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Un-Planning, A Manifesto
Do you hate city planners? Do you wish the New Urbanists would leave us all alone? Yes and yes? Then beware of reflexively defending the status quo, because the status quo is in no small part the handiwork of old city planners.
As Matty Van recently pointed out, a non-negligible portion of what the New Urbanists call our “over-reliance on cars” is due to former city planners and other central authorities having planned it that way.
It is government that has instituted zoning laws segregating commercial from residential areas. It is government that imposes absurd restrictions on small-scale, home-based industry. It was government that built many of our highways, despite the fact that private highways are totally a thing. It is government that mandates that people build a certain amount of parking on their property, whether they want to or not.
Houston is famous for its lack of zoning. It’s also Texas’s most walkable city. Coincidence? Maybe not.
I don’t mention Houston because I’m in love with walkable cities. When it comes to the tradeoffs between living in a walkable but crowded neighborhood and living a more quiet, suburban – but also more diffuse – life, I would probably choose the suburbs. I mention Houston because it’s evidence against an assumption that many liberals and conservatives apparently share: that the inevitable result of less city planning is less walkability.
Naturally, we conservatives want to defend the free market. But even we are prone to mistaking the aftermath of old regulations for the organic product of private enterprise. For their part, New Urbanists – or anyone else who wishes to make a serious case that over-reliance on cars should be regarded as a nuisance – would do well to remember what Coase said about the tendency of pretty much everyone to miscategorize old government-backed nuisances as products of the free market:
Legislative sanction makes that lawful which otherwise might be [actionable as] a nuisance. Examples of this are damages to adjacent land arising from smoke, vibration and noise in the operation of a railroad…; … unpleasant odors connected with sewers, oil refining and storage of naphtha….
Most economists seem to be unaware of all this. When they are prevented from sleeping at night by the roar of jet planes overhead (publicly authorized and perhaps publicly operated), are unable to think (or rest) during the day because of the noise and vibration from passing trains (publicly authorized and perhaps publicly operated), find it difficult to breathe because of the odour from the local sewage farm (publicly authorized and perhaps publicly operated), and are unable to escape because their driveways are blocked by a road obstruction (without any doubt, publicly devised), their nerves frayed and mental balance disturbed, they proceed to declaim about the disadvantages of private enterprise and the need for governmental regulation. “
– Section VII of The Problem of Social Cost, p 131 of “The Firm, the Market, and the Law”
I agree with the anti-New-Urbanists: let’s not try a new type of city planning. Instead, let’s get rid of the restrictions imposed by old city planning. Then people will be free again to build walkable neighborhoods if that’s what they want to do.
Let’s try un-planning for a change.
Published in General
I don’t think this quite describes the conversation. Those of us arguing against the central planning impulses of some in that thread were doing so not because we thought walkability inherently meant central planning, but because their statements implied it at every turn.
Of course, I’m open to arguments about other factors besides unplanning explaining the ugliness of Texas cities. Medieval Europe wasn’t massively regulated, and nothing says “gorgeous” like a Tuscan village or an English hamlet.
Fair point.
Nonetheless, it wasn’t clear (to me, at least) that the opposition to the pro-walkables was only due to the pro-walkables’ implied desire for planning. Some comments – from both the pro-walkable and anti-walkable sides – really did read as if walkability inherently meant central planning.
Either way, as long as city planning and walkability continue to appeal to certain kinds of conservatives, it’s good to clarify the distinction.
I’m starting to get a little confused about what we mean by planning. No one here believes in a planned economy, I’m sure, but a lot of other human endeavors require at least some amount of planning. If a locality wants to accommodate the expansion of suburbs, there has to be some planning because otherwise basic infrastructure wouldn’t work.
If you wander through a quaint European city, it has the appearance quite the opposite of being planned, and that’s a part of its charm. People like pleasant surprises and varied, intriguing architecture. However, those European cities also have land use plans that seek to preserve the traditional character of the city.
One of the things that puzzles me is that in every way, a suburban housing development looks like the epitome of planning – regularity, strict setbacks and separations, location of garage doors relative to the street, etc. Some that I’m aware of regulate how long your garage door may stay open or how long your car may be parked on the street. Mostly, urbanists are interested in typology – buildings with first floor shops and windows instead of blank walls, comfortable and enticing sidewalk space, etc.
Hmm… If only I were Sal, iWc, or James of England. Or Richard Epstein. Then maybe I’d be conversant on the history of how nuisance disputes were resolved from Roman times, through medieval times, to the present.
Using the word “nuisance” to describe an actionable harm apparently dates from about the 11th century in England. That might explain your English hamlet. But the idea of some intrusions from one person’s property onto another’s being actionable (even if it wasn’t called “nuisance”) ought to be much older.
If so, then resolution of nuisance disputes might have caused informal districting in continental medieval towns as well.
Even without legal action, birds of a feather might tend to flock together. If your work smells, your neighbors will hate you less if their work also smells. Patrons of brothels might have nearly as much interest as virtuous people do in patronizing brothels located away from the disapproving glare of the virtuous. Etc.
On the other hand, how much of that traditional character was planned at the time it was built?
That I don’t know. If you look at aerial views of my wife’s home town in Germany, most of the streets and thus houses follow what appears to be a vaguely circular pattern. But, on the ground you suddenly see that that the houses follow the path of the original medieval city wall that is still present in some places. Insomuch as the wall was planned, that dictated the pattern of the city. Most of the original houses and shops there were built between the 14th and 16th centuries. If some local land baron had a say in the design, or the church, or – more likely – the mayor, I can’t say. The Romans were also active earlier in the area, having built a number of roads and baths as well as a garrison that later became the site of a castle.
Here’s an aerial photo. The semi-circular feature you see near the top center is a mill race that powered a number of local enterprises. I image that took some planning.
Indeed. Suburbs are planned … by developers.
No longer do proprietors confine themselves to simply submitting plats; the forces that produced pre-World War II communities, so prized by “New Urbanists,” are not the forces producing modern suburbs.
Oh, I was reading you to mean that towns had regulatory restrictions on walkable development specifically. Now I see that you meant that it was a product regardless of the motivations.
I agree with the reasons you give for the banishment of the big boxes (I mean I agree that those are the reasons, not that they’re good reasons). I’m not so sure that counts as an anti-walkability restriction, though. The nature of the big boxes is that they will be few and far between to avoid over-coverage of a market; also the immense size and layout along with the unavailability of that kind of space within residential areas (that’s just a guess) might even make their banishment a pro-walkability restriction even if it an anti-affordability restriction.
To further theorize, maybe walkability is antithetical to affordability. That’s a lot of redundant uses for capital that could otherwise be used in other productive endeavors – if only people had some form of transportation to stretch their ranges outside of the walkable then maybe we could free up that redundantly-used capital.
Are you claiming cars may contribute to affordability? Leaving aside the costs of a car, what’s more redundant than a parking space?
“Claiming” is too strong of a word for what I’m doing. Plausibility is more accurate.
Otherwise, what’s more redundant than a parking space? Having to have at least three Wal-Mart stores in my urban zip code (and all of the surrounding zip codes too) to make living walkable, instead of the mere seven I have to choose from that are within 22.3 miles of my house and that span separate counties. For walkability to be doable then this dynamic would have to apply to all necessities for sure but likely other stores that offer ways for us to dispose of our discretionary incomes.
Cars themselves may. Regulatory restrictions that happen to make cities more car-friendly than they would otherwise be don’t, though – because of the nature of regulatory restriction, not because these restrictions favor cars per se.
That’s what’s bad about making living walkable – that is, forcing people to build walkably. Merely allowing Wal-Mart to buy up land for stores within a city if that’s what Wal-Mart wants to do is different.
Yes, there is no reason to suppose that in a less regulated environment, there would inevitably be Wal-Marts within walking distance of everyone, or even that many Wal-Marts within cities at all. Nonetheless, when Wal-Mart wants to build a store in a city that would happen to be within walking distance of the neighborhood immediately around the store, why stop them?
Yeah, the big box store is probably not harmonious with walkability. Walmart would not be able to sustain that concentration of stores.
There are competing regulations. Get the big box stores out because low-cost/profit=oppression (potential increase in walkability), cater to cars by forcing free or extremely low cost parking spots on many businesses and along city streets (decreases walkability through inefficient use of land).
If people actually had to pay the land use cost to park, there would probably be a lot less driving and a lot more real estate for small businesses/housing, as much as I love my car and free parking.
Russ Roberts had an interesting EconTalk on planning with Charles Marohn, from Strong Towns.
If cars had no role to play in affordable living in a free market, then I doubt we’d have as many of them as we do now even in a partly-unfree market.
Given our current state, there are many ways in which cars can make life more affordable. Having a car gives you access to more employment opportunities, more cheap merchandise, etc. There is no reason to suppose that all these advantages would have disappeared had regulatory interference favoring cars never happened in the first place.
Rather, if we had never had those restrictions, I’m guessing life would be “somewhat more walkable” than it is now. Not walkable for everybody. I’m guessing not even as walkable as what many pro-walkable planners would like to impose on us. But that it would be easier for some to carve out affordable lives for themselves without having to rely as heavily on cars as people wanting an affordable life do now.
There’s no such thing as free parking. Parking is just another use for a road like driving. Maintenance of the street for all uses is covered by taxes. Metered parking for revenue purposes is arguably double-dipping by local governments. Private parking lots are maintained by businesses, and the cost of their upkeep is factored into the price of the goods they sell. They will charge more to cover their costs if maintenance or land taxes increase.
They do pay it. It’s embedded in the cost of products that people buy.
And just to renew my primary objection, do you people really want to be walking in Atlanta heat to get groceries? That seems genuinely psychotic. How about walking in Fargo cold?
There’s no such thing as free heathcare either, but free at the point of use and mandated coverage causes wide distortions and inefficiencies in the market.
I’ll claim it. The cost of housing inside cities is astronomical. A car pays for itself rather quickly if you are saving $1000 a month by getting a 3 bedroom house in the burbs instead of a 3 bedroom apartment in the city.
Shhh, you can’t let practical realities get in the way of Utopian idealism.
Parking is not free at the point of use. You’re still paying for it through taxes or higher prices.
There are a lot of genuinely psychotic folks around who view walking in Fargo cold or Houston heat and humidity as character-building. Like Quilter used to feel I should cut my own lawn rather than hire a lawn service, even though it made more economic sense to do freelance writing instead of spending the time cutting a lawn.
I live in a Houston suburb. I generally take a 1-2 mile walk in the evenings when it cools down. I can also walk to the closest supermarket, and occasionally do in spring or autumn when the weather is nice. Not if I plan to buy a week’s worth of groceries, though.
I’ll walk or bike when I want to. Not because it is the “right” character-building thing to do.
Seawriter
That’s fine. Cars sound perfectly reasonable for that situation, but that’s not what I was thinking about when I wrote that. I was thinking about the city dweller who has to maintain a car to get to the stores in the suburbs as well as downtown because of the high proportion of parking spots already in existence.
That’s true, housing prices in cities are astronomical.
Even absent regulation, there are reasons to expect the per-square-foot cost of housing within cities to be higher than the per-square-foot cost of housing in the less-ritzy suburbs.
Nonetheless, there is good reason to believe that over-regulation makes in-city housing more expensive than it should be, driving some people who otherwise would stay in the city out into the suburbs and exurbs.
Well now you’re just being deliberately obtuse so I won’t bother continuing.
Throwing a hissy fit is always an effective mode of debate.
If Ricochet has taught me anything it’s when a line of debate will be fruitless. For whatever reason (semantics, priors), you aren’t accepting my definition of “point of use,” which means we won’t get anywhere if we continue.