No Light Rail in Vancouver!

Debunking Coercion Part 1

The Debunking That Doesn’t Work

Oct 1

2007

The Congress for the New Urbanism can’t decide whether it favors coercion or not. The group believes that New Urban designs — high-density, mixed-use developments with pedestrian-friendly layouts — will make cities more livable and that there is a large pent-up demand for such livability. But at least some of its members are not sure they trust people to choose New Urban living, so they are willing to force those choices upon people.

One of the first things CNU did when it was founded in the early 1990s was publish a list of “New Urban basics” saying, “All development should be in the form of compact, walkable neighborhoods and/or districts.” Another document, called the Charter of the New Urbanism, held that existing suburbs should be reconfigured along New Urbanist principles. This doesn’t offer much choice for people who don’t want to live in compact developments.

The charter adds, “Development patterns should not blur or eradicate the edges of the metropolis.” In other words, the 2- to 10-acre rural residential pattern that is found at the fringes of most urban areas should not be allowed to exist. With a few strokes of the pen, New Urbanists would proscribe both suburban and semirural lifestyles.

Not everyone in CNU supports coercion. CNU co-founder Andres Duany has specifically disavowed coercive zoning, saying that he believes there is a market for New Urban design and he simply wants to design for that market. He wants existing zoning codes that prevent mixed uses and other New Urban designs to be relaxed so that he can do so.

Another CNU co-founder, Peter Calthorpe, has not taken a stand against coercive zoning. After Laguna West, a New Urban development he designed near Sacramento, bankrupted its developer and was redesigned in more conventional patterns by a subsequent developer, Calthorpe went into the business of helping cities write coercive zoning codes that would require New Urban patterns of development whether there was a market for them or not.

Duany managed to convince CNU to take the more coercive language out of its charter and other documents it has on its web site (though they can still be found on other New Urban web sites). In debates with the Antiplanner, New Urban leaders such as John Norquist maintained that they do not advocate coercion and that the seemingly coercive language that had been on their web site was merely aspirational.

If the Congress for the New Urbanism does not support coercion, however, then why do they defend Portland? Portland and Oregon have adopted some of the most systematically coercive plans in the nation. Rural landowners are not allowed to build a house on their own land unless they own 160 acres, actually farm it, and actually earn $40,000 to $80,000 (depending on soil quality) per year farming it. Many urban homeowners have found their neighborhoods of single-family homes rezoned for multifamily, and the zoning is so strict that if their house burns down, they are required to replace it with rowhouses or apartments.

Portland’s plans also depend heavily on tax subsidies to get the kind of development New Urbanists favor. Any plan that says, “We are going to take billions of dollars from taxpayers and give it to a much smaller group of developers who also happen to be campaign contributors” has to be considered coercive.

By combining the urban-growth boundary to drive up the cost of single-family homes with subsidies to reduce the cost of multifamily housing, Portland is attempting to force a larger percentage of people to choose multifamily than would do so in an unregulated market. Portland taxpayers are also forced to pay for light rail and streetcars even though they voted against any further taxes for light rail in 1998. These are just some of the forms of coercion that Portland-area residents face every day.

I wrote about these problems in a Cato paper titled “Debunking Portland: The City That Doesn’t Work.” The Congress for the New Urbanism felt compelled to defend this coercive regime with a paper titled, “Dubunking CATO: Why Portland Works Better Than the Analysis of its Chief Neo-Libertarian Critic.”

Okay, first of all, “neo-libertarian”? Neoconservatives are people who twisted conservative principles around and created something they thought was new. (Traditional conservatives, for example, oppose interventionist foreign policies and many conservatives today remain opposed to the war in Iraq.) Just what about my paper is “neo-libertarian”?

The writer of CNU’s paper, one Michael Lewyn, answers this question on page 11 of his critique, where he claims that I support big-government programs. His evidence?

1. I quoted a letter from the Federal Highway Administration critical of Portland for failing to plan for the region’s present and future transportation needs. Apparently, in Lewyn’s universe, libertarians can’t even quote government officials without compromising their principles.

2. I pointed out that Portland planners rejected a Congressional earmark aimed at relieving congestion. Lewyn reads this as an endorsement of earmarks, but my point was that the region’s planners oppose congestion relief, not that Congress should earmark transportation funds.

3. I rejected regional planning in favor of local planning, and specifically preferred homeowner association covenants over zoning. But Lewyn feels that even voluntary homeowner associations must be a violation of libertarian principles. Apparently, he doesn’t understand the value libertarians place on voluntary associations and contracts.

I am on record as supporting highway tolls, privatization of highways, elimination of all zoning rules, and (as an interim measure) allowing neighborhoods to opt out of zoning and write their own covenants. These can in no way be construed as big government measures.

To be fair, I am also willing to support government transportation projects — provided they are user-fee driven so that the government agencies running those programs face the same market incentives that private businesses have to deal with. If that is not pure libertarianism, it is a form of pragmatic libertarianism that is well accepted within the libertarian movement.

“When government favors cars, O’Toole is a fervent believer in the wisdom of Big Brother,” claims Lewyn. Hardly. I have opposed sales taxes and other non-user fees for highways. But I also know that subsidies to transit riders average two hundred times as much, per passenger mile, as subsidies to autos. Rail advocates want to blur the issue by claiming that a tiny subsidy to autos justifies a gigantic subsidy to rail transit.

The term “neo-libertarian” seems to be an effort to taint my paper by associating me with other neos, such as neoconservatives. Lewyn is certainly not above such tactics. He states that my paper “accuses [former Portland Mayor Neil] Goldschmidt of statutory rape.” Excuse me, “accuses”? That’s like saying someone accuses Bill Clinton of having had sex with Monica Lewinski. Clinton admitted it, everyone knows it, so there is nothing to accuse. In the same way, Goldschmidt admitted having sex with a 14-year-old girl, which in Oregon is statutory rape (though the statute of limitations had passed by the time Goldschmidt confessed). Lewyn is more interested in making his opponent look bad than in reporting the facts.

“Even if Goldschmidt is a bad man,” says Lewyn, Portland’s New Urban policies are not “obviously related to Neil Goldschmidt’s alleged [again with the "alleged" -- there is no allegation, he admitted it] nasty deeds.” But my paper points out the relationship. Before Goldschmidt confessed to being a statutory rapist, he was the most powerful man in Oregon, and this political power intimidated many potential critics and stifled dissent. Only after he admitted his past misdeeds did local papers begin to openly discuss Goldschmidt’s “light-rail mafia” which manipulated Portland’s transit and land-use policies to enrich its members at taxpayers’ expense. “Were not for Goldschmidt’s statutory rape,” I wrote, “many Portland-area residents never would have learned about this cabal.”

Lewyn makes more substantive comments on transportation and land-use issues. Tomorrow I’ll respond to CNU’s comments on transportation issues, and I’ll look at land-use questions on Wednesday. I’ll wrap up this series on Thursday.

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Reprinted from The Antiplanner