Moving on...

So, you've probably already noticed that I've more or less given up on this blog...I've had it for years but it never really got much readership. I've been blogging recently at marketurbanism.com, a blog about urban planning and the free market, and I post pretty often, so if you're interested, add it to y'all's feed readers. And, of course, if you've got any job offers for a recent graduate, email me! (smithsj -at- gmail -dot- com)

HSR crowding out local transit projects

Yet another way in which Obama's high-speed rail plans are derailing actual progress in getting Americans out of their cars:

BUENA PARK, Calif. — Mayor Art Brown spent years pushing for a commuter train station combined with nearby housing in his community. But as townhouses are being finished around the $14 million Metrolink station, he's facing the prospect that California's high-speed rail line may plow right through his beloved project.

"The only option they presented to us was either losing the condo units or losing our train station," Brown said of an engineering presentation to city leaders last year.

That a successful effort to get car-dependent Californians to embrace mass transit could be derailed by another transportation project may strike some as ironic. But it's also one of the hidden costs — and a potential harbinger of delay — in the ambitious plan that would enable passengers to speed the 430 miles between Los Angeles and San Francisco in just 2 1/2 hours.

By the way, the projected cost of a one-way ticket on the high-speed rail line from LA to SF has risen from $55 to $105. Despite the fact that intraurban trips account for the vast majority of transportation use in America, the Obama administration and other politicians prefer to focus on expensive boondoggles like high-speed rail, often at the expense of more mundane, but much more important local projects like these.

Atlantic Yards and ACORN

I've heard a lot of nasty things about the Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, where NJ Nets owner Bill Ratner wants to use a combinatino of eminent domain and state giveaways to build a heavily subsidized basketball stadium and 16 mixed use high-rises, but I didn't realize that ACORN was also in on it:

New York, in short, would give Ratner an unfair advantage, and he would return some of the profits reaped from that advantage by creating the “economic benefits” favored by the planning classes. Architecture critics loved Frank Gehry’s design for the arena. Race activist Al Sharpton loved the promise of thousands of minority jobs. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn) loved the prospect of administering the more than 2,000 units of “affordable” housing planned for the development, as well as the $1.5 million in loans and grants that Ratner gave it outright. When the state held public hearings in 2006 to decide whether to approve Atlantic Yards, hundreds of supplicants, hoping for a good job or a cheap apartment, easily drowned out the voices of people like Goldstein, who wanted nothing from the government except the right to keep their homes.

LA's partial parking privatization

The LA Times reports that Los Angeles is considering "privatizing" ten public parking garages to fill a budget shortfall. The story is, unfortunately, a reminder of how infrastructure "privatization" is often little better than the status quo, and how media reporting of the issue can doom real reform.

Whereas pure privatization would mean selling the buildings and underlying land to anyone for any use, this scheme is actually a 50-year outsourcing of the garages' management (mostly, at least) and profits (again, mostly). The new "owners" could only use the structures to park cars, and using them to house people and businesses that would increase the walkability of the areas where the garages are located is out of the question.

True privatization would also bring in more money for the city, which is the stated goal of the privatization. The garages would be worth more if they were being sold with complete development rights, and the tax revenues from whatever's built on them (not to mention possible increases in adjacent properties' values) would probably exceed the "small negotiated share of future proceeds" that the city "could retain."

The only possible benefit I can see to this plan is that parking rates will move upwards towards the true market price. But even that would be too much for the city to stomach, as the city would "retain authority over parking rates at the garages" – and who wants to guess which way they'll be pressured to push prices?

The potential downfall of this plan, however, is that the public may forever associate privatization with this pseudo-corporatism, as happened in Russia in the early 1990's and Chicago's parking meter privatization scheme last year, which could impede future, more truly libertarian urban reforms.

Zoning as a tool for class exclusion

Discovering Urbanism has a nice post up about early 20th century urban planner Charles Mulford Robinson and his planning textbook, and it includes the following corrective to the notion that zoning originated as a way to separate polluting industry from places of residence and commerce:

There’s a common narrative about how zoning unfolded in America. First, planners needed to find ways to separate dangerous and unhealthy factories from the places where people lived. Once the legal basis for this tool was secured, it was eventually employed to separate businesses from residents. The final stage of zoning was to segregating different kinds of people from each other. That’s how we reached where we are today.

However, the Robinson textbook indicates that this progression was, if anything, reversed. In reality, residences at the time couldn’t be separated much from industry, because many of the working classes had to be within walking distance from their jobs. On the other hand, some of the very earliest uses of zoning were explicitly intended to separate “exclusive” neighborhoods from the lower classes, whether by requiring minimum densities or barring anything but detached single-family housing.

Obama plans to socialize the internet?

Wired.com's headline: Broadband Is This Generation’s Highway System, FCC Chief Says

Scary words, those are. In 1956, when Eisenhower set out to construct a national, socialized network of highways, he was fulfilling the dreams of many progressives since the turn of the century, who believed that a road system designed and funded by the government ought to replace the privately-owned networks of streetcars and other rail-based mass transit that had up until then been the mainstay of urban and suburban transportation. Their plans profoundly transformed America, giving birth to venerable American icons like the road trip, fast food restaurant, and large-lot suburban subdivision.

But it hasn't been all white picket fences and manicured lawns. Suburan and exurban sprawl consume ever-increasing amounts of energy and land, and are at the root of many of America's ecological and foreign policy problems. Our obesity epidemic may even stem from our car-based culture, and while the isolation that suburbs provide can be nice, there's something to be said for the diversity and culture that one finds in cities.

If the Obama administration doesn't back off the internet, it very well may end up as interesting as a suburban subdivision and as fast as a SoCal highway during rush hour.

The Nation's mass transit hypocrisy

I was heartened to see an article about the need for mass transit in the pages of The Nation, though I was severely disappointed by the magazine's own hypocrisy and historical blindness. The article is in all ways a standard left-liberal screed against the car and for mass transit, which is a topic close to my heart, though I'd prefer a more libertarian approach to returning America to its mass transit roots as opposed to the publicly-funded version that The Nation advocates.

The first bit of historical blindness comes at the end of the second paragraph, when The Nation argues for government investment in mass transit on the grounds that it will "strengthen labor, providing a larger base of unionized construction and maintenance jobs." But don't they realize that the demands of organized labor were one of the straws that broke the privately-owned mass transit camel's back during the first half of the twentieth century? Joseph Ragen wrote an excellent essay about how unions in San Francisco demanded that mass transit companies employ two workers per streetcar instead of one, codifying their wishes through a series of legislative acts and even a referendum. Saddled with these additional costs, the streetcar companies could not make a profit, and eventually the lines were paved over to make way for the automobile. Mass transit companies, whether publicly- or privately-owned, cannot shoulder the burden of paying above-market wages and still hope to pose any serious threat to the automobile's dominance.

The second, and perhaps more egregious error, comes a little later, when The Nation lays the blame on every group but itself for the deteriorating state of mass transit in America:

Nonetheless, smart growth and transportation activists still have high hopes that the Obama administration and a Democratic Congress will revitalize mass transit. But institutional stumbling blocks--including generations of federal policy favoring roads and cars; pressure from fiscal conservatives; and the power of auto, oil and highway construction lobbies--may cause them to miss this opportunity.

Smart growth, though not a libertarian movement, has a distinctly libertarian issue at its core: reversing the mandatory low density zoning and parking regulations that afflict almost every city, town, and village in America. But who started the movement for zoning and low-density planning in the first place? Progressives, a group which The Nation fancies itself a member of.

And in fact, a search of The Nation's archives reveals that my suspicions were correct: the magazine was, sure enough, among those who were calling for a de-densification of America, and railing against the inefficiencies of mass transit. From the April 24 issue published in 1920, there's an article entitled "The Lack of Houses: Remedies" in which the author, Arthur Gleason, lays out his policy prescriptions for dealing with what he considered to be a dearth of housing in America. Regarding zoning (which at the time almost always meant separating homes from jobs and decreasing density – anathema to the New Urbanist call for mixed uses and density), Gleason was wholeheartedly in favor of it:

Zoning regulates and limits the height and bulk of buildings, and regulates and determines the area of courts, yards, and other open spaces. It divides the city into districts. It regulates and restricts the location of trades and industries and the location of buildings. It conserves property values, directs building development, is a security against nuissance, a guarantee of stability, and an attraction to capital.

Not only did The Nation circa 1920 abhor density, but it also treated mass transit with disdain, writing that "[s]ubways make a slum out of a suburb." This is typical of Progressives of the era, who saw mass transit as capitalistic and backwards. There was also a tinge of racism to the attitude, as the "slum" was populated largely by Polish, Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrants, while the "suburb" contained more acceptable non-immigrant Americans.

The Nation pays lip-service to America's mass transit-laden past, writing that "it predates the automobile," but then conveniently forgets the reasons that mass transit in America ceased to exist. And that's convenient, because the reasons – almost all driven by government intervention against streetcars, subways, and density – were once causes that The Nation championed.

Reforestation outpacing deforestation?

While most people associate cities with pollution and the material and ecological excess of late capitalism, I've long believed that urbanization has the potential to be a great environmental savior. The NYT has a fascinating article that confirms what I said about cities attracting people who would otherwise live more environmentally profligate lives: the amount of total rain forest is likely growing, due to the reforestation of towns and villages abandoned by people in Latin America and Asia who are moving to cities. Elisabeth Rosenthal, the article's author, explains the reasons that people are abandoning land at a growing pace:

In Latin America and Asia, birthrates have dropped drastically; most people have two or three children. New jobs tied to global industry, as well as improved transportation, are luring a rural population to fast-growing cities. Better farming techniques and access to seed and fertilizer mean that marginal lands are no longer farmed because it takes fewer farmers to feed a growing population.

By some estimates, these demographic and technological shifts mean that forests are growing back far faster than they're being cut down:

These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest – an iconic environmental cause – may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.

There are two problems, though, with the new forests: they aren't "old growth" forests, and they aren't necessarily able to support many endangered species. The first part – the fact that they are "secondary" forests and not primeval – might be important in that it means the ecosystem is not as dense and complex as it would be in, say, a rain forest that hasn't been touched since pre-Colombian times. Scientists haven't reached a consensus on how significant this is, though it's comforting to note that as time passes, the now-secondary forests will become denser and older. As for the endangered species, it's a combination of the first point (new growth) and the fact that these new jungles are growing in different places than the forests which are being cut down, and are not reachable by the animals that are endangered within the old growth.

Reading this makes me think of a Wired article from a few years back about the Mayans and the rain forest, and how much of the Yucatán jungles are likely to be feral gardens of the ancient Mayans.

Uncomfortable truths about the progressive legacy

Yesterday I was listening to the pre-inaugural concert at the Lincoln Memorial on the radio, and one of the speakers said something that struck me as emblematic of the challenges that Barack Obama faces, though I doubt she realized the ironic significance. She was praising Theodore Roosevelt's conservationist legacy as a model for Obama, though she only touched on a small sliver of Roosevelt's environmental legacy. He definitely did cherish the environment; a timeline of his life shows that in early April 1903 he "communes with deer while writing letters in Yellowstone, WY." He was indeed a conservationist, as were many progressives at the time.

But the progressives were also something else – something that today's progressives would do well to remember: ardent planners whose plans often had grave unforeseen consequences. Just after his time communing with the deer at Yellowstone, Roosevelt traveled to St. Louis to address the 1903 Good Roads Convention. The "good roads" movement dated back to before the automobile rose to prominence, and was formed to agitate for improved roads for bicyclists and farmers. But around the time of Roosevelt's speech, the movement was hijacked by the automobile industry. Unwilling or unable to compete on their own against mass transit, the automakers sought for the government to clear and pave the roads they needed in order to sell their cars – an advantage the streetcars and railroads did not generally have. Not wanting to appear to be too blatant in their rent seeking, the automobile industry lobbied the government indirectly, giving organizations like the AAA money in exchange for influence and seats on their boards.

The nascent auto industry was not the only booster of subsidized roads – even the private railroads were not immune to the siren song of the great new progressive future. They joined the cause in the 1890s with the idea that improved roads would mean more business for railroads, unaware of the threat that the long-haul trucking industry would come to pose to their business. This new semi-public, semi-private corporatist transportation model suited the progressives as well, who believed in a statist future where "private" enterprise was directed and controlled, though not outright owned, by the government.

In the years since the 1903 Good Roads Convention, the idea that government ought to be providing "good roads" has fundamentally altered the landscape of the country in ways that Theodore Roosevelt never could have imagined. The highway lobby gathered strength throughout the early half of the 20th century, eventually culminating in the Interstate Highway System, the widespread suburbanization of America, and the deterioration of once-great American cities. Urban planners like Robert Moses razed neighborhoods and blighted the remaining barren expanses with highways that have become increasingly congested ever since. In order to stave off this inevitable overuse, planners flattened America with zoning laws and parking regulations that forced America to sprawl ever farther from its city centers, to areas reachable only by cars and trucks. A century later it's hard to imagine it happening any other way, and it's often forgotten that there was a workable free market urbanism before there was unsustainable sprawl.

Theodore Roosevelt might be more commonly remembered for his conservationist work, but it's important for people today to remember the unforeseen consequences of the progressives' other grand plans. The "good roads" path that he helped put America on has shown itself to be an enabler of global climate change and belligerent petrostates, encouraging Americans to live farther apart, travel longer distances each day, have bigger houses, and fill those houses with more things. The common telling of the roading of America is that it greased the wheels of commerce and is an integral part of the "American dream," but it's impossible to know what sort of advances in mass transit technology would have come about and how we'd be living had the government not favored the automobile and the truck over the streetcar and the train. Theodore Roosevelt's conservationist efforts are indeed praiseworthy, but might both the environment and the economy be in better shape today had the progressives not interrupted the rail-based urbanization of turn-of-the-century America and put us on the car-based sprawling sub- and exurbanization that characterizes America today?

In calling for the government to fund mass transit and urban projects, Barack Obama has shown that he recognizes the problems of America's land use configuration. But in doing so, he shows himself to be ignorant of the root causes of the crisis: government meddling in the transportation and land use industries. Just as the progressives and futurists failed to use the government to direct a more efficient transportation scheme, Obama will likely fail in using the government to fix America's energy problems. Unless he renounces the legacy of the progressives and admits to America that it needs to return to its market-based roots – at least with respect to transportation and land use policy – his campaign promises of reversing our unsustainable ways will go unfulfilled.

Is Houston really unplanned?

It seems to be an article of faith among many land use commentators – both coming from the pro- and anti-planning positions – that Houston is a fundamentally unplanned city, and that whatever's built there is the manifest destiny of the free market in action. But is this true? Did Houston really escape the planning spree that resulted from Progressive Era obsessions with local planning and the subsequent grander plans of the post-WWII age of the automobile? Michael Lewyn, in a paper published in 2005, argues that commentators often overlook Houston's subtler land use strictures, and recent developments in the city's urban core reaffirm this.

It is definitely true that Houston lacks one of the oldest and most well-known planning tools: Euclidean single-use zoning. This means that residential, commercial, and industrial zones are not legally separated, though as I will explain later, Houston remains as segregated in its land uses as any other American city. But single-use zoning is not the only type of planning law that Houston's government can use to hamper development.

As Lewyn lays out in his paper, minimum lot sizes and minimum parking regulations abound in this supposedly unplanned City upon a Floodplain. He discusses a recently-amended law that all but precludes the building of row houses, a stalwart of dense urban areas (the paper is heavily cited and poorly formatted, so I've removed the citations):

Until 1998, Houston's city code provided that the minimum lot size for detached single-family dwellings was 5000 square feet. And until 1998, Houston's government made it virtually impossible for developers to build large numbers of non-detached single-family homes such as townhouses, by requiring townhouses to sit on at least 2250 square feet of land. As Siegan admits, this law "tend[ed] to preclude the erection of lower cost townhouses" and thus effectively meant that townhouses "cannot be built for the lower and lower middle income groups." Houston's townhouse regulations, unlike its regulations governing detached houses, were significantly more restrictive than those of other North American cities. For example, town houses may be as small as 647 square feet of land in Dallas, 560 square feet in Phoenix, and 390 square feet in Toronto, Canada.

Though this law was eventually changed to allow denser homes within Houston's ring road (though not nearly as dense as some American cities allow), this change only affected a quarter of Houston's homeowners, leaving the rest still as regulated as ever. Not to mention the fact that even for those within the ring road, the rules only matter to new construction, leaving the vast majority of the building stock in compliance with the old rules.

Not to be outdone by minimum lot restrictions, the parking planners are also hard at work in Houston. As Donald Shoup explains in his magnum opus on parking regulations and the free market, minimum parking regulations are an oft-used and under-appreciated way for city planners to decrease density, push development farther from the city's core, increase an area's auto dependency, and decrease walkability and the viability of mass transit. Houston's planning code mandates that developers, regardless of what they perceive as the actual demand, build 1.25 parking spaces per apartment bedroom, and 1.33 spaces per efficiency apartment. Retail stores are also saddled with these parking minimums, and even bars as Lewyn notes are required to build "10 parking spaces per 1000 feet of gross area," flying in the face of common sense. To add insult to injury, the city requires that structures on major roads have a significant setback from the street, and the only rational thing to do with this unbuildable space is to put the mandated parking there, meaning that Houston actual codifies the hideous and inconvenient parking lot-out-front model of sprawl that is so typical across the US.

Another form of planning that Houston has, which is celebrated by the self-titled Antiplanner, is the institution of supposedly voluntary deed restrictions, or private land use covenants agreed upon by the owners of the property under restriction. I'm personally torn over the "libertarianness" of such schemes – are they truly voluntary? Can an individual owner of a property opt out of them once they've been signed? What's the statute of limitations? One thing that makes me suspect that they perhaps aren't as "free market" as they seem is that though the contracts are between individuals, Houston's city code allows the city attorney to prosecute these lawsuits at no cost to the supposed victims – fellow property-owners. In this way, as Lewyn explains, Houston's land uses are just as "Euclidean" as in other American cities:

But in Houston, restrictive covenants are so heavily facilitated by government involvement that they resemble zoning regulation almost as much as they resemble traditional contracts. Houston's city code, unlike that of most American cities, allows the city attorney to sue to enforce restrictive covenants. The city may seek civil penalties of up to $1,000.00 per day for violation of a covenant. Thus, Houston forces its taxpayers to subsidize enforcement of restrictive covenants even when litigation is too costly for individuals to pursue. In its covenant litigation, the city focuses on enforcement of use restrictions (that is, covenant provisions requiring separation of uses), as opposed to enforcement of other restrictions such as aesthetic rules. By subsidizing enforcement of use restrictions, Houston's city government subsidizes segregation of land uses--and in fact, land uses in Houston are only slightly less segregated than in most cities with zoning codes.

More recently, Houston's supposedly laissez-faire attitudes towards planning have again been tested by the proposed 23-story tower at 1717 Bissonnet Street. The tower would have been in a low-rise residential neighborhood, within walking distance of Rice University. After years of wrangling, the project was finally denied by the city, on grounds that the developers failed to prove that the project would not adversely affect traffic flow (a pretty arbitrary and un-libertarian requirement considering Houston's legendary congestion and the fact that developers have little say over where the city places its roads). And this, despite the fact that many of the tower's prospective residents – Rice students and staff – could have either walked or biked to school/work.

Boosters of Houston's land use policy – those who believe that Houston's land use patterns are the free market, revealed – never mention the restrictive minimum lot size and minimum parking requirements. They mention deed restrictions as free market innovations but fail to see how the city's prosecutors turn private concerns into public budget drains. And though the Antiplanner in his aforelinked comments on Houston recognizes the anti-density movement that reared its ugly head after the 1717 Bissonnet proposal, he evidently doesn't see this as seriously detracting from Houston's anything-goes land use policy.

Using eminent domain to blight neighborhoods

The Weekly Standard has a comprehensive and compelling piece of investigative reporting on Columbia University's attempt to acquire 17 acres in the heart of the Manhattanville section, north of its Morningside campus. The tale is a classic example of eminent domain abuse – the university worked hand-in-glove with the government to designate the area as blighted and eligible for eminent domain action, and the university's lawyers pushed the limits of rational argument so far and yet look like they'll probably come out on top.

But perhaps more importantly in this process of acquiring the necessary Manhattanville land on which to build its gleaming new Campus upon a Hill (and under which to build a mammoth garage complex) is not the explicit use of eminent domain, but rather the threat of the land being taken by force. Whereas Columbia's initial land acquisitions before the expansion plans were made public were probably not made under duress, as time went on, Columbia's plans became known, and, as a holdout landlord's leasing agent put it: "At some point along the line, with all of these concerns, the knowledge that Columbia University can or will invoke eminent domain has caused [ground floor retail renters] to seek out alternative space arrangements." This is a phenomenon that affects all negotiations with the government and big institutions like Columbia – and, post–Kelo, even private buyers – and which makes it very difficult to be sure that the owner didn't sell for less than they'd have liked (or, indeed, might not have wanted to sell at any price).

As it is, the land that Columbia has already acquired – 70% of what it wants – is largely vacant and most definitely more "blighted" than the land it wants to buy, however the relevant (and irrelevant) acronymed planning agencies made sure not to recognize any of their own studies that come to that obvious conclusion. So while the school is gathering all the land it wants, the buildings are vacant and the neighborhood is deteriorating. And even once it gets what it wants, the university's own plans admit that they have not decided what they will build on some of the land, meaning even more years of blight.

Unfortunately, the practice of taking land via eminent domain or otherwise restricting use has a long and illustrious history of not working out too well in the end. In the 1926 landmark Supreme Court Case Village of Euclid vs. Ambler Realty Co. that validated zoning codes as constitutional, the justices dismissed as "mere speculation" the plaintiff's argument that the restrictions aimed at keeping out industrial development would lower the property's value. Obviously this mere speculation turned out to be right, because the property didn't find a buyer until some two decades later, when the city relented, and the land has been used for industrial purposes ever since.

In the most recent land use decision handed down by the Supreme Court, Kelo vs. City of New London in 2005, the justices' decision has also shown itself to be clearly detrimental with respect to the specific property in question. Not two years after the would-be developer succeeded in wresting the holdouts' property from them, the proposed development has fallen flat on its face, and there are no plans to develop the vacant properties.

In my own hometown of Bryn Mawr, a suburb of Philadelphia, the eponymous "non-profit" hospital fought a protracted battle to acquire a good chunk of prime surrounding property (which would be even more valuable under the hospital's desired zoning designation), and while it never used eminent domain, the specter of it led people to sell their properties where they otherwise wouldn't have. Unsurprisingly, the Bryn Mawr Hospital's plans for developing the newly-acquired property seem to have stalled. Of the lots, one had a few houses that were turned into a parking lot that was supposed to replace a different parking lot which was to be developed, but that development never materialized, so now instead of a full parking lot and a house, there's a full parking lot and an empty parking lot. The other lot was a block of row homes, some of the few affordable property left in the area, and they were razed to the ground and now an unused grassy field stands in their wake.

But despite the constant disappointments in eminent domain and zoning outcomes, the courts and local governments don't seem to have learned the most fundamental rule of economics: private actors are better at determining the most efficient use of productive inputs than public ones like land use and eminent domain boards.

Matt Yglesias fails to make the right case against highways

Matt Yglesias is one of the best mainstream bloggers on land use/transportation that I know of, and, as one blogger who I don't recall right now once said, his urban planning and transportation posts could be blogs in their own right. However, it's puzzling that in an article for Cato Unbound, he comes up with such a pathetic rejoinder to the O'Toole/Cox/Poole vulgar libertarian transportation cabal, who don't seem to have ever met a road they didn't like:

Or consider the fact that Randall [sic] O’Toole is indignant about the prospect of public expenditures on mass transit systems, but appears to have little to say about public funding of highways. This, too, looks more like a case of narrow business interests than sterling free market principles.

While Yglesias' instincts are right – current transportation markets in America are highly distorted – the reason they're distorted has little to do with the ways highways are financed. Based on some basic figures, Randal O'Toole concludes that the vast majority of road funding – over 80% – comes out of user fees. Now, of course there're still some subsidies there, but it's really nothing compared to the subsidies that mass transit systems receive, which in America never even come close to covering operating costs, nevermind capital expenditures. Now, there are some problems with the 80% number, such as the government's favorable access to bond markets and the legacy of infrastructure that wasn't paid for with user fees, but all in all, it's hard to argue that roads have a subsidy advantage over mass transit.

However, that's not to say that Yglesias doesn't have a point when he says that libertarians and conservatives have blind spots when it comes to how they see transportation. But the real government benefit that the road/car system has over mass transit is density: there are innumerable regulations at every level of government in the United States which favor low-density, single-family detached housing over the denser forms that dominated non-rural areas before the 20th century. Successful roads as we have in America require this low density to remain (almost) financially solvent – it would be very difficult to cope with people's road needs if they were allowed to build as densely as they would without maximum density zoning rules and minimum parking regulations.

As a thought experiment, imagine your local town/neighborhood with twice the density. Chances are, the roads would quickly become very congested. They would have to be widened, which would require money, and even more money than normal, because the government would have to purchase valuable land next to existing roads. (That is, assuming that eminent domain is not used.) The gas tax would have to be raised, and soon the costs would get out of hand. On the other hand, mass transit would become more profitable rather than less, because much less track needs to be laid to satisfy the same demand, and mass transit systems have much more excess capacity than roads. If densities are limited, though, then this alleviates both stress on roads that go through valuable urban property (which are expensive and difficult to widen) and forces people to drive farther, thus paying more in user fees.

There's a legitimate case to be made against American transportation and land use policy, but condemning highway subsidies ain't it.

Reason's commenters put Reason contributers to shame

Reason Magazine, the Reason Foundation, and Cato are generally pretty okay libertarian standard-bearers, but they lose serious libertarian cred when it comes to land use. In those areas, they've been completely coopted by hacks like Randal O'Toole, Wendell Cox, and Robert Poole, who take every opportunity to bash the budding New Urbanist movement over its support of anti-sprawl land use regulations, without recognizing that the biggest part of the New Urbanist agenda is to repeal the highly restrictive minimum density zoning laws, minimum parking requirements, and other regulations that limit the sort of unregulated, organic growth that we see in the oldest and most desired parts of American and European cities today.

So anyway, it was totally unsurprising to see this article by Cox referenced in reason.com's blog, where he blames the recent subprime meltdown on New Urbanism. But what I was surprised to see is the incredible outpour of knowledge in the comments section, where various commenters methodically rip Cox's argument to shreds. Reason ought to look into its land use and transportation coverage, and instead of relying on these tired one-trick ponies, perhaps hire some of the commentators. They, at least, recognize that New Urbanism is nothing compared to the already-entrenched pro-sprawl regulations that have been in place since the advent of the automobile.

The subsidized roads/zoning feedback loop

I've been reading this fascinating article by William Fischel at Dartmouth about the history of zoning in America. The ultimate conclusion is that zoning is a political manifestation of home value insurance and that such insurance might be valuable in lessening the exclusionary impacts of zoning, but the history that the author gives is much more interesting.

The most interesting conclusion he has is that zoning was a direct response to the freedom of the automobile, bus, and freight truck. Whereas previously the rich (always the most fervent advocates of zoning, both then and now) were secluded from the city and inner-suburb riff-raff by higher subway fares and the expense of owning and operating a car, the author argues that the coming of trucks and buses in the 1910's is what really did in unregulated land use. Apartment blocks were the bane of every wealthy single-family homeowner's existence, and they were seen as lowering housing prices and destroying the character of a neighborhood.

All well and good – an explanation that rings true even today – but there's something that I find lacking in it. Namely, the car, bus, and truck weren't the only ingredients in this whole shift: there was also the not insignificant matter of the roads they ran on. The capital costs of laying streetcar tracks were financed by sale of houses and real estate around the streetcars, and the operating costs were financed through user fees.* The roads, on the other hand, were, at this point in time, both constructed and maintained by various levels of government. Though "libertarian" writers from the Cato Institute would have you believe otherwise, the government spending binge on roads preceded the nation's first state fuel tax (passed in Oregon in 1919) by at least half a decade. As early as 1913, the costs of building roads were already weighing on state and local budgets, who didn't fund those projects out of dedicated fuel taxes. The federal government didn't start collecting user fees in the form of fuel taxes until 1932, despite passing its first highway bill in 1916, and really getting into the highway funding game with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1921.

If the increased mobility afforded by buses and trucks is seen as a direct result of subsidized roads, then zoning is as well. Sadly, not only was zoning driven by the subsidized roads, but now zoning begets even more roads. Populations grow but legislated densities rarely do, so the natural tendency is to build outwards rather than upwards to accommodate the change. Though our current road system may be more-or-less pay-as-you-go, looking somewhat like a self-sustaining independent free market creation, the truth is that the current patterns are only sustainable because of the zoning regulations that spread people far enough out that everyone's driveway doesn't have to open into a six-lane highway. Were the government forced to provide roads for any density that required it, it would be overwhelmed with the costs of constantly widening streets.

* The land use situation wasn't completely laissez-faire. Real estate developers (i.e., streetcar magnates) often used their political connections to get the government to grand monopolies on streetcar lines, creating a sort of de fact exclusionary zoning code.

Suburbs become the city that DC never had

The Washington Post, which is pretty good at covering urban planning, has a great two-part series on possible redevelopment of Rockville Pike, a commercial road in Montgomery County, a Maryland suburb of DC. Like Reston and Tysons Corner – communities in Northern Virginia, the south suburbs of DC – the towns along Rockville Pike have been hit with New Urbanism fever, and are eager to redevelop their commercial streets into a denser urban form. Though they don't probably don't realize it, this is actually a more market-oriented approach, with developers building more dense structures than we have today if it weren't more widespread restrictions on density outside of the inner core of American cities.

But unlike Reston and Tysons Corner, Rockville Pike has the advantage of the Washington Metro's Red Line, which runs directly underneath (or something like it) the street for the length of four station stops. The line goes directly into the center of Washington, DC, and is a huge asset.

The towns, however, don't quite seem to have the ideas down. They still appear to be operating in the minimum parking mindset, enforcing rules that developers have to build more parking than they otherwise would, so as to avoid residents and customers using free city-maintained parking. They essentially offer the developers the right to build as the market demands in exchange for payments to the local coffers:

Floreen, who formerly served on the Planning Board, said there might be a way to reduce the amount of parking developers are required to provide if they are willing to pay more for greater density.

Floreen would do well to read a previous Washington Post story about minimum parking regulations in the NoVa communities that Rockville Pike seeks to emulate.

Unlike DC, these Maryland and Virginia suburbs do not always have the District's stifling height restrictions, and it is possible that a buildings 28 stories or higher could be built along Rockville Pike. The Post has a slideshow in the second article with some mock-ups of what planners want the boulevard to look like. And though the drawings always look better than reality, the only way reality will come close to the drawings is if local planners give developers the freedom to build urban buildings, without the weight of minimum parking requirements or county bribes in order to rise above the traditional suburban skyline. With all the talk of favorable tax zones and other things that amount to handouts to developers, you'd think that the planners would realize that it's their restrictions that are forcing them to have to bribe developers into building more densely.

But the potential for DC suburbs is quite good when you think about it, considering that they don't have as much competition in urban living from DC itself. Though there are areas of Washington that have distinctive urban traits, it's difficult to get over the fact that none of the buildings seem to rise much above ten stories. It isn't surprising that so many DC suburbs are adopting New Urbanism as planning guides, though it would be nice if they would recognize that recreating urbanism requires nothing more than doing away with the old Euclidean and suburban scriptures – no need to replace them with anything else!

The NYT on food

The NYT Magazine's subject this week is food, a topic that's nice to see covered in the Times, since it's an issue around which liberals and libertarians have common cause. The main article is about government food policy as it relates to the environment, health, and energy, and while much of the article recognizes the anti-libertarian policies that exacerbate America's addiction to high-calorie, low-nutrition foods, I can't help but think that the author doesn't spend nearly enough space discussing them. While he mentions some government distortions that I didn't even know about – after WWII, the government "encouraged the conversion of the munitions industry to fertilizer" – his list of remedies is heavy on the feel-good liberal policies that don't seem like they'd really do much, or are kludges to a problem that could be fixed with outright legislative repeal. Included on this list are such symbolic measures as putting more importance on the White House chef and converting parts of the White House lawn to modern-day "victory gardens." Also, the author digs into the dark underbelly of land use policy, and advocates "agricultural enterprise zones" and wants developers to have to write "food-system impact statements." But couldn't his ultimate goal – more farmland – be achieved in a more libertarian way, by say limiting the amount of zoning- and parking regulation-inspired low density sprawl that encroaches on farmland?

It's as if in the first half of the article, the author lays the blame at the feet of government for interfering with energy, transportation, and food policy, but then in the second half of the article, he tries to redeem himself to the liberal NYT crowd with wishy-washy crowd-pleasers like locovorism and giving food stamp recipients half price access to farmers' markets.

Would you like to buy this extra street?

The NYT has a story about something that I didn't even know happened: New York City selling one of its streets. The street in question is called Extra Place, extending out of First Street northwards in Lower Manhattan, but not quite reaching Second Street (i.e., it's a dead end). More accurately described as a grungy alleyway, it is a rare piece of not-yet-gentrified property in Manhattan, and it's adjacent to some luxury apartment buildings on First Street. These are owned by the developer Avalon Bay, who wants to buy the street, repave it, and "create a cleaner passageway to the shops and boutiques that are expected to open in the new buildings." They always want to "install seats, including some to be used by a cafe to which the developer expects to lease space." The city would earn money from the sale, would not have to incur any further costs with regards to maintaining the street, and would contribute to the density of Manhattan (one of its main selling points, and something that's good from both a planning, ecological, and cost-of-living perspective). Not bad for a god-forsaken strip that hasn't changed much since it was featured on the cover of a Ramones album. Of course, some residents in the vicinity are against the plan:

“There’s very little city-owned space left, and we would like the city to continue to own Extra Place,” she said. “There could be proposals to fix it up and manage it, which could be done by Avalon, but we also want to guarantee public access.”

As for the first objection – that the site ought to stay in the city's custody because "there's very little city-owned space left," what the hell is the benefit of city-owned space? Especially if it's left in the condition that it's in. As for the second part – that "there could be proposals to fix it up and manage it" – there could be, but isn't it interesting that there haven't been yet? And look, here is a proposal! And the last objection – to "guarantee public access" – is similarly stupid. Street-level property is very valuable as commercial real estate, which has to be open to the public to be profitable. I guess you could argue that those "seats" that the developers want to build are only going to be open to paying customers (although, if you look at the Starbucks model of outdoor seating or other models, we see that there's usually no one going around making sure those sitting are actually customers), but as it stands now, there are no seats for anyone to use. And I understand that it's sort of a straw man argument since, as this objector said, there "could" be plans to rehabilitate the space and keep it public, but like I said earlier, it hasn't happened yet.

Ethanol redux: Wind!

It seems that we have not learned the lessons of ethanol, and that wind power might be another example of a technology subsidized based on its ecological value that turns out to be more environmentally degrading than the alternative. The Atlantic has an article questioning the policy and comparing it to the ethanol debacle. The article cites two issues which make wind both highly uneconomical and not nearly as efficient as "less sexy" measures:

Powering plants up and down is inefficient, and when backup power is included, wind energy costs 10 to 30 percent more than fossil-fuel energy, even without factoring in the cost of new power lines. (Wind-energy costs have risen, not fallen, in recent years.) And once you include backup power, the cost of averting carbon-dioxide emissions by building a wind plant rises to $67 a ton, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Less sexy emissions-reduction strategies, such as increasing efficiency at current electrical plants, cost between $10 and $30 a ton.

The author, Matthew Quirk, correctly sees the folly in the government choosing technologies and elevating them in the market. His suggestion is ultimately that this means that as a solution to the climate change problem, we ought to instead levy a neutral carbon tax. It's a logic idea, but only if you consider current legislation inviolable. The truth is that so many of our carbon emissions are exacerbated by other government policies – land use and transportation laws, from the municipal government to the feds, mostly.

There's a far more direct way to get at pollution rather than another tax (albeit a fairly "fair" sounding one, whatever that means), and it's repealing the suburban-auto lobby's influence in our legal code. Restoring property rights (i.e., doing away with zoning rules and minimum parking requirements) would go a long way to moving to a more free market allocation of property and people – that is, more dense and dynamic clusters surrounded by inevitably less people in suburban and rural areas. Privatizing roads would be the ultimate step to restoring land use to the market, but that seems like just a little too much to wish for within the 21st century.

Edit: The NYT Magazine this weekend also had a piece on the politics and economics of wind. Ultimately, everyone concedes that wind is economically viable thanks to subsidies, but at the end the author focuses on the broader picture: the entire energy industry is subsidized, and the idea that it runs based on a free market is a myth. However, the subject of the article – Peter Mandalstam, a wind entrepreneuer, a sort of not-rich version of T. Boone Pickens – draws different conclusions from this fact than I do. He touches on an important point at the end of the article – "Let’s line up all the subsidies of coal and nuclear power and oil and natural gas and wind — and let’s have a debate," but rather than concluding that we ought to dismantle the original subsidies, his argument is that we ought to tack on additional subsidies, in this case for wind power.

And the most expensive city in the world is...in Angola?!

This is perhaps one of the most surprising facts I've learned in a good long time: the most expensive city in the world is Luanda, capital of Angola. Angola's recently been awash with petrodollars, and probably a combination of a piss-poor building stock, disincentives for construction (read: bureaucracy, corruption, and lack of property rights), an influx of refugees, and a sudden boom have propelled it past Moscow, Tokyo, and London to be the world's most expensive city (presumably for the rich/expats? I can't imagine the slum-dwellers are paying $10 for a salad). The story's also got some interesting information on the slums in Luanda, and a proposal to legitimize them that would make Hernando de Soto proud.

The American Prospect's pathetically limited imagination

The American Prospect, a typical liberal rag, has an article online entitled "The Conservative Case for Urbanism," but it's entirely unpersuasive and doesn't touch on some of the urbanism issues that would really appeal to conservatives. The article has essentially two (very poorly fleshed out) arguments: roads can be wasteful, and the federal government sometimes gets in the way of state/local mass transit initiatives.

But what it doesn't mention is that the sort of sprawl that dots America's (mostly suburban) landscape is enabled by zoning and minimum parking regulations, and that the suburbs might be a lot denser if people were allowed more complete property rights. I don't know if it's because the Republican party has strayed so far away from its limited government roots that this no longer qualifies as a "conservative" issue, or if the author mistakenly equates municipal government with individual choice, or if the author is just plain ignorant as to the root causes of sprawl. But in any case, she took what could have been an insightful topic, stripped away any persuasive arguments, and left readers with the impression that urbanism simply isn't compatible with American conservatism. And that's a shame.