Horizon

Not quite on topic, but did you read the NYT Magazine articles on real estate?

This is the one I'm talking about.

"...Yet because transport (mainly trucking) costs dropped significantly during the 20th century, location has become irrelevant. In Glaeser's view, cities now exist so that people can have face-to-face interactions or be entertained or consume products and services...."

Seems a little cold to discuss cities in terms of what they're good for.

But if anyone feels like book-clubbing Jane Jacobs I'd be interested. I keep meaning to read her and obviously ought to but never quite get around to it. Probably due to a completely unfair prejudice based on her having been a saint to some repellent yuppie neighbors who used to live around the corner from here. Ms. Jacobs' book appears to have influenced their carefully considered choice to tolerate our neighborhood and grace it with their presence. Which is not of course her fault.

Seems a little cold to discuss cities in terms of what they're good for.

Why is value measured in the pleasure that people derive from entertainment and human contact 'cold'? Economics isn't just dollars and cents, you know.

I was thinking more about his implication that there's no point in allowing space to a city resident who doesn't care for the theater or cafe society and who doesn't do a kind of work involving the lucrative face-to-face propagation of creative sparks among brilliant, highly trained minds. Perhaps there is a point to everyone Mr. Glaeser knows, but apparently there's no point to quite a few people who do continue, pointlessly, to live in cities anyway. Or can you see a bright side to this guy's theory for persons not fully engaged in the effervescent intellectual synergy of the cultural and technological center they happen to inhabit?

I think the point isn't that at all -- the point rather being that very few people now live in Manhattan or San Francisco because of their excellent ports. The fundamentals of location on good rivers or portages have little to nothing to do with whether cities thrive or decline.

This wasn't always the case. Washington-on-the-Brazos was an important Texas river port through most of the mid 19th century. The railroad came through a few miles south and within a couple of decades, cows were grazing in the streets. I doubt something like that could happen to New York or San Francisco, and conversely suspect that the port of New Orleans will be doings as much business as before Katrina even if the city never regains half its population.

Furthermore, if you read the whole article, he points out that the supply crunch is making places like SF and Boston more "rarefied", more elitist, and that (furthermore), he views this as a very bad thing indeed. I rather think you're reading some Richard Florida into a guy who really thinks cheap housing is a good thing.

"We will never go back to a world in which developers in Massachusetts or California or New York are able to do what they want with their property unimpeded by their neighbors," he says. And what surprises him is that the changes in how we have treated property rights for the last 40 years — who gets permission to build, the size and location of what owners are permitted to build — have been the subject of virtually no national dialogue, even as the effects on prices, in his view, have been extraordinary.

This is not to suggest that Glaeser wants New York or Boston to become another Houston or Phoenix, where developers build without hindrance and housing, as a result, stays cheap. "I'm pretty sure that Boston and California have gone too far to one extreme," he says. "But I'm not sure that Texas hasn't gone too far to the other extreme." He says he tends to think that officials in the Boston and New York metro areas need to allow for more housing when the market gets tighter again. At the very least, he says, officials should discuss the long-term effects of restricting home building. And there is a bigger point here anyway, he says. Zoning and housing supply ultimately determine not only who lives in a city but also the very nature of these places. Boston, San Francisco and Manhattan are obviously becoming rarefied destinations, mostly for America's elites (Glaeser calls the cities "luxury goods"), with housing floating beyond the reach of the young and the middle class. These cities' economies are in the process of becoming boutique, too, accommodating only the most skilled and privileged. Their desire to limit construction and grow not in buildings and population but in prices has, in effect, begun to shape their destiny. "A healthy city is one that has a healthy mix of demographic groups," Glaeser says. "Shutting out your 25-to-40 year-olds? That feels like a bad strategy for urban innovation."

One disappointing thing about the article is that it never addresses what exactly he thinks is wrong with Houston or Phoenix -- it mentions that he sees another side to the coin, but not what it is. I understand that within the current "sprawl is bad" consensus, this might be a dog-bites-man story, but I'm curious why Glaeser might think so, given that he seems perceptive about the other side.

Their desire to limit construction and grow not in buildings and population but in prices has, in effect, begun to shape their destiny...

Not true. Downtowns that are limited by geography (on islands or peninsulas) and where neighbors tend to be organized get accused of "not wanting" new neighbors, "wanting" high prices, etc. That's not it. It's that the existing residents do not themselves want to be priced out of their own neighborhoods by fancy development, and so they dig in their heels against the pressure for new construction. The impasses can often be resolved by arranging that some percentage of the existing neighbors will be able to afford to live in the new projects. A lot of deals have been struck lately, in San Francisco at least, in which considerable new housing is to be built after all, but on condition that a certain rather large percentage is affordable. On the other hand, there's deep fear now in this city's southeastern Bayview/Hunter's Point neighborhood that redevelopment plans for the area will push out the existing low- and moderate-income African American families in favor of yuppies. Some of the families were previously pushed to the Bayview from downtown during the "urban renewal" disasters that destroyed the Fillmore a generation ago.

"Their desire" to have high prices? That's a mean falsehood -- it's like the old schoolyard trick of shoving the victim's hand forward and asking, "Why are you hitting yourself?"

I don't know about San Francisco -- apples vs. oranges again, and yes, it's entirely possible that the Pacific Heights Whole Foods is populated by ADM shareholders buying organic for health reasons -- but in Austin, the "desire to have high prices" rings a very strong bell indeed.

I can name perhaps six ongoing development concerns that have been presented to the Austin City Council over the last couple of years. If you analyze each of them in terms of effect on housing supply vs. rhetoric, you see at least three efforts that pit individual homeowners against developers trying to build more housing units, two of which are advanced under the rubric of preserving neighborhood character, and the third advanced under (possibly valid) environmental rhetoric.

Four or five of the six (the "Triangle" development, the West Campus development, the McMansion ordinance, the Barton Springs aquifer/Southwest Parkway development, the Westlake Apartments development) really do pit the financial interests of current homeowners against the combined interest of potential homeowners and real-estate developers. The West Campus project is perhaps the best example.

The University of Texas has expanded to an enrollment of over forty thousand -- five times the population of my own hometown. Neither on-campus housing nor off-campus dormitories have expanded commensurately, largely because the neighborhood directly to the west of the campus is formed of high-value, low-density housing (1930s bungalows) that are not affordable to ordinary students. As a result, students compete for apartments all over the city that are near bus routes, or rent housing in the suburbs and compete for parking.

In either a rationally planned housing market or a totally unregulated one, this need would be solved by replacing at least some of the low-density housing in the West Campus neighborhood with higher-density housing for students. It is, however, in the interests of any given homeowner to keep housing in that neighborhood scarce and desirable by maintaining its low-density character. Because Austin -- unlike Houston -- has zoning, West Campus development has been delayed for years and years, and even now will be severely restricted.

This, it seems to me, is exactly what Glaeser is talking about.

Mind you, I grant that conditions in SF might be such that developers are competing to evict low-income, low-density tenants in order to replace their housing with even lower-density high-income tenants. But that sounds a lot to me like a desire (albeit not on the part of the tenants) to "grow not in buildings and population but in prices."

Well, we're each looking at a different environment. If it's any help I agree that opposition to development can be a product either of snobbery or of genuine egalitarian or environmental principles and it can be hard to guess from a distance what's really going on.

Anyway I think this column does a helpful job of showing how people of entirely opposed philosophies can end up on the same side of development battles.

From my experience here in Austin, wealthier central neighborhoods (who tend to vote leftish) tend to oppose development for either environmental or "neighborhood character" reasons, which they are apparently sincere about. Wealthier neighborhoods further out (who tend to vote rightish) oppose development for naked "that'll lower my property value" reasons.

For someone looking for cheap housing, the effect is the same, except perhaps that the outliers tend not to be as successful in their efforts. Apparently [fighting for noble ideals that just happen to match your self-interest/cloaking your self-interest with noble-sounding humbug] is pretty effective.

I enjoyed the column, on which more later.