Category Archives: Regional planning

The usually sensible Megan McArdle writes in the Washington Post that “Downtown is in deep trouble.” Where she becomes insensible is that she thinks that is a bad thing, arguing that city governments need to take action to lure businesses back into downtowns.

Chicago has the second-largest downtown in the United States, yet that downtown had only 12.5 percent of the jobs in the Chicago urban area before the pandemic, and even less now.

When otherwise sensible people think of a city, they imagine a dense, job-filled downtown surrounded by lower-density residential areas. Yet, as Washington Post writer Joel Garreau wrote more than 30 years ago, downtowns “are relics of a time past.” In fact, he said, downtown-centered cities were the “nineteenth-century version” of a city, and that “We built cities like that for less than a century.” Continue reading →

One of the arguments against single-family zoning is that separating housing from other uses forces people to drive to shops, work, and other destinations. Urban planners want to redesign cities so that people can walk to most of those destinations. They even have a name for it: the 15-minute city, meaning everyone can reach all of their primary destinations within a 15-minute walk.

Paris is such a walkable city with everything within 15 minutes of every resident, so no one there has to drive at all, right? Photo by Dr Bob Hall.

In a paper published last month, urban analyst Alain Bertaud has demolished this goal. Noting that Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo made this goal a part of her re-election campaign in 2020 and continues to promote it in office, he looked at the city to see what would need to be done to meet this goal. Continue reading →

Like many U.S. states, France has conducted a war on sprawl that has had economically ruinous and socially harmful consequences, yet produced no real benefits, according to a new paper from the Institut de recherches économiques et fiscales (Institute for Fiscal and Economic Research). Written by engineer Vincent Bénard, The War on Sprawl: An Irrational Political Obsession shows that anti-sprawl policies have caused a six-fold increase in land prices and significantly increased housing prices. This represents a transfer of wealth from low-income people who rent and/or have recently purchased homes to high-income people who have long owned their homes and may be landlords of rented homes.

Periurbanization (urban sprawl) in Paris suburbs. Photo by Medy Sejai.

The amount of rural development that is taking place in France is greatly exaggerated, says Bénard, and none of the supposed costs of sprawl “stand up to in-depth analysis.” Sprawling areas “do not cost more for public budgets, nor are they unfavorable to biodiversity,” while “forced urban density is not a good lever for controlling greenhouse gas emissions.” Continue reading →

The Antiplanner remains a skeptic of climate change not because of the evidence for or against it but because so many of its adherents are eagerly using it to impose their preconceived prescriptions for how people should live. The latest is an article in the Guardian claiming that urban densification is “one of the most impactful ways to slash greenhouse gas emissions.” If it weren’t for evil NIMBYs, the article implies, the world would be well on its way to ending carbon emissions.

This is, of course, total and complete garbage, as I showed in a Cato paper nearly 12 years ago. Claims that denser lifestyles emit fewer greenhouse gases ignore the self-selection issue (people who want to drive less choose to live in denser areas); the congestion issue (people who live in dense cities may drive less, but they drive in greater congestion and therefore end up burning as much or more fuel as people living in low-density suburbs); and the construction issue (greenhouse gas emissions from building multi-story housing are much greater than one- and two-story housing).

Beyond that, the viability of a plan that depends on completely changing the lifestyles of hundreds of millions if not billions of people is highly questionable. Finally, consider the alternatives: for the same effort, we can save more emissions by making more fuel-efficient cars than by trying to get people to stop driving and by building more energy-efficient single-family homes than by trying to get people to live in multifamily housing. Continue reading →