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Category Policy

Three Policies for Making Driverless Cars Work for Cities

Some urbanists have become skeptical about the future of autonomous vehicles even as unstaffed, autonomous taxis are now serving customers in Phoenix and Japan. Others worry that AVs, if they are ever deployed widely, will make cities worse. Angie Schmitt posits that allowing AVs in cities without implementing deliberate pro-urban policies first will exacerbate the problems of cars in urban areas. However, cars themselves aren’t to blame for the problems they’ve caused in cities. Policymakers created rules that dedicated public space to cars and prioritized ease of driving over other important goals. Urbanists should be optimistic about the arrival of AVs because urbanist policy goals will be more politically tenable when humans are not behind the wheel. To avoid repeating mistakes of the past, policymakers should create rules that neither subsidize AVs nor give them carte blanche over government-owned rights-of-way. Multiple writers have pointed out that city policymakers should actively be designing policy for the driverless future, but few have spelled out concrete plans for successful driverless policy in cities. Here are three policies that urban policymakers should begin experimenting with right away in anticipation of AVs. Price Roadways Perhaps the biggest concern AVs present for urbanists is that they may increase demand for sprawl. AVs may drastically reduce highway commute times over a given distance through platooning, and if people find their trips in AVs to be time well-spent, when they can work, relax, or sleep, they may be willing to accept even more time-consuming commutes than they do today. As the burden of commuting decreases, they reason, people will travel farther to work. However, the looming increase in sprawl would be due in large part to subsidized roads, not AVs themselves. If riders would have to fully internalize the cost of using road space, they would think twice […]

The Attack on Airbnb

New York politicians’ attacks on Airbnb are now getting national press; they argue that because Airbnb units could be used for long-term rentals, Airbnb reduces the housing supply and thus raises rents. But just as a matter of principle, this claim leads to absurd results.  The logic underlying the claim is: a housing unit that is used for short-term rentals such as Airbnb could be easily used for long-term rentals.  Thus, Airbnb reduces the long-term housing supply. But this argument proves too much.  If you own a house, your house could also be used for long-term rentals.  If you have a spare room, you could rent out that spare room.  And even if you rent out every room in the house, your house sits on land that could be used for a much larger number of rental units.  Since there are far more single-family houses than there are Airbnb units, bulldozing every house in the city would increase housing supply to a much greater extent than would outlawing Airbnb. Does this mean the city should bulldoze your house to build more rental housing?  

New Report by CMU and AHLA: The Case for Ending Parking Requirements in Downtown Los Angeles

The Center for Market Urbanism released its first policy report in partnership with Abundant Housing Los Angeles.  The paper, written by The Center for Market Urbanism’s Nolan Gray and Emily Hamilton, recommends eliminating minimum parking requirements as part of DTLA 2040, a process which will update both the Central City and Central City North community plans. The draft concept for the DTLA 2040 plan calls for eliminating parking requirements for the Central City and Central City North neighborhoods.  This would build upon the success of Los Angeles’ adaptive reuse, allowing new developments to facilitate affordable, dense, walkable neighborhoods. The paper discusses the history of parking requirements, burdens and damage caused by current parking requirements, and benefits of reforms: Combined with demand-based pricing for on-street parking, the elimination of parking requirements will allow for downtown neighborhoods that are more walkable while also reducing congestion for drivers. Read the Center for Market Urbanism/Abundant Housing LA Policy Paper here   The Center for Market Urbanism is a 501c3 organization dedicated to expanding choice, affordability, and prosperity in cities through smart reforms to U.S. land-use regulation. Abundant Housing LA is 501c3 organization which is committed to advocating for more housing. We want lower rents and a more sustainable and prosperous region, where everyone has more choices of where to live and how to pursue their dreams. LA is one of the most diverse, vibrant cities in America, and we are fighting to keep it that way for current Angelenos, our children, and those who come here to pursue their dreams.  

United against dynamism

The battle lines being drawn for the SB 827 debate is perhaps the clearest example ever of the strange bedfellows that align on land use politics. Tenant rights activists stand in opposition to preemption of local land-use regulations with landlords and owners of suburban single family homes. In The Future and Its Enemies, Virginia Postrel develops a dynamist-stasist lens for understanding policy debates. Dynamists are generally accepting of new ideas and innovation. They view the freedom to experiment as integral to the learning process that allows quality of life to improve over time. Rather than focusing on the distribution of income that results from innovation, dynamists’ concern is that life is getting better for everyone, most importantly the lowest income people. Stasists occupy the other end of the divide and come from two different perspectives. First, they may appreciate the privileges that the current law provides them. They don’t want to see the social upheaval that greater economic mobility could bring about. Second, they may be technocrats who do have a vision for a future that they think will be better than the present but want to achieve it only through a government-led plan. Each opposes the decentralized processes consumers and producers use to solve their own problems. The dynamist-stasist division applies to all areas of economic activity, but “not in my backyard” is the stasist “rallying cry.” Postrel’s framework is useful for understanding why opposition to upzoning unites groups that seem to have opposing politics. In the case of SB 827, stasists include technocrats who want to see increased access to housing, but only if new housing is rent controlled, subsidized, or government built, and traditional NIMBYs. Pessimism about change unites stasists of all stripes. They’re united in their view that new housing supply will result in worse neighborhoods rather than better ones. People who don’t want to […]

Why Walkable Cities Enjoy More Freedom

If you happen to visit Egypt and find yourself in the famous Tahrir Square, you might be puzzled: how could this space accommodate two million protesters? In fact, the square looked different at the time of the Arab Spring, up until the new military government ringed its central part with an iron fence. A similar transformation happened with the Pearl roundabout in the capital of Bahrain where demonstrators used to gather — it was turned into a traffic junction. In my hometown, Moscow, the square where millions called for the end of Soviet rule in 1991 now houses an hideous shopping mall. For a pro-liberty movement to raise its head, Twitter is not enough: face-to-face contact is crucial. That is why when oppressive governments want to destroy civil society, they destroy public spaces. Street markets, green squares and lively parks (think of the iconic Hyde Park corner) are places where citizens meet, negotiate and slowly learn to trust each other. Joseph Stalin knew it well, hence he made sure that city dwellers had no public spaces to socialise in. The results were devastating: chronic mistrust that post-communist societies are yet to overcome. Today, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the levels of social capital in Dresden and Leipzig are still lower than in Munich and Hamburg, which bears its economic as well as political costs. One study shows that residents living in walkable neighbourhoods exhibit at least 80% greater levels of social capital than those living in car-dependent ones. That is something to consider, given that only a half of Brits know their neighbour’s name. The economic benefits are also clear: improved walking infrastructure can increase retail sales by 30%. London has witnessed it on Oxford Street where the creation of a Tokyo-style pedestrian crossing led to a 25% increase in turnover in the adjacent stores. In the […]

Book Review: The Public Wealth of Cities

The Public Wealth of Cities by Dag Detter and Stefan Fölster proposes a series of reforms to improve municipal finances. The authors lay out guidelines for creating urban wealth funds (UWFs) and argue that financial stability is key to societal success.   Detter and Fölster first call for basic financial competency. According to the authors, most cities don’t even know what they actually own. Real estate and equipment are often owned directly by individual departments with no central record to provide a bird’s eye view of a city’s assets as a whole. When this is the case, good asset management becomes impossible because no one knows what they’re managing.   The authors also point out the need for cities to decide what is and is not a commercial asset. Where administrators designate an asset as commercial, maximizing ROI should supersede all other objectives. That doesn’t mean everything a city owns has to be managed to turn a profit, but where a piece of real estate or a facility is meant generate income, it ought to be managed explicitly to that end.   Professional financial planning is Detter and Fölster’s third major prescription. They argue that cities should hire professional asset managers to oversee their portfolios and that these managers should be shielded from the democratic process. They go on to make a very public choice argument that elected officials have inappropriately short time horizons and that pressure to please constituents can lead to decisions at odds with the long term sustainability of municipal finances. After developing that line of reasoning, they provide Singapore as an example of a municipality that does this pretty well.   In terms of the ideas presented, I loved the book. It touches on the organizational challenges of getting municipal finance right while speaking to what execution has […]

The Progressive Roots of Zoning

by Samuel R Staley Before the twentieth century land-use and housing disputes were largely dealt with through courts using the common-law principle of nuisance. In essence if your neighbor put a building, factory, or house on his property in a way that created a measurable and tangible harm, courts could intervene on behalf of a complainant to force compensation or stop the action. This pro-property rights approach maximized liberty and minimized the ability of citizens and elected officials to politicize the development process. This changed with the Progressive movement. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, Progressives argued that government should become more professional. Rather than being limited, government should use its resources to pursue the “public interest,” loosely defined as whatever the general public decided through democratic processes was the proper scope of government. Legislatures and, by extension, city commissions made up of elected citizens would set policy and goals while a cadre of trained professionals would use the techniques of scientific management to implement policies. One of the leading Progressives of the day, Woodrow Wilson, was skeptical of the value of elected bodies such as Congress because they interfered with scientific management of government. While many in the twenty-first century might be tempted to dismiss this public-interest view of government—indeed an entire academic subdiscipline, Public Choice, has emerged to demonstrate the foibles of governments and explore “government failure”—Progressive ideas held a lot of appeal at the turn of the twentieth century. In addition to national concerns over industries such as oil, steel, and railroads, local governments were rife with corruption, waste, and inefficiency. Reforms, such as the city-manager form of government, civil-service exams, and in some cases even municipal ownership of utilities, were thought to provide more transparency and accountability than the patronage-laden times of political bosses. (Today municipal […]

Exempting Suburbia: How suburban sprawl gets special treatment in our tax code

Our tax code favors suburbia. Homeownership, greenfield development, and sprawl receive preferential tax treatment, and the market responds to incentives built into the code. As a result, a disproportionate amount of capital flows to those investments. In many cases, it has been an unintentional side effect of pursuing other goals. The combined effect is that our tax system plays a huge role in shaping our communities. Its influence is an important factor to understanding how residential design in the US became what it is today.

Subsidizing Suburbia: A forgotten history of how the government created suburbia

This is the first article of a five-part series on suburbia in the United States. In primary school, one of my friends lived in a duplex. This fact blew my mind. To my inexperienced 7-year-old mind, a duplex barely registered as a house. Her family shared a driveway with their neighbors, and their yard was tiny. It was the first house I’d ever seen that shared a wall with its neighbors. I’d seen apartments of course, but in my mind those were temporary, for people who who were saving up to buy a “real” home. I couldn’t understand that some people might actually prefer to live in something besides a private home, because I’d never come across it before. Median income in American cities tends to rise at about 8 percent per mile as one moves away from the business district. My mental model of the world was pretty typical for an American child brought up in a single-family home. It’s easy to see why—US residential development is dominated by suburbs, and home ownership is touted as the ultimate symbol of prosperity. Other types of dwellings tend to be for young people starting out in life or low income households unable to afford a place of their own. The popular image of the American Dream includes a white picket fence and a car, not an apartment and a subway pass. This is in stark contrast with most other countries. The French word for suburb is banlieue, and it has come to connote poverty and social isolation, because that is where immigrants and the poor tend to live. They’ve been known as “red suburbs” because of their tendency to vote Communist. Meanwhile, the wealthy live in the city center. In South Africa, the inner city is reserved for the privileged white […]

The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America

Richard Rothstein’s “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America” should be required reading for YIMBYs and urbanists of any ideological stripe. Rothstein argues that housing segregation in the US has been the intentional outcome of policy decisions made at every level of government and that the idea of segregation as phenomenon driven by spontaneous self-sorting is largely a myth. Two major themes permeate the book: (1) the ways in which government has consistently intervened in the housing and land markets and (2) how these interventions were designed to pick winners and losers. The federal policy of underwriting loans for specific kinds of development (single family detached housing) and for specific people (whites) is an example that the author explores in depth. And after reading his account, I can safely say that I have a far better understanding of how nearly a century’s worth of policy interference has distorted markets and doled out privilege and oppression in equal measure. Throughout the book, Rothstein brings in the stories of specific people and places to add depth to his account. This both keeps things interesting and serves to humanize the story in a way that many tracts on policy fail to do. When he’s describing the lives of black Americans who were forced into soul crushing commutes because they were legally prohibited from living near their jobs, or families who had their houses firebombed for daring to move into a segregated neighborhood while police stood on their front lawns and watched…you remember that policy matters because it affects real people. And that real people suffered terrible wrongs for no other reason than the accident of their birth. Again, if you care about US housing policy, you must read this book. It’s impossible to understand where we are […]

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