(cc photo by David55King)

Interesting to see this on a website that seems to be part of Fox News:

Despite claims from the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, and the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, that Jerusalem’s real estate market is free and open to anyone regardless of race or religion, a new study shows Palestinians do not have equal access to property in Jerusalem.

The Israel group Ir Amim released a new study showing that 80 percent of land in Jerusalem cannot be purchased by Palestinians.

You can learn more at the Ir Amim website.

As regular readers of this blog will recall, there’s basically no city on earth in which the use of land isn’t heavily regulated. Oftentimes, I think the volume of regulation is excessive. But the reason land use in urban areas is heavily regulated is that when people are packed densely together, some measure of fairly intrusive planning/regulation is necessary for public safety, sanitation, workability of infrastructure, etc. When you have an ethnically divided city, and a history of ill-will, and a massive gap in the political power possessed by one group over the other, this is what you get.

Much of the suburban built environment is quite old at this point, and like anything else our older “innter” suburbs need to change and adapt in order to thrive. And of course you already see quite a bit of this, with many suburban areas becoming, for example, immigrant enclaves rather than refuges for white flight from central cities. Ellen Dunham-Jones did an excellent TED Talk on this subject recently:

One thing I wish she emphasized more, however, is the legal impediments to this kind of adaptation. I think a lot of people will look at her presentation and say “if transforming these uses is so great, why don’t developers/businessmen/’the market’ do it on their own.” And a big part of the answer is that the prevailing land use regulations don’t permit it.

An earlier iteration of this blog was frequently written from Big Bear Cafe in Bloomingdale, and I still visit now and again and am friendly with the owner and some of the staff. So I’ve been interested in their efforts to secure a full restaurant license which would allow them to, among other things, serve beer. The initial hearing doesn’t seem to have gone so well according to Lydia DePillis:

“They’re probably in line to come talk to the commission, ready to make this a whole new world,” said ANC chairwoman Anita Bonds. “Because that’s what this is about.”

“One small entity begets another small entity begets another small entity,” said Edward Jones, a neighbor who has lived at 1st and R Street since 1994. “And then we end up with the same issues that make you a U Street or an Adams Morgan.”

Commissioner Barrie Daneker, who said that he had never been inside Big Bear, objected categorically to the restaurant’s ambitions on the basis of neighborhood character. “I do not want to see Big Bear open until 1 a.m.,” he said. “If you’re a restaurant, nobody’s eating at 1 a.m. in Washington. This is not New York.”

Commissioner Marshall Phillips, Sr. gave an impressive speech about the neighborhood’s history with drunks and crime caused by liquor stores, raising the specter of Catholic University undergraduate-type misbehavior and warning that criminal elements would take advantage of tipsy rubes.

In my mind, the underlying issue here is that DC is stuck on a “specter of Adams-Morgan” equilibrium. One reason two particular corridors in the city are so crowded with bar patrons is that it’s extremely difficult to open new bars. Conversely, one reason it’s so difficult to open up new bars is that people fear that new bars will turn their neighborhoods into the new Adams-Morgan. Realistically, if things were relaxes citywide we wouldn’t suddenly have a dozen Adams-Morgans — there are only so many people around — what would happen is that Adams-Morgan itself would calm down.

From a policy point of view, the main issue is that we’ve set up a governance system where we have these micro-elected officials on the local ANC boards who essentially have no power except to say “no” to stuff. That naturally leads to a mentality where thinking is dominated by downside risks and everyone errs on the side of saying “no.” I think the answer might be to increase the fees associated with liquor licenses, and then put the extra funds at the disposal of the ANC itself to fund community endeavors. That way members might see some more upside to letting things open. Of course another alternative is for the sort of young people who are likely to be supportive of bars and restaurants to get more engaged with local issues and put pressure on elected officials. In general, people pay too little attention to local politics even though in practice it often does more to shape one’s quality of life than these national issues.

Matt Johnson raises the curtain on Montgomery County’s proposed re-write of its zoning code:

In 1977, when the code was last rewritten, it spanned 274 pages. It’s now over 1,000 and grew by 100 pages in 2008 alone.

As with tax codes, I think there’s a natural tendency for relatively simple, functional documents dealing with this subject to become unduly complicated over time as a result of a combination of good intentions and deliberate malfeasance. It would be good practice for all jurisdictions to try to do a regular re-write in order to clear out the dead wood and rethink methods. Simple zoning of course doesn’t ensure good zoning, but it at least should make it easier for people to understand what’s going on

The low-density spot between the Friendship Heights and Bethesda density-pockets would probably get denser if it were legal. (Google Maps)

Montgomery County is a suburban country adjacent to Washington DC. It’s a nice place with good schools and as lots of anti-urbanist pundits are always assuring us lots of people enjoy living there. They’re also planning to update their zoning code but they’re making sure not to change very much:

At a Planning Department information session for the media today, planners were quick to make clear that only 2.6% of the County would actually see substantive zoning change; the majority of changes will take place in current commercial, mixed use or industrial zones (i.e. don’t worry your single-family residential heads). As one planner said, only 4% of the County is really left to develop, so changing zoning will help contain and sustain growth. Another goal of the rewrite is to consolidate and simplify land use. At present, the code still has designations for foundries and abattoirs (slaughterhouses) and has two separate codes for mini golf (“Golf Courses, Miniature” and “Miniature Golf”). The plan is to reduce the number of allowed uses from 433 specific uses to 120 broad categories.

These do sound like changes for the better, but it also highlights what I’m talking about when I talk about suburban sprawl as a policy-driven phenomenon rather than a market-driven one. If Montgomery County didn’t have so much space that’s given-over exclusively to single-family residential uses, then more people would live in Montgomery County which would mean fewer people in the farther-flung suburbs. They might still drive everywhere, but they’d be driving shorter-distances. What’s more, if it were legal to intersperse some stores with those residences, they actually might not drive everywhere. And if residential dwelling patterns were denser, it would make less sense to locate office buildings on the fringe which would further reduce the incentive for sprawl.

This would be more ecological sustainable, it would probably be healthier, and it would be more economically efficient. Win-win, in other words. What’s more, if changes were made broadly the volume of changes in most places would actually be pretty small. If you pick up one random slice of inner suburbs and say “build as dense as you want” people would find that very disruptive, but if changes were made on a broad scale you’d see a big-but-diffuse aggregate impact.

Readers will know that I’m somewhat obsessed with the idea of sprawl as a non-market outcome. I like to draw attention to this for three reasons. One has to do with high-ideology—some people are very sincerely committed to the idea that everything in America should be governed by free market principles, and I’d like to draw those people’s attention to a policy area where I happen to agree with them but where market-oriented institutions rarely do work. Another has to do with rhetoric—in American political culture whichever side can position itself as on the side of “freedom” and “the market” tends to have the upper hand. And the last is a reason of economics—it’s important for people to understand that the current state of the American built environment is inefficient in both an ecological and an economic sense. In both cases, it’s needlessly wasteful of land and of energy for transportation and heating.

At any rate, Michael Lewyn of the Florida Coastal School of Law seems to share my interest in the subject and has a number of relevant papers. “You Can Have It All: Less Sprawl and Property Rights Too” makes the overall case, but the one I would really recommend to anyone either interested in evangelizing about this point to others or else to a skeptic who wants to really see a rigorous argument made is “How Government Regulation Forces Americans Into Their Cars: A Case Study” which is a detailed examination of zoning and land use regulation in Jacksonville, Florida.

To amplify Atrios’ point a bit, while of course taller buildings will make an area denser, you don’t actually need buildings to be particularly tall in order to have walkable urbanism.

This video from Dan Zack indicates that people are actually pretty bad at guesstimating the residential density of various areas, primarily because of an over-reliance on building height as a cue:

A lot of extremely dense areas, like central Paris, feature basically no super-tall buildings. Or I don’t think that if you walk around Somerville, Massachusetts it will be obvious to you that it’s one of the densest municipalities in America. The issue in both cases is that buildings occupy a very large fraction of the available space—you don’t have many wide streets, parking lots, setback buildings, interior courtyards, etc. For rowhouse neighborhoods, in particular, I’m coming around to the view that setbacks and unused front yards are sort of the silent killer.

Kevin Drum chimed into the sprawl debate with a contribution that I think is a little confused:

I’m just saying that everyone needs to understand what they’re up against here. It’s not zoning per se that causes sprawl, it’s the fact that lots of registered voters actively want sprawl and have successfully demanded rules that keep density at bay. These kinds of land use regulations aren’t going away without the mother of all knock-down-drag-out fights first.

Ryan Avent observes part of what this gets wrong. It’s true that the problem of overly restrictive land-use rules is in large part a problem of voter-preference. But it’s not a problem of voter-preference for sprawl per se. It’s a general problem of homeowner eagerness to exclude outsiders. It’s politically difficult to build dense infill development in Washington, DC and that’s not because DC residents want to live in sprawling areas or because DC residents approve of sprawl as a phenomenon. It’s a mixture of selfishness, misunderstanding, and poor institutional design. As Ben Adler reminds us, surveys indicate that about a third of Americans would like to live in walkable urban areas but less than 10 percent of the country’s dwelling units are in areas that fit the bill. That’s why houses in walkable central cities (Manhattan) and walkable suburbs (near Metro in Arlington Country, VA for example) are so expensive.

Obviously we don’t have good near-term prospects for eliminating selfishness from human affairs. But based on informal discussions with people, reading of neighborhood blogs, and participation on listserves of various kinds it’s clear to me that there’s a fair amount of genuine misunderstanding about the impact of land use decisions. So hear on the blog we seek to improve understanding!

There are also real issues of institutional design. Incumbent residents of developed areas generally prefer that new development happen someplace else. But because everyone desires this, we all wind up worse off than we would be if we couldn’t all get our way. Federal transportation spending can and should be used as leverage to encourage more efficient (both economically and ecologically) use of land. Property taxes could be replaced with taxes on land. The lines of political authority over land use decisions could be rationalized so as to allow for some accountability—how many DC residents can name their ANC Single-Member District representative or even know what that means?

Randal O’Toole has a baffling and bafflingly long post dedicated to trying to rebut my very simple view of the relationship between “sprawl” and land-use regulations. So I’ll just restate my argument in briefer form and ask O’Toole to say what, if anything, in it he disagrees with:

— Throughout America there are many regulations that restrict the density of the built environment.
— Were it not for these restrictions, people would build more densely.
— Were the built environment more densely built, the metro areas would be less sprawling.

O’Toole seems to want to engage in a complicated counterfactual hypothetical about whether or not most people would still prefer to live in large single-family homes even in the absence of regulatory restrictions. I don’t have a particular guess as to what the majority opinion would be, but I assume that we would have a mix. He also seems to want to engage in a viciously polarized debate about apartments versus single-family homes, but single-family developments vary widely in their residential density. So even restricting our attention exclusively to suburban living I maintain that absent lot size regulations, lot sizes would be smaller and there would be less sprawl.

What’s more, regardless of majority preference, I think the high cost of housing in New York, Boston, Washington, San Francisco, Santa Monica, etc. indicates that there’s market demand for walkable urbanism and that if it were easier for developers to build more densely in those areas more people would live in them.

I’m not personally interested in debating the “smart growth” slogan. My point is that from a policy point of view excessive regulation of land use in already developed areas is bad for the economy and for the environment. And to be specific and clear about this, I don’t think the problem is “libertarian” hypocrites per se, the problem is specifically John Stossel and Randall O’Toole who are stridently opposed to anti-sprawl regulations but seem totally uninterested in sprawl-promoting ones. I believe that Stossel, for example, lives on the Upper East Side in Manhattan a neighborhood whose classic tall apartment buildings with no attached parking facilities would be totally illegal to build in virtually ever contemporary American city. That’s a shocking fact of which few are aware and would be well-worth doing an episode on.

I’m sure I’ve complained about this before, but every time I use the Capitol South Metro station I’m re-enraged by Congress’s view that the best use for the parcel of land immediately adjoining the station is . . . a surface parking lot!

Subways are wonderful, but they’re expensive to build. Really, really expensive. You can’t just throw up another line or another station on a whim. Consequently, metropolitan areas who’ve invested in building them have a real responsibility to use the land near the stations in an efficient way—buildings with offices, houses, and shops rather than parking lots. Obviously Congress, by its nature, is insulated from the market forces that might otherwise compel someone to do something more useful with this valuable land. But they always have the option of doing the right thing.