Tag: urbanism

Zoning is evil

geographic and income convergence started to slow in the 1960s, when rich people in rich places started constraining land use through regulation. This limited the housing supply in those places, which forced prices up, and started to squeeze out those with lower incomes.Housing prices have always been more expensive in high-income places, but the difference now is unbridgeable. The result is that people can’t get on the upward mobility ladder, thus increasing the inequality that these same elites bemoan. But they don’t see or understand the connection between this income divergence and their own regulations and restrictions.

home ownership limits people’s ability to move to a better place, and with zoning laws and other barriers in place, it can no longer be the foundation of middle class wealth. government policy behaves as if we are perpetually stuck in the 1960s, and we are spending a lot of money to create an illusion.
Zoning is the real liberal guilt. zoning laws are the root cause of a surprisingly large number of problems. they seem largely anachronistic from a time when it made sense to keep smoke stacks and residential building separate. now they are driven by NIMBY and it is time to blow most of them up.

Rent regulation can keep some existing residents in their homes, and affordable housing programs can bring a small number of middle-income people into wealthy neighborhoods, but neither can change the fundamental laws of supply and demand. If desirable neighborhoods don’t start shouldering more of the burden of increased urban demand, American cities will soon end up like their counterparts in Europe, where everyone except the rich and the tourists are shunted off to the suburbs.

And yet more examples how liberals are full of shit on housing:

Throughout, Astorino speaks of his commitment to affordable housing. He notes with pride the county’s diversity. He delivers part of his address in Spanish. And year after year, he pledges to protect the county’s exclusionary zoning against federal efforts to expand affordable housing.

NIMBYism is never about race, except when it is

It’s hard enough to build new market-rate housing in the cities that need housing most. In Washington, D.C., the zoning commission just decreased the maximum height on “pop-up” additions and construction in the parts of the city growing most rapidly. Homeowners in D.C. say that they want to protect the character of their neighborhood and the quality of construction during this boom time.

Even at the most granular level, NIMBYism can take the form of an entitled localism that sounds positive. A hyperlocal petition started by a condo-owner to keep a 7-Eleven out of a nearby storefront is a crypto-case of There Goes the Neighborhood–ism.

if you have insane zoning laws, this happens:

For the love of god, keep adding homes. Keep adding homes so things don’t get any worse and you’re not trapped in a lose-lose-lose shitstorm like San Francisco.

zoning is one of the most evil things preventing the changes we need to survive climate change

The zoning strait-jacket binds a large majority of urban land in the United States. Los Angeles and Chicago, 2 of the nation’s densest central cities, permit the building of only a detached house on, respectively, 75% and 79% of the areas they zone for residential use. In suburban areas, the percentage typically is far higher. In a companion study of zoning practices of 37 suburbs in Silicon Valley, Greater New Haven, and Greater Austin, I found that, in the aggregate, these municipalities had set aside 91% of their residentially zoned land (71% of their total land area) exclusively for detached houses.

Zoning also makes Transit unworkable:

large swaths of desirable, close-in areas with relatively short buildings are highlit. Rich inner Brooklyn neighborhoods like Park Slope and South Brooklyn are currently built to missing middle density, with a floor area ratio of ~1.5 away from corner lots. A more appropriate floor area ratio in these neighborhoods is 12, corresponding to tapering buildings in the 20-30 story range, as on the avenues on the Upper East and West Sides. Park Slope is 30 min from Midtown by subway, and less than that from Lower Manhattan. The population of these neighborhoods is perhaps 150k, and should be more than 1m given their proximity to job centers.

Speaking of climate, lack of shade is also due to zoning:

Is it too hot to walk around the block? Sure, blame global warming, but in many parts of the country there is also a noticeable absence of shade. Why? One reason is that shade has been zoned out.

NYC could look a lot more like a real city:

Manhattan would look more like Sao Paulo, with a true forest of skyscrapers instead of the current puny and indeed embarrassing line-up.

Instead, we’re stuck with the embarrassing skyline we have:

Most people (even residents) never realize how New York City’s iconic skyline has been shaped by the city’s zoning codes. The variety in architectural styles is as much related to trends in design and technology as it has to do with changes in the zoning code over time. Moreover, certain key buildings themselves inspired the zoning resolutions of 1916 and 1961. On the 50th Anniversary of the 1961 New York City Zoning Ordinance, here’s a look back.


why staten island is a hell hole, in a nutshell. and if planning regulations were lifted entirely, NYC would reach 40m people. Output per person would rise by 5.7%. A similar study finds that zoning lowers GDP

We study how growth of cities determines the growth of nations. Using a spatial equilibrium model and data on 220 US metropolitan areas from 1964 to 2009, we first estimate the contribution of each US city to national GDP growth. We show that the contribution of a city to aggregate growth can differ significantly from what one might naively infer from the growth of the city’s GDP. Despite some of the strongest rate of local growth, New York, San Francisco and San Jose were only responsible for a small fraction of US growth in this period. By contrast, almost half of aggregate US growth was driven by growth of cities in the South. We then provide a normative analysis of potential growth. We show that the dispersion of the conditional average nominal wage across US cities doubled, indicating that worker productivity is increasingly different across cities. We calculate that this increased wage dispersion lowered aggregate US GDP by 13.5%. Most of the loss was likely caused by increased constraints to housing supply in high productivity cities like New York, San Francisco and San Jose. Lowering regulatory constraints in these cities to the level of the median city would expand their workforce and increase US GDP by 9.5%. We conclude that the aggregate gains in output and welfare from spatial reallocation of labor are likely to be substantial in the US, and that a major impediment to a more efficient spatial allocation of labor are housing supply constraints. These constraints limit the number of US workers who have access to the most productive of American cities. In general equilibrium, this lowers income and welfare of all US workers.

2022-06-02: Zoning kills opportunities for advancement

A janitor in New York, for example, used to earn more than a janitor in Alabama even after adjusting for housing costs. As a result, janitors moved from Alabama to New York, in the process raising their standard of living and reducing income inequality. Today, however, after taking into account housing costs, janitors in New York earn less than janitors in Alabama. As a result, poor people no longer move to rich places. Indeed, there is now a slight trend for poor people to move to poor places because even though wages are lower in poor places, housing prices are lower yet. 25% of the increase in the college wage premium between 1980 and 2000 was absorbed by higher housing costs. Moreover, since the big increases in housing costs have come after 2000, it’s very likely that an even larger share of the college wage premium today is being eaten by housing. High housing costs don’t simply redistribute wealth from workers to landowners. High housing costs reduce the return to education reducing the incentive to invest in education. Thus higher housing costs have reduced human capital and the number of skilled workers with potentially significant effects on growth.

2022-07-27: Florida is leading the way. These kinds of penalties should be applied to all permits. Of course it would be much better if the pointless permits weren’t required in the first place.

Last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bill that fundamentally changes the state’s permitting process for home building. It requires local jurisdictions to post online not only their permitting processes but also the status of permit applications. The transparency takes a good amount of mystery out of what can be an inscrutable branch of bureaucracy.

More important, the reforms also created a system that strongly incentivizes cities and counties to approve new home permits in a timely way. When a builder or property owner submits an application to build a new home, cities and counties have 30 business days to process it or request corrections.

If the government offices fail to respond in that time frame, the locality must refund 10% of the application fee for every additional business day of silence. Application fees can vary widely by locality, but the average cost in Florida is $1000. If officials request corrections to the application, they have 10 business days to approve or disapprove of the resubmitted application. Blowing past that deadline leads to an automatic 20% refund, with a further 10% added for each additional missed day, up to a 5-day cap.

The point of this policy is to put government on the hook for holding up new housing construction. Today in Florida, 1000s of new home permits are being processed faster under this law by bureaucracies faced with paying a penalty for foot-dragging.

2024-01-22: How Houston got denser

Houston is commonly thought to be a clumsy success in affordability, brought about by its lack of zoning. The truth is more interesting. The city’s planning authority implemented reforms that gave landowners automatic permission to build new townhomes, subject to certain conditions; alongside an opt-out system for local residents who do not want these changes to their area. This policy changed the face of the city, for the better. And yet this has largely gone unnoticed by the rest of the world, even those that are struggling with the same problems that Houston has overcome. Houston may have something to teach us on land use planning after all.

Let’s have lots of city states

with talk of secession in the air, how about turning all cities with > 1M people into their own states? this would ensure people would ask nicely for all the money flowing from the cities to other states.
2022-06-25: A dramatic example how much better city states are.

As a result of intensive political competition and experimentation among over 1000 sovereign city-states, political institutions developed to an impressive degree. For example, the level of democratic participation in many Ancient Greek states was only attained again anywhere else in the world by the developed countries in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The typical Late Classical Greek house had 250 to 330 square meters of interior space, more than the average American home today. This implies Classical Greeks urban dwellers typically enjoyed 50 to 70 square meters of residential space per capita. For comparison, in the US today, the average residential space per capita is about 75 square meters, and in France and Germany, it is 40 square meters, in the UK, it is 30 square meters, while in developing countries like Russia and China, per capita residential space is between 15 to 20 square meters.

2023-07-13: Jane Jacobs on the logic of city states

Jacobs shows us a glimpse of a world in which secessions would be “a normal, untraumatic accompaniment of economic development itself.” Regions would separate when they feel the need to, before decline has set in. “In this utopian fantasy, young sovereignties splitting off from the parent nation would be told, in effect, ‘Good luck on your independence! Now do try your very best to generate [or maintain, as the case may be] a creative city and its region and we’ll all be better off.’”

Private Cities

this will be a most interesting experiment. if the essentially privately run singapore is any indication, good things will happen.

The government of Honduras has signed a deal with private investors for the construction of 3 privately run cities with their own legal and tax systems.

2017-11-20:

Google is building a small city within Toronto: Toronto has 3 km2 of waterfront property awaiting redevelopment, a huge and prime stretch of land that amounts to one of the best opportunities in North America to rethink at scale how housing, streets and infrastructure are built. The government announced that they were partnering with Sidewalk Labs to develop the site.

Bill Gates is thinking even bigger, a 100 km2 site for a new city near Phoenix that might take advantage of Arizona’s forward thinking rules on self-driving cars.

All over the world, we can see the beginnings of a move from nation-states to smaller, more decentralized and agile communities such as common interest developments, special economic zones and proprietary cities. Your Next Government is Tom W. Bell’s primer on this coming revolution.

Depressing suburbia

Finally, a scientific explanation for the feeling of depression I get from suburban environments dominated by Applebee’s, OfficeMax and 8-lane thoroughfares. Urban design can have a measurable effect on how people feel. Researchers examined levels of self-reported happiness in 10 major cities. Quality urban environments do indeed contribute to happiness among residents.

“People are often connected to quality places that are cultural and distinctive. Not all neighborhoods are the same. Some are designed and built to foster or enable connections. Other are built to discourage them (e.g., a gated model) or devolve to become places that are antisocial because of crime or other negative behaviors.”

Death to suburbia. I have nothing against truly rural communities, it is the sea of despair and mediocrity in between that is the problem.
2012-07-13: I have said as much for 10 years

Nearly everything that these families had striven for — material possessions, good jobs, extracurricular enrichment for their kids — made them wholly miserable.

Dog domestication

Canines have had 36 ka to co-evolve with humans. Plenty of time for canines to domesticate humans as a food source, mainly via the cunning puppy dog eyes.
2012-12-06: How to make dogs from foxes in 8 generations (and “dragons” from foxes)

2018-12-15: This fictionalization of the domestication of wolves was surprisingly good.

2020-06-06: Foxes becoming dog-like

When the foxes moved from the forest to city habitats, they began to evolve doglike traits, potentially setting themselves on the path to domestication.

2022-02-08: Dog / Human co-domestication

Based on claims that dogs are less aggressive and show more sophisticated socio-cognitive skills compared with wolves, dog domestication has been invoked to support the idea that humans underwent a similar ‘self-domestication’ process. Dogs do not show increased socio-cognitive skills and they are not less aggressive than wolves. Rather, compared with wolves, dogs seek to avoid conflicts, specifically with higher ranking conspecifics and humans, and might have an increased inclination to follow rules, making them amenable social partners. These conclusions challenge the suitability of dog domestication as a model for human social evolution and suggest that dogs need to be acknowledged as animals adapted to a specific socio-ecological niche as well as being shaped by human selection for specific traits.

Selfdriving regulation

The benefits of driverless cars are potentially significant. The typical American spends an average of 100 hours a year in traffic; imagine using that time in better ways — by working or just having fun. The irksome burden of commuting might be lessened considerably. Furthermore, computer-driven cars could allow for tighter packing of vehicles on the road, which would speed traffic times and allow a given road or city to handle more cars. Trips to transport goods might dispense with drivers altogether, and rental cars could routinely pick up customers… The point is not that such cars could be on the road in large numbers tomorrow, but that we ought to give the cars — and other potential innovations — a fair shot so that a prototype can become a commercial product someday. Michael Mandel, an economist with the Progressive Policy Institute, compares government regulation of innovation to the accumulation of pebbles in a stream. At some point too many pebbles block off the water flow, yet no single pebble is to blame for the slowdown. Right now the pebbles are limiting investment in future innovation.

cities could double with robotic cars, all else being equal.

Innovation across Cities

New York is quite an average city, marginally richer than its size might predict, not very inventive and quite safe (267th in violent crime). too many banksters, in other words.

Larger cities are disproportionately the centers of innovation, wealth and crime. We use these general urban laws to develop new urban metrics that disentangle dynamics at different scales and provide true measures of local urban performance. New rankings of cities and a novel and simpler perspective on urban systems emerge. We find that local urban dynamics display long-term memory, so cities under or outperforming their size expectation maintain such (dis)advantage for decades. Spatiotemporal correlation analyses reveal a novel functional taxonomy of US metropolitan areas that is generally not organized geographically but based instead on common local economic models, innovation strategies and patterns of crime.

20 Minutes in Manhattan

From the social gathering place of the city stoop to Washington Square Park, Sorkin’s walk takes the reader on a wry, humorous journey past local characters, neighborhood stores and bodegas, landmark buildings, and overlooked streets. His perambulations offer him—and the reader—opportunities to not only engage with his surroundings but to consider a wide range of issues that fascinate Sorkin as an architect, urbanist, and New Yorker. Whether he is despairing at street garbage or marveling at elevator etiquette, 20 Minutes in Manhattan offers a testing ground for his ideas of how the city can be newly imagined and designed, addressing such issues as the crisis of the environment, free expression and public space, historic preservation, and the future of the neighborhood as a concept.

the new jane jacobs