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Urbanism For Capitalists / Capitalism For Urbanists
About twice a year, I decry how conservatives are conceding an important and powerful demographic and cultural change to liberals. It’s sometimes called the New Urbanism. To conservatives, though, its just the Evil City all over again. And anything good that may be happening is “yuppification,” “gentrification,” or — even worse — “hiptserfication.” I don’t see the problem: all three words mean revitalization, which means the creation of fine, safe, productive, and interesting places for people to live and work. In other words, it means bringing back downtown and main street which, once upon a time, were natural homes for conservatives. But, as I’m wont to say, conservatives are used to what they are used to and skeptical of all else. Many modern conservatives are simply not used to downtown and main street.
But that’s not totally true. My last foray into this arena was a four–part history of transportation in America. The responses to that thread made it clear that there is a solid core of potential, budding, and already-arrived conservative urbanists. Today, I’m here with some good news for conservative urbanists and to announce a fine discovery in the form of a blog: Market Urbanism, whose motto is “Urbanism for Capitalists / Capitalism for Urbanists.”
Hayek and Bastiat (and of course, Jane Jacobs, she of Spontaneous Order) are displayed prominently in their bookstore. A few quotes I’ve so far gleaned from a brief perusal of some of the site. About the website’s founder, Adam Hengels:
Growing up in suburban Chicago, Adam suspected there was something inefficient about the land patterns and transportation of the suburbs. When introduced to urbanist ideas in freshman architecture/planning coursework, the concepts made sense, despite the paternalistic bent of the professors who presented them. Thus, he became conflicted between the urbanist instinct and the free market instinct. Through study and practice of building design, infrastructure design, construction, economics, planning, development, and urban economics, Adam concluded that our problems with sprawl, congestion, and automobile dependency were largely the result of socialistic oversupply of transportation systems and top-down regimentation of land use, not due to market failures, as many urbanists proclaim.
From an article:
So why don’t conservatives and libertarians have more compunction about sprawl? I believe the problem is more the messengers than the message. Despite the free market aspects of modern-day urbanism, smart growth and new urbanism are not libertarian movements. Urban planning is dominated by liberals, and it shows – few even seem aware of the capitalist roots of their plans. The private corporations that built America’s great cities and mass transit systems are all but forgotten by modern-day progressives and planners, who view the private sector as a junior partner at best. Yonah Freemark views Chicago’s meek and tentative steps towards transit re-privatization as a “commodification of the formerly public realm” that’s “scarring” American cities – his version of history apparently starts in 1947. The Infrastructurist must have been reading from the same textbook, because Melissa Lafsky calls libertarianism her “enemy” and apparently believes that America reached its free market transportation peak around the 1950s. And Matt Yglesias, a rare liberal who understands the economic arguments in favor of allowing density, is routinely rebuffed by his commenters, who I doubt would be so offended if he were arguing for urbanism for environmental and social engineering reasons, as so many progressives and planners do today.
And while we’re on the topic, let’s not forget another wonderful discovery introduced to us by our own Chris Williamson: Charles Marohn, a “Republican Urban Planner,” whose lecture you can download here.
Published in Culture, Domestic Policy
What the new people do not see is that their desire to move into a new subdivision is partially paid for by other people’s taxes. When you move into a subdivision, the price you pay for that home is partially subsidized by the other residents of that city. And you’d be hard pressed to find any suburb here where any tax rates (property, income, or sales) have gone down as the suburb has grown. Some people want a new library branch, others a fire station, others a school, others a wider road… and it all is bought by new “temporary” levies.
To take your point about property taxes too, subdivisions beget subdivisions here. Sure there may not be a Kelo style confiscation, but when the farm next to yours gets plowed under, your own land valuation goes up, taking your taxes with it. Eventually they can rise to the point where you have to sell. Then you’ve got a new slew of neighbors suddenly complaining about your dust, your crop sprays, manure smells, flies from your livestock, etc. So the EPA comes knocking…
Indeed. Best things we can do are to fight the idiotic zoning laws and city beautification schemes, and try to re-privatize as much as possible. Get in there and let cities innovate again, thwart the central planners and planning commissions.
On the other hand, if you read legal history, you realize that cities are the crucible in which property rights were forged.
Our whole law and economy is based on the observation that rights can be bundled and unbundled. This observation only happens after people live in close enough proximity to make bundling and unbundling worthwhile.
Have you ever benefited from an easement? Won a dispute over drainage rights? Then you reap what was sown long ago when English-speaking people aggregated into towns and demanded that their neighborly spats over usage be recognized by the law. Coase saw this. I see it because I have a crush on Coase. Many conservatives apparently don’t want to see it, though.
Oh dear Lord!
OK, since you insist on perverting the intent of my statement:
Find me a city with better protection of property rights than rural Texas (not a Federally owned part).
Sheesh!
It wasn’t an insistence on perversion. It really is alarming how much of the “wild, wild west” is nothing of the sort, but instead has its usage dictated by federal ownership.
This proves my point, not disproves it. The closer you are together, the more rules and laws that you need to have. The more limits on how I can use my land as I see fit, the more limits on how I can behave.
Towns may be where these rules were created, but it was not because people wanted to come together and make them, the rules were a necessity.
The more you pack people together, less freedom they will have. I do not think you have refuted the intent of that statement, nor is saying so somehow conservative denial.
That may be so, but it was avoiding my point, which I notice, you have not acknowledge yet.
Let me try it this way: Do you think that people have more restrictions on the use of their property in cities or in rural areas, in general?
I have never seen anyone ever posit that my land value going up is a bad thing.
I’d love to have a big ol’ piece of property that went up in value so that developers were out to buy it and I cash in and make a fortune.
Sign me up!
If cooperation and coming together only diminishes freedom, then the entire science of economics is a joke in unutterably bad taste, and we would be better off not having economies at all.
Are you better off living in a world where everyone’s an isolated homesteader? Where modern medicine, insurance, and science do not exist? Where people don’t come together to trade goods and services? Is that more free?
Or is there more real freedom in a thriving market, where people agree to cooperate with each other to form businesses, insurance pools, mutual help societies, and cultural associations?
Matty, thanks for putting this information out there. I’ve long been frustrated by the general lack of interest (or outright distrust/dislike) that most conservatives have for cities. And I’d love to see someone take on making a conservative argument for density/good urbanism. So this is all encouraging. Sadly, though, I think current attitudes about suburbia vs. the city are grounded more in experience/comfort level than in politics — politics is just a tool we use to argue for our preferred scenario. People (present company included) want to live where they want to live. I cannot imagine living where basic services (groceries, coffee, church) weren’t within walking distance; others can’t imagine living where they might not be guaranteed a parking spot (or where they — gasp — might have to parallel park) outside their grocery/coffee shop/church. It’s just a shame that the latter scenario is so destructive to the beauty of our landscape, but that ship has mostly sailed. Anyway, I’ll be interested to read what the marketurbanists have to say.
Every time the book value of my home goes up, so do my property taxes – this is not an unmitigated good thing if I have no desire (or lack the ability) to “cash out”, nor is it a good thing if I am forced to sell my property and move still further afield or downsize my house to be able to live where I can afford. Property taxes are a form of wealth tax.
Please see Doc Savage’s excellent piece on what real lack of property rights looks like. People need laws (and lawyers) to have their property rights recognized in the first place!
You seem to want to say that law itself is what erodes rights. But it’s not. Rather, there are two competing types of law at war with each other: the traditional, common-law system that upholds property rights and the legislatively- and bureaucratically- imposed regulatory law that is answerable not to property-owners, but to government officials and (sometimes) the voters who elect them.
There is a lot to be said for horrendous zoning / access laws driving the sprawl problem too. Just take a look at wasted space with parking lots – you MUST size your lot based on the theoretical capacity of your building, not on the actual usage. So the Wal Mart right by me has a vast lot that is rarely (Christmas excepted) any more than 1/2 used. The Kohls right next to it has a similar lot size that is rarely more than 1/8 used, and there are similar allocations for every single store in that strip mall. So you have a huge underutilized lot that stretches a good 1/2 mile, PLUS drainage ditches, catch ponds (mosquito havens), massive road frontage, etc. If you are elderly and want to hit stores at opposite ends of this strip, good luck! But if the zoning and access rules were more sane, you would increase the density without sacrificing usability or crowding people in.
Urban planning is one of the great Social Sciences that makes wonderful plans, has lofty goals and only one small, tiny flaw, people.
People want safety, a sense of control, even if it is only a quarter acre and the freedom to be left alone once they reach a certain age.
We are creating cities without families which eventually become zoned encampments for the old and single. Families that care about their kids move them to a safer environment, if they possibly can.
Cities used to serve a function when they were about concentration of production, skill and capital.
Now they merely serve as a concentration of consumers.
We are moving into a networked future, the Statists and Urbanists need to leave antiquated ideas like concentration behind.
People walked from Africa and spread to every corner of the globe. Our species does not concentrate well. Do you truly believe the suburbs happened because it was against the nature and instincts of people?
I don’t know if I’d call the RTA marginal, though they are certainly short on cash. Metra is generally fast, clean, and on time. The L lines vary greatly, but the service frequency is pretty good, even on the South Side. Bus service is all over the place in quality.
I really don’t see the issue with groceries not being available. There are Jewel stores about every mile, and lots of pharmacies in the greater downtown. Where were you having problems?
Gas in Chicago is insane, though part of that is federal rules on gasoline. Crime is an issue. I’m not sure about the crime in good neighborhoods claim. And Chicago does seem determined to not recognize the second amendment.
Suburbanization is non-concentration? Seems to me that suburbanization is hyperconcentration.
If you moved from a thousand person single building to a single family house , that would tend to be less concentrated, but to each his own interpretation of words.
I’d also argue that subdivision designers share some of the blame. Most of them seem allergic to right-angle streets, or any amount of walkability
I grew up in a small town that had sidewalks, houses in rows with alleys, back and front yards, etc. This was a town of less than 5000 people, and it had a similar feel to the outer urban areas in Chicago.
Another group to look at are the fearmongers who oppose any level of free-range parenting.
What if I moved from a single family house in the city to a thousand person single building in the suburbs? Or don’t those exist?
Until there is evidence……. the null is no subsidy. Especially given the large checks I write to my various governments.
For cities I suppose it depends on the type of work. Actual manufacturing rarely occurs at any scale in cities anymore because cities have made the land unusable (zoning, EPA), the business unaffordable (taxes and regs), and the land needed too vast (vast parking lots requiring vast drainage, mandatory green spaces, EPA set asides, etc.). Delphi used to have a plant near downtown Columbus, but you would need about 3x the land today for the same number of jobs. This rather limits the sort of work you can effectively do in a city today. Columbus today mostly has banks, government agencies, and insurance companies – white collar jobs only, unless you get away from the core.
I would not say it is “largely subsidized” – that is going way to far. But our taxes are certainly underwriting services that we don’t necessarily use. I guess you could say that we are, perhaps, subsidizing others. I’m certainly subsidizing the education of others, the free library, and host of other city programs.
Sprawl is not in and of itself a problem. But I agree with all of this.
This is true; but this is true of all public services. It is primarily driven on the taxation side where we tax activities in such ways that taxation does not increase with increased consumption of services. We tax property which when it increases in value does not necessarily increase the amount of services consumed. ROADS on the other hand are funded out of gas taxes which is a fairly sound, but not perfect, proxy for usage.
Besides we are surfing the edge of radical decentralization where we can all live like the Spacers on Solaris.
Wow, OK Rico’s quote function truncated the original comment…
Roads! Gas taxes fund roads in a general sort of way, but again we’re paying into a general subsidy fund to pay for the upkeep on roads we’ll never use. This means inevitable roads to nowhere, mandatory service on sparsely populated roads, and taxes diverted from normal road maintenance to construct or dramatically improve new roads to service new subdivisions. Thus we are all paying the price when Builder X drops 500 houses into a cornfield off a 1 lane road. I’d rather Builder X had to buy the improvements and factor those into the house prices, but they know instead that the city will pay for it all.
From the mortgage interest you deduct to the cereal you eat for breakfast, you are subsidized. We all are.
80% of the checks you write are passed on to me and 80% of the checks I write are passed on to you and they keep 20% for their efforts. The world we are living in is 100% distorted.
Heh. Haven’t read that one in a while.
Will the people who buy these houses suddenly stop paying tax on their gasoline purchases?
We have dramatic shortcomings on how we tax people and charge people for services. The gas tax may be too low, which is something that I am open to changing.
I had this argument about raising the $5 fee on gun purchases to more adequately fund the background check system so that background holds didn’t take 3-4 days to clear due to backlog. They went from 12 people to 3 people checking records and it was a pain in the butt. But heaven help you.
That may well be the option, but my chief concern is with the immense up-front infrastructure costs, not the maintenance. I’ve watched my home county have to rebuild many many roads and especially bridges and intersections, as we’ve had something like a 300% population increase over the last 20 years (at one point we were in the top 10% of fastest growing counties). That improvement money mostly came out of state coffers filled with gas tax money – it would have been better if the county or the suburbs had to front the costs of replacing overused bridges, as they then surely would have gotten the developers to pony up, and that would have gone into the house (or strip mall) prices, etc.