Category: regulation

The war on zoning is a secret??!

Lisa Schweitzer1 Comment

There are a couple of things that need to go away from writing right now. 1) Analogies between the modern world and ancient Rome (or ancient Greece) that make no sense and 2) using “The War on X” to title anything. The first observation I credit to brilliant former student Peter McFerrin, who noted we should just ban people from making these analogies because most of them are entirely specious and usually self-serving. The second is self-serving, too; overly emotional metaphor that nicely exemplifies the logical fallacy, if-by-whisky. Oh, those liberals! They are AT WAR with the Constitution. There is a CULTURE WAR. Blah blah blah. Retch, Puke, Vomit.

No, war actually involves militaries. Somebody trying to change policies in a way you don’t like is not a war.

Before anybody says it, I don’t think there is a GOP war on women. But that doesn’t mean we’re not in a backlash, a serious one, or that the people leading it aren’t a-holes. It just means that the war metaphor has been over-used, and I’m tired of it.

SO this selection from the Atlantic Cities crossed my desk this morning: The Secret Conservative War On Zoning.. I don’t mean to be rude, but are you kidding me? Is the war a secret? Or are the conservatives secret? Every so often I wish that people in planning would engage in some serious reflexivity about their own biases, one of them being that the field attracts people who believe in progressive social change. There is nothing wrong with that: in fact, that sentiment strikes me as noble and compassionate in my students. But that doesn’t mean that it’s right all the time.

So the shopworn “war on” title combined with an assumed conservative bogeyman. Why conservatives would resent being cast in this role in public discourse is anybody’s guess.

The rest of the article doesn’t help me get over my original grump.

The American Legislative Exchange Council, the corporate lobbying group known for pushing the “Stand Your Ground” gun legislation that factored into the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida, may be getting into a new line of business: planning and zoning.

Note the careful dodge: “may be getting into.” I love leads like that. And the emotional lead: Trayvon Martin.

The rest goes on to explain that ALEC has put “poison pill” language into model legislation that would to make local zoning much more difficult or impossible. Shocking! Lobbyists rolling legislation? Utterly shocking! How DARE THEY? Naive planners must be taken aback at the dirty pool out-maneuvering!

Of course, planners and environmental organizations have already set up their OWN pre-fab legislative models and language that contains their own regulatory agenda. But it’s right when WE do it, and wrong the Bad Guys do it. Three words: form-based codes. Environmental lobbies have promulgated these and their variants as God’s Own Truth in model legislation and policy. The idea that another group might be forming up in opposition to the values assumed in these regulations should hardly surprise us: it’s how American politics works. Planners and planning ideas, even zoning, do not get a free pass in the political realm, no matter how convinced we are of our own individual rightness and our opponents’ wrongness, ignorance, and bad faith.

Only conservatives hate regulation, after all, right? That’s why Democrat Jerry Brown is in the middle of deconstructing CEQA–not because it’s an over-reaching law, which it is, but because it might stop him from spending $3billion in federal funds on his pet luxury train project.

Going back to War on Zoning, Flint tells us that zoning fights are not new, and the American Planning Association has set up training to help planners…Read More »

David King on the Co-Development of Subways and Real Estate in JTLU

Lisa Schweitzer

The Journal of Transport and Land Use always has good things in it, and this time out is no exception. I’ll pull out two papers to discuss this week.

The first is from fellow UCLA alumni and now assistant professor at Columbia University, David King. His manuscript is

King, D., 2011, Developing Densely: Estimating the Effect of Subway Growth on New York City Land Uses The Journal of Transport and Land Use, 4(2), pp. 19-32.

From the abstract:
Abstract:In the early twentieth century, New York City’s population, developed land area, and subway network size all increased dramatically. The rapid expansion of the transit system and land development present intriguing questions as to whether land development led subway
growth or if subway expansion was a precursor to real estate development. The research described in this article uses Granger causality models based on parcel-level data to explore the co-development of the subway system and residential and commercial land uses, and attempts to determine whether subway stations were a leading indicator of residential and commercial development or if subway station expansion followed residential and commercial construction. The results of this study suggest that the subway network developed in an orderly fashion and grew densest in areas where there was growth in commercial development. There is no evidence that subway growth preceded residential development throughout the city. These results suggest that subway stations opened in areas already well-served by the system and that network growth often followed residential and commercial development. ăe subway network acted as an agent of decentralization away from lower Manhattan as routes and stations were sought in areas with established ridership demand.

This is a wonderfully written paper, and I can’t claim any particular objectively because I think David is the shizzle. However, it’s worth chatting about the paper in some depth.

In this introduction, King notes three factors that reinforced the idea that the subway followed people rather the other way around:

1. The subways were developed by private transit companies with public financing. These companies were not real estate developers: they relied on fares alone for their business. I strongly suspect that this is the biggest single factor in the story he has to tell. If you are a private company, you don’t pour capital investment into places unless you are pretty clear that there are going to be passengers. Contrast this behavior with the behavior of pork-barrel, get-my-slice-of-the-capital-funding-pie-no-matter-how-few-passengers-there-are temptations of public funding for capital improvements.

2. There was no real zoning prior to the 1960s, so developers could cram as many units as they could pencil out into the parcels they owned.

3. Land values were on the rise, which would reinforce #2, and which drove manufacturing off Manhattan in favor of offices–so that we today can stroll around Manhattan and oooh and aaaah at its sustainable urban form populated by, among others, billionaire I-bankers holding the reigns of a capitalist machine that is currently eating the entire universe. But they live in apartments and walk more than everybody else, so they must be The Better Environmental People.

Anyhoozily, I am not the world’s biggest fan of Granger models, but King’s application of them is clever here. To make a long story short, the models look for a first period change in a variable that correlates with a second period change in different variables. King sets up the analysis to look at both possible directions: subway supply change lagged against real estate development (the subway following the people hypothesis) and the alternative, development lagged against subway supply (the people follow the subway hypothesis).

He tests against both commercial and residential development, and he finds that there is no support for the belief that the subways were speculative–that is, that they came before the development. Instead, subways followed development, and commercial real estate most importantly.

One quibble is that I wish he’d left Staten Island in the analysis. He drops it because it’s not a part of the subway network, but I think that makes for an interesting control. Another swing at the questions King brings up concerns whether there is a change in the rate of development once the station appears.

David King blogs about transportation over at Getting From Here To There.

Obama’s new CAFE Standards as a tax break

Lisa Schweitzer

Eagle-eyed reader Don C referred me to this nice Op-Ed from the statesman.com Ready for an Obama Tax Break: TxDOT might not be by Ben Wear. The key point:

Hang on first for some math.

Let’s say a Pflugerville physics schoolteacher drives 15,000 miles a year and, by coincidence, has a car that averages right at that 28 mpg existing standard. She would need 536 gallons to do that.

She pays both a state gasoline tax of 20 cents a gallon (which hasn’t increased since 1991) and a federal gasoline tax of 18.4 cents a gallon (locked in since 1993). So her annual tax hit (paid invisibly at the pump) is $107 to the state and almost $99 to the feds. So, about $206 a year.

With a 56 mpg car, her total tax would be $103. Oh, and at $3.40 a gallon (and subtracting the gas taxes), she would save another $800 by buying half as much gasoline.

But here’s the problem, from a statewide perspective. TxDOT, which gets about three-quarters of that state gas tax revenue and about the same percentage of what Texans pay in federal gas taxes (because a quarter of it, unfairly in the eyes of Texas officials, is then distributed to other states), would lose a couple of billion dollars a year. Ouch.

I had to look up Pflugerville.

Finance folks in transport have seen this train coming for some time. The GAO issued a report in 2009 discussing the issue of improved fleet fuel economy on Federal coffers. Most of us have argued we should go with a mileage fee, or usage subscriptions for autos. Both of which could be handled by leases to private companies.

Polluted, dangerous and poorly regulated: Brownfield redevelopment from Hollander and Sigman

Lisa Schweitzer2 Comments

Justin Hollander at Tufts is a rising star in planning research. He’s got a new book out on Shrinking Cities, but I haven’t seen that one yet. The one I have seen is a volume called Polluted and Dangerous: America’s Worst Abandoned Properties and What Can Be Done About Them from last year. At a book a year, he should do pretty well in this business.

From the blurb:

Blighted, contaminated, and abandoned property mars nearly every major American city. Justin Hollander conducted primary research in twenty urban centers containing such “brownfields” or, in the most serious cases, “HI-TOADS” (High-Impact Temporarily Obsolete Abandoned Derelict Sites). His goal was to study the sites and the official handling of them through the lenses of sustainability, urban planning, redevelopment, and environmental justice. In Polluted and Dangerous, he scrutinizes specific sites in five of the affected cities: New Bedford, Massachusetts; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; Trenton, New Jersey; and Youngstown, Ohio

link: UPNE – Polluted and Dangerous: Justin B. Hollander

In this month’s volume of the Journal of Law and Economics, Hilary Sigman has a manuscript that tests the level of capitalization that occurs surrounding these sorts of properties based on different liability regimes:

Sigman, Hilary. “Environmental Liability and Redevelopment of Old Industrial Land .” Journal of Law and Economics 53, no. May (2010): 289-206.

The manuscript contains a convincing analysis that liability rules are incompletely capitalized in land prices; so while potentially contaminated land is lower in price, it is not sufficiently lower in price to equalize vacancy rates or hit a point where there is parity between brownfields and greenfields in prices. This, I suspect, has to do with information problems: with a brownfield site, there is the possibility that the contamination will turn out much worse than originally believed.

Sigman is at the Bloustein school, where Hollander got his PhD. So there’s some good work coming out of there on brownfields.

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Investing in BP and other bad actors

Lisa Schweitzer

One of my colleagues triumphantly announced that his son bought BP stock yesterday, and I think expected us to be surprised or outraged or jealous, I guess. Unfortunately, he was talking to economists, who, if they paid attention, know full well that the odds are good in favor of BP if there is any precedent what happened in Exxon. Here’s cartoonist Scott Adams’ take, which as usual, captures the perversity of the issue with both wit and intelligence:

When I heard that BP was destroying a big portion of Earth, with no serious discussion of cutting their dividend, I had two thoughts: 1) I hate them, and 2) This would be an excellent time to buy their stock. And so I did. Although I should have waited a week. People ask me how it feels to take the side of moral bankruptcy. Answer: Pretty good! Thanks for asking. How’s it feel to be a disgruntled victim? I have a theory that you should invest in the companies that you hate the most. The usual reason for hating a company is that the company is so powerful it can make you balance your wallet on your nose while you beg for their product. Oil companies such as BP don’t actually make you beg for oil, but I think we all realize that they could. It’s implied in the price of gas.

Read the rest:

link: Dilbert’s Scott Adams on Betting on the Bad Guys in Investing – WSJ.com

John Keefe, writing for the Maritime Professional last month, also took up the question, though with less information and brio than Adams:

Maritime Professional – Too Big to Fail?

Keefe I do think has a point that Adams doesn’t quite see: that companies have gone paff! in recent years, leaving the public holding the bag for the consequences and shareholders with worthless stock. BP got driven out Nigeria, for example, and though the average Nigerian may not be in any way better off, Nigerian companies wanting to become oil barons certainly have.


Circumventing the NRA via the world court

Lisa Schweitzer

Neil Peirce asks whether mayors from around the world might create a united urban voice around issues that affect cities. One such issue: the US’s lax control over guns:

Citiwire.net » Could Mayors’ Fervor For Gun Curbs Trigger Global Legal Action?

A clip:

The “extremely violent” Mexican drug gangs, Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard Casaubon reported, are getting 85 percent of their weaponry from transfers across the U.S. border. (The method’s simple — the gangs simply recruit straw buyers who can flash a U.S. driver’s license at a gun shop, walk out with scores of firearms, many of them assault weapons, and then transport the lethal cargo into Mexico).

This is an interesting idea. Ten years ago, I would have said “no chance.” But recent inroads in global environmental enforcement of things such as environmental assessment suggest otherwise.


Environmental review and HSR in the northeast corridor

Lisa Schweitzer

Rail stimulus funds to bypass Northeast – The Boston Globe

The tone of this article suggests that the Northeast is getting the shaft while California is getting a windfall when it comes to HSR money. While I would argue that HSR makes much more sense in the northeast than in California, the interesting part of this article is the whining about environmental review. It’s not like California hasn’t gone through its paces or paid its dues here: the state’s HSR commission has done its due diligence with regard to performing the EIRs and invested heavily in the documents. I can argue with the quality of the assumptions, but you can’t argue that California hasn’t put its money where its mouth is.

The bottom line: everybody loves environmental review until it comes to their own projects; and as a result, the policy and planning world has a love-hate relationship with environmental review. It holds up bad projects; it holds up good projects. But even good projects can be poorly implemented if the communities get bulldozed along the way. These agencies want to fast-track or bypass EIR, and it doesn’t look like FRA is going to give it to them. It will be interesting to see if John Kerry has the muscle and the will to force the issue. It would be very interesting to see EIR as a regulatory regime fall down because of the new, rampaging desire to build rail when it was constructed in part to slow down the rampaging impulse to build roads.


Environmental review and HSR in the northeast corridor

Lisa Schweitzer

Rail stimulus funds to bypass Northeast – The Boston Globe

The tone of this article suggests that the Northeast is getting the shaft while California is getting a windfall when it comes to HSR money. While I would argue that HSR makes much more sense in the northeast than in California, the interesting part of this article is the whining about environmental review. It’s not like California hasn’t gone through its paces or paid its dues here: the state’s HSR commission has done its due diligence with regard to performing the EIRs and invested heavily in the documents. I can argue with the quality of the assumptions, but you can’t argue that California hasn’t put its money where its mouth is.

The bottom line: everybody loves environmental review until it comes to their own projects. These agencies want to fast-track or bypass EIR, and it doesn’t look like FRA is going to give it to them. It will be interesting to see if John Kerry has the muscle and the will to force the issue. It would be very interesting to see EIR as a regulatory regime fall down because of the rampaging desire to build rail when it was constructed in part to slow down the rampaging impulse to build roads.


Regulating and self-regulation, Friedman style

Lisa Schweitzer

My colleague, Richard Green, writes about What Milton Friedman Got Wrong:

Friedman had two fundamental problems with business regulation. His first is that the business would capture the regulator, and therefore use regulation to establish monopoly power….

His second, though, is just wrong. He argues that in order to preserve their reputations, businesses will self-regulate. Among other things, this ignores that managers often have short-term horizons. It also ignores that when large businesses implode, they leave victims with whom they never engaged in a transaction in their wake. BP did nothing illegal–how’s that reputation thing working out? And having now read a whole lot on Goldman-Abacus (including the SEC complaint, the response on GS’s web site, the offering circular, and excellent commentary from James Surowiecki, Yves Smith and others), it is not clear to me that Goldman did anything illegal or actionable (but I could be persuaded to change my mind). It is just that what it did (including investing long in CDS) should be unambiguously illegal and actionable. I can’t think of anyone who had a bigger reputation franchise than Goldman.

In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman makes both of these arguments, which I would argue Richard mixes different types of business reputations. In so doing, he exposes the biggest problem with Friedman’s assumptions about reputations serving as sufficient regulation for businesses within markets.

Businesses have different types of reputations: what Friedman is talking about is that quality of their products or customer services. So if a dentist is a hack, he won’t get much return business after a certain point because he’s just not very good at his job. The market will sufficiently regulate him. However, the usual problems apply here: prior to things like Yelp, for example, information problems could keep a lousy dentist in business for quite some time. Then there’s the fact that government inspections do a lot to reveal information: so upfront where the customer can see everything looks great but you go in back and it’s a cesspit, and the only way this becomes discovered without inspection is after a bunch of children die from salmonella. Hardly a welfare gain; and the problem with terrible doctors is that they can, in fact, kill somebody. Which is all well and good to let the market regulate until it’s your kid. So information is one issue.

Green, by introducing Goldman-Sachs and British Petroleum, has moved the discussion forward in a productive way. Unlike dentists or doctors, these companies’ customers have little reason to demand the sort of welfare-enhancing behavior that Friedman suggests can occur through reputations. As producers, BP and GS have accountabilities to shareholders and to customers, and those of us outside those groups have only regulation, goodwill, ore ethical consumer behavior in order to try to press “green” or “ethical behavior” accountability vis-a-vis the companies’ primary accountability: producing goods and services to sell. BP’s potentially self-regulating reputation does not rest on how well it cleans up or responds to the oil spill. It rests on whether it produces oil and makes money.

The market will discipline the latter behavior pretty sharply; the former it will discipline only insofar that its customers value public accountability. The structure of the oil biz helps a lot here: how are you planning to boycott BP? Do you even know where your gas comes from?

In fact, BP has had a terrible reputation for green behavior, or at least it should, having manufactured one corporate greenwash document after another while blowing up small towns in Texas after numerous safety violations, long before this particular spill.

In GS’s case, there is a premium placed among its shareholders and customers for higher returns, and none of them–if all the post-crash discussion is to be believed–look under the hood of the money machine.

So nobody’s watching, or more particularly, nobody with the power to affect change is watching.


Lecture on NEPA and Transportation Compliance

Lisa Schweitzer

I have recorded and posted a videocast, found here, of a supplemental lecture for my PPD 692 class. There will probably be more lectures as the class goes on, which I will post to this pared-down site.

Today’s topic is an introduction to the National Environmental Policy Act and its application to transportation projects. It’s meant for advanced undergraduates or relatively new master’s students who are just learning the policy context for project analysis in transportation planning.

I have no idea how permissions work, but as far as I am concerned, you can use this in your classes or pass it along to anybody who wants to learn more about NEPA.