Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Category corruption

Morton’s Fork and urbanism

I recently read about an interesting logical fallacy: the Morton’s fork fallacy, in which a conclusion “is drawn in several different ways that contradict each other.” The original “Morton” was a medieval tax collector who, according to legend, believed that someone who spent lavishly you were rich and could afford higher taxes, but that someone who spent less lavishly had lots of money saved and thus could also afford higher taxes. In other words, every conceivable set of facts leads to the same conclusion (that Morton’s victims needed to pay higher taxes). To put the arguments more concisely: heads I win, tails you lose. It seems to me that attacks on new housing based on affordability are somewhat similar. If housing is market-rate, some neighborhood activists will oppose it because it is not “affordable” and thus allegedly promotes gentrification. If housing is somewhat below market-rate, it is not “deeply affordable” and equally unnecessary. If housing is far below market-rate, neighbors may claim that it will attract poor people who will bring down property values. In other words, for housing opponents, housing is either too affordable or not affordable enough. Heads I win, tails you lose. Another example of Morton’s fork is the use of personal attacks against anyone who supports the new urbanism/smart growth movements (by which I mean walkable cities, public transit, or any sort of reform designed to make cities and suburbs less car-dominated). Smart growth supporters who live in suburbs or rural areas can be attacked as hypocrites: they preach that others should live in dense urban environments, yet they favor cars and sprawl for themselves. But if (like me) they live car-free in Manhattan, they can be ridiculed as eccentrics who do not appreciate the needs of suburbanites. Again, heads I win, tails you lose.

Chapter 9 Links

1) Ed Glaeser writes at the Boston Globe on Detroit, “Sensible people don’t incur debts during their peak earning years and then expect to pay the bills when their income starts to fall. Detroit did just that. Detroit’s debt overhang doesn’t just impose overly high costs on the city’s now modest tax base. It also scares off new businesses. What firm wants to own part of that obligation?” 2) I’m on the Cato Daily Podcast talking about Detroit and municipal bankruptcy and writing about how creating a charter city could help the city’s population and economic growth challenges at The Umlaut. 3) Ilya Somin points to the role of eminent domain in slum clearance and urban renewal efforts as a key contributor to the city’s decline. 4) Cost overruns aren’t just for transit. Construction on a Wayne County jail was halted after costs went 30-percent over budget, and the county is now seeking proposals from developers to buy the seven acre site. This is a fortunate development from an urban development perspective because anything a private investor builds will be better for downtown Detroit than a prison. 5) On an uplifting note, Sandy Ikeda writes at Wabi Sabi about the role of cities in the market process: Living cites and successful markets bring intellectually and culturally diverse people together to their mutual advantage, but they also create conditions in which vast amounts of novel information—about science, technology, religion, music, the arts, and lifestyles—get dispersed very rapidly. That in turn allows all kinds of people, the ordinary and the extraordinary, to experiment and to make new connections among all that information, generating even more diversity and attracting even more people. In this way, cities become “incubators of ideas” and economic growth. The process is highly dynamic, but also very messy and, yes, in a sense inefficient. […]

Fictional Scandal at the NYC Landmarks Preservation Commission

Stephen’s post on alleged corruption at the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission reminded me of a great scene from The Bonfire of the Vanities that I wanted to share here. Tom Wolfe describes a scenario in which a black bishop wants to sell his church’s property in order to raise money for the congregation. The fictional mayor’s assistant explains: “The bishop wants to sell St. Timothy’s to a developer, on the grounds that the membership is declining, and the church is losing a lot of money, which is true. But the community groups are putting a lot of pressure on the Landmarks Commission to landmark it so that nobody can alter the building even after they buy it.” “Is this guy honest?” asked the mayor. “Who gets the money if they sell the church?” “I never heard he wasn’t honest,” said Sheldon. “He’s a learned gentleman of the cloth. He went to Harvard. He could still be greedy, I suppose, but I have no reason to think he is.” The mayor meets with the bishop to discuss the issue of preserving the church and realizes that Bishop Thomas is an ideal connection to improve his approval with the black community. The mayor agrees to prevent the church from being landmarked and the bishop is overcome with gratitude at the benefit selling the property will provide the congregation. Then the mayor tells the bishop that he wants him to serve on a new “blue-ribbon commission against crime.” When the bishop declines because the commission would conflict with his role in the church, the mayor says not to worry about the church remaining without landmark status: “Don’t worry about that at all. As I said I didn’t do it for you and I didn’t do it for your church. I did […]

Before there were stimulus projects

In his new book, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, Richard White explores the financing of railroads in the American West and the political process behind it. In history books, this accomplishment is often looked on as a heroic feat of engineering and perseverance, but White offers a contrasting perspective of the abuse of tax dollars and manipulation of public opinion. I have not had a chance to read his book yet, but White offered a very interesting interview on Morning Edition. He explained: Western railroads, particularly the transcontinental railroads, would not have been built without public subsidies, without the granting of land, and more important than that, loans from the federal government … because there is no business [in the West at that time], there is absolutely no reason to build [railroads] except for political reasons and the hope that business will come. Unlike the railroads of the Northeast where Vanderbilt made his fortune, private financiers were uninterested in the West, where rails would not be making a foreseeable profit. If the expected benefits of an infrastructure project outweigh the expected costs, private financing will be available in the absence of public funding. Only when costs are expected to exceed benefits do infrastructure projects require subsidies. Historically, the argument that infrastructure is a public good that must be paid for by taxpayers has been proven false by private infrastructure projects ranging from highways to lighthouses, canals, and city streets. The transcontinental railroad, the largest public works project of its time, marked a shift toward American policy of relying principally on federally funded infrastructure rather than on entrepreneurs to supply these goods. In the 20th century, the Federal Highway Act of course dwarfed the scale of the transcontinental railroad, and today publicly provided infrastructure is claimed to […]

Five union work rules that harm transit productivity

Since Alon’s comment a few weeks ago that union work rules, not wages and benefits, are the real problem with labor unions at America’s transit authorities, I’ve been looking into the matter, which seems to be something that a lot of transit boosters don’t like to talk about. It’s an uncomfortable subject for two reason: 1) urban planners and unions have an ideological affinity, and 2) it’s hard to lobby for increased subsidies for transit when you admit that you’re making poor use of the money you already have. But despite planners’ reticence to talk about the problem, it needs to be addressed. Throwing money around is what governments do best, and while it might be an easy solution to problems in the short run, the money is running out. Some will surely quibble that we can afford to raise taxes and do more deficit spending, especially for something as vital as transit, but whether or not that’s true, the fact is that voters are increasingly doubting that it is, and so politicians are going to become stingier about doling out money for transit. Anyway, the most obvious area for savings is in actual wages and benefits, but many mainstream conservative and libertarian publications have written a lot about this issue, so I want to focus on just inefficient work rules. These are rules that are written into union contracts hashed out in a political process, and management doesn’t have the authority to overturn them. I found surprisingly little on the issue in the academic literature, but there’s plenty on it in newspapers, and so here’s a round-up of the major issues that I found with various American transit unions. The list is by no means comprehensive – either of all the cities that have these problems, or even of […]

Amtrak’s utter incompetence

by Stephen Smith There’s a lot to be said for Amtrak’s mismanagement, but a lot of it is technical and inaccessible to the layman. This, however, is unconscionable: Amtrak still does not offer wireless internet – either free or paid – on any of its trains. Megabus and Bolt Bus (whose tickets between DC and NYC are about $20), however, have had wireless for about two years, and I’m pretty sure some Chinatown buses have had it for longer. Amtrak’s normal tickets on the Northeast Corridor are about four times the cost of tickets on Bolt Bus and Megabus. Tickets on the Acela are about eight times the cost of bus tickets, and the service is heavily marketed towards business travelers who put a high price on their time. But no internet. It’s apparently coming to Acela in about six months and the rest of the Northeast Corridor by the end of 2010. Had intercity buses and airlines not introduced wireless internet, I seriously doubt Amtrak would have ever had the business sense to do it. Originally posted on my blog.

Block vs Poole: The Public-Private Partnership Debate

The Orange County Register’s Freedom Politics website (check out my rent control article FreePo published in March) features articles discussing two differing takes on road privatization from notable scholars Walter Block and Robert Poole. In Robert Poole’s article, he discusses the merits of the increasingly popular use of Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) to fund and operate roadways: Four potential benefits are particularly important: Fewer Boondoggles: Elected officials often champion projects that yield political benefits but have costs greater than their benefits. But with PPP toll projects, nobody will invest unless the benefits exceed the costs to the extent that they can project a positive return on their investment. That’s a powerful safeguard against boondoggles. Avoiding “Big Dig” Disasters: Large-scale “mega-projects” like Boston’s notorious Big Dig are prone to large cost over-runs and schedule delays. In a well-structured PPP project, those risks can be transferred to the private sector, shielding taxpayers from those costs. Cost Minimization: Traditional highway projects are built by the lowest-bidder, which often means they are built cheaply and need lots of expensive maintenance over their lifetimes. But a PPP toll highway must be maintained for decades at the private company’s expense. Hence, it has every incentive to build it right to begin with, to minimize total life-cycle cost. Sustainable Congestion Relief: If you add ordinary freeway lanes, they tend to fill up and become congested. But today’s urban toll lanes use variable pricing (as on the 91 Express Lanes) to keep traffic flowing smoothly on a long-term basis. In contrast, Walter Block takes a more principled stand for complete privatization: Public – private partnerships (PPP) are thus part and parcel of both fascism and socialism; they constitute a partial state ownership of the means of production. As well, they are emblematic of fascism, and government is the senior […]

What Would Moses Do? (Robert Moses, that is…)

(Map of Robert Moses’ unbuilt proposals via “vanshnookenraggen.”) Sandy Ikeda blogs: If Moses were around today I don’t think he’d waste any time getting every major project he could think of “shovel ready” for hundreds of billions of stimulus money. While he’s no longer with us, I do fear that, with the incentive structure of the stimulus legislation and the knowledge problems that will accompany such massive and hurried construction, we’ll soon be seeing many incarnations of Moses rising up in cities around the country. So, not only will we have to live with ill-conceived mega-projects for decades to come, we’ll be subsidizing the birth of who-knows-how-many local despots who’ll be guiding urban policy for the foreseeable future.

Illinois Court Rules Against Chicago’s “Vague” Landmark Ordinance

Chicago Real Estate Daily: An Illinois appellate court has struck down the city of Chicago’s landmarks ordinance, saying it is unconstitutionally vague, putting in jeopardy the city’s protection of more than 250 buildings and 50 historic districts. Judge James Fitzgerald Smith of the three person Appellate Court wrote, “We believe that the terms ‘value,’ ‘important,’ ‘significant,’ and ‘unique’ are vague, ambiguous, and overly broad”, and thus found the ordinance in violation of the state constitution. The case involved two plaintiffs and two landmarked districts where attempts to downzone the areas failed before landmarking. However, once the case (including appeals) is over, Chicago’s entire landmarks ordinance would be completely invalidated. Wow! I am surprised this isn’t making bigger waves in Chicago, and other cities. What should we expect to happen if appeals by The City should fail? Would property owners rush to tear down their landmarks before The City enacts a new landmarks ordinance? Per Tribune Architecture critic, Blair Kamin (who calls the ruling wrong-headed, but fielded some good comments): The laws are based on a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court ruling which stopped the bankrupt Penn Central Railroad’s attempt to pile a 55-story office building atop New York City’s Beaux-Arts Grand Central Terminal. In that ruling, the court held that communities have the right to safeguard significant pieces of property, so long as they do not trample the rights of the properties’ owners. The key word is “significant,” a word that appears frequently in Chicago’s seven criteria for landmark designation, as in the site of a significant historical event or a building that is the work of a significant architect. It makes you wonder if there is a more robust solution to landmarks that does less to compromise the property rights of the land owners, and isn’t vulnerable to unforeseen court […]

Trending now

gentrification
Only 2 Ways to Fight Gentrification (you’re not going to like one of them)
The problem with “public” transportation
The Great American Streetcar Myth
O’Toole Under More Fire