The hungry eyes of centralized planners on the property of citizens

Richard Florida seems a nice fellow but he always grasps the wrong end of the stick. His is the view of the self-anointed Philosopher King - "Here is what I want to do and the ignorant proletariat are always getting in my way." His case is not helped by his track record of being serially wrong about virtually all of his past theories and proclamations. He has one of the more severe, or at least, obvious cases of oikophobia among the chattering classes.

He has also long been an urban core booster. He likes density and centralized city planning and appears to have an unspoken abhorrence of emergent order. Presumably, in part, because emergent order has no place for central planners. The passion for central urban planning is mysterious given its own tragic record of repeated and persistent failure.

From America's Other Housing Cricisis: Undercrowded Suburbs by Richard Florida.

In a recent survey, America’s mayors named housing, and housing affordability, as the number-one problem facing their cities. This concern was not only voiced by mayors of expensive coastal cities, but in diverse communities across the nation. The biggest culprit, according to a large and vocal chorus of urban theorists and economists, is outmoded and overly restrictive zoning and building codes—not to mention politically powerful “not in my backyard” (NIMBY) groups—which hold back new housing construction.

But according to a report released Thursday by the urban-housing economist Issi Romem of Buildzoom, a platform for finding contractors, many urban cores are actually developing and growing denser. And lots of housing continues to get built at the suburban periphery. Romem argues that America’s real housing problem—and a big part of the solution to it—lie in closer-in single-family-home neighborhoods that were built up during the great suburban boom of the last century, and that have seen little or no new housing construction since they were initially developed.

[snip]

The development of what was once the great suburban crabgrass frontier (to use the historian Kenneth Jackson’s evocative phrase), providing upward mobility and a path to a better life in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s, has essentially been choked off. The urban core is growing denser, while the inner-ring suburbs are increasingly dormant, and in many cases distressed.

Florida then rolls out a series of maps to support his argument that residential neighborhoods should be repurposed for high density housing.

Development in Los Angeles, 1940–1960

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Light blue represents areas of new single-family construction; orange indicates areas of medium-density developments, of two to 48 units; red shows areas of large multifamily construction, of 50 units or more; and dark blue indicates virtually no construction at all.

Development in Los Angeles, 1960–1980

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Development in Los Angeles, 2000–2016

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Florida's interpretation:

While L.A. provides a particularly useful illustration of America’s dormant suburbs, it is far from unique. Romem’s study shows how this pattern fits virtually all U.S. metropolitan areas. Over time, a larger and larger share of their land is taken up by dormant single-family neighborhoods that are failing to add any new housing.

[snip]

The reality is that most of the housing stock and most of the land area of America’s metro areas is made up of relatively low-density suburban homes. And a great deal of it is essentially choked off from any future growth, locked in by outmoded and exclusionary land-use regulations. The end result is that most growth today takes place through sprawl.

Florida looks at those maps with the central planner's hunger to repurpose and optimize and make better. With the central planner's will to power. Why let those people continue living in those little quarter acre plots of paradise when we can put in freeways and apartment blocks

Why put up with this?

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When you can have this?

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Or This?

Florida looks at those maps and sees an opportunity to take people's land and use it for better purposes, i.e. use it in a way that he prefers. There is another way to look at those maps though. Those dark blue patches? Sure looks like people have built things that they are happy with and would prefer not to change.

Instead of looking at the cancerous spread of continual knocking down and building up, it looks like people have built and are pleased with what they have built. Zoning? An effort by citizens to protect what they have built from the rapacious appetite of centralized urban planners in cahoots with opportunistic developers.

I am being pretty dismissive of Florida. There are obviously real urban planning issues. Cities are complex systems that are never fully comprehensible. There are always enormous trade-offs between resident desires and city efficiencies, between communal well-being and external forces, between generations, etc. My objection is not to Florida per se but to the totalitarian inclination to take decision making away from citizens and put it into the hands of centralized insiders and rent seekers.

Complex urban systems are too complex for a central planner. This is Hayek's classic Problem of Knowledge. Central planners think they know best but they rarely do. The emergent order of the competitive market economy, constrained by the rule of law, has a by far better record of serving the needs of citizens.

Zoning is analogous to patents. We wish to accord some window of security to a person when they have built something (zoning) or invented something (patents). From an economic perspective, it makes sense to give people a planning horizon to give them stability and confidence that allows them to make effective personal and commercial investment decisions. How long that protection should exist is a valid question that presumably ought to resolve around empirical evidence of the value of that window of confidence. But it should not arbitrarily extinguished at the expense of residents for the benefit of the rent seeking central planners.

What is egregious is when centralized, non-transparent, rent seeking, changes are coercively imposed on citizens without their consent, all under the auspices of a select inner group imposing their wishes on their ostensibly equal fellow citizens. And that is what urban planners do. See Kelo for an example how this fails morally and fails commercially.