Spring Fever Links

1) Nate Berg at The Atlantic Cities covers new research on the world’s earliest cities. The findings would make Jane Jacobs happy as researchers have uncovered evidence that the earliest urbanization was a case of spontaneous order. Their construction wasn’t directed by kings as some historians previously thought, but rather by bottom-up decision-making.

2) Alex Block had two interesting pieces a while back on the politics of increasing urban density. He points out that the vested interests in urban development complicate the policy prescriptions that we often advocate here of loosening regulations.

3) Charlie Gardner at Old Urbanist points out that we shouldn’t get carried away with hopes for housing prices dropping in expensive cities with increased housing supply. While land use restrictions that Matt Yglesias, Ryan Avent, Ed Glaeser and others have written on force urban housing prices higher than they need to be, infill redevelopment is inherently a costly, slow process. It’s much easier for the price of housing in, say, Houston to stay closer to costs of construction because Houston has available land to build on cheaply and easily. Housing in New York is expensive in large part because of market fundamentals, but density restrictions make it more expensive than it has to be.

4) The case of the successful parking pricing in San Francisco that continues to receive opposition reminds me of this passage from Murray Rothbard’s For a New Liberty:

The libertarian who wants to replace government by private enterprises in the above areas is thus treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial. If the government and only the government had had a monopoly of the shoe manufacturing and retailing business, how would most of the public treat the libertarian who now came along to advocate that the government get out of the shoe business and throw it open to private enterprise? He would undoubtedly be treated as follows: people would cry, “How could you? You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes!”

Of course the San Francisco case is not nearly so radical, as street parking spaces are still government-owned, but the implementation of Donald Shoup’s market-based prices for parking serves as a step toward allocating spaces to their highest-valued use. The program’s success so far demonstrates that it is possible to move toward a free market allocation of a good that we are used to receiving free from the government, but it will always be a political struggle. Adam previously wrote at length about Rothbard the Urbanist.