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“Really Narrow Streets” project in the planning stages in Maine

In Maine, a group of residents are hoping to start a new community based on the principles of urban design advocated by Nathan Lewis at New World Economics and J.H. Crawford at Carfree.com. The group, led by Tracy Gayton, is hoping to attract enough individual investors to buy 125 acres of land which will be home to Piscataquis Village, a community of narrow streets. They’re using a Kickstarter-like investment model, in which individuals pledge to buy land contingent upon the group reaching the critical mass needed to get the project underway. The development would use covenants to limit building to require attached buildings, arcade sidewalks, and a building height limited to four stories based on the Really Narrow Streets model of dense low- to mid-rise buildings. On a previous post, some commenters came out strongly against covenants as a means for determining land use restrictions. What do you all think of them here? To me, this case illustrates the effectiveness that covenants have for shaping land use over an area broader than individual lots without the coercion of zoning. Tracy has created a presentation on the preliminary objectives for Piscataquis Village. He writes: We envision a settlement evolving organically and growing incrementally. Those people or groups of people that wish to pursue their own, various versions of the Good Life within the bounds of the Village are welcome. This project reminds me a bit of seasteading, the libertarian vision of a bottom-up society living on a water vessel to escape government coercion and violence. While I believe that most of the initial Piscataquis Village investors are from Maine and wish to continue living there, the projects’ rural location draws attention to the impossibility of a similar village emerging in the open space of, say, Howard County or Loudoun County because the […]

The Coase Theorem in Land Use

On a recent post about property rights in the land market, commenter David Sucher brought up the issue of transaction costs. He commented here and at his blog City Comforts: The “least intrusive means” should be always kept in mind. The only issue for me is the huge transaction costs which, I believe, make private agreements for land use quite impossible. The very reason we have government is because “voluntary private contracts” are too complex. We got rid of tort law (as to land use) because it was much easier to have uniform area-wide regulations. While David brings up very valid points, I think that economist Ronald Coase offered a persuasive argument against these area-wide regulations. The Coase Theorem, which interestingly, I don’t think we’ve written about in depth here, addresses this issue of transaction costs. In 1960, Coase published his most famous paper, “The Problem of Social Cost,” exploring a common problem for city dwellers: annoyance at their neighbors’ behavior. Coase uses as an example a confectioner whose business is adjacent to a doctors office. The confectioner uses loud machinery which causes vibrations next door and bothers the doctor. We can imagine a variety of solutions to this problem: the doctor could sound proof his office, the confectioner could upgrade to quieter machinery, one of them could move his business, the confectioner could compensate the doctor for the bother, or the doctor could pay the confectioner to stop making noise during his business hours. Assigning property rights would help any of these solutions emerge; if the confectioner has a right to make noise, the responsibility lies with the doctor to remedy the situation (or learn to live with the noise) or the reverse if the doctor has a right to quiet. In a standard Micro 101 class, in my experience, the […]

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 […]

TGIF Links

1. A reader from Vancouver wrote in to let Stephen and me know about a proposed policy to tax foreign investors at a higher rate than local property owners. Support for this policy is growing among residents, and with a mayoral election this Saturday, some are hoping to get candidates to endorse the policy now. Of course the higher tax rate would be done in the name of affordable housing for Vancouver natives. Hmm, with this one I’d say that the road to hell is paved with questionable intentions. 2. In other Vancouver news, recently upzoned parcels have sold for three times their previous value. 3. Two NYC taxi medallions sold for over $1 million each this week. On Marketplace, David Yassky, chairman of the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission said that he believes the fundamentals are solid in the medallion market. When the supply of your commodity is rigidly fixed, you’re already halfway to strong fundamentals. 4. A University of Connecticut study finds that growth in the number of a city’s parking spots is inversely correlated with population growth rates. 5. Some have questioned whether the abismal state of American infrastructure is a fact or just something that everyone knows and repeats. Gizmodo points out that in the United States we have a road system that built with cheap initial construction but expensive and ongoing maintenance costs. 6. Roberta Brandes Gratz at The Atlantic Cities speculates that Jane Jacobs’ female perspective led her to be able to see the small-scale, bottom-up activities of cities more effectively than men, who tend to look at cities from the macro level. Not sure where this leaves Hayek.

Cities and the Tax Code

We spend a lot of time here talking about the local regulations that harm cities, from parking minimums, to height limits to restrictions on mixed-use development. I’ve been thinking recently about another policy that impacts cities at the federal level: the tax code. I bring up this topic not to stoke the political debate on redistribution, but to think about the outcome that results if tax burdens push and pull people out of cities. I’ve often heard libertarian and conservative types say that they prefer suburban or rural living because city residents are more dependent on government services, but is it really true that city dwellers depend on government programs more so than others? City residents clearly pay higher local taxes and receive more local government services, but I would argue that this isn’t as important as federal taxation and spending because local taxes benefit the taxpayers more directly than the wider net of federal redistribution. In Triumph of the Cities, Ed Glaeser points to the mortgage interest tax deduction as an important factor that pulls people to the suburbs by way of home ownership, and I would certainly agree that all federal policies with the goal of promoting home ownership or facilitating easy credit harm cities. Another much-talked-about tax expenditure for ethanol fuel blenders has benefits that fall on drivers, and this is on top of all of the other tax benefits that domestic oil companies receive. Several government programs subsidize those who choose to live in inconvenient places. The USPS delivers many packages for a flat rate fee, while I doubt that FedEx would find this pricing profitable. Similarly, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided funds for expanding broadband to areas of the country that could not otherwise support the service. On the other hand, some federal policies […]

Cities and the Market Process: Part 1

In a post about the tendency for emergent urbanists to promote the idea of cities having a single equilibrium, Alon Levy recently wrote that collective choice is the best manner for determining urban form. Many urbanists accept that some of the top-down regulations that limit density or use are detrimental to cities, but they often stop short of suggesting that land use regulation should be abolished and transportation privatized, which I will support here with arguments based in Austrian economics. This post does not get to a critique of the collective choice that Alon supports; later entries in this market process series will address both the problems of creating urban policy through collective choice, and some of the institutions that have emerged within civil society that are essential to cities and their residents. The cohort of economists and urbanists who support the elimination of land use regulation is small because cities present all of the problems that neoclassical and Keynesian economists describe as market failures, including externalities, high transaction costs involved in Coasean bargaining, non-excludable goods, etc. However, I believe that emergent solutions solve these problems more effectively than either central planning or collective decision making that becomes law, and the failed and inefficient government projects that urbanist bloggers write about everyday suggest that government failure is no trivial concern. The first reason that regulation is a poor tool to for determining urban form comes from Friedrich Hayek. He clearly identified the calculation problem inherent in central planning: the information necessary to coordinate markets (including land use markets) is held by individuals with “particular knowledge of time and place.” Even assuming that urban planners are benevolent and seek to provide the best outcomes for their communities, they could never compile the knowledge necessary to determine what those outcomes are. Jane […]

Affordable Housing vs. Density: The Unintended Consequences of Zoning Bonuses

California Assembly Bill 710 was introduced to earlier this year to tackle the problem of municipalities requiring onerous amounts of parking for new development, widely recognized as one of the main impediments to transit-oriented development and infill growth. The bill would have capped city and county parking requirements in neighborhoods with good transit to one space per residential unit and one space per 1,000 sq. ft. of non-residential space, with an exemption process for areas with a true parking crunch and some other caveats….

Car Sharing as a Public Utility – What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Over at Washington City Paper‘s Housing Complex blog, Lydia DePillis takes issue with DC’s car sharing policy – and namely, the decision to auction off on-street spaces to the highest (car-sharing) bidder, “rather than allow the market’s first mover—Zipcar—[to] have them all for free.” She writes: The bigger question, it seems to me, is whether we need competition at all. The inaugural auction led to Zipcar losing 80 percent of its curbside parking spaces.

Real CEQA Reform, or Just Another Special Interest Handout?

California has, since the ’70s, had some of the strictest environmental laws in the country, but urbanists have recently been frustrated by what are known as CEQA lawsuits, named after the 1970 California Environmental Quality Act that serves as the basis of the challenges. CEQA battles have certainly hindered their fair share of highway and road projects, but they also affect transit and urban infill development, perhaps a perversion of the law’s pro-environmental intent. Skirmishes over the law have yielded mixed results – transit projects were made more vulnerable by a recent ruling, while affordable housing projects are now less prone to CEQA challenges – but there has recently been talk of more major CEQA reform.

Cities, Zoning, and Industry

D.C.'s Uline Arena – once a trash transfer station, now an indoor parking lot American cities have been on the rebound for about two decades now, with once moribund residential and commercial neighborhoods springing back to life.

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