I Hate You, I Love You
by Josh K-sky on Mar.23, 2010, under Politics
Ryan Avent elegantly reconciles two superficially contradictory truisms about sprawl and urban planning.
First, that people fight fiercely in defense of sprawling suburban arrangements; second, that people actively seek out dense, urban arrangements.
Basically, everyone always wants to be the last person on the hottest possible block.
(Continued here with a discussion of price data and externalities.)
March 23rd, 2010 on 11:18 am
Those two aren’t necessarily so contradictory. Say, for argument’s sake, that 30% of the population wants to live in dense urban areas, but there’s only enough housing in those areas for 15%. Since there’s twice as much demand as supply, housing prices will be forced up there. Meanwhile, the remaining 15% is forced to live in suburban sprawl, where they are a distinct minority with no chance of changing their communities’ zoning. Thus there will always be a big portion of the market that can never get what it wants.
This is why it’s problematic to apply the logic of markets to the intersection between desires and policy decisions. You don’t actually have an efficient market operating.
I’m much more sympathetic to the argument that suburbs leech off the positive externalities of urban centers and get to hide their negative externalities in the sky.