Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Hard Truths About Why Conservatives and Libertarians Hate Urbanism

It’s no secret that conservatives and libertarians don’t have very warm feelings towards urbanism. But with their emphasis on upzoning and reducing parking minimums, shouldn’t new urbanism and smart growth have at least some libertarian constituency? And given that local roads are paid for almost entirely out of general funds – that is to say, local roads are a blatant example of socialist redistribution – you’d think that there would be people on the free market right advocating raising the gas tax and tolling highways. But alas, no such luck. Michele Bachmann thinks roads shouldn’t count as earmarks, Carl Paladino’s never met a road he didn’t want to detoll, and Mother Jones managed to cobble together a whole article’s full of “We don’t need none of that smart growth communism”-style rhetoric coming from the Tea Party. Now, it could just be that there are just too many suburban Republican voters whose homes, lives, and culture are invested in sprawl for any politician to oppose it. But that doesn’t explain the lack of support from libertarian think-tanks and magazines, who, by virtue of their complete lack of political viability, don’t have to worry about politics and getting re-elected in the suburbs. Cato and the Reason Foundation still toe the “war on drivers” line, with Randal O’Toole denying that any developers even want to build less parking than current minimums require. So why don’t conservatives and libertarians have more compunction about sprawl? I believe the problem is more the messengers than the message. Despite the free market aspects of modern-day urbanism, smart growth and new urbanism are not libertarian movements. Urban planning is dominated by liberals, and it shows – few even seem aware of the capitalist roots of their plans. The private corporations that built America’s great cities and mass transit […]

Quote of the day

From Matt Yglesias: I never like to visit a place without checking out its local parking regulations. Whoa, and I thought I was bad! (He is, of course, talking about minimum parking requirements for developers, not day-to-day rules for people looking to park their cars.) If you’re feeling particularly optimistic today and feel like you need to correct that, take a look at his comments section. I posted this there as well, but I think it bears repeating: “It’s always amusing to me how [Yglesias’ commenters] seem to value ideological purity (i.e., opposing anything that moves anything towards the free market) over what are otherwise traditional progressive goals (helping the environment, reversing sprawl, revitalizing cities).” My favorite part is when someone calls him a “glibertarian.”

Happy 250th post!

…okay, so it’s not really the 250th post – that passed a few weeks ago, uneventfully. But we did recently pass 100,000 total page views (at least, so says Sitemeter…WordPress seems to think it’s more), so I thought it would be a good time to introduce myself and maybe ask you guys for a favor. First of all, my name is Stephen Smith (as you can now see above), and while this is Adam’s blog that he’s had for a few years now, I’ve been putting up most of the posts for the last few months. (I did post occasionally before August, but that’s when I really started ramping up the postings.) I graduated last spring from Georgetown undergrad, with an entirely unrelated and highly regrettable major that might have made a little more sense if I actually wanted to become an international trade lawyer, but which alas seems good for little else.  I’m currently biding my time with this (entirely unremunerative) blog until I can find a job in journalism or thinktankdom somewhere on the East Coast (or in any field, any place, really…).  So, if you have any leads on that, send me an e-mail at smithsj[at]gmail…you figure out the rest. Paid or unpaid, East Coast or East Africa (I can speak Romanian, French, German, and Spanish, in descending order of fluency…so maybe West Africa would be better) – I can’t promise you that I’ll take it, but I’ll at least consider it! Anyway, I also thought I’d take the time to ask you guys if you had any feedback on the blog. Anything you like in particular that you want more of, or that you didn’t like and want less of? Anything that I haven’t written about that you think I should? What field do you work […]

NJ, the far West Side, and LIC should pay for the No. 7 subway expansion

The transit blogosphere has been falling over itself with excitement since yesterday about Bloomberg’s proposal to extend the No. 7 train into New Jersey, and I have to agree that it sounds like a very good plan. It would be much cheaper than the recently-axed ARC project and wouldn’t involve a mile-deep, dead-end station. But best of all, it would reward areas like the far West Side, Queens, and North Jersey cities which have opened themselves up to development and allow the density necessary for mass transit to at least pretend to be self-sustainable – something that the commuter rail-centric New Jersey suburbs have been loathe to do. Despite the project’s reduced cost ($5.3 billion), it will apparently not be eligible for the $3 billion in federal funds that Chris Christie forfeited when he canceled the ARC project, so funding is the main stumbling block at this point.  The Times also cites “the lengthy environmental review required of such projects” as an obstacle. My suggestion is that West Side developers or tenants, along with those in the benefiting parts of Queens and New Jersey, should pay for at least some of the cost. Mass transit, especially in metro New York, has huge positive externalities for real estate, and West Side developers are already salivating at the prospect. Back around the turn of the last century, when transit lines in America were still built and operated by private companies, developers themselves would internalize these externalities by directly controlling the real estate around their stations. While this model still works in East Asia, it would be hard to imagine such flexibility in New York any time soon, but a well-designed tax increment financing system could come close.  Under such a plan, a tax would only be levied on the areas that will […]

Making-driving-more-expensive link minilist

These seemed not quite fleshed-out enough for their own post, but too important to be buried along with other links. 1. San Francisco is considering a congestion charge plan that would either cover the whole city during rush hour, or just the northeastern quadrant (or possibly a mix of the two), for what looks like a maximum of $6/day. Considering that local roads are rarely paid out of user fees, at this point any move towards making local roads more expensive would be a move towards a market equilibrium. The fact that much of “this money” would be spent on transit and non-road improvements is an irrelevant accounting trick, since money is fungible and so much road spending is already coming out of general revenues. And yet, I wouldn’t hold your breath for libertarian or small-government conservative support of this plan. 2. Sens. Tom Carper and George Voinovich have called for a 25¢ increase of the federal gas tax, which is 10¢ higher than the maximum increase recommended in any of the Bowles-Simpson plans. Voinovich, the token Republican signing the letter, is retiring from the Senate in 2011. The Hill notes that the proposal “seems likely to face staunch opposition from Republicans, many of whom ran on a firm anti-tax increase pledge.” Nevermind that the gas “tax” is technically a user fee and not a tax, and that keeping it artificially low without reducing road spending amounts to a subsidy for automobile drivers – Tea Partiers obviously don’t think with that level of nuance.

Sobyanin’s horrific plan for Moscow

It’s been a few months since longtime Moscow mayor Yury Luzhkov was fired, so I figured it would be a good time to check in on the city. In spite of Moscow’s infamous traffic and “perversely-sloped” population density gradient, the former mayor’s plan to build 100 km of new metro tracks and over 350 km of new railroad tracks was rejected just a few weeks before his ouster as too expensive. So now that the new mayor, Segrey Sobyanin, has announced his plan to untangle Moscow’s Gordian knot of traffic, how does it measure up? Well, put quite simply, it’s probably the worst urban plan I’ve seen since Paul Rudolph’s plan for the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Increasing the amount of parking by building large lots on the outskirts of town seems to be the most prominent proposal. Like the author of this Bloomberg article which claims that parking spaces in the city “meet 30 percent of needed capacity,” Muscovites don’t seem to recognize that all cars obviously already have places to park, and that increasing the amount of parking is only going to increase the ease of owning a car, and hence the amount of people who choose to do so. Russian urban planners seem to be stuck in the 1950s, too – here is the president of the national planners’ guild claiming that Moscow needs to more than double the surface area it dedicates to roads. The plan also seems to operate under the assumption that public transportation is the problem – their promises to expand mass transit ring hollow when they’re also contemplating banning trolleybuses from the city center and banning the private fleets of jitneys, known as marshrutki, which provide higher quality and more expensive service than the city’s decrepit buses. Some of the elements of the […]

Environmentalism vs. density, federal style

Coatesville is a town about 45 miles east of Philadelphia, and they want to refurbish their train station and build some transit-oriented development around it. The town really took off around the turn of the last century with the Lukens Steel Company, and because the train line was the town’s primary link to the outside world, development was concentrated around the station. But I guess being the epicenter of a century-old town doesn’t excuse you from the wrath of the mighty environmental review: If PennDOT and other stakeholders can settle on a plan and deal with some environmental issues at the site, Fauver hopes the state will begin the federally mandated environmental assessment process in March or April, which will take about a year. In contrast to locally-imposed environmental reviews, this time it’s the feds who are asking for it, probably since the station is served by Amtrak. In other words, it’s not something that greenfield McMansion developers on the outskirts of town have to endure. A federal twist on the familiar environmentalism vs. density theme.

Ann Arbor’s biggest problem with medical marijuana? Parking

Of course it would be the only thing standing in the way of Ann Arbor, the famously liberal college town that almost legalized weed in the ’60s and ’70s, and medical marijuana: Even for some Ann Arbor residents, the city’s tacit acceptance started to give way to unease. As more and more dispensaries opened up, some residents started calling council members to complain about congested parking and busy traffic near pot shops. So there you have it. I guess the only issue more controversial than pot is parking.

Premium link list

Recently I’ve been delaying posting a few things because I wanted to wait till I had more time to cover them, but I’m realizing that I’ll probably have new things to write about on the 15th (which is when regular posting will hopefully resume), so have at it – your first ever premium link list: 1. The Bowles-Simpson Plan is out (but apparently it’s not the final plan that will be presented to Obama), and it looks like a great deal for market urbanism.  Their “Zero Plan” is a broad base, low rate approach that eliminates all tax deductions and credits, including not only the mortgage-interest rate deduction that we’ve discussed earlier, but also the tax break that businesses get for providing employees with parking that Shoup criticized a few weeks ago.  (By the way, that first linked TPM article is by far the most comprehensive and concise outline of the plan that I’ve seen in the media so far.) 2. Cap’n Transit gives an overview of his local community group’s proposal for eliminating parking minimums in a politically-palatable way. Spoiler: it involves everybody’s favorite transit maps – frequency maps! People involved in DC’s recent moves towards parking reform should especially take note, since the success of their plan depends on the definition of “good transit service.” 3. Reinventing Parking has a post on illegal parking extortion in developing countries.  In India and Bangladesh, which Paul Barter discusses, the problem is parking contractors illegally raising prices.  In Bucharest, though, where I used to live, the “extortionists” were much less organized, usually gypsy street kids, who didn’t do much to stop you from parking, don’t actually provide protection for the car, and probably aren’t going to do anything to your car but guilt trip you if you don’t pay them.  In either […]

Links, links, links!

1. An bill that would replace New Jersey’s court-mandated patchwork of inclusionary zoning programs with a more uniform 10% affordable housing mandate has left advanced through its Assembly committee after passing the NJ Senate, though Chris Christie promised to veto it. 2. Last month I reported that Obama’s deficit commission may recommend paring back the mortgage-interest tax deduction. Well, the official plan is now out, and – good news! – it looks like completely doing away with the deduction is on the table. 3. The New Yorker reports on a Cooper Union exhibit that models what the area around the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway connecting the Holland Tunnel to the Williamsburg Bridge would have looked like if Jane Jacobs had lost and Robert Moses had won. 4. Even with $100 million in cash and hundreds of millions in tax-exempt bonds, Bronx Parking, which operates Yankee Stadium’s perennially under-used parking garage, still can’t turn a profit.

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