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Emily Hamilton

Emily Hamilton

  • Joined: May 21, 2025
  • Articles: 154

Mandating attractive urban design

The most recent installment of the American Enterprise Institute’s series Society and Culture Outlook features a piece about the role of urban design in how people use cities. The article “A plea for beauty: a manifesto for a new urbanism” by Roger Scruton is a deviation from AEI’s typically conservative view toward central planning. Scruton favors heavy-handed planning of the appearance of the built environment, essentially advocating for strict form-based zoning codes: Many suggestions have been made as to how an attraction to the center might be generated. Building downtown convention centers, expensive museums, and concert halls; offering tax credits for city-center businesses; creating enterprise zones; and removing some of the regulations that make living, moving, and trading downtown so difficult have all been tried, and none has worked. And the reason they do not work is because they are addressing symptoms instead of causes. People flee from city centers because they do not like city centers. And they do not like city centers because they are alienating, ugly, and without a human face. Or rather, they do not like city centers when they are alienating, ugly, and inhuman, the normal case in America. [. . .] The proof of this is easy to find in the old cities of Europe. People choose to live in the center of Paris, Rome, Prague, or London rather than the periphery. Others who do not live in those cities want to spend their vacations there to enjoy the culture, entertainment, and beauty of their surroundings. These are flourishing cities, in which people of every class and occupation live side by side in mutual dependency while maintaining the distance that is one of the great gifts of the urban way of life. And there is a simple explanation for this: People wish to live […]

Detroit’s Financial Future

After flirting with Chapter 9 bankruptcy or a state takeover of its finances, Detroit has reached a deal with the state of Michigan that will allow it to remain independently managed with a requirement for state oversight. The Detroit Free Press reports: The city has seven days to create the positions of chief financial officer and program management director and 30 days after that to make a hire from a list of three candidates from the mayor and state treasurer. Lewis said the city is compiling a list of candidates. “We’ve got a lot of requirements that are in the agreement,” Lewis said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do (with the agreement) and then getting to the work of fixing the city. Our focus is on executing the plan and getting the resources here to execute the plan.” Snyder reiterated that the city “shouldn’t expect” a cash bailout, adding that Detroit is one of many troubled communities in the state. But he said the state would use its resources in a variety of ways to help the city. Snyder said the agreement assures the things that need to be done will get done, describing it as a “progressive series of steps” that first allow the mayor and the council to make the decisions, and then empowers the project manager to do so if they don’t. “This is a legal document designed to deal with situations when they don’t go right,” he said. While bankruptcy protection offers the advantage to cities of achieving a more manageable debt load, it doesn’t come without a cost. Bankruptcy would add an additional stigma to Detroit, already known for municipal financial distress, encouraging business disinvestment. Vallejo, CA filed for bankruptcy in 2008, and as the New York Times explains, the city is still in a difficult […]

Cities and the Market Process: Part 4

This series looks at some of the ways that people organize themselves to live alongside each other in cities. Part 1 looks at inherent problems with top-down planning, and this part will expand on this issue with the specific problems of pricing government-owned land. Prices are an emergent order that convey information beyond what is available to any individual. Entrepreneurs are incentivized by profits to provide consumers with the goods that they are looking for. The market is constantly moving toward equilibrium as consumer preferences change and entrepreneurial discovery takes place. With all of these moving parts, equilibrium prices will never be achieved, but we will always be moving toward equilibrium as entrepreneurs respond to profit and loss feedback. For me, the clearest description of this market process is Israel Kirzner’s Competition and Entrepreneurship.  The essay “I, Pencil” by Leonard E. Read provides a simple illustration of the dispersed knowledge that prices capture. He points out that there is not a single person on earth with the knowledge to construct a pencil, one of the simplest consumer goods available. Prices allow for this division of labor. While the land market is distinct from manufactured goods, prices play an equally important role in allocating land use. The knowledge of this highest value use is likewise disperse and tacit, so no one decision-maker has the necessary information to allocate land efficiently. The problem of government pricing is perhaps most severe in below market-rate or zero-price street parking, but it can also be seen in open space, where the value of the land that is dedicated to (often unused) public space is not considered. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs criticizes government-provided land use in the form of city sidewalks that are too narrow, parks that are too large or not visible […]

More on Parking Prices

At Wabi-sabi, Sandy Ikeda (former Market Urbanism writer) has a great analysis of San Francisco’s pricing for parking. He points out that assigning prices to spots is not equivalent to allowing a market to determine a price. For a real price to emerge capital (the parking space) cannot be state-owned. Sandy points out that the “shortage” of parking arises because no one owns street parking, so the appropriate incentives are not in place for someone to charge an equilibrium price for parking. While the San Francisco programmay be a step in the right direction, he explains that “more intervention usually doesn’t solve the problems that were themselves the result of a prior intervention.” In this case, the city is trying to set a price for something that it could instead auction off to eliminate the original intervention. On yesterday’s post, two commenters pointed out other parking reforms in Austin and in Long Beach that go a step further than charging higher prices for parking. These cities have allowed businesses to lease parking spots for outdoor restaurant seating or retail. San Francisco has also tried turning parking spots into mini parks. This has several benefits, including allowing for land to be better-utilized by permitting a form of street narrowing. However, as long as curbside parking remains city-owned, prices for either parking or land leases will be determined arbitrarily, preventing the actual highest-value use from being discovered.

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 […]

The Tyranny of Zoning: Exhibit A

The Washington Post reports that the redevelopment of the Giant grocery store at Wisconsin Ave and Idaho Ave will finally be getting underway. Through the sick humors of the real estate gods, I live pretty close the this grocery store and can attest that it is an eyesore in bad need of a renovation: It is one of the most belabored Washington development projects in recent memory, but on April 12 the Giant grocery store at 3336 Wisconsin Ave. NW will finally close, making way for construction of a $125 million housing-and-retail project that will feature a much bigger new store. Giant began discussing plans to replace the out-of-date, 18,500-square-foot Giant almost a decade ago, but questions about what the company ought to build in its place grew to monstrous proportions in the Cleveland Park neighborhood. Eventually, the debate reached the point that some neighbors on opposing sides of the issue ceased speaking to one another. Last week I attended one of the Urban Land Institute’s Real Estate 101 courses about this project and learned about this project from the land use attorney’s perspective.  Phil Feola with Goulston & Storrs shared the story of the entitlement process for this project, going back to the first ANC meeting in 2005. Part of the property that Giant wanted to develop as retail is zoned residential, so rather than attempting to amend the code, they sought approval of a Planned Unit Development. Typically a PUD is easier to achieve than blanket upzoning for a parcel because with a PUD both city planning and the project’s neighbors know what they will be getting with the redevelopment. The neighbors initially requested 32 changes to the PUD, and after making some adjustments, Giant’s proposal received near-unanimous support from both the Zoning Commission and the National Capital Development Commission.   […]

Book Review: The Rent Is Too Damn High

Matt Yglesias’ new Kindle single, The Rent Is Too Damn High, is a quick and engaging read on the reasons that much of the conventional wisdom about housing markets is wrong. While Yglesias has many progressive views, with regard to land use he takes a classical liberal stance. He explains that the “rent is too damn high” because land use regulations restrict housing supply, keeping prices above the free market equilibrium. My favorite part of the book was Yglesias’ discussion of unbundling the supply and demand for land from the supply and demand for buildings. He provides a very clear explanation of the differences between the two, explaining that rising land values benefit land owners, but rising housing prices serve only to decrease everyone’s real income. Under a system where land use is regulated to constrain the supply of buildings, landowners earn long term rents (higher than they would otherwise earn) that cannot be eroded by other landowners building more densely. In the chapter “The Virtues of Density,” Yglesias offers a powerful counter-argument to “market suburbanists” who argue that land use deregulation amounts to forcing density on people: People worry that a denser neighborhood will have more traffic and more noise. Generally speaking, they’re correct. But all this means is that allowing higher density will be a self-limiting process. Balancing the different costs and benefits involved in denser building is, after all, precisely the sort of thing that relatively free markets are good at. Different people have different preferences about noise, commuting mode, lawn size, amenities, and employment possibililties. . . . To say that some of America’s neighborhoods — especially in coastal cities with strong economic opportunities and limited space — should be denser is not an argument for infinite density. Nor is it an argument for central planning […]

Maryland realtors fight to protect their subsidy

This post originally appeared at Neighborhood Effects, a Mercatus Center blog where we write about the economics of state and local policy. We’ve already explored Governor O’Malley’s proposal for the Maryland budget here and here, but recently, a perhaps unintended consequence of the budget came to light. By limiting the deduction that residents earning over $100,000 can make on their state income taxes, the proposed budget would limit the size of the mortgage interest tax deduction for many taxpayers. I stand by my earlier argument that reducing deductions for only one group of people is not a step in the direction of fairness, but a reduction in the mortgage interest tax deduction may be a positive side effect of an otherwise bad policy. From a limited-government perspective, the obvious downside of a reduction in the mortgage-interest tax deduction is that this represents a revenue-positive change in Maryland’s tax code in a state that already has one of the highest tax burdens in the country. Overall though, I think reducing this tax expenditure is a positive change because the policy has many negative consequences. While the causes of the financial crisis were many, by subsidizing investment in homes, the mortgage interest tax deduction played some part in the overvaluation of housing stock. Aside from the poor incentives that this tax expenditure creates in financial markets, it amounts to favoritism of suburbs over cities. In Triumph of the City, Ed Glaeser argues that the deduction leads many people to abandon renting in a city center for homeownership in the suburbs. However the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston provides evidence that the policy is more likely to lead people to buy larger homes than they otherwise would rather than trading renting for buying a home. Richard K. Green and Andrew Reschovsky write: If one set out to design a policy to encourage homeownership, […]

A hole in the literature?

In the comments of a previous post, readers discussed the incentives facing different types of landowners whose properties are facing potential upzoning, demonstrating just how complicated the relationship between land use regulations and property values is. As I see it, theory tells us that upzoning will increase the value of much of the land that will be redeveloped by opening up options for the developer to put the land to a higher valued use. However, land that is not economically viable for redevelopment and perhaps some land near this margin would fall in value due to the increased supply permitted. The example from the earlier post was a proposal for upzoning in Hollywood. I would think that plenty of properties there would be ripe for redevelopment, as single family zoning is constricting supply to well below the market clearing level. If this is true, many homeowners would stand to receive a windfall with upzoning. I’m not very familiar with Los Angeles, but I’d think it likely that owners on the periphery of the area to be upzoned could potentially lose money, as the supply of housing would increase in the most desirable parts of Hollywood, devaluing homes in the less desirable areas. In the comments, awp provided clear analysis of what’s going on in this situation: The excess “rent” comes from having a part of a limited SUPPLY. Any one individual would be able to increase their portion of the “rent” by being the only one allowed to increase their supply, while lowering the total “rent” through the increase in SUPPLY.  If the zoning is removed there will be no remaining excess “rent”.  It would take some serious analysis that I have never seen to figure who would benefit the by moving from a zoning regime to a free market regime. […]

Transportation and Infrastructure Blues Links

1. For anyone who doesn’t follow Stephen on Twitter at @MarketUrbanism, he’s now a real estate reporter at International Business Times. Here he covers criticism of the National Association of Realtors’ forecast that housing prices have bottomed out. 2. In the debate over whether or not to ban food on the Subway, a rider whom the New York Times interviews brings up the key issue of enforceability. The state senate proposed the ban to mitigate the system’s rat problem. While the state could certainly change the rules about eating on the Subway, the informal law wouldn’t be so easy to change. Metro has always (?) been food-free, and the ridership culture generally supports this, but New Yorkers who are in the habit of eating on their commute are unlikely to stop due to a small probability of a fine. 3. At the risk of turning Market Urbanism into an EconTalk fan blog, Russ Roberts has another great urbanism-related podcast with David Owens, author of The Conundrum. The book is about the unintended consequences of environmental activism. While the podcast (and I believe the book) deals primarily with climate change and cities’ relatively low per-capita carbon usage, the problem of unintended consequences is abundant throughout urban planning. As much as they’d like to, planners can’t change human behavior in a vacuum. 4. Yes! Melbourne Planning Minister Matthew Guy proposes not some wimpy upzoning, but abolishing height limits in the city’s CBD. The plan has a long road to implementation, but it’s a first step in allowing developers to meet the growing city’s demand for space. The opposition predictably cites the fallacy that density makes traffic worse. 5. Penelope Trunk ponders the fundamental differences between city people and non-city people and concludes that city dwellers are relatively unhappy because they are “maximizers.” I’m not totally sold […]

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