measured happiness as much as we might have hoped. Why?

“It is a mistake to think that rising income gaps are the main or even a primary source of popular discontent in China,” Mr Whyte says. It is, he adds, procedural injustices, abuses of power and the lack of recourse that make people angry enough to take to the streets.

Most migrant workers know first-hand what Mr Whyte is talking about. Lei Pengcai, 61, moved to Beijing last year from a small town in Hunan province and took work washing the dishes in a restaurant. His monthly wage is 1,400 yuan ($220), most of which he sends back home to his wife and family. Moving to Beijing has opened his eyes to the kind of wealth that some enjoy, but he sees income disparity as a fact of life. “I haven’t been, but isn’t there great inequality in America and England too?” he asks.

Mr Lei declares himself pleased with the past decade’s reduction in rural taxation; not too bothered by moderately rising prices of goods; and somewhat concerned that, although his basic health care is adequate, his coverage would not suffice if he were to suffer a severe illness or injury. But he is clear on the one thing that does make him unhappy: official corruption. In his hometown, official posts are handed out to friends or bought and sold. Once installed, he laments, officials can grab land, charge fines, and demand bribes under threat of closing down a business. They do whatever they want, he says, and the people cannot stop them.

Fairness matters. And, it's revealed more in process than in outcomes.

Exam security

Canterbury takes its invigilated exams pretty seriously.

Students in our big 100-level exams have to leave all of their materials at the front of the room save a pencil, pen, ruler or non-programmable calculator (as needed for the exam). Hats have to be left at the front of the room. We arrange students through the room in a checkerboard; we know where each student is seated so we can check scripts later on if we suspect somebody's copied from a neighbour. Two invigilators stalk the room throughout. We leave a blank row after every second row of students so the invigilators can get up to any student who's asking a question, or who is peeking a bit too often up a shirt sleeve.

What are the key features of this set-up?

• Students can't tell where they'll be seated before entering the room. They'll likely be seated near somebody with an alphabetically close last name, but they can't tell where in the room they'll be.
• Students can't easily smuggle answers in; the only materials they're supposed to have in front of them are the ones they have to have, though we'll usually allow a water or drink bottle.
• Students don't have access to the blank exam booklets, which vary colour from year to year and, occasionally, by whatever the lecturer happens to have had in his older stock. It's not always easy to predict what the colour of the exam booklet cover will be, so it's harder to smuggle in one that has notes inside.
• Invigilators can approach any student from an oblique angle; as they can be behind a student, it's hard for a student to tell when he's being watched.

Turns out that those measures would thwart most of the exam hacks that students taking this government cybersecurity course tried when they were instructed to try to cheat on the exam. The quiz asked them to write the first hundred digits of pi. Some of the hacks were very nice, but students didn't have to try all that hard given the reasonably lax exam setting.

 

Here's the working paper: Embracing the Kobayashi Maru. What did the students try?

• Variants of encoding the answer onto materials they were allowed to bring into the exam with them: textbooks; the back of name tags that always sit on desks; notebooks; course schedules; post-it notes; food; coffee cup sleeves; random materials that might be in a pencil case; hidden in a watch bezel; bringing in a pre-completed answer sheet hidden among other papers.
• Variants of hacking the exam room: writing on ceiling tiles; writing the answer on sheets of paper in the pile that the invigilators were likely to distribute on request for blank papers; hiding the answer within the computers on the desks;
• Hacking the grader's or invigilator's laziness: Memorize the first ten digits, then provide random numbers.

Most of these won't work given our processes. To what sorts of attacks could we still be vulnerable? Security through obscurity is a pretty poor solution and I'm sure our students are more creative than I am anyway. So here are a few potential options:

• Notes written on or around drink bottles or coffee cup sleeves;
• Notes hidden on one's person and accessed in the privacy of a toilet stall, especially if you've drawn the lucky straw and both invigilators are of not-your-gender;
• Small notes written on erasers or taped inside the sleeve of a programmable calculator;
• Small notes hidden inside pencil cases if the invigilator isn't strict enough on the "pencils and pens only" rule;
• A note hidden under a pony-tail or in dreadlocks.

Options are near limitless for variants on open book or open notes exams; fair systems would let students either bring in anything (completely open book) or restrict students to bringing in only one or two sheets of paper of specified size. Otherwise you're just encouraging students to encode notes on the cover or in the text of the book.

Perhaps I should include a "Please cheat on this question" question in the midterms next semester. Academic misconduct and a visit to the proctor for cheating on other questions, but only a zero on that question if caught cheating on it with bonus points for demonstrating the hack afterwards; then we'd have a better list of things for which to watch out for subsequent cohorts. But as I'm not even sure it's a good idea, it's pretty unlikely that I'd be able to convince the various "Powers That Veto" that it's all that hot.

No exam system will ever be hack-free. It's important to set a strong anti-cheating norm, demonstrating that students could reasonably expect to be caught if they try so they don't expect to be disadvantaged if they don't cheat. Our processes probably do more to encourage honesty by showing that we care about honesty and setting the right expectations than by thwarting the most determined of exam hackers.

Group One Carcinogens!

I love how newspapers always catch the really scary carcinogens in the Group 1 list for comparison purposes. Turns out diesel exhaust is a Group 1 carcinogen.

Here's the Toronto Star:

The decision is a result of a week-long meeting of independent experts who assessed the latest scientific evidence on the cancer-causing potential of diesel and gasoline exhausts.
It puts diesel fumes in the same risk category as noxious substances such as asbestos, arsenic, mustard gas, alcohol and tobacco.

Otago Daily Times:

The decision puts diesel fumes in the same risk category as a number of other noxious substances including asbestos, arsenic, mustard gas, alcohol and tobacco.

Our public broadcaster, OneNews:

Diesel engine exhaust fumes cause cancer in humans and belong in the same potentially deadly category as asbestos, arsenic and mustard gas, World Health Organisation (WHO) experts say.
...The decision puts diesel fumes in the same risk category as a number of other noxious substances including asbestos, arsenic, mustard gas, alcohol and tobacco.

3News:

Reclassifying diesel exhaust as carcinogenic puts it into the same category as other known hazards such as asbestos, alcohol and ultraviolet radiation.

But, 3News also helps put things in perspective:

"It's on the same order of magnitude as passive smoking," said Kurt Straif, director of the IARC department that evaluates cancer risks.

The Christchurch Press and NZ Herald give the same summary as 3News. But the Herald gave a scarier assessment in a second article:

The exhaust from diesel was added to the World Health Organisation's list of most carcinogenic substances yesterday. It ranks alongside arsenic, asbestos, formaldehyde, mustard gas and plutonium as a major health hazard.

Plutonium! That's really scary! Way scarier than passive smoking!

So, what else is in Group One? Here's the Cancer Society. Lots of scary stuff like plutonium. But also a few other things that are a bit less worrying. As I wrote back in 2009 when Doug Sellman was putting alcohol up against plutonium and Gamma Radiation and Mustard Gas:

But here are some other known carcinogens that could have been listed alongside alcohol instead and would have been perhaps a bit less scary: ciclosporin (used to prevent organ rejection after transplant), estrogen-based oral contraceptives and menopausal therapy, risky sex (Hepatitis B & C, HPV, HIV), the sun, mineral oils, salted fish, wood dust, painting, boot and shoe manufacture and repair.

I call a win for the news outlets that quoted the IARC specialist that diesel exhaust is about as bad as second hand smoke. It's a heck of a better way of putting risks in perspective than pointing to freaking plutonium. I call place for those that gave a range of risks that included UV radiation - people have a handle on the riskiness of the sun. And a great big loss to anybody reckoning plutonium comparisons helped enlighten their readers. It would have been helpful if the Science Media Centre had put up the quote from Straif that helps readers contextualize things.

I still don't get how import restrictions on older vehicles, including both petrol and diesel, make more sense than better smog checks on older cars. I sit behind an awful lot of very horrible smelly mid 90s Toyota LandCruisers in Christchurch. Old vans are terrible too. Banning the import of 2004 models seems a pretty roundabout way of getting those stinkers off the roads.