Regulators
- Posted by ryan on January 23rd, 2009 filed in Cities
Matt has a nice post up on mandated parking minimums (can I say minima without being laughed at?), and he comments that a default position toward free markets is a pretty good rule of thumb. I agree with that, and I think the regulatory burden in many urban areas is, in general, far too high. For instance, we have absurd density limits. It’s often illegal to build the kinds of urban neighborhoods people love — mixed-use, dense, street-fronting, with ground-floor retail, etc. Despite the fact that I own my condo, I am not allowed to rent it out (thanks to FHA rules for the condo building) and even if those rules weren’t in place, I’d have to go through an annoying business license and permitting process. In many District neighborhoods, there is unmet demand for restaurants and bars, because the city has placed a hard limit on the number of available restaurants and bars. On the list goes.
Anyway, I saw in Google reader that libertarian intellectual Will Wilkinson had shared Matt’s post, presumably because he agreed with it. And indeed, this is one of those times when libertarians and liberals can find common cause. On the other hand, most of Cato’s planner types vigorously defend suburban sprawl and highway construction, and vigorously oppose smart growth and transit construction, despite the obvious point that it takes an immense web of regulations and subsidies to support rapid suburban and exurban growth.
I don’t really know what my point is, other than libertarians have a funny idea about what constitutes “government intervention”, and when such intervention is appropriate.
January 23rd, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Ryan, Yeah I agree with Matt. For my part, I find transportation and urban policy really confusing. I’d like to see a very different system than the one we have. But the one we have is fairly path-dependent in both a descriptive and prescriptive sense. Once a certain infrastructure is in place, people make all sorts of investments around it that creates strong incentives to keep it in place. And then, if you’re evaluating the short-to-medium-term efficiency of policy alternatives, the benefits of even moderate changes to the status quo end up needing to be very big to overcome the costs of a shift in direction, given that people have so much already invested in the way things are. That’s my guess as why you tend to find some libertarian planning types peculiarly in favor of lots of highways and exurban growth.
January 24th, 2009 at 1:00 am
Count me as another libertarian who’s not into our current profligate highway spending. But I think it bears mentioning that you wanted to ban an urban parking lot a few days ago.
Point being, I’m completely on board with eliminating asinine height/redevelopment restrictions on density, mixed-use development, etc. But banning urban surface lots–indeed, imposing restrictions on land use–is just as economically inefficient.
January 24th, 2009 at 11:18 am
I’m not a libertarian.
The notion that any and all land use restrictions are inefficient is a little extreme. We should allow someone to put a toxic waste dump in the middle of a busy city? With a surface lot, the principle is the same; the lot imposes costs on surrounding businesses and residents. I’m sure we could work out a fancy pricing system to prevent its construction, but in this case, it’s much easier for the regulatory authorities to simply nix the lot.
January 26th, 2009 at 1:31 am
A libertarian would argue that nuisance laws or polution laws would be more appropriate solutions to the toxic waste dump in the middle of a busy city than land use regulations.
Also, surface lots / land speculation can play a valuable part in vibrant urban environments, as I argue here: http://marketurbanism.com/2009/01/22/taxing-land-speculation/
But in a world where automobile transport isn’t highly subsidized, and minimum parking isn’t mandated, surface lots would be less common…
January 30th, 2009 at 12:30 am
I think the free market already has a very strong deterrent to toxic waste markets in the middle of cities without resorting to nuisance or pollution laws: a toxic waste dump could never generate the kind of revenue that would allow its owner to pay inner-city rents. Whereas a person benefits from being near other people (i.e., commercial and residential property like people), a piece of toxic waste doesn’t give a shit if it’s next to a Brooklyn brownstone or in the middle of the desert. No rational profit-seeking entrepreneur would ever put a dump or any sort of heavy industry in a city, even in the absence of zoning and pollution regulations.