New and Old #142
Friday roundup and commentary
Why Don’t We Just Build New Cities?, The Atlantic, Jerusalem Demsas, September 27, 2023
This is just the sub-headline, but it’s a good summation: “Yearning for a blank slate crosses the ideological spectrum—but sooner or later, new places will face the same old problems.” It’s easier to build than to maintain, and it’s easier to tear down than to build.
This siren song of just starting over fresh, instead of permitting the slow, unsatisfying accumulation of small reforms and change, will always be tempting. But read this great piece on why we should mostly ignore it.
How Parking Ratios Kill Homes, Sightline Institute, Catie Gould, December 6, 2023
“It will make future projects incredibly difficult, if not impossible,” said Matt Edlen, whose firm is in the midst of constructing a six-story building that will add 46 new homes to Main Street. It’ll be one of the last projects built under the old rules. “Anything like that just stops.”
Local zoning codes, the thick binders of monospaced text that shape how modern cities are allowed to evolve, are often thought to be carefully crafted regulations that are uniquely tailored to each town’s history and needs.
But Washougal’s story shows what often happens instead. Key regulations that limit how many homes can be built on any given lot are simply copy-pasted from one place to the next based off of what feels right, with scant research into the origins of those numbers or how they fit into the local context.
This is one of the things people who work on these issues find out. These codes were often just borrowed from other localities, and many of them at this point are just an accretion of rules which have never really been interrogated or overhauled. It’s not just a kind of central planning, in essence—it’s lazy, bad central planning.
Also this: “The rules can also become so complicated that even a trained city planner can easily misinterpret them. That’s exactly what happened in Washougal.”
Read the whole thing.
In 1975, the United States divided vehicles into two categories, “passenger cars” and “light trucks.” Light trucks at the time were largely farm and work vehicles, and no owner would consider using their slow, expensive, and gas-guzzling truck to take their kids to school. Today, 80% of new vehicle sales are categorized as light trucks, mostly pickups and SUVs used for commutes, grocery store runs, and trips to the park.
Despite this shift, American regulators continue to treat the two categories very differently: light trucks see much more lenient fuel economy and emissions standards, a high “Chicken Tax” import tariff ensuring domestic control over the industry, and a generous “Hummer Deduction” for business owners, all of which bolster the industry and enable carmakers to build bigger, more expensive, and more profitable vehicles.
The light truck regulatory loophole is a really interesting example of regulatory capture, i.e. the regulated industry shaping regulations to its own benefit. Restrictions on imports are interesting too, especially inasmuch as they put small, inexpensive foreign cars off-limits.
This is why this is a collective action problem and not a mere consumer choice issue:
Though the auto industry has thrown its weight behind light trucks, their popularity by now has become a self-perpetuating spiral. More SUVs on our roads lead to even more SUVs; bigger SUVs lead to even bigger SUVs.
The mere presence of a preponderance of large vehicles alters the ability of others to opt out.
This is the write-up of a study, and it has some interesting conclusions. Like this from the summary:
Cost of living emerges as an overwhelming theme of these correlations: the metros that are home to the most children, as well as the metros attracting the most family migration, do not strongly tend to be the ones with, for example, high educational achievement, low child mortality and homicide rates, and strong upward mobility. Some of these correlations are even in the “wrong” direction. Rather, the metros that are objectively attractive to families are the ones with low cost of living, including affordable housing and child care.
Whether or not these conclusions are correct, the issue of making cities hospitable to and affordable for families is an important one. Give it a read.
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I would love to buy a new small truck. CAFE standards are based upon vehicle footprint, so larger trucks require less fuel efficiency to be sold. Considering demand didn't go away for trucks (and never will), larger trucks were the rational response to CAFE standards. Unintended regulatory consequences 101.