Tag london

Market Urbanism MUsings: February 19, 2016

1. This week at Market Urbanism: Shanu Athiparambath has his first post on the blog via Scott Beyer: Economist David Friedman Says India Must Go Taller to Make Homes Affordable I remember my father saying that when he visited India in the 1950s and 1960s, bureaucrats in Delhi made arguments for restricting luxuries for the rich in air-conditioned luxury hotels where bureaucrats and American visitors held conferences. Emily Washington: Reforming Zoning in a Kludgeocracy While studying economics often leads people to think about the ceteris paribus effect of a policy change, in the real world, a policy will rarely be changed without resulting in domino effect of other changes in other policies and market outcomes because land-use policy is entangled with so many other policies. 2. Where’s Scott?: Scott Beyer is spending a final weekend in New Orleans before heading to Oklahoma City. This week, he wrote for National Review about rapid high-rise growth in the Miami neighborhood of Brickell. Starting as a low-slung neighborhood, it grew to become what it now is thanks to the city’s tolerance of unfettered growth. And rather than bringing Armageddon, as critics of rapid urban development might suspect, Brickell has become an economic powerhouse and an urban destination. At a time when so many other cities suppress development — and suffer the consequences – Brickell symbolizes a mentality worth restoring throughout urban America. 3. At the Market Urbanism Facebook Group: Nick Zaiac wants you to check out Cato’s new study related to immigration and housing affordability Tobias Cassandra Holbrook is interested in London’s growing skyline: Don’t listen to the Nimbies – skyscrapers can make London great again R John Anderson introduced the group to his latest post explaining where small urban developers should be looking to build  4. Elsewhere: New study confirms that boomers are clueless about where they like to live. h/t: Charles […]

London Planning Politics Breeds a Rare NIMBY Strain: Preventative Anti-NIMBY NIMBYism

Ministry of NIMBYs is more like it! Talk about man-bites-dog: London’s Ministry of Sound, perhaps the world’s most famous nightclub, has gone on an all-out offensive against new residential skyscrapers near its home at Elephant & Castle, in Southwark. Their latest target is a 41-story tower in an area which, along with the City of London across the Thames, has a newfound fondness for tall towers, including the recently built Strata SE1 (silly name: “the Razor”)….

London congestion pricing, then and now

It’s already Sunday and I’ve exhausted my cache of unread blog posts from the week, so I went in search of new blogs to read and can across this really good one: Spatial Analysis. A post from December has this set of maps – private turnpikes in 18th century London and the congestion zone map in the 21st: It looks to me like the old map is skewed and that they are actually quite similar, but I’m having trouble aligning them – maybe someone who knows London better than me could compare them for us? Again, that’s from spatialanalysis.co.uk.

Friday link list

Expect a lot more of these… 1. Beijing tries to relieve congestion by…building a quarter-million parking new spaces and 125 miles of new downtown streets?! But don’t worry – bike sharing! 2. Seattle inches closer to a Shoupian on-street parking policy, and Austin ponders charging for on-street parking after dark and on Saturdays. My favorite comment from the Seattle story is this one: “Get rid of the illegal aliens and we will have LOTS of room to park! And plenty money! Sanctuary idiots!” I guess that was one positive aspect of the Holocaust: more parking! (Oops, did I just Godwin this blog?) 3. East (a.k.a. Spanish) Harlem wants to develop its transit-accessible parking lots and fill them with “low- and middle-income residents” to aid in its “struggl[e] to maintain its affordable housing stock,” but of course “they want to prevent the construction of large apartment towers.” Sorry, East Harlem – you can’t have your cake and eat it too. 4. As if we needed any more evidence that diverting police officers for voluntary bag searches in the DC Metro was an absurd idea. 5. A Green candidate for London mayor has proposed expanding the area that the congestion charge covers, build tiers in, and raise prices to the point where entering the innermost part of London would cost drivers £50/day (!!). As long as we don’t end up on the right-hand side of the Laffer curve – that is, as long as the city can raise more revenue at £50/day than it could at any lower price – I think this would be a step in the direction of market urbanism, since it would emulate the behavior of a profit-seeking road firm. (One way of testing that is to raise the charge gradually and to stop once total revenue starts […]