25 Sep 2014
As is often the case, after reading JR Lind’s fine article on Nashville’s growth-oriented policies, I find myself agreeing with his premise, but not the conclusion. The premise: that increasing city population is not a good thing in and of itself, and our leaders do us a disservice by making economic and population growth the end-all/be-all of civic progress. 100% agreed, and it’s a problem on more than just the local level (witness the nation worshiping at the altar of GDP).
That said, I don’t necessarily agree with his diagnosis of dilemma:
For city leaders facing population explosions, such is the dilemma:
They can allow growth to continue unfettered, straining budgets and patience while they struggle to preserve the character of the city and its neighborhoods. (Nashville’s 14 community plans go a long way to doing that, but, like the boiling frog, incremental changes add up to become wholesale ones.) Then their cities succumb to sprawl, creating political pressure to raise taxes to pay for the services required by a larger population or, conversely, to do more with the same or less.
Or, they can draw bright lines and institute draconian planning measures that can come off as cold and unwelcoming, but certainly and necessarily limit the availability of affordable housing. Further, as Portland has shown recently — and as Atlanta demonstrated three or four decades ago — stanching growth in the core can simply just push the sprawl outward.
There’s no easy solution and no failsafe plan to crack this code. If the inevitable wave is to be avoided — or, at least, survived — the answers need to be found sooner rather than later and the Nashville area’s leaders have to decide if the city’s reputation as an unequivocally welcoming place is one they would like to preserve, consequences be damned, or if a proverbial moat should be built, consequences be damned.
This indeed may be a mind-bending dilemma for our planners (though I doubt they are too troubled by it), however it’s a false one for us. We have a third option: do nothing. (That is to say, no coercive urban planning at all, lest I be misunderstood as an advocate for the status quo that is our tangled web of kleptocracies.) If there is indeed “no easy solution and no failsafe plan” (as indeed, there never is), the moral course action is to refrain from acting.
Zoning – that civic hammer for which everything is a nail – rarely, if ever, does more good than harm. In fact, more specifically, it’s often a contributing factor to many of the ills that seem inseparable from city growth – for example, urban sprawl. As Kevin Carson points out in his essay on energy and transportation (worth reading in its entirety for its relevance to this discussion and how we got here):
Unless one takes the fantastic position that zoning laws fortuitously replicate the exact same pattern of urban development that would have taken place in a free market – that laws prohibiting neighborhood commercial enterprises, prohibiting walk-up apartments over downtown stores, and mandating minimum lawn and parking lot sizes had absolutely no effect because there was not a single person who would have desired to do anything forbidden by these laws – then the logic is inescapable that their net effect was some non-zero increase in sprawl.
Sprawl, essentially, is a problem of efficiency in space usage which drives other patterns –foremost among them the culture of the automobile commute and the negative externalities (real or perceived) that come with it. The solution to this problem – the ever-widening (in lanes and budget) transportation infrastructure – is yet another bandaid which further consolidates centralized development and discourages any distributed growth that can scale comfortably with resources and infrastructure.
As long as living in Nashville is desirable compared to other alternatives, people will continue to come here, this much is certain. The consequences of this growth are unclear, but one thing is clear: the strained budgets and infrastructure are not a symptom of growth, they are the symptom of planning that has failed, via ineptitude or regulatory capture (corruption and profiteering). The problem is not that our planners face a dilemma, the problem is that we have planners at all. Show me a negative consequence of growth, and I’ll show you a regulatory actor that has distorted the incentives.
Our city’s property is in demand and people want to come here. Let them come! The “character of the city and its neighborhoods” will change either way. We have the choice now whether it comes via the free interaction of people maximizing resources or under the bootheel of zoning and eminent domain.
Until we’re not building baseball parks, subsidizing sports teams and building giant sheds, any discussion of how to confront the “strained budgets” of a city government as a consequence of growth is a mere joke.
16 Aug 2014
There’s a post about the rioting (which didn’t really happen) in Ferguson that’s going around in jacobinmag, a magazine named after Jacobins. Jacobins, if you’re not familiar with history, were a group of French revolutionaries whose main claim to fame is coopting a revolution in order to stage a couple of years of widespread creative decapitation. The name of the magazine isn’t ironic, by the way. I know, it was a head-scratcher for me, too. So anyway, this article can be a bit hard to read if you’re not familiar with the parlance of these modern-day authoritarian jacobins, so I thought I’d post this handy translation of the key parts:
Rallies and protests erupted as people took to the streets — eventually culminating in a riot. Crowds went from holding candle light vigils at the site of Brown’s death to burning down a number of businesses and lighting molotov cocktails during confrontations with police. How did we get here?
Translation: recent mass protests over a police killing had a few instances of damage to property and looting which we’re going broadly characterize as “riots” in order to use it to justify everything that follows in an exercise of our lust for violence, power and – hopefully! – murder!
Riots, like other forms of political action, can build solidarity. They can create strong feelings of common identity.
Translation: Defense against aggression can be co-opted to empower authoritarian shitheads like us who want our hand on the tiller so we can start putting heads on pikes.
Rather than evidence of illegitimacy, the presence of these “outsiders” reflected the magnetic power of the political moment.
Translation: huge groups of people wielding power give us a giant murder-boner
The community was unified and ready to take action. The police were the problem, and they had to be stopped.
Translation: *whispers* muuuuurder-boooooner
Not only is this a more substantive analysis than what is often offered on the Left, but acting on this analysis is the only way to eradicate entrenched racial hierarchy.
Translation: rioting is the only way to eliminate racial hierarchy (ed: say, how’s that workin out so far?)
riots are often galvanizing community events with the potential to unleash concerted political energy in dynamic and unpredictable directions, the stale politics of respectability only leads to further marginalization and dislocation. Now, it’s possible to disagree with the utility of insurrection. But these communities’ responses to subjugation must be discussed in political terms and not simply dismissed out of hand.
Translation: Riots are “unpredictable”, so who knows what can happen! Maybe murder. Maybe not all murder is bad! let’s get started!
On the surface, addressing the effects of rioting is an important political issue. By framing themselves as a customer in need of their “corporate neighbor,” it’s possible that this person is acting not out of concern for the working people that lost their jobs — their actual neighbors — but from the fear that their shopping routine will be disturbed. Like Deandre Smith observed, we identify more strongly with broken windows than broken people.
Translation: this person is claiming to be sad that they don’t have a place to buy things from their neighbor anymore, but they’re wrong. They are stupid, and we know better. This rioting might be a good opportunity to put us in charge, don’t you think?
“Let’s find ways to honestly observe and discuss their political needs, rather than simply criticizing the nature of their response to social violence.”
Translation: uh …
“social violence”? Seriously? I don’t know how to translate that. I give up, fuck these people.
29 May 2014
After reading a Tennessean article that reports the magnanimous graciousness of metro police in “allowing” a Nashville resident to continue residing in a makeshift tent encampment on the banks of the Cumberland, I’m left with a few lingering questions. The article posits matter-of-factly that the land belongs to metro. I’ve heard from other sources working with metro to delay the eviction that it’s not immediately clear who the land belongs to. According to Lindsey Krinks with Open Table, “they wrote trespassing citations a while back stating it was state property and now they are saying it’s metro property, but it’s more likely private property or the Army Corps of Engineers property”
The questions I have are:
- Who owns the land the camp is located on? My best approximation of the camp’s location is here, but that is an imperfect guess – I based that by matching up the appearance of some buildings across the river in this photo. If that location is right, it appears the camp would be on land owned by Lone Star Industries (thanks to @jrlind for the help):
The rest of the surrounding riverfront property appears to be owned by metro water.
* What was/is the impetus for his eviction? Did the owner (lone star industries?) make a complaint citing trespassing?
* If the owner is metro, what is the problem with his residence there (absent a better emergency, short-term or long-term affordable housing solution), and in what way is evicting him a solution to that problem?</ol>
Good quote from Lindsey that says it all:
> The police continue to remind us that they have the power and that they alone exercise the "legitimate" use of force and violence here. "The police department could have taken action some time ago," Don Aaron said. "We've elected not to." This article should be a story about how so many police officers and sergeants continue to harass our people. This should be a story about the dire shortage of affordable and accessible housing in Nashville and beyond. But instead, it is a watered down pat on the back to Metro PD for not doing what they could (and would) have done "some time ago" - shut down another camp and further entrench the poor in cycles of poverty and criminalization. We still also have not seen who actually owns the land and we are making great progress on finding housing with the guys. It shouldn't take months (or years) to find housing in Nashville, but for so many, it does. And yes, THIS is the real crime.
19 May 2014
This is st_rev’s, but I find myself referencing it a lot, so I’m putting it here:
You want to sell product/project/policy X for dealing with Z. Z is guaranteed to 1) get worse, 2) get better, or 3) stay the same.
If 1: “Z is getting worse, we need more X!”
If 2: “X is working, we need more X!”
If 3: “X kept Z from getting worse, we need even more X!”
Originally got this analysis from Penn & Teller regarding quack medicine, but it applies to public policy just as well. Drug war? Stimulus?
Drug use is increasing, we need more drug war! Drug use is declining, we need more drug war!
Stimulus kept economy out of depression, we need more stimulus! (tm Paul Krugman).
06 May 2014
In modern democracies, election seasons are often accompanied by public-service campaigns designed to encourage citizens to turn up at the polls and vote; regardless of one’s political leanings, it seems, it is important that one votes for something. In some countries, governments go so far as to legally require voting.
These campaigns are a terrible idea. Most voters have no idea what is going on–they may not even know who their leaders are, and certainly do not know who is the best candidate. Imagine that someone asks you for directions to a local restaurant. If you have no idea where the restaurant is, you should not make it up. You should not tell the person some guess that seems sort of plausible to you. You should tell them you don’t know and let them get directions from someone more knowledgeable.
Ignorant voting is even worse than ignorant giving of directions, because voting is an exercise of political power (albeit a very small one)–to vote for a policy is not only to make a recommendation, but to request that the policy be imposed on others by force. Collectively, the majority imposes policies or personnel choices on the rest of society. To be justified in participating in any such imposition, one must have some strong justification for thinking that the policy or personnel choice is beneficial. This justification is almost always lacking for the great majority of voters. In the great majority of cases, therefore, voting not only fails to qualify as a civic duty; it is positively immoral.
One might suggest that citizens have an obligation to become informed, and then vote. But becoming sufficiently informed to know who is the best candidate in a given election is typically extremely difficult. Indeed, it is not implausible to think that for most people and most elections, the task is actually impossible–no matter how much they study, most voters still will not know who the best candidate is, and may not even attain a reasonably high-probability guess. Even if it is not impossible, discovering who is the best candidate is clearly very onerous. It is therefore unreasonable to demand that an individual undertake the enormous costs of acquiring this knowledge, merely to secure a probability of, say, one in ten million of producing a modest benefit for society.
In short, it is most plausible to say that individuals have no obligation to vote, and that if they are ill-informed (as nearly all citizens are), they are obligated not to vote.
– “In Praise of Passivity”, by Mike Huemer. (hat tip to st_rev for this essay)
Happy election day!
