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Montaigne on Spontaneous Social Order

“In fine, I see from our example that human society holds and is knit together at any cost whatever. Whatever position you set men in, they pile up and arrange themselves by moving and crowding together just as ill-matched objects, put in a bag without order, find of themselves a way to unite and fall into place together, often better than they could have been arranged by art.” Michel de Montaigne

What About Vancouver?

Market urbanists such as myself tend to believe that if a place suffers from absurdly high housing prices, there is probably not enough new housing being built to accommodate rising demand. A recent paper argues that inadequate supply is not a significant part of the problem in high-cost Vancouver, primarily because the number of housing units has kept up with the number of people (p. 11)   It seems to me, however, that this theory overlooks people priced out of Vancouver, thus understating demand. To put the matter in hypothetical form: suppose that in 1991, Nimbytown had 20,000 people and 10,000 housing units.  In 2011, Nimbytown had 30,000 people and 15,000 housing units; however, 30,000 more people are priced out of Nimbytown.    Obviously, it would be silly to say that housing is keeping up with demand. Vancouver is, to be fair, adding housing supply- but at about the same pace it did 20 years ago.  From 1991-95, Metro Vancouver added about 18,000 housing starts per year, ranging from just over 14,000 in 1991 to just over 21,000 in 1993.    Housing starts then nosedived, not reaching the 20,000 level until 2007.  Between 2007 and 2011, the region averaged about 16,000 housing starts per year, slightly fewer than in the 1990s. In a region with a stagnant population, this would be a strong performance.  But from 1991 to 2011, the number of Vancouver households grew by over 40 percent, from just over 600,000 to almost 900,000.  So should a region with 900,000 households have the same number of housing starts as one with 600,000?  I don’t think so. The paper blames Chinese investors for Vancouver’s high housing prices- and logically, any increase in demand should, other things being equal, increase housing costs.  But the author of the paper has written elsewhere: […]

Are Houston’s Deed Restrictions “Basically Zoning”?

Houston Neighborhood

Houston doesn’t have zoning. As I have written about previously here on the blog, this doesn’t mean nearly as much as you would think. Sure, Houston’s municipal government doesn’t segregate uses or expressly regulate densities. But as my Market Urbanism colleague Michael Lewyn has documented, city officials do regulate lot sizes, setbacks, and parking requirements. They also enforce private deed restrictions, which blanket many of the city’s residential neighborhoods. A deed restriction is a legal agreement among neighbors about how they can and cannot use their property. In most cities, deed restrictions are purely private and often fairly marginal, adding rules on top of zoning that property owners must follow. But in Houston, deed restrictions do most of the heavy lifting typically covered by zoning, including delineating permissible uses and design standards. Whenever I point out that Houston has relatively light land-use regulations (and is enjoying the benefits), folks often respond that the city’s deed restrictions are basically zoning. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Before I turn to the essential differences, it’s worth first observing how Houston’s deed restrictions are like any other city’s zoning. First, like zoning, Houston’s deed restrictions are almost universally designed to prop up the values of single-family houses. Despite the weak evidence for a use segregation-property values connection, this justification for zoning goes back to the program’s roots in the 1920s. Many of Houston’s nicest residential neighborhoods, like River Oaks and Tanglewood, follow this line of thinking, enforcing tight deed restrictions on residents that come out looking a lot like zoned neighborhoods in nearby municipalities like Bellaire and Jersey Village. Second, both zoning and Houston’s deed restrictions are enforced by government officials at taxpayer expense. In most other cities, deed restrictions are overseen and enforced by a private group like a homeowners association, […]

Cities are not man-made things

[In this space I’ll be posting quotes, ideas, and excerpts relating to a book I’m writing (thus far untitled), which I might describe as “What I have learned from the economic and social theory of Jane Jacobs.”  My hope is to get thoughtful, informed feedback that will be useful in shaping the book.] Architects and planners refer to something called the “built environment” by which they usually mean things such as city streets and pathways and the grids made up by them, buildings of various kinds, plazas, the infrastructure of water and energy inflow and outflow, parks and recreation areas, unbuilt open spaces. Although parts of each of these urban elements were consciously constructed, usually by a team of individuals, the way that they fit together, except in the case of mega- and giga-projects, are not the result of a deliberate plan. Buildings in a particular location, for example, – offices, schools, residences, retail, malls, entertainment, places of worship, research facilities – are of different vintages, constructed by different people for different purposes at different times with different techniques, historical contexts, and sensibilities. But the way they all more-or-less complement one another, their “fit,” is an emergent, unplanned phenomenon. I will refer to these elements collectively as the “built framework,” where the word “built” should not in all cases imply deliberate design. What goes on within the built framework can also be planned or unplanned There are, of course, the activities for which a particular element is intended (most recently, that is, because spaces can have multiple uses over time). A gas station, what we might call a “specialized space,” is primarily for pumping gas, not for seeing a football game, which you do at a stadium. But there are other activities that take place in or are facilitated by a given element, […]

Why another book about cities?

city books

The starting point for Jacobs’s analysis and the focus of much of her thought is the city, its nature and significance. There are plenty of books out there that in some way celebrate cities.  Many describe cities as engines of economic development, wellsprings of art and culture, and incubators of ideas religious, social, and scientific.  But few go very far in explaining why and how all that usually happens in a city.  Fewer still view the urban processes as expressions of “emergence,” or what some social theorists describe using the related term “spontaneous order.”  That is the perspective of this book and its main contribution: To look closely at what makes a city a spontaneous order and an engine of innovation, and to trace the analytical and policy consequences of viewing it this way. Jane Jacobs is one of those exceptions, indeed an outstanding one.  In fact, she is probably the first to carefully examine, not only the nature and significance of cities, but to distill realistic principles that govern urban systems and to analyze the mechanisms of economic change that follow from those principles. Her analysis of the relation between the design of public space and social interaction offer insights that complement, and often exceed, those of Max Weber, Henri Pirenne, Georg Simmel (pdf), Kevin Lynch, and others. Her work also has deep connections with modern social theorists such as F.A. Hayek, Elinor Ostrom, Mark Granovetter, and Geoffrey West. But she was not the first to develop conceptual tools congenial to understanding urban processes as emergent, spontaneous orders.  In fact they have largely been available for decades in the field of economics, although few professional economists, including urban economists, have fully appreciated the urban origins of many of their standard concepts and tools of analysis. Indeed, there is a […]

Intro to Culture of Congestion

Welcome to the first post in Culture of Congestion! I’ll be posting quotes, ideas, and short essays relating to a book I’m writing, which I might describe as “What I have learned from the economic and social theory of Jane Jacobs.”  My hope is to get thoughtful, informed feedback that will be useful in shaping the book.  – Sandy Ikeda When I asked Jane Jacobs what she believed her main intellectual contribution was, she answered without hesitation, “Economic theory!”  It’s been my experience that most of those who admire Jacobs for her trenchant writings and fierce activism against heavy handed urban planning and top-down urban design find it surprising that she thought of herself at heart as an economist.  But a glance at the titles of her books makes this rather obvious: The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, and The Nature of Economies. And in her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she explains in intricate detail a la modern social theory what social institutions and norms enable people to discover and pursue their plans at street level, and how doing so allows the city in which they are embedded to flourish in unpredictable ways.  She understood how creative innovation – in commerce, science and technology, and culture – is central to that flourishing.  She explained, in a way that rivals or surpasses most economic theorists, how and under what conditions innovation takes place and how that tends to undermine attempts at central planning at the local level. One of my motivations for writing this book is to make Jane Jacobs, economist, better known especially to those who already rightly admire her for the other contributions she has made as a public intellectual, and to trace her criticisms of urban planning and design and of various public […]

what about singles?

Both smart growth supporters and sprawl apologists focus on the needs of families with children: sprawl defenders argue that only suburbia can accommodate the desires of parents, while some smart growth types argue that cities should require lots of two- and three-bedroom units downtown because families need a lot of space. But a current exhibit at the National Building Museum in Washington suggests that this focus is a bit misguided.  The exhibit points out that nearly 30 percent of U.S. households are singles living alone.  Judging from all the planning-media blather about families, one might think that the housing market is focused on their needs, and that 30 percent or even more of the housing stock consisted of single-sized units. But the exhibit points out that in fact, less than 1 percent of housing units are studios, and about 12 percent are one-bedrooms.  So family-oriented units are in fact overrepresented in the housing stock. Larger units may  not dominate downtown, but they start to dominate pretty close to downtown.  For example, when I looked at zillow.com I discovered that downtown Pittsburgh is dominated by one-bedroom units, but in zip code 15203 just south of downtown, 3/4 of housing units available for rent or sale have two or more bedrooms, including 80 out of 115 rental apartment listings.    In zip code 15202 just northeast of downtown, 34 of 60 rental apartment listings, and 71 percent of all rental listings have two or more bedrooms. Of course, Pittsburgh is a pretty family-oriented city.  But even in Washington’s 20036 zip code (a wealthy downtown neighborhood) 1/3 of all listings are for two or more bedrooms.  And if you go just two subway stops north to Cleveland Park (zip code 20008) 108 out of 174 listings have two or more bedrooms. What about […]

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 […]

new report on SROs

Once upon a time, New York City’s poor single people were usually not homeless because they lived in little apartments with shared bathrooms and kitchens.  These units are called “single room occupancy” (SRO) units in plannerese. (When I was young, people used less flattering terms such as “fleabag” and “flophouse” to describe the nastier SRO buildings). What happened?  Why are so many people sleeping on the streets of Midtown?  A recent paper by NYU’s Furman Center partially answers the question, by discussing the obstacles to SRO construction.  For decades, New York’s housing law has made SROs almost impossible to build, in a variety of ways:  By flatly outlawing SROs, unless they are built with government or nonprofit involvement Through anti-density regulations that limit the number of dwelling units in a building; Minimum parking requirements (though these are an issue primarily in the outer boroughs). The paper recommends allowing market-rate SROs, limited density deregulation, counting SRO units as affordable housing for purposes of the city’s inclusionary zoning ordinance, exempting SROs from minimum parking requirements, and government subsidies for SROs.  

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