In the next two posts, I would like to offer some precisions on the relationship between Christian faith and the free market. I hope the significance of my position will come out as I work it out.
The free market is, essentially, the ability of individuals to decide for themselves what interactions they want to enter into.
Christian faith, on the other hand, is essentially a matter of revelation. In itself it cannot be freely determined, because its content is essentially given. Indeed (as is well known) the word "heresy" is simply the Greek word for "choice": to pick and choose on matters of faith is to fall away from faith. Whether Jesus is truly God and truly man is not for me to pick; it is for God (through his Church) to reveal, and me to believe.
Or, to come at it from a different angle, the core meaning of "faith" is trust in an authority. The authority might be a friend giving you directions ("well, I have faith" -- or "I don't have faith" -- "in his ability to tell me how to find the house"), a spouse's promise ("I trust that he will be faithful"), or God's self-revelation in Christ. To pick and choose is sometimes appropriate -- for example, we try to choose a spouse we can have faith in, and we might decide we have more faith in Google maps than in our friend's directions -- but this choice is, in itself, the opposite of faith. To decide for yourself is to indicate that you do not, or do not yet, trust the other person. Only after we pledge our faith to one another, or step out on a journey with faith in our directions, have we begun to have faith.
The first way I would like to apply this distinction between faith and free choice (and thus, the free market) is in the idea of church shopping. "Shopping" is a fine choice of words: because church shopping essentially reduces church to a consumer interaction. You find a pair of shoes that fit your feet and your style, you pick out the apples that look most crispy, and you shop for the "right" church for you.
Let me immediately acknowledge that this dynamic is complicated. We can't entirely rule out the role of free choice in finding a church, because you have to find a particular place that corresponds with the bigger revelation to which you ascribe. If a pastor is clearly contradicting the Gospel, you have to go elsewhere. The failing may be moral (if you fear he will abuse your children, for example) or doctrinal (if his preaching is so untrue as to prevent you from worshiping and growing in the faith).
Yet this dynamic of choice must be firmly circumscribed by faith. From the outside, it seems to me that American Protestantism has so erred on the side of choice as to undermine faith. "Church" becomes more a matter of finding what fits you than of submitting to revelation.
I think there are dangers of this in American Catholicism as well. In theory, Catholics choose a church entirely based on location: because it is assumed that you simply go to receive, not to find your favorite church. In theory, church shopping is entirely foreign to Catholics. But in our age of easy transportation -- and of widespread apostasy -- it has become normal to drive through several parishes on the way to "yours." Again, there is space for this: if the priest is truly abusive, you should leave. But it seems to me that choice has gone too far. Parish itself becomes a matter of preference.
And of course, ironically, the more people choose, the more they have to choose: if all the faithful people leave St. Luke's, and all the wacky people come in, then both St. Luke's priests and its congregation will increasingly become hostile to the faithful. This is what happened to mainline Protestantism -- all the Bible folks gave up on their denominations -- and it has happened in far too many Catholic parishes. Because the faithful leave, large swathes of people who have never thought it through -- indeed, who are, as they should be, receptive to the teaching of their local church -- never come in contact with orthodoxy. This is a grave disservice. Catholics and Protestants alike should be careful about abandoning their local church. If they have to leave, they should be careful to pick the most "neighborhood" church they can: to commit to a church because it is given to them, not because they seek it out.
A second irony of free-market church shopping is that it heightens one's faith in the local authority. Some Protestants, it is true, may be so little committed to any particular church that they always check their pastor against their own private judgment. But far more common, I think (because more in line with human nature), once people "pick" a church, they do indeed receive, in faithful trust, whatever is given them. I see this in many Protestants: precisely because they have shopped, they accept their local pastor (and congregation) as a near-absolute authority. To put it differently, because they have shopped, they can assume that everyone who disagrees with "their" church must be wrong. My Protestant uncle, for example, cannot imagine that other Bible-believing people could think differently about Baptism: even though it's an issue on which Evangelical Protestants themselves hold a variety of positions.
The same happens to Catholics. In theory, Catholics are members of the universal Church, and share a faith in common with all Catholics. We go to our local parishes precisely because we trust that the faith is the same everywhere. But the flipside is that because we have not chosen our pastor, we know that he is not our infallible authority. We share the "catholic" -- that is, universal, worldwide and ancient -- faith. If Fr. Smith doesn't get it quite right, we can shrug our shoulders, and hope that the priests get rotated regularly. By not worrying too much about the perfection of our particular church, we enter into a worship that is bigger than our local church.
But this is not so when we church shop. In my experience, people who pick out a parish, and drive a long way to get there, tend to elevate the authority of their favorite priest, and of their community, above that of even the Pope. Certainly this is often the case in communities that celebrate the "old" form of the Mass: precisely because they have left other parishes to join this one, they assume that everyone else is wrong and only their local community has the true faith. In a sense, their private-judgment choice of parish has made them more obedient, because they no longer listen to any voice outside that parish.
Church shopping is dangerous. I recommend that if your local Catholic parish is really bad -- if you have true abuse (and what constitutes true abuse depends greatly on whether you have children) -- then you should go to a parish next door. And Catholics should be very wary of choosing a house based on their favorite parish. For Protestants . . . the same, mutatis mutandis. But that mutandis is pretty tricky: there is a private-judgment consumerism built into Protestantism that makes it very hard to give oneself to the local community.
That's the first part of my post: how the free market affects the Church itself. Tomorrow I will post on how the Church should (and shouldn't!) affect the free market.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Monday, July 21, 2008
The Spirituality of Driving the Speed Limit
Now that I am freeway-commuting half an hour to work every day, I've had some more time to reflect on the speed limit.
I am a convinced non-speeder. Let me say at the outset that there is some reason to doubt the legal status of the speed limit. According to St. Thomas (and the Catechism), there are four elements to a true law: an intelligible statement (the form) promulgated (the matter) by a legitimate authority (the agent) for the common good (the end). Where these conditions obtain, says St. Thomas (and the Catechism, following Romans), true law obliges, not only in the civil sphere but in conscience: he who breaks the law sins.
Speed limits are, without a doubt, uniquely intelligible (nothing is more purely intelligible than numbers); they serve the common good (more on that below); and the promulgating authority could not be more legitimately constituted than in a working democracy like ours.
There is an interesting question, however, about their promulgation. On the one hand, nothing is more clearly stated: a simple, numeric sign, frequently repeated. There is no law that is more easily determined than the speed limit. On the other hand, I do not believe I have ever seen a police car obeying it; traffic in general is not expected to obey the speed limit; and we all know that the police will not prosecute you if you're within five mph of the law. This creates the opening for an argument about custom (Thomas's technical term is consuetudo): when something is "always done" a certain way, it appears to the people that it is the law. I think one could make an argument that the custom whereby both police and drivers generally exceed the speed limit, usually by customary amounts, makes it legitimately difficult to tell what the authorities actually consider the legal speed limit to be. It undermines our ability to determine what is expected of us, an essential component of law.
In the end, I don't buy this argument. We don't have to be over strict. There are certain cases -- perhaps with decrepit parking meters, or pedestrian signals -- where long neglect is so obvious as to make the law itself questionable. But where there is doubt, we should probably assume that the law is real. Consider, for example, that Paul (in the passage the Catechism treats as determinative) demands obedience to the Roman "authorities" who killed our Lord, and then Paul himself. If Paul lends so much credence to legitimate authority, we probably should too.
All that said, I think there are spiritual fruits to obeying the speed limit, even if we're not sure whether it obliges in conscience. Reviewing these fruits will help us appreciate the beauty of law itself.
First, consider that a central reason for breaking the speed limit is our own passion for speed. Speed, to be sure, is a good, and the fun of going fast is a good. But we do well to put this in proportion. Twenty-five miles an hour, often treated as an absurdly slow speed limit, is about the top speed of a race horse -- until the invention of the train about one hundred fifty years ago, it was probably the fastest human beings had ever traveled. Speed is convenient and speed is fun, but there is something dehumanizing about going so far beyond our natural limits. Driving the speed limit puts our speed in context -- even going 65 when everyone else is driving 70 helps us to consider just how fast we are moving. Limiting our passions can help us appreciate them better.
Second, the speed limit is ordained for the common good. Apart from the speed limit, we often determine our speed based on our own safety. But there are other people on the road. I might be okay weaving through traffic, but for the driver who is somehow impaired, or sleepy, or distracted, my speed could be a life-threatening hazard. And what is safe for one driver might not be safe if everyone were doing it.
This turns on its head a common notion about fast driving. It seems to me that many people judge how "good" a driver is based on how fast he can go. My brother-in-law thinks he's an excellent driver because he can get from A to B in record time -- and my father-in-law is terrified to drive with me because he thinks if I drive so slowly, I must not know what I'm doing. But to the contrary, a good driver is one who considers not only his own needs, but the needs of those around him. I think it fair to say that I am more "in control" of what I am doing than the speeder.
This, in turn, leads us to a deeper aspect of law. Authority exists not only to coordinate all subjects to a common good (the end), but also to oversee the coordination itself (the means). When I drive from home to work, my only concern is to get to work -- in one piece, to be sure, but as fast as I can. The job of the Authorities, however, is to oversee the goods of the many -- to make sure that my self-centered action does not trample other selves.
Speed limits can serve this function in many ways. Driving through Northern Minnesota several years ago, I was struck by a sign outside a farm house. It stated that fast traffic is noisy. I had never thought of that before. I later learned that on a stretch of freeway through St. Paul where the speed limit mysteriously dropped to an "unreasonable" rate, the limit was determined not based on the safety of drivers but on the noise levels of the surrounding neighborhood. I had never thought of that. Similarly, I first encountered the problem of speeding in the suburban cul-de-sac neighborhood where we lived when I was in high school. To the driver, the main road seemed like an exciting series of S-curves. To those of us who walked on that sidewalk-less street, however, the speed limit was a matter of life and death. The speed limit served not only the safety of the drivers, but also the peace safety of pedestrians.
And I have read of efforts to solve traffic jams by reducing speed limits. Traffic is a complicated problem of game-theory, where what is best over all is not best for me if I'm the only one doing it. If everyone tries to go 65 during rush hour, then even one person touching his breaks can set off a long string of brake-slamming -- we've all experienced this odd phenomenon, where traffic screeches to a halt for no apparent reason. All the worse if there has been a real accident: rubber-necking can back up traffic for miles. All of this can be greatly mitigated, it seems, by just requiring traffic to drive more slowly in the first place. If we all drive 40, instead of 65, then we can all keep driving 40 and not have to stop and go.
The point of all this is that legitimate authority takes a broader view than we as individuals can see. I just want to get to work. But the road I travel affects many people beyond myself. It is right for an authority to control my actions -- to limit my speed -- in order to protect goods that I do not see, goods I had never considered. My obedience to that legitimate order, in turn, helps me to see that there is a world bigger than myself, to appreciate that my actions affect others and that I am not omniscient. Obeying the speed limit is a valuable exercise in humility.
Finally, obeying the speed limit is simply an exercise in obedience. The father of a friend of mine once gave me this advice: "children don't do what you say, they do what you do." The example he used has stuck with me: "If you tell your children to obey the law as they watch you break the speed limit, they will follow your actions, not your words, and ignore the law themselves."
The speed limit, precisely because it is so clearly stated and so numerically precise, is our most direct experience of civil authority. It is easy, in a sense, not to kill, or perjure, or steal, both because opportunities rarely present themselves and because we can see how these things affect another person. I don't steal, not just because it's illegal, but because I know it will hurt the proprietor of this convenience store. And yet it's good to realize that there are bigger goods, that life is more than a bunch of individuals not hurting one another. It is good to practice obedience -- and, I think, profoundly dehumanizing -- de-Christianizing -- when every day, everywhere we drive, we look authority in the face (in the image of that speed-limit sign) and say, "I will not serve."
I drive the speed limit. I do it because I think it is a true law, and as a Catholic, I believe that law obliges in conscience; I think it is a sin to speed. But I also do it because I think it's good for me. Not only is it safer (and let's be frank: the statistics say that speed is by far the top cause of traffic accidents), but it also helps me to appreciate that I am part of a world bigger than myself. There are things I'd never thought about. My passions are not the only rule. There are needs other than my own. And we were made for obedience to legitimate authority -- to the one legitimate authority who is Christ our God. Even if I didn't believe this was a true law, I think the spiritual benefits of driving the speed limit would be worth the extra five minutes and the occasional angry tailgater.
And I hope I can play a small role in creating a society in which everyone reaps these spiritual benefits. The custom of lawlessness is one law I will not serve.
I am a convinced non-speeder. Let me say at the outset that there is some reason to doubt the legal status of the speed limit. According to St. Thomas (and the Catechism), there are four elements to a true law: an intelligible statement (the form) promulgated (the matter) by a legitimate authority (the agent) for the common good (the end). Where these conditions obtain, says St. Thomas (and the Catechism, following Romans), true law obliges, not only in the civil sphere but in conscience: he who breaks the law sins.
Speed limits are, without a doubt, uniquely intelligible (nothing is more purely intelligible than numbers); they serve the common good (more on that below); and the promulgating authority could not be more legitimately constituted than in a working democracy like ours.
There is an interesting question, however, about their promulgation. On the one hand, nothing is more clearly stated: a simple, numeric sign, frequently repeated. There is no law that is more easily determined than the speed limit. On the other hand, I do not believe I have ever seen a police car obeying it; traffic in general is not expected to obey the speed limit; and we all know that the police will not prosecute you if you're within five mph of the law. This creates the opening for an argument about custom (Thomas's technical term is consuetudo): when something is "always done" a certain way, it appears to the people that it is the law. I think one could make an argument that the custom whereby both police and drivers generally exceed the speed limit, usually by customary amounts, makes it legitimately difficult to tell what the authorities actually consider the legal speed limit to be. It undermines our ability to determine what is expected of us, an essential component of law.
In the end, I don't buy this argument. We don't have to be over strict. There are certain cases -- perhaps with decrepit parking meters, or pedestrian signals -- where long neglect is so obvious as to make the law itself questionable. But where there is doubt, we should probably assume that the law is real. Consider, for example, that Paul (in the passage the Catechism treats as determinative) demands obedience to the Roman "authorities" who killed our Lord, and then Paul himself. If Paul lends so much credence to legitimate authority, we probably should too.
All that said, I think there are spiritual fruits to obeying the speed limit, even if we're not sure whether it obliges in conscience. Reviewing these fruits will help us appreciate the beauty of law itself.
First, consider that a central reason for breaking the speed limit is our own passion for speed. Speed, to be sure, is a good, and the fun of going fast is a good. But we do well to put this in proportion. Twenty-five miles an hour, often treated as an absurdly slow speed limit, is about the top speed of a race horse -- until the invention of the train about one hundred fifty years ago, it was probably the fastest human beings had ever traveled. Speed is convenient and speed is fun, but there is something dehumanizing about going so far beyond our natural limits. Driving the speed limit puts our speed in context -- even going 65 when everyone else is driving 70 helps us to consider just how fast we are moving. Limiting our passions can help us appreciate them better.
Second, the speed limit is ordained for the common good. Apart from the speed limit, we often determine our speed based on our own safety. But there are other people on the road. I might be okay weaving through traffic, but for the driver who is somehow impaired, or sleepy, or distracted, my speed could be a life-threatening hazard. And what is safe for one driver might not be safe if everyone were doing it.
This turns on its head a common notion about fast driving. It seems to me that many people judge how "good" a driver is based on how fast he can go. My brother-in-law thinks he's an excellent driver because he can get from A to B in record time -- and my father-in-law is terrified to drive with me because he thinks if I drive so slowly, I must not know what I'm doing. But to the contrary, a good driver is one who considers not only his own needs, but the needs of those around him. I think it fair to say that I am more "in control" of what I am doing than the speeder.
This, in turn, leads us to a deeper aspect of law. Authority exists not only to coordinate all subjects to a common good (the end), but also to oversee the coordination itself (the means). When I drive from home to work, my only concern is to get to work -- in one piece, to be sure, but as fast as I can. The job of the Authorities, however, is to oversee the goods of the many -- to make sure that my self-centered action does not trample other selves.
Speed limits can serve this function in many ways. Driving through Northern Minnesota several years ago, I was struck by a sign outside a farm house. It stated that fast traffic is noisy. I had never thought of that before. I later learned that on a stretch of freeway through St. Paul where the speed limit mysteriously dropped to an "unreasonable" rate, the limit was determined not based on the safety of drivers but on the noise levels of the surrounding neighborhood. I had never thought of that. Similarly, I first encountered the problem of speeding in the suburban cul-de-sac neighborhood where we lived when I was in high school. To the driver, the main road seemed like an exciting series of S-curves. To those of us who walked on that sidewalk-less street, however, the speed limit was a matter of life and death. The speed limit served not only the safety of the drivers, but also the peace safety of pedestrians.
And I have read of efforts to solve traffic jams by reducing speed limits. Traffic is a complicated problem of game-theory, where what is best over all is not best for me if I'm the only one doing it. If everyone tries to go 65 during rush hour, then even one person touching his breaks can set off a long string of brake-slamming -- we've all experienced this odd phenomenon, where traffic screeches to a halt for no apparent reason. All the worse if there has been a real accident: rubber-necking can back up traffic for miles. All of this can be greatly mitigated, it seems, by just requiring traffic to drive more slowly in the first place. If we all drive 40, instead of 65, then we can all keep driving 40 and not have to stop and go.
The point of all this is that legitimate authority takes a broader view than we as individuals can see. I just want to get to work. But the road I travel affects many people beyond myself. It is right for an authority to control my actions -- to limit my speed -- in order to protect goods that I do not see, goods I had never considered. My obedience to that legitimate order, in turn, helps me to see that there is a world bigger than myself, to appreciate that my actions affect others and that I am not omniscient. Obeying the speed limit is a valuable exercise in humility.
Finally, obeying the speed limit is simply an exercise in obedience. The father of a friend of mine once gave me this advice: "children don't do what you say, they do what you do." The example he used has stuck with me: "If you tell your children to obey the law as they watch you break the speed limit, they will follow your actions, not your words, and ignore the law themselves."
The speed limit, precisely because it is so clearly stated and so numerically precise, is our most direct experience of civil authority. It is easy, in a sense, not to kill, or perjure, or steal, both because opportunities rarely present themselves and because we can see how these things affect another person. I don't steal, not just because it's illegal, but because I know it will hurt the proprietor of this convenience store. And yet it's good to realize that there are bigger goods, that life is more than a bunch of individuals not hurting one another. It is good to practice obedience -- and, I think, profoundly dehumanizing -- de-Christianizing -- when every day, everywhere we drive, we look authority in the face (in the image of that speed-limit sign) and say, "I will not serve."
I drive the speed limit. I do it because I think it is a true law, and as a Catholic, I believe that law obliges in conscience; I think it is a sin to speed. But I also do it because I think it's good for me. Not only is it safer (and let's be frank: the statistics say that speed is by far the top cause of traffic accidents), but it also helps me to appreciate that I am part of a world bigger than myself. There are things I'd never thought about. My passions are not the only rule. There are needs other than my own. And we were made for obedience to legitimate authority -- to the one legitimate authority who is Christ our God. Even if I didn't believe this was a true law, I think the spiritual benefits of driving the speed limit would be worth the extra five minutes and the occasional angry tailgater.
And I hope I can play a small role in creating a society in which everyone reaps these spiritual benefits. The custom of lawlessness is one law I will not serve.
Suburban wildlife (an addendum)
I wish to add to my previous post, and to my post on urban nature study, a concession: suburbia has a lot more wildlife. A couple months before we moved away from Washington, we bought a bird book, so that we could identify what was around us. To our chagrin, we found that once we knew what we were looking at, there wasn't much. Lots of pigeons, of course, as well as starlings (a kind of blackbird), an occasional crow, a few robins, and lots of mockingbirds. There was one other gray bird I saw from time to time, but not frequently enough to find it in the bird book. And if you went to the right place, our beautiful ducks and those dirty seagulls. But that's it.
Here in the Twin Cities . . . well, maybe once I learn the names it won't seem like so many, but there are a lot of birds we never saw in Washington, including hawks and blue herons, not to mention blue jays, cardinals, yellow finches, and chickadees.
There are also lots of rabbits, an occasional fox, who knows what else? And my commute takes me past farms where I see goats, cows, and a couple horses.
This is More. And, frankly, more is better. It is good to have contact with these animals. It is unfortunate that we did not in our more urban Washington. And a solid apologia for the city needs to recognize that there are also prices for not having yards.
That said, once again, the point is to weigh the costs and benefits. Now I see herons, it is true, and that is a Very Good Thing. But I almost always see them zipping down the freeway at 55 mph. That does not negate the goodness, but it greatly diminishes it. I think I, and my children, got a lot more out of sitting next to those ducks in front of the concert hall then we get from seeing something for a brief flash out of a car window. And frankly, even with the horrible sprawl of Washington (which my arguments are trying to limit), my family often drove out of the city: we saw more wildlife on a real rural adventure than we see from our pseudo-suburban backyard and our commuter lifestyle. There are benefits to suburbia -- but I think there would be more benefits if it were gone.
Here in the Twin Cities . . . well, maybe once I learn the names it won't seem like so many, but there are a lot of birds we never saw in Washington, including hawks and blue herons, not to mention blue jays, cardinals, yellow finches, and chickadees.
There are also lots of rabbits, an occasional fox, who knows what else? And my commute takes me past farms where I see goats, cows, and a couple horses.
This is More. And, frankly, more is better. It is good to have contact with these animals. It is unfortunate that we did not in our more urban Washington. And a solid apologia for the city needs to recognize that there are also prices for not having yards.
That said, once again, the point is to weigh the costs and benefits. Now I see herons, it is true, and that is a Very Good Thing. But I almost always see them zipping down the freeway at 55 mph. That does not negate the goodness, but it greatly diminishes it. I think I, and my children, got a lot more out of sitting next to those ducks in front of the concert hall then we get from seeing something for a brief flash out of a car window. And frankly, even with the horrible sprawl of Washington (which my arguments are trying to limit), my family often drove out of the city: we saw more wildlife on a real rural adventure than we see from our pseudo-suburban backyard and our commuter lifestyle. There are benefits to suburbia -- but I think there would be more benefits if it were gone.
Monday, July 7, 2008
The Cost of Yards: Nature
I apologize for the silence on this blog--and right in the midst of a series, on the commercial management of neighborhoods. We are in the midst of a cross-country move, from Washington, DC, to St. Paul, Minnesota; life has been upside down. I do intend to finish the series I began, but since I have been spending an inordinate amount of time in the car recently and thinking a lot about where I want (and do not want) to live, I will here give a more immediate post, on the cost of yards. Someday, perhaps, I will discuss the social costs; here I will only discuss the costs for the natural world.
To open, I'd like to acknowledge that my position is a little unconventional. In Washington, we often joked about the standard assumption that what an urban environment really needs is "dedicated green space." Indeed, I agree. But I would not extend this need as far as it is often extended. Even in the densest neighborhoods in Brooklyn (though perhaps not in some parts of Manhattan, the densest square miles in the United States), every brownstone and many apartment complexes have backyards and garden spaces. There are places for flower boxes out front (though, to be fair, in some neighborhoods flower boxes need to be kept out of range of unseemly types). There are trees in the sidewalks, huge parks, little playgrounds, neighborhood gardens, and triangle gardens caused by strange street patterns. (Indeed, Jane Jacobs emphasized the importance of using these odd spaces for natural beauty.)
Yet most Americans -- certainly those in Washington, a city of vastly greater greenspace than New York -- want more. They want a yard. They want a place to garden. Walking around St. Paul, I have been struck by the frivolity of the latter: add up all the space in my parent's upper-middle class midwestern neighborhood that is actually gardened, and, I think, you will find that Brooklyn is sufficient for the time and energy Americans have for gardening. But what of yards?
Jane Jacobs points out the irony of yards as environmental safeguards. Perhaps you need a mathematical mind to fully appreciate this, but every foot added to a neighborhood's average curb adds exponentially to the amount of countryside that will be paved over. Allow me to oversimplify in order to make a point. In our old neighborhood in Washington, the average family had about ten feet of curb space. (Actually, slightly more per house, but many houses had more than one family stacked on top of each other.) In St. Paul, let's say the average house has 100 feet of curb space. Now, if I need to go 20 houses down (to the market, or the park, or work, or wherever) in Washington that would be 200 feet, in St. Paul, it would be 2,000.
The most basic problem is that we will much more quickly reach our walking thresholds. Perhaps one is willing to carry a jug of milk no more than two city blocks before it seems easier just to drive. Whatever that threshold is, increasing the average lot size by a factor of ten means only 10% of what was formerly within our threshold will remain there.
(This is actually a bit more complicated, because yards, neighborhoods, and walks are all in two dimensions, not one. But we'll leave that alone.)
A problem subsidiary to this one is that as fewer and fewer things are within our walking threshold, our threshold is likely to decrease. This was something we often observed in Washington: those who are used to walking places consider eight blocks just a run around the corner, but when non-walkers come to visit, they consider the same distance to be unreasonable. They are used to driving. And thus that factor of 10 is quickly multiplied: not only are things ten times farther away, but people are less willing to walk a comparable distance.
And so, of course, as more and more things require driving, more and more people require cars (consider that in New York fully 50% of residents don't even know how to drive), more and more streets must be built, and more and more places will need parking lots. Dedicated green space means more concrete: you pave paradise and you put in a parking lot!
Now obviously, this math quickly reaches a saturation point. Even in the denser yarded neighborhoods of St. Paul, no one walks anywhere; you might think that once this point is reached, increased distances will be irrelevant.
But that is not the case. To appreciate why, think for a minute about the odd phenomenon (as a child, it drove me crazy!) of what happens when a stop light changes to green. At first glance, it seems that when the light changes, everyone should start driving. But in fact, when the light changes, the first guy starts going, but the next guy has to put some space between him and the car in front of him before he starts, and so on, so that, as we all know all to well, if you're even five cars back, the light may be red again before you even start creeping up toward it. Why is this? For the simple reason that the faster you're going, the more space you need between you and the car in front of you (and the cars to your sides, as well). In stopped traffic, you can be right on the guy's bumper, but that would be dangerous when you're moving; and a distance that's safe at 30 mph is quite unsafe at 60. A single car takes up far more space on a freeway than in downtown traffic.
This is another reason (in addition to the lowering thresholds for walking) that the yard-to-street ratio is exponential: adding a foot of yard to each house means adding a disproporionate distance that people must travel; and if people want to get there in a reasonable amount of time, they will need to drive faster, and thus take up more road space.
A third exponential factor is the flipside of the first: the more people drive, the more they get used to driving. If you're used to walking down the block for something, driving five miles seems like going a long way. If you're used to driving five miles, twenty five will seem less unreasonable. This, I'd like to suggest, is a big part of the SUV phenomenon. If you don't spend much time in your car, it's reasonable to have a small, slightly uncomfortable one. But if everywhere you go requires packing the family in for a half-hour drive, you get something big and plush (with a DVD for the kids!). The comfort of your car becomes increasingly important. (And honestly, SUVs are much more comfortable, and, truth be told, much safer. If you're going to spend all that time in your car, it makes sense to invest in something that will protect you.) In other words, increasing yardspace by a factor of ten means not only increasing drivetimes, but also increasing people's willingness to drive long distances, both for internal reasons (it seems normal to drive a long way to things) and for external reasons (people buy cars that make driving more pleasant).
A fourth exponential factor is the decreasing feasability of mass transit. This is an article in itself, but the simple fact is, putting bus lines and train lines out to the suburbs is stupid. Nobody wants to drive through ten miles of suburban traffic, park their comfy SUV in a big sunburned parking lot, then get onto a crowded train to take them in to where mass transit actually makes sense. Again, there's some math here. The area of a circle is pi times the square of its radius: in other words, adding a mile to the radial distance from you to center city means adding an exponential amount of area for mass transit to cover. It makes sense to have mass transit where everyone is close together; pi times ten miles squared is a reasonable amount of area to cover with buses and trains. But covering a circle pi times thirty miles squared is simply impracticible. (This is one of the ways that the new urbanism and other liberal projects are totally unreasonable.) The system becomes too complex, the drives are too long, the cost-benefit ratio skyrockets. Spreading people farther apart (with yards) massively increases the necessity of everyone taking their own car.
I'll cut this off before it becomes even more burdensome. The point is, a little "dedicated greenspace" exponentially increases the spaces that must be covered with roads and parking lots. (Not to mention those beautiful "green" spaces that buffer people from the freeways.)
Why does it matter? Three quick reasons. First, it means that people are increasingly far from actual nature. As more and more land is turned into exurbia, those who do not live in the exurbs must drive farther and farther to get to undomesticated places. And honestly, a yard is no comparison for fields and woods. Nor is a park really a good substitute, both because it can never be wild in the same way and because every park means that much farther that everyone must drive to get around it. And ironically, the farther people have to drive to get to the countryside, the more the countryside needs to be paved for people to get to it. Robert Moses built Jones Beach so that New Yorkers could enjoy Long Island. But he covered it with parking lots so that people wouldn't have to take mass transit. In our modern cities, where mass transit is no longer even practicable, every state park needs a massive parking lot.
The second problem is environmental. I am no expert on this so I can't say much of intelligence, but I know that the pesticides we put on our yards are far more damaging to the natural world around us than our normal lives; it's not the people, I think, who make the Mississippi unswimmable; it's the yards. I do know that dense living, because more of the transportation is done on foot, requires fantastically fewer resources; the statistic I've heard is that New Yorkers today use as much fuel as Americans in general did in the 1920's. That's a lot greener. And I know that it's more efficient to heat or cool a space when the space next to it is being heated and cooled rather than when it's surrounded by the great outdoors; energy bills go down all around with row homes and apartment buildings. And it would seem to me -- again, as an amateur -- that the land is more able to sustain the impact of human living if more of the land is left untouched. Even assuming that people produced the same environmental impact no matter how far out they were spread, doesn't it seem like concentrating all that impact on a few square miles would make it easier for the surrounding land to survive than if the impact hits a larger swathe? Greenspace is not 'green,' in the sense in which that word is now used.
And a third reason is that car culture means people don't spend much time outside anyway. If the goal is to give people some contact with nature, it probably makes more sense to promote a pedestrian lifestyle than to make people drive past yards and dedicated greenspaces (or, more likely, to drive on freeways so they don't have to deal with the greenspace).
The title of this post is the "cost" of yards. I intend this post not as a final word -- 'yards are bad' -- but as a factor to consider. If urban neighborhoods are decrepit, not family friendly, not affordable, or otherwise unliveable, than it probably makes sense to pay these costs and choose to live somewhere with a yard. But the basic conclusion is this: yards make us further, not closer, to nature.
(In postscript, I would like to note that the solution need not be coercion. The solution may be more negative -- lower taxes, lower regulations, fewer aids to the suburbs -- rather than positive, such as more services, or direct attacks on the suburbs. But this is a matter for another post.)
To open, I'd like to acknowledge that my position is a little unconventional. In Washington, we often joked about the standard assumption that what an urban environment really needs is "dedicated green space." Indeed, I agree. But I would not extend this need as far as it is often extended. Even in the densest neighborhoods in Brooklyn (though perhaps not in some parts of Manhattan, the densest square miles in the United States), every brownstone and many apartment complexes have backyards and garden spaces. There are places for flower boxes out front (though, to be fair, in some neighborhoods flower boxes need to be kept out of range of unseemly types). There are trees in the sidewalks, huge parks, little playgrounds, neighborhood gardens, and triangle gardens caused by strange street patterns. (Indeed, Jane Jacobs emphasized the importance of using these odd spaces for natural beauty.)
Yet most Americans -- certainly those in Washington, a city of vastly greater greenspace than New York -- want more. They want a yard. They want a place to garden. Walking around St. Paul, I have been struck by the frivolity of the latter: add up all the space in my parent's upper-middle class midwestern neighborhood that is actually gardened, and, I think, you will find that Brooklyn is sufficient for the time and energy Americans have for gardening. But what of yards?
Jane Jacobs points out the irony of yards as environmental safeguards. Perhaps you need a mathematical mind to fully appreciate this, but every foot added to a neighborhood's average curb adds exponentially to the amount of countryside that will be paved over. Allow me to oversimplify in order to make a point. In our old neighborhood in Washington, the average family had about ten feet of curb space. (Actually, slightly more per house, but many houses had more than one family stacked on top of each other.) In St. Paul, let's say the average house has 100 feet of curb space. Now, if I need to go 20 houses down (to the market, or the park, or work, or wherever) in Washington that would be 200 feet, in St. Paul, it would be 2,000.
The most basic problem is that we will much more quickly reach our walking thresholds. Perhaps one is willing to carry a jug of milk no more than two city blocks before it seems easier just to drive. Whatever that threshold is, increasing the average lot size by a factor of ten means only 10% of what was formerly within our threshold will remain there.
(This is actually a bit more complicated, because yards, neighborhoods, and walks are all in two dimensions, not one. But we'll leave that alone.)
A problem subsidiary to this one is that as fewer and fewer things are within our walking threshold, our threshold is likely to decrease. This was something we often observed in Washington: those who are used to walking places consider eight blocks just a run around the corner, but when non-walkers come to visit, they consider the same distance to be unreasonable. They are used to driving. And thus that factor of 10 is quickly multiplied: not only are things ten times farther away, but people are less willing to walk a comparable distance.
And so, of course, as more and more things require driving, more and more people require cars (consider that in New York fully 50% of residents don't even know how to drive), more and more streets must be built, and more and more places will need parking lots. Dedicated green space means more concrete: you pave paradise and you put in a parking lot!
Now obviously, this math quickly reaches a saturation point. Even in the denser yarded neighborhoods of St. Paul, no one walks anywhere; you might think that once this point is reached, increased distances will be irrelevant.
But that is not the case. To appreciate why, think for a minute about the odd phenomenon (as a child, it drove me crazy!) of what happens when a stop light changes to green. At first glance, it seems that when the light changes, everyone should start driving. But in fact, when the light changes, the first guy starts going, but the next guy has to put some space between him and the car in front of him before he starts, and so on, so that, as we all know all to well, if you're even five cars back, the light may be red again before you even start creeping up toward it. Why is this? For the simple reason that the faster you're going, the more space you need between you and the car in front of you (and the cars to your sides, as well). In stopped traffic, you can be right on the guy's bumper, but that would be dangerous when you're moving; and a distance that's safe at 30 mph is quite unsafe at 60. A single car takes up far more space on a freeway than in downtown traffic.
This is another reason (in addition to the lowering thresholds for walking) that the yard-to-street ratio is exponential: adding a foot of yard to each house means adding a disproporionate distance that people must travel; and if people want to get there in a reasonable amount of time, they will need to drive faster, and thus take up more road space.
A third exponential factor is the flipside of the first: the more people drive, the more they get used to driving. If you're used to walking down the block for something, driving five miles seems like going a long way. If you're used to driving five miles, twenty five will seem less unreasonable. This, I'd like to suggest, is a big part of the SUV phenomenon. If you don't spend much time in your car, it's reasonable to have a small, slightly uncomfortable one. But if everywhere you go requires packing the family in for a half-hour drive, you get something big and plush (with a DVD for the kids!). The comfort of your car becomes increasingly important. (And honestly, SUVs are much more comfortable, and, truth be told, much safer. If you're going to spend all that time in your car, it makes sense to invest in something that will protect you.) In other words, increasing yardspace by a factor of ten means not only increasing drivetimes, but also increasing people's willingness to drive long distances, both for internal reasons (it seems normal to drive a long way to things) and for external reasons (people buy cars that make driving more pleasant).
A fourth exponential factor is the decreasing feasability of mass transit. This is an article in itself, but the simple fact is, putting bus lines and train lines out to the suburbs is stupid. Nobody wants to drive through ten miles of suburban traffic, park their comfy SUV in a big sunburned parking lot, then get onto a crowded train to take them in to where mass transit actually makes sense. Again, there's some math here. The area of a circle is pi times the square of its radius: in other words, adding a mile to the radial distance from you to center city means adding an exponential amount of area for mass transit to cover. It makes sense to have mass transit where everyone is close together; pi times ten miles squared is a reasonable amount of area to cover with buses and trains. But covering a circle pi times thirty miles squared is simply impracticible. (This is one of the ways that the new urbanism and other liberal projects are totally unreasonable.) The system becomes too complex, the drives are too long, the cost-benefit ratio skyrockets. Spreading people farther apart (with yards) massively increases the necessity of everyone taking their own car.
I'll cut this off before it becomes even more burdensome. The point is, a little "dedicated greenspace" exponentially increases the spaces that must be covered with roads and parking lots. (Not to mention those beautiful "green" spaces that buffer people from the freeways.)
Why does it matter? Three quick reasons. First, it means that people are increasingly far from actual nature. As more and more land is turned into exurbia, those who do not live in the exurbs must drive farther and farther to get to undomesticated places. And honestly, a yard is no comparison for fields and woods. Nor is a park really a good substitute, both because it can never be wild in the same way and because every park means that much farther that everyone must drive to get around it. And ironically, the farther people have to drive to get to the countryside, the more the countryside needs to be paved for people to get to it. Robert Moses built Jones Beach so that New Yorkers could enjoy Long Island. But he covered it with parking lots so that people wouldn't have to take mass transit. In our modern cities, where mass transit is no longer even practicable, every state park needs a massive parking lot.
The second problem is environmental. I am no expert on this so I can't say much of intelligence, but I know that the pesticides we put on our yards are far more damaging to the natural world around us than our normal lives; it's not the people, I think, who make the Mississippi unswimmable; it's the yards. I do know that dense living, because more of the transportation is done on foot, requires fantastically fewer resources; the statistic I've heard is that New Yorkers today use as much fuel as Americans in general did in the 1920's. That's a lot greener. And I know that it's more efficient to heat or cool a space when the space next to it is being heated and cooled rather than when it's surrounded by the great outdoors; energy bills go down all around with row homes and apartment buildings. And it would seem to me -- again, as an amateur -- that the land is more able to sustain the impact of human living if more of the land is left untouched. Even assuming that people produced the same environmental impact no matter how far out they were spread, doesn't it seem like concentrating all that impact on a few square miles would make it easier for the surrounding land to survive than if the impact hits a larger swathe? Greenspace is not 'green,' in the sense in which that word is now used.
And a third reason is that car culture means people don't spend much time outside anyway. If the goal is to give people some contact with nature, it probably makes more sense to promote a pedestrian lifestyle than to make people drive past yards and dedicated greenspaces (or, more likely, to drive on freeways so they don't have to deal with the greenspace).
The title of this post is the "cost" of yards. I intend this post not as a final word -- 'yards are bad' -- but as a factor to consider. If urban neighborhoods are decrepit, not family friendly, not affordable, or otherwise unliveable, than it probably makes sense to pay these costs and choose to live somewhere with a yard. But the basic conclusion is this: yards make us further, not closer, to nature.
(In postscript, I would like to note that the solution need not be coercion. The solution may be more negative -- lower taxes, lower regulations, fewer aids to the suburbs -- rather than positive, such as more services, or direct attacks on the suburbs. But this is a matter for another post.)
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Addendum
In my last post, I made some comparisons between my experience with my Internet Service Provider (a typical low-end capitalist enterprise) and my politicians, national, municipal, and neighborhood.
I would like to add that I just got off the phone from a long survey by my ISP. As I sat through this survey -- with a person whose English was appalling -- I asked myself how they can honestly expect people to sit through these surveys. But I did. And I think the reason is, in a sense, democratic: I want my voice to be heard. Honestly, I'm a little bit flattered to be asked my opinion. I gleefully give lots of 2's on a scale of 1 to 7 ("seven indicating I strongly agree, one indicating strongly disagree"). I am also glad to give 6's for things I think they're doing right. I want my voice to be heard. And I am glad that my ISP wants to hear it. Despite the low-end phone worker, I know that they do want my business, and do want me to recommend them to my friends, because that's where their bread is buttered.
By comparison, I wrote to my Councilman late last week, had a couple exchanges, and then asked a series of questions in the middle of this past week. I think he got tired of me: he certainly hasn't responded.
This morning, getting into the car on the way to church, I ran into my Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, our lowest-level politician. When we first moved to this neighborhood a year ago, I sent her lots of long emails, trying to make my voice heard, trying to help influence decisions that directly impact me. In every response, she politely (sometimes less politely) put me off, saying she doesn't have time to think seriously about these things and giving me amazingly pat answers. I left our last exchange up in the air about eight months ago: I decided that talking to my neighborhood politician is a total waste of time and energy, and I hoped my abrupt breaking-off of the conversation would signal that to her.
Well, I saw her this morning. A pleasant smile. She handed me her little flier that she's started distributing (100% anti-development, but also 70% anti-long-term residents). With her smile, she made some cryptic remark like, "you're stuck with me." And that was all.
Only an anecdote. But in my experience, today as every day, business cares about me a heck of a lot more than politicians do. I may be only a dollar sign to my ISP -- but I'm much less than that to the politicians who "represent me," and who have far greater, monopolistic power over me and the place where I live.
More later on how I think businesses could manage urban neighborhoods. . . .
I would like to add that I just got off the phone from a long survey by my ISP. As I sat through this survey -- with a person whose English was appalling -- I asked myself how they can honestly expect people to sit through these surveys. But I did. And I think the reason is, in a sense, democratic: I want my voice to be heard. Honestly, I'm a little bit flattered to be asked my opinion. I gleefully give lots of 2's on a scale of 1 to 7 ("seven indicating I strongly agree, one indicating strongly disagree"). I am also glad to give 6's for things I think they're doing right. I want my voice to be heard. And I am glad that my ISP wants to hear it. Despite the low-end phone worker, I know that they do want my business, and do want me to recommend them to my friends, because that's where their bread is buttered.
By comparison, I wrote to my Councilman late last week, had a couple exchanges, and then asked a series of questions in the middle of this past week. I think he got tired of me: he certainly hasn't responded.
This morning, getting into the car on the way to church, I ran into my Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, our lowest-level politician. When we first moved to this neighborhood a year ago, I sent her lots of long emails, trying to make my voice heard, trying to help influence decisions that directly impact me. In every response, she politely (sometimes less politely) put me off, saying she doesn't have time to think seriously about these things and giving me amazingly pat answers. I left our last exchange up in the air about eight months ago: I decided that talking to my neighborhood politician is a total waste of time and energy, and I hoped my abrupt breaking-off of the conversation would signal that to her.
Well, I saw her this morning. A pleasant smile. She handed me her little flier that she's started distributing (100% anti-development, but also 70% anti-long-term residents). With her smile, she made some cryptic remark like, "you're stuck with me." And that was all.
Only an anecdote. But in my experience, today as every day, business cares about me a heck of a lot more than politicians do. I may be only a dollar sign to my ISP -- but I'm much less than that to the politicians who "represent me," and who have far greater, monopolistic power over me and the place where I live.
More later on how I think businesses could manage urban neighborhoods. . . .
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Commercial Neighborhoods, Part II
In the last post, I argued that government is a bad manager of urban neighborhoods because government is unitary and neighborhoods are diverse and benefit from diverse approaches. In this post I will argue that neighborhoods are especially hurt by a government that is democratic. This realization surprised me.
Democratic governing is, first, inherently short-sighted. Every government official is concerned about his legacy, to be sure. But his legacy is not really that long-term of a concern: most people do not get into governing until late in life, the others move on to other things after they finish. Even Mayor Daley only headed Chicago for twenty-one years (1955-76), and if you pay any attention to urban issues, you know that it takes a lot longer than that for policies to play out.
Did Chicago's housing projects help or hurt the minorities that were put there? Did the ethnic groups Daley helped shuffle from the cities to the suburbs assimilate in a healthy way? What habits does welfare instill in children? These are major issues of Daley's mayoralty, and I do not think 1976 (when he died) was soon enough to know all the answers. Fundamentally, a politician in a democracy is concerned with getting re-elected, not with how his policies will affect the city fifty years down the road.
Strangely enough, I think developers -- capitalists -- have much more incentive to think long-term. At the end of a politician's term, he steps down, and blames the rest on his successor. The end of a politician's term is a washing of his hands. But the end of a capitalist's "term" is a sale: because the capitalist is driven by the bottom line, not by re-election, he has to be concerned with what someone will pay for the property he has developed, and a large part of that price is what the next guy will be able to sell it for.
Take an example. Near our house in Washington is a huge new luxury apartment development built by the development mogul Jim Abdo. He built in a neighborhood that is "developing" (read: troubled, but maybe recovering). Now, I have no idea how long Abdo's term is on this property. But whether he sells it next year or twenty years down the road, the guy who buys will be wondering both what it's worth at that point and what it will be worth when he's ready to sell. If Abdo wants to make a profit, he needs to be able to convince the next guy that this thing is a good investment long-term. Of course there's some wheeling and dealing in this -- the next guy might be a dupe -- but since Abdo cannot produce that dupe himself, he needs to build some fundamental long-term value into his project or he is going to lose money. Not so with the politician.
A second problem with democratic politicians is that they only have to please 51% of their constituents to get re-elected. The politician can write people off. I was thinking about this lately when dealing with an annoying problem with parking in my neighborhood. (The details are not worth explaining.) I wrote to my local neighborhood commissioner, than my councilman. You know what? I don't think they cares. They do not need my vote to get reelected. If I am a little bit annoying -- and I probably crossed the line on being too snide -- they can just write me off. Indeed, it is the very rare politician who can get a vote from even three out of five of his constituents, unless there is no one running against him. Democratic government is not based on pleasing everyone.
By contrast, today I called my internet service provider. Now let's be honest: these people are capitalism at its worst, shipping out customer-service to someone in India with no authority to help me and a pleasant demeanor that makes it hard to yell at them. These companies stand behind the lowest line of their policy (in this case, it was the $149.95 fee for early cancellation, even though I'm moving out of state one month short of the end), they keep you on hold as long as they can, and they leave you out in the cold. That said, they make every penny of their earnings off of people like me. They need me to come back when I next sign up for internet, and they need me to give positive reviews to my friends. Writing me off doesn't hurt my councilman in the least, but it does lose money for my ISP.
If the people managing my neighborhood had some financial incentive instead of just needing 51% of the vote, I think they would be much more inclined to help me out when they could. My ISP did not let me out of my contract, but they did fully reimburse me for a service I said I had not ordered. My councilman has not reimbursed me for my parking tickets, despite a similarly plausible argument.
This need to please all customers bleeds into another advantage of capitalism: the niche. The knee-jerk reaction to having neighborhoods run by capitalists is that since they are driven by the bottom line, they will only cater to the rich; people who are not a good investment will get left out in the cold.
Now, my first response to this is that you have to be pretty uninformed about the recent history of American cities -- or history in general -- to honestly believe that people getting left out in the cold would be a new problem created by the capitalists. Twentieth-century democratic governance of cities is one long story of the masses being left out in the cold. If the capitalists left someone out from time to time, they would have a hard time doing a worse job than the politicians.
But the other response is that precisely because they are driven by the bottom line, capitalists want to suck every penny they can out of the market before them. Of course the margin is better on millionaires, so the capitalists will line up to see who can serve them. But there's a limited number of rich people, and there is money to be made off the poor, too. Jim Abdo is building million-dollar condos down the street from us. But our landlord, a smaller fish, is making money off of my poverty-level family, and there are an awful lot of us who need apartments and cough up the money for rent. Capitalists would be stupid to withhold housing from us just because the margin is lower with us than with the rich.
Politicians, on the other hand? If they don't need our vote to get reelected, than we depend purely on the goodness of those tight politician hearts to care for us whom they do not need. Put it this way: capitalists are many, politicians few. Both are inclined to serve first those who serve them best. But after that, capitalists can squeeze into tiny niches -- like my landlord, who owns only this one building -- whereas all the political seats are filled long before anyone comes to caring for the little guy. If you have ever dealt with municipal services, you might share my skepticism.
I should note that our living situation is pretty good. We found exactly what we need -- and we have pretty precise needs, because of a wheelchair in the family, two small children, a stay-at-home mom, a neighborhood we love, and our over-particular aesthetics. Granted, our landlord's a bit of a bum. He has not followed through on some basic maintenance, and he has mostly left us to take care of ourselves. But we pay a rent we can afford for an apartment we really love, and when it comes down to it, he has coughed up the cash for things the apartment needs. That, ahem, has not been the case with our politicians -- we wrote, for example, to our congresswoman when our child with special needs temporarily lost his government health services on the stupidest of technicalities caused by the stupidest of bureaucratic blundering, and we didn't even get a response. Landlord Tom might be lazy, but Delegate Eleanore doesn't give a damn about people like us. Why? Because Tom gets a check from us, while Eleanore doesn't need our vote.
On a less mercenary note, Tom has a grand total of about twelve renters. Congressional Delegate Norton serves all 600,000 residents of Washington. Our most local form of government, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, which has zero authority and largely unopposed elections, has about one political officer for every 15,000 residents (40 ANCs for the city); the City Council, which actually has authority and "real" elections (meaning, determined by the Democratic primary) has eight wards, or about 75,000 residents per politician. Jim Abdo, the city's biggest real-estate developer, has done 30 projects, the largest of which has under 500 units. (30 x 500 would be 15,000, like the ANC, but Abdo has much more authority and most of his projects are much smaller than 500 units.) In other words, the biggest capitalist in the city has far fewer constituents than the most local politician. No wonder our landlord treats us like people and our government treats us like numbers. Even the greatest philanthropist can't think personally about 75,000 people.
So capitalists are better neighborhood managers than democratic politicians because the end-sale requires them to think longer term and because they have to treat every constituent as a customer, not just 51% (and this in turn means they are more inclined to serve niches and take care of under-represented groups, and even treat people as individuals). The last advantage of capitalism over democracy, I would like to argue, is the contract.
Hayek makes the important point that being pro-market absolutely does not mean being laissez-faire. Proponents of the free market, it is true, want government to stay out of regulation. They want government to let the market drive the economy. But at the heart of the market is contracts, and contracts require strict enforcement. Without enforcement of contracts, the market cannot work.
(This principle extends further than you might think. Milton Friedman, for example, argues that sound money -- meaning above all very strict control over inflation, as well as decent foreign-exchange rates -- is necessary in order for terms of contracts to be meaningful. If I agree to pay $1,200/mo. in rent but we don't know what $1,200 will be worth at the end of the year, our contract is meaningless.)
So even in the realm of economics, absolute support of the free market does not mean laissez-faire, hands-off government. And of course there are plenty of cultural things government should do, like supporting the family and providing general safety, that are out of the realm of the market and so demand government action.
Business transactions are fundamentally contractual. Politics is not. In 1994, Newt Gingrich took over the House with the slogan "Contract with America." But the slogan stuck because everyone knows that politics is not about contracts. Even Republican voters in 1994 could not appeal to anyone to enforce that contract. And from "read my lips: no new taxes" to Gingrich's line-item veto to "the era of big government is over" to Bush's entitlement reform, politicians are all about making promises they do not follow through on. That's the nature of politics. You can vote them out of office. But you can't enforce the contract.
If capitalists were to run our neighborhoods, there would need to be very strict contracts, covering things like how the neighborhood can change, and how fast, what freedoms I have to modify my own property within the neighborhood (which is a fundamental part of choosing the neighborhood that is right for my particular needs), and what services will be provided.
I am not an expert on this topic, but I think there should be stricter enforcement of what is assumed, as well. My present landlord, for instance, acted surprised when I asked him to install phone jacks for me. He had left them out in the latest renovation. I think the government should step in to say that phone jacks are assumed to be part of a property, and thus part of the contract, so the landlord does not have the right to blame me for not noticing that he had left them out of the construction.
But all of this can be sorted out in the next post, when I try to spell out what commercial management of neighborhoods might look like.
Democratic governing is, first, inherently short-sighted. Every government official is concerned about his legacy, to be sure. But his legacy is not really that long-term of a concern: most people do not get into governing until late in life, the others move on to other things after they finish. Even Mayor Daley only headed Chicago for twenty-one years (1955-76), and if you pay any attention to urban issues, you know that it takes a lot longer than that for policies to play out.
Did Chicago's housing projects help or hurt the minorities that were put there? Did the ethnic groups Daley helped shuffle from the cities to the suburbs assimilate in a healthy way? What habits does welfare instill in children? These are major issues of Daley's mayoralty, and I do not think 1976 (when he died) was soon enough to know all the answers. Fundamentally, a politician in a democracy is concerned with getting re-elected, not with how his policies will affect the city fifty years down the road.
Strangely enough, I think developers -- capitalists -- have much more incentive to think long-term. At the end of a politician's term, he steps down, and blames the rest on his successor. The end of a politician's term is a washing of his hands. But the end of a capitalist's "term" is a sale: because the capitalist is driven by the bottom line, not by re-election, he has to be concerned with what someone will pay for the property he has developed, and a large part of that price is what the next guy will be able to sell it for.
Take an example. Near our house in Washington is a huge new luxury apartment development built by the development mogul Jim Abdo. He built in a neighborhood that is "developing" (read: troubled, but maybe recovering). Now, I have no idea how long Abdo's term is on this property. But whether he sells it next year or twenty years down the road, the guy who buys will be wondering both what it's worth at that point and what it will be worth when he's ready to sell. If Abdo wants to make a profit, he needs to be able to convince the next guy that this thing is a good investment long-term. Of course there's some wheeling and dealing in this -- the next guy might be a dupe -- but since Abdo cannot produce that dupe himself, he needs to build some fundamental long-term value into his project or he is going to lose money. Not so with the politician.
A second problem with democratic politicians is that they only have to please 51% of their constituents to get re-elected. The politician can write people off. I was thinking about this lately when dealing with an annoying problem with parking in my neighborhood. (The details are not worth explaining.) I wrote to my local neighborhood commissioner, than my councilman. You know what? I don't think they cares. They do not need my vote to get reelected. If I am a little bit annoying -- and I probably crossed the line on being too snide -- they can just write me off. Indeed, it is the very rare politician who can get a vote from even three out of five of his constituents, unless there is no one running against him. Democratic government is not based on pleasing everyone.
By contrast, today I called my internet service provider. Now let's be honest: these people are capitalism at its worst, shipping out customer-service to someone in India with no authority to help me and a pleasant demeanor that makes it hard to yell at them. These companies stand behind the lowest line of their policy (in this case, it was the $149.95 fee for early cancellation, even though I'm moving out of state one month short of the end), they keep you on hold as long as they can, and they leave you out in the cold. That said, they make every penny of their earnings off of people like me. They need me to come back when I next sign up for internet, and they need me to give positive reviews to my friends. Writing me off doesn't hurt my councilman in the least, but it does lose money for my ISP.
If the people managing my neighborhood had some financial incentive instead of just needing 51% of the vote, I think they would be much more inclined to help me out when they could. My ISP did not let me out of my contract, but they did fully reimburse me for a service I said I had not ordered. My councilman has not reimbursed me for my parking tickets, despite a similarly plausible argument.
This need to please all customers bleeds into another advantage of capitalism: the niche. The knee-jerk reaction to having neighborhoods run by capitalists is that since they are driven by the bottom line, they will only cater to the rich; people who are not a good investment will get left out in the cold.
Now, my first response to this is that you have to be pretty uninformed about the recent history of American cities -- or history in general -- to honestly believe that people getting left out in the cold would be a new problem created by the capitalists. Twentieth-century democratic governance of cities is one long story of the masses being left out in the cold. If the capitalists left someone out from time to time, they would have a hard time doing a worse job than the politicians.
But the other response is that precisely because they are driven by the bottom line, capitalists want to suck every penny they can out of the market before them. Of course the margin is better on millionaires, so the capitalists will line up to see who can serve them. But there's a limited number of rich people, and there is money to be made off the poor, too. Jim Abdo is building million-dollar condos down the street from us. But our landlord, a smaller fish, is making money off of my poverty-level family, and there are an awful lot of us who need apartments and cough up the money for rent. Capitalists would be stupid to withhold housing from us just because the margin is lower with us than with the rich.
Politicians, on the other hand? If they don't need our vote to get reelected, than we depend purely on the goodness of those tight politician hearts to care for us whom they do not need. Put it this way: capitalists are many, politicians few. Both are inclined to serve first those who serve them best. But after that, capitalists can squeeze into tiny niches -- like my landlord, who owns only this one building -- whereas all the political seats are filled long before anyone comes to caring for the little guy. If you have ever dealt with municipal services, you might share my skepticism.
I should note that our living situation is pretty good. We found exactly what we need -- and we have pretty precise needs, because of a wheelchair in the family, two small children, a stay-at-home mom, a neighborhood we love, and our over-particular aesthetics. Granted, our landlord's a bit of a bum. He has not followed through on some basic maintenance, and he has mostly left us to take care of ourselves. But we pay a rent we can afford for an apartment we really love, and when it comes down to it, he has coughed up the cash for things the apartment needs. That, ahem, has not been the case with our politicians -- we wrote, for example, to our congresswoman when our child with special needs temporarily lost his government health services on the stupidest of technicalities caused by the stupidest of bureaucratic blundering, and we didn't even get a response. Landlord Tom might be lazy, but Delegate Eleanore doesn't give a damn about people like us. Why? Because Tom gets a check from us, while Eleanore doesn't need our vote.
On a less mercenary note, Tom has a grand total of about twelve renters. Congressional Delegate Norton serves all 600,000 residents of Washington. Our most local form of government, the Advisory Neighborhood Commission, which has zero authority and largely unopposed elections, has about one political officer for every 15,000 residents (40 ANCs for the city); the City Council, which actually has authority and "real" elections (meaning, determined by the Democratic primary) has eight wards, or about 75,000 residents per politician. Jim Abdo, the city's biggest real-estate developer, has done 30 projects, the largest of which has under 500 units. (30 x 500 would be 15,000, like the ANC, but Abdo has much more authority and most of his projects are much smaller than 500 units.) In other words, the biggest capitalist in the city has far fewer constituents than the most local politician. No wonder our landlord treats us like people and our government treats us like numbers. Even the greatest philanthropist can't think personally about 75,000 people.
So capitalists are better neighborhood managers than democratic politicians because the end-sale requires them to think longer term and because they have to treat every constituent as a customer, not just 51% (and this in turn means they are more inclined to serve niches and take care of under-represented groups, and even treat people as individuals). The last advantage of capitalism over democracy, I would like to argue, is the contract.
Hayek makes the important point that being pro-market absolutely does not mean being laissez-faire. Proponents of the free market, it is true, want government to stay out of regulation. They want government to let the market drive the economy. But at the heart of the market is contracts, and contracts require strict enforcement. Without enforcement of contracts, the market cannot work.
(This principle extends further than you might think. Milton Friedman, for example, argues that sound money -- meaning above all very strict control over inflation, as well as decent foreign-exchange rates -- is necessary in order for terms of contracts to be meaningful. If I agree to pay $1,200/mo. in rent but we don't know what $1,200 will be worth at the end of the year, our contract is meaningless.)
So even in the realm of economics, absolute support of the free market does not mean laissez-faire, hands-off government. And of course there are plenty of cultural things government should do, like supporting the family and providing general safety, that are out of the realm of the market and so demand government action.
Business transactions are fundamentally contractual. Politics is not. In 1994, Newt Gingrich took over the House with the slogan "Contract with America." But the slogan stuck because everyone knows that politics is not about contracts. Even Republican voters in 1994 could not appeal to anyone to enforce that contract. And from "read my lips: no new taxes" to Gingrich's line-item veto to "the era of big government is over" to Bush's entitlement reform, politicians are all about making promises they do not follow through on. That's the nature of politics. You can vote them out of office. But you can't enforce the contract.
If capitalists were to run our neighborhoods, there would need to be very strict contracts, covering things like how the neighborhood can change, and how fast, what freedoms I have to modify my own property within the neighborhood (which is a fundamental part of choosing the neighborhood that is right for my particular needs), and what services will be provided.
I am not an expert on this topic, but I think there should be stricter enforcement of what is assumed, as well. My present landlord, for instance, acted surprised when I asked him to install phone jacks for me. He had left them out in the latest renovation. I think the government should step in to say that phone jacks are assumed to be part of a property, and thus part of the contract, so the landlord does not have the right to blame me for not noticing that he had left them out of the construction.
But all of this can be sorted out in the next post, when I try to spell out what commercial management of neighborhoods might look like.
Commercial Neighborhoods, Part I
How do you manage a neighborhood? (I'm thinking especially of urban neighborhoods, but much of this applies just as well anywhere else.) How, for example, do you manage development so that it does not undermine community? How does a neighborhood get cleaned up without shipping out all the local culture that gives it character and community? How do you decide whether someone can build a twelve-story building in a two-story neighborhood?
How do you manage zoning? How do you decide whether someone can build a hair salon, or a cigar club, or a law firm where there used to be a house, or a vacant lot, or an old school, or just a different sort of business? How do you decide whether brick sidewalks are worth it, or street cleaning, or extra policing? How do you determine speed limits, and where to put stop signs and stop lights and cross walks? And how do you allocate taxes so that people are actually paying for what they get? How do you manage a neighborhood so that people want to live there?
I would like to make a perhaps surprising proposal: if you care about the long-term -- and because continuity is fundamental to neighborhood, neighborhoods are fundamentally long-term ventures -- the answer is private enterprise, not democratic government. I will make this argument in the next three posts.
Democracy is singularly ill-equipped to manage neighborhoods. In this post I will deal with the problem inherent to unitary government: the need for diversity.
Diversity is important for neighborhoods (as for just about everything) for at least three reasons. First, because people are different. Neighborhoods should vary wildly, because people vary wildly. Wall Street has to be different from Greenwich Village, or you lose both. Some people want a quieter family neighborhood, some want a wild young neighborhood; immigrants like different things from upper-class WASPS, and blacks, artists, Hispanics, Jews, working people, and retirees all just want different things. That does not mean these people should be totally separated. But it does mean that even in the best world, where everyone is maximally virtuous, people should be able to choose from very different kinds of neighborhoods so they can live very different lifestyles, because people, at their best, are very different. A unitary city government (and by unitary, I mean that they make decisions for the whole city, even if they are a council) will always tend to impose a singular vision on the wild diversity that is a city.
A second need for diversity is in problem-solving. In the 1990's, Rudy Giuliani was mayor of the biggest city in the US -- the whole city. He put through a series of reforms, including "broken windows" policing, tougher policing (including standing behind the police when they appeared brutal), pro-business taxes, a crackdown on public indecency, etc. His package worked: New York was a terrifying place when Giuliani took over, and now it is a glorious place, where people want to visit and live. But what worked? Any one part of his package could have been the silver bullet or counter-productive. Because one set of reforms covered the entire city, we cannot tell what each policy accomplished. We would have a much clearer picture, and much better data for the future, if different parts of New York had taken different courses: better control of the variables. Better to divide the city than to leave it to a single authority.
The third need for diversity in neighborhoods is for competition. To ask people to leave New York for Indianapolis -- or Philadelphia, or Washington, or anywhere else -- if they do not like New York's policies just is not fair. People have jobs, people have friends. But diversity of neighborhoods within a city considerably lowers that burden, so that people can vote with their feet, and go to the neighborhood that they think is working best. It is worth noting that this kind of movement benefits not only the rich. The poor too should have the option to choose a system that works better for them. When they do not have that option, the authorities do not have to take their needs seriously.
All of this comes to Hayek's standard objection to government "planning." The problem is not with planning, but with the limitation of planning: because government planning is at its heart the refusal to let other people plan. It means that one person, or one group of people, does all the planning, and everyone else's intelligence is ignored. Centralized planning means people cannot choose for themselves what kind of neighborhood best suits their needs, cannot argue among themselves about which policies are helpful and which harmful, and cannot choose for themselves which authorities they want to submit too. Centralized planning is bad because it prevents more broad-based planning. This is the problem with government planning in itself.
In the next post, I will explain why neighborhoods are especially hurt by government that is democratic. In a third, I will try to outline what a commercially managed neighborhood would look like.
How do you manage zoning? How do you decide whether someone can build a hair salon, or a cigar club, or a law firm where there used to be a house, or a vacant lot, or an old school, or just a different sort of business? How do you decide whether brick sidewalks are worth it, or street cleaning, or extra policing? How do you determine speed limits, and where to put stop signs and stop lights and cross walks? And how do you allocate taxes so that people are actually paying for what they get? How do you manage a neighborhood so that people want to live there?
I would like to make a perhaps surprising proposal: if you care about the long-term -- and because continuity is fundamental to neighborhood, neighborhoods are fundamentally long-term ventures -- the answer is private enterprise, not democratic government. I will make this argument in the next three posts.
Democracy is singularly ill-equipped to manage neighborhoods. In this post I will deal with the problem inherent to unitary government: the need for diversity.
Diversity is important for neighborhoods (as for just about everything) for at least three reasons. First, because people are different. Neighborhoods should vary wildly, because people vary wildly. Wall Street has to be different from Greenwich Village, or you lose both. Some people want a quieter family neighborhood, some want a wild young neighborhood; immigrants like different things from upper-class WASPS, and blacks, artists, Hispanics, Jews, working people, and retirees all just want different things. That does not mean these people should be totally separated. But it does mean that even in the best world, where everyone is maximally virtuous, people should be able to choose from very different kinds of neighborhoods so they can live very different lifestyles, because people, at their best, are very different. A unitary city government (and by unitary, I mean that they make decisions for the whole city, even if they are a council) will always tend to impose a singular vision on the wild diversity that is a city.
A second need for diversity is in problem-solving. In the 1990's, Rudy Giuliani was mayor of the biggest city in the US -- the whole city. He put through a series of reforms, including "broken windows" policing, tougher policing (including standing behind the police when they appeared brutal), pro-business taxes, a crackdown on public indecency, etc. His package worked: New York was a terrifying place when Giuliani took over, and now it is a glorious place, where people want to visit and live. But what worked? Any one part of his package could have been the silver bullet or counter-productive. Because one set of reforms covered the entire city, we cannot tell what each policy accomplished. We would have a much clearer picture, and much better data for the future, if different parts of New York had taken different courses: better control of the variables. Better to divide the city than to leave it to a single authority.
The third need for diversity in neighborhoods is for competition. To ask people to leave New York for Indianapolis -- or Philadelphia, or Washington, or anywhere else -- if they do not like New York's policies just is not fair. People have jobs, people have friends. But diversity of neighborhoods within a city considerably lowers that burden, so that people can vote with their feet, and go to the neighborhood that they think is working best. It is worth noting that this kind of movement benefits not only the rich. The poor too should have the option to choose a system that works better for them. When they do not have that option, the authorities do not have to take their needs seriously.
All of this comes to Hayek's standard objection to government "planning." The problem is not with planning, but with the limitation of planning: because government planning is at its heart the refusal to let other people plan. It means that one person, or one group of people, does all the planning, and everyone else's intelligence is ignored. Centralized planning means people cannot choose for themselves what kind of neighborhood best suits their needs, cannot argue among themselves about which policies are helpful and which harmful, and cannot choose for themselves which authorities they want to submit too. Centralized planning is bad because it prevents more broad-based planning. This is the problem with government planning in itself.
In the next post, I will explain why neighborhoods are especially hurt by government that is democratic. In a third, I will try to outline what a commercially managed neighborhood would look like.
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