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Market Urbanism MUsings July 8, 2016

  1. This week at Market Urbanism, we’re Liberalizing Cities From The Bottom Up Middle Aged NIMBYs, Young YIMBYs by Michael Lewyn Most of the Pro-Urb posters on housing costs assume that high rents are the result of insatiable demand driven by wealthy foreigners, that government lets developers do as they please, and that housing supply is pretty much irrelevant. Why The Tech Industry Should Care About Housing by Jeff Fong Our broken housing system is silently depriving us of future contributors who could build great things; and for each individual who’s preemptively priced out, we’ll never know what those things might have been. Is Commercialism Making Cities Less Livable? by Shanu Athiparambath Are these people correct? If they were, the world’s most commercial cities would be the least livable. But anyone with a modicum of education or travel experience knows this is not true. The cities with the most economic freedom, commercial enterprise and prosperity–think Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Sydney and Vancouver–also have the highest living standards. 2. Where’s Scott? Scott Beyer will spend his last day in Dallas tomorrow visiting the downtown location of the recent sniper attacks. The rest of his weekend will be in Fort Worth, and the rest of July in Austin, stop #7 on his 30-city writing tour. 3. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Brent Gaisford wants to get together with fellow Los Angelenos “if you want to get more involved in the fight for affordable, urbanist housing in LA“ Sandy Ikeda is surprised by an update on China‘s largest “ghost city” Cato Institute filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to take up a case that would restrict historical districting via takings law. Nick Zaiac and Randal John Meyer were involved in the research Shanu Athiparambath wrote Why Building In India Is A Challenge and These Income Segments […]

Is Commercialism Making Cities Less Livable?

Commercialism is blamed for most of the evils that plague society, inside and out of India. In the Indian city of Coimbatore, roads have become narrower and traffic more intense. There is not enough space for pedestrians. Many residents blame the city’s rising level of commercialization. Are these people correct? If they were, the world’s most commercial cities would be the least livable. But anyone with a modicum of education or travel experience knows this is not true. The cities with the most economic freedom, commercial enterprise and prosperity–think Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Sydney and Vancouver–also have the highest living standards. Similar studies show that the cities with the lowest living standards, meanwhile, are in countries that are developing, or that are suffering under repressive, anti-capitalist regimes (think Caracas, Venezuela, the world’s most dangerous city). Nevertheless, it is clear that the most commercialized Indian cities have become less livable in some important ways, such as by suffering from more congestion. So, what is going on? It is true that people migrate to cities with more commercial enterprise. It may seem that such “crowding” is unpleasant. But people are migrating to these cities precisely because there are more shops, hospitals, schools, leisure spaces and other amenities. The fact that there is already a heavy concentration of people in these cities is an important factor also, since that means there are more potential employers and business associates. Alas, the existence of people somewhere lures yet more people. Indeed, it is hard to think of a neighborhood where real estate prices have significantly fallen because of population growth. Such neighborhoods may have become more crowded…but that does not mean they are less livable. Moreover, vast population growth and crowding are not the same. Population density is defined as the number of people living on […]

Why The Tech Industry Should Care About Housing

[Editor’s note–this is the inaugural article for a new blog that Jeff launched called Tech For Housing, where tech workers advocate for more housing in the Bay Area.] San Francisco–For decades, every city in the Bay Area has restricted housing production. And for decades, the Bay Area has gone deeper into housing debt. People and money continue streaming into the region, cities rarely allow new housing, and prices continue to rise. This hurts every industry in the Bay Area, and tech is no exception. The housing market steals money straight out of our pockets and, if we stay the current course, will rob us of the better version of ourselves we need more time to become. How Housing Robs Us Blind Housing in San Francisco costs 73% more than in Austin, 53% more than in Seattle, and 36% more than in Los Angeles. And figures for many of the Peninsula Cities are even worse. After accounting for cost of living, our real incomes in Bay Area tech are often lower than those of our colleagues in less expensive locales simply by virtue of housing costs. Obviously, this is bad for us as employees, but it hurts founders and investors as well. The higher housing prices climb, the more founders have to pay employees to provide for the same standard of living. And the higher labor costs become, the more money founders have to raise from investors, meaning more capital gets tied up funding the same amount of work. All this adds up to tech, as an industry, paying more and more to stay in the Bay Area for zero added benefit. Median Rental Price per Bedroom Source: Trulia But there’s more at stake than just burn rates and take-home pay. As it stands, housing prices are a millstone around our […]

Middle Aged NIMBYs, Young YIMBYs

Today, CNU Nextgen, a group of younger members of the Congress for New Urbanism, retweeted a New York Times story about the evils of NIMBYism in Boulder. Why did I find this noteworthy?  Because on the Pro-Urb listserv, dominated by middle-aged CNUers, a very different conventional wisdom prevails.   Most of the Pro-Urb posters on housing costs assume that high rents are the result of insatiable demand driven by wealthy foreigners, that government lets developers do as they please, and that housing supply is pretty much irrelevant.

Market Urbanism MUsings July 1, 2016

1. This week at Market Urbanism Do The Rich Cause High Rents? by Michael Lewyn One common argument against building new housing is that new construction will never reduce housing costs, because the influx of ultra-rich people into high-cost cities creates an insatiable level of demand. ReasonTV on SF’s YIMBY Movement (a video by ReasonTV) Have you ever had the experience of trying to stuff a lot of stuff in the suitcase? Have you ever gone to a party and seen that the pizza is gone, but you still wanted some? It’s just running out. And they know that we have run out [of housing in San Francisco]. How Realistic Are The Cities Of Fallout? by Nolan Gray Sacred sites—whether in the form of a shrine or a megaton bomb—play an essential role in early human urbanization, both in Fallout 3 and the real world. As the historian Lewis Mumford points out in The City in History, the dead are the first humans to take up stationary residence. Y-Combinator, Tech, and “New Cities” by Adam Hengels A society where housing and the components of vibrant cities are abundant and affordable is a vision worth striving towards. As is a society where disputes are resolved speedily in a bottom-up fashion. In many ways, the technology sector is already on a path to make that happen – they just may not yet realize it yet. 2. Where’s Scott? Scott Beyer is in Dallas, and will spend this weekend visiting small west Texas cities like Wichita Falls, Lubbock and Abilene. This week he wrote 5 articles–one for Governing Magazine making the Case for Cities to Outsource Economic Development; and 4 for Forbes–The Explosive Northern Growth Of Metro Dallas…Boulder, CO: Another Desirable But Over-Regulated U.S. City…On Urban Housing Issue, Liberals And Conservatives Talk Past Each Other…and What Is A […]

How Realistic Are the Cities of Fallout?

Diamond City

  Even by the bizarre standard set by other fandoms, the fandom surrounding the Fallout video game series is weird. Where your typical human would rather spend a Friday night doing strange things like “hang out with friends” and “go out,” your average Fallout fan is likely spending his or her night asking “Could super mutants exist?” or debating the ethical merits of Fallout 4’s factions. In the spirit of this tradition, we wanted to ask: how realistic are Fallout’s cities? It’s worth first asking, does the Fallout universe even have cities? On the one hand, what we call “cities” in Fallout are quite small. In terms of actual visible inhabitants, even the largest of the Fallout cities—the urban area of New Vegas—has fewer than 150 known residents. Other large communities like Megaton, Rivet City, and Diamond City have approximately 50 residents each. The settlements that dot Fallout 4’s Commonwealth all have maximum populations of 21. Even the earliest known cities—take for example, Jericho—had estimated populations ranging from 2,000 to 3,000 in 9,000 BCE.   There are two possible responses to this: First, we could be generous and look at Fallout concept art. After all, what we see in the virtual world of Fallout may fall short of the game designers’ vision of each city. Renditions of Megaton, Diamond City, and Rivet City depict cities with populations likely in the hundreds. In the case of New Vegas, concept art depicts a large city potentially supporting thousands of residents. Each is still smaller than even the earliest cities, but they are hardly the villages we experience in the games.   Second, we could set aside population as an issue altogether. In The Urban Revolution, archaeologist V. Gordon Childe sets out 10 general metrics for urban cities. We won’t go through them here, […]

Y-Combinator, Tech, and “New Cities”

Monday, Y-Combinator, an early-stage technology startup incubator, announced it will “study building new, better cities.” Some existing cities will get bigger and there’s important work being done by smart people to improve them. We also think it’s possible to do amazing things given a blank slate. Our goal is to design the best possible city given the constraints of existing laws. They are embarking on an undertaking of noble intentions, and I will explain why the technology sector needs to be at the forefront of thinking about cities.  However, in the pursuit of designing “new” cities from a “blank slate” they have begun their quest with one fatally flawed premise, that wise technocrats can master-build entirely new cities catering to the infinitely diverse set of needs and desires of yet-to-be-identified citizens.   Any visions of city-building must first humbly acknowledge that cities are an “emergent” phenomena.   According to wikipedia, “emergence is a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties.”   What makes cities vibrant are the “spontaneous order” which emerges among city dwellers as they pursue their individual desires. Cities are like the internet – networks, patterns, and interactions emerge not through design but from spontaneous order.  Like no entity could conceivably understand or control the internet, no entity has the knowledge to anticipate the desires of millions of individual agents, and design a city accordingly.  This is called the “knowledge problem.” According to economist Friedrich Hayek: If we can agree that the economic problem of society is mainly one of rapid adaptation to changes in the particular circumstances of time and place, it would seem to follow that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the […]

ReasonTV on SF’s YIMBY Movement

Last week, Reason.tv (the multimedia outlet of Reason Magazine) published a video about San Francisco’s YIMBY movement.  The video describes the decades of underdevelopment in San Francisco as the result of community activism intended to limit the supply of new construction.  As a result, San Francisco’s housing market is severely supply-constrained, and outrageously expensive.  The problem has gotten so bad that pro-development, “YIMBY” organizations such as SFBARF and Grow San Francisco have sprung up to counter the anti-development forces. It’s great to see Reason taking notice of the YIMBY movement, and we’d love to see more attention paid to urbanism at libertarian sites.  Three of us at Market Urbanism attended the first nationwide YIMBY conference in Boulder that the video mentions, and we’ll be sharing our thoughts on the conference soon. (h/t Jake Thomas at the Market Urbanism facebook group)

Do The Rich Cause High Rents?

One common argument against building new housing is that new construction will never reduce housing costs, because the influx of ultra-rich people into high-cost cities creates an insatiable level of demand. I recently found a source of information that may be relevant to this argument: the Wealth Report, which lists the number of high-wealth individuals in a set of world cities, including five American cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Miami).  In particular, the report lists the number and percentage growth of “ultra high net worth individuals” (UHNWIs), which it defines as those with over $30 million in wealth. It seems to me that if UHNWI growth was related to high housing costs, then the most expensive cities in this group (New York and Los Angeles) would have the highest UNHWI growth.  In fact, the number of UHNWIs grew most rapidly in Houston (63 percent) between 2005 and 2015.   By contrast, UNHWI growth in the other four cities ranged between 31 and 34 percent. In Canada, UNHWI growth was higher, but roughly equal (ranging between 65 and 70 percent) in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal- despite the fact that these cities have radically varying housing costs. The median housing unit price in Vancouver tops $1 million, about three times the median price in Montreal. What about UNHWIs as a percentage of city population?  New York has 5600 of them in a city of 8.1 million*- just under 700 per 1 million.  Low-cost Chicago has 2030 in a city of 2.7 million- about 750 per 1 million. Houston has 1318 in a city of 2.1 million, or around 625 per million.  These differences don’t strike me as significant.   *I am assuming these people all live in the central city; I am not actually sure this is the case, […]

Market Urbanism MUsings June 24, 2016

  1. This week at Market Urbanism Brent Gaisford contributed Lack of New Housing On The Westside Is Causing Gentrification Of East And South LA There are a lot of reasons for gentrification, but the lack of new housing on the Westside deserves a lot of the blame in recent years. As we’ve discussed, social and economic changes are pulling new people into LA, many of them young and affluent. A lot of those new people would probably like to live on the Westside, but we aren’t building any places for them to go. 2. Where’s Scott? Scott Beyer flew back Monday from Boulder to Dallas. The most surprising thing he found about the YIMBY conference was how dramatically the fight for land-use deregulation has become a progressive cause. Almost everyone there identified as liberal, and was representing cities like New York, San Francisco, Portland, Los Angeles and Seattle. This growing bipartisan consensus around zoning reform is a subject Scott will soon cover for Forbes. 3. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Jeff Andrade-Fong introduces a new YIMBY org: Tech for Housing Roger Valdez at Forbes: Seattle Mayor’s Affordability Scheme Is More Politics, Less Helpful Change Roger Valdez at Smart Growth Seattle: Lot Suit: City’s Motion to Dismiss Fails, Compares Housing to Porn, Drugs Adam Milsap‘s latest at Forbes: Los Angeles’ New Manufacturing Hub Won’t Generate Innovation Krishan Madan is curious how to respond to arguments that new housing burdens local schools via Nolan Gray: Why the elevator could be the next great disruptive technology by Matthew Yglesias via John Morris: Are artists abandoning NYC? (audio) Jedediah Mackenzie Weeks wants to know what Market Urbanists think of Baltimore‘s Port Covington redevelopment proposal via John Morris: Local Businesses Clash with the City of Portland Over Major Thoroughfare’s Road Diet Bob McGrew wants to hear […]

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