New and Old #145

Friday roundup and commentary

“Yes, And” In My Backyard, City of Yes, Ryan Puzycki, December 7, 2023

Across America, from Austin to Albany, the foremost challenge cities are facing is to simply make it easier to build more housing in places where we already allow housing to be built. In Austin, City Council is set to increase the number of housing units allowed on a single-family lot from two to three. This modest reform is being characterized in apocalyptic terms by opponents who argue that it will literally eliminate residential neighborhoods, as if a handful of new neighbors were an invasion of catastrophic proportions.

In this context, liberalizing residential zones to allow even modest commercial establishments like corner stores might be too much of a heavy lift given where the politics are today, to say nothing of full-scale reform.

However, Puzycki argues, citing Tyler Cowen, that deregulating commercial property development and allowing mixing of uses would unlock a huge amount of economic growth. He arrives at that by reversing which use is being liberalized:

the major economic problem facing cities with respect to real estate is an undersupply of housing and an oversupply of commercial real estate. The problem is especially acute for office parks and business districts, which have been hollowed out by work-from-home, threatening property values and tax revenues. As I argued in “The City of ‘Yes, And’,” cities should respond to these challenges by embracing both residential, yes, and commercial reform—but by flipping the script that Cowen presents. Rather than pushing to deregulate residential zones to allow more commercial uses, urbanists should pursue the liberalization of existing commercial zones to allow for a plethora of other uses, including housing. 

Very interesting. Read the whole thing.

Small-Town Story, American Scientist, Brian Hayes, March-April 2004

This is a really interesting, somewhat long piece. Here’s a (small!) chunk of it:

Some quantitative insight comes from American Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: How It Flourished and What It Cost, a 2002 book by Bruce L. Gardner of the University of Maryland. Gardner summarizes data from several studies of incorporated communities with a population of 1,000 or less. (Only incorporated towns are included because that's what the Census Bureau counts.) It turns out the number of such towns was roughly the same in 1990 as it was in 1910—about 9,500. Of course they are not all the same towns; many have come and gone, and the total number has fluctuated to some extent over the decades. Another study gives a more detailed view for the years from 1940 to 1960, which was the era of steepest decline in farm population. Of 10,099 towns in the under-1,000 category at the start of this period, 8,363 were still on the list at the end, for a loss of 1,736. But only 303 of those missing towns dwindled away to nonexistence; the rest departed the data set not by shrinking but by growing beyond the 1,000-person cutoff. Meanwhile, another 271 towns crossed the boundary in the opposite direction, declining from a larger population to under 1,000. And 1,236 towns in this size class were newly incorporated during the period. The net change resulting from all of these events was a loss of 229 towns, or about 2 percent. These numbers don't seem to support the notion that the small town as a social institution is about to dry up and blow away. If anything, what needs explaining is the remarkable stability and resilience of these communities. In the aggregate they seem to have survived almost unchanged through an unprecedented demographic upheaval.

Read the whole thing.

Create Streets proposes building housing on Britain’s “needlessly wide” roads, Dezeen, Amy Peacock, September 15, 2023

The paper argued that Britain continues to widen roads in an attempt to decrease travel time, but speed efficiency has plateaued since the turn of the 21st century.

Additionally, unnecessary road building is often prompted by the placement of new schools, shops and leisure facilities. Building these facilities at the centre of new developments will minimise the need for new roads and encourage people to walk or cycle, saving the developer and council money, according to Create Streets.

The paper emphasised that building new roads will continue to be necessary, but they should be narrower and lined with homes and amenities that serve communities – “not single-minded soulless distributors and expressways”.

One of the reasons cited for this is net-zero carbon emissions, which gives a lot of people the impression that it’s about reducing convenience or standard of living for the sake of the planet. But the whole point, for me, is that this sort of thing isn’t a sacrifice at all. Why would narrower, safer roads with more homes and businesses not be a good thing? Think of a Main Street versus a four- or six-lane road lined with detached buildings surrounded by parking lots. Which do you prefer?

‘How Did I End Up in Indiana?’ Welcome to the Internet’s Favorite Small City, Wall Street Journal, Libertina Brandt, November 29, 2023

Paywalled, but if you have a subscription, it’s a fun piece. Housing advocates sometimes say, “What, everyone should just move to Indiana?” (Or Ohio, or whatever state). Don’t knock it till you try it.

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Related Reading:

New and Old #133

New and Old #134

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