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Marc Scribner at CEI on Seattle’s land use regulation
A few days ago I wrote about inner Seattle’s residential density liberalization, and I mentioned that I’d emailed a few land use writers at libertarian think tanks to get their reaction. I’m happy to report that all of them responded, and throughout the week I’ll post links to/reprint their responses, along with any comments I might have. So first I’d like to direct y’all to CEI’s OpenMarkets.org where Marc Scribner responded. He essentially said that the move looks like a net benefit in terms of land use liberalization, but that Seattle’s limits on sprawling growth (as opposed to infill growth) are more serious and costly. I’m glad that he agrees with me that Seattle’s new plan will be a positive marginal change, but I’m not sure that I agree with some of the other things he says. I’m certainly not going to defend King County’s urban growth boundary – we’re opposed to them, and think that people who are concerned about sprawl could achieve better results less coercively by simply allowing more infill and stopping the subsidies for all modes of transportation. But I do wonder how Marc reached the conclusion that sprawl restrictions are more onerous than density restrictions. He points to the run-up in housing costs in Seattle over the last decade, but given that we’ve already established that Seattle has both sprawl-prohibiting and density-prohibiting regulations, I don’t see how he’s decided that the former are more significant than the latter. This is a difficult question to answer, and on some level can only be done properly by liberalizing and observing. But barring that, econometric methods can be used to make guesses as to how restrictive such regulations really are – something we’ve tried to do before with parking minimums. I do not, however, see any of those […]
