Trump’s comments in LA today about cutting red tape for rebuilding in the wake of the fires are interesting. It’s in line with his view that there are too many regulations across government, and it probably is also informed by his past life as a developer. As a small developer in LA myself I agree the system is broken. I hope LA and the government can use this crisis to radically rethink how to streamline building zoning and permitting. I agree we shouldn’t be zoning use as much, and I feel like with modern technologies there shouldn’t need to be a million permits and reviews and professionals touching every level of the building process. Mix the 1970s Pattern Language concepts with AI or something….
Regulatory reform would be the silver lining of the fires, but I also don't see how LA rebuilds without some change to the existing regime. Necessity may be the mother of reinvention. Hope you and yours are all safe out there!
(More broadly, I think the preference for suburbs (and the "suburb shortage") is the actual "affordability crisis." For the same reason, pave-paradise-"yimbys", like MattY, are exactly wrong, imo. Non-density is a feature and not a bug, and if ppl are fleeing urban cores for the burbs, then "make the burbs more like urban cores" is very odd conclusion to draw.
Ha, thanks, Moses. I agree that the affordability problem is also relevant to the suburbs, and there's no doubt that greenfield projects are part of the solution. I think we could probably build better suburbs, and while I don't think the only choice is sprawl or dense urban living, I don't think we have a lot of good examples of alternatives. Would more people opt for New Urbanist-style suburbs if more were available, or are there not more available because people don't want them? Would more people stay in cities if there were better/cheaper houses available, or do most people just not want to stay in cities? That's a question I try to wrestle with in my writing: what's nature, what's nurture, what's culture? The best way to find out, in my view, is to take a laissez-faire approach to land use: remove restrictions rather than impose requirements, and see what people build. Of course, cities have been failing on this and many other policy areas, which certainly hasn't helped.
Well, how would one take a laissez faire approach to people who wanted to live in a single family home neighborhood, if not zoning (or privately created restrictive covenants)?
I'm a big fan of new experiments, cul-de-sac, etc, and agree that preferences are heterogenous across space and time. I also think the arguments against land-use regs are much more persuasive where density is already the norm.
I get very suspicious, however, when people find a "solution" that involves breaking a thing that's demonstrably working. People like suburbs, for the most part. They're functional, safe, and otherwise support a quality of life that people seem to like, relative to alternatives--and that's why they're so expensive. If you then conclude "oh the problem is that they are bad at governing, so we need to override their zoning authority" it's like, "a. Who da fuck are you calling bad at governing, Mr. Urban hellscape?; and b. If anything, you should be asking yourself what insights about governing can I learn from these places that are so attractive to live?"
More succinctly, "The solution is that we should change the rules in the one place that seems to have figured it out" requires an insane-level of hubris.
I think you default to property rights in all these cases. It seems legitimate to me that property owners should be able to form an HOA or establish limited deed restrictions. Zoning-free Houston allows such deed restrictions, but the restrictions come up for a vote periodically (every decade or so?), which gives whoever owns the property the opportunity to weigh in on whether to support change in their neighborhood and does not force the properties to conform to the preferences of the past.
But then I think of a place like my hometown in suburban Connecticut*, where "all" the land has been developed. The town's population has stagnated if not declined, and it is looking at closing one of its high schools. Most of the farmland surrounding the historic center was developed in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but downtown has remained basically the same for most of my life. The town seems unable to accommodate or contemplate population growth under the current regime, and yet housing there is more expensive than ever. There are things they could do that don't involve rezoning the entire town, like allowing redevelopment of underutilized box stores, strip malls, and office parks, but I don't know that any of that is under consideration.
As to the rest, I have been very critical of urban misgovernance, and as a city lover/dweller, I believe we ought to clean up our own house first. To your point (b), the crop of folks who categorically run American cities do not take schools or public safety seriously, and as a result, all of us who remain in cities are reaping what they sowed.
*Edit: I vaguely recall that you are also from CT? I grew up in Wallingford.
I'm sure it will be beaten out of me over the next four years, but I just don't have the energy for the hysteria and handwringing of the first term. FWIW, if I were writing this week about, say, the rule of law or immigration, the tone would have been entirely different.
"Practically, while this may slow the transition to cleaner technologies on urban roads, cities have other tools for dealing with automobile emissions, like congestion pricing and tolls, that Project 2025 doesn’t cover."
This seems unduly optimistic to me. Trump himself has vowed to kill NYC's congestion pricing; he's certainly not a fan, although I'm not sure he has the ability to shut it down now that it's live. Given that other cities would likely need federal approval for congestion pricing as well, why would you assume that his administration would be any more open to the idea?
It probably is too optimistic, but I was positioning this more in the context of "Project 2025 as a blueprint for Trump 2.0". This strikes me as one of those things that Trump says to placate his base, like the whole "Suburban Lifestyle Dream" stuff—i.e., culture war talking points. But he's really a city person at heart, and part of me thinks if he were still living full-time at Trump Tower (within the congestion pricing zone), he'd love the speed at which he was chauffeured around town and wouldn't care about the price.
From what I've seen, it doesn't sound like he can eliminate it with the stroke of a pen, and opponents are asking him to do another environmental review (classic NIMBY move), which seems like an admission that they can't kill it outright. Still, the way congestion pricing has been positioned, as a boon to the MTA and not as a time-saving measure for commuters, also set up this us/them, suburban/urban dynamic. We'll see what happens.
If the NFIP were abolished would that push the obligation to the states? States are already taking on more burdens as insurers leave and I wonder what happens next.
I see a much bigger picture here but one of many questions and a 'what do we do now' quest to understand what our future brings. What if this is the Golden Age? What if conspiracy theories are true, at least as it concerns housing and urban planning? I've seen people flying on these odd devices. Do they fly in snow, wind or rain? Do we continue to develop roadway for cars? Do we continue to have two or three car garages? Where do we park these new devices? Can the underground transport; superfast trains, be adapted for we the people? How will our lives change if we can go from NY to LA in an hour? How will our lives change when we have free electricity? What will our housing shortage be once all the houses purchased by Blackrock return to the people, and the farmland purchased by Gates return to the farmers? How will we treat our land once pesticides are outlawed? Do we pretend like none of this exists? They're just some crazy conspiracy theories; or do we continue on designing with a 'what if?' in the back of our minds? I hope so. How the world will change, few know, but it will change. Let's be open to it.
Some good food for thought here! I agree: the future is hard to predict, but let's be open to change and adapt! Humanity has a pretty good record of that in the long run.
Trump’s comments in LA today about cutting red tape for rebuilding in the wake of the fires are interesting. It’s in line with his view that there are too many regulations across government, and it probably is also informed by his past life as a developer. As a small developer in LA myself I agree the system is broken. I hope LA and the government can use this crisis to radically rethink how to streamline building zoning and permitting. I agree we shouldn’t be zoning use as much, and I feel like with modern technologies there shouldn’t need to be a million permits and reviews and professionals touching every level of the building process. Mix the 1970s Pattern Language concepts with AI or something….
Regulatory reform would be the silver lining of the fires, but I also don't see how LA rebuilds without some change to the existing regime. Necessity may be the mother of reinvention. Hope you and yours are all safe out there!
Thoughtful, considered, even-keeled. Remarkable.
(More broadly, I think the preference for suburbs (and the "suburb shortage") is the actual "affordability crisis." For the same reason, pave-paradise-"yimbys", like MattY, are exactly wrong, imo. Non-density is a feature and not a bug, and if ppl are fleeing urban cores for the burbs, then "make the burbs more like urban cores" is very odd conclusion to draw.
Ha, thanks, Moses. I agree that the affordability problem is also relevant to the suburbs, and there's no doubt that greenfield projects are part of the solution. I think we could probably build better suburbs, and while I don't think the only choice is sprawl or dense urban living, I don't think we have a lot of good examples of alternatives. Would more people opt for New Urbanist-style suburbs if more were available, or are there not more available because people don't want them? Would more people stay in cities if there were better/cheaper houses available, or do most people just not want to stay in cities? That's a question I try to wrestle with in my writing: what's nature, what's nurture, what's culture? The best way to find out, in my view, is to take a laissez-faire approach to land use: remove restrictions rather than impose requirements, and see what people build. Of course, cities have been failing on this and many other policy areas, which certainly hasn't helped.
Also, I want to quote your first paragraph on my welcome page. ;-)
Well, how would one take a laissez faire approach to people who wanted to live in a single family home neighborhood, if not zoning (or privately created restrictive covenants)?
I'm a big fan of new experiments, cul-de-sac, etc, and agree that preferences are heterogenous across space and time. I also think the arguments against land-use regs are much more persuasive where density is already the norm.
I get very suspicious, however, when people find a "solution" that involves breaking a thing that's demonstrably working. People like suburbs, for the most part. They're functional, safe, and otherwise support a quality of life that people seem to like, relative to alternatives--and that's why they're so expensive. If you then conclude "oh the problem is that they are bad at governing, so we need to override their zoning authority" it's like, "a. Who da fuck are you calling bad at governing, Mr. Urban hellscape?; and b. If anything, you should be asking yourself what insights about governing can I learn from these places that are so attractive to live?"
More succinctly, "The solution is that we should change the rules in the one place that seems to have figured it out" requires an insane-level of hubris.
I think you default to property rights in all these cases. It seems legitimate to me that property owners should be able to form an HOA or establish limited deed restrictions. Zoning-free Houston allows such deed restrictions, but the restrictions come up for a vote periodically (every decade or so?), which gives whoever owns the property the opportunity to weigh in on whether to support change in their neighborhood and does not force the properties to conform to the preferences of the past.
But then I think of a place like my hometown in suburban Connecticut*, where "all" the land has been developed. The town's population has stagnated if not declined, and it is looking at closing one of its high schools. Most of the farmland surrounding the historic center was developed in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, but downtown has remained basically the same for most of my life. The town seems unable to accommodate or contemplate population growth under the current regime, and yet housing there is more expensive than ever. There are things they could do that don't involve rezoning the entire town, like allowing redevelopment of underutilized box stores, strip malls, and office parks, but I don't know that any of that is under consideration.
As to the rest, I have been very critical of urban misgovernance, and as a city lover/dweller, I believe we ought to clean up our own house first. To your point (b), the crop of folks who categorically run American cities do not take schools or public safety seriously, and as a result, all of us who remain in cities are reaping what they sowed.
*Edit: I vaguely recall that you are also from CT? I grew up in Wallingford.
You're a lot more optimistic than I am over this administration.
I'm sure it will be beaten out of me over the next four years, but I just don't have the energy for the hysteria and handwringing of the first term. FWIW, if I were writing this week about, say, the rule of law or immigration, the tone would have been entirely different.
"Practically, while this may slow the transition to cleaner technologies on urban roads, cities have other tools for dealing with automobile emissions, like congestion pricing and tolls, that Project 2025 doesn’t cover."
This seems unduly optimistic to me. Trump himself has vowed to kill NYC's congestion pricing; he's certainly not a fan, although I'm not sure he has the ability to shut it down now that it's live. Given that other cities would likely need federal approval for congestion pricing as well, why would you assume that his administration would be any more open to the idea?
https://nysfocus.com/2024/08/26/trump-hochul-kill-congestion-pricing
It probably is too optimistic, but I was positioning this more in the context of "Project 2025 as a blueprint for Trump 2.0". This strikes me as one of those things that Trump says to placate his base, like the whole "Suburban Lifestyle Dream" stuff—i.e., culture war talking points. But he's really a city person at heart, and part of me thinks if he were still living full-time at Trump Tower (within the congestion pricing zone), he'd love the speed at which he was chauffeured around town and wouldn't care about the price.
From what I've seen, it doesn't sound like he can eliminate it with the stroke of a pen, and opponents are asking him to do another environmental review (classic NIMBY move), which seems like an admission that they can't kill it outright. Still, the way congestion pricing has been positioned, as a boon to the MTA and not as a time-saving measure for commuters, also set up this us/them, suburban/urban dynamic. We'll see what happens.
If the NFIP were abolished would that push the obligation to the states? States are already taking on more burdens as insurers leave and I wonder what happens next.
Going to the states would be better than it going to thousands of individual municipalities, but I too wonder what happens next!
I see a much bigger picture here but one of many questions and a 'what do we do now' quest to understand what our future brings. What if this is the Golden Age? What if conspiracy theories are true, at least as it concerns housing and urban planning? I've seen people flying on these odd devices. Do they fly in snow, wind or rain? Do we continue to develop roadway for cars? Do we continue to have two or three car garages? Where do we park these new devices? Can the underground transport; superfast trains, be adapted for we the people? How will our lives change if we can go from NY to LA in an hour? How will our lives change when we have free electricity? What will our housing shortage be once all the houses purchased by Blackrock return to the people, and the farmland purchased by Gates return to the farmers? How will we treat our land once pesticides are outlawed? Do we pretend like none of this exists? They're just some crazy conspiracy theories; or do we continue on designing with a 'what if?' in the back of our minds? I hope so. How the world will change, few know, but it will change. Let's be open to it.
Some good food for thought here! I agree: the future is hard to predict, but let's be open to change and adapt! Humanity has a pretty good record of that in the long run.