Adam Martin at William Easterly’s development blog Aid Watch has a post up warning about the tendency among developing nations to adopt Western styles wholesale, even if such styles are not even efficient in their countries of origin. He posits this as a sort of developmental Whiggishness, and cites education policy and intellectual [...]]]> by Stephen Smith

Adam Martin at William Easterly’s development blog Aid Watch has a post up warning about the tendency among developing nations to adopt Western styles wholesale, even if such styles are not even efficient in their countries of origin. He posits this as a sort of developmental Whiggishness, and cites education policy and intellectual property law as possible examples of the trend. We here at Market Urbanism, by virtue of language and location, tend to focus on urbanism in North America and Europe, but I thought this would be a good opportunity to discuss the state of urbanism in developing countries.

The starkest example of misplaced developmental Whiggishness in planning I can think of is the city of Kuala Lumpur. The city was practically brand new when it was made capital of the Federal Malay States in 1895, and as a British protectorate, the Crown sent New Zealand planner Charles Reade to the Malaysian capital in 1921 to head its planning department. Schooled in the methods of the nascent Garden City movement in the UK, Reade made a name for himself by spreading the sprawling, proto-suburban style throughout Australia and New Zealand before his posting in British Malaya. Under Reade’s aegis, Kuala Lumpur became a test case for the movement’s applicability outside of the industrialized West.

Housing estate in Malaysia

Unlike in the West, where dense, built-up urban cores relegated Garden City developments to small new towns and the outskirts of large cities, Kuala Lumpur offered an opportunity to build a metropolis from scratch as a Garden City. Charles Reade eagerly set to work building sprawling, low-density housing estates alongside wide roads which anticipated widespread private vehicle ownership. Residential, commercial, and industrial areas were segregated and separated by grassy, undeveloped parkbelts, characteristic of the Garden City style.

Following independence, a nationalist Malaysian government used a hybrid Japanese/American industrial policy (under the inauspicious moniker of “five-year plans”) to foster a domestically-oriented automobile industry, fulfilling Reade’s prophesy of Kuala Lumpur as an auto-oriented city. With two state-owned car manufacturers – Proton established in the ’80s and Perodua in the ’90s – middle-class car ownership became a national prerogative. In addition to bankrolling the two auto companies, the government subsidized gasoline and civil servants’ car loans, and embarked on an ambitious road-building scheme.

Beyond the British-style town planning of the 1920s and the hybrid American/Japanese industrial policy of the 1980s, Kuala Lumpur also began instituting American-style restrictions on density. Private minibuses were regulated out of existence and public bus service has not adapted to changing land use patterns.  In addition to height and density limitations, developers are faced with sprawl-promoting minimum parking requirements to the point where Kuala Lumpur’s downtown has twice as many parking spaces as not only its middle-income Asian counterparts, but also wealthy Asian cities like Singapore and Tokyo.

Kuala Lumpur may be the most blatant example of poorly-advised adoption of Western land use policy, but other cities around Asia exhibit similar anti-urban tendencies. Bangkok, Jakarta, and Manila are also “parking requirement enthusiasts,” and urban transportation scholar Paul Barter believes that similar dynamics may be at play in South Asian cities. The state of apartment buildings in Mumbai, 60% of which had controlled rents as late as 2006, makes the South Bronx look like the Upper East Side. The late Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach once said that artificially low rents were more destructive to Hanoi’s housing stock than American bombing.

Bucharest, post-Ceaushima

Outside of the immediate region, the communist world has adopted, to its detriment, many Western planning tendencies. Communist planners pursued the urban planning theories of Le Corbusier, the eminent Swiss architect and designer, with particular zeal, turning what to the West was a passing fad into the communist world’s sole planning style. While the French never seriously considered Le Corbusier’s plan to demolish most buildings within central Paris’ Right Bank and replace them with towers and parks with highways along the Seine, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu implemented his ideas quite faithfully in Bucharest, once known as the “Little Paris of the East” for its architecture. He razed vast swathes of the oldest, densest parts of the city and replaced them with towering apartment blocks, vast open spaces, and massive roads. In keeping with the Vietnamese foreign minister’s bombing theme, locals have dubbed Ceaușescu’s planning disaster “Ceaushima.”

Other communist cities, like Moscow and Pyongyang, built their typically-communist tower blocks on the outskirts of town, wherever there was open land. This resulted in a peculiar situation where density rises as one gets farther away from the city center, making mass transit difficult to implement. And while communist regimes didn’t envision widespread car ownership, their sense of grandiosity and love of military parades led to the construction of wide boulevards that discourage walkability and are now choked with cars. Like Le Corbusier, the communists despised the sort of petty commerce and consumerism that bustling streets and alleyways exude, so the isolated residential towers that dot the urban landscape of former communist countries have little in the way of ground-level retail. While Le Corbusier’s urban planning legacy in the West is limited to a dwindling number of decrepit high-rise public housing projects, the damage in communist countries, where all housing was public housing, is much longer-lasting.

In some ways, pro-sprawl urban planning has done more damage to countries like Malaysia and Romania than to the West. Unlike the Anglosphere and Europe, which already had relatively dense and developed urban cores before sprawl set in, developing countries are still in the process of urbanizing, so their older, denser cores do not have the capacity to hold much of the population. Some cities, like Kuala Lumpur or Pyongyang, had almost no pre-planning development; others, like Bucharest, had their historic centers redeveloped into Corbusian wastelands. The US had its freeway revolts and Western planning professionals have started to reconsider forced suburbanization, but the developing world is still waiting for its Jane Jacobs.

Academic references

1. Garnaut, Christine. “Chronicles from the far east: the garden city model of planning in the Federated Malay States, 1920-1929.” [source]
2. Mohamad, Jamilah and Amin T. Kiggundu. “The rise of the private car in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.” [source]
3. Barter, Paul A. “Transport, urban structure and ‘lock-in’ in the Kuala Lumpur Metropolitan Area.” [source]
4. Renaud, Bertrand. “The urban dimension of the North Korean economy: a speculative analysis.” [source]
5. Richards, Simon. “The anti-social urbanism of Le Corbusier.” [source]

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Matt Yglesias points to an article about Toronto’s new zoning code. The story is short on details, although the lowering of parking minimums near transit and overall simplification of the code seem like appealing features to Market Urbanists. I did, however, find a blog post from last year about the proposed changes, [...]]]> by Stephen Smith

Matt Yglesias points to an article about Toronto’s new zoning code. The story is short on details, although the lowering of parking minimums near transit and overall simplification of the code seem like appealing features to Market Urbanists. I did, however, find a blog post from last year about the proposed changes, which has a lot more details. Keep in mind that this is from last year and so it might not still be relevant, but if anyone’s interested in digging a little deeper into the new code, there’s a good place to start.

This part, though, is not very encouraging:

The new zoning also takes a more coherent approach to minimum parking provisions, requiring a lot less parking for condos/apartments or office buildings that are in the downtown core or on heavy transit lines. Many new projects don’t need the amount of parking required by zoning, and developers would be glad not to pay the extra cost to provide it. But the overall reduction in minimum parking requirements is disappointingly limited — the planner in charge of the project, Joe D’Abramo, estimated it at about 10% less compared to previous requirements.

There also seems to be a lot of New Urbanist-style regulation – for example, making it more difficult to build drive-thrus and driveways – that we don’t necessarily support. When you look at the revisions as a whole I doubt that there’s more urban-forcing than urban-allowing, but I do wish that they’d work harder on repealing things like parking minimums and density restrictions before trying mandate density. Even if the mandatory New Urbanist regulations are minor, they give ammo to people like Randal O’Toole and the Cato/Reason bunch to claim that urbanism is being forced down people’s throats rather than simply being allowed. New Urbanist planners might not have faith in the market to build densely if left to its own devices, but we do.

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• August 31, 2009 -- HSR Urbanists: “We Are All O’Tooles Now” (18)
• May 29, 2009 -- Yglesias Has My Head Spinning… (16)
• May 13, 2009 -- Do We Need “New Urbanism” To Fix “Unwalkable Sprawl”? (18)
• January 21, 2009 -- The Story of I’On: Struggles of a New Urbanist Project (4)

At the risk of beating the parking theme deader than the Ground Zero Mosque, here are some recent parking-related stories published around the world:

Among urban planners, libertarianism gets a pretty bad rap. Melissa Lafsky at the Infrastructurist goes so far as to call libertarianism “an enemy of infrastructure,” and dismisses entirely the idea that private industry can build infrastructure with a single hyperlink – to a poorly-written article on New Zealand’s economy written over a decade ago [...]]]> by Stephen Smith

Among urban planners, libertarianism gets a pretty bad rap. Melissa Lafsky at the Infrastructurist goes so far as to call libertarianism “an enemy of infrastructure,” and dismisses entirely the idea that private industry can build infrastructure with a single hyperlink – to a poorly-written article on New Zealand’s economy written over a decade ago that barely says a word about transportation, land use, or infrastructure. She goes on to criticize the Reason Foundation’s transportation writers (something we too have done), and with it, negates entirely libertarianism’s contributions to urbanism.

Here at Market Urbanism we’re used to these sorts of attacks from the left, and we work tirelessly to disassociate ourselves (well, mostly) from Reason’s brand of (sub)urbanist libertarianism. Normally I wouldn’t expend so much effort, but the Infrastructurist is a blog that I read daily and we’ve linked to them approvingly over the years, so I figured it merited a rebuttal.

To start, I would recommend that Melissa bone up on her history. At least in North America, every great intracity mass transit system was build by private enterprise, almost without exception. From subways to streetcars, private enterprise showed a willingness and eagerness to build and profit from rail-based transit. Sure, the systems weren’t totally private and unregulated (exclusive franchise monopolies were often granted by municipal governments, among other interventions), but the system was far more “private” than the current mostly-suburban road/automobile transportation system that Reason and many other self-identified libertarians champion.

While many progressives today like to blame the demise of rail-based transit on GM, Firestone Tire, and Standard Oil (what I like to call the Who Framed Roger Rabbit theory of urbanist history), the truth is that progressives themselves were the ones who really did mass transit in. Through populist measures like the mandatory five-cent fare and costly pro-union regulations, planners hobbled the “traction magnates” with onerous regulations that were not applied to the nascent bus and jitney industries. This shift away from rail-based transit was accompanied by the rise in sprawl-promoting zoning and parking requirements. The Nation, which is now known to decry sprawl, was an adamant supporter of mandating it through zoning back in 1920, and was not above using coded racism to bolster its position.

Aside from her curious reading of urban history, Melissa Lafsky appears to have a very narrow picture of what constitutes the libertarian position on transportation and land use. Her description of the Reason Foundation’s take on urbanism is admittedly quite apt, but her assumption that Reason’s viewpoint is the only libertarian one couldn’t be farther from the truth. I can understand if she doesn’t read our blog, but surely she should have read her own blog’s favorable take on Tyler Cowen – one of the most prominent intellectual libertarians and owner of the most popular economics blog of all time – and his NYT column on America’s free parking glut. The debate has even spilled out of the libertarian and transit blogospheres and into Newsweek and Matt Yglesias’ blog, but you wouldn’t know it from reading Melissa’s post.

So feel free to call out the Reason Foundation for its whacky positions on urbanism – lord knows we’ve filled many pages doing it. But please don’t assume that libertarianism (or even Reason, whose magazine once called Jane Jacobs “one of the greatest libertarians of the last century”) is a monolithic entity without any redeeming urbanist qualities, and that this fact is so self-evident that you don’t need to seek out more than one organization’s opinion. Might we suggest adding our blog to your feed reader?

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• November 6, 2008 -- Reason’s Commenters Put Reason’s Contributers to Shame on Urbanism (4)
• August 27, 2010 -- Toronto’s new zoning code (0)
• August 26, 2010 -- Parking round-up (1)
• August 24, 2010 -- Shoupistas take Los Angeles (0)

Donald Shoup and his arguments about free and underpriced parking have been getting quite a bit of press recently, and it looks like Shoup’s hometown of Los Angeles has surpassed San Francisco (with its SFpark initiative) as the largest city in America to adopt some of his proposals:

The yearlong ExpressPark program, slated to begin [...]]]> by Stephen Smith

Donald Shoup and his arguments about free and underpriced parking have been getting quite a bit of press recently, and it looks like Shoup’s hometown of Los Angeles has surpassed San Francisco (with its SFpark initiative) as the largest city in America to adopt some of his proposals:

The yearlong ExpressPark program, slated to begin next summer, will use not only new meters but also a network of wireless pavement sensors to keep track of parked vehicles in real time. The sensors will help transportation officials determine which meters are in use and which have expired. Eventually, roadside signs will guide motorists to empty spaces in municipal parking garages and lots.

The program — which involves only city-owned parking in a 4.5-square-mile area — will feature adjustable parking rates, or “dynamic pricing.” In other words, when parking demand increases, meter rates increase; when demand drops, rates drop.

“ExpressPark will allow Los Angeles to take the lead in testing new ways to manage curb parking,” said Donald C. Shoup, a UCLA professor of urban planning and a longtime proponent of pricing based on supply and demand. [...]

“What we’re striving for is pricing such that 85% of meters are occupied and 15% are open,” said Peer Ghent, senior management analyst with the meter operations division of the city’s Department of Transportation, or LADOT.

That 85/15 number is straight out of Shoup’s book, so it’s a good sign that they plan to hew relatively closely to his ideas, at least in regards to city-managed spots.

One thing that I do wonder is whether this will be paired with an attempt to cut back on LA’s parking minimums, which are surprisingly pervasive in America’s second-largest city. If not (and I don’t see any indication, either in the LA Times article or elsewhere, that comprehensive parking minimum reform in LA is on the table), and if there are many more private-but-mandated parking spaces than there are city-owned ones, the availability of privately-owned spaces could prevent these public spots from charging anywhere near the true market price for parking.

(HT: Planetizen)

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• February 3, 2010 -- LA’s partial parking privatization (1)
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• August 23, 2010 -- New empirical evidence that parking minimums encourage sprawl (6)

In general, I think of Manhattan below Central Park as perhaps the freest place in America in terms of land use restrictions. There are no minimum parking regulations, zoning variances are relatively easy to get, and FAR restrictions are relatively generous. Historical preservation designations sometimes limit redevelopment, but other than that, developers [...]]]> by Stephen Smith

In general, I think of Manhattan below Central Park as perhaps the freest place in America in terms of land use restrictions. There are no minimum parking regulations, zoning variances are relatively easy to get, and FAR restrictions are relatively generous. Historical preservation designations sometimes limit redevelopment, but other than that, developers have a relatively free hand to…develop.

That is, unless you’re talking about building a tall skyscraper within 17 blocks of the Empire State Building:

The owners of the Empire State Building, Anthony E. and Peter L. Malkin, even want a 17-block no-go zone surrounding their 1,250-foot tall tower. This would prevent Vornado Realty Trust, which wants to erect the new building on Seventh Avenue, or any other developer, from putting up a similarly oversize building in the zone.

The City Planning Commission has already approved Vornado’s plan for a tower, called 15 Penn Plaza, opposite Pennsylvania Station. It would be 56 percent larger than what would ordinarily be allowed, in keeping with the city’s desire to promote high-density development close to transit hubs. But Community Board 5, whose district includes the area, did not approve. A committee at the board said the developer had not provided a rationale for such a large zoning bonus, especially since it did not have a tenant and might not build for years.

While we at Market Urbanism are generally not fans of tying density bonuses to private improvement of public infrastructure, we should note that part of the quid-pro-quo for the government allowing the building is that the developer make improvements to Penn Station “worth more than $100 million,” which would be lost if the project is not approved.

(HT: Infrastructurist)

Edit: I may have overstated the freeness of Manhattan’s land use situation – see the comments section for a more nuanced and enlightened discussion of the barriers to development in America’s densest neighborhoods.

Edit II: Reason has prevailed, and the project was approved.

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Although we at Market Urbanism are big fans of Donald Shoup’s work on parking minimums, we have to admit that rigorous econometric evidence that parking minimums mandate more parking than the market would otherwise supply has been a bit lacking. Randal O’Toole at The Antiplanner quite rightly asks to see empirical proof that parking [...]]]> by Stephen Smith

Although we at Market Urbanism are big fans of Donald Shoup’s work on parking minimums, we have to admit that rigorous econometric evidence that parking minimums mandate more parking than the market would otherwise supply has been a bit lacking. Randal O’Toole at The Antiplanner quite rightly asks to see empirical proof that parking minimums are binding. Tyler Cowen appears to have found this proof, in the form of paper posted online very recently which seeks to determine whether or not non-residential developers in Los Angeles County build more parking than they would in the absence of minimum parking mandates. Here’s the second half of the abstract, emphasis mine:

[To] our knowledge the existing literature does not test the effect of parking minimums on the amount of lot space devoted to parking beyond a few case studies. This paper tests the hypothesis that parking space requirements cause an oversupply of parking by examining the implicit marginal value of land allocated to parking spaces. This is an indirect test of the effects of parking requirements that is similar to Glaeser and Gyourko (2003). A simple theoretical model shows that the marginal value of additional parking to the sale price should be equal to the cost of land plus the cost of parking construction. We estimate the marginal values of parking and lot area with spatial methods using a large data set from the Los Angeles area non-residential property sales and find that for most of the property types the marginal value of parking is significantly below that of the parcel area. This evidence supports the contention that minimum parking requirements significantly increase the amount of parcel area devoted to parking.

The study ends up finding that at least half of all non-commercial properties have more parking than they would otherwise choose, and that the excess can oftentimes be quite large.

In the aforementioned link, Randal O’Toole suggested that Shoup’s residency in Los Angeles might be biasing his research, since the City of Los Angeles is quite dense indeed. This study, however, uses a large dataset with data points from all over the County of Los Angeles, home to almost 10 million people, or over a quarter of all Californians. (Many more live in other dense areas, like San Diego and the Bay Area.) And in fact certain parts of the paper focus solely on suburban areas, and claim to be undercounting some of the denser areas where the discrepancy between what the market would choose and what the law currently dictates would be even greater. One example of properties that were dropped from the study were properties for which the FAR, or floor area ratios, regulations were even more restrictive in terms of density than the parking minimums, making marginal analysis impossible. These properties tended to be downtown, where the parking minimums are most likely to be binding.

I’d be interested to see if this econometric evidence changes The Antiplanner’s mind about which pro-sprawl regulations are relevant constraints on density and which are not. I will admit that O’Toole has far more patience with numbers and equations than do I, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he caught something that I didn’t, but to the extent that I understand them, the authors’ methods appear sound to me. I’ve e-mailed Randal and asked him for his opinion, and if he responds, I’ll let you readers know either here or in a new post.

Related Posts:

• August 26, 2010 -- Parking round-up (1)
• August 24, 2010 -- Shoupistas take Los Angeles (0)
• August 16, 2010 -- NYC’s lingering obsession with parking minimums may come to an end (2)
• February 3, 2010 -- LA’s partial parking privatization (1)