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Liberalizing Cities From The Ground Up
Shinjuku Station, Tokyo Train stations in Japan are a lot of things. They are busy – Tokyo’s Shinjuku Station sees two-thirds as many passengers as the entire NYC Subway. They are complex – the big ones are shared by multiple railway companies, from public to private and everything in between.
D.C.'s Uline Arena – once a trash transfer station, now an indoor parking lot American cities have been on the rebound for about two decades now, with once moribund residential and commercial neighborhoods springing back to life.
When libertarians (and liberals) argue that increasing the supply of urban housing will lower the price of urban housing, they’re drawing on some pretty basic and well-established economic concepts. And yet, the coexistence of gentrification and housing supply growth seem to put a lie to that theory – in cities across America, we see neighborhoods adding housing while still seeing rapid increases in the price of housing. From the point of view of the poor and often non-white residents who are being pushed out, the market remedy of increasing supply just doesn’t seem to be working. …
The era of liberals writing e-books about market urbanism is upon us! I knew about Matt Yglesias’ upcoming “Kindle Single” The Rent is Too Damn High, but Ryan Avent’s The Gated City took me by surprise. Ryan’s book has a “print length” of 90 pages, costs $1.99, and despite the name “Kindle Single,” can be downloaded to pretty much any computer or smart phone. I haven’t read it yet, but I’m going to download it soon. Consider this an open thread to discuss the book(s).
During the past few decades, “industrial policy” was an epithet, and you still won’t see Obama going around calling his “green jobs” projects industrial policy in speeches any time soon. But some think it’s time to shed the stigma, and the flagship Obama industrial policy seems to be electric vehicles – or more specifically, the batteries that power them: “It was a calculated risk — a lot of money, to be sure, but given the stakes, I think it was a pretty thoughtful bet,” says Ron Bloom, who recently served as an assistant to President Obama for manufacturing policy. “If vehicle electrification really does take off, as many, many people think it will, and we’re not part of it, then we could lose our leadership of the global automobile industry.” Which would be catastrophic. By some estimates, as much as 20 percent of all manufacturing jobs are directly or indirectly related to the automobile industry. Bloom points out that the United States is not the only country betting on batteries; a number of Asian countries have done so as well. And if a bunch of Asian countries jumped off a bridge, would you do it too? The Times calls it “less like Google and more like Ford,” and I’m not sure if they mean that as a bad thing. I’m not going to lay out a long case against electric cars right now, but suffice it to say I think they’re just another subsidy to the auto-based system, and that the true environmental harm in cars is not their actual emissions, but the land use patterns than they necessitate, and an electric battery doesn’t change this one bit. I’m certainly not going to lay the blame on urbanists for Obama’s electric car infatuation, but I think it should be a wake-up […]
I’ll (hopefully) be doing an interview with someone at the Federal Railroad Administration (probably a PR person, but since its via email, hopefully they’ll be able to go ask bureaucrats and engineers the answers to some technical questions) for Streetsblog DC next week, so, if you’ve got any burning questions, let me know and I’ll ask them! You can either leave them in the comments or email them to [email protected]. Here’s some background for those who aren’t aware of the controversy over FRA’s safety regulations.
A paragraph on what we might today call “good transit” in Railroaded: What distinguished railroads from the natural geography through which they ran was their centrality to measures of value; they transformed everything around them. There is no such thing as a badly placed river on a mountain, although humans may wish they were located elsewhere. They are wehre they are, but engineers located railroads for human purposes. There were good locations and bad. To determine the line between “the utterly bad and the barely tolerable” in railway location, Wellington relied on a second abstract measure: the dollar. Wellington thought engineering should not be considered the art of construction but rather “the art of doing that well with one dollar, which any bungler can do with two after a fashion.” How to build a railroad was widely studied, but “the larger questions of where to build and when to buil, and whether to build them at all” had been neglected. Hm, if only there were some process for building infrastructure that “relied on the dollar”…
I’ve you have any interesting in Philadelphia or architectural history, you should be reading Philaphilia (scroll down past the weird drawing – I know). I think the Empty Lot of the Week feature (most recent one here) is my favorite. That is all.
So I bought Richard White’s Railroaded based on the interview Emily blogged about earlier, and so far I’m enjoying it. It can be a bit polemical (“He was an eclectic hater who hated people who often hated one another”) and by page 34 I’ve already gotten lost a few times in railroad finance jargon, but hopefully that’ll ease as I get further in the book. Anyway, in the beginning the author makes reference to commonalities between today’s financial mess(es) and the intercontinentals. Here’s the first one I saw: The Central Pacific and other transcontinental railroads, their bankers, and the syndicates together lured investors, who had first ventured into the financial markets during the Civil War, along the financial gangplank one small step at a time. Investors proceeded from government bonds to government-secured railroad bonds, to convertible bonds, to mortgage bonds vouched for by the same people who sold the government bonds, to a whole array of financial instruments, and from there, potentially, into the drink.
Here’s something to keep in mind when you hear mayors making plans for things like designated green energy zones or tech clusters: Q: Has anything surprised you about downtown’s recovery? A: This was always a financial center. Now we have a lease for a million square feet from Condé Nast. That is a change. The diversity has been a surprise to me. That’s from a Crain‘s interview with Larry Silverstein, whose firm is building the 1 World Trade Center. It’s going to be a big building, no doubt, but it’s not a neighborhood. If Larry Silverstein couldn’t predict what kind of company would be the anchor tenant in this one tower, how can we trust cities to pick the futures of entire neighborhoods? Some of the plans – call them neighborhood industrial policies – can be quite elaborate. Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson’s Greenest City 2020 Action Plan, for example, calls for a “technology centre” with a “food processing enterprise incubator.” But how often does this sort of government urban-industrial planning work out? Silicon Valley (computer technology) and Singapore (biotech) both had their genesis in state-funded universities, though Singapore’s biotech sector was much more intentional than Silicon Valley’s tech industry. Financial hubs like London and Delaware and trade hubs like Hong Kong also required a certain amount of government foresight, in the form of good – i.e., laissez-faire – financial regulations and trade policies. But Vancouver isn’t a city-state, and Mayor Robertson can’t found a university or opt out of Canada’s federal patent laws. Most of these sorts of zones are implemented solely on the local level, which generally means targeted tax breaks, subsidies, and zoning set-asides. But while these might make great ribbon-cuttings and talking points, they are tepid policy tools at best, and I don’t believe any major agglomeration has […]
