Freedom, Rail, and Zoning
Ryan Avent wonders why libertarians hate trains. What I wonder is this. Here’s Tyler Cowen explaining why he doesn’t take the Metro:
It’s not about population density per se. It’s about how many independent, hard-to-connect nodes the system has and that is why high-speed rail on the whole works better in Europe or Japan than in many other locales. To give an example from a slightly different realm, I live right near the Metro in a high-density suburban area. Yet I don’t take the Metro to my Arlington office, which is about two minutes from a Metro stop. I’d rather do the 37-minute drive. Why? Because I stop at the supermarket and the public library on my way home at least half of the time or maybe I stop to eat at Thai Thai. If those conveniences were right next to my house I’d consider the Metro but they’re not.
That seems about right to me. But libertarians often act as if they think that this outcome is the result of consumer choice or a free market process. But ask yourself, why is it that there are no conveniences right next to Cowen’s house? Well, I don’t know exactly where he lives, but I believe it’s in Fairfax County which is governed by this exciting zoning ordinance. Fairfax County, in its infinite wisdom, allows for the creation of housing at various different levels of density in different areas. They’re differentiated by the number of permitted dwellings per acre—one, two, three, four, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty, or thirty per acre. Even within the thirty per acre area, buildings cannot be over “150 feet, subject to increase as may be permitted by the Board in accordance with the provisions of Sect. 9-607″ and there’s a requirement that “40% of the gross area shall be open space.” We also need to make sure to “Refer to Article 11 for off-street parking, loading and private street requirements.”
All multiple-family residential structures in the county must, per Article 11, provide “One and six-tenths (1.6) spaces per unit.” A detached single-family home needs “Two (2) spaces per unit for lots with frontage on a public street and three (3) spaces per unit for lots with frontage on a private street, provided that only one (1) such space must have convenient access to a street.” A bowling alley needs “Four (4) spaces per alley, plus one (1) space per employee, plus such additional
spaces as may be required herein for affiliated uses such as eating establishments” with the eating establishment rule being “One (1) space per four (4) seats plus one (1) space per two (2) employees where seating is at tables” and with different rules for counter service.
One could go on. But I don’t really understand why it is that this kind of thing doesn’t seem to bother libertarians very much. Bryan Caplan specifically cites America’s large houses and ample parking spaces as the benefits of our free market approach when they are, in fact, the product of systematic regulatory mandates. I think this illustrates the basic tribalism of a lot of our politics. If Fairfax County were considering some kind of hippie-inspired stringent rent control law, we’d be hearing no end of it from blogging George Mason University professors. But given a set of extremely severe land use regulations that happen to antagonize environmentalist and left-wing Europhilic bicycle commuters, suddenly mandatory minimum parking requirements become the essence of capitalism.
61 Responses to “Freedom, Rail, and Zoning”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
August 29th, 2009 at 11:36 am
I wonder if Yglesias has read Daniel Rodgers’ discussion of zoning as the evil twin of urban planning in Atlantic Crossings? It’s a really good read on how zoning happened in early-1900s America.
August 29th, 2009 at 11:40 am
Of course, if a good rail and zoning bill were available to pass in the Senate with 50 votes, Matthew would advocate bargaining away the rail and zoning aspects in the bill order to get a bill with increased highway funding.
After all, a bill passed with 65 votes must be better than a bill passed with 50 votes, right?
August 29th, 2009 at 11:41 am
If Fairfax County were considering some kind of hippie-inspired stringent rent control law, we’d be hearing no end of it from blogging George Mason University professors.
I think that’s about right. This is really a cultural divide. Notice how many white suburbanites chide young white people who move into city cores with the line “you can’t raise a family there” despite the fact that millions of people do it every day. I think they are really saying you can’t raise a white family in a big city. Now why would they say that?
August 29th, 2009 at 11:43 am
A classic smackdown. And I agree more and more about “the basic tribalism of our politics.” Ideology is such an afterthought.
August 29th, 2009 at 11:51 am
The right way to think about Mass Transit is the NYC subway – much of it was built where there was no development – Then the development occured around the subway.
August 29th, 2009 at 11:56 am
The funny thing is that my experiences are quite different from Tyler’s. When I would take the metro or any other form of public transport home, I wouldn’t think that I was hamstrung by the inability to stop at the library or the grocery store on my way, mostly because the grocery store was typically near my workplace or home. Is Cowen really that isolated from amenities like libraries and grocery stores where he lives that it’s more worthwhile for him to drive every day?
The seems more akin to having a set of personal preferences (maybe the guy likes to drive to work and/or considers it “natural”) and coming up with “practical” justifications for it. Man is, truly, the rationalizing animal.
August 29th, 2009 at 11:57 am
I agree. I hate most zoning. I really do, especially as practiced by Fairfax County. I agree with your periodic critiques of zoning. Really! I used to live on the edge of a zoned area and so I was right next to a gas station and numerous ethnic restaurants. I loved it. I complain about our current situation to my wife all the time. I say “where’s the gas station?” You can’t imagine what it’s like having to get milk in the middle of the night.
That all said, it is unlikely to change and in the meantime we face other choices.
August 29th, 2009 at 11:59 am
PRT would be more convenient that the Metro, a heck of a lot cheaper, and also more efficient in many instances, as running nearly-empty Metro trains wastes money and energy. With PRT you can do those chores on the way home as Tyler describes much as is done now in a personal automobile–perhaps there would be slightly more walking involved, but that is probably made up for by faster average speeds. Since PRT is cheaper, stations can be denser than with a Metro (especially in areas away from the city center) and so more things will be close to a PRT station than will be close to a Metro station.
Zoning is certainly a big part of a lot of problems in urban and suburban development, but it is not the only reason we don’t all have rail running close to our homes and to where we want to go. There are also the issues of cost and local NIMBY objections. Some people are simply not interested in taking the train and don’t want a train line running through their town to slow down car traffic. Many a rail line proposal has been defeated this way. Certainly some people would also object to PRT infrastructure, but its footprint is much smaller and it has no effect on car traffic other than taking many drivers off the road who wouldn’t have taken a train.
August 29th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
Cowen should consider setting aside one day a week for errand-running on the way to and from work (and maybe at lunch too). On that day he takes the car. The other days he can take the Metro. I did this in Florida, using Trirail for my 22 mile commute most days, but driving one day a week so I could stop at the store, go to the bank or post office, etc. You just have to be a little organized about things.
August 29th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
I agree. I hate most zoning. I really do, especially as practiced by Fairfax County.
When Cato starts getting funding from interest groups that are chafing under current zoning regulations, I assume we’ll hear more about the problems of mandatory setbacks and development limits of open space. But they don’t. Zoning issues are the primary interest of local community members. Developers tend to be fairly talented at making money off whatever zoning structure is available, and their main concern is just getting a zoning variance, rather than the overall structure of zoning in general. As a consequence, libertarian thinkers simply don’t have a client base interested in paying them to talk about zoning.
Cowen should consider setting aside one day a week for errand-running on the way to and from work (and maybe at lunch too). On that day he takes the car.
That would be a good idea if Cowen preferred (or was neutral towards) taking the metro, but he prefers to drive. I think some people simply grow up with the idea that a car commute is an integral part of their day, and it falls into their vision to what adulthood is all about, and they develop preferences accordingly.
August 29th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
So, Mr. Cowen, at what gas price would cause you take the Metro? Better get used to the idea that it will happen in your life time.
August 29th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
By the way, if you’re wondering why I switched homes to the new, evil locale, without the gas station, it is because my wife (who is a Democrat) does not hate zoning.
And at $10 a gallon I’m still driving, if you are wondering.
August 29th, 2009 at 12:16 pm
Unfortunately the outer boroughs, which have sparser subway coverage, have a bit of their own urban sprawl problem and a degree of car dependence for anyone who doesn’t want to take an hour to cross town. Even if you extend the subway/elevated service to cover more of the outer boroughs, the automobile is likely to still be ubiquitous, and so it likely wouldn’t have the same effect on development as it would have a hundred years ago when most people didn’t have cars.
August 29th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Tyler’s decision is even more odd considering that the State of Virginia would subsidize his Metro or bus travel for up to $230 per month for travel to and from work, making it essentially free. I too work at Mason (in Fairfax) and do the 1.5 hour each way commute from Capitol Hill. I dont know how many Mason types take advantage of the commuter subsidy but it would be interesting to find out.
Tyler is by the way being honored by Mason in its annual Celebration of Scholarship coming up in a month or two.
August 29th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
I, on the other hand, had to get up at 6:30 AM every day as a high school student to drive 30 miles and back to my rather distant high school, frequently through traffic. Needless to say, the experience of driving was more a matter of getting to point A to point B than something to be treasured.
Tyler’s comment here gets to another error we frequently make when choosing a place to live: we don’t live in places we actually want to spend time in when we’re outside the house. If your social life, shopping interests, and leisure activities all take place in some nebulous region distant from home or work, then obviously getting milk in the middle of the night is going to end up being a challenge and going home is going to be a place where you go into “shut down mode” rather than a place where you actually do stuff. But some people want that: once we get home, we want to leave those things behind, rather than come home and then think about doing errands and getting groceries.
And at $10 a gallon I’m still driving, if you are wondering.
Which is fine– as long as we express our personal preferences as cultural/personal preferences, rather than some sort of activity done out of the immovable practical nature of things. You just could have said, “I like driving to work, and taking the metro doesn’t fit into my preferred lifestyle” rather than dressing it up with talk about stopping at the library and getting groceries. We would, of course, wonder why you’d choose NoVa to live in when you had a much different envisioned lifestyle than the one that NoVa caters to, when it comes to commuting.
August 29th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Do you really think that libertarians would oppose loosening these kinds of regulations?
August 29th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Nah, Matt is out-libertarianising the libertarians. I would like to say just because he can but in truth he has been hammering away at this consistently for as long as I have been reading him.
I don’t see Tyler objecting to this, but he is going to have to find another libertarian objection to transit.
August 29th, 2009 at 12:34 pm
Comparing parking minimums to rent control is brilliant.
August 29th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
There used to be all kinds of right-wing complaints about housing prices and zoning. What happened to change that?
August 29th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
Maybe you need to talk to more libertarians. It bothers me plenty.
August 29th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
What a laff riot! Where to go to get milk at midnight? I had hoped the only people who couldn’t make it through the night without crying for milk were babies, but apparently babies come in all sizes these days.
And, oh yeah, remember when housing prices were going up because zoning was restricting the supply? Good times, good times….
August 29th, 2009 at 1:57 pm
You’ve got that exactly right, Matt. Even among that subset of libertarian organs that aren’t on the payroll of trucking and oil companies, there is a cultural bias against the sort of people who oppose sprawl.
In the entire existence of Reason Magazine’s Hit & Run blog, for example, there has not been a single entry complaining about lot sizes, height limits, residential-only zoning, single-family-only zoning, setbacks, or parking requirements. There are, however, numerous examples of them complaining about land use restrictions that the industry and the right-wing oppose, such as wetlands protections. There are also numerous pieces in which they denounce people who object to those very land use restrictions, and propose repealing or loosening them, on the grounds that they are not ideologically correct.
Ultimately, it comes back to an ideological determination that the auto-dependent, single-family home on a large lot style of development is the most “individualistic.” It’s not a coincidence that the vacation resort Howard Roarke designed in “The Fountainhead” sounds exactly like a post-WW2 residential subdivision, and it’s not a coincidence that they have a soft spot in their hearts for they style of housing development that Arthur Levitt explained would reduce leftist activism by denying working-class people common areas or public meeting places in which they might get up to no good.
August 29th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Nice smackdown. This sort of thing probably does bother a lot of libertarians, but its low on their concern list – well below letting corporations pollute as much as they want or regulating the safety of our food supply for example.
August 29th, 2009 at 2:02 pm
Wonderful. Please point us to the body of work in which you denounce sprawl zoning, and acknowledge the central role that government regulation played in the shift in land use to the auto-dependent, sprawling suburbs that became so common after WW2.
August 29th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
Matt & Tyler:
Great riff! Ah, the way our habits & customs & laws hem us in! I agree with you both, and as a (rural area) planner, I have often cussed the damn straight jacket of our zoning laws.
August 29th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
I remember reading this Tyler Cowan post and thinking it was an odd response, since I distinctly recall that he stated that he wanted to live in the suburbs. So essentially his argument was that he didn’t like the idea of using transit because he wanted to live somewhere that didn’t enjoy the benefits of population density, and mass transit. As a living preference that is perfectly fine, but its a bizarre argument for why someone would think mass transit isn’t a sound idea.
August 29th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Tyler – I invite you to blog in the same way as high speed rail, about interstate highway expansions whose costs exceed their benefits. Such as the I-270 proposal to spend $4 billion on a highway without analyzing a transit alternative. Or a similar project elsewhere in the country.
Wait, you might say, the costs and benefits of these highway projects haven’t been analyzed. That’s because no such analyses are required, unlike the case of transit projects. But then shouldn’t you be blogging about that? Instead of criticizing, on cost-benefit grounds, the transportation projects whose costs and benefits are analyzed.
August 29th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
I apologize for using the word “smackdown,” since MY’s post wasn’t really a direct refutation of Cowen — and his comment here was very fair-minded.
That said, I wasn’t persuaded by Cowen’s response that zoning “is unlikely to change and in the meantime we face other choices.” The built environment of cities can change —- and it doesn’t have to change very much to make mass transit a (more) viable commuting choice.
I think the more fundamental point, though, is the point about “tribalism,” because that goes to the heart of the problem I have with libertarians. Libertarians would like to live in a political world where we get to choose between two consistent ideologies —- one which is all about freedom, and another which is all about the state.
But that’s not the world we actually inhabit. In reality we have a choice between two political coalitions, one of which is anti-intellectual and increasingly scary. Libertarians would like to focus on the world of ideas and ignore the unsavory partners they have in practice chosen to break bread with. To which I have to respond: it would be nice if we had that choice, but in fact these coalitions are “unlikely to change and in the meantime we face other choices.”
August 29th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
[...] are near stations, because there are Metro-inconvenient places in between that he likes to go. Matt Yglesias rightly wonders why libertarians don’t complain more about the zoning requirements of suburbs like [...]
August 29th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
It’s generally agreed among libertarians that localized government is much preferable to a national one. Backward local governments can be moved away from, or much more easily changed from within.
Patri Friedman discusses some of this (4:30 minutes in):
http://www.cato.org/event.php?eventid=5747
August 29th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
[...] libertarian would like to take a moment to endorse Matt Yglesias’s complaints about land use regulations and the weird love affair many libertarians seem to have with cars and [...]
August 29th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Somewhat related discussion of neighborhood design over at Slate.
I do miss Mixmaster dropping in to explain how neighborhoods such as the one depicted in the Slate article (circa 1900) physically cannot exist.
Cranky
August 29th, 2009 at 5:34 pm
Yglesias is right. I searched for “libertarians zoning ordinances” and had to go three pages into my search before I found libertarian complaints. Something is wrong here, I would have expected local zoning to be much higher on the libertarian hitlist.
August 29th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
> Yglesias is right. I searched for “libertarians
> zoning ordinances” and had to go three pages
> into my search before I found libertarian complaints.
Back in the 1980s libertarians did regularly cite Houston and its reputed total lack of zoning codes as the ideal living environment. Haven’t heard anything about that for a while though.
Cranky
August 29th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
The big change going on now across America is what I call Parisification, in which central cities are reserved for the well to do, while the welfare class is moved to the fringes. For example, Mayor Daley, who has studied Paris closely on numerous trips, is using Section 8 rental vouchers as an excuse to demolish public housing built on otherwise useful land (such as Cabrini Green near the Gold Coast) and dump Chicago’s underclass on lower rent small towns in the hinterland like Champagne-Urbana and Madison.
Similarly, Washington DC has become notably whiter in this decade as people like Matt move to town and American-born African Americans get squeezed out to places like Baltimore. NYC has been losing American-born African Americans since 1979.
August 29th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Tyler “we should consider the bailout to have been successful in averting a financial meltdown” Cowen has been getting a good and well-deserved Austro-libertarian smackdown on the Internet.
August 29th, 2009 at 6:12 pm
And, oh yeah, remember when housing prices were going up because zoning was restricting the supply? Good times, good times….
yeah. That’s the best part about libertarians. You stop and ask them for evidence and they do what they do best: lie and move on to the next grift. I’ve seriously never met a bigger pack of delusional liars. But they’ll always have 1921…
August 29th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
When I lived in Tokyo, I quickly noticed that the equivalent of big shopping malls WERE the train stations.
That made it far better to travel by train or subway rather than driving.
I don’t think it is the zoning but it sure made it easy to avoid owning a car. I only drove a car when I was on vacation and only took a cab when I was out too late and the trains shut down.
August 29th, 2009 at 6:23 pm
Keep the goverment hands off of my zoning laws!!!!!!!!!!!!!
August 29th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
I thought libertarians hate trains because they aren’t designed to crash in just the right way to kill all the non-Galts. If there were just way to pay to make that happen—
August 29th, 2009 at 10:12 pm
Hey Benny Lava:
1. Do you deny that zoning laws that require one acre lots can cause housing prices to rise? And contribute to sprawl? And might have been enacted to keep out minorities?
2. How would you know if libertarians lie? You yourself are too intellectually incurious and dull to bother understanding the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. How would someone as dumb as you know fact from fiction?
3. Since you don’t understand 1921, why bring it up and embarrass yourself by broadcasting your ignorance to the entire planet?
4. There’s a great video and song which celebrates the sophisticated Yglesias worldview.
August 29th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Bob Roddis,
I would answer your questions thusly:
1. I do not confirm nor deny the correlations between one acre zoning and price, sprawl, or minorities. Why do you ask?
2. You have sufficiently demonstrated with this question the dishonesty of libertarians. The Austrian Business Cycle has been disproven by the empirical evidence. The best that said proponents can do is point to 1921. Your ad hominems demonstrate said lack of evidence. Quite pathetic, really.
3. You prove my point about 1921. Case closed.
4. Relevance? Are you assuming I share Yglesias’ world view?
August 30th, 2009 at 2:45 am
If Fairfax County were considering some kind of hippie-inspired stringent rent control law, we’d be hearing no end of it from blogging George Mason University professors. But given a set of extremely severe land use regulations that happen to antagonize environmentalist and left-wing Europhilic bicycle commuters, suddenly mandatory minimum parking requirements become the essence of capitalism.
“Four legs good, two legs bad”.
August 30th, 2009 at 8:29 am
Libertarianism is a religion with a cruel, jealous and dishonest god.
August 30th, 2009 at 9:18 am
Question for Steve Sailer – Since the market is doing this, how can it possibly not be a good thing?
August 30th, 2009 at 10:38 am
To tt:
In France, these Muslim immigrants generally live in vast
public housing projects on the edge of town. They probably wouldn’t have been able to live in Europe in the first place without significant government welfare support. That’s not “the market”.
August 30th, 2009 at 10:46 am
I live right near the Metro in a high-density suburban area.
Matt talks a lot about minimum lot sizes, parking spaces, etc. I want to know what failure of zoning or the market puts high density area without a supermarket. Something is fishy here. Does Cowan really want us to beleive that he lives in a high density development built close to Metro that *doesn’t* have a supermarket?
Alternatively, why is it so important for Cowan to do this stuff on the way home from work as opposed to taking the Metro home and then taking the car out? He says he lives really close to the Metro, so it’s not as if stopping to get the car and then heading out is really out of his way.
Why should the rest of us have to subsidize his choices?
August 30th, 2009 at 12:22 pm
This explanation by Mr. Cowan reminds me of a Peggy Noonan column. “Gee, I am happy with my health care. Why should there be health care reform?”
This has the intellectual rigor typical of (g)libertarian assertions. –I got mine, bub, don’t rock the boat.
Dr. Pangloss in Candide previewed their viewpoint: “–All things for best in the best of all possible worlds!”
–unless of course, it’s THEIR ox getting gored –say with a 3.6% tax increase. Then, of course, it’s a national emergency.
August 30th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
There is a big difference between the libertarian elite and the libertarians – well, not “masses,” exactly, but libertarians who are not prominent pundits or who do not take money from well-funded political advocacy organizations.
August 30th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Since the central city has long been overwhelmingly poor, and since the outer neighborhoods and suburbs have long been equally segregated through efforts to keep the poor out, I fail to see how Steve Sailers’ “Parisification” – that is, increasing the economic diversity of both areas by moving middle-class and wealthy people into the central city, and providing housing for poorer people around the fringe – is anything but an unalloyed good.
Maybe someday we’ll be faced with a situation in which so many middle- and upper-class people are moving into the South Bronx and other center-city neighborhoods that we’ll have to consider doing something about it. Wouldn’t that be AWESOME?
August 30th, 2009 at 2:06 pm
Bob – Thank you. The prevalence of single family houses in the United States, you will surely agree, has nothing to do with the market either.
August 30th, 2009 at 3:15 pm
If he agrees with that ludicrous statement he’s as big a fool as you are.
August 30th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
I’m not sure why the libertarians don’t push more for liberal zoning laws. I assume the reason for that is zoning laws are a local issue and the focus is on national laws.
Reason magazine has written often about Jane Jacobs’ fight against zoning laws and named her one of the heroes of freedom, so it a big issue among mainstream libertarians.
August 30th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
I’m not sure why the libertarians don’t push more for liberal zoning laws. I assume the reason for that is zoning laws are a local issue and the focus is on national laws.
It’s pretty simple: libertarian think tanks get funding to discuss issues their funders are interested in. Since their funders are oil & gas companies, major manufacturers, and people who want low taxes, the libertarian national dialog is going to revolve around these issues. And since their funders typically live in large single family homes, their biggest concern when it comes to government regulation is making sure that the federal government doesn’t interfere with their desire to drain the wetlands on their estate and build a tennis court.
August 30th, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Reduce the lost size.
August 30th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
Yes, the have. However, Jane Jacobs never led a fight against the zoning laws that contribute to sprawl. She wrote very little about zoning in the suburbs at all.
August 31st, 2009 at 11:05 am
Hey Benny, show me an example of stimulus ever working. Didn’t work in the great depression. Didn’t work for Japan. Isn’t doing anything now.
August 31st, 2009 at 12:43 pm
In point of fact, the economy grew every single year during the Great Depression, except in 1937, when the stimulus money was turned off.
In point of fact, economy grew even faster after the war stimulus started in 1940.
August 31st, 2009 at 2:34 pm
But I don’t really understand why it is that this kind of thing doesn’t seem to bother libertarians very much.
Matt clearly doesn’t spend enough time at
reason.com.
August 31st, 2009 at 9:29 pm
[...] Avent responds, asking why libertarians hate trains. Matt Yglesias chimes in on that, as well – adding a critique of zoning laws to the equation. Zoning is likely the reason [...]
September 1st, 2009 at 2:54 pm
[...] Matthew Yglesias: But libertarians often act as if they think that this outcome is the result of consumer choice or a free market process. But ask yourself, why is it that there are no conveniences right next to Cowen’s house? Well, I don’t know exactly where he lives, but I believe it’s in Fairfax County which is governed by this exciting zoning ordinance. Fairfax County, in its infinite wisdom, allows for the creation of housing at various different levels of density in different areas. They’re differentiated by the number of permitted dwellings per acre—one, two, three, four, eight, twelve, sixteen, twenty, or thirty per acre. Even within the thirty per acre area, buildings cannot be over “150 feet, subject to increase as may be permitted by the Board in accordance with the provisions of Sect. 9-607″ and there’s a requirement that “40% of the gross area shall be open space.” We also need to make sure to “Refer to Article 11 for off-street parking, loading and private street requirements.” [...]