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Stephen Smith

Stephen Smith

I graduated Spring 2010 from Georgetown undergrad, with an entirely unrelated and highly regrettable major that might have made a little more sense if I actually wanted to become an international trade lawyer, but which alas seems good for little else. I still do most of the tweeting for Market Urbanism Stephen had previously written on urbanism at Forbes.com. Articles Profile; Reason Magazine, and Next City
  • Joined: May 21, 2025
  • Articles: 282
  • Comments: 41

LaHood’s revealingly stupid reply to the WaPo’s HSR criticism

The WaPo earlier this week ran an editorial against California high-speed rail, and on Friday ran a response from Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood. As the dedicated anti-California HSR blog High-Speed Train Talk says, the letter does a pretty good job of summing up everything that’s wrong with the guy. The letter starts off with this stunningly ignorant comparison to highway building in the 1950s: If President Dwight D. Eisenhower had waited until he had all the cash on hand, all the lines drawn on a map and all the naysayers on board, America wouldn’t have an interstate highway system. And if it didn’t have an interstate highway system, maybe rail transportation wouldn’t have died out in the first place! We also learn that “put[ting] Californians back to work” is “perhaps [the] most important” goal of the project – a candid admission that this project is more about making work for union workers than it is about transportation. This was obvious beforehand – we will, after all, pay double for the HSR trains due to procurement protectionism – but it’s nice to see LaHood finally admit it. And just in case we still harbored any delusions about LaHood’s reasoning skills, he rounds the letter out with this blatant tautology: Focusing the total sum of our federal dollars in one project, as The Post suggests, is a poor strategy that will not serve our long-term goal of creating a national high-speed rail network.

Prince Charles on urbanism: the good and the bad

Prince Charles, perhaps the world’s most famous urbanist, on Dharavi, which he’s planning to replicate in either Calcutta or Bangalore: Unlike the ‘fragmented, deconstructed housing estates’ built in the West, the slum has ‘order and harmony’ he claimed, adding: ‘We have a great deal to learn about how complex systems can self-organise to create a harmonious whole.’ Though he’s got good things to say about organic development, his critiques of modern architectural styles and his habit of injecting himself into planning decisions have not earned him fans in the UK, where two years ago a group of architects actually sent him a letter telling him to shut up: Charles’s “private comments and behind-the-scenes lobbying” were anomalous in a modern, democratic system, said the letter writers, who also included Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the Swiss duo whose practice turned the former Bankside power station into the Tate Modern, and Italy’s Renzo Piano, the co-designer with Rogers of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. […] Rogers’ proposals for the Chelsea site had already been adapted following local objections and were now in the hands of Westminster council planners, they noted. “If the prince wants to comment on the design of this, or any other, project, we urge him to do so through the established planning consultation process. Rather than use his privileged position to intervene in one of the most significant residential projects likely to be built in London in the next five years, he should engage in an open and transparent debate.” “This is not really about a style, or an argument about how buildings look, but how we go about things,” said Deyan Sudjic, the director of the Design Museum in London, who also signed the letter. “What’s slightly depressing is that this is kind of an old argument […]

Midnight link list

1. “Gen Y/Millennials” want density. Ha! Sucks for them. 2. Mini-bleg: Does anyone know what “building regulations” are preventing this proposed Jackson Heights building from having windows on one side? 3. Southwest DC, before and after highways/urban renewal, in pictures. 4. Overplanning in China. 5. Palm Beach County wants to allow private developers to build along West Palm Beach’s train line and bus stops, but Mayor Lois Frankel wants a sports stadium. 6. St. Louis got money from Obama’s stimulus to hire consulting firms to upzone the city’s dense neighborhoods.

Hump day list

Because for the first time since May, I have a hump day. Which is why all you get is a list. 1. Traditionally, the NYC-dominated New York State Assembly’s whacky rent control impulses have been tempered by the suburban/upstate-dominated Senate, but the NYT says that they may have struck a deal, with the Assembly winning the following: About one million apartments in the city’s five boroughs, roughly half of all rental units, are covered by the existing laws, which sharply limit landlords’ ability to raise rents and keep many apartments, particularly in Manhattan, renting at well below market value. Currently, apartments become deregulated when the rent reaches $2,000 and total household income of the tenants is at least $175,000 annually for two years. [Assembly speaker Sheldon] Silver said he would like not only to preserve those protections, but also to expand them, by raising the income and rent thresholds. “You want to preserve people making $210,000, $225,000 a year, living where they’re living,” Mr. Silver said. Uh, maybe you want to preserve that… 2. A good article from the NYT about Brooklyn’s new skyline. I’m impressed that they held off until the last page to quote a naysaying politician: Robert Perris, the district manager of Community Board 2, which represents the area, said the benefits of residences along Flatbush Avenue were clear. But, he added, so are the benefits of a strong commercial district — and strengthening the commercial district was one of the chief goals of the rezoning. When residential buildings are erected in commercial zones, he said, their lots are lost for commercial purposes. It also would have been nice to have a sentence or two more more detail in this fairly long article about the 2004 “rezoning,” though. 3. This study found that parking adds 10% to […]

Newsflash: there’s no supply and demand in a centrally-planned market

The NYT has an absolutely boneheaded article about the shortage of taxicabs in Manhattan during the evening rush-hour. They blame rising Manhattan rents and cabbies’ schedules, but the statists at the New York Times don’t see the obvious glaring issue: controlled prices and a taxicab cartel! They cite it as an “apparent violation of the laws of supply and demand,” without recognizing that for supply and demand to work, you need drivers to be able to charge their own prices and enter markets at will. Aside from that supply and demand bit, I’d say the second stupidest quote comes from David Yassky, leader of the cabbies’ cartel: Mr. Yassky said the city “should be circumspect about substituting its judgment for the judgment of business people.” Hmm, that’s odd, because last I checked, Yassky was in charge of a state organ devoted to protecting incumbent taxi drivers from the judgment of business people.

Yet another town moves from parking minimums to maximums with no stop in between

Despite its ridiculously biased opening sentence (“Fairfax County residents will have a harder time finding a free parking space in some neighborhoods if transportation planners get their way”), the Washington Post actually has a relatively informative article on potential new parking maximums in Fairfax County, Virginia. Essentially they want to do what a lot of smart growth-enthralled planners want to do: replace their parking minimums with maximums. Under current ordinances, new townhouses must have at least 2.75 parking spaces per dwelling. Under the draft recommendations, parking would be limited to 1.75 spaces per dwelling in a townhouse development less than a quarter-mile from a Metro station or 2.5 spaces per dwelling if the townhouse were located one-fourth of a mile to a half-mile from the station. Parking at commercial developments would be reduced from 2.6 parking spaces per 125,000 square feet of space to 2.1 if less than a quarter-mile from the Metro and to two spaces less than a half-mile away. Ignoring that last sentence, which I’ll get back to in a minute, this is pretty much the standard planner’s bias – move directly from parking minimums to parking maximums, without, oh, I don’t know, maybe just eliminating the centrally-planned parking regulations altogether?? This is one of the reasons that it’s very hard for libertarians and conservatives to get onboard with recent planning trends: the planners go from car-forcing to car-forbidding, skipping over entirely the obvious intermediate step of just letting people choose for themselves how car- or transit-oriented they want their lives to be. There was also this interesting fact: Yet the number of jurisdictions in the United States that impose parking maximums on developers is still perhaps fewer than 50, Rathbone said. For all the anti-smart growth rhetoric we hear about the planners coming to take away our […]

Terrorism and cities, then and now

I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I (or Robert Fogelson) thinks that the threat of nuclear war in the 1950s was anything but a minor footnote in the history of American decentralization, but this bit from Fogelson’s Downtown (I finally finished! – review forthcoming) caught my eye: The belief that the central business district had outlived its usefulness was heightened by the growing fear of atomic warfare. Less than a year after the United States obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, some Americans were wondering whether the modern city as doomed. As early as 1948 Tracy B. Augur, past president of the American Institute of Planners, declared that the only defense against atomic weapons was dispersal. “We cannot afford not to disperse our cities,” he said. “If we delay too long,” he warned, “we may wake up some morning and find that we haven’t any country, that is, if we wake up at all that morning.” Although some skeptics argued that dispersal would be impractical and ineffective, Augur and others made a strong impression on many Americans, even many who had a substantial stake in the well-being of the central business district. A good example is Albert D. Hutzler, president of Hutzler Brothers, Baltimore’s leading department store. Asked at the 1948 Businessmen’s Conference on Urban Problems, a conference sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, “Isn’t decentralization inevitable? Aren’t we wasting money and energy in trying to delay it?” he replied: If you would have asked me that a few years ago, I would have been extremely hot in saying it was not inevitable. I would have been tremendously strong in saying that our best course was redevelopment, spending all the money necessary for it. However, I have wavered a little bit since the atomic bomb. I am quite […]

Friday link list

Expect a lot more of these… 1. Beijing tries to relieve congestion by…building a quarter-million parking new spaces and 125 miles of new downtown streets?! But don’t worry – bike sharing! 2. Seattle inches closer to a Shoupian on-street parking policy, and Austin ponders charging for on-street parking after dark and on Saturdays. My favorite comment from the Seattle story is this one: “Get rid of the illegal aliens and we will have LOTS of room to park! And plenty money! Sanctuary idiots!” I guess that was one positive aspect of the Holocaust: more parking! (Oops, did I just Godwin this blog?) 3. East (a.k.a. Spanish) Harlem wants to develop its transit-accessible parking lots and fill them with “low- and middle-income residents” to aid in its “struggl[e] to maintain its affordable housing stock,” but of course “they want to prevent the construction of large apartment towers.” Sorry, East Harlem – you can’t have your cake and eat it too. 4. As if we needed any more evidence that diverting police officers for voluntary bag searches in the DC Metro was an absurd idea. 5. A Green candidate for London mayor has proposed expanding the area that the congestion charge covers, build tiers in, and raise prices to the point where entering the innermost part of London would cost drivers £50/day (!!). As long as we don’t end up on the right-hand side of the Laffer curve – that is, as long as the city can raise more revenue at £50/day than it could at any lower price – I think this would be a step in the direction of market urbanism, since it would emulate the behavior of a profit-seeking road firm. (One way of testing that is to raise the charge gradually and to stop once total revenue starts […]

Preservationists hyperventilate over extra story in Chelsea

About a month ago I put a post where I discussed how overzealous historical preservationists were halting necessary incremental development, and in the long run guaranteeing that the buildings will have to be completely razed if cities are ever to regain a modicum of economic rationality. I mentioned the case of a building in Chelsea whose top story was added illegally (or so the city claims – the details are murky) and will now be torn down, and I was surprised to see that the NYT devoted a whole article to it in yesterday’s. What’s interesting to me is all the hyperbolic statements that preservationists are making, especially considering that the building’s supposed significance (it was home to an abolitionist who helped slaves escape) has little to nothing to do with its architecture: “It’s just come to this desperate situation,” said Fern Luskin, an architectural historian who lives on the block and has taken up the cause of protecting the historic integrity of the building, a Greek Revival house at 339 West 29th Street, between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. “It’s like taking a serrated knife and lopping off our history,” she said of the addition. “It will permanently disfigure the evidence of what happened there.” Of course, except for the cornice at the top, there’s no “lopping off” going on here – it was an addition, for Christ’s sake! And this I guess is why it’s so urgent to preserve the roof, which no one but the maintenance man will ever even see: The Gibbonses, abolitionists before the Civil War, used the house as a meeting place, where they helped escaping slaves en route to Canada. “They were like the Schindler of their day, taking such a chance, harboring slaves that were running for their lives,” said Ms. Luskin, referring […]

If it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it; if it dies…

I apologize for the lack of posts for the last few days – I just moved to DC (a few blocks north of H Street, right by Gallaudet, if anyone’s curious), and I have yet to begin another rewarding relationship with Comcast. But, I’m here at work (I started interning at Reason magazine today), and I’ve got some free time, so I wanted to post this excerpt from Fogelson’s Downtown (I’m almost done!) that illustrates perfectly the shift from the second to last phase of Reagan’s joke about government, as applied to housing policy: If neither public authority nor private enterprise could overcome the obstacles to urban redevelopment on its own, perhaps they could overcome them by working together. Or so the downtown business interests and their allies hoped. The trouble was that public authority and private enterprise were not used to working together. Through the mid nineteenth century public authority had routinely joined forces with private enterprise to stimulate economic development. But later this practice gave way to what might be called, for lack of a better term, an adversarial arrangement. Under this arrangement, public authorities granted private companies a franchise to build and operate the street railways, gas systems, and other public utilities other than the waterworks. They also regulated these companies. Under the watchful eyes of the courts and state legislatures, public authorities regulated the building industry as well. They established fire zones, drafted building codes, imposed height limits, and formulated zoning regulations. They also granted building permits – and, at least in theory, inspected everything from elevators to fire escapes. This adversarial arrangement was the subject of a nationwide debate in the early twentieth century. Some Americans attacked it as one of the principal sources of corruption in cities. Others defended it as the most efficient […]

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