South African cities and their multipolarity

So, I knew that South Africa's capital/city situation was a bit odd, but I never realized until today just how weird it truly is. Officially, South Africa's has three capitals – Cape Town is the legislative capital, Pretoria is the executive capital, and Bloemfontein is the judicial capital. It's unclear to me where Jacob Zuma, the country's president, actually lives, but he has official residences in both Pretoria and Cape Town. The parliament meets in Cape Town, however oddly enough, despite being the judicial capital, Bloemfontein is actually not where the nation's highest court, the Constitutional Court, meets – that honor goes to Johannesburg – which despite being the largest in the country, is not an official capital.

The largest and most important city not being the capital is actually something that's common throughout former British colonies. Washington, DC is not even within the top 10 American cities by population, Ottawa is only the eighth largest city/fourth largest metro area in Canada, and Wellington is essentially tied for second in New Zealand with Christchurch (Wikipedia seems to be confident enough that the 100 person difference is accurate, though).

At first I was going to say that this is due to their fluctuating populations, but now that I think about it, that's not the case with the US, for which, if I understand correctly, DC was a compromise between the North and the South after the Civil War. A lot of state capitals in the US are similarly insignificant – Sacramento in California and Albany in New York, for example. In fact, none of the six most populous US states have the same capital/largest city; not until number seven, Ohio, do you get Columbus as both the largest city and capital.

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.

They paved paradise/And put up a parking lot

In the field of urbanism and land use policy, there are two major anti-market forces at work in America: zoning laws that mandate low density, and parking laws that mandate lots of parking. Both are often ignored when it comes to discussions of transportation and the environment, but the Washington Post has a rare story about parking. The story is specifically focused on Tysons Corner, a suburban edge city outside of DC which has become a major job center in recent years. The town's Wikipedia article calls it "the opposite of a bedroom community, with a daytime population greater than 70,000 and a nighttime population of about 18,000."

Anyway, like most edge cities in America, the place is literally paved over, with 40 million square feet of parking compared to 28 million square feet of office space. And at 167,000 spots in total, there are more than three times the number of spots (50,000) as in "downtown Washington" (what exactly that means – everything in DC? – is unclear). Though the article laments all this parking, it's never exactly clear why there is so much parking. Is it built by the government, or built by private developers? Do the developers build it because that's what the market demands, or do they build it because minimum parking regulations force them to? The article gives a few hints that it's the government, not the developers, who want all the parking:

Yet private developers, including the big retailers, are ready to do with less parking. They welcome the chance to spend less money building parking structures, which can cost as much as $40,000 per parking space. [...]

"The market quickly figured out that you didn't need as much parking," said Arlington board member Chris Zimmerman (D). [...]

"County planners may also be an impediment, Schwartz said, noting that the county increased its parking requirements recently for some developments."

Overall, I'm not terribly impressed with the article. It could have gone a lot deeper explaining why exactly there is so much parking, discussing the economics of minimum parking regulations and the Catch-22 that says that mass transit won't be built without density, but density won't be allowed without transit. Or they could have picked a developer and had him discuss the costs of the project and layout of a particular project if he built the whole thing according to how he wants it, versus the plan that he'll eventually be forced to accept due to minimum parking regulations. For a deeper treatment of the subject, see Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking. I haven't read the book, but it sure looks interesting – you can find reviews and discussion of the book and the idea here, here, and here, with an ungated article from 1999 by the author on the same subject here.

(HT: Planetizen, an invaluable daily stream of articles related to land use, urbanism, and transportation.)

Philadelphia urban planning

Urban planning has been in the news a lot lately in Philadelphia because of a combination of its sudden trendiness, high gas prices revitalizing urban cores, and its new mayor. Here's a recap of planning news during the last few days in the City of Brotherly Love:

• Dense buildings are hot in Philadelphia – just this month the largest skyscraper in the city opened, and this week plans were announced to top that record by 50%. The tower at 18th and Arch would be 1,500 feet high, while taking up half the space as the current tallest building in the city. As usual, neighbors are complaining, despite the fact that the site is well within Philadelphia's central business district. The neighbors are worried about reduced availability of parking since the site is being built on a parking spot, though they don't seem to care that market forces dictated (with the caveat that no land use is truly market-based in America) that that plot of land be turned into high-density office (and perhaps residential?) space.
• One of Philadelphia's very successful "edge cities," King of Prussia, has finally been fully developed, but the last development is a decidedly anti-exurban "new urbanism" type project. Though the area doesn't have any hope to be connected to rail any time soon, the project does aim to create the walkable, urban-looking core than KoP never had. The area became popular when big government-style planning conspired to run three major highways through the town in the '50s, and its place was confirmed when big government-style Cold War military spending was directed at the town, where weapons contractor GE poured money into the town in the '60s. And of course no story about the suburbs would ever be complete with an anecdote about WWII veterans building houses in the area, financed by subsidized mortgages through the GI bill. The article doesn't mention whether or not government officials prodded developers into building this sort of project, but it seems unlikely given that the NIMBY forces were too busy decrying the development of the golf course, which some apparently thought counted as the last bit of undeveloped land in the area. It took a specific PA Supreme Court ruling to protect owners of golf courses from zoning that would proscribe further development of their property.
• The Delaware River waterfront – a centrally-located but poorly-developed area of Philadelphia – is probably going to be rezoned and developed in the near future. One of the big debates is whether or not to allow slot machine gambling on the riverfront. Many people are against the idea, especially in light of the fact that the casinos would have huge parking lots and would not adhere to the urban image that Philadelphia is trying to cultivate. While at first my libertarian instincts say to allow the development, on second thought I wonder if the profitability of the casino there isn't due only to restrictions on casinos elsewhere. If casinos were allowed to be built throughout the region, would the most profitable location for them really be on high-value riverfront property?

The WaPo finally realizes the root cause of the subprime crisis

The Washington Post had an article about the roots of subprime mortgage crisis which was the paper's website's headline in the morning, and has gradually been pushed lower and lower on the page to the point where now it's not even on the front page of the website. Anyway, the article puts the blame on the government's distortionary activity within the mortgage markets. Beginning around the year 2000, as part of Bush's "ownership society," federal agencies like began aggressively purchasing subprime mortgages, effectively creating a market for them where they otherwise did not exist. Agencies like FHA and HUD, and pseudo-private agencies like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were the government's tool to manipulate the market for mortgages, and manipulate it they did: 40% of all mortgages are financed by lending companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which hold $5.3 trillion in outstanding debt, and receive tax breaks (read: subsidies) to the tune of $6.5 billion a year.

Part of the irony of Bush's "ownership society" is that it requires taxpayers to fund it. While on its face home ownership might seem like the paragon of private property and private ownership, it's really not in very high demand in the actual free market. While America does indeed have very high rates of homeownership, it's in spite of the market, not because of it. I can't find the statistic at the moment, but I remember reading that only 10% of all Americans owned their own homes in the beginning of the twentieth century. After WWII, mortgages subsidized by the VA (which accounted for, I believe, over half of all mortgages) became the primary vehicle for the widespread fleeing the white middle class from rented apartments, and into the suburbs. These subsidized mortgages were often cheaper than rent, despite the fact that renting doesn't give any permanent rights to the property, while mortgage payments due – a dead giveaway that the proposal was anti-market. After the immediate post-WWII era, homeownership was encouraged with the mortgage interest tax write-off, and the surfeit of lots zoned exclusively for single-family homes, regardless of what the market might actually demand in those locales. The aforementioned federal agencies and pseudo-private corporations also play a role, extending subsidized mortgages to people in the name of encouraging homeownership, which politicians and pundits have for some reason deemed a better option than renting. And, to complete the picture, most recently those left behind from the subsidies – the poor, and especially poor blacks – have had their incentives manipulated through subprime mortgages, increasing (at least temporarily) their rates of homeownership. Only, while in the past the government accounted for the full cost of this subsidy, during the subprime crisis, all the government did was allow the mortgages to be made, but isn't going to be left holding the bag when the payments don't come.

Road building and the Great Depression

I was reading today a book on the history of roads in 20th century America called The Geography of Nowhere. I was a bit disappointed in the book itself – I was looking for a more detailed treatment of the funding and scope of government road projects – but I came across this interesting bit about road expenditures before the Great Depression: "A commission under President Hoover concluded that the automobile was the 'most potent influence' on the rise of local taxes between 1913 and 1930." This caught my eye because according to Amity Schlaes' The Forgotten Man, property taxes were the most difficult tax for Americans to pay during the Great Depression. In a time before the widespread adoption of income and sales taxes, property taxes made up the lion's share of local government revenues: two-thirds of all revenue according to Dick Netzer, and over 90% of all taxes levied in cities of more than 30,000 according to David Beito.

Because this was in an era before politicians recognized the incremental wisdom in at least pretending to fund roads with user fees, this run-up in taxes was part of a larger trend of the pre-WWII era: property owners and renters were subsidizing roads for the benefit of the wealthy. Real estate developers who ran private forms of mass transit (mostly streetcars) and who were in direct competition with government-financed roads were some of the biggest payers of taxes, which makes the transfer especially ironic. I'd known that road construction was a big driver of industry and commerce in the first half of the twentieth century, but I hadn't realized the exacerbating effect those costs had during the Great Depression.

Nature's best friend: the city

From Wired, here's a very informative map of per-capita carbon emissions in the United States. If you want total carbon emissions (not per capita), they have another. The maps are essentially inverted – the places that use the most amount of total energy are the most densely populated, yet they emit much less carbon per person. Even cities that we don't think of as very urban – like Los Angeles, Phoenix, and all cities in Texas – do very well in per-capita carbon emissions. In the original article, they show a close-up of the LA metro area, and it actually says that some parts have negative carbon emissions. I don't really understand how that's possible, but the point – that they have a carbon footprint about an order of magnitude smaller – is well taken.

There are a few reasons why cities are so much more efficient than other types of living. For one, people occupy smaller houses, and those houses are often stacked on top of each other, allowing more insulation, which reduces heating and cooling costs. Their transportation carbon footprint is much lower, since car ownership is less prevalent, and ground-based mass transit is remarkably energy efficient. This applies to all goods consumed in cities: since many distribution systems are based at least somewhat on a hub-and-spoke model, being in the "hub" allows goods to get to you much faster, using less energy. Furthermore (and this may account for the negative carbon emissions of the most densely-populated centers), the amount of nature that has to be destroyed is much lower, and many natural landscapes (forests, plains, etc.) act as carbon sinks, removing carbon from the atmosphere and turning it into oxygen.

Most of the time, efficiency in energy equates with efficiency in economics, as the system will use fewer inputs to achieve the same output. However, we'll never know, since the most polluting industries (transportation and energy production) have had their market signals removed by government policies and regulation, ensuring the perpetuation of the very anti-market status quo.