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Month September 2012

Opportunity for States to Protect Land Use

If this season’s political campaign rhetoric has demonstrated anything, it’s that governors love to take credit for job creation. What I haven’t seen any governor mention, though, is that there is huge opportunity for economic growth in relaxing zoning codes. Most obviously, allowing new opportunities for infill development will create construction jobs. More significantly though, in the long run, cities allow for faster economic growth (and job growth) than other locations. The regulations that prevent cities from growing keep economic progress below what it otherwise would be. While researchers disagree over whether population density or total population is the variable that is most significantly correlated with economic growth, either way zoning plays an important role in holding back job growth, providing policymakers who are willing to deregulate with opportunities to improve their competitive standings next to other cities. Political incentives stand in the way of this growth opportunity, however. Most zoning restrictions benefit a city’s current residents at the expense of potential residents. For example, minimum lot size requirements serve to raise the price of homes, preventing low-income people from moving into neighborhoods that current residents wish to keep exclusive. By changing this current order, policymakers risk losing the support of their homeowning constituents, and interest likely to be better organized than renters and potential city residents. Limitations on housing supply raise the value of existing homes, artificially raising the value of residents’ assets, which homeowners strongly fight to protect. At the local level, policymakers are therefore incentivized to privilege homeowners’ interests at the expense of broad economic growth. At the state level however, the incentives may be different, such that economic growth may benefit state policymakers more than protecting home values. State policymakers have constituents who live in a wide variety of municipalities, some where land use restrictions are less binding in […]

Urban Development in Charter Cities

In light of approval in Honduras for three new charter cities (REDs), much has been written recently on their potential to improve economic development. Economist Paul Romer makes a compelling case for the potential of charter cities, asserting that countries with institutions that impede economic growth can benefit by designating small areas with rules that permit free trade. Despite the promise of REDs, designating new areas for urban economic zones may pose some challenges that haven’t been addressed elsewhere. Cities almost always grow through spontaneous orders in locations that emerge through human migration. Cities are a product of human action, not of human design. Older cities grew through their accessibility to trade and natural resources. More recently, towns have become cities as they have become centers for specific industries. This process happens not with top-down planning, but rather as the market process leads individuals to move to specific places, resulting in the urbanization patterns that we see. In the case of Honduras’ REDs, however, the locations were selected by the state. Unlike the approved sites for REDs in Honduras, Hong Kong and Singapore (models of charter cities) were not greenfields before they became charter cities. Since becoming models of charter cities, both islands’ populations have exploded, but some level of development existed before British rule, and the British did not set out to create large cities. Rather than being planned, the success of these two islands was an accident, in which good institutions in fortunate locations have facilitated enormous economic growth. In contrast, all of the infrastructure and design for the REDs will be built from scratch, at first by one company, MKG, until other investors and individuals move to the city. In a sense, city construction may have to begin before there is demand for it. MKG has pledged $15 million […]

David Gunn on Amtrak’s $151bn NEC plan and how he rebuilt the Harrisburg line

First order of business: I wrote two articles for Bloomberg View (the opinion counterpart to Bloomberg News) on the high cost of US transit – one on private-sector gouging, and one on public-sector gouging. Secondly, I’ve been talking to former Amtrak president David Gunn a lot recently – at first for the labor piece I just linked to, but the conversation has veered into other topics. (If you have any burning questions you’d like answered, leave them in the comments.) The other day I got around to asking him what he thought about Amtrak’s $151 billion proposal for the Northeast Corridor and the $7 billion Union Station plan. His verdict? “It’s all a fuckin’ pipe dream.” His response was basically that big, flashy plans never work out, and that the only way to get things done at Amtrak is to do them under the radar. He used the rebuilding Amtrak’s Harrisburg line from Philadelphia to Harrisburg as an example. The Harrisburg line (the eastern half of Pennsylvania’s original Main Line) is the most important stretch of tracks that Amtrak actually owns after the Northeast Corridor, so I think there’s a lot to be learned  Corridor itself. Here is my transcription of what he said about rebuilding the Harrisburg line. Most parts are verbatim, but there are a few sentences that I wrote from memory, and a few things that I probably missed. The Harrisburg line was a wreck. From Paoli on in [towards Philadelphia – i.e., SEPTA’s most important regional rail line], it was a bad 60 mph railroad, and from Paoli to Harrisburg it was a bad 70-80 mph railroad. The signals were ancient, the track was rough, trees were brushing up against the cars, weeds were growing on the ballast. I rode the line with a fellow who’s got a private car, and we […]

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