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Market Urbanism MUsings March 11, 2016

1. This week at Market Urbanism: Matt Robare contributed his first Market Urbanism article, Protectionism Is Already Harming American Workers And Cities The delays and high costs associated with Buy America have helped to make American transit costs the world’s highest. The Congressional Research Service found that new bus prices were double in the United States versus Japan and South Korea. According to Alon Levy, locomotives purchased by Amtrak cost 30 percent more than the European equivalent, increasing costs by $100 million. Stephen Smith also touched on Buy America’s unintended consequences in 2010 2. Where’s Scott? On a related note, Scott Beyer, who finished his third week in Oklahoma City, wrote a Forbes piece titled Does Bernie Sanders Actually Think NAFTA Is What Killed Detroit? Detroit has long stood near the top in all the big-government indicators, with some of the nation’s highest taxes, strictest business regulations, lowest economic freedom rates, largest per capita public workforces, high rates of public and private sector unionization, and an Occupy-Wall-Street-style civic and governing culture. This model has produced exactly the dystopia that conservative critics fear, marked by human and capital flight. Scott’s previous MU photo essay on Cuba was translated into Spanish by the Latin American news site PanAm Post. 3. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Anthony Ling warns about when “When city development goes wrong. Very wrong.” in California Bjorn Swenson tells us “Greyhound is rebranding itself as a relevant twenty-first century company” Tom W. Bell published a paper on Special Economic Zones in the United States and asks “Would USSEZs encourage innovation in urban design?” If you are in Toronto, come see Sanford Ikeda, who will be speaking about “Why a city can’t be a work of art” at the Ryerson University Planning Expo Krishan Madan reminds us that Seattle raised it’s minimum wage to help people get by, but neighbors still […]

Protectionism Is Already Harming American Workers And Cities

Both Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York reality television personality Donald Trump have based their presidential campaigns in part on the issue of trade. Both of them oppose free trade policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement and the pending Tran Pacific Partnership, arguing that free trade has resulted in American jobs going overseas, leaving American workers worse-off. To remedy this situation, Trump has proposed declaring China a currency manipulator and imposing duties on Chinese-made goods, while elsewhere he’s advocated a 35 percent import tax on items made in Mexico and a 20 percent tax on all other imported goods. Sanders has also advocated imposing tarrifs on countries that manipulate their currencies to subsidize exports. To counter both candidates’ narratives of heartless corporations offshoring American jobs or unscrupulous foreigners “stealing” jobs that belong to American workers, economists and commentators from across the political spectrum have compiled impressive arrays of statistics proving that free trade actually benefits everyone. But they didn’t have to do so much. There are already examples, right now, of protectionist legislation that explodes the myths of the Trump and Sanders crowds. Since 1978, the “Buy America” provision of the Surface Transportation Assistance Act has forced transit agencies and passenger railroads like Amtrak and commuter rail services to have around 60 percent of the equipment and structural components manufactured in the United States if they want federal funding for their projects, unless they apply for and receive a waiver. Has this provision protected American workers? Does the United States now have a thriving rail equipment industry capable of competing with European, Japanese and Chinese companies, bearing out Alexander Hamilton’s “infant industry” argument? No. According to Metro Magazine, the Buy America provision makes “significant supply-chain disruptions” likely because the American market share for bus and train components […]

Market Urbanism MUsings March 4, 2016

1. Where’s Scott? Scott Beyer spent his second week in the Oklahoma City area, finding a place in the relatively wealthy northern college suburb of Edmond, OK. This week he wrote for Governing about New Orleans‘ music noise issue, and profiled a man in Forbes who escaped Cuba by raft for Miami. There are over 1.1 million Cuban immigrants in the United States, and even more than other immigrant groups, they have clustered, with over two-thirds living in greater Miami. What unites this group is not dislike of their home country, but the need to leave the Castro brothers’ Communist regime. 2. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Nolan Gray found another great Daniel Hertz article: Great neighborhoods don’t have to be illegal—they’re not elsewhere John Morris shared Donald Shoup‘s contribution to a Washington Post series on cities becoming less car-dependent  (h/t Nolan Gray) John Morris also found a post at Medium calling for repeal of segregationist zoning policies Jeff Fong shared a short podcast interview with Alain Betaud Sandy Ikeda shared Bill Easterly‘s research on the largely unplanned emergence over 400 years of single block in Soho Mark Frasier congratulates Zach Caceras‘ work seeding local reforms at Startup Cities Adam Lang‘s ongoing frustration with urban renewal in his Philadelphia neighborhood which we previously covered 3. Elsewhere: New Geography reposted Nolan Gray’s recent article on Jane Jacob’s Hayekian approach William Fischel will be speaking Tuesday at NYU about his new paper: The Rise of the Homevoters: How OPEC and Earth Day Created Growth-Control Zoning that Derailed the Growth Machine Chris Hagan‘s WBEZ radio piece about population loss in Chicago‘s North Center neighborhood due to restrictive zoning Nick Zaiac wrote Maryland Is an Over-Regulated Disaster: Here’s How to Fix It and published a report at The Maryland Public Policy Institute Commutes in the U.S. are getting longer, reports the Washington Post’s Wonkblog. 4. Stephen […]

Market Urbanism MUsings: February 26, 2016

1. This week at Market Urbanism: Nolan Gray contributed a post Who Plans?: Jane Jacobs’ Hayekian critique of urban planning discussing Jacobs’ three arguments against central planning: Hayek and Jacobs defended the importance of local knowledge, illustrated the power of decentralized planning, and celebrated the sublime spontaneous orders that organize our lives. Yet their theoretical innovations went largely unnoticed long after their respective publications. Here, the two thinkers diverge: while Hayekian ideas have largely driven centralized economic planning into the dustbin of history, I suspect the Jacobsian urban revolution has only just begun. The post was also discussed at Reason and Urban Liberty 2. Where’s Scott?: Scott Beyer is now in Oklahoma City, with plans to spend this weekend in Stillwater, OK. This week at Forbes, he described urban liberals’ inability to understand housing “filtering”: Officials believe that if new projects can’t be forced to charge lower prices, they shouldn’t be allowed at all. A smarter approach would be to view such projects the way one would view a gated community of mansions. Sure, such housing isn’t affordable, but it still serves a purpose: to provide rich people a place to live, thereby opening up older, smaller, less luxurious units for lower-income people. 3. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Nolan Gray shared a CityLab piece quantifying the influx of young people in downtowns Private Protection Co. Puts Govt. Police to Shame in Detroit via Mark Frazier Bad news from John Morris: L.A. is seizing tiny homes from the homeless What Computer Games Taught Daniel Hertz About Urban Planning via Erik Genc 4. Elsewhere: Strong Towns spent the week discussing the numerous ways federal housing policies distort the marketplace against walkable urban environments.  Lots of good reads and podcasts… Chicago plans to use Eminent Domain to seize the old Post Office and sell it. (when Chicago issues an RFP, […]

Who Plans?: Jane Jacobs’ Hayekian critique of urban planning

Cities are fantastically dynamic places, and this is strikingly true of their successful parts, which offer a fertile ground for the plans of thousands of people. – Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities For most of the field’s history, prominent urban planning theorists have taken for granted that cities require extensive central planning. With the question framed as “To plan or not to plan?” students and practitioners answer with an emphatic “Yes,” subsequently setting out to impose their particular ideal order on what they perceived to be, as Lewis Mumford put it, “solidified chaos.” Whether through the controlled centralization of Le Corbusier or the controlled decentralization of Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright, cities were to be just that: controlled. When in 1961 Jane Jacobs set out to attack the orthodox tradition of urban planning, it was this dogma that landed squarely in her crosshairs. With her characteristically deceptive simplicity, she invites us to ask, “Who plans?” While many take Jacobs’ essential contribution to be her insights into urban design, her subversion begins at the theoretical level in the introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Despite their diverse aesthetic preferences, Corbusier and Howard share much in common. Both assume that planning entails the enshrining of a single plan and the suppression of all other individual plans. Both insist on imposing a “pretended order” on the “real order,” treating the city as a simple machine rather than a manifestation of organized complexity. Like Adam Smith’s “man of system,” each thinker was “so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he [could not] suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it.” Jane Jacobs’ critique of this orthodox tradition unfolds in three steps, closely following F.A. Hayek’s argument in […]

Market Urbanism MUsings: February 19, 2016

1. This week at Market Urbanism: Shanu Athiparambath has his first post on the blog via Scott Beyer: Economist David Friedman Says India Must Go Taller to Make Homes Affordable I remember my father saying that when he visited India in the 1950s and 1960s, bureaucrats in Delhi made arguments for restricting luxuries for the rich in air-conditioned luxury hotels where bureaucrats and American visitors held conferences. Emily Washington: Reforming Zoning in a Kludgeocracy While studying economics often leads people to think about the ceteris paribus effect of a policy change, in the real world, a policy will rarely be changed without resulting in domino effect of other changes in other policies and market outcomes because land-use policy is entangled with so many other policies. 2. Where’s Scott?: Scott Beyer is spending a final weekend in New Orleans before heading to Oklahoma City. This week, he wrote for National Review about rapid high-rise growth in the Miami neighborhood of Brickell. Starting as a low-slung neighborhood, it grew to become what it now is thanks to the city’s tolerance of unfettered growth. And rather than bringing Armageddon, as critics of rapid urban development might suspect, Brickell has become an economic powerhouse and an urban destination. At a time when so many other cities suppress development — and suffer the consequences – Brickell symbolizes a mentality worth restoring throughout urban America. 3. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Nick Zaiac wants you to check out Cato’s new study related to immigration and housing affordability Tobias Cassandra Holbrook is interested in London’s growing skyline: Don’t listen to the Nimbies – skyscrapers can make London great again R John Anderson introduced the group to his latest post explaining where small urban developers should be looking to build  4. Elsewhere: New study confirms that boomers are clueless about where they like to live. h/t: Charles […]

Reforming Zoning in a Kludgeocracy

To market urbanists and many others, it’s clear that there is a positive relationship between high housing costs and land-use restrictions and that liberalizing zoning would lower housing costs relative to what they would be in a more regulated environment. Given this relationship, reducing zoning would improve efficiency in the housing market by allowing consumer demand to drive the amount of resources that are put into housing development. However, land-use reform would also affect other policy areas such as public schools, transportation infrastructure, and sewer and water provision. Predicting how a liberalizing reform in one policy area will affect the complete public policy landscape is as impossible as predicting how one private sector innovation will affect other markets. Political scientist Steven Teles coined the term “kludgeocracy” to describe the complexity of contemporary American policy. For example, zoning has become a tool to make high-performing public schools exclusive, even though land-use policy and education policy are seemingly unrelated areas governed by different agencies. Because providing zero-price quality education to every child in the country may be impossible, zoning is a kludge that allows policymakers to provide this service to their high-income and influential constituents. Teles describes this policy complexity: A “kludge” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” The term comes out of the world of computer programming, where a kludge is an inelegant patch put in place to solve an unexpected problem and designed to be backward-compatible with the rest of an existing system. When you add up enough kludges, you get a very complicated program that has no clear organizing principle, is exceedingly difficult to understand, and is subject to crashes. Any user of Microsoft Windows will immediately grasp the concept. […]

Economist David Friedman Says India Must Go Taller To Make Homes Affordable

In this exclusive interview to PropGuide, legendary economist David Friedman, who studied at Harvard University and University of Chicago, says that the government should allow developers to build high-rises to make homes affordable for everyone by 2022. I met David Friedman at Starbucks in Connaught Place, the Central Business District of Delhi. Starbucks, which exemplifies the age of aesthetics, tends to maintain consistency in look, feel and attitude across the world. But, its store in Delhi’s premier market reeks of traditionalism, with bare cement interiors, local crafts and furniture. The Connaught Place market, though somewhat dilapidated, is one of the most expensive office spaces in the world. Starbucks, which does not have many outlets in India, bought space here because as per its brand values, it cannot afford to open stores where the catchment area does not justify the investment. The young men and women who listened to Friedman consuming expensive retail space without consuming the expensive coffee epitomize India’s leisurely café culture. Economist David Friedman is one of the most creative minds of our times. Friedman studied Physics at Harvard and Chicago, and has never taken a course for credit in economics or law. But, the finest of minds vouch that Friedman’s class on legal systems is the best economics course in the world. David Friedman is the son of Milton Friedman, the 1976 winner of Nobel Prize in Economics, and economist Rose Director. Rose Director was the co-author of Milton’s best-selling book, ‘Free to Choose’ and sister of economist Aaron Director who was instrumental in the development of the Chicago School of Economics. Here are excerpts from an interview: Shanu Athiparambath: Economist Tyler Cowen said that when he visited India, he was surprised to see crowded streets where nothing happened. He couldn’t see their possessions, because they live on the streets. Why are so […]

Market Urbanism MUsings Feb 12, 2016

  1. Where’s Scott?: Scott Beyer returned to New Orleans for the end of Mardi Gras. This week at Forbes, he wrote a 4-part series on the “Quirks of New Orleans Culture,” covering things like Second Line Parades, King Cake, Mardi Gras Balls, and other idiosyncrasies. There are certain commentators who will argue that, thanks to gentrification, corporatism, and globalization, U.S. cities are losing their cultural distinctiveness. These people should really try leaving their rooms more often. One thing I’ve noticed while traveling is that cultural differences, in fact, remain alive and well in America. And nowhere is this more evident than New Orleans. 2. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: John Morris shared Daniel Hertz’s latest, Report: Market-rate housing construction is a weapon against displacement;  and some good news from Los Angeles LA’s Metro Going to Start Charging For Parking at Rail Stations Tory Gattis notified readers about Club Nimby, a new blog by Austin attorney Chris Bradford (of Austin Contrarian fame) that tries to better explain the phenomenon of American Nimbyism. We don’t talk about Atlanta enough, so Mike Lewyn shared Atlanta’s War on Density “The data says we’re right,” says Nick Zaiac about the report on market-rate development 3. Elsewhere: fxstreet.com covers Chicago‘s dreary financial situation, namely for the public school system. Bond buyers would have the promise that CPS will use its “full faith and credit” to repay the bonds. There’s only one problem. It’s a lie, and the district officials know it. The term “full faith and credit” means that a borrower will use all assets available to repay a debt. But Chicago’s school system, in the footsteps of Detroit two years ago and now Puerto Rico, has no intention of foregoing other expenses to pay bondholders. Charles Marohn loves Memphis, but not the “orderly but dumb” pyramid. MU twitter poll on the likelihood […]

Market Urbanism MUsings: Feb 5, 2016

1. This week at Market Urbanism: Nolan Gray‘s second article at Market Urbanism:  Return to Sender: Housing affordability and the shipping container non-solution the belief that these projects could address the growing affordability crisis hints at a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the problem and distracts policymakers from viable solutions. 2. Where’s Scott?: Scott Beyer is spending Friday in Mobile, AL, to celebrate Mardi Gras where it was invented. His article this week was at Forbes:  Washington, DC Reformed Its Zoning Code; Now Time To Ditch The Height Limits The DC zoning code changes are a testament to this growing consensus favoring deregulation. If it can happen in America’s center of governance, it means similar zoning overhauls may be awaiting other cities. 3. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution‘s Quora response to “What do economists think about buying vs renting a house?” via Nolan Gray It’s Superbowl Weekend, and John Morris had coffee with Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist, Brian O’Neill to explain why he wants to ‘Tear down Heinz Field’ (Pittsburgh Steelers) Krishan Madan informed us that Cincinnati Built a Subway System 100 Years Ago–BUT NEVER USED IT Sandy Ikeda shared a Guardian piece on the role of cities in shaping musical genres Speaking of music, let’s all sing the “Monorail Song” with Nolan Gray 4. Elsewhere: Alon Levy, Pedestrian Observations:  Why Costs Matter Joe Cortwright at City Observatory:  Don’t demonize driving—just stop subsidizing it Justin Fox: Why parking your car for free is actually expensive (h/t Donald Shoup) see this too Floating cities in Tokyo Bay??  (h/t Jeff Wood) RIP Bob Elliott:  Bob and Ray on Urban Planning  (h/t Michael Strong) Chicago may eliminate the Clybourn Planned Manufacturing District.  A move Adam Hengels called for in 2014. 5. Stephen Smith‘s Tweet of the Week: SF & NYC’s experiences w/density bonuses/mandatory IZ suggest to […]

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