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Suburban Market Gardening

I filmed this video about Whisper Farms in suburban Pasadena, California. It’s an ordinary home that’s been pressed in to service as a for-profit market garden. My friend Kirsten Dirksen was kind enough to edit it in conjunction with her website  www.faircompanies.com This sort of small scale local food production is generally ignored or labelled as irrelevant. It isn’t “agriculture.” It isn’t…. anything. It’s just eccentric hobbyists who like to play farmer. But I disagree. When we look at the challenges of feeding more people with fewer resources, this kind of distributed hyper-local production makes tremendous sense. Most North Americans live in suburbs. Most suburbs have substantial amounts of sunny land right next to where people live. There’s already water being used to grow ornamental landscapes. Lawns are the largest single crop in the country. Growing food instead makes sense, particularly if different people specialize in different crops. Producing food in this manner eliminates the costs associated with transporting food from remote farms to population centers. Cities themselves are a rich source of waste materials that can be turned to organic feedstocks for agricultural production and soil amendments. Provisional labor is abundant. So are local paying customers. No one is suggesting that a California mortgage can be paid by selling lettuce at the farmers market. But most “real” farms are dependent on non-farm income from a family member who works in town as well. Suburban market gardens aren’t much different. This is one piece of a larger set of responses to how to work around concentrated industrial agribusiness. [Originally published on the blog Granola Shotgun]

Planning As A Question Of Scale

This post was inspired by Nolan Gray’s “Jane Jacobs’ Hayekian Critique of Urban Planning” and the discussion it recently sparked over at Strong Towns. In Jane Jacob’s Hayekian Critique of Urban Planning, Nolan Gray argues for the futility of trying to master plan something as complex as an entire city. And he’s right. The last century’s Corbusian fantasies overwhelmingly ended in failure. And, in what’s a very even-handed article, he goes on to make room for some amount of centralization where decentralized planning just seems to break down. He’s right on that point as well. But after reading Mr. Gray’s article and the discussion it sparked over at Strong Towns, I think we can take the conversation a little farther. Instead of a binary choice, we should be speaking in terms of a spectrum with centralization and decentralization on opposite, theoretical ends. Once we think in those terms, we can approach questions of planning as questions of determining what issues are best addressed at what scale (individual, neighborhood, district, municipal, regional, etc). Looking at India’s or China’s Wenzhou, we can see how hard it is to produce certain kinds of city-wide infrastructure through decentralized market coordination. In the specific areas where relatively decentralized coordination produces sub-par results, it makes sense solve problems via a single entity with responsibility for an entire urban area. The point here is not that municipal or regional planners are ever better at confronting knowledge problems than market participants; it’s that, in some places, transaction costs render decentralized coordination nearly impossible, so the potential benefits of better-leveraged local knowledge never even have a chance to appear. In these situations, any plan is better than no plan, and below a certain scale, no plan is what we end up with. And where transaction costs aren’t too high we should […]

High Rent Sucks. Let’s Build More Houses.

LA rent sucks. It’s way, way too damn high. Let’s fix it. If you rent, you’re probably already on board. You gotta pay the man on the 1st of the month, every month, and that sucks. But what if you are the man? You’ve got the sweet house, the trophy husband, the picket fence. Even then, you should still be upset. Here’s why this matters, to everybody: High housing costs are hamstringing the whole American economy. To the tune of a TRILLION dollars a year. $3,000 for every man, woman, and child. Short and sweet – the places where the rents are too damn high tend to be places where people are more productive and can make a lot of money (think entertainment in LA, tech in SF, or finance in NYC). But because the cost of living is so high in those places, lots of people choose to move to places where it is cheap instead. If we drove rents down, and people started moving to where the best jobs are, the US economy would grow by $1-2 trillion a year. That’s more money for you, more money for me, and more money for Uncle Sam. High rents are trapping us in our cars, breaking up families, and literally driving us into obesity and early death.  Remember those high-paying jobs in our most productive cities? Well some people want them even though they can’t afford to live near them. So they drive, and they drive far. And when more people drive, and the farther we drive, the more cars there are on the road (cars on road = # of people driving x distance they drive). Then we’re all stuck in traffic. Sitting in our damn cars for hours in traffic makes us fat, gives us less time at […]

Market Urbanism MUsings May 6, 2016

1. This week at Market Urbanism: Emily Washington ties Adam Smith‘s ideas to urbanism in Mercantilist logic and land-use regulation Adam Smith taught the world that mercantilism impoverished 18th-century nations by erecting barriers to trade and reducing opportunities for specialization and economic growth. Regulations that restrict urban development likewise reduce opportunities for innovation and specialization by limiting cities’ population size and density. Dan Keshet Taylor Swift Spurns Country Music’s Longtime Attitude Towards Cities Taylor Swift, on the other hand, can portray a positive side of cities: cosmopolitan places to escape bad relationships, meet new people with different life experiences, and grow your dreams. Let’s Go L.A., an anonymous new contributor, adds Zoning, Buildings Codes, And Low-Quality Housing quality can be used to convey a wide variety of characteristics. Something can be low quality in the sense that it is hazardous to human health and safety, or something can be low quality in the sense that, while functional, it doesn’t meet the aesthetic preferences of the neighbors. Stephen Smith quoted about Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn at Washington Post 2. Wednesday was Jane Jacobs‘ 100th birthday, giving market urbanists much to walk and talk about. These include numerous Jane’s Walks that will occur this weekend in numerous U.S. cities: Nolan Gray discussed Jane Jacobs and Friedrich Hayek on the Strong Towns Podcast Emily Washington talked about Jane Jacobs on the Cato Daily Podcast Sandy Ikeda is hosting his annual Brooklyn Heights Janes Walk this weekend An urbanist friend of Jeff Fong dedicated a song to Jane Jacobs Stephen Smith is never afraid to point out the NIMBY tendencies of Jane Jacobs on twitter: It’s Jane Jacobs’s 100th birthday!! To celebrate, I will tweet out some of her most NIMBYrrific quotes. — Market Urbanism (@MarketUrbanism) May 4, 2016 3. Where’s Scott? Scott Beyer spent his third week in San Antonio, and will travel tomorrow to the Mexican […]

Zoning, Buildings Codes, And Low-Quality Housing

Emily Washington recently wrote for Market Urbanism about the need for low quality housing, attributing some of the high cost of housing in U.S. cities to building codes that increase construction costs. Some provisions of building codes were encouraged by social reformers and reflect middle-class standards and expectations, rather than necessities of health and safety. Over at Rooflines, Jamaal Green responds that there is no shortage of low quality housing in the U.S. Anyone with a cursory familiarity with the lower end of the U.S. housing market can vouch for the fact that there are many dwellings out there, in cheap cities and expensive ones alike, that are very low quality in their ability to provide shelter, keep out pests, supply functioning water and sewer connections, and so on. Part of the issue here is that quality can be used to convey a wide variety of characteristics. Something can be low quality in the sense that it is hazardous to human health and safety, or something can be low quality in the sense that, while functional, it doesn’t meet the aesthetic preferences of the neighbors. As Paul Groth details in Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States, it is clear that many zoning and building code provisions reflect the middle-class sensibilities of Progressive Era reformers. In particular, living arrangements that were not centered on family life, such as residential hotels and rooming houses, were nearly driven out of existence. Unlike the lower end single-room cubicles of Groth and the doss houses of Jacob Riis, this was not due to public health, but to the perceived impact on social relations of residents. Turn of the century hotels and rooming houses made it possible for women to live alone and for both men and women to engage in intimate relationships, straight […]

Taylor Swift Spurns Country Music’s Longtime Attitude Towards Cities

If you listen to a lot of bluegrass and country, you’d think cities were the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. J.D. Crowe and the New South ask why they ever left their plow behind to look for a job in the town: Hank Williams, Jr. thinks that you’ll only get mugged if you go downtown.  If you keep watching, you find that this is exactly what happened to the narrator’s friend! Dave Grisman didn’t get mugged, but still found himself impoverished: Taylor Swift, on the other hand, can portray a positive side of cities: cosmopolitan places to escape bad relationships, meet new people with different life experiences, and grow your dreams. In White Horse, she reminds herself that small towns are difficult places for dreams to come true: In Fifteen, she describes a process where girls growing up in small towns can be encouraged not to dream big dreams (although she has moved on to bigger, better things, as she reminds herself): In Mean, she holds out the hope for city living as a way of escaping abusive relationships holding her back: When she finally reaches the big city (New York), she is overwhelmed with the possibilities. People come from all over the world, feel free to explore their sexual identities, remake themselves, and try to achieve their dreams: Real-life Taylor Swift is a fantastic example of somebody who achieved her dreams by moving to a specialized city, Nashville. The Music City has grown and evolved as a cultural and economic engine in country music that allows young people like herself to meet like-minded, skilled people to collaborate with. Good for Taylor Swift for recognizing that the same process means cities can allow for personal growth in other dimensions, by exposing people to others from all over the world and all walks of life.   [Originally published on […]

Mercantilist logic and land-use regulation

Adam Smith taught the world that mercantilism impoverished 18th-century nations by erecting barriers to trade and reducing opportunities for specialization and economic growth. Regulations that restrict urban development likewise reduce opportunities for innovation and specialization by limiting cities’ population size and density. Even as improvements in communications technology and falling transportation costs reduce the burden of distance, many industries still benefit from the geographical proximity of human beings that only dense development can provide. Removing land-use regulations will allow greater gains from trade as more people are allowed to live in important economic centers like New York City and Silicon Valley. Cities facilitate innovation by placing people with diverse backgrounds and goals in close proximity. While Israel Kirzner’s research provided a comprehensive analysis of entrepreneurs in the market process and in economic growth, economists have not given sufficient attention to the geography of entrepreneurship. The settings in which entrepreneurs work – Sandy Ikeda’s “action space” – matters, and cities provide a crucial role as the action space for much of human innovation. Silicon Valley is an urban action space where geographical proximity has made entrepreneurs more successful than they would have been without the inspiration they provided one another. The Homebrew Computer Club, a social group founded in 1975 for computer hobbyists, played a crucial role in the development of personal computers. The programmers, engineers, and inventors who attended those early meetings would go on to revolutionize computing thanks, in large part, to the information they gathered from swapping ideas, hardware, and skills from the other group members they encountered. The club began meeting in garages, parking lots, and university auditoriums, but it was only possible because these enthusiasts all worked for semiconductor companies that brought them to the same region of California. Empirical evidence bears out the importance of cities in facilitating […]

Market Urbanism MUsings April 29, 2016

  1. This week at Market Urbanism: Carolyn Zelikow of Aspen Institute wrote her first Market Urbanism article, Richard Florida Should Replace The Term ‘Creative Class’ With ‘Country Club’ So I was shocked that reading Florida’s book not only gave me zero ideas for my own community, but actually made me question whether the “Creative Class” was something that cities should try to foster, period. As far as I can tell, the Creative Class is just a new name for rich people. Howard Ahmanson also contributed his first post, No, ‘New Urbanism’ And ‘Smart Growth’ Are Not The Same It is a fact that perhaps 90% of New Urbanists are also Smart Growthers, though many of the leaders of the New Urbanist movement are not; that still does not mean the two philosophies are identical. Michael Lewyn followed up on his article on “school-based sprawl”: “Public Schools Only” Vouchers and Sprawl This plan might discourage sprawl by making prestigious suburban schools available to urban parents.  And if both students from affluent families and students from poor families entered these schools, the class differences between urban and suburban schools might be erased in the long run. 2. Where’s Scott? Scott Beyer spent his second week in San Antonio. He wrote two Forbes articles this week–about a Private Proposal To Solve Chicago’s Freight Rail Bottleneck, and whether San Francisco’s Solar Panel Mandate Will Increase Housing Costs: The goals driving the solar panel mandate sound wonderful, but how will they influence San Francisco’s already-high housing prices?…As I learned through recent research and interviews, it doesn’t appear that San Francisco’s officials are too curious about the answer. Scott also published on his blog a radio interview about his visit to Havana, Cuba (starts at the 20:31 mark) 3. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Bjorn Swenson “dropped a bombshell” on his hometown’s Facebook […]

“Public Schools Only” Vouchers and Sprawl

About a month ago, I wrote about the pros and cons of school vouchers as a solution for “school-based sprawl” (that is, parents moving to suburbs to avoid urban public schools).   I noted that a voucher program that included private schools might be expensive, since some private schools are quite costly. By contrast, a school choice program limited to public schools would avoid these fiscal problems: the state could simply forbid public school districts from discriminating on the basis of residence.  If a school district wanted to avoid radical increases in enrollment, it would have to use a lottery to decide which students were admitted.  This plan might discourage sprawl by making prestigious suburban schools available to urban parents.  And if both students from affluent families and students from poor families entered these schools, the class differences between urban and suburban schools might be erased in the long run.  So such an open enrollment program might both expand student choice and be more egalitarian than the status quo. This plan has one major cost: it would require a considerable investment (either public or private) in transportation, since students in search of good schools might wish to go all over a metropolitan area.  Either government will have to buy many more school buses, or parents will have to spend a lot more time transporting their children to faraway schools.  Moreover, suburbanites will be unwilling to pay property taxes for schools that other people’s children will attend; thus, states  might have to take over school financing. I note that most states have in fact enacted “open enrollment” laws allowing some interdistrict transfers. However, these laws are generally toothless;  suburban school districts can generally refuse to admit students from other districts on the ground that there is insufficient space for them.   Moreover, open enrollment […]

No, ‘New Urbanism’ And ‘Smart Growth’ Are Not The Same

There are two political movements in urban development that have a lot of overlap but are not the same.  ‘New Urbanism’ advocates the legalization and building of communities resembling the 19th century American town, with a fair number of single family homes [or maybe ‘single family’ with granny flats], row houses, and clumps of apartments, close enough to commercial places to be walkable, and diverse in terms of income, hopefully without subsidy.  Smart Growth, on the other hand, goes farther and advocates the forbidding of building that is not either New Urbanist or denser, sometimes even high-rise; and also any building at all outside a ‘growth boundary’.  It is a fact that perhaps 90% of New Urbanists are also Smart Growthers, though many of the leaders of the New Urbanist movement are not; that still does not mean the two philosophies are identical.  Smart Growth, in fact, finds itself an ally in many areas of No Growth, which is not the same as Smart Growth either, but is quite popular in the suburbs as people desire to conserve the values that brought themselves to the suburbs in the first place, and not have the value of their investments diluted by ‘printing’ new housing, as the value of our money is diluted by ‘printing’ money. A disproportionate number of Jewish people are ‘progressives’ and ‘socialists’ for very historical reasons, for example, but that does not mean that Judaism and progressivism are the same.  And there is a lot of overlap between conservatism and evangelical Christianity, but the two are not the same either.  Overlap does not, and must not, mean identity. I will admit that, though the single family suburban house was favored for many years by government policy, nevertheless it is what many people, including especially families with children, desire; […]

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