Also read my other post about Kotkin’s book: NIMBYism as an Argument Against Urbanism Traditionally, defenders of suburban sprawl have been skittish about proclaiming that government should promote sprawl and halt infill development. Instead, they have taken a libertarian tack, arguing that government should allow any kind of development while asserting that a level playing field would favor automobile-dependent suburbia. But in his new book The Human City, Joel Kotkin, who, among many other titles, is the executive director of a pro-sprawl organization called the Center for Opportunity Urbanism, appears to take a different view. Like more libertarian defenders of the status quo, he generally opposes attempts to limit new suburban development. But he also writes that both city residents and suburbanites aggressively resist “densification”- that is, when nearby landowners want to build new housing or offices. For example, he writes that Los Angeles neighborhood activists “have rallied against attempts to build denser buildings, which generate more congestion and erode both the area’s livability and its distinct urban identity.” Similarly, he writes that some New Yorkers opposed “Mayor Bloomberg’s attempts to further densify already congested Midtown.” But Kotkin never suggests that turning a cornfield into a subdivision creates congestion, or that doing so would erode an area’s “distinct rural identity.” He also doesn’t seem to think that new housing belongs in existing suburbs: in describing zoning that prohibits such housing, he writes that “suburbs generally can be expected to, for the most part, resist high degrees of densification”, including “attempts by planners to impose strict regulations on construction and impose higher densities”. This language implies (erroneously) that “densification” is something imposed by a distant government, rather than by landowners who want to build places for people to live. So if I interpret his book correctly, it seems that there is nothing libertarian […]
