Over at Vox today we have yet another piece about "America’s housing crisis." The author proposes a "radical" solution (land taxes) that's not especially radical, but put that aside. The real issue here is that America doesn't have a housing crisis.
I'm not sure why, but I find the new urbanists one of the most annoying groups in the progressive pantheon. It's not because they're wrong, precisely, or because they're meanspirited, or anything like that. There's just a disconnect from reality that seems to motivate so much of what they say and do.
Take America's housing crisis. Here it is:
We have as much housing per household as we had in 2001. And just in case you think I'm cheating with this "household" business, here it is per person:
We have more housing per capita than we did in 2001.
Now, there are places—California is ground zero—where the amount of housing per person has indeed gone down. But is this a housing crisis? That depends on what you think the "right" amount of housing is. Urbanists consider it obvious that the right amount is about 4 million more than we have, but the people of California have made it crystal clear over the years that they disagree. They don't want more housing.
So selfish of them! Drawing up the ladder after they've gotten on board! Maybe so, but another word for this phenomenon is "democracy." People who live in a place get to vote for the policies they like, and Californians have decided they don't really want more people. Roughly speaking, California hosts about 10% of the population of the country on less than 1% of the land (the 50-mile-wide stretch from San Francisco to San Diego), and Californians think that's enough.
And anyway, California is still a very nice place. If we build 4 million more housing units, what will happen? Rents will go down and lots of people will resume migrating here. Then rents will go back up and we'll have yet another crisis. What's the point?
But this still doesn't really explain why I find the urbanists annoying. Here's my real beef: they are obsessed with big cities. They spend nearly all their time trying to convince us that big, crowded cities should become even bigger and more crowded. Or that suburbs should become big and crowded, just like cities. This is a fantastic waste of time. Residents of big cities don't want to become more crowded and resident of suburbs don't want to become more like cities. They will fight you forever on this. Absolutely forever. The game isn't worth the candle, especially when there are so many other far more useful things we could be devoting our energy to.
So why waste time on this? The urbanists will haul out studies about economic gains, environmental impacts, mass transit, etc., but they massively oversell those benefits and completely ignore the downsides of crowding. Instead, they should be spending approximately 100% of their time promoting policies that would get people out of big cities and into smaller cities that have room to grow.
Honestly, we don't need a bigger New York or a bigger Los Angeles. But we might need a bigger Flagstaff or a bigger Knoxville. That should be the central goal of the urbanists. I don't understand why it isn't.
“ But we might need a bigger Flagstaff or a bigger Knoxville.”
But then you have to live in flagstaff or Knoxville . (I’ve been to both.)
But seriously folks, you have a good point. I live in Denver and I hate just about everything about how it has changed over the past several years. (I will admit that all my new young hip apparently well-off neighbors who came from just about every state in the union, Canada and Puerto Rico all seem very nice. But they are exploding my property taxes.)
Knoxville is nice, except for being in Tennessee.
Except it has Jewish mayor Glen Jacobs......another gliber whore for the Putin regime.
If there were more than enough housing your real estate prices would drop and you would pay lower property taxes. The reason they are exploding is because demand is massively exceeding supply.
The amount of property tax you pay is usually not affected by the real estate market. The taxing authority determines the amount of revenue they expect to raise and sets the tax rate accordingly. If the market rises, the rate can fall while holding revenue constant. On the flip side, if the market falls the tax rate has to rise to keep the revenue constant.
As the population increases, the amount that needs to be raised increases, and many of those increases fall disproportionately on those who have been around the longest.
For example, consider the water system. When population doubles and new sources of water and piping need to be developed, money is raised from the entire population, even though the old population already paid for the sources and distribution that were needed to supply that old population.
It isn't because they are true believers.
https://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Movements-Perennial/dp/0060505915/ref=sr_1_1?crid=39NEXC31I3QXP&keywords=true+believer+hoffer&qid=1646449221&sprefix=true+believer%2Caps%2C97&sr=8-1
Their dreams of mass transit are pipe dreams. You can count the number of cities with adequate mass transit without using your other hand. I live in a city of over 6 million people, and our mass transit system serves almost entirely as geographically distributed long term parking for the airport. It is so bad that no one lives in the entire city. We live in sectors. I spend most of my life in about 1/8 of the city. Going anywhere else is a multi=hour odyssey.
As I said in another post: watch the movie singles. Tom Skerrit tells you the truth.
Re: I spend most of my life in about 1/8 of the city.
That doesn't seem bizarre to me. Assuming you have everything you need fairly close to home why waste gas and mileage you don't need to?
>Maybe so, but another word for this phenomenon is "democracy."
So I feel like this is a bit disingenuous. Supporting democracy means accepting the will of the majority. It doesn't mean you can't think that the will of the majority is wrong and advocate for something different.
It seems to me that if people don't want to live in areas of high density they should move to places that fewer people want to live. Not that the people living where more people want to live should be able to keep out those that either desire density or are willing to accept it for the other benefits of those areas.
I'm open to the idea that the opposition to changing the status quo is not worth the benefits of the status quo but I think the assumptions he's making here are questionable. Firstly I don't think it's going to be any easier to encourage people to move to smaller cities than it is to to get bigger cities to allow more density. Secondly I don't think making smaller cities bigger necessarily produces the same economic benefits as enlarging the cities with strong economies does.
Growing small cities into bigger ones is a great idea...but who is doing it successfully?
There is a long-term global trend toward megacities. That suggests to me that there are some powerful forces at work, and getting lots of companies to move to small places will be very difficult.
Many states have tried all sorts of tactics, with very little to show for it.
KD, as a longtime reader, I think it's a mistake for you to climb on this particular hobbyhorse, and here's why:
It's exactly your very-persuasive-argued point about the drop in crime occurring because of the switch to unleaded gas, that is driving the "urbanism", whether you think it's new or old or medium aged.
LA in particular was built to enable white people to spend their days working in the city and their nights and weekends living far out away from the high-crime-high-lead-in-the-air-areas where the minorities were forced to live. However, as much as you love your suburbs (as you've expressed many times) LA is not Irvine. It takes literally 4-5 hours in the car every day to work downtown and live in the suburbs now. So much for family life. So much for enjoying life at all.
Now that crime has dropped and we don't hate and fear each other so much, people want to live closer to work, maybe even right in the city. Young people want to be able to live somewhere and not need a car.
I highly suggest you come back up to LA and take a walk or bus or whatever works for you, on Wilshire Blvd where the new subway is going in. What used to be a ghost town of abandoned department stores is now a thriving area of people living and working without cars. It's quite a transformation, and a lot of it has to do with the drop in crime. The city is just not scary in the way it was in the 70s, 80s, 90s. I say go with it.
persuasively*-argued
Mixner lives!
(Anybody remember him?)
Unfortunately, yes.
I agree that young urbanists oversell the housing "crisis." However, I find Kevin's dismissal of the problems via his citation of "democracy" a bit off—and indeed glib. You can find majorities for lots of flawed policies. That doesn't mean the policies aren't flawed.
Also, I'm going to go out on a limb and predict we're eventually going to see more house-construction-friendly regulations (perhaps approaching a true "shall issue" standard with respect to building permits). Why? Because at some point home ownership rates are going to fall below 50%. California will get there first (it has to already be perilously close).
Right now robustly deregulated housing construction policies aren't perceived to be in the interests of most voters. But that's eventually no longer going to be the case.
It is of course not true that people move to places because housing there is cheap. Does not happen except maybe for a small number of retirees.
People move to places where there are jobs. And those jobs are in overcrowded areas like the Bay Area, driving up housing costs. This is the real problem that the urbanists are trying to solve. And, frankly, this will only be possible by compromising. So long as everybody insists on living in a suburb, preferably white, we are stuck. Leaving out the jobs angle is the thing that makes Kevin's argument false.
As to the most annoying "progressives": I give that reward to people with Black Lives Matter signs in their lawns in towns like Los Gatos, where you never meet a Black person. They are the main opponents of the urbanists of course.
It's not that Californians don't want more houses or more people. There's plenty of room for both. What they don't want is more *traffic*. The highway system is saturated. The situation already absorbs excessive amounts of residents' time and limits their freedom of movement, and they don't want it to get worse.
We also like water.
Ho! It's been a long time since you've written something I agree with.
The other important fact is that people like low density living. https://www.zillow.com/research/homeownership-american-dream-20476/
80% of Americans say they want to live in a single family home but only 60% of all homes are single family.
this post is so lazy and ignorant, i can't believe Kevin actually believes it.
and petty too!
deep down you know the urbanists are right and that's really what bothers him
The problem with suburbs as done in North America is that compared to urban neighbourhoods sprawl is more expensive to maintain while generating less income in taxes. Basically, a suburb has a negative ROI.
Unfortunately, building a new development is subsidized and maintenance costs only kick in after about 20 years, so the first few years of a suburb are profitable.
Cities have been subsidizing the maintenance of older suburbs by building new suburbs in a classical ponzi scheme.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6OGLN69ehUTVa