I like Scott Beyer, who calls himself “the Market Urbanist.” He and the Antiplanner see eye-to-eye on a lot of issues. But we also have some areas of fundamental disagreement, as shown in the Reason video below.
Some of them are simply factual. He thinks there is a large, pent-up demand for dense housing in the cities. To the extent that such demand exists, I think it is an artifact of restrictions that prevent low-density development at the periphery of many urban areas.
To some, this might indicate a difference between a Millennial and a Boomer. But I think results more from biased surveys. Planners often ask people, “Would you rather live in a walkable neighborhood steps away from coffee shops, grocery stores, and transit stops or in a single-family neighborhood where you have to drive everywhere?” Given such a question, many Millennials and maybe even many Boomers will select the walkable neighborhood.
A more honest survey would ask, “Would you rather pay $400,000 for a 1,000-square-foot condominium in a noisy neighborhood with moderately high crime where you can walk to a grocery store with limited selection and high prices or pay $200,000 for a 2,000-square-foot home with a yard in a quiet neighborhood with negligible crime a short drive away from three large supermarkets that are competing hard for your business?” Given that question, we know that the vast majority of people prefer the single-family home because that is where the majority of Americans in almost every age group, including Millennials, are settling.
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In fact, however, we have more than 125 years of evidence that people want such a right. Developers learned before the turn of the 20th century that people would pay more for single-family homes if they knew the neighborhood they were moving to would remain single family. In other words, they were willing to give up the right to develop their property to higher densities provided their neighbors also gave up the same right. In California, residents of single-family neighborhoods specifically claim that proposals to rezone their neighborhoods for multifamily would take away their property rights.
We also know that such property rights, whether in the form of covenants or single-family zoning, doesn’t make housing expensive so long as there are few restrictions on development on the urban fringe. With such minimal restrictions, developers can build whatever the market demands for new housing without imposing undesired changes on existing neighborhoods.
I’ve debated several market urbanists and it appears to me that many of them — not necessarily including Beyer — support free markets so long as they produce the results they want, which are dense urban housing. They complain about single-family zoning in cities and suburbs but turn a blind eye to urban-growth boundaries and other restrictions at the urban fringe. They praise Jane Jacobs as some kind of prophet even though almost everything she said about cities was wrong.
If people want to live in higher densities, then they should be able to do so providing they are willing to pay the price. If there is sufficient demand, then developers will build it for them. But they can do that at the urban fringes and don’t need to destroy existing neighborhoods to do it.
The only way to find out what people really want is to allow both sprawl on urban fringes and dense developments in the urban core. There is no way to find it right now when both markets are comically distorted, because, as you said, what people say they want very much depends on who is asking, how they formulating the question, and what assumptions do they make about cost and quality of these options.
I have to disagree with the idea that zoning laws are similar to these (rather rare) property covenants. In the heart of the housing crisis, in the Bay Area, where draconian land-use restrictions collided with the technology-driven economic boom, the situation is rather different. In the great city of San Francisco, the planning system allows many actors, sometimes located rather far away from the proposed development, to have significant veto power over the project. Giving so many actors the discretionary right to veto things is bound to lead to suboptimal amounts of stopped developments because communication problems are large.
Let’s talk about a simple model. There is a development proposed. Its construction will cost property values of 100 people in the vicinity to fall by $1,000. The project will net the developer $200,000 in profits. Theoretically, the developer can build it, give $1,500 to every neighbor affected (either in monetary form or through building something desirable for these people) and call it a day. Suppose, however, that one greedy neighbor demands $3,000 in compensation. In this case, the developer can pay $1,000 to everyone else, $3,000 to this person, and still earn a reasonable profit. The incentives, however, are such that every property owner has an incentive to egoistically demand a lot of money. If everyone demands $3,000, the development is no longer profitable. Everyone lost: the developer can no longer earn a profit, and neighbors get no compensation. The neighbors should, of course, come together and agree on what their demands should be. If you have ever been to a community meeting you may guess how this will go. Badly.
An example of that is an infamous case of a development being banned because a part of its shadow will fall on a minuscule part of school territory. In no sane world is it worth more than potential profits from this development + potential benefits of new residents from living in this development rather than where they live right now. Yet, because of the communication problems, the development was banned.
Furthermore, the government is implicitly subsidizing this rather expensive and complicated system. All of those endless zoning boards, planning departments, planning commissions, discretionary reviews, etc., etc., etc. cost money. As does the endless reviews where the developer should pay to prove that the development does not affect anything, instead of potential challengers proving that it will.
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To some, this might indicate a difference between a Millennial and a Boomer. But I think results more from biased surveys. Planners often ask people, “Would you rather live in a walkable neighborhood steps away from coffee shops, grocery stores, and transit stops or in a single-family neighborhood where you have to drive everywhere?”
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It’s as if they don’t realize they’re asking “would like you like to be easy and simple”.
HELL YEAH!
These things sound wonderful. As someone who spends 90% of my days car-free, I can tell you it doesn’t make things easier. Walking or biking to the store means lugging all that stuff back which is a pain for one or two people. For a family you’d have to be constantly going to the store because you can’t just load up the car with stuff and drive.
What time you’d save not driving would be consumed with shopping.
I think that the host was correct in that you should allow everything, both dense developments and sprawl. Otherwise, it still looks like bad old planning – smart people getting together and deciding how others should live. Fundamentally, there is not enough data for these smart people to ever hope to make a qualified decision.
I don’t have any problem with “allowing everything,” but one of the things I want to allow is for people to live in single-family neighborhoods if they want to, using protective covenants if not zoning. The densification advocates deny peoples’ right to live in single-family neighborhoods.
The new urban experiment is fine, in upper echelon income areas. Sadly it’s not market principle, it’s secluded and inflate market principle. The “Demand” is vastly over inflated by denial like Cartman’s YOU CANT COME IN principle
The market urbanist argument presents urban and other areas as being somewhat of a false dichotomy. As others have noted the only way to know what people want, or can tolerate would be to get rid of all regulations. With that said my guess is that there would be SOME people who want to live in an urban area while others would prefer other arrangements. From a regulatory perspectives regulation does not seem necessary to force density in an area that is attractive. That will happen on its own. However, regulation in the form of maximum densities and zoning seems more reasonable when you think of the economics of developers who would want to cram people into as high a density as possible to maximize their return even if this density makes life miserable and creates a host of other problems like congestion or pollution.
Honestly, the whole density topic strikes me as being more of a fetish than something borne out of reality or an empirically based understand of how people want to live or what makes economic, environmental or social sense. There can be numerous models of “what can work.” and conceptually going through them it does not seem likely that high density would dominant most models.
Also on some what of a side note, even contemporary socialists seems to have come to the conclusion that central planning does not work and have retooled their thinking according (see around minute 18-20ish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXNrVaJJfHA
One other point about density. In an effort to de-fetishize the concept I think that an empirical model of density needs to be developed that considers crime, individual preference, congestion, environmental impact and infrastructure/supply chain efficiency. The major failure of the type of density that I see the planners advocate is that is assume people will not drive or own cars. This obviously avoids the conveince and likely economic and material efficiency of cars. The other consideration is modeling. The idea that people are going to live clustered around a central urban area does not reflect the reality of modern transportation infrastructure. It would be interesting to see a combination of the density model combined with various GIS models that don’t assume the need for a central city.
Glad Houston made the video, because it is an example and it answers the question: there is definitely strong demand for *both* urban density and suburban homes. We’re getting plenty of both. So I think there would be agreement on allowing both fringe growth and densification outside of single-family neighborhoods (like all commercial or industrial land). The real question is what to do with SF zoning. Realistically, I don’t see people allowing much more densification than triplexes or quadplexes there. I’d say let each neighborhood decide: give them an estimate of how much their land value goes up if they allow plexes, and let them vote. Pragmatically, I might default replace SF zoning with up to triplexes by-right (like MSP did) unless 2/3 (or half?) of a neighborhood votes to opt-out and stick with a single-family designation.
But the developer has incentives too. The more jurisdictions there are in a given urban area, the more credible threat a developer can make to take their investment elsewhere (along with the local tax revenue that goes with it) and find a local government more accommodating of their type of project. Competition, even among local governments, can be one of the most powerful tools to dissipate rents.
In the case of San Francisco, the city is relatively small (area-wise), and there are other nearby cities (Daly City, SSF, even Oakland) who might be more willing to tolerate a project than SF, which already has a large tax base and is extraordinarily choosy when allowing new development.
I usually like the material that Reason puts out, but I was underwhelmed by this this video. The host didn’t seem too knowledgeable about the issue and didn’t seem to ask the right questions. For their part, Randal and Scott just seem to talk past each other and emphasize one part of the issue, Randal emphasizing the need for more elastic urban boundaries to increase the land supply and Scott emphasizing cities allowing denser development.
Beyer totally lost me when he repeated a long-discredited planner trope claiming that nobody would choose to live in the suburbs without the existence of land use zoning. The fact that there is a wealth of global evidence to the contrary, both in developed and developing countries, just seems lost on him. If American land use zoning is somehow peculiar or exceptional, then look outside the country to see what happens when it doesn’t apply.