I realize that linking to two pieces on Mr. George in three days puts yours truly at risk of exemplifying Churchill's definition of a fanatic:
"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."
But here we are. And this one takes a slightly different approach to get where we are going.
Plus some footnotes that would make even Matt Levine envious
From American Affairs Journal:
A city is an agrarian-urban unit that exists to promote the well-being of individual persons over the course of a whole life and the city itself across multiple generations. Extended human well-being in any city requires that city to occupy its own land well, to protect its adjacent landscape, and to afford citizens opportunities to engage in the production and exchange of material and social goods. This broadly Aristotelian account of the nature and purpose of cities is intrinsic to classical humanist urbanism broadly understood. This approach calls for a cityscape featuring a mix of uses within pedestrian proximity, in blocks of commercial/residential “background buildings” and civic/religious “foreground buildings.” All together these define a beautiful and hierarchical spatial realm of streets and squares that, historically, serves as the medium of human social life.1
This view of cities and its corresponding view of human nature will no doubt strike some readers as quaint. But lest we dismiss it hastily, consider some problematic conditions of present-day cities and their adjacent suburban and rural landscapes. Consider also the mostly young people who bear the brunt of these problematic conditions, symptoms of two interrelated and problematic phenomena. One is the seventy-year experiment to physically reorganize human settlements around the automobile—a cultural aspiration and legal regime known as suburban sprawl.2 The other, beginning in the 1980s, is the rise of global cities,3 characterized as such by their attraction to and dependence upon a “creative class” of people with expertise in accounting, advertising, banking, information technology, and law, qualifications making them especially well suited to participate and flourish in, and to enable, the new and growing global economy.
The aesthetic, economic, environmental, and social failures of sprawl are well elucidated in the writings of neo-traditional urbanism advocates, such as Strong Towns and the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU). But what has become most striking about the rise of certain global cities is the growing importance of location and a corresponding boom in the value of urban land. Urban land is a finite commodity, and the rise in land value has made these increasingly elite cities unaffordable not only for the poor, but also for the middle class. Indeed, it is one of the causes of a shrinking urban middle class. This explosion in urban land value is even more important than the “end of distance” that some anticipated social media would enable.This urgency has prompted renewed interest in Henry George, the nineteenth-century political economist and land reformer, and specifically in the idea and merits of land value taxation and some possible forms in which a land value tax (LVT) might be implemented. One of these forms entails a marriage between an LVT and a New Urbanist idea called transect-based zoning. Though I hope to indicate the possible fecundity of that union, such an approach to an LVT is neither the most common nor the most obvious. I intend to describe other possible approaches as well, all with both the modesty that follows from not being a member of the economists’ guild, and the impertinence of one who thinks some subjects are of sufficient import that they should not be left uncritically to experts. Because consideration of land use in so much of the modern world occurs in the legal and cultural context of suburban sprawl and hypermodernist urbanism,4 I want to begin with the idea of transect-based zoning before moving on to Henry George and the land value tax.
Transect-Based Zoning
Transect-based zoning (aka form-based codes or FBCs) is a New Urbanist idea conceived as an alternative to currently normative use-based zoning, which first emerged in the United States in the early part of the twentieth century. Use-based zoning came into being for reasons good and bad. In part it responded to the early effects of the industrial revolution on premodern cities: large factories, noxious emissions, rapid population growth, physically overtaxed road, water, and sewer infrastructure, and so forth. On the other hand, it was a naïve application of modern utilitarian rationality (“form follows function”) and also partly used as an agent of social control—a tool for powerful interests to keep “undesirable elements,” usually black people, in their “proper place” by means of exclusionary zoning of lot sizes and housing types.
Use-based zoning’s characteristic effect, however, especially as it developed in post-1945 automobile suburbs, is indicated by its name. Various activities of quotidian human life—home, work, school, shopping, worship, recreation—were organized into separate zones, typically accessible only by car.
As New Urbanists5 began studying in earnest the pre-1945 town and city neighborhoods that antedate suburban sprawl, they began to notice and document several distinguishing features of traditional urban form:
- A mix of daily and weekly activities within pedestrian proximity (typically a 5–10 minute walk);
- Durable buildings, the uses of which would often change over time (consider typical pre-1945 residential and commercial buildings that have been put to a wide variety of uses since their original construction);
- A spatial environment of public streets and squares defined by an ordered arrangement of buildings sited on or relatively close to their front property lines;
- A building hierarchy divided roughly between plentiful and common residential and commercial background building types, and singular and more monumental civic and religious foreground building types;
- The use of streets for parking, and a rarity of town and neighborhood surface parking lots; and
- A gradient of urban building and population densities.
However, when New Urbanists set out in the 1980s and ’90s to work with residential real estate developers on walkable, mixed-use settlements, it quickly became apparent that existing zoning ordinances—indeed, existing sprawl culture, including bank lending practices, federal housing programs, state Department of Transportation regulations, and a host of other institutional conventions—would not allow it. And so New Urbanists set out to change these institutional practices, beginning with changing use-based zoning ordinances in order to level the legal playing field for developers wanting to make walkable, mixed-use settlements. The new zoning ordinance type that New Urbanists invented was the transect-based code.
The idea of a transect is derived from late nineteenth-century geographers, who first employed it to depict gradients in a natural environment. The New Urbanist insight was to extend the idea of a natural transect to depict a rural-to-urban gradient, and to recognize its potential as the basis for a different kind of zoning ordinance. A common New Urbanist transect diagram pragmatically divides an ideal world (i.e., one with no suburban sprawl) into realms of rural and urban, and then depicts a gradation of urban transect zones, ranging from less dense to more dense. The diagram itself then becomes the basis for a different kind of zoning code that zones not on the basis of building use (where what is not permitted is forbidden), but rather on the basis of building type and density (where what is not forbidden is permitted).
New Urbanists have had significant success in getting transect-based codes adopted, not only for greenfield site developments prior to the 2008 housing crash, but also as exclusive or overlay codes in some major U.S. cities, including Denver, Miami, Cincinnati, and Nashville. The results of all this New Urbanist effort, particularly the greenfield projects, is sometimes dismissed as “just a prettier form of sprawl.” But New Urbanist greenfield developments have always existed side by side with less well-publicized urban infill efforts, which have increased in both number and emphasis since 2008. Further, the alternative to a mixed-use New Urbanist greenfield development is generally a single-use sprawl development occupying considerably more rural land. And if the adoption of transect-based codes by major cities has not (yet) led to an urban renaissance, there is the deeper problem that the culture of traditional urbanism and architecture was lost for at least two generations over the course of the twentieth century. A renaissance of good urban building and good urban culture is a slow boring of hard boards, and likely a long-term cultural project.
There is at least one conspicuous aporia, however, in common New Urbanist polemics, and it has to do with land value and its implications. New Urbanists market themselves to both developers and public officials with the true claim that good urban design creates economic value. Moreover, the Charter of the New Urbanism professes that the traditional towns and city neighborhoods they champion should be just and economically diverse environments, with housing affordability across class lines; and that this goal can be achieved by promoting a variety of urban housing types in addition to the single-family detached house. These might include the granny flat or coach house ancillary dwelling unit, the apartment above the store, the attached single-family row house, the bungalow court, the duplex, the two-flat, the triple-decker, the six-flat, the corner lot twelve-flat, and the U-court apartment building.
New Urbanists have come to characterize these housing types as “missing middle housing,” by which they mean older urban housing types now generally absent from a spectrum that once included the detached single family house at one end and the mid-rise urban apartment building at the other. The New Urbanist argument has been that provision of missing middle housing in quantity can be facilitated by transect-based zoning that makes such housing legal as of right; and that this increased housing diversity and quantity will increase both affordability and the population density needed to support pedestrian proximity to urban advantages, like neighborhood schools, parks, storefronts, and public transit....
....MUCH MORE
Related:
"San Francisco’s Future Should Begin with a Land Value Tax"
