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Market Urbanist Meetup [Manhattan Edition] March 22, 2014

Market Urbanists will be gathering again in New York City for an informal meet up.  Last year, we explored the fascinating ethnic neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  This year, we’ll meet in Midtown Manhattan, where some ethnic enclaves are nestled amongst towers and bustling streets. Come join a wide cross-section of urbanists in attendance:  architects, journalists, economists, real estate developers, planners, and students.  Anthony Ling of Rendering Freedom set up a Facebook event for the meetup.  We’ll meet at 3pm in Herald Square (right in front of the clock tower on W 35th St.)  Please sign up on Facebook, and tell your friends.  (Anthony also set up a Market Urbanism Facebook group to help us connect to fellow Market Urbanists) See you then!   https://www.facebook.com/events/1455717651329006/

Urbanism without government

Asking, “But who will build the roads?” is a cliched response to proposals for a more libertarian political system. However, it leads to the interesting historical question of “Who has built the roads in anarchic societies?” Colonial America provides a few examples that answer this question. Perhaps the best known example of anarchism in American history was in Rhode Island, or “Rogue’s Island,” founded by Baptists fleeing Massachusetts. The stateless Baptists founded the cities of Portsmouth and Warwick. Unlike the Baptists, William Penn didn’t intend to create an anarchic colony, but Pennsylvania was, in fact, without a government from 1684 to 1691 as evidenced by Penn’s failure to successfully levy any taxes during that time. It’s difficult to know much about street building from this time period in part because of how much time has passed and in part because, as Murray Rothbard writes, “The lack of recordkeeping in stateless societies — since only government officials seem to have the time, energy, and resources to devote to such activities — produce a tendency toward a governmental bias in the working methods of historians.” However, we do know that Philadelphia’s neighborhoods near the Delaware River were growing during this time. One of the country’s oldest continually occupied streets is Philadelphia’s Elfreth’s Alley. It was dedicated in 1702, shortly after this period of complete anarchy and served  as a route to connect local merchants’ property with the already thriving Second Street. As the society dedicated to the alley’s preservation writes: Elfreth’s Alley — popularly known as “Our nation’s oldest residential street” – dates back to the first days of the eighteenth century. Twenty years after William Penn founded Pennsylvania and established Philadelphia as its capital, the town had grown into a thriving, prosperous mercantile center on the banks of the Delaware River. Philadelphians […]

Culs de sac for safety?

At Cato At Liberty, Randall O’Toole provides a list of recommendations for reversing Rust Belt urban decline in response to a study on the topic from the Lincoln Land Institute. He focuses on policies to improve public service provision and deregulation, but he also makes a surprising recommendation that declining cities should “reduce crime by doing things like changing the gridded city streets that planners love into cul de sacs so that criminals have fewer escape routes.” This recommendation is surprising because it would require significant tax payer resources, a critique O’Toole holds against those from the Lincoln Land Institute. Short of building large barricades, it’s inconceivable how a city with an existing grid of streets would even go about turning its grid into culs de sac without extensive use of eminent domain and other disruptive policies. O’Toole is correct that the grid owes its origins to authoritarian regimes and that today it’s embraced by city planners in the Smart Growth and New Urbanist schools. But while culs de sac may have originally appeared in organically developed networks of streets, today’s culs de sac promoted by traffic engineers are hardly a free market outcome. As Daniel Nairn has written, the public maintenance of what are essentially shared driveways “smacks of socialism in its most extreme form.” Some studies have found that culs de sac experience less crime relative to nearby through streets, perhaps in part because they draw less traffic. However, it’s far from clear that a pattern of suburban streets makes a city safer than it would be would be with greater street connectivity. Some studies find that street connectivity correlates with greater social capital. O’Toole’s promotion of social engineering through culs de sac to create a localized drop in crime at the expense of a city’s residents’ social capital is […]

Los Angeles’ Pedestrian Environment

Last week, Tyler Cowen wrote that Los Angeles is the best city in the world based on several factors, including that it’s one of the best cities for walking. While he makes the valid point that LA’s beautiful weather gives it an advantage over many other American cities with good walking opportunities, I have to disagree that it ranks among the best cities for walking as a tourist or for enjoyment. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this topic because my boyfriend is from LA and has often tried to convince me that it has great walking neighborhoods. Tyler is clearly correct that weather is an important aspect of walkability, so whether or not LA can compete with older, colder American cities on walkability depends on the walker’s preferences for weather relative to other factors like aesthetics and safety. Personally, I weight urban design much more heavily for walkability than weather, and from this standpoint I don’t think LA can compete with the few cities built before wide boulevards became standard street construction. As Nathan Lewis points out, American city planners began building wide streets well before personal cars became common for transportation. Only the U.S.’s oldest neighborhoods that predate the Revolutionary War feature the narrow streets that facilitate a pedestrian scale environment. Stephen Stofka at Strong Towns supports 1:1 as the best ratio of building height to street width, but personally, I prefer a “really narrow street” design with mid-rise buildings, with a ratio often approaching 2:1. With buildings taller than the streets, pedestrians feel a sense of enclosure and close-in building facades pull the walker along as compared to the expansiveness of wide streets that make comparable walking distances feel farther. Although some call Boston’s financial district an urban canyon, to me it’s one of the most interesting places to walk that I’ve […]

Potential for Voluntary Infrastructure

Last fall I visited Budapest and learned some interesting history of the city’s beautiful Chain Bridge. Before 1849, the small cities of Buda and Pest were connected by a temporary bridge that was only viable during warm months. In the winter, the bridge had to be taken down due to ice, making it impossible to cross the Danube between the two cities if the ice wasn’t solid enough to walk on. Count István Széchenyi, a Hungarian statesman who traveled extensively throughout Europe, made it his mission to secure financing for a bridge to improve economic growth opportunities and Budapest’s standing on the world stage. His experiences in rapidly modernizing cities like London taught Széchenyi the importance of mobility for economic growth. Legend has it that Széchenyi was motivated to build a bridge between Buda and Pest because ice on the Danube prevented him from getting to see his sick father before he died, but it’s unclear to me if this is an accurate history. The bridge was the realization of both a politician’s ambitions and a private financiers goal to profit from tolling the bridge and by increasing the value of his landholding in Pest. While the bridge lost money during its financier’s life, it ultimately began turning a profit in 1860. It’s impossible to understand Széchenyi’s motivations for securing the bridge centuries later, but it seems he was likely motivated by a combination of profit seeking, nationalistic pride, and philanthropy. The Chain Bridge joined a slew of other privately built bridges and other infrastructure around the world, built either by people who hoped to profit from providing transportation services or who sought to increase their land value by providing mobility. While a voluntarily built bridge seems exceptional from today’s vantage point — when a public private partnership or contracted toll road management seems […]

The Use of Knowledge in Urban Development

This post was written for an essay contest on the question “What would Hayek say today?” Hayek and other Austrian economists demonstrated that government ownership of the means of production is a sure route to poverty, but today, central planning remains the norm in one crucial area: cities. In the United States, the Supreme Court determined that cities could designate sections of city land for specific types of development in the landmark case Euclid v. Ambler. Since then, land use regulation has expanded to include heights limits, parking requirements, and design guidelines across the world’s great cities. Urban planners and politicians determine the rules for the location and types of development permitted within their jurisdictions, and ultimately have veto power over major projects designed in the world’s great cities. If Hayek were alive today, he would focus on applying his work on the knowledge problem to city planning. In the United States, progressive city planners began promoting restrictions on building height and density with the objectives of promoting light and air in the early twentieth century. At the time, these objectives were considered important for public health.  Property owners and policymakers soon realized that zoning tools could also be used to protect home values by preventing the construction of low-cost, high-density housing. Today, property owners support a wide range of policies designed to limit housing supply and increase the value of their assets. These policies include minimum lot sizes, density limits, and parking requirements. While a large economics literature describes the regressive effects of zoning, these policies remain nearly ubiquitous in the Western world. They owe their persistence to powerful public choice incentives that lead policymakers to favor their current constituents over the unrepresented people prevented from moving into their municipality or neighborhood by restrictive land use regulations (Schleicher, 2012). […]

The Value of Walkability

Last week DC Streetsblog reported on a new survey from Kaiser Permanente. The survey covers Americans’ attitudes toward walking and their self-reported walking habits. While a substantial majority of people believe that walking has health benefits ranging from weight management to alleviating depression, the survey found that most people walk less than the 150 minutes per week that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends. The Streetsblog coverage attributes a lack of walkable infrastructure to low walking rates, although it’s not clear to me that the survey explicitly supports this conclusion. However, past research demonstrates that people who live in neighborhoods where they are able to complete errands on foot do, unsurprisingly, do walk more than those who don’t. While people may not cite walkabilty as an important consideration in choosing a house, choosing a home involves weighing many factors, from size, price, distance to work and other amenities, aesthetic, and countless others factors. Consumers rely on tacit knowledge to weigh many of these factors because they can’t consciously enumerate all of them in making a decision of where to live. For this reason, revealed preference theory is a more reliable tool than survey data for observing how consumers value one attribute of a complex good like housing. Building on a past project, my colleague Eli Dourado and I are studying whether or not consumers do pay a premium for greater neighborhood walkability. Using a fixed-effects model, across all metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas in the United States, our preliminary results indicate that, on average, Americans are willing to pay a premium of about $850 for a house with one additional point in Walk Score. Because of the many restrictions that limit walkable development, consumers have to pay this premium for the scarce supply of houses in walkable neighborhoods. This finding […]

Book Review: Perverse Cities by Pamela Blais

In her new book Perverse Cities: Hidden Subsidies, Wonky Policy, and Urban Sprawl, Pamela Blais explores the impact of flat-rate fees for development charges and network services like sewer, water, and cable. She explains in detail how these little-discussed policies play an important role in shaping development and redevelopment and how the current funding of these network goods incentivizes large lot, greenfield development over infill development on smaller lots. Blais focuses her analysis on Canada and the United States. Development charges provide an easy inroad into her critique of average cost over marginal cost pricing for infrastructure. Many North American municipalities charge developers a flat-rate fee for each lot they develop. They often set this fee at the rate for lots of varying sizes, even though larger lots require more asphalt, sewer and water pipes, and cable to service them. While the cost differences may be small between one 25-foot versus one 60-foot lot, infrastructure for a new suburb of 100 houses will cost significantly more if the houses have 60-feet of frontage versus 25, but because these costs aren’t reflected in prices, residents don’t take them into account. Because the same development fee will be capitalized into each house, those who live on smaller lots cross-subsidize the services like road maintenance, garbage collection, and snow clearance of those who live on larger lots when these services are provided by local governments. Blais provides detailed accounts of how these fees shape development patterns and that the resulting sprawling development is both environmentally detrimental and expensive for cities to maintain. She points to several network services that fit a model similar to development charges: water and sewer, electricity, gas, telephone, cable television, internet connectivity, and postal service. While she cites extensive empirical evidence that the cost of delivering these services is inversely related to […]

Local Greenhouse Gas Rules Likely to Backfire

Next week the Cambridge City Council will consider a petition to require new or newly renovated buildings of 25,000 square feet or more to be net-zero emissions. Under the rule, any energy that buildings use beyond what they produce must be sourced from approved, renewable energy sources. While intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the rule would have some easy to foresee side effects: Jeff Roberts, a land use and zoning project planner for the city, said the cost of developing what is being called “net zero” buildings could be passed on to tenants, and could drive away new development. “There’s always the possibility that this would create a shift–that the cost might cause development that would otherwise occur in Cambridge to occur in other communities that don’t have similar requirements, such as Boston or Somerville or suburban areas,” Roberts said. With this rule, Cambridge would follow in the path of other cities that have attempted to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the local level. Santa Monica has been one of the municipalities leading the way on  attempts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions since 1994. The city has adopted its own standards for greenhouse gas reduction, but has made little progress toward its defined targets, today using 35% more electricity per household than the average California household does. While the environmental activists that support these local-level rules surely realize that greenhouse gases do not recognize political jurisdictions, local greenhouse gas emissions reductions in cities like Santa Monica and Cambridge miss the real opportunities to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. It’s unsurprising that very left-leaning cities have pioneered these types of rules, but in doing so, these cities are missing the real opportunities they have to reduce emissions. Santa Monica is one of the most walkable places in the Los Angeles area, offering […]

Why the Left and the Right Should Join Forces against Eminent Domain

The destruction of inner cities at the hands of bureaucrats wielding eminent domain has been well documented by urban theorists from Jane Jacobs to Richard Epstein. As Ilya Somin points out, eminent domain has played an important role in destroying property in Detroit, contributing to its population losses. Dating back to the implementation of Title 1 of the Housing Act of 1949, urban policymakers began using federal funds for slum clearance. Unsurprisingly, destruction of housing units correlated with the population decline in Detroit and other cities. While one would think that the horrors of slum clearance under Title 1 have been adequately demonstrated to prevent planners from pursuing neighborhood destruction as an economic growth strategy, cities across the country continue using eminent domain to clear “blighted” neighborhoods. Last year Denver declared an area of its Five Points neighborhood, including 246 homes, blighted, meaning that now developers interested in building in the area can request the city to use eminent domain to grant them the properties that they want. While the Atlantic Yards project received extensive press coverage, policymakers often employ eminent domain more quietly on behalf of stadium builders, benefiting sports fans at a dear cost to neighborhood residents and business owners. Like urban renewal projects dating back to the 1950s, Forest City Ratner has failed to deliver the promised housing that was part of the Atlantic Yards agreement when the city agreed to condemn the neighborhood. Perhaps Robert Caro provides the most poignant description of the horrors of eminent domain in The Power Broker, explaining the losses of neighborhood cohesion when the tool is used to demolish private housing to be replaced by public housing or in some cases vacant lots  when promised public works are not delivered. One would think that the well-documented failures of urban renewal would lead policymakers […]

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