The LA City Council adopted a measure yesterday to prevent new fast food restaurants from opening in South LA. The theory is that this will enhance the diversity of dining options in the area in a manner conducive to public health. Cato’s David Boaz throws a fit:

But I was particularly struck by this statement from Councilwoman Jan Perry, sponsor of the measure: “I believe this is a victory for the people of South and southeast Los Angeles, for them to have greater food options.”

Greater food options? All the council is doing is banning some restaurants. How will that give residents more options? Maybe — maybe — other restaurants will open in South Los Angeles because fewer fast food restaurants will open over the coming year. But residents will still not have “greater food options,” just different options, courtesy of those who know best.

I don’t find Perry’s reasoning all that baffling. It seems that the most profitable kind of food service business to run in South LA is a fast food business. It further seems that this is the case to such an extent that there are almost no sit-down restaurants in the area. But it’s possible that a sit-down restaurant in South LA could be profitable, while still being a less efficient use of the space than would a fast food outlet. Prevent new fast food outlets from opening and some sit-down restaurants may open to fill the gap. That will probably result in a smaller overall number of eating establishments than would have existed without the ban, but a greater diversity of choices since the hypothetical new fast food outlets would be similar to the existing options.

Now that said, it’s far from clear to me that this is a good idea. The notion is to reduce obesity by bringing healthier choices into play. But what’s banned is “any establishment which dispenses food for consumption on or off the premises, and which has the following characteristics: a limited menu, items prepared in advance or prepared or heated quickly, no table orders and food served in disposable wrapping or containers.” That doesn’t have anything to do with the nutritional content of the food being served and as such seems unlikely to have any kind of dramatic impact on the variable they’re trying to nail. My neighborhood’s beloved Florida Avenue Grill isn’t fast food, but it’s not health food either.

One of the oddest aspects of some of the debates over the Bush administration and various forms of legal due process has been how unkosher it’s viewed to suggest that the sort of powers Bush wants might be used abusively, in the manner of a Richard Nixon. It’s odd because the rules Bush is trying to discard were put in place for the very specific reason that the Watergate investigation led to revelations of a much larger pattern of abuse. It’s a pattern that reached a high point under Nixon, but wherein Nixon was clearly building on the abuses of his predecessors. So it wouldn’t by any means be unprecedented for the Bush administration to use, say, surveillance powers to spy on political adversaries.

Meanwhile, as Paul Krugman says surely the recent revelations coming out of the Justice Department should be relevant here. People were being hired and fired for career positions on explicitly partisan political grounds. That’s serious wrongdoing. And it’s at the Justice Department. That’s not evidence that partisan abuses were happening at the NSA, but combined with the history it should surely raise an eyebrow or two and in a rational world would be fueling demands for a more thorough examination of what the administration was really up to.

PPI has launched a new blog, MovingUp USA on issues of poverty and social mobility. Over there Katie Campbell has a post on “States and Cities Take a Lead in Poverty Reduction” noting various things and then arguing that “Due to the skyrocketing federal deficit, which Jonathan Weisman of the Washington Post writes today will grow to a whopping $490 billion dollars this year, it looks like states and cities will have to continue to lead the way and find creative solutions to reduce poverty and boost social mobility regardless of who wins the White House this fall.”

Since urban areas tend to contain both pockets of poor people and pockets of liberals, it’s to some extent inevitable that city governments will wind up taking the lead on poverty issues. But for the sake of poor people, we shouldn’t be content to leave it that way. On the local level, after all, the easiest and most effective way to eliminate poverty is just to make it too expensive for poor people to live there. Your typical low-poverty suburb hasn’t discovered some miracle formula that turns all its citizens non-poor. Instead, land in the suburb is relatively expensive and its enacted regulations that prevent you from building small houses, from building dense apartment buildings, from crowding a lot of people into a single family home, etc. Basically, if you make it illegal to do anything that would make it possible for a poor person to rent a home in your town, you can ensure yourself a low poverty rate.

This could work in big cities, too. New York City could eliminate its existing public housing, enact regulations to make it even harder than it currently is to build new housing units, and end rent control and soon enough the number of poor people would plummet. But you wouldn’t be actually helping anyone this way, you’d just be pushing them out. Conversely, a city that does maintain a reasonable level of services for poor people (and note that the ability to get around without a car is an important service for many poor Americans) will likely become something of a magnet for the impoverished. Even — or in some ways especially — if such a city establishes a track record of helping people get on their feet on move up the economic ladder, its actual poverty rate may not decline as new waves of poor people show up.

Which isn’t to say that state and local government can’t do good things. Often they do very good things. But ultimately the incentives facing a lot of local governments are bad, and the resources aren’t distributed in the right way. National leadership is vital to making really sustainable progress, especially considering that the number of people in need of help goes up in downturns at just the time when state and local governments usually need to cut spending.

Photo by Flickr user padraic used under a Creative Commons license