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Year 2008

“The answer: Freedom.”

I related to this particular post by Michael Lewyn at Planetizen, Why I fight: Occasionally, someone familiar with my scholarship asks me: why do you care about walkability and sprawl and cities? Why is this cause more important to you than twenty other worthy causes you might be involved in? The answer: Freedom. Now, the article doesn’t discuss freedom from a property rights or free-market point of view, but from a mobility point of view. As a former “carless teenager” in suburbia (well, carless until 16), I can relate to that. I think my yearning for freedom is what sparked my interest in the city too. Of course, some people equate driving to freedom. For some its walkability, transit, or silent star filled skies. Freedom means different things to everyone, and I found my freedom in the diverse experiences and opportunities only available in the city.

Links to Interesting Articles

Market Urbanism readers may not have noticed, but not too long ago I added a feature to the sidebars labeled “Check these out.” This is a feed from the Market Urbanism del.icio.us bookmarks. I added this feature as a timesaving alternative to creating a new post every time I find a relevant article, leaving more time for in depth posts. You can subscribe to the feed here: rss feed Let me know what you think – is it better, or should I post more often? ——- Update: Look up! Based on your feedback, I made the feed a feedburner feed and created a animation at the top of the page featuring posts from the links feed. It looks like this:

Cul-de-sacs – Privatize ’em

Daniel Nairn at Discovering Urbanism brings up a great point about cul-de-sacs. Are they public goods, or truly unnecessary “socialism in its most extreme form”? Take the standard cul-de-sac that serves a handful of households. The purpose of this design is to exclude the general public from passing through while serving the automotive needs of a small number of individuals. Does it pass our intuitive sense of fairness to declare that the entire public, say the local municipal citizenry, ought to foot the bill for what could essentially be considered a shared driveway? Perhaps a more important question: How does the government’s decision of where to draw the line between public and private encourage or discourage the connectivity of the road system? Dan discusses that Virginia’s DOT is looking at shifting funding away from roads that don’t play a significant role in the transportation network, by using a very well defined metric: The link-node ratio is calculated by dividing the number of links (street segments and stub streets) by the number of nodes (intersections or cul-de-sacs). A perfect grid of streets will have a link-node ratio around 2.5 and a network of complete cul-de-sac or dead end streets with only one way in and one way out will have a link-node ratio of 1.0. It is suggested that a ratio of 1.4 will provide adequate connectivity in many situations. The link-to-node ratio seems like a very rational approach to determining public roadway funding, if one chooses to concede that roads are a public good. Unfortunately, owners of homes on cul-de-sacs have grown acustomed using their publicly-funded, communal driveways, and would suffer from decreased funding for roads they are entirely dependent upon. A viable solution would be for the municipality to grant the cul-de-sac roadway and land to the owners of […]

Who Owns the West?

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution – Now is the Time for the Buffalo Commons: The Federal Government owns more than half of Oregon, Utah, Nevada, Idaho and Alaska and it owns nearly half of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Wyoming. See the map for more. It is time for a sale. Selling even some western land could raise hundreds of billions of dollars – perhaps trillions of dollars – for the Federal government at a time when the funds are badly needed and no one want to raise taxes. At the same time, a sale of western land would improve the efficiency of land allocation. Alex suggests using the funds to buy cheaper land in the plains for The Buffalo Commons, the world’s largest nature park. I haven’t looked into the nature park idea, but I would like to see the Federal Government unload much of that land. The MR post links to an article at a blog called Strange Maps, which uncovered the map from Stanford Magazine. Strange Maps explains: This map details the percentage of state territory owned by the federal government. The top 10 list of states with the highest percentage of federally owned land looks like this: 1. Nevada 84.5% 2. Alaska 69.1% 3. Utah 57.4% 4. Oregon 53.1% 5. Idaho 50.2% 6. Arizona 48.1% 7. California 45.3% 8. Wyoming 42.3% 9. New Mexico 41.8% 10. Colorado 36.6%

Tolling NY’s East River Bridges Back on The Table?

[flickr: darren bryden] Congestion pricing schemes, touted as environmentally-responsible at the time of $4 gas, were defeated in New York City last Spring. However, as the market turmoil threatens to wreak havoc on tax revenues, fiscal necessity has lured New York State and New York City politicians to re-examine the political viability of charging tolls to drivers entering Manhattan. The NY Times City Room blog discusses the history of tolling on New York City’s East River bridges, but much of that history features plans to reinstate tolling and the popular resistance to those plans. How East River Bridges Stayed Toll-Free: On numerous occasions, politicians have tried to reinstitute tolls on the four bridges — the Brooklyn (completed in 1883), Williamsburg (completed in 1903) and Manhattan and Queensboro (both completed in 1909). After all, the Brooklyn Bridge charged horse-drawn carriages a toll from the time it opened. But by the Depression, the tolls were a thing of the past. The history shows that officials have failed again and again to revive tolls on the four bridges. (Other major crossings, including the bridges run by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, already charge tolls.) Tolling being “the third rail of of New York City politics”, it will be hard enough to institute in the face of voter sympathy for road socialism. So, we shouldn’t hold our breath for the ideal solution, full privatization of the bridges and transit, but tolling may be a step in the market direction. Or is it?? Is tolling just away for politicians to let themselves off the hook for their irresponsibility, and will just result in another new tax? Or can we hope it will soften the resistance to market-based solutions. [thanks to loyal Market Urbanism reader, Benjamin Hemric […]

Matt Yglesias fails to make the right case against highways

Matt Yglesias is one of the best mainstream bloggers on land use/transportation that I know of. As one blogger (who I don’t recall right now) once said, his urban planning and transportation posts could be blogs in their own right. However, it’s puzzling that in an article for Cato Unbound, he comes up with such a pathetic rejoinder to the O’Toole/Cox/Poole “vulgar libertarian” transportation cabal, who don’t seem to have ever met a road they didn’t like: Or consider the fact that Randall [sic] O’Toole is indignant about the prospect of public expenditures on mass transit systems, but appears to have little to say about public funding of highways. This, too, looks more like a case of narrow business interests than sterling free market principles. While Yglesias’ instincts are right – current transportation markets in America are highly distorted – the reason they’re distorted has little to do with the ways highways are financed. Based on some basic figures, Randal O’Toole concludes that the vast majority of road funding – over 80% – comes out of user fees. Now, of course there are still some subsidies there, but it’s really nothing compared to the subsidies that mass transit systems receive, which in America never even come close to covering operating costs, never mind capital expenditures. Now, there are some problems with the 80% number, such as the government’s favorable access to bond markets and the legacy of infrastructure that wasn’t paid for with user fees, but all in all, it’s hard to argue that roads have a subsidy advantage over mass transit. However, that’s not to say that Yglesias doesn’t have a point when he says that libertarians and conservatives have blind spots when it comes to how they see transportation. But the real government benefit that the road/car system […]

Could NY Democrats Revive Rent Control?

New York State’s Assembly is now in Democratic control.  On many legislators wish list is to end the vacancy decontrol provisions that allow landlords to remove a unit from rent control if a tenant moves out and the unit rents for more than $2,000 per month.  (for those of you not in New York, apartments over $2,000 per month is actually almost all apartments in Manhattan and desirable locations of Brooklyn & Queens) Crains – Change in state Senate control could hurt landlords “Roadblocks to considering such legislation have been removed,” says Ms. Rosenthal, who represents the Upper West Side. “This will be at the top of many people’s agenda come January.” Of course, this is going to scare the crap out of landlords and renters of market-rate units. “With all of the current uncertainty, why would you throw another obstacle in the way of even more investment in housing in the city,” asks Steven Spinola, president of the Real Estate Board of New York. Mr. Spinola is also confident that Senate Democrats will not act quickly on housing laws. “They’re going to have enough trouble dealing with fiscal problems,” Mr. Spinola says. Maybe our wise legislators will take the time to learn about the microeconomics of rent control…

Talking points on the housing bubble

By Sandy Ikeda Last week I spoke to a standing-room-only crowd of students and faculty about the current economic and financial turmoil.  I shared the podium with three of my colleagues, who range all the way from far to the left of Barack Obama to very, very far to the left of Barack Obama.  Needless to say, they all blamed, to a greater or an even greater degree, “the free market.” Now, I do think it’s possible in principle for wide-spread mal-investments to occur in an unfettered market.  (F.A. Hayek writes about the possibility in his Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle, which you can read online here.)  But enormous speculative bubbles, of the sort we’ve just witnessed in the housing market, are typically the result of government interventions and policies. So in my talk on this highly complex issue I tried to make three points:  (1) the immediate cause of the financial panic on Wall Street was the housing bubble with its sudden rise in mortgage defaults; (2) the free market, which stands for minimal government and the absence of privilege or discrimination, did not create this bubble; and (3) government (and Fed) policy and pressure did, by undermining lending standards across the board and pushing lending rates artificially low. This blog has already referenced Russell Roberts’s fine collection of blog posts on the problem, and if you’re already familiar with the issues then obviously there will be nothing new here for you.  But I think it might be useful to have a list of “names and dates” that make the above case.  The following is not meant to be exhaustive (e.g., it doesn’t even mention important international factors), but is only an outline of the major legislation and policies relevant to the housing bubble. (Caveat:  My expertise in […]

Sandy Ikeda Guest-Blogging at Market Urbanism

When the New York Sun decided to shut down its press, the biggest loss to the blogosphere was Sanford Ikeda’s Culture of Congestion blog. At the Sun, Sandy blogged about cities, economics, politics, and related subjects. Sandford Ikeda is an Associate Professor of Economics at SUNY Purchase. Professor Ikeda is the author of Dynamics of the Mixed Economy: Toward a Theory of Interventionism, involved with the Katrina Project at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and Past President of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics. Much of Sandy’s work and blog posts has overlapped with Market Urbanism’s topics, and viewpoints. Sandy is also a fellow resident of Brooklyn, and admirer of cities. Naturally, I was very honored and excited that Sandy accepted my offer to publish his posts at Market Urbanism while he explores the many options available to him in the blogging world. I am certain Market Urbanism readers will enjoy Sandy’s contributions.

The Moral Case Against Rent Control

In Market Urbanism’s four part series on rent control, I avoided the topic of the morality of rent control, as I intended to address the economic issues and leave the morality to others. Thankfully, J. Brian Phillips of the Ad Hoc Committee for Property Rights is an expert on the subject. In his blog, he linked to the recent Retail Rent Control post, and took the time to address the moral issue: But the real issue isn’t political. The real issue is moral. A large part of the public sees nothing wrong with forcing others to provide for their wants and desires. And there is a steady stream of politicians all too eager to propose laws to grant them their wishes. They think that their wishes can somehow transform reality, that if they pass a law with the intention of creating affordable widgets, affordable widgets will result. They think that politicians are nothing more than genies who can grant their wish simply by writing a law. It doesn’t work that way. Reality is not malleable to one’s wishes. He makes plenty of good points, so I recommend reading the whole post. He concludes: Each individual has a moral right to live for his own happiness. He has a right to the fruits of his labor. He has a right to pursue his values without intervention from others, so long as he respects their mutual rights. Human beings are not sacrificial animals. Also, here’s another another article on the morality of rent control: Why Rent Control is Immoral by Michael S. Berliner, Ph.D. The morality issue belongs as a prominent part of the rent control discussion, but is seldom heard among all the progressive anti-market rhetoric.

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