Physical Address

304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124

Tag Wendell Cox

Long-form link list

1. Another empirical paper claiming that anti-density zoning increases racial segregation: Previous research on segregation stresses things like urban form and racial preferences as primary causes. The author finds that an institutional force is more important: local land regulation. Using two datasets of land regulations for the largest U.S. metropolitan areas, the results indicate that anti-density regulations are responsible for large portions of the levels and changes in segregation from 1990 to 2000. A hypothetical switch in zoning regimes from the most exclusionary to the most liberal would reduce the equilibrium gap between the most and least segregated Metropolitan Statistical Areas by at least 35% for the ordinary least squares estimates. 2. Wendell Cox, in a discussion about the relatively dispersed downtowns of the biggest mainland Chinese cities, notes that development along Beijing’s ring roads “resemble[s] more the post-World War II corridor form of Central Avenue in Phoenix than Manhattan, Seattle or Pittsburgh.” Interesting that the urban system that Cox makes a living defending is so popular in communist mainland cities, whereas the market-oriented Chinese cities of Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong follow the more traditional dense downtown design. 3. The NYT reports that the mayor’s office runs a non-profit that organizes farmers markets in rich neighborhoods that already have good food availability, while throwing up barriers and red tape that prevent private groups from starting their own in poor neighborhoods. 4. One company wants to start building prefab skyscrapers, which they claim are quicker and cheaper than traditional construction, although apparently current building codes don’t allow them to build such structures more than six stories tall. In New York City, Forest City Ratner wants to build “the world’s tallest prefabricated steel structure, a 34-story tower that would fulfill his obligation to start building affordable housing at the site,” though the building […]

Has Wendell Cox ever heard of India’s license raj?

Wendell Cox, in his ongoing crusade to prove that everyone hates cities, writes about the suburbanization of Mumbai at New Geography. After reviewing all the statistics, he concludes: Mumbai: Penultimate Density, Yet Representative: The core urban area (area of continuous urban development) of Mumbai represents approximately 80 percent of the larger metropolitan area population. Mumbai is the third most dense major urban area in the world at nearly 65,000 residents per square mile (25,000 per square kilometer), trailing Dhaka (Bangladesh) and Hong Kong. Yet even at this near penultimate density, Mumbai exhibits the general trends of dispersion and declining density that are occurring in urban areas around the world, from the most affluent to the least. In the two Mumbai city districts, as in other megacities, housing has become so expensive that population growth is being severely limited. Overall, the Mumbai larger metropolitan area may also be experiencing slower growth as smaller metropolitan areas outperform larger ones, a trend identified in a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute. Finally, the over-crowded, slum conditions that prevail for more than one-half of the city’s residents could be instrumental in driving growth to more the distant suburbs of Thane and Raigarh. He never comes out and says it explicitly, but the implication is clear: Market forces are driving people out of Mumbai. But with all this talk about overcrowded slums and high housing prices, Wendell Cox is missing the elephant in the room: land use regulation. Given rent control laws that would make Sheldon Silver blush and a fixed floor-area ratio of 1.33 for even the dense historical island core, how the hell does Wendell Cox expect Mumbai’s core to grow? India’s stifling regulations are legendary, but Cox seems to be floating on a cloud of car exhaust fumes, blissfully unaware of […]

Who believes that smart growth caused the recession?

So, I have a question. This might sound like I’m trying to be snarky, but I’m actually genuinely in search of an answer: Is there any economist out there other than Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin who actually believes this? This all should give some pause to the relentless hoopla about the country’s supposed “urban renaissance.” The roots of the current economic crisis lie deep in urban economies, where employment growth that has lagged even in good times.  During the last economic expansion, urban job growth was roughly one-sixth that of suburbs and one-third that of smaller communities. I believe the smart growth-caused-the-subprime-mortgage theory originated with Wendell Cox, and while Joel Kotkin’s statement is rather vague and leaves a lot of wiggle room, it sure sounds like he’s buying into it, too. Any others to add to the list?

Livechat invitation and more thinktank responses

As promised, I want to reprint the responses I got from Wendell Cox and Randal O’Toole, but first I wanted to invite everyone to a livechat that’s being organized by Tim Lee. Tim used to write for Cato, but now he’s pursuing a PhD at MIT and doing freelance writing on tech policy. He organizes these livechats occasionally and has been kind enough to ask me to be his guest, so if you want to participate (or just watch), go to Tim’s website on Wednesday between 9:30 and 10:30 pm EST, and click on “General Chat” on the bar in the lower right-hand corner. The audience should be relatively small, so if you have something you want to ask or discuss or debate, there’s a good chance that we’ll get to it. So anyway, Marc Scribner has posted his response to my response to his response to my response (sorry, couldn’t help myself) to Seattle’s recent land use liberalization. Wendell Cox’s response was similar to Marc’s, so my disagreements are similar, but Randal O’Toole took a different approach, and one that I pretty much completely agree with: I have no significant problem with liberalizing parking codes. My one caveat is that planners need to remember why those parking minima were there in the first place. In some cases, they were put in because some guru somewhere said that was the way to do it. But in other cases, there was a genuine concern about the need for off-street parking in order to prevent congestion around on-street parking. In this case, I agree with Don Shoup that the remedy is for the city to charge market rates for on-street parking. Sometimes, of course, the market rate is zero. But other times parking should be metered to insure that everyone who really wants […]

The mirage of revealed preferences

I often hear from libertarian-inclined defenders of the suburban status quo that the fact that American is so overwhelmingly suburban is proof that it’s what Americans want. Economists call this “revealed preference,” but it could also be understood as voting with your feet and wallet. People have made the decision to live in the suburbs, so there must be something they like about it. Randal O’Toole of Cato and Wendell Cox of Demographia have both made versions of this argument, as has Jesse Walker back when he was at CEI. Though some liberals take issue with the idea that markets reflect preferences better than democracy, for the most part people understand that there’s wisdom in consumer choices. There is, however, one catch to using revealed preferences: the market has to actually be a market. That is, it has to be free of regulation and subsidies that push consumers too much one way or the other. So, for example, you cannot use consumers’ “revealed” preference for high-fructose corn syrup to argue that Americans prefer it over sugar, because the government massively subsidizes corn and imposes tariffs and quotas on sugar. Now of course, America has a mixed economy, with an arcane structure of rules and regulations undergirding a capitalist system, so no sector is going to be entirely free of interference.  Although people like O’Toole are adamant in their stated opposition to parking minimums and mandatory low density zoning, they believe that density-forbidding regulations are mostly benign and unnecessary, since most Americans wouldn’t really want to live more densely than they do now.  By this logic, even if restrictions on density were loosened, developers wouldn’t change their ways and America’s deeply suburban land use and transportation patterns would endure. At the end of the day, whether not we can use “revealed […]

Another week, another consolation link list

Another week without posts (from me, at least), another giant consolation link list! I’ve got a lot of them piling up and probably won’t be back to regular posting for a few more days, so I’ll try to spread them out over a few posts. 1. Wendell Cox’s Demographia came out with its 2010 Demographic Residential Land & Regulation Cost Index and finds, surprise surprise!, that sprawling Sunbelt and Southern cities have both the least regulated housing markets the most affordable housing. Bill Fulton finds a few faults with the study, including its tendency to lump all land use regulation (whether pro-sprawl or pro-density) together. What surprises me more, though, is that the report seems to only take into account “new detached housing,” and yet its conclusions are being reported as being applicable to “housing” writ large. I didn’t read it in detail, but I don’t see any evidence that multifamily residences or the right to build densely and without parking were even considered. 2. Slum (re)development will probably be one of the biggest urbanism stories of the century, and Mumbai seems to be making some fateful decisions. I’m having trouble finding comparisons of how different countries are doing it, but I suspect the most successful, attractive, livable developments will be the ones where local squatters are given property rights and are allowed to control the pace of redevelopment. Anything else is likely to breed popular resentment and will probably result in a lot of glitzy megaprojects built by political insiders that aren’t well-integrated into the surrounding city. 3. The NYT has a story on a “split” among environmentalists over density, although it seems like the pro-density camp is clearly winning, at least institutionally within the environmentalist movement.  I think a more interesting story is how people who are first […]

My Article at FreePo on the Resurrection of Rent Control

The Orange County Register’s new site, Freedom Politics just posted an article I wrote for them on rent control.  Here’s a snippet: In these days of economists constantly debating the right way to revive the economy, it seems like there is no way to find consensus among economists.  Economists don’t spend much time debating the issues they agree on, and to them, rent control is about as dead an issue as the earth revolving around the sun.  In 1992, 93% of American and Canadian economists surveyed agreed with the statement “A ceiling on rents reduces the quantity and quality of housing available.”  Opposition to rent control among economists spans the political spectrum from Milton Friedman and Walter Block to leftist Nobel Laureates Gunnar Myrdal and Paul Krugman.  In fact, it was the socialist Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck who famously said, “In many cases rent control appears to be the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city—except for bombing it." The article is part of a series called “Undead Ideas” and I’m told the article is supposed to feature a humorously hideous illustration of a zombie Richard Nixon, which is the reason for the Nixon joke.  I will share the illustration once it is public.     Could President Obama resurrect an undead Richard Nixon to implement nationwide rent control in the face of the impending stimflation?  There’s a 93% chance his economic advisors wouldn’t let him do such a thing.  However, Nixon’s undead corpse has been spotted mumbling "I am now a Keynesian" in places like California and New York City where bad ideas never seem to die. I actually thought of the word “stimflation” on my own, but I checked and learned I wasn’t the first to think of it.  The domain stimflation.com had just been reserved last week… […]

Trending now

A self-defeating argument
Texas MUD
gentrification
Only 2 Ways to Fight Gentrification (you’re not going to like one of them)
The problem with “public” transportation