Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Tea Partying at Planning Meetings

At the Atlantic Cities, Anthony Flint writes on recent Tea Party activism in urban development arena. Tea Party groups across the country have spoken out against all manner of urbanist plans, from CAHSR to Smart Growth in Florida. Flint opines: What’s driving the rebellion is a view that government should have no role in planning or shaping the built environment that in any way interferes with private property rights. Both Flint and the Tea Party members that he’s writing about are seeing right past an essential property right.  Don’t landowners have a right to employ their property as they see fit without explicit approval from their communities? Smart Growth tends to limit the right to build sprawl although its historic presercation component creates competing objectives. Traditional land use planning limits property owners’ right to build too though. In an article all about the Tea Part and land use, Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones quotes a Tea Party activist who said, “”We don’t need none of that smart growth communism.” I love this as a stand alone quote, but this activist is ignoring the other side of the issue. Traditional planning, at least as top down as Smart Growth, has shaped his or her presumably suburban neighborhood. How about, “We don’t want these socialist setback requirements,” or “Down with pinko minimum lot sizes?” Property rights in land use are, of course, a contentious and debatable issue. Charlie Gardner offers a summary of the court decisions that have led to a world where municipal governments are permitted to take away property rights without compensating land owners for these takings by limiting the density and uses that they are allowed to build. The suburbanist side of this debate is that property rights include the right to control a certain degree of land use for […]

Real Estate and Revolution in Moscow

From an interesting NYT analysis of Russia’s new protesting class – young, urban, and doing pretty well: It is a paradox, but one that has been documented by social scientists: the residents of Moscow and other large cities tend to express greater frustration with Prime Minister Putin as his government has helped make them wealthier. One explanation is the high level of public corruption here, which threatens new personal wealth….

Surprise: Transit In The US Gets Just As Many Subsidies As Transit In Europe!

The service the Silicon Valley is paying for but not getting Often when I talk about how high American capital transit costs are compared to those in Europe and East Asia, transit backers get quite defensive, and take it as an attack on transit. This couldn’t be further from my intention. My point isn’t that transit in America is expensive and should not be built – it’s that transit in America is expensive and this is why we get such poor service….

Two Notes

1) Commenter Mike Chlanda: I’ve randomly picked you to receive my copy of The Heights. Please email me at [email protected] with your shipping information so that I can send it to you. Thanks all for your interest in the book. 2) Russ Roberts gave a fantastic and humbling talk at the Mercatus Center holiday dinner last night that I wish that I could link to here. It was broadly about the limitations of economics as an objective science. Economists have a strong tendency to see what they want to see in data. It seemed particularly relevant to yesterday’s post. I can look at the evidence and see that clearly cities are essential for productivity growth, while Randall O’Toole dismisses  those studies as insignificant. Also given yesterday’s topic, Russ had a great quote that was something like, “there are many things that economics isn’t good for. It’s too bad that one of them is macroeconomics.”

Washington Post: Only Idiots Think Infrastructure Spending Is Wasteful, And Americans Are Idiots

It’s no surprise that a lot of politicians and policymakers believe that America’s biggest infrastructure problem is insufficient taxpayer funding. But never have I seen it expressed so condescendingly as in a Washington Post article published yesterday in the PostLocal section, not labeled as an opinion piece, titled: “Experts struggle to express direness of infrastructure problem to a wary public.” There’s no doubt that America’s infrastructure, and especially its transit, is indeed in dire straits….

Urbanization and GDP

I am no macroeconomist; however, I think there are some important dots to connect between cities and economic growth. The Gated City by Ryan Avent, (discussed more in depth here), explores this thesis and offers a nice overview of the research that links population density and productivity. He cites Ed Glaeser and others who see a strong correlation between the two. Glaeser finds that with a 50 percent increase in population density, productivity increases by 4 percent. Additionally, I find Geoffrey West’s work (not cited by Avent) particularly intriguing. West is a former physicist who has studied the correlation between city size and all sorts of variables from the number of gas stations to the number of bank deposits per year. He’s found that every time a city doubles in size, worker productivity increases by 15 percent. The distinction between West and many others who study this issue is that he focuses on a city’s total population rather than its population density. Increasing worker productivity is the holy grail of macroeconomics. As worker productivity grows, it raises our wages and standard of living. This is what lifts poor countries out of poverty and ensures that future generations will enjoy a higher standard of living than we do today. Some of the factors that economists widely agree contribute to higher growth rates include education, property rights, and rule of law. Perhaps urbanization should be added to the list too. I won’t weigh in here on whether the variable that influences productivity is population size or population denisty; maybe they both do. In the context of land use policy, I would argue that it doesn’t matter which variable we look at. By limiting development, land use restrictions typically lead cities to be both less dense and of smaller populations. This applies equally to traditional land use […]

DC Approved 4,000 New Housing Units This Year, But Is It Enough?

Twitter tells me that earlier tonight, “not-ruling-it-out” possible future mayoral contender (and local smart growth demigod) Tommy Wells held his inaugural book club meeting; the book discussed was Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City. DC’s chief planner Harriet Tregoning was also there, and while she’s been relatively good to the cause of density in DC, the kinds of people who would show up to a Tommy Wells Triumph of the City book club probably want a bit more out of her, so I presume (again, I wasn’t there) that she ended up being one of the least radical people there. One person tweeted regarding the book club: “Building permit data says DC on track for 4,000 new housing units this year,” which I presume was a statement made by someone defending DC’s supply expansion efforts….

e. e. cummings the urbanist

A post of Stephen’s from a year ago got a few hits today. I reread it and recalled a poem I studied in high school by e. e. cummings: plato told him: he couldn't believe it(jesus told him;he wouldn't believe it)lao tsze certainly told him,and general (yes mam) sherman ; and even (believe it or not) you told him:i told him;we told him (he didn't believe it,no sir) it took a nipponized bit of the old sixth avenue el;in the top of his head: to tell him I actually have no idea what this poem is about, but I’m going to suggest that perhaps e. e. cummings did not support the destruction of New York’s private mass transit to meet government ends.

Book Review of The Heights: Anatomy of a Skyscraper

I’m reviewing The Heights: Anatomy of the Skyscraper by Kate Ascher as part of a TLC Book Tour. Other bloggers are also reviewing the book, and you can find links to their reviews here. I received a complimentary copy of the book, and I’d like to send it to a reader if anyone is interested in reading it. If you’d like it, just comment saying so by Monday, December 5th. If multiple readers would like it, I’ll pick one at random. _______________________________ The Heights reads like a textbook for Skyscrapers 101. It’s full of interesting skyscraper facts along with diagrams and timelines. I learned a lot from the book, having no background in architecture or engineering. For someone who has studied these subjects though, I imagine that this book would be too elementary. However for me, it offered a useful overview of the history and science of skyscrapers. Ascher details the process of planning, constructing, and owning skyscrapers, from the details of different types of foundations to building maintenance. She explains some of the challenges that skyscrapers present that I might not have thought about. For example, buildings with unusual designs that do not have straight sides must be designed with mechanisms for reaching the windows for cleaning and maintenance. She also explores skyscraper financing. I was surprised to learn that the bulk of the cost of owning a skyscraper comes not from construction, but rather from cleaning and maintenance over the life of the building: Although the annual cost of maintenance pales in comparison to the cost of constructing a building, over the life of a building — which can be upward of 100 years–it is much more significant. Holding aside capital replacement and reinvestment, the cost of the initial structure itself represents only about 5 to 10 percent of the total cost of owning […]

Trending now

gentrification
Only 2 Ways to Fight Gentrification (you’re not going to like one of them)
The problem with “public” transportation
The Great American Streetcar Myth
O’Toole Under More Fire