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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
This is true. Regulation also makes the cost of cars far higher than it needs to be.
You’re basing your argument on people not paying the true costs of what they’re using when they are in fact paying those costs whether they recognize it or not. The cost is so negligible on a per person basis that it is not worth a business’ time to break that out as an individual fee charged on entry that would come with its own costs to maintain through gated entries and parking lot attendants/machinery.
Your argument does point out that land could be used for something else, but there is a counterbalancing opportunity cost to the stores that if they have nowhere for people to park, people won’t go there. The idea that people would line up for a boutique lifestyle of walking everywhere is simply not borne out by real life experiences. Wagons, stage coaches, and horses all required places to stop so the idea of parking is not unique to cars.
Additionally, there is an opportunity cost imposed on someone by forcing them to walk to a shop. This is a cost in time both in transit time (driving is faster than walking) and in frequency (how often I have to go to the store). The time I lose having to walk or make more trips is time I could be doing something else. If I’m driving, I can carry more goods per trip than if I’m walking, reducing the overall number of trips. There are some goods that cannot be carried which will require some form of transport which will require parking while they are loaded and unloaded. It is simply more convenient to allow for transportation modes beyond walking, and it always has been. Mankind would not continue to create faster ways of travel if walking everywhere were not an inconvenience.
Eh, there’s good planning and bad planning. Atlanta damn sure could have used some planning. It’s an incoherent mess.
Atlanta has more planning than you think. I take it you’ve never had a run in with a zoning board?
On the other hand, some shopping centers do charge for parking (and not necessarily real swanky centers, either).
It seems to me that how much parking a business decides to provide for customers, and whether it charges separately for that parking or not, is best left up to that business, and that forcing businesses to provide a minimum amount of parking imposes unnecessary costs, just as forcing businesses to avoid providing parking (or to avoid providing free parking) would.
Wouldn’t it be more accurately described as a run-over?
Seawriter
The more I think about this, the more I think a walkable community can only exist in a heavily planned/regulated area. To keep things walkable, there has to be a restriction on the size of the lots each person can own. The more land around each house, the further it will require people to walk from the outer edge inward. There still reaches a point where it becomes impractical to walk somewhere with any frequency. It also ignores things like economies of scale and economies of agglommeration that arise from locating businesses together instead of sporadically disbursing them throughout an area.
This entire concept is also de facto exclusionary because it assumes all the goods one wants are available without providing for where they will come from. I want to telecommute and walk to the store for my purchases, but the guy who actually raises the crops needs land, more than you can have in a walkable community. The guy who raises the pigs is going to be forced out of town because the smell is a nuisance. Oops, guess neither of them will be able to walk to the store. So much for their quality of life. (cont)
Well, yes. But un-planning isn’t about forcing people to do anything, just getting rid of old mandates and restrictions.
From personal experience, I can say that in congested city traffic, driving to a store within comfortable walking distance is sometimes worth it for us, but also sometimes not worth it.
The factory, too, requires large square footage so that’s going outside of town, too. All those factory workers will have to live near it to walk there so there goes that segment of the population. It’s not long before you start to realize why people don’t live near their workplaces or why some people live further out and thus require some mode of transportation beyond walking to get from place to place let alone conduct business.
This idea of walkable communities doesn’t strike me as very egalitarian. It sounds much more like an elitist attempt to force people to live a certain way while assuming they will enjoy the comforts of modern living without having to account for how we get those comforts of modern living.
You’re right, there are clearly instances where walking is a better choice, but if you are purchasing something like furniture or appliances, there really isn’t a choice. That has to be transported by other means which requires infrastructure to transport it, as well as room for the place to make it. To keep things walkable, the community size has to be regulated, and certain industries have to be forced outside of it which also relegates the people working in those industries outside of it.
There’s not much to show for it.
I’m not interested, though, in forcing walkability.
Just in pointing out that regulations don’t always help walkability, they can also hurt it.
That’s true, but I’m failing to see how you have walkability at all without regulations. It would seem to me that those regulations would be exclusionary and detrimental to all but a favored few.
Yes, I agree, those regulations would be. I do not want those regulations.
No dispute there. There is just no reason to think that a completely planned city will meet the demands of citizens more than semi-planned cities. More likely you end up with Portland.
I apologize if someone has said this already but there was a great episode on EconTalk about this a few weeks back.
Recommended to me to Xpost: What timing! Here’s a blog post from a Cato guy responding to the initial article.
True, it might be more expensive, but to whom? “The Rich” don’t have the power of condemnation via “imminent domain” – unless the government does it for them. And in that case, we’re right back where we started – with the rich in control, but now with the government as the cudgel. Without the power of condemnation, the plebe or the prole remains in control of his own destiny.
It’s funny: In college I had a class in “environmental design.” In order to learn how to design environmentally friendly communities, we studied the old cities and towns of New England, built decades before anybody thought of city planning.
The claim that government policy led to our reliance on cars implies that the government wanted people to drive more than the people wanted to, and created explicit incentives for them to do so. I don’t believe that ever happened. However, once the New Left gained power, the opposite happened, and today we have trains and bike lanes in excess of demand because the government wants us to stop driving cars, and has created explicit incentives to that end. There’s a world of difference between the government observing roads clogged with cars and saying “We need more roads” and seeing roads clogged with cars and saying “We need more trains.” One is non-ideological, the other is ideological.