Market Urbanism

Liberalizing cities | From the bottom up

“Market Urbanism” refers to the synthesis of classical liberal economics and ethics (market), with an appreciation of the urban way of life and its benefits to society (urbanism). We advocate for the emergence of bottom up solutions to urban issues, as opposed to ones imposed from the top down.

Alon Levy on Downtown Brooklyn

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In my last post about the geometry of cities and the importance of downtowns, it looks like I understated the extent to which Downtown Brooklyn was built up during New York’s market-driven boom during the turn-of-the-century. Quoteth commenter Alon Levy:

I think you are essentially correct, but there’s one historical fact you get wrong: when the NYC subway was built, Downtown Brooklyn was a very large CBD, in fact larger than today relative to Manhattan. Nobody seriously expected people to live in the Bronx and work in Brooklyn, but people did expect Brooklynites to work in Downtown Brooklyn, taking advantage of the large network of trolleys and els.

The subway was built around Downtown Brooklyn and not just Manhattan. The lines all go through Downtown Brooklyn, with the exception of the L. In addition, the BRT built a few loops going from Downtown Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan and then back to Brooklyn, which have since been rerouted as Midtown eclipsed Brooklyn as a job center.

Nowadays, the problem of traveling from a community to one side of the primary CBD to one on the opposite side is acute, on both transit and highways. As a result, the poorest slice of suburbs will usually be the one on the opposite side of the favored quarter and the dominant edge cities; in Washington, this means PG County, which is opposite Tyson’s Corner and poorer than the white-majority DC suburbs.

My guess about Downtown Brooklyn – both then and now – is that its jobs were probably not as prestigious or high-paying as those in Lower and Midtown Manhattan, and probably contained a lot of department stores. The reason for the “lesser” jobs would be that if you were trying to attract the best talent, you’d want to pull from the widest range of people – presumably why you located in New York City to begin with – which would include lots of people from Westchester, New Jersey, and the Bronx. This will apply equally to places like Tysons Corner outside of DC: It will always be more desirable to be located within the District, where you can pick the best of the entire metro area, and not just the Virginia half.

  • You’re still probably underrating Brooklyn c. 1900 relative to midtown, Westchester, and Jersey. Literally no one lived above 26th street until the 1860 census, when Brooklyn was already past 1/4M people (and bigger than Florida, Kansas, Nebraska, or any Western state other than California.) By 1900, there were still 3-4 times as many people in Brooklyn (1.2M) as in all of Manhattan above 26th street (around 340,000), and the entire state of New Jersey had only 1.9M. (All numbers from various pages on Demographia.com.)

  • Anonymous

    Aren’t you assuming that metro areas are static. I could make the opposite argument by recategorizing the region as the Tysons Corner metro area. I recognize it sounds a little bit silly, but you hear people say Silicon Valley more than San Francisco. When was the last time that Obama invited a bunch of SF business exec to the White House. This week, he invited a several Silicon Valley execs. I might even go so far as to say it is more prestigious for those firms to locate in Silicon Valley than SF.
    As far as tech businesses are concerned, the center of gravity is the center of where science-tech people live. That means, the center of the region is somewhere else than the historic center. Low income employees are only a small portion of the business and so it doesn’t matter that the business aren’t located near the poorer part of town.

  • Yeah, you’re right. I actually thought about the fact that what’s now NJ Transit commuter rail was more interurban transit (right?), and wasn’t used for daily commuting. Thanks for pointing it out.

  • That’s a good point. If Northern Virginia continues to upzone (which I’m not sure it necessarily will), the center of gravity could very well shift. I don’t know a lot about California’s urban development, but I’m always surprised at how small San Francisco is. I guess small size added to extreme urban land use regulation added to the power of the tech sector managed to move that one pretty drastically. DC has the small size part, but more growth is allowed, and the industry that’s growing (essentially gov’t services) isn’t anywhere as innovative as the tech sector. I guess it all comes down to how much growth NoVa allows – no doubt they could overpower DC if they wanted to, but I’m not sure they will.

  • Don’t forget the Brooklyn Bridge wasn’t built until 1883.

  • Benjamin Hemric

    Some comments:

    1) Regarding Brooklyn:

    Before Brooklyn was absorbed into New York City, it was really its own full city — with its very active docks (at a time when shipping, both freight and passenger, was much more important than it is today); its own rail hub (although Brooklyn was hobbled by being on an island more than Manhattan was); its own socio-economic elite; its own “Metropolitan Museum”; its own “Central Park” (in some ways Prospect Park, by the same designers of Central Park, is thought to be better); its own “Metropolitan Opera House”; its own leafy green suburbs; etc.

    In other words, for many years, especially before Brooklyn was consolidated into New York City, the people of Brooklyn saw themselves as being very competitive with New York City.

    2) Not everyone was happy that Brooklyn was consolidated into New York City, and part of the reason was that it was felt that Brooklyn would eventually be hobbled by consolidation. And I think this was true. (Although Brooklyn did, nevertheless grow to be comparable to Philadelphia, the nation’s third largest city. As a matter of fact, when I first visited Philadelphia, I was surprised that Philadelphia’s downtown didn’t seem all that much bigger than downtown Brooklyn’s.)

    (By the way, “the New York Times” writer, John Tierney interviewed Jane Jacobs about this a few years back and, if I remember correctly, both of them more or less agreed that Brooklyn was hobbled by consolidation into Greater New York.)

    3) Because of the way state lines are drawn, people seem to forget that there are other pretty big downtowns in the area too: e.g., Jersey City, which is just on the other side of the Hudson from Manhattan, had a population peak of 301,173 in 1940; Newark, which is also very close by (Newark Airport is as close to Wall St. as JKF is), had a population peak of 442,337 in 1930. Both were centers of their own hub and spoke systems I believe, with their own suburbs, etc.

    4) Yes, it’s true that the an existing hub/spoke system of transportation does favor a downtown at the center and disfavor downtowns along the spokes. So, for example, the extension of the subway (including the elevated “subway”) system to Jamaica, Queens, for instance, helped feed Manhattan and sap Jamaica, Queens. (Jamaica was, for many years and may still be, the second largest downtown on Long Island after Brooklyn.)

    5) BUT another way of looking at this is as a challenge to disfavored downtowns to densify and eventually develop spokes of their own. In other words, as another commenter in this thread already appears to have pointed out, one shouldn’t just see the world as a “static” system in which what it is that we see now is taken as a law of nature, never, ever to be changed in the future.

    In a densifying world (especially one with autos and trucks, which are less constrained by hub and spoke systems) developing new vital downtowns may not be quite the problem that it may have been in the more recent past. That isn’t to say that such “outlying” downtowns will become rivals to Manhattan’s various downtowns. But they could be smaller, but nevertheless, still economically vibrant downtowns of their own.

    6) I think it’s important for market urbanists to step back and reflect upon how much of the current systems does NOT appear to be a result of market forces (i.e., market urbanism), but of “planning” (conscious or subconscious) — the idea that planners (and citizens as a group via the political process) know better than the marketplace (citizens as individuals) what is best, and that Manhattan “should,” for example, be more of a downtown than downtown Brooklyn, etc.

    7) So I think the “true” market urbanism perspective here is, more or less, the following: “Let’s not root for one outcome or another, but just let’s do the best we can (solving legitimate problems along the way) and see where the market will take us. That’s the way, so it seems to me, our great cities were built in the first place.”

    Benjamin Hemric
    Fri., Feb. 25, 2011, 10:30 p.m.

  • Rhywun

    Silicon Valley has more “buzz” than San Francisco because of the nature of the industry, not because that area has in any way become the “center” of the region. It has little in the way of a traditional center such as density, culture, or variety. What it does have is a high concentration of workers in a high-prestige industry.

  • Rhywun

    There are centers in New York outside Manhattan that are noticeably expanding lately, such as Long Island City, Jamaica, and yes, downtown Brooklyn – mostly because Manhattan is just not affordable to nearly anyone anymore. In all cases, these were once important hubs that gradually lost most of their prestige over the decades as the city became more centralized around Manhattan, yet they still have excellent transit connections not only to Manhattan but to their surrounding areas. As highly regulated as the city is, it’s hard to see this is anything other than a rational response to market forces – in this case, the fact that mere mortals can no longer afford rents in Manhattan, but they still want to be in the city. For decades after the 1898 consolidation, Manhattan was “the city”, while the other four boroughs were relegated to being bedroom communities. In some ways, what we’re seeing now is a (modest) reversal of that trend.

  • Alon Levy

    In both the Bay Area and the Beltway region, the traditional central city is still the center of gravity – Washington much more so than SF, which has been hobbled by water ever since they built the Transcontinental Railroad. The DC metro area has a very small population tilt in the direction of Fairfax County, which is more than made up for by the pull of Baltimore in the opposite direction; until 2007, Fairfax County was a net bedroom community in terms of earnings (i.e. total earnings at county jobs were smaller than total earnings by county residents).

    In the Bay Area it’s a bit different. Silicon Valley sprang up as an independent metro area, which merged with SF-Oakland later. It’s hard to measure which exercises the most pull, because the geography ensures it’s impossible to suburbanize in all directions equally; most suburbanization happens due east.

  • Ncaj

    Tyson’s Corner draws from DC, MD, and VA and has some of the highest-paying jobs in the DC area (big four accounting firms, investment banks, big gov’t contractors, tech, etc.)

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