Market Urbanism – Page 25 – Liberalizing Cities From The Ground Up

An interesting complementarity in a city: rich & poor

Here’s something I hadn’t thought of in quite this way (but many others probably have): In a living city, space is cheap enough so that people with wacky (often “terrible”) new ideas can test them out, while wealthier people in that city search for wacky new things to try out (because they’ve experienced a lot of other things). In “creative” markets, such as for art, the demand side complements the supply side across income groups in an interesting way.

How Should We Interpret Jane Jacobs?

At first blush, the enterprise of interpreting the Jane Jacobs’ work might seem like one best left to the proud and peculiar few, or to put it less charitably, those of us with nothing better to do. Yet the forces of history militate against this apathy: Jane Jacobs has emerged as quite possibly the most important figure in North American urban planning in the second half of the twentieth century. Her work is now taught in every urban theory and urban planning program worth its weight in ESRI access codes. She is responsible for introducing hundreds of thousands of people to planning and urbanism (including this author) and continues to shape how many of us think about cities. In one of my more popular blog posts here on Market Urbanism—and in a forthcoming book chapter—I argue that we should interpret Jane Jacobs as a spontaneous order theorist in the tradition of Adam Smith, Michael Polanyi, and F.A. Hayek. Built into her work is a profound appreciation of the importance of local knowledge, decentralized planning, and the spontaneous orders that structure urban life. Needless to say, this is not the prevailing interpretation of the importance and meaning of Jacobs’ work. Two very different alternative interpretations prevail. In this post, I argue that both interpretations are mistaken. Jane Jacobs, Form-Based Coder Many have taken Jacobs’ particular critiques of conventional U.S. zoning, often referred to as “Euclidean zoning,” as motivating a new form of zoning that takes into account her observations on design. In contrast to the mandates of Euclidean zoning, which proscribes land-use segregation and low densities, Jacobs celebrated mixtures of land uses and urban densities. Jacobs spends large sections of Death and Life discussing in detail particular urban designs that she sees as essential to fostering urban life. Much of “Part One” focuses on […]

Why Autonomous Vehicles != Endless Sprawl

There’s been an ongoing debate in urbanist circles about whether autonomous vehicles (AVs) will damn us to perpetual sprawl and super commuting. I don’t believe that they will. In the first place, the business conditions under which AVs could conceivably induce more sprawl are unlikely. And in the second, there are numerous other factors that will affect the future of urban development in the US. That’s not to say we won’t double down on past mistakes, but it won’t be AVs that single handedly bring about that future on their own. No One Wants To Sell You a Self Driving Car For AVs to even begin to induce more sprawl, they need to facilitate super commuting. For that to happen at any significant scale, they need to be ubiquitous and privately owned. And that is something I don’t think we’re going to see for one simple reason — it’s a product no one is selling. Ole Muskie notwithstanding, no one with capital to burn thinks selling private AVs is a winning strategy (with good reason). Given the accumulated R&D costs of the last several years, the price a firm would need to charge for the first generation of personal AVs would be astronomical. Moreover, a company selling personal AVs would give up on mountains of valuable data generated as the vehicle racked up mileage. Trip data feeds back in to improving the ability of AVs to navigate and data about consumer habits is valuable as well. We should also remember that the state of AV technology is still quite…meh. And in the absence of a step function improvement in the technology, the fastest way to get to market is to restrict the problem space. That means means a driverless TNC service that can be limited to trips in certain areas […]

Jeff Fong
July 18, 2018
Logistics & Transportation planning sprawl Transportation

does gentrification cause eviction?

I found an interesting new website: EvictionLab. This website contains eviction data by city for a large number of American communities. One might think that gentrifying cities and/or high cost cities have more evictions. But interestingly, low-cost, poor cities tend to have more evictions. Nine of the ten cities with the highest eviction rates are in low-cost southern states; the tenth is Warren, Michigan. Even within states, low-cost cities tend to have higher eviction rates than more expensive, gentrifying cities. For example, Fresno has the highest eviction rate of any major city in California- 2.8 (that is, 2.8 evictions for every 100 renter households) while Los Angeles and San Francisco are below 0.5. Seattle has a lower eviction rate (0.3) than Washington’s smaller cities, Austin has a lower eviction rate than Dallas or Houston (0.98 percent as opposed to over 1.5 percent for Houston and Dallas). Miami’s 2.01 percent eviction rate, although high by national standards, is lower than that of other Florida cities such as Jacksonville (5.34) and Tampa (3). New Orleans (1.6) has a lower eviction rate than Baton Rouge and Shreveport (both of which clock in at over 4 percent). New York City is a partial exception- its 1.61 rate is higher than that of Syracuse and Yonkers; on the other hand no statistics are available for the state’s two biggest cheaper cities, Buffalo and Rochester. So what does it all mean? It seems clear that there is not a strong correlation between gentrification and eviction, or for that matter between higher-than-average housing costs and eviction. Beyond that, I’m not sure what conclusions to draw.

How Much Should We Blame Planners for Sprawl?

Broadacre City, Frank Lloyd Wright's sprawling vision

How much should we blame planning for the degree to which cities sprawl? As much time as we (justifiably) spend here on this blog explaining how conventional U.S. planning drives excessive sprawl, it’s worth periodically remembering that, at the end of the day, the actual extent of the horizontal expansion of cities is largely outside the control of urban planning. Consider Houston. Whenever I say anything nice about Houston’s relatively liberal approach to land-use regulation, someone invariably comments some variation of the following: “Yes, that’s all well and good in theory. But in practice, heavily regulated cities like Boston are far more urban and walkable, so maybe relaxed land-use regulations aren’t so great.” Indeed, most of Houston is classic sprawl. But this begs the question: to what extent can urban planning policy be blamed for sprawl? The urban economist Jan Brueckner, drawing on an extensive literature, distinguishes between the “fundamental forces” that naturally drive urban growth outward and the market failures that push this growth beyond what might occur in an appropriately regulated market. (For the purposes of this post, I’ll be using “sprawl” and “horizontal urban expansion” interchangeably. In the same paper, Brueckner thoughtfully distinguishes the two.) The latter, urban planners can address. The former, not so much. Let’s look first at the “fundamental” variables that planners have little to no control over. Brueckner identifies three: population growth, rising income, and falling commuting costs. The first variable is obvious: as cities grow, demand for all housing goes up, and some of that housing goes out on the periphery regardless of planning policy. Metropolises like Houston, Dallas, and Atlanta are currently experiencing 2% population growth every year, meaning they are on track to double in population in the next 35 years. You would expect a lot of horizontal expansion, all else […]

Nolan Gray
June 26, 2018
sprawl Zoning

Morton’s Fork and land use issues

I recently discovered a new logical fallacy: the “Morton’s Fork” fallacy. This argument is one in which contradictory observations lead to the same conclusion. For example, if I argue that new housing near public transit is bad because it (1) spurs gentrification by bringing rich people into the neighborhood and (2) increases crime by bringing poor people into the neighborhood, I am engaging in this fallacy. Similarly, I have heard arguments that new housing is bad because it (1) brings down property values and (2) increases property values. In such situations, it is sometimes possible that one of the two claims could be true, but it is unlikely that both claims could be true.

Ch. 1 What is a City?: Concluding thoughts & works cited

Viewing cities as spontaneous orders and not as works of art helps to explain the tradeoff between scale and order, as well as the role of time in softening the severity of that tradeoff. Complexity and creativity are at odds with scale and the comprehensiveness of design because increasing scale impinges on the action spaces where creative, informal contact tends to happen. Design might complement that informal contact to a point, but beyond a fairly low level it begins to overwhelm it. Again, small is not always beautiful, and big is sometimes unavoidable. That makes it all the more important to understand the impact of scale and design on spontaneous social orders. That applies as much to private as it does to public projects. When the designs are small relative to the surrounding social milieu, the downside of the tradeoff isn’t very steep. The problems start when budget constraints are soft and projects become mega-projects and mega-projects become giga-projects. I don’t want to sound too ideological – Jane Jacobs somehow avoided being ideologically pigeonholed all her life – but soft budget constraints are primarily the domain of governmental and, especially, of so-called public-private developments: Those elephantine-starchitectural-wonder-complexes that too-often strive for off-the-charts wow-factors. Without legal privileges, subsidies, and eminent domain, could the scale and degree of design of purely privately funded developments even begin to compare to those? I don’t think so. The rules of the game of urban processes interact in complex ways. So deliberately changing some of those rules to achieve a particular outcome is akin to trying to impose a particular design on the social order, killing the social order in the process, although perhaps preserving the appearance of life. Taxidermy again. (That, by the way, is why I have problems with landmarks preservation on the scale practiced […]

Sandy Ikeda
May 31, 2018
Culture of Congestion Jane Jacobs planning

The High Cost of Solar Mandates

By Christopher Koopman and Josh T. Smith Facing a current housing crisis that is putting working families on the brink of homelessness, it would seem like California would have one of two options. The state could take steps to alleviate the growing problem. Alternatively, it could sit on its hands and do nothing at all. It seems, however, the state has found a third option: make matters worse. After it’s vote last week, the California Energy Commission took another step toward requiring all new homes under three stories to have solar panels installed beginning in 2020. Right now only between 15 and 20 percent of new single-family homes in California install rooftop solar. While solar may make economic and environmental sense for some, mandating it for all Californians will backfire by worsening the state’s housing affordability crisis, disincentivizing the building of newer, more energy efficient houses, and continuing to hurt the poor in a state that is already home to the highest rate of unsheltered homeless in the nation. The housing crisis in California is largely driven by a simple economic problem: housing supply has failed to keep up with demand. As the demand for homes in the Golden State has increased, the housing supply has failed to respond. Why? In particular, restrictive zoning policies continue to slow development and force prices up. Now people making $80,000 a year are having a hard time finding affordable housing. Make no mistake, skyrocketing housing prices are a growing problem in large cities across the country, but especially so in California. The 2017 Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority report estimated there was a 23 percent increase in homelessness from 2016 to 2017. That’s almost 11,000 additional people without homes. By mandating solar panels on all new houses, California’s regulators are essentially adding $9,500 to […]

Ch. 1 What is a City?: Cities cannot be efficient

Before we can correct what we think is wrong with a city, we need an appropriate standard of what is right. That standard of rightness in turn depends on our understanding how the thing we are trying to fix is supposed to work. In this regard I’m afraid neither standard macroeconomics nor microeconomics is much help at all. In traditional macroeconomics, too much important detail is lost in its pre-occupation with aggregates and averages. For example, standard macroeconomic theory treats capital as homogeneous, and so makes no distinction between a hammer and a harbor, except that a harbor may be the equivalent of many, many hammers. Such an approach is too blunt an instrument for getting to the level of detail needed to appreciate the complex time-structure of capital of an economy, let alone to tell us what would be necessary to promote that structure (Lachmann 1978). Jacobs expressed antipathy toward macroeconomics. Macro-economics—large-scale economics—is the branch of learning entrusted with the theory and practice of understanding and fostering national and international economies. It is a shambles. Its undoing was the good fortune of having been believed in and acted upon in a big way (Jacobs 1984: 6-7) Earlier in this Chapter we saw that, unlike a living city, a nation-state is not a natural unit of economic analysis. In Jacobs’s words: Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn’t necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth. Indeed, the failure of national governments and blocs of nations to force economic life to do their bidding suggests some sort of essential irrelevance (Jacobs 1984: 31-32). The […]

Sandy Ikeda
May 29, 2018
Culture of Congestion Economics Jane Jacobs

The “Old People Need Cars” Argument- Myth or Fact?

The needs of the aged are often a political football in disputes over transportation policy. On the one hand, defenders of low-cost parking and other car-oriented policies argue that older people all need cars because they can’t be bothered to walk. On the other hand, smart growth types argue that we will all be too old to drive someday, so we need to end the reign of car dependency. One way of examining the issue is to find out whether seniors in fact drive more than everyone else. Happily, the 2016 American Community Survey comes to our rescue here. In Manhattan where I live, there are just over 129,000 senior-headed households with no car, and just over 36,000 with a vehicle available. So contrary to car-lobby conventional wisdom, only about 22 percent of senior-headed households have a car. How does that compare with other age groups? On the one hand, only about 25,000 out of 200,000, or 12 percent, of millennial-headed households (that is, households headed by someone under 35) have a vehicle. But among Manhattan households headed by persons between 35 and 64, about 28 percent (just over 109,000 out of just over 386,000) have a vehicle- more than senior-headed households, to my surprise. So I rate the “Old People Need Cars” claim as Mostly False: most seniors here in Manhattan don’t have cars, even though they are more likely to own cars than millenials. On the other hand, the latter fact suggests that seniors are rarely physically incapable of using cars.

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