Hard Truths About Why Conservatives and Libertarians Hate Urbanism

Excellent stuff. As a conservative, I often wonder why people on my side of the aisle are so closely wedded to the suburban paradigm. That paradigm was hardly a free-market creation. How could it exist without the massive government interventions of the interstate system, the FHA, and the mortgage tax deduction? I think the typical right-winger’s antipathy to urbanism is rooted in a form of identity politics. Cities are more progressive culturally, they’re run by liberal interest groups, and they’re just plain more European. It’s the equivalent of the reaction that urban liberals get when confronted with the rural Heartland. In a sense, you can’t fault people for absorbing these kind of biases. We all have them to some extent or another. What you can fault people for is making bad public policy out of prejudices.

Let’s be clear, this applies to people on left and right. Urban growth boundaries do limit supply and raise housing prices. Some light-rail systems are a huge waste of money. But highway spending is also often absurdly wasteful and transit-oriented development is not a prelude to communism. Adhering to rigidly ideological views on city planning issues is not only polarizing but ultimately harmful to the common good.

We should certainly apply market principles to urbanism, whether in congestion pricing, parking, or density regulations, but this is a tricky proposition because city planning is by its very nature a public endeavor. Even a supposedly free-market city like Houston cannot get by without some form of building regulation. Basically, it’s a balancing act. But both conservatives and liberals need to reexamine their biases; otherwise, we are stuck with the same tired cliches. One side claims liberals are trying to force us all into cramped apartments and nasty public transit, while the other thinks suburbia is just a result of a greedy “sprawl” industry and the intolerance of some Americans for people of other races and socio-economic classes. This debate shouldn’t be dominated by the narrow-minded and quick to judge. Let’s take it away from them!

Stephen, I agree with the particulars of your argument, but it glosses poorly. It reads like “the problem with conservatives is that liberals aren’t good enough.” It gives too much credit to liberals/statists as sole owners of the “urbanism” conversation. And it lets conservatives/libertarians off the hook far too easily.

I think Oskar has a more productive line of thought. At least when it comes to urbanism, libertarians appear to be more motivated by tribalism than by principled theory or actual reality.

In some ways, the issue that you’re raising, “Why conservatives and libertarians ‘hate’ [maybe this is too strong a word?] urbanism,” is the central issue of this blog, so it seems to me.

Thus I’d like to submit some tentative (albeit lengthy!) thoughts on this issue, with the proviso that I may not be as familiar as others here are with the conservatives / libertarians who “hate” urbanism. For instance, I’m only passingly familiar with Randal O’Toole, so my thoughts are more geared to the libertarian types I admire who, surprisingly to me, seem to support what seems to me to be the Randal O’Toole line. I’m thinking here of Virginia Postrel, John Stoessel and John Tierney.

1) I agree — but only in part — with those who say that a reason for this phenomenon are the messengers, rather than the message. (This argument seems to be the same to me as the “tribalism” argument, i.e., urbanists are [supposedly] in the other tribe, not our [belief in markets] tribe.)

2) However, it also seems to me that many (most?) self-proclaimed market urbanists are, in fact, not “really” market urbanists at all, but actually true believers in “planning.” So, the skeptical conservatives / libertarians are, in fact, often correct in their skepticism of “market urbanism” (as it is practiced).

It seems to me that most of the time the “real” interest of self-proclaimed market urbanists is actually in some sort of rather SPECIFIC end result rather than in a true belief in market mechanisms for “better” (in a more general way) settlements, whatever those settlements would actually be like as a result of market urbanism.

On the other hand, some theories of “market urbanism” seem to me to take a belief in markets too far. For instance, I disagree with those “pure” libertarians who believe that urban settlements would be better off with the private ownerships of local streets.

3) Now, in defense of both those who don’t really believe in market urbanism and those who take it too far, there does in fact seem to be a lot of genuine disagreement and confusion about how one should be defining “planning,” “market urbanism,” etc.

I think this is due, in part, to the fact that there is no such thing, of course, as a TOTALLY market based urbanism (or economics, for that matter). To use the field of economics as an example (since the language of economics is this instance, believe it or not, actually clearer), even anti-planning market-oriented economists believe in SOME degree of government intervention and “planning” (i.e., so that an economy will avoid hyper inflation, bubbles, destabilizing “busts,” debilitating economic stagnation and lack of economic mobility, etc.).

4) So it seems to me that a large part of the problem here is actually one of definitions and language, e.g., defining what is or is not “planning,” “market urbanism,” etc.

With all the words in the English language, it may be that we do not currently have enough words to designate the different degrees and permutations of about “ideal” types of government intervention in urbanism (or economics, for that matter).

For instance, imagine how difficult it would be to talk about religious beliefs (if one were bold enough to talk about religious beliefs) if we didn’t have enough words to cover the various major religions that exist and their many, many variations. I think it would be very difficult to talk fruitfully about the various beliefs of Christians if we had only one name to use, “Christian,” rather than (to take examples from various local churches) Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Unitarian, Baptist, Jehovah’s Witness, etc., etc., etc.

5) In lieu of coining names for most of the various belief systems that are out there, here’s a very rough attempt at making a useful distinction between “planning” and “market urbanism.” (Some earlier and more detailed attempts along these lines are contained in comments on the “Discovering Urbanism” blog and, maybe, also here on the Market Urbanism blog.)

Basically I think people are engaging in “planning” when they try to “overly” manage urbanism (or an economy) by fostering one sort of activity (or type of business, in the case of economies) over another in order to further a rather specific goal. The real purpose of government in “market urbanism,” however, is rather to take care of what seems to me to be “genuine” government functions that relate to very general goals — including the goal of maintaining a functional and efficient market place (a kind of “guardian” function, to borrow a concept from Jane Jacobs).

So in my scheme of things, overly intrusive government “planning” does NOT include, however, activities like planning for a settlement’s water supply, planning for roads, planning for schools, parks, etc. These are, so it seems to me, legitimate government functions. This, to my way of thinking, is what governments legitimately do — and they’ve been doing this before the field of “urban planning” came along.

I think of this legitimate type of government activity as “problem solving” rather than planning. “Planning,” though, is trying to “prevent,” via government intervention, supposed problems from occurring in the first place; “problem solving,” on the other hand, is first determining whether there is, in fact, a rationale for addressing a particular problem through governmental intervention and then, if there is, addressing the problem with very limited government intervention.

At the moment, I’m inclined to think of this “problem solving” approach as being what I call “True Urbanism.” What is “True Urbanism”? It’s essentially the traditional urbanism that existed before the field of urban planning came along — but with the added insights / refinements that have been provided by Jane Jacobs in her seven major books (or, at least, as I interpret her writings in these books).

6) To bring this back to the original issue, it seems to me that the “real” (or most fruitful) question then is, “What are differences that exist between self-described conservatives / libertarians and “market urbanists”/”true urbanists” — and would a market urbanist / true urbanist address such differences?

It seems to me that one of the biggest, and a virtually unaddressed difference, is with regard to the “usefulness” of zoning. One would think, of course, that conservatives / libertarians would be very anti-zoning (and it seems to me that most of the early opponents of zoning were, indeed conservative and libertarian types) and would be in favor of only very limited forms of zoning, if even that. But, surprisingly (at least at first blush), this is not the case.

So I think it would be very useful to take a closer look at the underlying reasons that “lapsed” libertarians are so surprisingly in favor of heavy-handed government intervention in this area. From a brief look at the “anti-planner” website (which I believe is Randal O’Toole’s website), the explanation that seems to come across (and I think I’ve seen this explanation elsewhere, also) is that what is, in essence, highly restrictive zoning is something that is necessary to help keep up property values.

As a market urbanist/ true urbanist, it seems to me that, while there is some merit to this idea, it is nevertheless an essentially incorrect one. How could pre-zoning cities have had areas with such high property values if this was the case? In the pre-zoning era, for example, I believe Wall Street had the highest land values. And, intuitively, this makes sense as builders of high density structures can afford to pay more for land and thus make it more valuable.

So I think it would be useful to look at both the pluses and minuses of the” zoning is essential to maintain high property values” idea as a way of better understanding “why conservatives and libertarians ‘hate’ urbanism” — and also as a way of developing better, less restrictive zoning regulations that nevertheless address any of their legitmate concerns.

Benjamin Hemric
Sat., November 20, 2010, 2:57 p.m.

Haha…”violently agree,” I like that. It describes a frightening large proportion of my interactions with fellow homo sapiens.

I wrote this article mostly for urbanists (who, obviously, tend to be overwhelmingly liberal/statist). While I recognize that a lot of the disagreement between urbanists and libertarians is simply the result of differences in political preferences, there’s at least a part of new urbanism and smart growth that should be amenable to libertarians (namely, the upzonings, the loosening of parking regs, and the lowering of road subsidies), but for some reason isn’t. And like I said in the article, I think the reason liberals/urbanists aren’t making those arguments is that they don’t actually understand them. They know they want sprawl to be more expensive, but they don’t realize that that’s actually a move towards the market equilibrium. In other words, they’ve sort of stumbled upon vaguely libertarian policies by accident.

Anyway, thanks for the praise and for the comments – I don’t get paid for any of this, so reading people’s comments and watching the hit count go up are really the only feedback I get (and despite my OCD, the former is still more gratifying than the latter). Obviously we’re broadly in agreement, and I’m glad that you finally found us. As you know, it’s a cold and lonely world out there for us “market urbanists.”

I don’t think it’s really this. European social democratic urbanists argue in exactly the same manner as American liberal urbanists: transit is good because it’s used by the poor and working classes and is good for the environment, cities are important (and are the most reliable source of social democratic voters), the future should be clean energy. And yet, they still command support from liberal/FDP-style (=libertarian) parties, as well as many business-oriented conservatives. I would chalk this difference to 2.5 reasons:

1. The multiparty systems of Continental Europe create a non-conservative alternative to social democracy, appealing to right-wing liberals. In the US, those people exist, too – Mitt Romney’s one of them, and they form the main bloc of swing voters in the Northeast – but to vote to the right they have to vote for a party dominated by cultural conservatives, who hate cities for social and demographic reasons. The European equivalent of the post-Tea Party right in the US would be various rural populist parties, which tend to be as pro-road as Michelle Bachmann.

1.5. Part of the multiparty system is that governments have to have broad coalitions, which tend to produce consensus and status quo. This environment is friendly to long-term infrastructure planning. The US political environment encourages orienting all government spending on a two-year cycle, and promotes us vs. them politics more.

2. The costs of building transit in Europe and the US differ by close to a full order of magnitude. A regional rail line, light rail line, and sometimes even subway could be built in most of Europe for around $5,000-10,000 per weekday boarding. In the US, increasingly $20,000 is the lower limit: the Sunbelt (including Portland) never gets much development along its rail lines so the ridership is pitiful, whereas older cities like New York and San Francisco take 3-10 times more money to build anything than peer non-US cities. This makes fiscal conservatives and good-government watchdogs groan. Those parts of the Anglo-Saxon world that have European rather than American transit costs have reasonably strong transit consensus; Calgary, whose LRT cost less than $3,000 per weekday boarding, manages to be both very conservative and very pro-rail, with aggressive TOD near stations, extensive downtown redevelopment without parking minimums, and imported German industry practices for keeping operating costs very low.

Conservatives are in general more anti-urban because they pull their political support from the country and far out suburbs, not cities. Not that they’d care where their support might come from, but because cities are by thier very nature going to be liberal. To live together in compact forms one needs to be both tolerant of others’ views and willing to live under some kind of shared rules (from a government) to grease the tolerance.

That being said I think the main issue with the conservative/teaparty anti urban argument is mostly semantical. I don’t think you will necessarily win an argument over someone who preferes the mega-church or homogenious societal rules over an elected representative establishing society’s laws. I think when you hear a Michele Bachman claim that roads aren’t earmarks you immediatly attack the hypocracy (non-violently) and clearly show that a subsidy is a subsidy. Once you establish that fact, it’s a lot easier to win the greater good argument in terms of societies priorities and benefits.

I appreciate the history lesson in this post though becasue liberals need to be less reflexivley anti-capitalist. Capitalism is human nature, but you can’t have a civil society without government, so as usual a balance is what is called for.

The tea party is a creation of oil money. This post is very clever disinformation. Congratulations. It takes a lot of education an writing skill to ignore the fact that the private auto was forced down our throats, has made life miserable, and is now destroying the biosphere. The fake solutions such as parking limits are easy straw men. Follow the money. Trillions are spent on energy wars, while people sit in traffic jams going nowhere.

Here’s a hint:

You say mass transit and suburbanites hear: “murder” and “rape”
You say “mixed income neighborhoods” and suburbanites hear: “murder” and “rape”

There are exactly two ways you can build a city that won’t be abandoned:

1) Strictly segregate your city – put some strong filter on who gets to live there that excludes almost all black people.
2) Enforce the law – vagrancy punished by 6 months in jail, criminals found and prosecuted after one mugging, not dozens, minor property crime harshly punished, any single violent crime being thought of as a huge problem and no expense spared to ensure that the perpetrator is extremely harshly punished (life in prison? severe beating at the hands of the police? – those work).

The first is the current NYC model. The filter is that you have to be extremely rich to live in NYC. You miss the point when you say there is “pent up demand” for more space like NYC. NYC is only desirable if it is expensive. Only the extremely high price of living in NYC keeps it safe.

The second is the pre-1960 United States model. If you go back to pre-1960s law enforcement (including extra harsh law enforcement on groups that are significantly more criminally inclined (i.e., black people)) you can have low cost “urbanism”. Without it people will look at your wonderful walkable neighborhoods and ask themselves: “what happens if a few black people move in?” The answer seems to be “you’ll be trapped and subject to a very high chance of being victimized by criminals”.

The rest of NYC isn’t desirable. Sort of by definition; if it were desirable it would be expensive.

Of course, you can feel free to move to Jamaica where things like this happen:

http://robert-lindsay.blogspot.com/2010/10/man-stabbed-to-death-in-new-york-as.html

Yeah, so someone gets stabbed to death and people walk past the dying man and don’t even call 911. The joys of urbanist living!

“…but I think the war on drugs explains a lot of why we associate minority innercity neighborhoods with violence and undesirability. ”

The reason “we” associal NAM (non Asian minority) inner city neighborhoods with violence and undesirability isn’t because of some strange hypnosis – it’s because those neighborhoods are violent and undesirable. Google “the color of crime” for the actual statistics. Some bullet points from that:

* Blacks are seven times more likely than people of other races to commit murder, and eight times more likely to commit robbery.
* When blacks commit crimes of violence, they are nearly three times more likely than non-blacks to use a gun, and more than twice as likely to use a knife.
* Hispanics commit violent crimes at roughly three times the white rate, and Asians commit violent crimes at about one quarter the white rate.
* The single best indicator of violent crime levels in an area is the percentage of the population that is black and Hispanic.

Now, maybe ending the war on drugs will somehow end the threat of violence from NAMs but frankly, I doubt it. The only model that actually worked was pre-1960 law enforcement which was stopped by people who have quite a bit of blood on their hands. There are plenty of wives with murdered husbands, fathers of murdered daughters, women whose lives are never the same after having been raped, and people who reasonably didn’t want to end up like them all of whom then moved out of your urbanist neighborhoods.

If you want them to move back or to accept urbanist design, end urban crime completely and prosecute the people who allowed and encouraged the first wave that emptied the cities. Otherwise, people will hear about “walkable neighborhoods” and think “murder” and mass transit and think “rape”.

I don’t have a blog.

Nor do I care if you call me a racist – it’s an absurd charge. Groups are different and have different physical features, different mental traits and different behaviors. Evolution didn’t stop 10,000 years ago nor did it stop at the neck.

Try refuting what I wrote instead. All facts and that’s it. That you have to resort to name calling and pointing out that these are forbidden thoughts just shows how deep the controls are placed. A generation of people had their lives ruined intentionally by progressives who wanted to cleanse urban environments of their class enemies. They used the fact that one racial group is significantly more dangerous and criminally inclined to do so. How? They gutted law enforcement. No one will accept urbanism as long as progressives are not called to account for the carnage that went on in the cities starting in the 1960s.

It’s strange that you say “Evolution didn’t stop 10,000 years ago,” when most evolutionary psychologists base their theories on the (wrong) idea that it did. It’s perfectly fine if you reject evolutionary psychology, but then you need another basis for your racial theories…

But what’s not strange is that you get the history of white flight completely wrong. White flight began in the late 1940s and early 1950s and in some cases even earlier, well before the crime wave began. The US crime rate only began to rise around 1965; the race riots of the 1960s were often in cities that had just become black-majority or close to it, since the police forces were invariably still dominated by whites. The depopulation that followed was in some cases of middle-class blacks more than of whites.

But if you’re just trying to make the point that walkable cities suffer from a crime problem (which many non-racists agree with), it’s still wrong. If crime stopped people from moving to cities, you’d expect Houston and Dallas and Atlanta to be empty by now and the suburbs in New York and Massachusetts to be teeming with domestic migrants.

I’ve never deleted any comments that weren’t spam, and I don’t want to start now, but I will if you keep talking about this.

I think of this debate as planner vs. planner: It’s between two groups of people controllers. One group wants to fight congestion by reducing population density in crowded areas and the other wants to fight sprawl by reducing population density in uncrowded areas. Sometimes the two sides cooperate and pass BANANA (Build Almost Nothing Anywhere Near Anything) regulations. The resulting housing shortage is blamed on greedy landlords and used as a pretext for more regulations.

Libertarians are definitely, on the whole, very anti-urban. That, and the fact that most urbanists are decidedly anti-capitalist, is the reason this blog exists.

Wow, I thought I was the only one who understood the many common goals between private development (on the right) and planners (on the left).  If only they could be realized…  It is a great point that the old neighborhoods beloved by planners were built by private developers, including privately owned streetcars.  I think a lot of these “market urbanist” points are made by Jane Jacobs, but unfortunately most planners who read her just hear what they want to hear.

I think libertarians betray their rational side by unfairly dismissing urban ideas because of (and I’m agreeing with the article here) basically who the ideas are associated with. I’m a libertarian and I don’t care if I hear truth that comes out of a marxist, fascist, capitalist, primitivist, anarchist, or whateve because I’m a rational truth seeker before I am a libertarian. If libertarians really investigated, they’d realize that most of the suburban tract development in the last 20 years is definitely very government supported and a more libertarian approach would have allowed more mixed use.

Its because we like the following:

1) houses
2) opens spaces
3) suburbs
4) cars

Cities are noisy, rundown, stress-inducing places for many people. I don’t want to live in a city and I don’t want to spend $1 million to buy a house. Urbanism takes choices away from me.

Incidentally there are cities which have high densities, open spaces and all the things I like: Kyoto is a good example, Montreal is not bad. But I don’t want to fucking live in New York or Tokyo and that is essentially what Urbanists are trying to force onto people.

I am an urban designer who is very much a conservatist in political thinking. I think Oskar Chomicki is right that somethings like cars and interstates have tied with the right-wing more than we should have let, because it embodies a season of large federal spending, and a lack of free market innovation in the transportation economy. As much as right-wing groups despise federal spending, mandates, and lack of free market options, they sure embrace the automobiles and federal spending on interstates and state roads. I find this to be inconsistent. Free markets used to drive transit in cities, yet we have allowed government to completely take over this and far too many other factors of urban life. Conservatists don’t hate cities, they hate when political factors take over every aspect of life because government thinks they can do it better than private business, which is never true. I disagree with almost everyone in my field on this, but the only difference is I have a much better understanding of history and actually read statistics and studies which provide facts to the decisions I make. I find that this is an anomaly anymore. We tend to like to make laws which make us feel good rather than ones that actually do good in cities.