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Car and Driver(less) Link List

1) A reader pointed out this post at Volokh Conspiracy arguing that personal cars give us freedom, citing the example of automobiles helping African Americans boycott segregated buses in the 1950s. Sasha Volokh writes: Let’s think back to 1955, when African Americans stayed off segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala. During the year-long boycott, 325 private cars, some owned by African Americans, some by whites, some by churches, picked up people at 42 sites around the town. I don’t think that it works to think of technologies as something that can increase our freedom, per se. While cars give some people greater freedom of mobility, for those who can’t drive or refuse to drive for whatever reason have worse freedom of mobility in cities that are built for automobiles. Rather government spending and regulations that favor one type of transportation over another impede the freedom of those who don’t prefer the favored mode. And in this case of cars presenting an alternative to segregated buses, Volokh explains that drivers picked up passengers at defined stops. They were using their cars to implement a voluntary community transit system, using cars beyond their purpose as personal automobiles. 2) Many people have written about the potential of driverless cars to enhance freedom of mobility and to improve automobile safety, but Meagan McArdle points out that car manufacturers will likely face greatly increased liability when driverless cars reach the roads. Do you think driverless cars are in our near future? I’m sold on their potential to cut back on parking in city centers. 3) My colleague Eileen Norcross writes at US News on Governor Bob McDonnell’s proposal to move to funding transportation with a sales tax rather than a gas tax in Virginia: The governor is right to note that the gas tax suffers from […]

A Trial of Zoning

A recent Wall Street Journal op ed combines two of my favorite topics: Franz Kafka’s The Trial  and the inefficiencies of zoning. Roger Kimball explains the roadblocks he has faced in trying to repair his home after it was damaged in Hurricane Sandy. He writes: It wasn’t until the workmen we hired had ripped apart most of the first floor that the phrase “building permit” first wafted past us. Turns out we needed one. “What, to repair our own house we need a building permit?” Of course. Before you could get a building permit, however, you had to be approved by the Zoning Authority. And Zoning—citing FEMA regulations—would force you to bring the house “up to code,” which in many cases meant elevating the house by several feet. Now, elevating your house is very expensive and time consuming—not because of the actual raising, which takes just a day or two, but because of the required permits. Kafka would have liked the zoning folks. There also is a limit on how high in the sky your house can be. That calculation seems to be a state secret, but it can easily happen that raising your house violates the height requirement. Which means that you can’t raise the house that you must raise if you want to repair it. Got that? Disaster rebuilding efforts highlight the impediments that bureaucracies create for economic development, but they are far from the only time that land use regulations create kafkaesque obstacles for property owners. In The High Cost of Free Parking, Donald Shoup explains that parking requirements can create a similar effect. When a business owner goes out of business and wants to sell his property, it’s likely that the next owner will want to operate a different type of business in the location or that parking requirements will have […]

Q&A with David Schleicher

I recently spoke with George Mason University Law Professor David Schleicher about his research on land use law and economics. Here is our conversation including links to some of his academic articles that have earned a lot of attention in the land use blogosphere. Emily: What are some the costs of land use restrictions? Talk about agglomeration economies and how these relate to development restrictions. David: This is a huge area of research that spans back to Alfred Marshall looking at why cities exist in the first place. It comes up with explanations for why people are willing to pay increased rents to live downtown. These include lower transportation costs for goods, which was a major driver of urbanization for much of American history. Today this is a small driver of urbanization because the costs of internal shipping have fallen so dramatically. Now an important advantage of urbanization is market size. You can see this in all different markets. Restaurant rows are a great example of this. When you go to one of these rows where there are a lot of restaurants and bars, you have insurance that if one place you go is bad, you know you have other options nearby. The last category of agglomeration benefits is learning, or information spillovers. We see this in cluster economies like Silicon Valley where people at different firms learn from each other. As Marshall explained, “The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries, but are as it were in the air.” Wage growth is faster in urban areas than in rural areas, and this comes from this learning process. In the aggregate, if you keep people out of dense cities, you will decrease national productivity. Emily: In your paper City Unplanning, you propose a tool called Tax Increment Local Transfers (TILTs) that would compensate property owners for allowing more development […]

Emergent Order in Cities and Markets

Last week at The Atlantic Cities, Allison Arieff posted a Q&A with Alex Marshall about what Marshall asserts are Jane Jacobs misunderstanding of how cities work. Marshall says: Human interaction takes place, but it shouldn’t obscure what makes it possible, which is government. As much as I admire Jacobs, I suspect her experiences fighting Robert Moses, the master builder and destroyer of New York City, turned her off to government. So much so that I suspect she began to ignore it. Jacobs described how urban economies, such as say the computer ecosystem in the Silicon Valley, emerge in an organic way. I argue that these business ecologies emerge only within the containers that government builds. Both cities and economies emerge as overt political acts. They are constructed things. Here Marshall completely eschews the historical evolution of both cities and markets in making his assertions. Both cities and markets are vehicles for human exchange, but neither is built by a person or a government. Populations, not infrastructure, are cities’ most important assets. Population changes, much like prices in a market, are a product of human action but not of human design. Historians have found evidence that the emergence of cities was not the result of ancient leaders’ direction but was rather the result of individuals acting in their own best interests. Likewise, we see both historical and current examples of trade emerging without government. States have much more power to limit trade or initiate plunder than they do to facilitate successful trade. Jacobs identified that the spontaneous order that allows prices to direct trade likewise leads city streets to serve their residents’ commercial and civic needs when they are not restricted from doing so. Marshall asserts that Silicon Valley didn’t emerge organically because it came about within the legal and infrastructure “containers” that government provides. While it’s true that government […]

Meetup this Saturday

This weekend Anthony Ling who writes the blog Rendering Freedom (and has previously written here) will be in DC. Stephen Smith will also be in town, and we’re planning a meetup on Saturday. Anthony is an architect in São Paolo. He writes about architecture, economics, and urbanism, and I’m excited to learn more about his experiences studying and working in Brazil. If you’re in the DC area, I hope that you can join us. Details: Saturday, December 1st at 1:00 p.m. Burger Tap and Shake (at Washington Circle in Foggy Bottom) Please email me at [email protected] if you have any questions.

Irrelevant real estate trends

Earlier this week Wendell Cox wrote a piece at New Geography arguing that projections for increasing demand for multifamily housing relative to single family homes are incorrect. He was criticizing a study by Arthur Nelson that predicts increased demand for multifamily housing relative to single-family housing in California between 2010 and 2035. So far, Cox points out that this hypothesis is not being fulfilled; between 2000 and 2008 slightly over half of newly occupied housing units were single-family homes on conventional lots (larger than 1/8 acre), not indicative of a shift in preferences toward multifamily housing. Cox emphasizes that his data is based on revealed preferences rather than forecasts or surveys which may indicate a false preference for denser housing. However, he does not acknowledge that these preferences he cites are not revealed in a free market. The mortgage interest tax deduction biases home buyers toward larger homes, the complex entitlement process for dense infill development restricts supply of denser housing, and the the zoning and parking requirements that regulate development all shape revealed consumer decisions. Both Cox and Nelson seem to base their views of consumer preferences heavily on introspection, assuming that over time more Americans will come to share their preference for suburban or urban living respectively. And they both take the same approach of looking at the real estate trends aggregated across the entire state. This is an interesting question for academics, but not a particularly relevant area for real estate markets. Real estate is local, and state trends are not likely to apply to many cities and neighborhoods. The average home sold in California went for $309,000 at $195 per square foot last month. However this statistic is meaningless for West Hollywood residents where the  average sale price was $378 per square foot. It’s equally meaningless […]

Campaign season is over links

Stephen had great twitter coverage of urbanist election issues last night, but here are a few more links to significant outcomes: 1. Washington state and my home state of Colorado voted to legalize marijuana possession, private use, and in Colorado limited production. Drug policy liberalization is a huge win for cities, as arrest rates among users are higher in urban areas. However, given the current administration’s intolerance for medical marijuana dispensaries that are legal under state laws, I see little reason to hope that the feds won’t prosecute drug users  who are in violation of federal but not state laws. 2. In Alexandria, VA voters reelected democratic Mayor William Euille and elected an all democratic city council. This has ramifications for the city’s waterfront redevelopment plan; opponents of increased development have sued, and the case will be heard by the state supreme court this spring. Opponents allege that the zoning change required supermajority support from the city council, but the new democratic plurality makes supermajority support likely. 3. In Escondido, CA voters passed upzoning with Proposition N which will allow increased downtown housing development as well as allow more commercial and industrial development. The city’s conservative leadership supported Proposition N for economic development. 4. Kirk Caldwell was elected mayor of Honolulu. The opposing candidate Ben Cayetano ran on an anti-rail platform. Rail in Oahu is already under construction, but a lawsuit has stalled progress. The elevated 20-mile HART project has a projected $5.2 billion price tag, $1.55 billion of which local officials say will come from the federal government.  I don’t know enough about the project to have an opinion on whether or not it’s a good idea. 5. Virginia voters said “yes” on Question 1, requiring authorities to demonstrate public use to employ eminent domain (as opposed to the Kelo public benefit standard). 6. I won my […]

Fields of Dreams in Tysons Corner

Earlier this week Cap’n Transit wrote about Tysons Corner in the context of the Silver Line TIFIA loan application and Tysons’ Smart Growth redevelopment. This development plan is something I am quite familiar with as it was the subject of my MA thesis, and his post brought to mind some of the weird issues in the plan. I am skeptical of Smart Growth generally, and the Tysons plan exemplifies some of the problems that are common to grand Smart Growth redevelopment plans. In an effort to win the support of all progressive causes, Smart Growth plans sometimes encompass many competing objectives. For example, a Smart Growth agenda may advocate increased density while simultaneously championing historic preservation and open space without acknowledging that these goals are opposed. Because of the emphasis on top-down planning inherent in Smart Growth, prices do no reconcile these competing goods. In the Tysons plan, this planning and consensus building somehow came to include strong support for emphasizing athletic fields. Developers who build in Tysons are required to either provide fields or pay into a fund to support fields on public land. I think that the support for athletic fields comes from the popularity of intramural sports on the National Mall where 20-somethings play sports in think tank or Hill staff leagues after work. Maybe Fairfax planners think that providing athletic space will lure young adults to the suburbs. This issue has gotten so much attention that residents outside of the Tysons area have even started lobbying for fields in Tysons to avoid the traffic of young Tysons residents driving to other parts of the county to find sports fields. The plan calls for 20 new fields of two-to-three acres each for a projected population increase from 17,000 to 100,000. From a pedestrian perspective, dedicated sports fields in Tysons will create long expansions of […]

A message to journalists and academics from George Haikalis

I spoke to George Haikalis (trust me, he’s a lot smarter than his HTML looks), a regional planner and former NYCTA official, about the high cost of New York City transit. He had a message to the press and academia: Part of the problem is that we don’t really have a very strong independent technical press, or independent academic community that really understands anything about railroads. We’re pretty much at the mercy of the big engineering firms, and those firms pretty much do the bidding of key bureaucrats, who have a central theme: keep this within their family. “Their family,” or course, being the agency they work for. In the case of East Side Access and the canceled ARC project, which is what we were discussion, this means (/meant) LIRR and NJ Transit getting their own unspeakably expensive deep caverns just so they wouldn’t have to share any of the existing abundant station platforms with other regional railroads.

A Moral Case for More Immigration

This is a post outside of the typical urbanist issues we write about here, but one that I think is very important to cities. At Forbes, Adam Ozimek writes that economics bloggers are failing to make the case for the importance of permitting increased high-skilled immigration: I think it is professional malpractice that economists see trillions of dollars in pareto improvements going to waste and don’t scream about it from the rooftops daily because it’s not as fun to argue about. I don’t think the public has a good sense of the extent to which more high-skilled immigration would help us, and part of the problem is precisely that we don’t scream this from the rooftops with the regularity and fervor it deserves.  As urbanization is a process of migration, the issue should be of prime concern for urbanists as well as economists. Many of the world’s greatest cities were built through immigration, and the variety of cultures in cities creating diverse food, arts, and events are an important factor in making cities interesting places to live. While I’ve been broadly in favor of more immigration as long as I can remember, through a few experiences I’ve become much more passionate about broadly increasing the number of immigrants allowed to move into the United States. High-skilled immigration is an economic no-brainer, but I think from a humanitarian perspective we should be allowing more immigration from all backgrounds. I spent a semester in college in Guadalajara, Mexico. There I worked in a school for niños trabajadores, children who attended school for a few hours a day and also worked in jobs like selling flowers or gum.  The non-profit school was run by some amazing teachers, but it was difficult knowing that the prospects for these students in school and outside of school were difficult. A few […]

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