The Antiplanner squared off against regionalist Myron Orfield in Minneapolis yesterday over the question of whether governments should try to regulate land uses. My presentation (11.6-MB PowerPoint or 10.5-MB PDF version) argued that urban areas are too complicated to regulate and that attempts to do so end up doing more harm than good. Dr. Orfield responded that letting people do what they want led to housing discrimination and too many septic tanks destroying ground water supplies in exurban areas.
Perhaps the most difficult question anyone asked us is where we agree. We both stared at each other for a minute before answering. Obviously, we both oppose racial discrimination and water pollution. The question is how these problems are solved. Dr. Orfield thinks that regional government is needed; I would push things down to the local level as much as possible.
It is one thing to say that people shouldn’t impose costs on others by polluting the water table. It is quite another thing to have a regional government restricting growth beyond an urban-growth or urban-service boundary based on the idea that it is too expensive to allow leapfrog development.
Similarly, it is one thing to say that housing discrimination is illegal. It is quite another thing to demand that suburbs build subsidized housing for low-income families who may not even want to live in neighborhoods that don’t have low-cost grocery stores, the churches of their choice, and the other services they use.
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Dr. Orfield complained that there were 187 local government in the Twin Cities region. He saw this as a drawback; I see it as an advantage as each government will tend to compete for businesses and other taxpayers. As well-intentioned as Dr. Orfield’s goals may be, asking regional government to dove the problems opens the door to all kinds of pernicious regulation, urban monuments, and other problems.
Would the Twin Cities, for example, be building ridiculously expensive light-rail lines if it were up solely to local governments? Probably not. Only because rail supporters can tax the region as a whole are the lines getting built.
Regional government has not yet made Twin Cities housing unaffordably expensive. But housing costs are rising and they are more volatile than in regions with less government regulation, such as in Indiana, North Carolina, and Texas.
The Sensible Land Use Coalition, which sponsored the debate, videotaped it and plans to make it available. I’ll let you know when that happens.
Cobb county has wisely done everything they can to keep the poverty of Atlanta from spreading to their prosperous area (for example, stopping the MARTA boondoggle from entering and restricting public transit to the bare minimum), but somehow the poor people have managed to creep in, burdening the county with numerous problems:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/sprawled-out-in-atlanta-106500.html#.VCQhoed-2Dg
Interesting comment and attachment by Gilfoil. Definitely food for thought.
I guess a positive way to look at the changing demographics of suburbs is that it shows that we do have mobility (upward, downward, sideways) in this country. That mobility (called freedom) does create complexity.
This complexity is often ignored by certain politicians, elitists and planners who see our world as static – one that they can easily manipulate and control if we just let them regulate everything – as they see fit. As the disastrous results from government built high-density housing and the war on poverty have shown, spending trillions of dollars trying control society often creates more problems than it solves.
I liked the part how Cobb County outlaws unrelated people living together under the same roof to help discourage poor people from pooling their money to rent a house. Definitely a pro-Liberty (TM), anti-Big Government agenda they’ve got going on there in Cobb County.
404s on the presentation, just like with the American Dream Coalition links.
http://www.startribune.com/local/minneapolis/277008591.html
From the Politico article:
Don’t feel too badly for these trailer park folks. They probably didn’t want to live in an affluent suburb like Cobb County anyway!
finally found the 2014 ADC documents:
http://americandreamcoalition.org/2014PAD/
Six of seven comments on this post are by Gilfoil, who is often far off topic. Gilfoil is trollin’ hard. Too bad he can’t learn a few HTML tags.
Frank you are very welcome for the ADC docs!