I come for the central planners
at a local hearing
A few weeks ago, I wrote about the way that our County approaches planning near our neighborhood.
The other day, the planning board held a hearing at which residents were allowed to speak. But we were only given 2 minutes each. The archived video is here. The hearing lasted about 2 hours, but for some reason the video starts with 5 hours of nothing, until the hearing starts at about the 5 hour mark.
If you scroll ahead to the 5 hour and 45 minute mark, you can see my testimony. In my 2 minutes, I went for an attempt to illustrate how the plan was contrary to the lifestyle of the people being planned for.
Other residents of our neighborhood pointed out how impossible it would be to get to work and transport their children without cars. They said that they had chosen to live in a suburb, not a city. Many of them had done their homework, finding facts that seemed to have eluded the planning board.1
There is a separate effort by the state to improve the main road referred to in the plan, and apparently there was no coordination by the county planning board with that effort. This was pointed out by a resident of another neighborhood in the planning zone.
The other neighborhoods did not send as many people to testify, But their representatives were even more troubled by the plan, because it would likely result in traffic overflowing into their residential streets.
The other neighborhoods also were unhappy with the plan’s proposal to add housing. Their representatives point out that some of their streets are already so crowded with parked cars that there is only one through lane, so that adding housing without parking would worsen the situation.
Our neighborhood was less NIMBY about adding housing. In fact, a few seconds after the 5 hour, 15 minute mark, Jeremy, who I taught in high school, praises the plan to add housing while criticizing the plan for transportation. He was not the only one, but most of our residents chose to focus on the transportation issue.
I am told to be pessimistic that the board will change its mind, even though there was massive opposition to the plan. As several of the speakers pointed out, the board has a reputation for blowing off the public.
For example, residents point out that a bus terminal that is assumed in the plan, and plays a key role in it, does not appear on the schedule of the transit authority to be built for at least several years.
"Their representatives point out that some of their streets are already so crowded with parked cars that there is only one through lane, so that adding housing without parking would worsen the situation. Our neighborhood was less NIMBY about adding housing."
NIMBY is not a good way to describe it*.
A concept I've introduced a few times here over the years to explain the distinction between "actual NIMBY" and "YIMBY - just please without ruining my life, or else I'll resist" is the urban building principle of "Conservation of Infrastructural Adequacy".
That is, sure, go ahead, buy that piece of real estate and you have a presumptive right to build whatever you want on it - subject- to the condition that your neighbors shouldn't experience a sudden deterioration in the quality of the neighborhood's amenities they've been enjoying for a long time in the reasonable expectation of stable continuance. Deteriorations such as an explosion of congestion on the road or in public transport, an increase the local rate of traffic-related harms, radical increase in the local cost of maintaining and using a private vehicle, etc. You may claim that these people are merely incumbents talking their book but who don't actually have any legal right to any of that. They will disagree with you, but more to the point, they will use politics to make sure that, one way or another, they do. That's how we got into this mess.
So, if you want to build a giant tower block on the plot that once contained a small number of single-family homes, then you should add a lane to the main road, and maybe you have to buy the road from the city to privatize it, and maybe you also have to buy a lane's worth of frontage from all the surrounding properties to do it.
"But the politics is impossible, the transactions costs too high, and that would make my project prohibitively expensive!" Yeah! Maybe! Maybe a lot of so-called obvious unlocked potential value that is being 'blocked' is, in fact, a value-losing proposition if one actually does the proper analysis. Or maybe not, it depends, but now you can't just pretend, "that's not my problem", you've got to price in mitigation for what would otherwise be externalities of infrastructural inadequacy. See, a lot of libertarian economists will go on about Shoup and "The High Cost of Free Parking", and tell people they should get used to paying for parking and tell cities they should adjust laws which mandate free parking spots. But they fail to extend that logic to "The High Cost of Free Externalities." These high costs are, after all, what those incumbent neighbors are worried about. So tell builders they should get used to paying for externalities, and tell cities they should adjust laws which let builders get away with it for free.
In what is a kind of quasi-Hernando de Soto point, real estate in urban areas is a bundle of sticks of property rights, but only -some- of those rights are formalized into explicitly legal rights and titles. The informal rights are built upon reasonable, investment-based expectations and so forth, and while it would be convenient for the BBB argument to pretend otherwise, they are in fact no less valid or legitimate that the formal rights, and they are certainly 'priced-in' to the fair market value of the local properties. It's just that, as with most property rights, value is related to one's ability to maintain possession when contested and someone is trying to take it away.
And the foundational basis for the value of these informal real estate rights is the ability to defend those rights, it's just, not in ways that are in court via traditional causes of action in property law with more-or-less orderly and socially efficient processes and predictable adjudications based on well-established caselaw. Instead, the regime we have now is what happens when people really want and act like they ought to have a right to the principle of conservation of infrastructural adequacy, but absent formalization, have to go about defending their just interests via the means of the craziest, least efficient, and most corrupt and politicized ways possible, such these zoning codes and planning board actions. The answer is not to replace these kludges and copes with nothing at all, but with something formal, so better.
*As I might have explained to Bryan Caplan had he taken up my offer to give him an actual challenge in debate over "Build Baby Build", as opposed to the "violent agreement" / "praising by faint criticism" he has typically received. (Note, this is not really fair, I know Caplan doesn't read the comments to his blog posts.) There is a funny scene on page 207 of BBB where Caplan as giant bear facepalms when being bested in a debate by a tiny mouse and, exasperated, asks, "How am I losing to this guy?" Caplan erroneously attributes this to what I suppose you could call his proposal for a cognitive bias - a tendency to mistake the number of arguments on each side for the relative weight of the overall cases. Not only is he not correct in this attribution, but unfortunately his intent was not well-adapted into illustration and comes off as David vs. Goliath, and one is inclined root for the underdog, er, "undermouse." It would have been better portrayed as a whole hive of bees who are not just the natural enemy of bears per the trope, but which can only defeat the bear not by merit of even their combined strength but only by massing the number of their stings.
I didn't watch the video. I can easily imagine it. In my youth, not knowing where I was going, I took a position as a planning and zoning administrator for a small city. Woof....I lasted exactly 10 1/2 months. Small community zoning boards, land use commissions, planning committees, code enforcement officers, and all related such positions are a pox on humanity.