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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37970 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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YIMBY sentiment on this forum has (I think) been mostly focused on increasing the density of existing residential zones. However, it may be worth noting that there is an alternative: converting existing agricultural or unused land to low-density residential use (i. e., continuing to "sprawl"). In this article, a former employee of the libertarian Cato Institute accuses that organization of focusing exclusively on high-density housing, and of smearing as racist people who are not interested in long-term high-density living and clamor for more single-family houses. (In his view, upzoning imposed from the top down is not libertarian, because the existing owners have a sort of property right in the zoning of their neighborhood as a substitute for deed restrictions that could or should have been used instead of zoning codes.)

I don't see how that is an "alternative." Is that not exactly what we have been doing for the past 70 years? The YIMBY argument is precisely that that mode of development is bad for economic, social, and aesthetic reasons. You can disagree with that, but presenting this model as being on an equal playing field with high-density urbanism when it has had a decisive advantage in zoning laws and government subsidies for decades seems a little odd.

Is that not exactly what we have been doing for the past 70 years?

In the author's view, no. Rather, many cities have used zoning (e. g., urban-growth boundaries) to prevent sprawl.

During my first year, Cato published my 416-page book, The Best-Laid Plans, which showed that urban planners had an irrational mania for density that was making housing less affordable in regions that attempted to stop the growth of low-density suburbs. In the same year, Cato published a paper that I wrote showing that San Jose’s urban-growth boundary was rapidly densifying that city to the detriment of congestion and affordability, along with two other papers on housing issues.

In 1990, a planner named Douglas Porter urged planners to use metropolitan governments to halt urban sprawl and force people to live in higher densities, policies that became known as smart growth.

The self-described market urbanists also fail to recognize the role the suburbs play in keeping housing affordable in the cities. Land is more expensive in the central cities than in the suburbs, but so long as the suburbs are allowed to grow, they will stay affordable and the central cities will remain affordable as well, though still more expensive than the suburbs. If growth-management policies prevent the suburbs from meeting housing demand, then prices will rise dramatically in both the cities and suburbs. By focusing on the cities instead of the suburbs, they arrive at wrong-headed policies such as eliminating single-family zoning.

If we're focusing on California, the system there is uniquely dysfunctional due to a confluence of factors, including the onerous costs of environmental and other assessments.

Japan is an example of a place with cheap rents in dense cities; they have simply built enough apartments to keep up with demand.

If we extrapolate both models, building outwards will run into land use problems much sooner, as the space taken up by roads and parking lots will crowd out homes and businesses, unless we can decentralize work entirely so that not everyone is trying to drive downtown in the mornings from farther and farther away.

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