Utopian urbanists and the will of God

Here's a hypothetical discussion I'd like you consider, not because it could ever happen but because I think it makes an interesting thought experiment.

Imagine we're sharing a cup of coffee with Edward Glaeser and we make them the following proposal: let's take a large metropolitan area in the South or West and just zone the hell out of that puppy, set aside huge swathes of land right through the middle of the city, allow no development whatsoever, not even any roads except for a couple of elevated highways.

I predict that Glaeser would object strenuously to the suggestion. He would probably start things off by waxing eloquently on the evils of zoning, then decry the inefficiency of wasting land that could potentially house millions of city dwellers.

Suitable chastised we drop that idea and change the subject, asking him what cities in the South or West we should look to as models. I'll make a second prediction: he would cite either Seattle or San Francisco (and possibly both), praising them for their density, walkability and lack of sprawl.

The trouble is that all of these appealing aspects are pretty much a direct result of large swathes of undeveloped land that cover large parts of these area, swathes that can be driven across only by way of a handful of elevated highways.

Of course, it's awfully easy to be unfair to someone when you're writing his dialogue for him. It's quite possible that I've misrepresented Glaeser's positions on one or both of my predictions. Still, when I read Glaeser, I can't shake the impression that he's not just suggesting policy changes that can make things better; he's talking about a utopian product of libertarian ideals.Because of this I get the feeling that a city building around a body of water is fundamentally different than a city building around a piece of zoned land, even if the end result is the same. (Is it even possible for the end result to be the same? That's a topic for another post)

None of this makes Glaeser's analyses bad or diminishes any of his many good ideas, but when it comes to setting policy, utopianists always make me nervous.

Subtracted cities -- the art of falling gracefully

A few years ago, I was doing some work for a young company that had developed a reputation as a growth stock. As I became privy to more of the company's long-term plans, I started to wonder about the sustainability of its strategy. The company seemed to be counting on sustaining growth rates that would soon put us over 100% of the market.

I once mentioned this to a colleague who had drank deeply of the Kool-aid. I expected one of two responses: either he would find this troubling or he would point out a flaw in my argument. He did neither. Instead he just shrugged and smiled and assured me that when we reached that point the people who ran the company would simply find a way to "innovate out of the problem."

It's easy to understand the appeal of growth but good planning and management also have to be able to handle plateaus and even declines. This is true for industries like the newspaper business. It's also true for cities.

From Deborah Potter via Richard Green by way of Mark Thoma:

Detroit stands as the ultimate expression of industrial depopulation. The Motor City offers traffic-free streets, burned-out skyscrapers, open-prairie neighborhoods, nesting pheasants, an ornate-trashed former railroad station, vast closed factories, and signs urging "Fists, Not Guns." A third of its 139 square miles lie vacant. In the 2010 census it lost a national-record-setting quarter of the people it had at the millennium: a huge dip not just to its people, but to anxious potential private- and public-sector investors.

Is Detroit an epic outlier, a spectacular aberration or is it a fractured finger pointing at a horrific future for other large shrinking cities? Cleveland lost 17 percent of its population in the census, Birmingham 13 percent, Buffalo 11 percent, and the special case of post-Katrina New Orleans 29 percent. The losses in such places and smaller ones like Braddock, Penn.; Cairo, Ill.; or Flint, Mich., go well beyond population. In every recent decade, houses, businesses, jobs, schools, entire neighborhoods -- and hope -- keep getting removed.

The subtractions have occurred without plan, intention or control of any sort and so pose daunting challenges. In contrast, population growth or stability is much more manageable and politically palatable. Subtraction is haphazard, volatile, unexpected, risky. No American city plan, zoning law or environmental regulation anticipates it. In principle, a city can buy a deserted house, store or factory and return it to use. Yet which use? If the city cannot find or decide on one, how long should the property stay idle before the city razes it? How prevalent must abandonment become before it demands systematic neighborhood or citywide solutions instead of lot-by-lot ones?

Subtracted cities can rely on no standard approaches. Such places have struggled for at least two generations, since the peak of the postwar consumer boom. Thousands of neighborhoods in hundreds of cities have lost their grip on the American dream. As a nation, we have little idea how to respond. The frustratingly slow national economic recovery only makes conditions worse by suggesting that they may become permanent.

Subtracted cities rarely begin even fitful action until perhaps half the population has left. Thus generations can pass between first big loss and substantial action. Usually the local leadership must change before the city's hopes for growth subside to allow the new leadership to work with or around loss instead of directly against it. By then, the tax base, public services, budget troubles, labor forces, morale and spirit have predictably become dismal. To reverse the momentum of the long-established downward spiral requires extraordinary effort. Fatalism is no option: Subtracted cities must try to reclaim control of their destinies. ...