Ask the Carless Guy, Volume Something or Other

How many a-holes do we have on this ship?

I received this email from my college roommate today:

listening to public radio this morning they kept talking about a decline in the amount of new homes being built as a bad sign. isn't this going to happen eventually anyway since the amount of open land gets smaller with every house?

I didn't hear it myself. I'm wondering if this was national public radio, or a local DC show, so that I can look up who the interviewer/interviewees were. That always has to be the first question to ask yourself, "what is this guy's angle?" Without knowing that I can't pinpoint why he might be saying that lack of new housing starts is bad, because...well, what is bad?

Is it bad because he is in the real estate industry and knows no other way to operate his business than the status quo that has utterly failed and bankrupted us? Is it because he's an economist and worried about losing jobs in the housing construction industry? Was it bad that the horse and buggy industry is no longer a thriving job growth industry?

Cars have their place. Single family housing has its place. This is the common misconception of me, typically by those who don't know any better or are so mired in ideology or fear of altering their precious status quo. That I excoriate them because of my own preferences. First, that wouldn't be very professional. Second, and personally, I live by a simple rule: Live the way you want, as long as it doesn't negatively affect others and ensure that others have a similar choice to be able to live they way that they want without negatively affecting others.

Want to stop bailing out banks for bad loans on single family houses people couldn't afford? Want to stop wasting money on overextended infrastructure and unnecessary and poorly planned highways? WALKABILITY IS A TAX CUT.

Unfortunately, we built a structural inertia upon zoning, bank loans, tax incentives, and road construction that carried us WAYYYY past equilibrium for those industries. We are now experiencing the pain of this overshoot, like any druggie experiencing withdrawal. Any institutions we establish have to be flexible and adaptable enough to change when we change and learn as we learn, or else it becomes a starship in ludicrous speed with no breaks.

It is the cause of every recession. The severity of which is determined by how far we went off in one direction and how long it takes until we reverse the inertia. I've been howling about the impending housing doom since 2002, but that apparently was steering the Titanic with flippers and scuba gear whilst hanging onto the rudder. I was just too naive and broke having just graduated from school to know how to wager against it.

So no more housing starts may or may not be a bad thing, but we have to look deeper. Where are those housing starts occurring or not occurring? If they are no longer occurring at the edge, in exurbia, that is a good thing. We can't afford more single family homes at the edge nor the infrastructure to them. All the people who CAN afford to be out there, either already are or they choose not to be.

We KNOW we have at least a surplus of 4 million large lot single family homes. We're pretty sure that banks are sitting on x2 that number to inflate the prices on the previous 4 million. With the ARM resets about to happen this year and next, we might be looking at another x2. Some estimates have a surplus of 22 million by 2025.

Building new houses is insane, at least in the way we've been doing it, on land in exurbia that the highest and best use of is probably agricultural production or nature. The housing industry keeps trying to prop up the myth that everybody needs their single family house in BFE, as some sort of sign of independence or surge in middle class choice or prosperity. All marketing BS. They do so, because it is easy on them. Land is cheap, so they externalize transportation costs on the consumer.

Cities, particularly young cities that know no better are eager for the tax base. That is, until they get the bill to maintain that infrastructure at such a low density. But the unfortunate reality is that you can't unbundle transpo from housing without having a lot of poor people stuck in the middle of nowhere.

If it is because there is no new housing where we badly need it, where it is tied to cheap, effective, optional choice of transportation then it is a bad thing. And we need to loosen up the credit markets for locational efficient housing starts for rental, ownership, and affordable housing. This should be job one at the federal and state level.

The other key is utter and complete overhaul of all state and federal standards for transportation planning and design, land use and zoning, and affordable housing standards. Some of these are already happening. As I have said before, with all of the press that healthcare and bank bailout get, the best thing that any administration has done in thirty years is the effective merger of HUD, EPA, and DOT under one roof, with the exact right person in charge.

This will be the way out of this uber-recession. We just have to make sure we don't cement this particular direction so we can provide some steering or breaking at a later date. Railroads were once as corrupt if not more so than the highway industry is now. It is the nature of the beast.

Conservatives Against Sprawl

It is starting to pick up steam, as our endless ranting apparently has now apparently migrated rearward from the explicit memory of our collective frontal lobe to the implicit regions of the hemisphere. Personally, I think this is one issue that can be agreed upon by both right and left, possibly for differing reasons, and we can certainly disagree on the best way out of the mess. Here is E.D. Kain at True/Slant citing Kunstler and requesting Andrew Sullivan take up the mantle (which he has in the past):

Sprawl is a result of massive statist interventions into our culture and society, and its symptoms are equally enormous. Everything that conservatism has historically stood for is undermined by sprawl. It is not only the physical manifestation of our decline, it is a poison which continues to contribute to that decline. Its repercussions can be felt in our discourse, in our speech, in our way of thinking. This is not merely a matter of aesthetically pleasing communities, but of communities which allow individuals to be a part of the whole. I doubt this is sustainable, this suburban maze - in any way: fiscally, socially, spiritually. It is, as James Howard Kunstler called it, “a peculiar blip in human experience.”

I can't disagree with anything he states. He doesn't really offer any solutions, but that really isn't his job. Frankly, he gets at the fundamental and logical disconnect in the modern conservative mind that peripherally suggests limited government then gleefully spends on highway projects, forming an endless rhetorical loop that people want their house an hour from their job and the road that caused that to be the only choice must be expanded to allow for "free choice."

Perhaps this tipping point suggests a potential coalescence of common purpose, which will be the only way out of this mess.

So You're a Libertarian

"I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious." HL Mencken, Living Philosophies.

I have a long post outlined in the myriad of drafts (some of which are actually on-going), detailing the type of people, demographic categories or psychographic segments who, logically would/should support walkable communities. The reality of it, and the point of that eventual argument, is to show that pretty much anybody with a brain or a pulse should be in favor of walkable communities. I do have a special category for those who do not. Whether Pew adds it into their psychographic segments is another story.

One of the segments of the population who would/should logically support walkable communities is any/all who identify themselves as fiscal conservatives and it turns out that even enlightend conservatives agree. The American Conservative:

For the 101st time: sprawl — an umbrella term for the pattern of development seen virtually everywhere in the United States — is not caused by the free market. It is, rather, mandated by a vast and seemingly intractable network of government regulations, from zoning laws and building codes to street design regulations. If Stossel wants to expand Americans’ lifestyle choices, he should attack the very thing he was defending, namely, suburban sprawl.

In short, top down standards, tax policy, zoning, and subsidies have made for a generic world of limited (or no) choice:

Perhaps, choice isn't the preferred word than variety, because they are different but the choice is irrelevant. Housing choice is for the most part is the equivalent of cocoa puffs and fruity pebbles...all made of the same crap underneath: corn starch, artificial coloring, flavoring, and some bran flour. Flip the formula around a little bit and you get a two-car garage, a pool, and a third half-bathroom and an hour commute.

Other conservative cases for transit, urbanism, and more transit.

Full disclosure: I consider myself a leftist libertarian. Whatever that means, right? While we are putting all of our cards on the table, I think any rational person could support the idea that any public spending towards the commonwealth should be thoughtful and generate a return of value, whether that value is monetary, social, ecological, or in general quality of life improvements.

One of our key challenges is monetizing, properly assessing the value of, those often overlooked "externalized" factors. Some things like clean water, clean air, healthy food, quality of life. How do you put a number on those things? Some might consider them subjective, which works exactly in favor of "business as usual." It's subjective. Can not value. Can not put into the equation.

The scary thing is that the bill for those costs ALL eventually come due. This is (and will be) the fundamental undoing of neo-classical economics which attempted to add critical scientific objectivity to our decision-making processes. Sounded good in theory.

Our biggest flaw is that we base these decisions on raw numbers. I am "leftist" libertarian because in my mind return-on-investment extends to cockamamie notions like an educated and healthy citizenry. Utilization of the commonwealth covers things that the "free market" has been unable to properly value, nor deliver to everyone. I can't arrive at the statistics showing investment in education or health, but using the blink method I know that investing in people, empowering them to contribute to the economy and society rather than drain from it, is fundamentally a good thing for all of us.

But the gray area of healthcare (or sickcare as is more aptly named) nor education is not what this post is about. Recently, I was asked what I thought of an idea found here of charging a toll to traffic passing through Dallas on highways without stopping of $20. This comes at a time when California recently passed an increase on gas taxes of $.18/gallon. TxDOT is struggling for cash. The Trinity River Toll Boondoggle is on the ropes. And the Federal highway trust fund is running on fumes. Also, two weeks ago, Mayor Moncrief of Fort Worth, made the absolutely true but refreshingly honest statement that car oriented development was a colossal mistake.

This has all come about at the same time, as we are coming to the realization that car-oriented design can't pay for itself. Lobbyist shills like Wendell Cox, posing as crusaders for free markets, often use the argument against public transit initiatives, that public transit doesn't pay for itself. I have news for you. No form of transportation pays for itself. Walking burns energy that isn't replaced without access to new forms of energy in the way of food/calories.

Where we can begin to differentiate between forms of transportation is the type of development that occurs in, around, and because of the form of, or multiple forms of transportation. Development and transportation are inextricably linked, and must be thought of that way. Transportation networks designed strictly for the car are ugly and unsafe. It is not a leap of logic to assume that things "ugly and unsafe" are literally repellent, forcing all real estate investment away from, but gas stations and drive-throughs. This creates a tension within real estate development. It wants to agglomerate near density of movement, ie traffic, but not car traffic.

Without adequate wealth, which has essentially been underwritten for decades with debt, a fantasy of wealth, a lack of density can not afford the amount of infrastructure and amenity of cities, of proper urban design. Suburban development as we know it is wrecking school systems, the environment, and even our physical health and now we collectively and despondently are staring straight into the reality of that bill arriving in the mail.

Of course, the kind of suburbia I am referring to, isn't the good kind of suburbia: the self-sufficient satellites of major cities - often of about 25,000 or so people, only about a square mile, and including a range of housing types, a jobs to housing balance, adequate public spaces and public services, and an agricultural belt coating the voids between celestial nodes of development.

This is about the corrosive form of suburbia that has no future in its current form. Fortunately, for us, this provides ample opportunity for rebuilding. The way out of recession is the qualitative improvement of our cities and interconnected network of suburbs into a new built form that increases quality of life, access to amenity, cuts waste through travel time and inefficient use of public infrastructure. It creates for more interconnected economies, that eliminates the unspoken tax that is the distance between things and the cost of energy to traverse that distance.

To do so, however we have to pay for it. There are no free lunches. The irony is that this suburbia, hailed as the brave new world of freedom and choice is often filled with those who hypocritically excoriate others for the threat of possibly taking advantage of the system and "living off the state." Well, call me H.L. Mencken 'cause I also have news for you. You are going to have to start paying for that lifestyle. (I'll refrain from calling anyone part of the 'booboisie' as Mencken did.)

Stepping back a second, the city (in its abstract form) is a manifestation of local economics. Its form defined by various related economic inputs, all mentioned above: Design standards, tax policies, zoning, myriad of subsidies, and the implementation of transportation networks are all components of a cities genetic code, its "urban genotype."

Despite what some will have you believe, the phenomenon of this particular brand of suburbia is quite young in relation to the evolution of human settlement patterns. And how could it not be. The car was an entirely new phenomenon, fundamentally changing the way we perceived space and time. However, time, as always, has allowed us to see the error in our ways. If the output, city form (urban phenotype), is no longer useful, the inputs have to change. In the absence of a complete overhaul of zoning/coding, the quickest way towards profound change is the implementation of some or many policies designed to make the luxury of individual (auto)mobility pay for itself.

• Does this mean increases in property taxes under a certain density threshold?

• Is it a singular, large toll, such as mentioned above for pass-through traffic?

• Or is it many smaller tolls?

• Is it a slow, gradual increase in gasoline taxes?

Each of these is a form of a pigovian tax. A punitive policy constructed to limit behavior that negatively affects society. The question becomes what is politically implementable?

A singular, large toll on a new road like the Trinity River Toll Road (or any other) could effectively eliminate the need for the road in the first place. So why build it? It would also potentially reduce inter-city commerce.

Gas taxes and more road conversions to tolls could possibly and unfairly punish only the middle- and lower-classes. But, they are precisely the ones who would benefit most from relocation to new development areas, walkable communities, near transit.

What can we stomach and how much at a time? Complex systems often react poorly, convulsing under pressure of quick, dramatic change. When immediate, reactive adaptation occurs, sometimes the next evolutionary iteration isn't an improvement, which is why steady, incremental change is always preferred.

My personal preference is to slowly but firmly increase gas taxes by year (say a dime/gallon each year), add tolls to all highways priced to regulate capacity, AND market-based parking. The key is to not limit choice, but to charge for the cost driving and its related infrastructure places on society.

The next question is where does that revenue go? I would roll all of it into an appropriate hierarchy and provision of alternative transit (but done efficiently and intelligently so as to not overbuild), street re-design into complete street/context-sensitive design, and housing programs to increase affordability and variety of housing types near transit-stations as well as the improved walkability and interconnectivity of those areas.

Or just remember my new catch-phrase: Walkability is a tax cut.