Friday, October 15, 2004
The New Yorkers' Map of the World
Some years ago, two very smart men, George Dantzig and Tom Saaty, wrote a not-so-smart book, Compact City: A Plan for a Liveable Urban Environment (out of print). By now there are other books and countless essays with similar names and themes.The latest New Yorker magazine includes David Owen's "Green Manhattan: The environment needs more big cities" (no link to the article available).
The well-known New Yorkers' (Manhattan-centric) Map of the World was amusing self-parody.
Yet, there is also the occasional unintended self-parody. Owens argues that if more of the world were settled at Manhattan densities, and the Manhattanites' greener lifestyles (including the fact that "Eighty-two percent of Manhattan residents travel to work by public transit, by bicycle or on foot.") prevailed, the world would be a better place -- and David Goostein's pronouncement that this time we are (really, really) running out of oil would not be so troubling.
Where to start? I took the easy way and went to Wendell Cox's www.publicpurpose.com. Wendell makes it all simple and clear but high-brow writers for the New Yorker take 5,000 words to erect a structure that the data, so easily accessible thanks to our host, easily undermine.
Owen neglects the fact that 70% of those who work in Manhattan are not Manhattan residents. And many of these folks do not walk or bicycle or take transit to work; large (and growing) numbers of them take very long drives via you-know-whats to get there. If not, they (unlike Owen) use cars to facilitate the non-commuting portion of their lives.
Moreover most of these long-distance commuters and their families could not afford Manhattan prices; they are unlikely to find that their tastes and resources match the options that the Manhattan set-up offers.
Trouble is that Manhattan is an island geographically but it cannot function without the almost 1.5 million who show up each day to help make the place work. In fact, it depends on its sprawling hinterland in more ways than just the daily commuting influx indicates.
Mr. Owen and his fellows can continue to pat themselves on the back only if that New Yorker map of the world is actually their frame of reference.
Rethinking
On Oct 13, the WSJ ran a story titled "In Bhutan, Happiness is King ... Society Values Well-Being Over GDP -- and Economists Take Note" (the link would only be useful to subscribers). An accompanying table,"How You Doing? ... Some Researchers are rethinking the value of measuring material wealth without regard to a broader notion of fulfillment. Below, well-being rankings, based on combined 'happiness' and 'life satisfaction' scores:"1. Puerto Rico 4.69
2. Mexico 4.38
3. Denmark 4.24
4. Colombia 4.18
5. Ireland 4.16
6. Iceland 4.15
7. N. Ireland 4.01
8. Switzerland 3.88
9. Netherlands 3.86
10. Canada 3.86
15. U.S. 3.50
.
.
.
72. Albania -0.86
73. Bulgaria -0.87
74. Belarus -0.92
75. Georgia -1.11
76. Romania -1.30
77. Moldova -1.63
78. Russia -1.75
79. Armenia -1.80
80. Ukraine -1.81
81. Zimbabwe -1.88
The source given is the World Values Survey but I could not find this list at their website, altough the questionnaire is available.
Those of us afflicted with revealed preference thinking might reflect on the fact that, in just the last few years, 3.5% of Puerto Rico's population decamped from #1 to #15 (refers to net outmigration).
Perhaps the researchers who are busy "rethinking" all the balderdash re national wealth might say that it's always the wiser ones who stay where they are. And they hang on to a good thing, keeping it a secret about how good life is -- except perhaps when the rethinkers come around with their surveys.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
Mega-Projects (contd.)
Many Californians (and others) like to think of a Golden Age when "things got done" and eye-catching large-scale public projects were actually built. From today's vantage point, Egypt's pyramids are also attractive but, then, those were the days when costs were not up for discussion. So, 5,000 years later, the Pharos get a pass.Not so for Robert Moses, whose devices are nicely summarized by Gene Callahan and Sanford Ikeda in the Fall 2004 Independent Review ("The Career of Robert Moses: City Planning as a Microcosm of Socialism"): "The career of Robert Moses, which had a tremendous impact on the day-to-day life of tens of millions of people, presents a paradigmatic example of the fatal conceit of constructivist planners ..." (p. 260; see the article for the wrenching details).
No pass, either, for the planners of Washington DC's Metro. Wendell Cox looks at promise vs performance 25 years later -- and it is not a pretty sight. The ten-billion dollar system did nothing to help the capitol avoid the standard big-city decline in transit use -- and concurrent increase in private vehicle use.
To be fair, neither Moses nor the Metro planners used slave labor to build their projects.
Monday, October 11, 2004
The Cities Are (not) "Bouncing Back"
Since the mid-1990s, there has been steady drumbeat about US cities "bouncing back". This is, of course, unlikely but, nevertheless, provocative because turnarounds are big news.I now have my 2003 US Statistical Abstract CD ROM (much handier than the hard copy) and here are the population shares since 1990 for New York city, for the top-20 cities and for the top-75:
PLACE(S) 1900 1940 2000
New York city 4.52% 5.65% 2.84%
Top 20 cities 15.73 18.97 10.96
Top 75 cities 22.03 27.42 18.24
Cities as interesting units of analysis have been eclipsed by metro areas and their exurban hinterlands. Nevertheless, Smart-Growthers, big-city politicians and their acolytes have been selling a fable to gullible media.
The cities, as we knew them, peaked near about 1940. There has been no turning back. For many years, national politicians worried over being seen as not having an "urban policy", e.g. pumping enough tax money into declining areas. The welfare policy that seemed to matter was all about places and not people. As people do better, they leave declining places behind. Political representatives, however, represent places, not people.
Sunday, October 10, 2004
Mega-Projects
A week or so ago, Patrick Crozier of Transport Blog was kind enough to respond to my post about a proposed maga-dollar extension of LA's underwhelming Red Line.Pat pointed to an even more expensive extension of London's Jubilee Line which, he reports, is responsible for a development boom valued far in excess of the money spent.
There must be some projects in the world that, well timed and placed, did impact development -- even to the tune of garnering more development benefits (valued in land value increments) than was spent.
Urban economists would probably point to a distributional problem unless the affected landowners were made to shoulder the costs of the windfall that came their way. On top of that, as some neighborhoods boom, others may fade. Here are additional and complex impacts to discern and consider.
Mainly, however, the discussion suggests that there is some objective function that some land use planning group is maximizing -- and that they do so via clever investments in subways, or anything else for that matter.
This is every planner's dream but, largely, a fiction. 1) there is no agreement on what should be maximized; 2) there is no science to help us specify and rank maximands (although substantial regional science literature -- including some that I had a hand in when I was much more optimistic about such things -- suggests there is); and 3) there is no easy way to design the instruments that would do the work of achieving the goals.
OK. So we can, nevertheless, do it via successive approximations and compromises. I am reminded of the lesson that I got from reading Alan Altshuler and David Luberoff's Mega Projects: The Changing Politics of Urban Investment. Namely, it is all about getting something built. Anything. The specifics matter much less than local politicians succeeding in getting their hands on federal dollars to leverage. In fact, that seems to be all that the mega-planners did.
