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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
But that’s exactly the point.
Remember that the press is rather selective in its coverage. Again, case in point in Columbus: The Short North, Arena District, and Brewery District all gets lots of play for their trendiness – they are in the news all the time, and this gives the impression that the old city is coming back to life. However, the renewal, as such, has been confined to these areas for 20+ years now (and much of it was government driven anyway). Downtown itself is barren, the East Side is unsafe, the West Side is full of derelict manufacturing plants. Parts of the old city are lively, many more are not and likely won’t be.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there were no trend. Communications technology makes access to opportunities even in a scattered living environment much greater than they used to be – for which I am thankful!
Even so, I think it’ll be a while before cities outlive all their usefulness.
Skinny jeans? Guru, I thought you were manlier than that ;-)
Well prices are rising in cities because demand is rising faster than supply. And that’s because of city policies that make it difficult to build and difficulties converting old buildings into modern spaces. (A house built in the 1930s has great character but too few plugs.)
But that’s all beside the point as far as I’m concerned. I just don’t understand this problem our side has where we dismiss whole chunks of society as not our thing and therefore offer no political alternative at all. Why not have a conservative vision for cities? After all, there’s no suburb without an urb.
I think back to Joseph’s remark above and wonder if we are really able to get back in to the cities. It takes a certain hardiness to move into an area where you are socially unwelcome, a vastly outnumbered political (and possibly racial) minority, and where you feel confined by it all anyway (worse if you are generally anti-social like me). How do we approach something like that? How do we muck in and change things?
This is an economic key too – In Columbus we have houses galore that were built in the 20’s and 30’s, and those old neighborhoods are poor. It would cost more than the property value of these houses just to bring them back from years of neglect, to say nothing of modernizations required. Preservationists don’t want the houses torn down, but it would be cheaper to do so and build new houses, or apartments, or factories in their place. Of course, doing that would also displace the current residents and would likely be seen as racist gentrification. Yet without money coming in, the houses will eventually all decay to ruin anyway, turning from houses to tenements to slums to burned out husks.
My wife likes em cause they show off the butt. And by skinny jeans I mean slim cut Italian slacks
So do other hip-hugging cuts that don’t give guys the illusion of lady calves ;-)
Still, props for your gallantry. Dressing to please your spouse is smart – I dress sexier now than I did when I was on the market simply because my husband enjoys it.
For awhile (and may still be true) in rochester ny that all houses sold had to be brought up to code. Basically you couldn’t give the land away.
Aha.
I am sitting here in a pair of shorts which are separating things not meant to be separated…. for love….
Your example of such a city is? One where the government does not impact on the market at all, I mean. No government in zoning, roads, or public transport. Just market forces.
I understood you just fine. You appear unwilling to say, in a simple sentence that I have less freedom in a city. Why is that?
Rights and law are not Economic power. You keep conflating the two. They are not the same. Most people in Mongolia have neither.
Would you at least agree that I cannot fire a weapon inside city limits?
You keep asking me to agree with you, but refuse to agree to my one point.
Just agree that cities take away freedom. Period. Don’t talk trade offs.
Libertarians tell me all the time about how horrible HOA’s are, and here you are expounding on how free cities make me. Most city laws make HOA’s look tame.
I have less freedom in a city. Can you agree with that one fact, yes or no?
I believe they are more closely related than most conservatives like to admit, though.
A right that cannot be exercised for practical reasons does tend to lose some of its real-world value. Similarly, as Steyn often notes, restrictions which cannot practically be enforced tend to be less burdensome than those that can be:
I do care that the letter of the law should grant us certain rights, but I also care about which rights we have, practically speaking, irrespective of what the regime says.
Of course, though some tension between the rights the regime officially recognizes and the rights ordinary people can get away with in everyday life is inevitable, too big a difference between the two courts disaster. It is demoralizing, costly, maddening… impoverishing, as de Soto so eloquently argued.
But I’m with de Soto: the real rights lie with the people, even when the regime refuses to acknowledge them.
Sorry, no. Your passionate preference doesn’t make trade-offs go away. It never does. Trade-offs are here to stay no matter how much we hate them.
I am the sort of libertarian who thinks homeowner associations and other essentially private villages are actually a good idea. You’re barking up the wrong tree here.
Somehow you cannot give a simple yes or no in agreement to the idea that I have less use of property inside a city. Over and over I have asked, putting it different ways.
Moreover, you say things like “Your Passionate preference doesn’t make trade-offs go away”. Right. So, while you want me to acknowledge trade offs (which I do and have) you flat out refuse to acknowledge that cities take away freedom of to use property.
What I cannot understand is why the Midget Faded Rattlesnake, is unwilling to admit this simple fact?
Cities decrease freedoms. But you either disagree or refuse to admit it.
Either way, you are not arguing in good faith.
As I have said repeatedly, city living restricts some uses and enables others. Why is that so hard to understand, Bryan?
Freedom is not garbage pick up. That is a service. Freedoms are not services that I pay for.
If I had the economic power, I’d live on a huge parcel of land, outside a city, and work to be as free from regulations on how I use that land as possible.
Living in the city, or living in the country, it is better to be rich than poor. Economic power is not granted by the city. In fact, based on our big cities today, the middle class leaves. They work great for the rich, and the poor are stuck there.
Historically, cities have been nexuses of economic power.
That bad governance can wreck a city – and indeed in modern America often has – does not negate that there are economic advantages to concentrating human capital in entities like cities.
Moreover, saying that there are advantages to concentrating human capital in a city is not the same as saying there are no disadvantages.
In 2015, I am not sure I see any advantages. Now you and Matty and Skip all do. That is fine.
Just don’t come at me saying “There are lots of hidden supports for your way of life. You are no better than welfare queens” which is the intent of Matty’s posts.
When the cities stop being subsidized by the suburbs, then we can talk.
See my bit about the amount of stimulus Baltimore got.
OK, your biggest beef with Matty’s argument is that it’s an insult to you and yours.
I am not entirely convinced by Matty’s argument, though I gather I’m much less hostile to it than pretty much everyone else here.
Big government, after all, has a vested interest in turning the middle-class into welfare queens in order to secure its perpetuation. Perhaps it has not gotten as far in this endeavor as Matty asserts. But that it may have gotten further than any of us are really comfortable admitting would not surprise me – humans like to hang on to the last shreds of illusory self-worth wherever possible, which for conservatives may include delusions of self-reliance.
All entitlements die hard, but there are public-choice reasons to expect middle-class entitlements to be particularly undead.
Right now, the Left, under Obama, is actively working to increase population density and end the suburbs.
Anyone that supports increased urbanization is on his side at the moment.
See, that in and of itself is insulting. “Delusions of self-reliance”?
I am not on welfare. I don’t get a check for not working. I am not getting money to help me eat.
To smugly say otherwise, frankly, makes someone sound like a lecturing lefty.
Because I live in a suburb does not make me a ner’do’well
Matty’s argument is also poor history. To argue that suburbs are all about subsidy while ignoring all the money spent on cities is nuts. It is not like suburbs were getting their support while big urban cities get nothing.
In Fulton County, the City of Atlanta and South Fulton is engaged in a great transfer of wealth from North Fulton. So much so, that all over North Fulton, every zipcode is becoming a city just about.
Explain to me how you see anyone actively looking to “end the suburbs.” Or even how they would do that.
That strikes me conspiracy theory-ish and impossible. And probably explains the disconnect here.
Are you saying that humans don’t have an impulse to cling to illusions of self-worth in order to salve their egos? You hold a Master of Arts in Psychology from the Georgia School of Professional Psychology and are a Licensed Professional Counselor. I think you would know human nature better than that.
Or are you saying that a feeling of self-reliance (however arrived at) is not part of a conservative’s sense of self-worth?
Casey,
That does need some documentation.
Stanley Kurtz is a radical conspiracy nut, I admit, writing for that rag National Review. ;)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1595230920/ref=nosim/nationalreviewon
The implications of your statement is that conservatives (me included since I am on the other side of this debate) are, for all intents and purposes, bitter clingers.
When entitlement spending is conflated with tax breaks or the government building roads, there is a problem with reasoning. Using a road built by the government is not the same morally as living on hand outs, and saying so is not being delusional, or hanging on to some illusion to preserve a sense of self worth.
I cannot speak for others and their sense of self worth. I am not even sure what you mean by self-reliance.
I think you mean not being dependent of the government. If that is the case then yes, it is. And as I said above, I don’t think using roads is an act of dependence the same way as taking entitlements is. I don’t think it is dependence at all. I think governments should build roads with tax dollars. That does not make me pro government dependence. It makes me normal.