The Niskanen Center is supposed to be a free-market group. It is named after Bill Niskanen, who was Ronald Reagan’s chief economic advisor until he got fired because he was too free-market oriented for Reagan. His research on how bureaucracies work influenced me when I was working on Forest Service planning in the 1980s, long before I met him in person. After I went to work at Cato (where he was chairman of the board), I learned his father had run Pacific Trailways out of Bend Oregon, and I enjoyed visiting with him about the history of transportation.
Click image to download a 4.2-MB PDF of this 22-page report.
After Niskanen passed away in 2011, Cato Institute senior fellow Jerry Taylor, who I remember as being so laser focused on free markets that we had many arguments over the whether it was better to be a pure libertarian vs. a pragmatic one, started the Niskanen Center to bring market tools to environmental issues.
So I was stunned last week when I opened the Niskanen Center’s web site to find an article claiming that the main obstacles to affordable housing were “anti-density regulations and difficulties scaling up mass transit.” Many free-market groups have fallen for the bogus claim that density is the answer to high housing prices, but spending more money on mass transit? How is that free-market oriented and just how will it make housing more affordable?
Then I looked at the credentials of the people who wrote the report. Alex Armlovich has a masters degree in urban policy. Andrew Justus has a masters degree in urban planning. Prior to working for Niskanen, Justus worked for Smart Growth America promoting complete streets and more subsidies for Amtrak.
What’s free market about this? What this really means is that the New Urbanists/smart-growth advocates have infiltrated another former free-market group. Bill Niskanen would be totally ashamed of the group that was named for him.
Wait, do you really think that regulations aimed at prohibiting developers from building dense housing are free market? There’s a difference between “we need more/less density” and “the government should force more/less density”.
In a free market, you should be allowed to choose live in a dense area or a low density area and you should not have to worry about government regulators changing the zoning in your neighborhood. Free people look at an area they prefer to live in, before they buy their home. If the zoning is to be changed, it should be decided by percentage the property owners, not bureaucrats and politicians.
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1. Land use regulation authority should rest at the level of government that best captures
all of its costs and benefits.
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In a free market, this would be the property owner. They’re not calling for property owners to have that right in their paper.
No one should be creating a regional government like Minnesota’s Met Council. They’re not elected. They force developments on communities that aren’t wanted by the community. Worse, they do bupkiss to make things better.
Worsts of all, their actual policy is just dumb. It doesn’t accomplish what they claim. They claim since we have these shared infrastructure resources like interstate 94, that they need more dense housing on those corridors. They fought Lake Elmo for years on this. They won. Lake Elmo had to allo for this right off of I-94.
https://goo.gl/maps/KcxFq8XHHq1E2hwY8
What’s the point? Less than a decade later just 1/2 miles away in Woodbury, one new apartment building has 2-3 times as many units. If denisity was need for the shared resource, Met COuncil failed.
Minnesota’ Met Council runs Metro Transit. Metro Transit’s LRT lines are plagued by violent crime, the worst in the nation. Metro Transit’s response? The other agencies are cheating and not reporting all their crime.
Just last week someone was beaten at a station so bad, their were reports of brain matter. Metro Transit’s response on why their wasn’t security at one their system’s busiest stations? Well, we have it there when we have the resources.
This was at 9:30am on a monday morning.
Beaten to the point that brain matter came out.
Ya, that’s the Met Council for ya.
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Optimal land use reform should increase the total value of land
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Holy b8888, these people aren’t free market, they want centralized planning.
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At its most basic, a house is not all
that different from a refrigerator. Houses and refrigerators are both just big boxes with doors.
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#facepalm
The real question is where is the money coming from? Once you figure out who is funding these group’s and their agendas the real agenda will become obvious.
If cities keep urban growth boundaries, but then allow more density in established single-family neighbourhoods, guess what? The price of lots increases faster. And developers demolish single-family houses people want and replace them with mid-rises and high-rises people don’t want. How is a market that forces purchasers to buy things they don’t want free?
i guess a true constitutional/federalist land would leave these issues to the states, for good or ill. in NC many many decades back there used to be mill housing where large textile mills built houses for many of their employees. an easy commute, iow. jefferson himself in VA was a liberal by many standards….state spending on schools and a public university.