Realizing Reform: Free Markets, Better Government, and the Common Good
This is the final post in a series on density first posted in 2012 at Seattle’s Land Use Code.
Living in densely populated cities is better for the environment but it can also be good for the economy, for government, and the development of people’s potential to be moral and compassionate. Advocates for density and urbanists should begin to broaden their approach to how we build great cities; we need to move beyond the realms of architecture, urban planning, and design. And we should reconsider our ideological assumptions.
The best thing we could do in the affordable housingarena, for example, is think about more than just price, and monthly housing costs when considering housing affordability. Broadening our approach to affordability means increasing supplyand accounting for costs other than housing, a shift that is an ideological challenge to the liberals among us.
The good news about density in the city is that the problems are neither technical nor scientific but conceptual. We already know how to grow sustainably. But new ideas are hard to come by when we refuse to change some of our basic assumptions. Here are some ideas I’ve suggested before in each of the three areas I’ve written about, the economy, government, and the moral dimension of cities.
Zero Based Zoning
One local planner has called Zero Based Zoning, “Voodoo Planning.” Others have mistaken it for libertarian land use or a repeal of all the rules. Some have offered Form Based Code as a way to use the code to inspire better outcomes. Each of these, in its own way, misses the point of Zero Based Zoning.
Zero Based Zoning is a way of strategically peeling back a code based on the fear of what might happen in favor of spontaneous order, the structure and relationships that develop when people are allowed to pursue their self interests limited only by supply, demand, and health and safety. We need a code that encourages everyone take risks for innovation. We need a code that aspires for the best, not a code that fears for the worst.
Constitutional and Charter Reform
The documents that we rely upon to help guide us as we solve problems are not working any more. Our Federaland State Constitutionsare not just from another era, they are from other centuries. Far from being sustainable operating systems for government, these antiques are actually limiting us from innovation in the here and now. Constitutional reform is important because it would allow us to seek opportunities for the 21st century without the limits imposed on us in the 19th and 18th centuries.
Charter reformis also essential. Seattle’s Charter, for example, like the Washington State Constitution, has been tweaked dozens of times since it was written; but what about the structure of the Charter? Wouldn’t it be better to have more elected and accountable neighborhood representation on a larger City Council than an unaccountable and unelected group of neighbors who appear whenever their narrow interests are challenged.
Fixing our outmoded forms of Federal, State, and local government will take a lot of work. But the benefits of rethinking and redoing our guiding documents are many, and we really have no choice if we’re going to make our cities work.
We Believe . . .
Opposing good things in our neighborhoods because they make us uncomfortable is wrong. If we believe that we ought to make concessions—some may even call them (Gasp!) sacrifices—for the broader good, then we’re called upon to do the same with land use. Yes, a bigger building will take some time to get used to. Yes, the person building it may make a substantial profit because it’s bigger. And yes, it might cast a shadow on us while we walk our dog. It might even be downright ugly. But it’s worth it because it makes the world better.
When I wrote the Urbanist CreedI didn’t intend to proselytize the unbelievers, but to encourage urbanists to be consistent with some core values. In Seattle we have to close the gap–what I call the Sustainability Gap–between what we say we value and what we actually do when it comes to growth in our city. Power points, brown bags lunches, and conference panels are useful and even important for achieving our goals. But if we truly believe what we say, are we prepared to follow our impeccable logic with determined action?
One of my heroes is Emmeline Pankhurst, who led a militant women’s suffrage movement in England at the turn of the last century. Pankhurst’s suffragettes didn’t just attend meetings and write letters. They didn’t simply hope and pray for the vote, they broke windows, they took over meetings, they made noise, they endured forced feedingduring hunger strikes, and they even died.
If the effects of climate change are as serious as we say they are then our actions, or lack of action, are fundamentally at odds with what we are saying and what we really believe. The changes we need to build cities that can accomplish economic growth, good government, and human development are big ones, but they are achievable. Let’s start making those changes now before crisis creates urgency for more drastic action.
I close this series with a quote from Pankhurst, whose efforts led, eventually, to success. She said, when big changes are needed
You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under, if you are really going to get your reform realized.
Where Would Jesus Live: The Moral Dimension of Cities.
This is the third post in a series on density first posted in 2012 at Seattle’s Land Use Code. Tomorrow’s post is the closing post, Realizing Reform: Free Markets, Better Government, and the Common Good
Jean-Paul Sartre’s play, Huis Clos, is probably best remembered for the phrase, “l’enfer c’est les autres,” often translated as, “hell is other people.” In the play three people arrive in hell and are locked in a room for all eternity. Upon arriving the first “guest” is surprised not to find any devils with pitchforks or any devices for gruesome torture. The torture, instead, will be coming from his roommates who have yet to arrive. Once they do, the real pain begins.
There is no doubt that to be locked in a room with other people forever would be hellish, even if they were people we liked. The Other (where I capitalize this term I am using it in the phenomenological sense) is hell because other people can create all kinds of discomfort. The Other is hell because he can be, for example, someone that reflects the failures of our own economy, society, and social order. Homeless people, visible and on the street, are a finger pointing at our way of doing things and a voice saying, “it’s not working.” The Other is a thorn in our collective side. The Other is hell because she can mirror what we like least about ourselves, our fears of what we were or what we might become.
But let’s turn to another phrase in which the Other is featured, the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” elegantly sums up a simple moral imperative. Other people are annoying, yet we need them. Other people are the way we learn to understand and challenge ourselves. Other people can threaten, cajole, and confuse us. What does it mean to treat other people the way we’d want to be treated? And if we did, what kind of world would it be?
If we want to solve the pressing issues of social and economic disparity the best place to do that is in the city. Only in the city can we find the rich and poor, the sick and healthy, black and white, all living so close together. How can we really decrease the impacts of poverty, for example, if the only poor people we see are on television or in a newspaper story? How can all schools get better when those with means are only willing to send their children to “the good schools” in sprawling suburbs or high end neighborhoods?
It’s easy to vote for Obama and contribute to the World Wildlife Fund, but what happens when a halfway house for newly released offenders is going to be located in your neighborhood? Rather than fight it, shouldn’t you welcome it and in the end won’t having such facilities located close to you improve your knowledge of the issues faced by people newly released from jail? Wouldn’t those issues fair better if neighbors, like you, rallied for more funding and support for those people rather than battling against the facility because it would hurt your property values, or because you are scared?
Jesus of Nazareth wandered the countryside performing magic tricks and telling rustic parables about sheep and mustard seed, and it can be easy to think that his vision of heaven or the Kingdom of God as he often described it, as somewhat remote or inaccessible—or maybe even rural. At one point someone asked him to sum it all up. His whole point, he said, was to encourage people to love God, and love their neighbors as themselves. That’s it. Jesus left very few directives to his followers, which perhaps accounts for the 2000 years of heated argument about what Jesus really means.
Perhaps, though, Jesus was a density advocate. If we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, it’s awfully hard to do if we have no neighbors. Living in a city means having lots of neighbors and encountering Otherness every day. How we deal with Otherness, our neighbors, shapes how we deal with issues of public spending, priorities for policy, and how we organize our society. Our tendency can often be to push each other and unpleasant things away. Cities make that harder to do, turning the problems of other people into our problems.
Other people are hell when they make noise, smell bad, talk to themselves, take your parking spot, or wait in ridiculously long lines for the latest food fad. However, we humans can make the best of our short lives when we try to learn from and love one another; and what better way to do that than have lots of people close together? Maybe when Jesus talked about heaven or the Kingdom of God, he was thinking about a big, dense, crowded city.
Community Based Land Use: From Individual Rights to Community Rights
This is the second post in a series on density first posted in 2012 at Seattle’s Land Use Code. Tomorrow’s post is Where Would Jesus Live: The Moral Dimension of Cities
One of our nations founding documents, the Declaration of Independence, has inculcated the idea that as Americans we are entitled to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These are basic human principles most people want. As Americans, we feel that this entitlement is best expressed at the individual level rather than as a group.
However, freedom and rights are not always best measured at the individual level; communities have freedoms and rights as well. Americans are exceptional not because they conquered a continent or put a man on the moon, but because they believe that rights and freedoms start with the individual rather than with or through good government and the community.
This strange idea is not only a source of pride, mingled with patriotism, but also deeply embedded in our psyche and language. But even if there are God given individual rights we are born with, there would be no way to express those outside of society which would have to understand and appreciate those rights and freedoms and establish, together as a group, the methods to ensure them.
Rights and Land Use
When government decides to condemn property to make way for a rail project, for example, one is certain to hear the clamor over “rights” being taken away. The sanctity of the home and hearth is positioned against the faceless machine of communal development, the lone individual against the mob. However, that narrative is dependent on the idea that the rights of one individual trump the well being of the group.
If we are going to support a sustainable future, we have to make decisions that are based on considered and careful analysis of what will work best over time for the most people. That means that each of us as individuals must be prepared to yield our own best interests over time to that of what is likely best for the whole society. This is a value system that is typical among many cultures, and while it can lead to bad outcomes, so can radical individualism.
The Individual Versus the Community
Each of us every day faces limits on our convenience and comfort created by rules, regulations, or laws—or simply by the presence of our neighbor. A long line at the coffee shop, a crowded bus, or a traffic jam thwarts our ability to do what we want to do. We accept these daily inconveniences for the same reason we accept regulatory ones; crowds and rules make life more predictable and individuals more accountable. We are willing to trade the discomforts of living with other people because the benefits surpass those of living alone.
Americans of all political persuasions often announce, “I have a right to…” followed by what is likely the most trivial comfort or convenience. Making good land use decisions will mean unlearning more than 200 years of historical conditioning and language so that our measure of freedom is no longer based on whether a group of individuals are inconvenienced by a road, transit, or development project but whether those things are benefitting the greater good.
Community Based Land Use
Community based land use policy is not a mass of angry neighbors expressing their “rights” to weigh in on how a project is making them uncomfortable. That might look like community action, but it is really a group of individuals collectively expressing their discontent. They might even be a majority in the room, in their respective geographic area, or even at the ballot box. But a community is not collective individual opinion. Community is not the majority of who fills a room, or sends e-mails to elected officials. Those things matter less than the discernment of government about what will benefit the community in a longer time horizon.
So far, government has tried to make people happy as individuals while at the same time looking out for the long-term interests of the community. Cars and subsidized roads have helped us do both for a long time now. The result, though, has been rapid environmental degradation through depending on the car to allow us to be alone one minute and in a crowd the next. The car has meant being able to have isolation and community whenever we want; all we have to do is turn a key and drive to whichever one we want at the moment.
Something New
Shifting our view of how we are free won’t be easy. We’ve done it before. I once asked an older man who was an air raid warden during World War II if people complained about air raid drills that required everyone in town to shut off their lights, close their blinds, and stay quiet. He said there was none; and there wasn’t any process either, the drills were mandatory.
Blocking views, making noise, and a few topless barber shops might inconvenience and annoy a few people for awhile, but pushing uses together, putting more people closer together, and freeing the market to produce as much housing in the city as possible is the best route to the common good and the best way to find a good life, freedom, and happiness.
Use Over Form: Creating Jobs, Prosperity, and Accommodating Growth
The first in a series on density first posted in 2012 at Seattle’s Land Use Code. Tomorrow’s post is Community Based Land Use: From Individual Rights to Community Rights.
Land as Economic Engine
It may sound like a slogan but it is true that to create jobs and economic growth, land, in cities, should be allowed its highest and best use. Government sets the limits of that use, but so do the market place, and the principles of health and safety. These three limits—government regulation, supply and demand, health and safety—all change over time.
Government, through code, can set limits that are more restrictive than the other two. It can, for example, limit the number of housing units that can be built on a parcel of land to 50 when an analysis of the market shows that 100 units on the site would be financially viable and 150 technically feasible.
Government ought to carefully assess the outer limits of each of these limitations on land use, and introduce no regulation that would be more restrictive than the other two, especially in areas with a high supply of public transit.
Use Versus Form
When government conditions use by setting limits on building form, it is really setting limits on the economic potential of the land, extending its authority beyond the market and health and safety. Land use decisions are too often characterized by debates over what new buildings will look like rather than how they will function. Government should stop facilitating discussions about building form and allow user demand to drive what buildings look like and how tall they are. There are three parts to this suggestion.
First, debates about form (“it’s out of scale!”) are generally about something else other than building form. Form based opposition is usually a feint by neighborhood groups or simply a Red Herring. Fenestration, roof lines, paint colors, view blockage, height bulk and scale, are all kitchen sink arguments intended to exploit aesthetic and architectural weaknesses to limit use and potentially kill a project. Neighbors have figured out that for a developer time is money. When the City bogs everyone down in discussions about whether Juliet balconies should have clear or frosted glass, it isn’t supporting democracy it is just limiting job creation and growth.
Use Versus Process
Second, form based discussions favor the status quo. How can things change in the built environment without significant changes in building form? Changes in form are the most visible aspect of significant change, even though most use will happen, sight unseen, inside a building. When the process begins by asking questions like, “will this project significantly impact the neighborhood?” the die is cast, since the answer will always be, “yes.” Any significant project that will benefit the local economy will reorder the form of the whole neighborhood. An open ended process about building form allows people who already live in the neighborhood to engage in a Goldylocks operation in which the City and developer must try to make the building form not too big, or too small, but “just right.” And, in such a process, there is zero representation from future residents and users, only the ones who live nearby now.
Use Versus Planning
Planners plan. Planners believe in planning. Planners believe that without The Plan, there would be chaos. Planning is based on the careful study of what has worked in the past to create great public spaces. Ask planners what creates community in a city and they will have an answer that involves some kind of form based plan that channels or shapes or supports human behavior. Implement the right plan, they’ll say, and the outcome—all things being equal—will be community and great public space.
But planning doesn’t lead to community. People are the basis of community and economies. Communities create great space, not the other way around. Planners obsess about form because it’s something that is tangible, manageable, and programmable while communities can be unpredictable and the way people use space can be surprising. And that’s the point; chaos is our friend. More people, more chaos, more spontaneity is good for the economy, community, and public space. One need not look further than Burning Man for an example. A thousand people, even in a desert, will build a city, a community, and an economy—without urban planners.
Land Use, Rules, and Baseball
Baseball provides a useful analogy for how we should pursue land use regulation in a way that does not retard economic growth. There is a liturgical quality to baseball in our country. People go to “the game” because they like the sport, but there is another sense in which people go: they want community. The game is where the people are, and where there are people there is an opportunity to simply be with other people while participating in the same activity.
The rules of baseball are set when we get to the ballpark, there is no sense in which I can influence those rules that day. The players, the managers, owners, coaches, and even the umpires cannot change the rules no matter how unfair they think they are. The umpires can interpret the rules and apply them, and the often make mistakes or make calls that are questionable. But at no time is there an opportunity, that day, to change the rules. Taken together, several seasons of play, might reveal that rules need to be changed. Perhaps, for example, the pitcher’s mound needs to be lowered or raised because there are too many or too few strikes being pitched.
Land use should be like baseball. We all love it but we don’t agitate for rule changes when there are bad buildings built, when someone gets a windfall, or when a project we like fails (even if we get upset). What we do is legislate broadly and sit back and watch what unfolds. If we don’t like what we see, we make adjustments, but we do not make rules up for every project; that makes as much sense as having the rule making body for baseball making rules up before every pitch to ensure the outcome.
Ceaseless tweaking and fussing by elected officials, planners, land use attorneys, and neighborhoods is keeping us from realizing the full potential of land in our city for the public good and the common wealth. We need to think through what we want to accomplish, make rules that set some broad limits, and then let things unfold. As long as buildings are safe for occupancy and effectively accommodate more people, it is less important how many units are built, what they look like, or how they are priced. A land use code for the 21stcentury would create space for innovation–and mistakes.
More Than Climate Change: The Economic, Political, and Moral Dimensions of Density
Introduction to a series on density first posted in 2012 at Seattle’s Land Use Code. Tomorrow’s post is Use Over Form: Creating Jobs, Prosperity, and Accommodating Growth.
What are the values that support living in the city? What, besides the many environmental reasons, makes density something we need to press for whenever we can? Is the only reason density advocates urge more people in a smaller space because of climate change? The overwhelming quantitative facts supporting dense cities as being more sustainable should be enough, but even so, there are other important principles that support density.
For me, the discussion of whether density and cities are better for water and air quality, for energy efficiency, and for reducing carbon emissions was over a long time ago. I’m not the only one. That’s why, these days, in Seattle, everyone is for density. You’ll read it over and over again in comment sections all over town. “I support density, just not thatkind of density.”
Opponents of change and growth will always preface their argument against change by affirming they whole-heartedly support change itself, and then go on to criticize a specific change as economically unfair, infringing on their rights, or that it is somehow immoral.
Why go on and on arguing about the environmental benefits of growth with people who already claim they agree? How do we shift the discussion to the economic, social, and moral benefits of density over sprawl and NIMBYism? On a recent beach retreat I tried to put together my thoughts on these questions. Density advocates, myself included, are just repeating the same things over and over. It’s time for something new.
I’ve written three essays take a step in that direction. The first essay offers a view of land use economics that some might call laissez faire or even Hayekian. We need to rethink our tendency, in Seattle anyway, to always try to solve problems with more rules and process.
The second essay is an effort to look at why we need to wrest control of the debate about land use away from people who abuse and misunderstand the idea of “rights.” We are a country deeply soaked in Natural Rights language, but the idea that we have certain rights has become corrupted and confounded so that now our daily conveniences and comforts are wrongly associated with basic rights. We need to shift our thinking away from American individualism and toward an American communitarianism.
The third essay attempts to give density a moral footing. I am not averse to saying that urban living is better if not the best way to live. I might be wrong and there are other points of view. But we ought to at least try to make the argument that cities afford far more opportunities to live moral lives than any other arrangement by exposing us to the adversity we find in other people in the same way frontier living exposed the first pioneers to the adversity of the natural world.
Lastly, and in conclusion, I revisit some practical solutions that I have offered before. I plan to post these periodically over the next week or so.
Many will find these essays discursive and boring. Others will find contradictions between what appears to be Christian Socialism on the one hand and Hayekian individualism on the other. Perhaps my thinking is muddled. Or maybe our frameworks for looking at problems related to land use need a reset.
Some other readers will find a conflict with my support of the profit motive fulfilling the public good and my interest in locating power in the community, government, and faith over the supposed rights of the individual. I’ll admit that I am still working through the synthesis of my embrace of government mandates and, at the same time, the idea of spontaneous order created when people are allowed to pursue their selfish interests.
Regardless of how that all turns out, my hope is to get Urbanists and supporters of growth, change, and density talking not just about the numbers and data but also about the basic principles the are the foundation of why we support what we do.
