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Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
A lot of words have been written about how horribly FRA safety regulations cripple US main line passenger railway budgets (and you should read them!), but it’s also important to remember that even as a safety regulator, the FRA fails. You have to see it to believe it: …
No, but really – fly California. On Tuesday, the California High-Speed Rail Authority laid down their cards in the form of a new “business plan” for the proposed line, and its cards are not good – the system is now projected to cost $98 billion in year-of-expenditure dollars, which, taking into account inflation, is about twice the $33 billion figure given in 2008.* But despite the price hike, not many people’s opinions on the project seem to have changed – those who were for it are still for it, while those opposed are even more set against it….
In the first post of this little series, I addressed the problems of top down land use regulation through the lens of Austrian economics. Because cities contain public space and infrastructure that is used by many residents and cannot be bought and sold in the way that many goods can be, Alon Levy suggests turning to collective choice to solve these problems. I will agree that collective choice, or its close cousin communal property rights can be employed well in cities. For example, business improvement districts can work together to undertake projects that would not be worthwhile for any business to take individually, benefitting themselves and their customers in the process. Similarly, these voluntary and emergent organizations can emerge among homeowners or neighborhoods, circumventing some of the coordination problems involved within communities. In a future post, I will go into further detail about the benefits of these types of organizations, whether they’re formal or informal. But now, I want to point out the problems of collective choice when carried out through legislation or land use regulation. As Alon points out, collective choice is inherently biased toward favoring a city’s or neighborhood’s current residents, against potential future residents. This makes policies created through collective choice inherently anti-density and anti-growth. It also means that cities come with a built-in vested interest that wants to protect their property. When planning departments allow this group to protect their interest through the political process, the market process is stifled because entrepreneurs cannot take advantage of available profit opportunities to increase urban density. Furthermore, collective choice leads to many unholy alliances, such as NIMBYs and historic preservationists, NIMBYs and environmentalists who want to protect open space, NIMBYs and those opposed to new transit projects, etc. In other words, collective choice leads to many of the results that urbanists criticize. […]
There’s a lot that bothers me about preservation policy, but one of the weirdest has to be rules that make it difficult to fill in gaps in building height. I’m not a big fan of the idea that historic neighborhoods have to stay the same “scale” forever, but it boggles my mind that people can both support keeping neighborhoods “in scale,” but oppose people who want to bring a building up to the neighborhood’s scale. 33 Bond, practically begging for more height …
Following up on my post yesterday skyscrapers in Europe, I’d like to explain why, in detail, central business districts are generally superior to off-center ones like La Défense outside Paris or Washington’s Virginia suburbs. It’s not that I just enjoy the spatial symmetry and organic shape of a centralized city – it’s actually more efficient! Neglect it, and you’re doing a disservice to your poorest citizens, who too often find themselves out of commuting range of many of a city’s jobs. …
Charlie Gardner at Old Urbanist, one of my favorite urbanist blogs, has a great post that echoes what I said a few days ago about the latest wave of American public housing projects. Here he first quotes a Nashville public housing official: “Part of the problem with public housing in the U.S….
I often hear from people who are defending Washington, D.C.’s height limit argue that the restriction gives the city a “European” feel. I disagree with this for a number of reasons – the city has much fewer historic downtown buildings, and the ones it does have are much younger than in the Old World….
Ken Burns’ new documentary Prohibition is excellent and highly recommended on its own merits, but urbanists should take special note of its urban themes. Cities have always been caricatured as centers of licentiousness, and the booming cities of turn-of-the-century America, teeming with poor Catholic immigrants, must have been terrifying to the established white Americans of the Midwest and America’s small towns. New York and Chicago proved to be impossible to temper, and it was there that Prohibition was the most violent. …
California Assembly Bill 710 was introduced to earlier this year to tackle the problem of municipalities requiring onerous amounts of parking for new development, widely recognized as one of the main impediments to transit-oriented development and infill growth. The bill would have capped city and county parking requirements in neighborhoods with good transit to one space per residential unit and one space per 1,000 sq. ft. of non-residential space, with an exemption process for areas with a true parking crunch and some other caveats….
“Light and air” is a very common excuse that people give for why we must have basic zoning laws, and while nowadays a lot of people mean it simply in an aesthetic sense – another way of saying “I like to be able to look out a window and not see another skyscraper 50 feet away” (though for some reason when said interaction happens on the second or third floor, it’s okay?) – the origins of it are very interesting, and I believe crucial to understanding today’s urban plans. Of course, the ideas that turn-of-the-century planners had about disease and density turned out to be totally incorrect – privacy and being able to look out a window is nice, but the lack thereof is not a great health risk. As Robert Fogelson writes on pages 125-26 of Downtown: Skyscrapers were also a serious menace to public health, advocates of height limits charged. As early as the mid 1880s, they said that tall office buildings were turning the streets below into dark, damp, and gloomy canyons. During the winter they blocked the sun, leaving the cold streets even colder. During the summer, wrote American Architect and Building News, they acted as “storehouses of heat,” driving up the temperature after sunset, making the once cool and refreshing nights unbearable. The skyscrapers also shrouded the nearby buildings in darkness, forcing the office workers to rely on artificial light – which, it was believed, put a strain on the eyes. Worst of all, the skyscrapers deprived both the streets below and the adjacent buildings of fresh air and sunlight. To Americans who still held that disease was a product of the “miasma,” the noxious vapors that permeated the cities, the lack of fresh air was bad enough. To Americans who believed in the new […]
