Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Towns are an interesting case where the free market system breaks. The reason is that developers work in units that are too small. If they built whole towns, people would pay more to live in the ones that were walkable and human. But currently developers mostly just build a few hundred houses on the edge of some existing town. Which means they compete with one another at the level of houses rather than towns. Which produces grim expanses of McMansions.

I'm not saying developers should switch to building whole towns. It would be a harder problem. The kind of people who currently build houses might not be capable of solving it.

View on HN

> Towns are an interesting case where the free market system breaks.

What you're observing isn't the output of a free market; for that, see towns built primarily up until about the 1930s; these are traditional, walkable towns, with a coherent downtowns and organic patterns of settlement.

Since then, zoning laws and land-use planning have drastically altered the common patterns of development and led to the rise of master-planned subdivisions that are all too common today.

If not for the artificial segregation of residential and commercial uses and for equally artificial restrictions on density of development, modern suburbs would likely be smaller satellite towns, each with its own coherent walkable core, instead of megatowns with purely residential sprawl extending great distances away from the only urban core permitted to be developed.

I don't know whether it's the same outside of cities, but based on my limited experience, Japan appears either to have no zoning laws at all or to have such permissive ones that basically anything can be right next to (or, very often, on top of) anything else. Experiencing it after living in the US was a very jealousy-inspiring experience.

You can see similar patterns in dense urban environments built up in the US prior to the rise of zoning, too. New York, as an obvious example. But I bet without zoning, much of the rest of the US would probably look like New England, which had already substantially "suburbanized" well before the fashion for land-use planning took hold on this continent.

I think zoning has a lot more deleterious effects than just creating alienating urban spaces, too. It influences everything from transportation infrastructure to energy consumption to individuals' emotional states to macroeconomic patterns. Out of all the utopian policy innovations that have backfired over the past century, zoning is probably the worst.

One counter example to your claim is Houston. While it exhibits the same urban sprawl, there is no legal master plan that divides the city to different uses.

> One counter example to your claim is Houston. ... [T]here is no legal master plan that divides the city to different uses.

Houstonian here. What you say is correct --- but many, many neighborhoods in Houston have legally-enforceable deed restrictions [1]: When you buy property in those neighborhoods, you are deemed to have agreed to a (typically, very-detailed) set of restrictions about what you can or cannot do with, or on, your property. Local homeowner associations can be pretty vigilant in seeking out and going after violators.

Moreover, some neighborhoods are in fact separate, incorporated cities that do have zoning laws. (I live in one such.)

[1] http://www.houstontx.gov/planning/Neighborhood/deed_restr.ht...

However, they have a legal amount of minimum parking spaces per residence/store, which mandates auto-centric development. If you search for "Houston" in http://www.streetsblog.org/2010/09/01/shoup-to-otoole-the-ma... , there's some good discussion of this issue.

I would have said it's a case where the zoning system breaks. You get "grim expanses of McMansions" because some city planner ruled by decree that this area over here is "residential" and can't have little corner bodegas mixed in, while that area over there is "commercial" and can't include housing. In those few parts of the US that don't have zoning laws, you get lots of mixed use.

Heck even if a neighborhood was originally all just houses when it was first built, unless some bureaucracy is actively preventing it some people will want to work out of their home and provide services for their neighbors.

I would rather say that US cities are broken because of design, not for lack of it. Sure, standardizing signs, and requiring access to parks are top-down design. But nearly all beautiful European cities weren't planned, they have evolved. With individuals adding, and replacing homes and buildings over the centuries in such a way that footpaths were not blocked, and people could go from A to B easily, even if that meant that roads would not be at straight angles, wide, or at fixed intervals.

Besides the ubiquitous grid-pattern in the US, other regulation such as zoning, maximum building heights, plot-sizes, and parking lots, only made things worse.

(of course there is a lot of regulation now in Europe, and there even was some historically, and due to scale increase the market likely would not be able to build beautiful cities anymore (and I am normally quite skeptical of the unbound market) but in this case it might actually have worked at some time)

Pining for a European-style urban environment was one of the reasons I left California and went back to the 'good old UK'.

You make a very good point.

Visting cities in Europe is actually a very good way to design versus evolution. Cities that evolved their city are relatively easy to find. However, if you want to see cities that were designed, you only need to find the cities that were flattened in WW2, such as Rotterdam.

>nearly all beautiful European cities weren't planned, they have evolved

In the smaller and traditional sense, absolutely, but many major European cities have had horrendous suburban explosions that are just as unappealing as US suburbs (except, plenty of buses and usually a train or two). It seems to be a 20th century thing, in my view, but then I wasn't around to admire the bucolic pasture of the previous centuries where I assume dire poverty was the norm, which leads me to question - at least we have housing for more or less everyone in Europe?

It kind of works that way. The developers have to get their units approved by the city, which itself has a master plan of the type of growth/urban mix they'd like. The city government is making that decision to allow subdivision blooms at the city edge.

If the city is content with being a bedroom community, they'll allow developers to build anything. However, if the city wants to encourage more downtown or walkability, they'll only approve projects that offer wider sidewalks, business downstairs/lofts upstairs. Or they'll provide incentives to encourage this kind of growth.

My fathers civil engineering company is working with a small town on their 15-20 year master plan. You can see how they've blended their community values into the kind of development they want to attract (Shandon, CA):

http://www.scribd.com/doc/47280427/Shandon-Community-Plan-Up...

"In order to achieve a compact urban form, the Community Plan encourages floor area ratios consistent with those found in small downtowns rather than in suburban settings."

"The neighborhood commercial areas are intended to serve a neighborhood’s daily retail needs. Uses typically found within these areas include markets, restaurants, cafés/delis,bakeries, ice cream parlors, pharmacies, laundromats, barbershops, hair salons, hardwarestores, gas stations, banks, offices, and other similar uses generally serving nearby residential areas."

Towns aren't free market. We fund roads millions of times more than public transportation. We let developers build infrastructure and then hand it over to towns which get to maintain it. So the free market basically has no responsibility for anything they build. A lot of these issues are really going to come to a head in 8 years when boomers start dying in huge numbers.

But cities do compete - London, NY, Boston, SF all are fairly viable competitors For attracting the best of global talent.

And areas of cities (I think the term is metro-area, including feeder towns etc) compete within the city - Kent is a lot more expensive than east essex and both are roughly the same distance from London.

I am not saying the micro level analysis is wrong - just that only considering commercial house builders as the only agents with skin in this game is too narrow.

Each city mayor will adjust their regulation mix to get the best out of their towns - if we don't like the results that's probably because local democracy needs more effort from us than traditionally it gets - every city could be a pedestrianised beauty if getting elected depended on it.

> But cities do compete - London, NY, Boston, SF all are fairly viable competitors For attracting the best of global talent.

But they compete as governments, rather than as direct builders. That makes it really hard for it to work as a market.

Cities are far more Schumpter-style agents than national governments - look at Detroit for an example of a city that has suffered creative destruction.

Cities can and often do act as independant (global) agents (bidding for Olympic games comes to mind, and offering special sweetheart deals to banks etc). London has a revenue and expenditure of roughly 22BN - putting it around 150th in the Fortune 500, and it is far mnore concerned with attracting and retaining talent from New York or Paris than from Sheffield.

If London fails to provide the right mix of house building and amenities, those people and businesses will (eventually) go elsewhere.

Humans do not physically move often or easily - but cities do rise and fall and compete with each other - they are the right level IMO to look at "good neighbourhoods" and if we want to solve the "livability" of cities, then cities (or possibly sub-city-areas) are the right sized unit for the discussion.

Its not about houses, its about neighbourhoods.

I don't disagree that cities (or, if we must, neighborhoods) are the right unit, but well... you give the example of Detroit and that's not a poster child for a well-functioning economic agent.

There is a problem of indirection, as chez17 alludes to. A "city" is too much: a place to do business, a place to live alone, a place to explore, a place to retire, and so on and so on. Some of these measures are so critical that failure can be crippling. Thus, a city might compete for the attention of international organizations like banks and the Olympic committee... but why? What's the actual value exchange happening there and how does it play out in the details? (I'm not asking "why should they", but "why are they".)

I meant that Detroit is an example of a city that did not meet the needs of the Market and so has effectively become bankrupt / collapsed while those people who could have moved to competing cities - I was trying to say that the competition between cities was working (although it's hardly a perfect market)

In answer to why - tax revenue is one less than compelling answer - my preference is to look back at the city states of Greece - they competed and fought for supremacy, for survival for riches - but mostly they fought because their city was their tribe and their home and the others were enemy. It's pretty human basic stuff I believe - nations are too big to get really worked up about but a city - it's the right sort of size.

>But cities do compete - London, NY, Boston, SF all are fairly viable competitors For attracting the best of global talent.

It's not so much the city as the jobs a person can get. If you get offered a job in Boston or London, the odds are you're not moving to New York no matter how much you like it. Cities do compete a little bit (you get an offer in Boston and London), but overall it's almost exclusively where you can get a job.

It isn't a failing of the free market. It's a failing of zoning regulations which are decidedly not a free market institution. Developers would be happy to be build more walkable communities but zoning regulations like minimum setback, minimum lot size, parking requirements and the rest force them to build low density suburb neighborhoods. People choose the government they get (generally), and many people have a NIMBY attitude towards increased density, thus they seek out such communities.

>Towns are an interesting case where the free market system breaks.

A curious conclusion given the the politicians, bureaucrats, urban planners, and general busybodies that wield government power as a club to impose Their Vision on everyone else.

I'd strongly recommend this book for a case study on how this actually plays out in reality:

http://www.amazon.com/Rationality-Power-Democracy-Practice-M...

> Towns are an interesting case where the free market system breaks.

It doesn't break. It's being broken on purpose — you cannot own a town.

Towns that used to have an invested owner are often famous for their excellent design. See Zamość[1] for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zamo%C5%9B%C4%87

Saltaire near Bradford, Yorkshire is a world heritage site: http://www.saltairevillage.info/

It was built around a textiles mill and was designed and planned according to the wishes of the mill owner, one Titus Salt. One of his stipulations was that alcohol was to be unavailable in Saltaire. The first bar only opened quite recently - called Titus's. :)

It might be of interest, but the drab McMansion-ville I live in is was carved out of empty farmland about 12-13 year ago. No local town to grow on the edge of, which necessitated also building a planned town center, with commercial/office/dining/entertainment space.

It's nice to live in the suburbs, walk to a movie, walk to a coffee shop, then walk to get groceries. It's almost as nice as living in a city, just with fewer overall choices, but nicer living arrangements.

I live in a similar project (old WWII airfield), that has the same approach to walkability - but it is only viable because one development agency owns rights to development and ensures there is a strong mix of housing types and utilities - its not perfect, but it is a lot better than say old tenement blocks in industrial towns - my local fish and chip shop in Lancaster was the same faceless tenement house, just that someone had converted their living room into a chip shop. It was the only amenity for 20 minutes. Horrible place.

Anyway, wandered off track a bit - it is possible to build a whole town (2000 homes) with one commercial super-contractor. However it is bumping into local democracy issues already so anything bigger is always going to need a proper mayor. Like a real city.

We ended up with an overall controlling agent, but then a wide variety of developers built various parts of the development. So there's a fairly nice selection of home styles, and builders, from one-room condos to 6500 sq ft super homes.

Utilities are controlled, we get our internet from Verizon (FiOS), trash, etc. but with the controlling agent as the broker and bundle negotiator.

There's a semi-elected board that runs the place, I think 7 of 12 are developer people and the rest are elected from the neighborhood. The condos each have their own controlling boards.

AS the neighborhood gets more and more developed, the developer will be ceding more and more slots from the board to elected officials.

I don't know if there are any plans for a mayor, but I think we'll end up with around 15-20k residents once everything is complete.

It more or less works.

What free market in housing? There are zoning laws, public roads, signage ordinances, building codes, loans and outright subsidies to manipulate businesses into locating one town or another. On the financial side, banks have been (and continue to be) one of the most heavily regulated industries in the nation, next to health care. Government-run Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now originate a majority of the mortgages in America.

If all that were cleared out of the way, it would be possible for the right kind of person to get the capital necessary to build an entire town. Disney's ideas are probably quite workable, given a truly free market.

I can think of one such example: Celebration, FL. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celebration,_Florida

It's an entire town designed by Disney, built in the 1990s.

Been there, has a strong Stepford Wives type of neighborhood feel to it. But it is a nice neighborhood because of so much being within walking distance. I would consider living there.

The pink flamingo rebel from a few years back had to provide some good laughs.

The Washington, D.C. suburbs have a couple of planned towns about 30 miles outside the city limits: Columbia, Maryland, and Reston, Virginia. Reston does have neighborhoods where one can walk. I don't think that household in either town can do without an automobile. Nor do I think that most residents find them entirely satisfactory. The teenagers of Reston used to call it "Deadston".

I have been wondering why it doesn't pay to build good places so thank you. Do you think that is the only way to tackle the problem? There must be a way to fund and build buildings where you make more money by building a decent one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com