The Voluntary City: Choice, Community and Civil Society, edited by David Beito, Peter Gordon, and Alex Tabarrok. It's very much anti-zoning. Here you can look inside the book. I am genuinely puzzled by this progressive meme that GMU economists don't speak out adequately against zoning and in favor of more diverse, more vital, and more practical urban environments.
If you take away their memes, they won’t have anything left but the smug anger.
One book? That’s all you got?
How many books and articles do you think GMU scholars have written on the minimum wage (which affects less than 5% of all workers) or unions (probably less than a third at this point)?
Do you know of any libertarians who have written on the energy implications of zoning and other land use requirements? How about the history of America’s private mass transit systems?
Face it: the topic is understudied. And this is coming from a libertarian, not a progressive.
(Shameless plug: I am a contributer to a blog called Market Urbanism, whose main thesis is that the US government is vastly anti-urban and pro-sub/exurban.)
Maybe because the “meme” is true? Libertarians are the most vocal pro-sprawl group out there:
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-365es.html
http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v21n5/cpr-21n5.html
http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/2009/08/11/randal-otoole-assaults-myths-of-suburbia/
Notice how Caplan’s argument is essentially plagiarized from this second link? Why are libertarians such liars? Why is Tyler lying about this?
“one book” is plenty. How many books has Alex written on, say, rent control? Or on import tariffs? Or kidney sales or import quotas?
On some issues the “correct answer” is so obvious to one and all that you don’t really need to keep talking about it. The relevant points were all made in books written a long while ago which everyone today has read or absorbed through osmosis; there’s little need to write more until something comes up that threatens the existing set of social compromises and puts one of these issues back in play.
(Discussing minimum wage briefly came back into vogue when the Card study made it relevant again. Has anybody lately made a similar attempt to “prove” that zoning “works”?)
Bob,
How was the book? Pretty good?
Oh.
Best-
My impression wasn’t that Yglesias was claiming that GMU economists were supporting current zoning practices, but rather that they were praising the results those practices and attributing them to free markets. Maybe neither of those is true, but they aren’t the same thing.
The issue is that you’re much more likely to get libertarians worked up into a frothy rage about minimum wage, public transit, or denying global warming than you are to get them about zoning regulations. Even though zoning regulations affect far more people than any of the above. It comes down to tribalism, which we all fall victim to and which designates our priorities. Even the most hackish Democrat (politicians generally, in fact) is against deficits in boomtimes, but that’s pretty meaningless when a hundred projects are prioritized ahead of reducing the deficit.
Matt’s not arguing against the academic philosopher kings at GMU, but libertarianism as it actually exists and functions, on the ground and in the halls of Cato.
As I’ll explain below, you’ve confused Tyler’s comment about being against zoning with being against sprawl.
To explain Tyler’s confusion, these comments seem to illustrate that it comes down to being viewed as pro- or anti-sprawl, not being pro- or anti-zoning.
Randal O’Toole is passionately anti-zoning, as posts on his personal blog show. His policy recommendations are to remove zoning. However, Randal believes that the balance of zoning and other planning regulations are anti-suburban, and that removing them would increase what people call sprawl. He, however, believes that if that’s what people would want, it’s a good thing.
There are two different axes here: One can believe that regulations and zoning are good and bad, and separately one can believe that the current regulations and zoning are pro or anti suburb. This leads to four different groupings.
Libertarians like Ed Glaeser are against zoning and regulations, but think that in their absence there would be more density. Other libertarians like Randal are against zoning and regulations, but think in their absence there would be more suburbs.
Liberals who believe that most zoning and regulations favor suburbs and sprawl and those like Randal who believe that zoning and regulations operate against suburbs but who oppose zoning and regulations would seem to agree on policy recommendations. However, for some reason some seem to hate him all the same for what he thinks would happen absent those regulations. They agree on the cure, but Randal is apparently evil for believing that something different would happen absent regulations.
Another way of putting it is that libertarians are focused on the process and means and the evil of zoning and regulations themselves, but don’t care so much about whether people in a free market would choose suburbs or not. Liberals on the other hand seem much more likely to care about the ends and being morally against sprawl, and would rather be on the same team with someone with entirely different policy recommendations than someone with the same recommendations but believes that the results would be different.
Randal has no problems linking to Ed’s work, and highly praises it. This confuses people who hate sprawl and like Ed because he’s on the side of the anti-sprawl angels but hate Randal because he defends sprawl.
Simply because Ed recognizes the very real benefits of sprawl doesn’t mean that he doesn’t think that more density would be better, and that cities would be more dense (and, hence, the country’s population would live in cities more) in the absence of regulation. Sprawl has grown in particular because edge areas have had less regulation than central cities. Yes, he thinks that the lower housing prices are a good for many families, but he thinks it would be even better if central cities allowed their housing stock to increase and their housing prices fall to reasonable levels.
Consider his papers The Causes and Consequences of land use regulations: Evidence from Greater Boston, The Greenness of Cities, and so on from his website. Furthermore, personal interviews reveal his preferences for cities and more density, and that he thinks both that it would result without regulation and zoning and that it would be a good thing.
Have you read his book? He’s against the vast majority of current zoning and regulation and in favor of granting more building permits. The percentage of current zoning and housing regulation that he’s in favor of is so small that I find it an acceptable shorthand to say that he is against regulation and zoning.
Progressives tend to be for or against particular zoning laws depending whether they think the laws will favor urban or suburban development: urban good, suburban bad. Libertarians tend to simply be against zoning laws, regardless of whether they would favor urban or suburban development. (Emphasis here on tend, because significant externalities make the issue non-trivial.) Progressives may see this as being “pro-sprawl” (i.e. pro-suburban), but it’s really just an aversion to regulating a specific outcome. If market outcomes are urban, that’s fine by me.
That said, it’s a bit fantastic to imagine that the market-prefered bundle, the selection of which is being thwarted by government regulation, would have the vast majority of us happily living in dense cities. How did this come about? Did lobbiests from the lawn product manufacturers convince all the politicians, over the objections of their constitutants, to force us all into the suburbs? No. The reality is that a whole lot of people (probably a majority) prefer to live in a suburban environment.
Progressives who want to encourage urban living would do better to find ways to replicate in the city some of the things people like about the suburbs, instead of trying to convince government to make the suburbs less attractive. But there is a bit of a culture war here, and suburbans are the enemy, and in a war you want to dominate the enemy, not win him over.
Is he going to issue a retraction or something? He was pretty flat-out wrong on this one.
Really guys? Does everyone really think we only live in suburbs because of zoning laws?
I grew up in the suburbs. By the way, suburb is very wide reaching adage. It can be an extremely rural but not quite “rural” setting or an extremely urban but not really “urban” setting. It can be cookie-cutter Las Vegas neighborhoods that make you want to vomit to beautiful diverse towns.
In the suburbs I can have a pool, a variety of pets, privacy, and a beautiful view. Or I can have a trashy lawn, keep all my old automobiles I’ve ever owned, and keep a goat to eat my beer cans I throw off my porch. That is the freedom that Americans want.
Don’t you realize that every rich European has a beautiful place in the country? The suburb is the middle class version of that! Everyone wants it. Your lying to yourself if you think most people really just want to live in a 1200sf apartment downtown. Sure, they might want to live there sometimes, but they also want their villa. Come on, I am currently living in the city and loving it but let me tell you I will be back in the suburbs (more on the rural than urban side) before long. I can’t wait to have the means to set up my space as I want it. To keep lots of pets and have cool and unique trees. To have privacy and quiet again. Fresh air.
Not every suburb is amazing. Stop comparing all suburbs to prime city locations. There are really terrible urban living spaces and really terrible suburban living, even if they are terrible for different reasons THAT is the comparison. Just like the beautiful suburbs are the comparisons to the beautiful urban spaces.
Suburban style cities are a recent development, brought about by the automobile, the worldwide population explosion, and zoning codes. The zoning codes are why this style is much more prevalent in the US than elsewhere.
It isn’t really “much more” prevalent in the US than in other wealthy democracies. Europe is on the same path of sprawl and suburbanization as the U.S. For several reasons (less land, higher gas taxes, lower incomes) Europeans probably won’t become quite as sprawled and car-oriented as Americans, but they’re clearly following the same basic pattern.
As for zoning, if there were sufficient demand for denser development that was being blocked by zoning codes, people would vote to change the zoning codes to allow the desired development. They did it in Portland. They did it in Arlington. They can do it anywhere. It’s not happening because there isn’t enough demand.
As for zoning, if there were sufficient demand for denser development that was being blocked by zoning codes, people would vote to change the zoning codes to allow the desired development.
I love it how libertarians’ traditional critiques of government regulation completely collapse when it comes to zoning. Somehow because the area of governance is small, that means that anything that’s legislated is as good of an indicator of market demand as the workings of the free market itself?
Laws come about for a reason. If a municipality (indeed, ALL municipalities) has a decades long history of passing regulations prohibiting density, you can bet that a couple of people at some point wanted to build more densely than this requirement.
I believe in markets, including markets where votes buy the government.
If private agreements met the needs of the majority of the voters, the voters would buy private agreements. Instead the private agreements tends to leave the voters holding the bag, so the voters buy someone who is selling a solution that sounds like it will solve the problem.
Take for example the suburban housing developments: in nearly everyone of them, the private agreement was that that blacks, Jews, Italians, and the many other undesirable non-white would be excluded.
Over time, voters discovered that there were many reasons for excluding people, like not being a white male, so now 60% or more of the voters were excluded. So, the private agreements were nullified but the voter buying a public system.
Of course, the public system finds the means to build coalitions of minority groups, racists, people without kids, anti-government types, and so on, and now 4 acre lot zoning accomplishes the same thing as the private agreement without the red lining.
To argue that the public system of zoning is what created the racial or class or income divide that turned many cities and communities into rundown ghettos is to ignore history. You can find many areas where the poor are confined to living by the factories and dumps pumping out toxics and separate white enclaves, and no zoning existed when these divides were created. That zoning cements these divides should be no surprise.
But the zoning and other public solutions followed private agreements that had already acted to implement the disagreeable aspects, such as racial and class divides,and didn’t cause or create these divides.
But returning to my original point: I believe in markets for just about everything, including the institutions that people use to implement the way we interact. Government is the system that the people overwhelmingly buy.
While a small number of people don’t like the fact that every place in the US has a product that is just a variation on a government model, how is this different from the current situation where you can’t find good quality shoes in the US, but just poorly crafted, over priced shoes made in factories by cheap labor with profits going to the corporation that spends five times on marketing and advertising than on design and controlling for quality and value.
The percentage of current zoning and housing regulation that he’s in favor of is so small that I find it an acceptable shorthand to say that he is against regulation and zoning.
It’s pretty good.
Comments on this entry are closed.