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Category Free-market impostors

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.

Kotkin And The Atlantic- Spreading ‘Localism’ Nonsense Together

The Atlantic Magazine’s Citylab web page ran an interview with Joel Kotkin today.  Kotkin seems to think we need more of something called “localism”, stating: “Growth of state control has become pretty extreme in California, and I think we’re going to see more of that in the country in general, where you have housing decisions that should be made at local level being made by the state and the federal level too. You have general erosion of local control.” In fact, land use decisions are generally made by local governments–which is why it is so hard to get new housing built.  This is as true in California as it is anyplace else; when Gov. Brown tried to make it easier for developers to bypass local zoning so they can build new housing, the state legislature squashed him.   Local zoning has become more restrictive over time, not less.  And the fact that state government has added additional layers of regulation doesn’t change that reality. But did the Atlantic note this divergence from factual reality, or even ask him a follow-up question? No, sir.  Shame on them!    

NIMBYism as an Argument Against Urbanism

In his new book The Human City, Joel Kotkin tries to use NIMBYism as an argument against urbanism.  He cites numerous examples of NIMBYism in wealthy city neighborhoods, and suggests that these examples rebut “the largely unsupported notion that ever more people want to move ‘back to the city’.” This argument is nonsense for two reasons. First, the NIMBYs themselves clearly want city life and a certain level of density–otherwise they would have moved to suburbia.  In cities like Los Angeles and New York, a wide range of housing choices exist for those who can afford them. Second, the fact that some people want to prohibit new housing does not show that there is no demand for new housing.  To draw an analogy: the War on Drugs prohibits many drugs.  Does that mean that there is no demand for drugs?  Of course not.  If anything, it proves that there is lots of demand for drugs; otherwise government would not bother to prohibit it. For my more in-depth review of The Human City, read:  Joel Kotkin’s New Book Lays Out His Sprawling Vision For America

Rothbard The Urbanist Part 7: Pricing Highways

Surprise!!  I’ve had the intent to wrap-up the Rothbard The Urbanist series for a long time, and it’s been sitting on my todo list for over 6 years. I want to thank Jeffrey Tucker, then at mises.org, and now at FEE.org and liberty.me for enthusiastically granting permission to reprint excerpts from For A New Liberty.  Murray Rothbard’s 1973 classic can be downloaded free from Mises.org as pdf, and audio book read by Jeff Riggenbach.  This chapter is also discussed by Bryan Caplan as part of an econlog book club series on For A New Liberty. It’s been a while, so you may want to catch up on the first six posts: Rothbard the Urbanist Part 1: Public Education’s Role in Sprawl and Exclusion Rothbard the Urbanist Part 2: Safe Streets Rothbard the Urbanist Part 3: Prevention of Blockades Rothbard the Urbanist Part 4: Policing Rothbard the Urbanist Part 5: Diversity and Discrimination Rothbard The Urbanist Part 6: Traffic Control We pick up in the heart of chapter 11: “The Public Sector, II: Streets and Roads” to expand on a subject core to Market Urbanism: the pricing of highways, and the consequences of a system where politics, special interests, and top-down planning have incarnated a dysfunctional system severely disconnected with bottom-up pricing signals necessary to be sustainable.  Tragically, Rothbard’s insights on these subjects have been mostly neglected for over 30 years, while apologists for sprawl and automobile dominance have nearly monopolized the conversation among free-market advocates. We begin the section with Professor Rothbard’s acknowledgement of what sprawl apologists turn a blind eye to, yet urbanists on the left are keenly aware.  Government intervention, fueled by special interests and old-fashioned progressive ideology, massively subsidized the highway system and crowded-out otherwise viable railroads.  As a result, we have an overbuilt highway system, urban neighborhoods were eviscerated, suburbs spread far-and-wide, privately […]

The Status of Smart Growth Regulation

Debates over land use policy often devolve into opponents arguing over how to interpret the same set of facts. For example, “market suburbanists” argue that because apartments in walkable neighborhoods tend to cost more per square foot than suburban single family homes, high densities make coastal cities expensive. Smart Growth advocates may look at the same data and argue that zoning rules that restrict the supply of high-density housing in desirable locations is what makes housing expensive. In order to provide clarity to the debate on land use regulations, Mike Lewyn and Kip Jackson survey the zoning codes of the 24 cities with populations between 500,000 and 1,000,000 residents. In their new Mercatus Center study, they find that while some cities have in fact enacted the sorts of policies that market suburbanists fear — minimum density requirements and maximum parking rules — these regulations remain very rare relative to near-ubiquitous maximum density rules and minimum parking requirements. Lewyn and Jackson list the mid-size cities that have adopted various types of Smart Growth regulations below. While a handful of cities have adopted the types of regulations they surveyed, every U.S. city in this sample has a maze of traditional zoning rules. A perpetual challenge in studying the effects of both traditional and Smart Growth regulations is finding data. Municipal codes are all housed on unique websites with varying degrees of accessibility. The difficulty of achieving clear answers as to what causes high housing prices contributes to advocates of traditional zoning and Smart Growth to shout past one another. While Smart Growth as a whole is maligned by some advocates of the free market, many Smart Growth tenets are actually deregulatory. Policy changes including upzoning, reducing parking requirements, and permitting mixed-use development are all steps toward laissez-faire land use relative to the status-quo, even though these policies […]

Randal O’Toole: “If you didn’t have those suburban restrictions, you wouldn’t have that pressure for density in DC”

Earlier today I posted the video of the Cato discussion on housing with Randal O’Toole, Ryan Avent, Adam Gordon, and Matt Yglesias, but I wanted to transcribe one segment towards the end. (Like I said, it’s hard to skip to the end of the streaming video because you can’t scroll beyond what’s already been downloaded.). For the last question, someone from the audience says he’s a fan of Randal’s who lives in DC, and asks Randal, and the rest of the panelists, what they about the recent calls to lift the city’s height limit in response to development pressures. Randal responds first: Well this is where I think the policy questions [and the difference between Randal and the other panelists] come in on density. I think we ‘ve got Maryland, which has all these restrictions on supposedly protecting agricultural land, we have Loudoun County and other counties in Virginia that have zoned most of their land for 20-acre large lot sizes, those have restricted the ability of people to live in single-family, to build new single-family homes in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. And so it’s created a pressure for more density in Washington, DC, but if you didn’t have those suburban restrictions, you wouldn’t have that pressure for density in Washington, DC. So I’d say, let’s get rid of the suburban restrictions, and then see if there really is a demand for high-density high-rise in Washington. If there really was a demand, there’s a lot of three-story buildings that could be redeveloped to be six and seven stories if you wanted to. Matt: “You’re not allowed to!” Ryan: “You should try to do that – if you can make it happen, then that would be a great profit opportunity.” Randal: “Well, I’ve seen streets of row houses here [in DC] […]

Cities and the Tax Code

We spend a lot of time here talking about the local regulations that harm cities, from parking minimums, to height limits to restrictions on mixed-use development. I’ve been thinking recently about another policy that impacts cities at the federal level: the tax code. I bring up this topic not to stoke the political debate on redistribution, but to think about the outcome that results if tax burdens push and pull people out of cities. I’ve often heard libertarian and conservative types say that they prefer suburban or rural living because city residents are more dependent on government services, but is it really true that city dwellers depend on government programs more so than others? City residents clearly pay higher local taxes and receive more local government services, but I would argue that this isn’t as important as federal taxation and spending because local taxes benefit the taxpayers more directly than the wider net of federal redistribution. In Triumph of the Cities, Ed Glaeser points to the mortgage interest tax deduction as an important factor that pulls people to the suburbs by way of home ownership, and I would certainly agree that all federal policies with the goal of promoting home ownership or facilitating easy credit harm cities. Another much-talked-about tax expenditure for ethanol fuel blenders has benefits that fall on drivers, and this is on top of all of the other tax benefits that domestic oil companies receive. Several government programs subsidize those who choose to live in inconvenient places. The USPS delivers many packages for a flat rate fee, while I doubt that FedEx would find this pricing profitable. Similarly, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided funds for expanding broadband to areas of the country that could not otherwise support the service. On the other hand, some federal policies […]

Socialism and the roads, then and now

I’ve been reading Stephen Goddard’s Getting There: The Epic Struggle between Road and Rail in the American Century, and it’s a great book with lots of excerpable content, but here’s one thing that caught my eye on page 170. I should note that when Goddard talks about “the highwaymen,” he’s talking about the old technocratic highway corps that focused on improving rural roads, which was only a small subset of the overall highway lobby. (The broader highway lobby included politicians looking for Keynesian votes, auto/tire/rubber/oil companies looking for customers, and, increasingly, big city mayors in a misguided attempt to reverse the auto-powered trend towards decentralization.) Seeing to advance these watershed ideas, yet wary of the power of the highway coalition, FDR set up the urban-oriented Interregional Highway Committee (IHC) in 1941. He borugh traditional engineers and visionaries together and named his osmetime-nemesis MacDonald its chair. Its mix of disciplines led the IHC to the pregnant conclusion that highway building was not merely an end in itself but a way to mold the declining American city while reviving it. At the core of the concept was a twofer: by cutting a selective swath through “cramped, crowded and depreciated” cities and routing downtown highways along river valleys, Washington could eradicate “a long-standing eyesore and blight” while easing gridlock. The autobahns may have inspired the interregional highways, but on one element they differed fundamentally: the German roads sought to serve the cities, while the American roads aimed to change them. The variance would become startingly apparent a generation later. To the highwaymen, the Roosevelt administration’s visionary proposals were anathema. Michigan Representative Jesse P. Wolcott warned that a “small coterie of individuals who would socialize America” were taking control of American highway policy. A member of the House Roads Committee decried the NRPB’s “cradle […]

David Alpert calls out Virginia Tea Party group as land use statists

David Alpert at Greater Greater Washington has been on top of a story out of Virginia about a Virginia Tea Party group and its bizarre and seemingly anti-free market opposition to a state law forcing local governments to make room for dense growth. The law – which was passed a few years ago by Republicans, as David notes – included a few provisions, but the one in question, which a longtime Northern Virginia Republican is seeking to overturn, required each locality to designate an “urban development area” in which it would allow medium density development. It appears that the original plan was to have an urban growth boundary too, outside of which development would be much harder, but I’m not sure that was included in the version that passed. But whatever the rest of the law contained, Del. Robert G. Marshall and Virginia’s Campaign for Liberty are only opposing the provision that forces localities to provide upzoned land “sufficient to meet projected residential and commercial growth” for the next decade or two. I’ve read the bill (it’s relatively short), and the provision in question doesn’t even put a floor on density in the zoning area or cap the amount of parking allowed – all it does is force local governments to allow developers to build at higher densities. Here is, as far as I can tell, the strictest condition on the UDAs, which also have to allow mixed uses and smaller lot set-backs: The comprehensive plan of a locality having a population of 130,000 or more persons shall provide for urban development areas that are appropriate for development at a density on the developable acreage of at least eight single-family residences, 12 townhouses, or 24 apartments, condominium units, or cooperative units per acre, and an authorized floor area ratio of at least 0.8 […]

Hard Truths About Why Conservatives and Libertarians Hate Urbanism

It’s no secret that conservatives and libertarians don’t have very warm feelings towards urbanism. But with their emphasis on upzoning and reducing parking minimums, shouldn’t new urbanism and smart growth have at least some libertarian constituency? And given that local roads are paid for almost entirely out of general funds – that is to say, local roads are a blatant example of socialist redistribution – you’d think that there would be people on the free market right advocating raising the gas tax and tolling highways. But alas, no such luck. Michele Bachmann thinks roads shouldn’t count as earmarks, Carl Paladino’s never met a road he didn’t want to detoll, and Mother Jones managed to cobble together a whole article’s full of “We don’t need none of that smart growth communism”-style rhetoric coming from the Tea Party. Now, it could just be that there are just too many suburban Republican voters whose homes, lives, and culture are invested in sprawl for any politician to oppose it. But that doesn’t explain the lack of support from libertarian think-tanks and magazines, who, by virtue of their complete lack of political viability, don’t have to worry about politics and getting re-elected in the suburbs. Cato and the Reason Foundation still toe the “war on drivers” line, with Randal O’Toole denying that any developers even want to build less parking than current minimums require. So why don’t conservatives and libertarians have more compunction about sprawl? I believe the problem is more the messengers than the message. Despite the free market aspects of modern-day urbanism, smart growth and new urbanism are not libertarian movements. Urban planning is dominated by liberals, and it shows – few even seem aware of the capitalist roots of their plans. The private corporations that built America’s great cities and mass transit […]

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