How tax policy affects sprawl (pdf)

How Overregulation Creates Sprawl (Even in a City without Zoning)

In Praise of Annandale

How much did highways really matter for suburbanization?

Did highways cause suburbanization? (Answer: somewhat, but blight-flight is more important.)

Conniptions on urban economics

The glibertarian position is that smoking bans in restaurants and bars are a violation of the property rights of the bar and restaurant owners, and therefore, the choice to ban smoking ought ot beleft to the individual establishments; the more economically-minded will say that if the market does not produce non-smoking bars (or restaurants), it’s because people don’t care enough about a non-smoking environment to support such establishments.

That’s the glib position because it ignores all the other ways in which bars and restaurants (especially those which serve alcohol) are regulated by the government at various levels. Everywhere in the U.S., local or state governments have enormous powers to regulate alcohol sales and consumption. It’s more expensive to open a bar than to open another retail establishment which doesn’t serve alcohol – in California, a new liquor license can cost upwards of $12,000 (pdf), plus all the monthly fees charged, and the local police have the arbitrary power to deny a liquor license for pretty much any reason. The more thoughtful libertarian will say that of course, all this regulation forces bar owners to be more conservative about their business plan, limiting the appearance of non-smoking bars and restaurants (though with higher-end restaurants, the risk is lower, and non-smoking resturants are uncommon, but not rare, where there is no smoking ban). What the more thoughtful libertarian doesn’t have a good answer for is how to get from here to there – removing the morass of regulations on alcohol sales is well-nigh impossible, and to all except the hard-core libertarian, it’s probably undesireable, too – we may not want to return to this situation:

Out of a total of 95,968 houses he found the following: brew-houses 171, inns 207, taverns 447, ale-houses 5975, brandy-shops 8659; total number of licensed houses for the retail sale of liquor 15,288, of which considerably more than one-half were spirit bars. The population was about three-quarters of a million. About one house in every six was licensed at this time, and that in spite of attempts; made to check the traffic by restrictive acts passed in 1728-1729.

This result was presumably the result of a very liberal liquor licensing regime; one which most libertarians wouldn’t complain too much about.

Granted that we’re not likely to return to that world – where there was a drinking establishment for every 50 people – we have to decide what policies will best serve the interests of the public. A large part of the public has a weak interest in eating and drinking out where there isn’t cigarette smoke, while smaller parts of the public have stronger interests in eating and drinking out where they can smoke or where there is no smoke. The barkeepers and restauranteurs, who are often large taxpayers and otherwise pillars of the community, have an interest in not losing their business due to ill-advised regulation, and the public (and the police) have an interest in not having laws and regulations which are widely flouted in public.

The conservative city councillor will look at all these factors for his own town, and decide what the values and mores of the people who live (and visit) will support.

Farrell and Bainbridge discuss the notions of fragile versus robust social consensus, expanding on an idea expressed by George Will in Statecraft as Soulcraft – changing laws can shape or change a moral consensus, but only if the existing consensus isn’t very strong against the changed laws. (Will’s example is the support that anti-discrimination laws gave to changing the American moral consensus to one which deplores racism, a fairly stuning reversal given the amount of time it took.) It appears that at least in much of the U.S. and Europe, there was not much support for the “rights of smokers”, and government changing the rules to limit those “rights” in favor of the “right” of non-smokers to forbid indoor smoking allowed a rather rapid change in social norms.

Three Thoughts On Early Cities
Libertarians Against Sprawl – anarcho-libertarians against sprawl…
Are You Going to San Francisco – advice on living in San Francisco.
Lessons from the Left: When Radicals Rule – For Thirty Years – Santa Monica.
Life Without Buildings architecture blog.
Make Little Plans – this could be the slogan for conservative local government.
A cuter form of sprawl
The Choice of Cities – how cities grow from slums.
Death of the Suburbs: Part Nauseum – the suburbs aren’t dying.
4 Cases Of How Tearing Down A Highway Can Relieve Traffic Jams (And Save Your City) – the case is somewhat overstated, but sometimes, fewer freeways do make things better.

This should be obvious to most reasonable people – any urban area whose population is growing can grow up, or out, or some combination of the two. The natural tendency is “both”, as the benefits of density are more compelling for some people than for others, and for some uses than for others. NIMBYism means artificially forcing that development to be more outward than upward, which means creating longer commutes, removing more land from farming or wildland than would otherwise happen, and other things which any consistent environmentalist would oppose.

However, conservatives aren’t automatically environmentalists any more than they’re automatically against environmentalist claims. NIMBYism, besides being anti-environmentalist, is also usually a huge violation of property rights – most NIMBYs are utterly unconcerned with compensating property owners for diminishing the value of their property.

Conservative governance will generally mean not messing with existing arrangements, except very carefully, and in ways which create real net benefits to the people governed, rather than just to one politically-favored group or another. Unlike the reactionary leftists which run Berkeley, conservatives will realize that their actions have consequences, and will take pains to minimize their negative impacts. So a conservative won’t add to NIMBY policies, but will also be careful in dismantling them. According to the article, Oakland is doing a rather poor job of deNIMBYing. Oakland may look conservative compared to neighboring Berkeley, but it’s been run by not-very-competent liberal-to-leftist politicians for over 40 years. No surprise that that as they decide collecting more bribes from developers the broader environment is more important than the squawks of the NIMBYs, they screw things up.

Conservatives have understood that social growth naturally takes place in an organic fashion, without the need for an overarching General Plan to be followed, and that while the results of organic growth are often less “efficient” than the results of planned growth, that the planned growth is often sterile, loses its human nature, and often harbors deep levels of chaos, and ultimately usually fails to produce the supposed economic efficiency it promised.

Organic growth is not without its own rules, and can be shaped by intelligent application of rules which respect the needs and capacities of the people who create the growth. As an example, look at the old centers of European cities versus American cities. A European city has, at its heart, a complex pattern of streets which run in all different directions, and often don’t run very far before taking a sharp bed or ending altogether. An American city (North or South American) often has at its heart a densely-built rectilinear grid of streets. Some of these streets continue far out into the newer parts of the city, though many end or break near the edge of “downtown”. But for cities which survived arrival of “modernist” city planning, both the European and the American downtown show a wide variety of scale and use, and economic and social life.

The imposition of a grid pattern on the basic layout of the city is a definite artificiality; one which was encouraged, if not mandated, by the laws governing cities built in America. But beyond encouraging or imposing a rectilinear grid of streets, most older cities grew organically, without attempts to confine different uses to different quarters of the city, and thus the artifical nature of the rectilinear grid does not limit the complexity of the city and thus render it sterile.

Conservative governance at its heart attempts to set the guidelines and basic rules which a society needs to function, and allow the society to grow organically within those limitations. This is true whether one is trying to govern New York City, or a village of a few hundred people.

One example comes from Concord, California, where I spent much of my childhood. When Concord first grew past its agricultural beginnings, it was mostly a working-class community. In the boom of the 1960s, it added a large middle class population, mostly in its newer areas, but there were some mixed neighborhoods. One difference in behavior between the middle class and the working class inhabitants is that the middle class do very little car repair in their driveway, and the repairs they do tend to be limited to single-afternoon projects. If there’s not someone under the hood of the car, it’s kept neatly closed up, looking driveable even if it isn’t. The working class, however, are more likely to have “project cars”, and to leave the work half-done from one weekend to the next. The sight of half-finished project cars, perhaps on cinderblocks or with large parts sitting on the lawn next to the car, tends to offend middle-class sensibilities. A group of middle-class voters, perhaps assisted by the auto-repair shops in town, managed to convince the City Council to impose strict regulation against leaving undriveable cars visible from the street. This led to a predictable explosion. As the law over-reached somewhat (it could arguably have made it illegal to change the oil in one’s driveway), it was eventually repealed, as it lacked sufficient support among even its intended beneficiaries, the middle class.

A typical middle-class householder finds the sight of broken-down cars on his neighbor’s front lawn to be offensive, while a typical working-class householder is more understanding, even if he would not leave a car out on his own lawn.

A conservative government would not have passed a law anywhere nearly as restrictive as Concord’s. There are some potential hazards from project cars, and a law which addressed dripping fluids, hazardous debris or other actual hazards would be reasonable. People who prefer to live in a neighborhood without cars up on blocks can find neighborhoods where the homeowners’ association bans cars on blocks (or garish christmas displays, or too-bright colors of house paint, etc.), and a conservative government won’t override such restrictions.

In general, people prefer to live around other people who share their values and tastes. A conservative government shouldn’t interfere with people sorting themselves this way, unless there are larger harms to be prevented. On the other hand, a conservative government shouldn’t advance the cause of uniformity by imposing burdens on people who aren’t imposing actual harms on the community.

Much has been written about how various interventions in the local housing and real estate markets have created the current pattern of suburbanization we see in the U.S. today – two links from my earlier post discuss how zoning and planning laws have created “unwalkable sprawl”, and made it difficult to impossible for people to vote with their dollars for more walkable communities. Another culprit was government-standardised mortgage packages, which favored a certain type of development over others.

There are a few problems with the libertarian idea of restoring a free market to land use as a way of solving various urban ills:

• Previous patterns of settlement and development were also shaped by government interventions in the land market.
• Path dependence is a bitch: undoing government interventions isn’t going to restore the status quo ante, and will create significant dislocations, no matter how carefully planned the unwinding.
• Governments at all levels interfere in the real property markets, and it’s just not politically practical to actually remove all those interventions; partial removal may very well exacerbate the problems we’d like to solve.

So rather than theorize about a utopian vision of pure free markets in land, conservatives (and libertarians) need to address which interventions are most harmful, and which interventions generally leave cities and towns better places to live, or at least which interventions would be most harmful to eliminate. The difference between a conservative and a libertarian will be that a conservative may believe that certain government direction or control on the free market is justifiable for its own sake, while a libertarian purist will tolerate those controls only on a temporary basis.

One example of an intervention which as a conservative I can support, which a libertarian will oppose, is smoking bans in restaurants and bars. The libertarian will say that bar and restaurant owners ought to be able to decide for themselves whether to permit smoking, and that the market will provide options between smoky and smoke-free restaurants. The conservative will point out that competitive pressures on restaurant owners led to a situation where essentially all bars and restaurants permitted smoking, leaving the 75% of non-smokers subjected to smoke in order to not lose the patronage of the 25% who do smoke. As a conservative, I believe this restriction ought to be applied at a local level, not a statewide or nationwide basis. Land use has plenty of collective action problems like this where some government action will significantly improve life for the majority.

With that said, here are a few intersting posts and articles from my recent browsing:
Car damage from bad roads. It’s worst in California, even though the weather is pretty gentle on pavement. This indicates government failure.
Do we need new urbanism to fix unwalkable sprawl?
A Tale of Two Exurbs
The evil of rent control
Stadtluft Macht Frei
Unbuilt Australia. City planning fantasies.
The Center For Land Use Interpretation Newsletter

Policing has its limits, even in a city or town which is supportive of crime-suppression efforts. There will never be enough money to pay for enough police to catch all criminals or to prevent all crime. Thus, the police have to set priorities, which means making value judgements, as well as having a realistic picture of what sorts of crime are actually happening. Incidentally, this is another reason policing is mostly run locally – different communities will have different problems and make different value judgements, and those ought to be respected.

So what should a conservative police policy look like? The stereotypical answer is “more cops, more jails”. In places which have been run by apologists for crime for a long time, that’s a good start, but that’s not always the right answer, and it isn’t a thorough enough answer.

The primary function of the police should be to maintain, by force when necessary, ordered liberty. A person who is dead is not free, and thus preventing (and punishing) murder ought to be the top priority of the police anywhere. In many communities, however, murder is not a significant problem, and even in those where it is, it is the most visible symptom of a larger disorder. So what else should the police be doing?

In short, suppressing violence and maintaining public order. Public order is difficult to define, and the definition may vary with community standards, but the police’s ultimate goal should be that an attractive young woman or a frail older woman can feel safe walking anywhere in town at any time. Suppressing violence is a large part of this, but it is not enough.

Prostitution and selling of intoxicants do not do great harm to the community at large when the business is conducted entirely behind closed doors. When these activities move out into the street, they hurt everyone around them, not just the people directly engaged in the transactions. A street where women advertise sex for sale is a street where every woman is at risk of being treated as if she were for sale; this is the real harm streetwalkers do to the community morals. Drug-dealing in the open creates an atmosphere of suspicion and menace, as passers-by are suspected of being informants for the police, especially if they refuse to buy; the risks of drug-dealing also puts large numbers of criminally-minded and armed people out on the street, raising the risks to anyone who might appear an easy target for robbery.

Drunkenness (or other intoxication), especially in large numbers, is another activity which causes much more harm to the community when it becomes public. A person who wishes to avoid the attention of people whose inhibitions have been chemically lowered can avoid marrying a drunk and stay out of bars; but if public drunkenness is not controlled by the police, that isn’t enough. In some communities, there may be a time and place for large public festivals where lots of people get a little drunk, but those should be very actively policed to make sure that harassment of people doesn’t get out of hand, and they should be well-planned and publicised, so people who wish to avoid them can easily do so.

In short, the police should be preserving liberty by preserving order. Street prostitutes, aggressive beggars, drunks, the mentally ill, and drug dealers reduce the liberties of others by presenting an implicit (and often explicit) threat to the peacable citizen who wander into their turf. By cleaning up the streets, potentially violent conflicts will be reduced.

There’s more to add, in future posts.