Happy Friday, everyone.
Last week, I wrote a piece for Business Insider about the perils of municipal fragmentation and a few potential solutions that California policymakers weighed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. What’s municipal fragmentation, you ask?
To understand the problem of municipal fragmentation, consider New York City's housing shortage. (By one estimate, the New York metropolitan area would need to build more than half a million homes in order to close the housing gap.) The city can and should stimulate a lot more housing production within its borders (and is attempting to do so), but even if the city council abolished all zoning laws tomorrow and allowed massive amounts of new construction, New York would probably still be digging out of a housing shortage in a decade, albeit a less severe one.
That's in part because New York City comprises less than 10% of the entire New York City metropolitan area in terms of surface area. The region as a whole includes more than 900 other municipalities, from New Haven, Connecticut, in the north to the seaside towns of southern New Jersey. Quite a few of those localities are affluent bedroom communities that have grown prosperous off their proximity to New York while providing the city with very little in return.
For example, many residents of Greenwich, Connecticut (average household income: $272,636) have lucrative jobs in Manhattan. They benefit from the city's booming economy, as well as its high concentration of skilled workers and major employers in high-wage industries like finance, but their property taxes don't go to New York. Instead of seeing itself as part of the broader NYC area and welcoming people who are looking to secure their economic future there, Greenwich has instituted a draconian zoning code that keeps people out and contributes to the region's housing supply crunch. (It doesn't help that the governor of Connecticut recently vetoed a bill intended to mitigate the state's housing shortage.)
If Greenwich and every other exclusionary suburb in the New York metro area loosened up their zoning, it would go a long way toward easing the central city's affordability crisis. There's plenty of room there; even increasing Greenwich's population density to make it on par with a denser midsize city like New Haven would mean growing its population by fivefold, adding more than 250,000 residents. More homebuilding in the suburbs would not only make the region as a whole more affordable, but it would also give more enterprising people a chance to move to the area, work, build businesses, and contribute to the shared prosperity of the region. But officials in New York City have no jurisdictional authority to push other towns to greenlight more housing. And since the potential benefits are so diffuse, Greenwich residents who oppose more development (aka NIMBYs) have little clear incentive to be part of a region-wide solution.
And here’s one of the solutions that California leaders floated:
Inspired in part by the work of the Los Angeles 2000 Committee, in 1989 some influential Northern California residents secured both public and private funding to create the Bay Area 2020 Commission. This commission's work was much more explicitly regionalist, and so its core recommendation was for a significantly more muscular regional planning mechanism than even the Los Angeles committee had devised. The Bay Area's commission proposed merging the area's three major regional bodies (the Association of Bay Area Governments, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, and the Bay Area Air Quality Management District) into a single commission.
This Regional Commission would have had extensive powers, including the ability to levy fines on local governments that didn't comply with regional plans, and to issue permits for a proposed development anywhere in the Bay Area's nine counties. A bill was introduced in the state senate to implement Bay Vision 2020, but, needless to say, it didn't pass. Many local governments, and two of the three regional bodies that were supposed to merge, were not pleased with the prospect of ceding their autonomy.
You can read the whole piece here.
I was also recently interviewed by Dave Infante of Fingers, a great newsletter about the business and culture of drinking in the United States. We discussed urban planning, the death of the corner bar, and how American zoning laws effectively subsidize drunk driving.
The framing of a subsidy for drunk driving is provocative. It’s great. Can you say more about it? How are the individual bar owners or the city zoning commission that requires parking minimums “subsidizing” drunk driving?
It might be useful to take a step back from the individual bar or restaurant with a parking lot, and instead think about how cities in general are planned. Parking mandates are part of a larger system of planning and zoning that also very frequently involves separation of uses. So you are putting bars and restaurants in general, outside residential areas, and especially far outside “single family residential” areas. Already, you’re making it so that if people want to go to those establishments, they're probably not walking. Then there's the question of how much road space is allocated to private cars versus other means of transportation. That's another nudge towards driving in a car. Then the parking is another part of that. If you look at the Parking Reform Network’s website, you can see how much of different urban downtowns are dedicated to parking. In some cities, it’s 20%, 30%, 40% of the central downtown area. It’s just tarmac.
And of course, you agree that’s the highest and best use for that land. Right, Ned?!
Right, right. [laughs] So you’re creating a lot of desert, essentially, where there aren’t other establishments and there’s not a great way to get around between establishments. This is just kind of nudging people further in the direction of driving. If you're concentrating all of the places that serve alcohol in areas that are separated from residential use, and you're making it so that any way of getting to those places other than driving your own car is prohibitively inconvenient, then people are going to drive to and from the bar. I'm sure most people who do that, most of the time, are going to drink responsibly or have a designated driver. But way too frequently, that’s not the case. We’ve created a planning system where in general, we're putting the alcohol where the only way to access it is by going there, having a few and then driving back.
Read our full conversation here.
Lastly, here’s an older piece of mine that I’ve been thinking about lately. Two years ago, I wrote a piece for The Nation about the role of homelessness in MAGA propaganda:
Why did Rufo and those who followed adopt homelessness as their pet issue? Partly because it was there: Widespread, visible homelessness in places like New York City, Seattle, and San Francisco was politically salient to the locals. And the right could plausibly argue that homelessness was especially prevalent in liberal cities because of progressive governance, not in spite of it.
But homelessness serves another purpose for the far right. Consider the other preoccupations of the San Fransicko crowd: Rufo went from fulminating against supportive housing programs to attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives; Shellenberger has diversified into assaults on “trans ideology.” Tucker Carlson is, well, Tucker Carlson. And then there’s Richard Hanania, another celebrity of the online right, whom HuffPost recently outed as an (allegedly former) white supremacist. Here’s what Hanania had to say after New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged Penny with manslaughter for killing Neely: “These people are animals, whether they’re harassing people in subways or walking around in suits.”
Bragg is Black, and so was Neely. Both are “animals” in Hanania’s view, but Neely in particular was deserving of extrajudicial execution.
Racism, homophobia, and transphobia aren’t incidental to the anti-homeless smear campaign; they’re part of the point. Disgust with unhoused people is a gateway into an entire politics built around the murderous contempt for subaltern groups. Conveniently, Black and queer people are disproportionately likely to experience homelessness in America; to reactionaries, homelessness becomes both a consequence of their subaltern status and an explanation for it.
Sad to say, I think my argument in this piece is only more salient today, given that the Trump administration is using homelessness to justify its occupation of Washington, D.C.
One of the points I make in this Nation piece (and in dozens of other pieces I’ve written) is that high-cost blue cities caused their own homelessness crises through bad land use policies. So it was striking to see the that, even as J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller were going around depicting homeless people as subhuman vermin, the City of Los Angeles issued a resolution opposing State Sen. Scott Wiener’s latest transit-oriented development bill. Effectively, the L.A. City Council drafted, and Mayor Karen Bass signed, a resolution supporting the perpetuation of the Los Angeles homelessness crisis. That’s an appalling moral failure on its own terms, but it’s also a gift to the fascist regime that was deploying National Guard troops in the city not too long ago.
That’s all for now. For my next post, I’m planning to weigh in on the John Ganz/Eric Levitz debate about rhetoric versus “vulgar positivism.”