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Month October 2011

Hey Bloomberg, Buy Your Own 7 Train to New Jersey!

A few days ago, Mayor Bloomberg made a startling announcement: The 7 train extension to New Jersey is still on. The idea was first floated last year as a replacement for the canceled trans-Hudson commuter rail ARC project, but it was a hard sell then, and at $10 billion, it’s still a hard sell. The federal ARC funds have long since been redistributed, and New York City has no idea how it’ll even finish the Second Avenue Subway – where does Bloomberg think money for a subway line to New Jersey is going to come from? …

Book Review of Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi

I’m reviewing Instant City: Life and Death in Karachi by Steve Inskeep as part of a TLC Book Tour. Other bloggers are also reviewing the book throughout October, and you can find links to their reviews here. I received a complimentary copy of the book, and I’d like to send it to a reader if anyone who’d like to read it doesn’t mind a copy with some underlining and margin notes. If you’d like it, just comment saying so by Wednesday, November 2nd. If multiple readers would like it, I’ll pick one at random. _____________________________ In a manner that is rare for non fiction, Instant City is really a page turner. Inskeep takes us through the history of Karachi from Pakistan’s independence in 1947 through the present, stringing personal stories of social entrepreneurs, politicians, activists and real estate developers together to tell the city’s story. He revolves the historical accounts around a 2007 bombing, in which unknown perpetrators bombed a procession that was part of a Shia religious holiday. Following the bombing, rioters burned down blocks of wholesale retail buildings. Despite the arrests of four suspects, many of the city’s residents are so distrustful of the city’s MQM government that they believe that city officials caused the bombing and subsequent fires in order to clear out the neighborhood’s current tenants to make way for more glamorous businesses. While the city’s mayor passionately denies that city government had any involvement with burning its citizens’ property, that residents have so little faith in their government demonstrates how absent the rule of law is in Karachi regarding property rights to land. In with the history of the city’s history, growth, and conflict, Inskeep covers land use in Karachi in considerable detail. To me, “Groundbreaking” is the most interesting chapter, where Inskeep details the experience of slum clearance in the […]

Cities and the Market Process: Part 1

In a post about the tendency for emergent urbanists to promote the idea of cities having a single equilibrium, Alon Levy recently wrote that collective choice is the best manner for determining urban form. Many urbanists accept that some of the top-down regulations that limit density or use are detrimental to cities, but they often stop short of suggesting that land use regulation should be abolished and transportation privatized, which I will support here with arguments based in Austrian economics. This post does not get to a critique of the collective choice that Alon supports; later entries in this market process series will address both the problems of creating urban policy through collective choice, and some of the institutions that have emerged within civil society that are essential to cities and their residents. The cohort of economists and urbanists who support the elimination of land use regulation is small because cities present all of the problems that neoclassical and Keynesian economists describe as market failures, including externalities, high transaction costs involved in Coasean bargaining, non-excludable goods, etc. However, I believe that emergent solutions solve these problems more effectively than either central planning or collective decision making that becomes law, and the failed and inefficient government projects that urbanist bloggers write about everyday suggest that government failure is no trivial concern. The first reason that regulation is a poor tool to for determining urban form comes from Friedrich Hayek. He clearly identified the calculation problem inherent in central planning: the information necessary to coordinate markets (including land use markets) is held by individuals with “particular knowledge of time and place.” Even assuming that urban planners are benevolent and seek to provide the best outcomes for their communities, they could never compile the knowledge necessary to determine what those outcomes are. Jane […]

London Planning Politics Breeds a Rare NIMBY Strain: Preventative Anti-NIMBY NIMBYism

Ministry of NIMBYs is more like it! Talk about man-bites-dog: London’s Ministry of Sound, perhaps the world’s most famous nightclub, has gone on an all-out offensive against new residential skyscrapers near its home at Elephant & Castle, in Southwark. Their latest target is a 41-story tower in an area which, along with the City of London across the Thames, has a newfound fondness for tall towers, including the recently built Strata SE1 (silly name: “the Razor”)….

Why Preserve a Broken Cornice Line?

There’s a lot that bothers me about preservation policy, but one of the weirdest has to be rules that make it difficult to fill in gaps in building height. I’m not a big fan of the idea that historic neighborhoods have to stay the same “scale” forever, but it boggles my mind that people can both support keeping neighborhoods “in scale,” but oppose people who want to bring a building up to the neighborhood’s scale. 33 Bond, practically begging for more height …

On Favored Quarters, Off-Center Skyscraper Districts, and Poverty

Following up on my post yesterday skyscrapers in Europe, I’d like to explain why, in detail, central business districts are generally superior to off-center ones like La Défense outside Paris or Washington’s Virginia suburbs. It’s not that I just enjoy the spatial symmetry and organic shape of a centralized city – it’s actually more efficient! Neglect it, and you’re doing a disservice to your poorest citizens, who too often find themselves out of commuting range of many of a city’s jobs. …

Old Urbanist on New Public Housing

Charlie Gardner at Old Urbanist, one of my favorite urbanist blogs, has a great post that echoes what I said a few days ago about the latest wave of American public housing projects. Here he first quotes a Nashville public housing official: “Part of the problem with public housing in the U.S….

Brookings Study on HCVs; Results to be Expected

This post originally appeared at Neighborhood Effects, a Mercatus Center blog where we write about state and local policy issues as well as the broad concepts of economic freedom.    A new Brookings study by Kenya Covington, Lance Freeman, and Michael Stoll finds that increasingly, recipients of housing vouchers are using these subsidies to move from inner cities to suburbs. The authors support low-income people moving to high-income suburbs because they suggest that this is where they would have the best job prospects. However the study authors find that about half of all HCV recipients moved to low-income suburbs rather than high-income suburbs, and they assert that this is a problem because low-income suburbs do not have as many job opportunities as their high-income counterparts. This result is unsurprising, though, since vouchers go further in areas with lower housing costs. The study does not take into account the individualized process of housing decisions because it relies on aggregate statistics and looks only at the ratio of people to jobs, ignoring other variables such as availability of housing and transit. In the executive summary, Covington, Freeman, and Stoll suggest that “policies that … reevaluate existing zoning laws and development impact fees … could give HCV recipients access to a broader range of high-quality residential environments,” but they do not pick up on these themes in their policy recommendations. Instead they focus on shaping the way that individuals choose to use their housing subsidies. By relaxing density restrictions both in urban cores and in suburbs, policymakers would allow landlords to build housing that is accessible to a wider range of incomes with and without housing vouchers. HCVs offer a major improvement over publicly provided housing specifically because they allow individuals to choose the best place to live for themselves, using local knowledge rather than top-down planning. The Brookings authors […]

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