By Matthew Cameron

Yesterday, The Washington Post reported Michelle Obama is teaming up with Wal-Mart, Walgreens, Supervalu, and a number of regional supermarkets to build stores in what are known as “food deserts,” low-income areas that have little-to-no access to fresh fruits and vegetables. The logic behind this initiative is that it’s tough for poor people to eat healthy if the only places in their neighborhoods that sell food are convenience stores and corner markets. Therefore, building supermarkets that are stocked with a variety of fresh produce ought to improve the health of the people who live in these neighborhoods.

Now, there’s plenty of research out there that would appear to validate this assumption. This study, for example, found that people who live near supermarkets have better health outcomes than those who live closer to convenience stores or small-scale grocers. Another suggests that individuals who regularly shop at supermarkets consume more fruits and vegetables than those who purchase food elsewhere.

But arguably these studies are just showing that poor people are both unhealthy, and tend to live in neighborhoods that lack grocery stores. Would more supermarkets, as such, actually make a difference?

A study by Donald Rose and Rickell Richards of Tulane University comes closer to answering this question. It looks at whether easy access to supermarkets correlates to fruit and vegetable consumption. Importantly, the study’s sample consists solely of food stamp recipients, who are overwhelmingly low-income. This controls for the various socioeconomic characteristics that confound the other studies. Additionally, the authors’ calculations accounted for other factors such as nutritional awareness, employment status and parental status that could have skewed their findings. The result:

After controlling for confounding variables, easy access to supermarket shopping was associated with increased household use of fruits (84 grams per adult equivalent per day; 95% confidence interval). Distance from home to food store was inversely associated with fruit use by households. Similar patterns were seen with vegetable use, though associations were not significant. [...]

Nationally representative studies show that fruit consumption is low in the USA, with an average of only 1.5 servings consumed per person per day. Given this panorama, our results, suggesting a 1 serving size difference in fruit consumption due to store access, mean that store access is an important issue, even if only for the limited portion of the Food Stamp population with an access problem. While our results on the relationship of store access to vegetable consumption are less certain, the latter continues to be a dietary problem.

Obviously, improving access to fresh produce isn’t a panacea for all of the disadvantages — time and budget constraints, lack of nutritional education, etc. — that the poor face. But Rose and Richards’ report should encourage supermarkets and the Obama administration to press on with this initiative as a plank in the broader fight against health inequality.

That blockbuster story comes via Dave Alpert:

Line said the Mall is covered by the same laws as other national parks such as the Grand Canyon, Yellowstone, and Yosemite. Putting a bike station on the Mall would violate the National Historic Preservation Act because a station would be seen as going against the historical purpose of the Mall and its monuments.

“The National Park Service reflects an American heritage and what a particular park means to American citizens, not (necessarily) at (the) convenience of select individuals,” Line said.

Oh, wait, they’re talking about a Capital Bikeshare station not about the highway ramps and automobile-only asphalt. That stuff’s there because of American heritage rather than the convenience of select car owning individuals.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, responding to me on the case of a Washington, DC landowner “forced” to sell her property because her investment has massively increased in value and she now needs to pay high taxes on it does, I think, hint at a real alternative to progressive neoliberalism:

I actually think it’s fairly easy to understand Johnson’s beef. She likes her neighborhood as it is. She may well be able to “sell high,” but the fact is she doesn’t want to sell at all. She probably would love to see her property values rise, but the neighborhood isn’t simply, for her, a financial instrument–it’s an emotional one. In that sense, Johnson isn’t very different than millions of other humans who invest in neighborhoods.

Her contention that the city is “driving us out of here.” is very much debatable. But it’s worth noting that a class of owners with a commitment to something more than a naked financial return is a good thing. When Matt asserts that the city is trying to make H Street a “desirable place to live,” I am compelled to ask “desirable for whom?” I’m not being obtuse here–I understand, in the aggregate, his larger point. But very often people find a kind of value in their living condition that eludes socioeconomic data.

That makes perfect sense. But I do think it’s worth saying that the alternative being put on the table here is a conservative one, and the mere fact that the successful investor who doesn’t like high property tax rates is black doesn’t change that fact. After all, what concrete policy steps could the DC government take to avoid more people being stuck with the problem of rising property values that lead to higher property taxes. Well, I see two:

1. The city could stop investing in improved public services and public safety.
2. The city could reduce property taxes, especially on well-heeled property owners.

That’s not a wild-eyed or insane policy agenda by any means. Indeed, it’s the fiscal agenda of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And I think it’s good for progressives to pay attention to things like Johnson’s story, since she can perhaps help people to better understand why an agenda of spending cuts and property tax cuts can appeal to a broad group of people and not just a tiny cabal of Koch-funded conspirators. That said, here in the DC context, we should recognize this kind of communitarian critique of liberalism for what it is — a conservative critique.

(cc photo by electronavalanche)

My baseline view is that American population will grow over the next 50 years, so we’ll need more of all kinds of housing. Big cities, small towns, whatever. More. But it’s interesting to speculate about the balance. Karl Smith describes his “growing interest in radical exurbanism”:

The idea that developments in telecommunication will allow people to live far away but still have business relationships.

We might then imagine living arrangements evolving solely around being near family and friends. A sort of extensive network of small towns, each containing people highly sorted to wanting to live within the norms of that small town and with the people of that town.

I think that’s very appealing in many ways. But I doubt it will predominate. In the future, the trend toward increased mechanization of manufactured goods production will continue. And the trend toward digital goods being extremely cheap and plentiful will also continue. That means, more or less necessarily, that the majority of people will be involved in selling face-to-face services to each other. What kind of services? I’m not sure. Cops, yoga instructors, chefs, and preschool teachers all seem like plausible candidates. And there will necessarily be some advantages to scaling that kind of thing up. In a radical exurban community there might only be the population base for a Papa John’s. A larger community that supports a Papa John’s, a Pizza Hut, and a Dominoes will be better able to match idiosyncratic customer preferences with available variety of crappy national chain pizza. Consequently, the larger community has higher productivity in the crappy chain pizza sector (for the record, Papa John’s is the right choice).

And this same dynamic applies to a wide range of face-to-face services in a way that militates in favor of some kind of metropolitan living.

Georges Tanguay and Ian Gingras give us “Gas Price Variation and Urban Sprawl: An Empirical Analysis of the 12 Largest Canadian Metropolitan Areas.” The results are about what you would expect—cheap gas inspired gasoline-intensive development patterns: “On average, a 1% increase in gas prices has caused: i) a 0.32% increase in the population living in the inner city and ii) a 1.28% decrease in low-density housing units.”

Conversely, higher incomes make gasoline more affordable and are associated with increased sprawl.

Roderick M. Hills, Jr. and David Schleicher have a new paper:

The politics of urban land use frustrate even the best intentions. A number of cities have made strong political commitments to increasing their local housing supply in the face of a crisis of affordability and availability in urban housing. However, their decisions to engage in “up-zoning,” or increases in the areas in which new housing can be built, are often offset by even more “down-zoning” or laws that decrease the ability of residents in a designated area to build new housing as-of-right. The result is that housing availability does not increase by anywhere near the promises of elected officials.

In this essay, we argue that the difficulty cities face in increasing local housing supply is a result of the seriatim nature of local land use decisions. Because each down-zoning decision has only a small effect on the housing supply, citywide forces spend little political capital fighting them, leaving the field to neighborhood groups who care deeply. Further, because down-zoning decisions are made in advance of any proposed new development, the most active interest group in favor of new housing – developers – takes a pass on lobbying. The result is an uneven playing field in favor of down-zoning.

Drawing on examples of “extra-congressional procedure” like federal base closing commissions and the Reciprocal Trade Act of 1933, we argue that local governments can solve this problem by changing the procedure by which they consider zoning decisions. Specifically, they should pass laws that require the city to create a local “zoning budget” each year. All deviations downward from planned growth in housing supply expressed in the budget should have to be offset by corresponding increases elsewhere in buildable as-of-right land. This would reduce the degree to which universal logrolling coalitions can form among anti-development neighborhood groups and would create incentives for pro-development forces to lobby against down-zonings in which they currently have little interest. The result should be housing policy that more closely tracks local preferences on housing development.

That sounds about right. The basic pattern is that on any individual question, we over-weight the preferences of the immediate neighbors which leads to a citywide equilibrium of less new development than we collectively want. The proposal here is for a kind of statutory PAYGO for zoning to halt that undershooting process.

This anti-bicycle screed from the blog of the Arlington Country GOP is noteworthy for explicitly complaining that the incumbent Democrats have engaged in “failure to require adequate parking at new development projects.”

The main crux of their complaint is that a handful of additional on-street parking places for automobiles are being removed in order to “install even more subsidized rental bicycles along the Rosslyn-Ballston corridor” but here, too, the free market logic is lacking. After all, physical space in this corridor is extremely expensive. Far and away the largest subsidy Capital Bikeshare receives from the Arlington Country government is precisely the provision of space. But the alternate use for that space was as automobile parking. So we’re not talking about any net increase in subsidy, we’re talking about shifting a tiny proportion of the space currently set aside as a subsidy to drivers and repurposing it as a subsidy for bicycles. Even with the new stations up and running, the amount of space dedicated to on-street parking will still dwarf the space dedicated to bicycle sharing. And that’s even though subsidies to drivers are regressive and encourage worse air pollution and public health outcomes.

It’s all just a reminder that sincere devotion to free markets plays almost no role in economic policy debates. It’s identity politics all the way down.

I’ve been thinking it was clever of the producers of AMC’s The Killing to choose Seattle as the setting for an adaptation of a story that was originally Danish, and new census numbers confirm that few American cities are whiter:

Along with Portland, Seattle is among large U.S. cities in which the highest proportions of residents describe themselves as non-Hispanic white, based on 2010 census data. In Seattle, 66 percent of all residents fit that category — the fifth-highest rate among the nation’s 50 largest cities — higher even than Wichita, Kan., and Minneapolis. Seattle rose two notches in the ranking from a decade ago, in part because other cities experienced higher growth in their Latino populations. [...] While Seattle has one of the highest concentrations of Asians in the U.S., the proportion of blacks and Latinos is among the lowest.

The combination of many whites and many Asians in a country where “urban” often passes as a euphemism for “black” makes it a solid choice to stand in for the almost excruciatingly white Copenhagen.

LR writes:

I’m curious to hear your thoughts on something I read yesterday in the Dallas Morning News. Is there evidence that half tolls/half free lanes decrease congestion?

There are a lot of variables that go into traffic congestion and we haven’t seen a lot of projects of this sort running over the long term, so empirical data is difficult to come by. But the theory here is impeccable. You have what amounts to two identical roads, one is free and one costs money. Naturally, everyone wants to take the free road. But as “everyone” tries to crowd onto it traffic moves slowly and some people will want to exchange money for time by taking the toll road. And at any given time of day, there’s got to be some price at which the tolled road will be uncongested.

The moral of the story, to me, is that in the end you get the kind of cities you want. People sometimes act as if it’s an act of nature that cities built at different times have different characteristics, but obviously if you build tons of untolled highways what you end up with auto-oriented development and giant traffic jams (Los Angeles). If you build trains and train stations and no highways, then you get transit-oriented development and giant traffic jams (Manhattan). All kinds of infrastructure strategies “work” and I bet Dallas’ will work too—if the tolls are set at an appropriate rate, this will become the best city for people who like to drive quickly and have money to burn on tolls. Given my personal lifestyle preferences that doesn’t seem like the place for me, but given how important improving housing and transportation are to increasing American living standards I think it’s good that someone’s going big on this.

I read on Twitter today that only about 5 percent of American workers commute to work via mass transit. And as a great example of why that’s the case, reader SD forwarded me an email that Seattle City Council member Nick Licata sent to constituents explaining why he thinks new buildings in the Pioneer Square neighborhood should be limited to 120 feet instead of 140 feet.

The message offers a variety of basically aesthetic reasons in defense of this position, but it doesn’t confront the basic fact that transit-accessible urban space in economically dynamic cities is scarce. When you restrict the quantity of built space that can fit in that scarce space, the activity (houses, offices) that might otherwise locate there don’t just vanish. Instead, they locate to some other other place that almost certainly isn’t dense transit-accessible urban space. Meanwhile, building mass transit is expensive. And while I’m all for building more, there are limits to how much new building is realistic. Far and away the most cost-effective way to increase transit utilization is to relax restrictions on dense construction near existing nodes. And the most realistic way to make the case for additional construction is, again, to maximize the use of station-adjacent land.