by E M Risse
A failing education system puts Americans at risk in a globally competitive economy and undermines our democracy.
Most readers of this column, some grudgingly, have come to agree that there is a direct connection between the pattern and density of land use and transportation (aka, mobility and access). Some were surprised to see that in our last column (“Education and Human Settlement Patterns”, Jan. 31, 2005 ) we dragged education into the discussion by examining importance of the size and location of school facilities. More
Monday, February 14, 2005
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
10 comments:
Ed Risse may have written the mother of all dysfunction. Here is a treatise that consists of a string of declarative sentences, each dependent on another and written in such a form as to appear to be truisms or axioms, without a shred of supporting documentation or examples. Such a string of statements does not constitute an argument, let alone one that can be sensibly debated.
He compounds the errors in this exercise by the use of transparent fallacious argumentation. "Most readers of this column, some grudgingly, have come to agree" or "Those who speak up..... lack the training and the capacity to analyze facts so that they could intelligently address these issues." or "Citizens have no clue what they need to understand in order to be prosperous, happy and safe. "
In other words, if you don't agree with me you are clueless and uneducated. This is not an argument that is designed to convince someone who doesn't agree with you that your argument has merit.
Not that the argument has any merit, if you can even find the argument. Here is an article whose premise appears to be "A failing education system puts Americans at risk in a globally competitive economy and undermines our democracy."
To support this premise one would presumably attempt to show that 1.) The education system is failing. 2.) This puts Americans at risk. 3.) Define risk. 4.) Show that this (demonstrated) mode of failure causes this risk in a global economy. 5.) Show what the level of risk is and its likelihood of coming to fruition. 6.) Offer an alternative. Let's see how Ed does.
After carrying on for a full page of unrelated comment on his favorite topic "dysfunctional human settlement patterns" he finally gets around to the topic of education with the following statement. "Check out the substandard level of achievement by students in the United States as compared to students in regions that are our primary economic competitors. We do not recall seeing a summary of comparative educational achievement that puts the United States anywhere above "fair-to-middling" in measures of academic achievement." No reference, no statistics, no proof, nothing more than a reference to his own failing memory.
Some of his readers may remember seeing articles of the type that rank the academic achievement of U.S. students with the academic achievement of students from other nations. Generally these are focused on certain narrow areas of achievement, but that is a long way from showing in a blanket way that the education system is failing.
That statement is followed up with this: "many citizens of the United States... lack the education necessary to move with confidence or be productive in the competition-driven market place". and "...according to data on educational achievement, the current education system is leaving entire generations behind." Together these declaratives, without reference or proof, amount to his entire contention that the education system is failing.
It is not much of an argument to support such a sweeping statement.
Historically, kings, emperors, religious leaders and other forms of aristocracy have competed with each other for power while being supported by peasants. This form of civilization has been more or less constant, regardless of the settlement patterns, and successful civilizations have come and gone for reasons that have nothing to do with the settlement patterns, other than the fact that settlement patterns have disappeared when deprived of the infrastructure that supported them.
Indeed, the earliest Old World settlements arose on the riverbanks precisely because the rivers afforded transportation with little investment in infrastructure. In the New World, the plow, and the wheel, and iron were absent, as were draft animals to operate the plow and the wheel. Yet the Mayans and Aztecs had civilizations that were remarkably similar to feudal and religious states in the old world.
Ed Reese presents this information to us the following way; "Over the past 25 years the top 5 percent of the economic ladder have gotten a lot richer, the bottom 40 percent have lost ground and those in the middle are running as fast as they can to keep their heads above water." This is the modern version of various forms of aristocracy being supported by peasants, and it is his way of getting around to the idea that education affects our ability to compete in the arena of Global economics.
He goes on to say that, "It does not take a Ph.D. in economics to understand that the United States has morphed over the past 50 years from bread-basket, mass producer and innovator to mass consumer and importer." which is another way of saying that we are the global aristocracy and we are being supported by the peasants of other nations. He fails to point out that it took a lot of Ph.D.s to put us in this situation. Ph.D.s in various forms of food production made being the breadbasket obsolete. By itself, this precipitated a mass change in settlement patterns, which has not yet been completely sorted out. Yet many people persist in claiming that we have to “save prime farmland” in the face of the fact that we only need a tiny fraction of our farmland for current and projected needs far into the future.
It is hard to see how this represents a failure in education or of economics, yet Risse contends that it results in the fact that "The U.S. not only imports consumer goods and low-end labor to do the bottom rung jobs but also outsources work and imports individuals with the technical and professional training to take the jobs that the education system is not supporting." Immigrants who perform low-end labor come here because they perceive that we offer more opportunity than where they come from, and that includes economic opportunity and educational opportunity. Education, it turns out, is one of our largest exports.
Students take our education home and then turn around and compete with us: it is not that our education is bad that causes economic dislocation, it is that others are willing to sell the fruits of education at a lower cost than we are. You can fly to India or South Africa for heart surgery for a fraction of what it costs to have here. The rate of medical related bankruptcies in the U.S. has increased by 2200% in the last five years. Faced with that statistic, who can say that traveling overseas for medical procedures is dysfunctional?
Our educational system is capable of producing highly skilled technical workers, however, so are other educational systems. Regardless of where the training occurs, if someone else is willing to sell us services for less than we are willing to provide them, how does that suggest that our failing educational system is putting us at risk?
That is all Risse has to say in support of his thesis. Risse barely touches on two of the five areas necessary to support his thesis and ignores the remaining three entirely. There is no discussion of what the risk is or how it relates to global economics and there is no discussion of a proposed alternative plan.
Instead, having postulated that a failing educational system puts us at risk in the global economy he digresses into a diatribe on what's wrong with the electorate. ( They are stupid and uneducated because they don't elect politicians who ascribe to my ideas, which every right thinking individual knows are the only correct ones.) Here is a (synopsized) sample. ". It is painful to read letter(s) begging governance practitioners to spend more money to solve contemporary societal problems. ...(and others) castigating governance practitioners for raising taxes to solve these same problems (of) commuting, school capacity, economic development, safety and security not to mention environmental sustainability."
This has exactly what to do with global economics? Then he goes on "It is even more painful to realize that over half the population lacks the information, ability or will to even address these issues in the most rudimentary ways: voting and civic participation. "
Only a tiny fraction of the population goes to the poll and votes. I prefer to believe that these are the ones who at least care about what is happening and are therefore the most likely to be informed. It might be just as likely that they don't go to the polls because the traffic is too bad, they'll get fired if they are late to work, they know that the wealthy aristocrats who can afford to run for government will do as they please anyway, and they are more interested in a ball game and a beer.
Whatever the case, at least the wealthy aristocrats of old had enough sense not to pretend to care what the illiterates thought about; at least until a revolt was imminent. I'm always amused when some campaign or another does not go well. The loser always claims that if more people had gone to the polls, then his side would have won. At best, all you can say is that either the people who didn't turn out didn't care one way or another, or if they had turned out, then the results would be more of the same. If we had a $10 or $25 fine for not voting, then either we could stop bickering about what people think, or else we would have enough money to build roads AND schools.
Risse concedes that a lot more money is needed for education: it just needs to be spent in more productive ways. Some would say the same thing about highways, some of which we could have built for the amount of money we spent fighting over them. Others would say the same about public safety - police and fire protection, etc. Others would say the same about social programs, economic development, and housing. There is a very simple method for learning exactly what it is that people prefer to spend their money on, and on that does not depend on the ballot box.
Every citizen with income or property files a tax return. We already have check-offs for various expenditures. All we have to do is put a form on the back of the return on which the citizen indicates in broad generalizations where the he would like his money to be spent. I submit that averaged over thousands of returns the result would not be too different from our current budget. By limiting the politicians from digressing from the results by more than, say 15%, the damage the politicians do would be limited to arguing over marginal results.
The results would be the most productive way of expending funds, by definition. Our funds would be spent doing what we want done.
To Ed Risse, more productive ways of spending education money apparently means any way that educates people to think the way that he does: "The 55 percent +/- who are now being "left behind" are unable to effectively participate in governance and contribute to civil society. The core question is: How does a society inform well intended, imaginative and concerned citizens to the point they can make intelligent choices in the market and in the voting booth."
As far as I know there is no requirement that democracy represents any simile of intelligence: we could democratically choose to elect a dictator for life if the conditions warranted such an act. We could democratically choose to eliminate the separation of church and state, or the requirements for the protection of private property, the prohibition of slavery, and require that the government provide economic redress for every bad decision we ever made in the past. It would still be democracy, bad as the results might be.
This quote about those left behind causes me a problem: where did the 55% statistic come from and who says uneducated people can't contribute to society? I have friends who can't read and write, but who are highly skilled in their profession and have raised their children well. Where is the failure? We have a democratic system that produced the education system we have, and an educational system that supports our Democracy. As one person put it (Ben Franklin?) “It’s the worst of all systems, except for all the others.” I’ll readily agree our education system can be improved, but saying it will change our condition in the world is a stretch.
Risse’s simplistic views on democracy resolve to black and white or, in this case red and blue. “The root cause of conflict between Red and Blue is a collective inability to understand and to intelligently make decisions that are in citizens enlightened self interest.” In America the choices other that red and blue are sharply limited, and pretty much to marginal causes. Therefore the root cause of conflict between red and blue is mostly created by the aristocrats in power, who gain primarily by opposing each other, the populace be damned. At the same time the phrase enlightened self-interest is an oxymoron. A move that is in my interest is in my interest, enlightened or not, but the real problem here is what Risse means by enlightened: this boils down to exactly what he believes. Anything else is uneducated stupidity at best and rapacious aggrandizement at worst.
In his view: “Citizens have no clue what they need to understand in order to be prosperous, happy and safe. A democracy cannot function with uninformed citizens.” I believe there are several hundred million citizens laboring mightily to provide for their families and provide various amenities for their community that will be surprised to hear that.
For myself, if someone proposes to instruct me on topics as basic as my own happiness, prosperity, and safety, it tends to raise a lot of red flags. The flags have words on them like demagoguery, thievery, control, and regulation. I am guaranteed the right to life, liberty and the pursuit (not attainment) of happiness. The logical extension is that I am guaranteed the right to do so without instruction as to what, exactly, that entails. I’m particularly skeptical if the instruction purports to be “enlightened”.
Risse presents the proposition that “There is plenty of room in this nation-state for those who crave simplicity… and for those who crave complexity and challenge. There is… not enough room for this diversity…if an uneducated population is baited into thinking that the problem is "those other people,… “ ut this flies in the face of his previous statements. It seems to me that some people choose to accept complexity in their lives in one area as a trade-off for simplicity in other areas: some people choose to commute all over creation in order to live where they choose, yet this is a fact that Risse concludes is dysfunctional.
He raises the question “How does a society inform well intended, imaginative and concerned citizens to the point they can make intelligent choices in the market and in the voting booth. “ and goes on to relate the development of students with a certain initial bent. He state that certain students raised in a Planned Community “get it”, whatever that means. By the time they are in high school (and presumably more adult) they are less susceptible to his particular brand of indoctrination. Later, when they are fully educated and engaged in government they are fully invested in ibelieving what he calls the “Myths That Blind Us”.
Evidently, and by his own example, education and experience leads us to believe that things are not so simple as Mr. Risse would have us believe.
He would have us believe tha
Ed Risse may have written the mother of all dysfunction. Here is a treatise that consists of a string of declarative sentences, each dependent on another and written in such a form as to appear to be truisms or axioms, without a shred of supporting documentation or examples. Such a string of statements does not constitute an argument, let alone one that can be sensibly debated.
He compounds the errors in this exercise by the use of transparent fallacious argumentation. "Most readers of this column, some grudgingly, have come to agree" or "Those who speak up..... lack the training and the capacity to analyze facts so that they could intelligently address these issues." or "Citizens have no clue what they need to understand in order to be prosperous, happy and safe. "
In other words, if you don't agree with me you are clueless and uneducated. This is not an argument that is designed to convince someone who doesn't agree with you that your argument has merit.
Not that the argument has any merit, if you can even find the argument. Here is an article whose premise appears to be "A failing education system puts Americans at risk in a globally competitive economy and undermines our democracy."
To support this premise one would presumably attempt to show that 1.) The education system is failing. 2.) This puts Americans at risk. 3.) Define risk. 4.) Show that this (demonstrated) mode of failure causes this risk in a global economy. 5.) Show what the level of risk is and its likelihood of coming to fruition. 6.) Offer an alternative. Let's see how Ed does.
After carrying on for a full page of unrelated comment on his favorite topic "dysfunctional human settlement patterns" he finally gets around to the topic of education with the following statement. "Check out the substandard level of achievement by students in the United States as compared to students in regions that are our primary economic competitors. We do not recall seeing a summary of comparative educational achievement that puts the United States anywhere above "fair-to-middling" in measures of academic achievement." No reference, no statistics, no proof, nothing more than a reference to his own failing memory.
Some of his readers may remember seeing articles of the type that rank the academic achievement of U.S. students with the academic achievement of students from other nations. Generally these are focused on certain narrow areas of achievement, but that is a long way from showing in a blanket way that the education system is failing.
That statement is followed up with this: "many citizens of the United States... lack the education necessary to move with confidence or be productive in the competition-driven market place". and "...according to data on educational achievement, the current education system is leaving entire generations behind." Together these declaratives, without reference or proof, amount to his entire contention that the education system is failing.
It is not much of an argument to support such a sweeping statement.
Historically, kings, emperors, religious leaders and other forms of aristocracy have competed with each other for power while being supported by peasants. This form of civilization has been more or less constant, regardless of the settlement patterns, and successful civilizations have come and gone for reasons that have nothing to do with the settlement patterns, other than the fact that settlement patterns have disappeared when deprived of the infrastructure that supported them.
Indeed, the earliest Old World settlements arose on the riverbanks precisely because the rivers afforded transportation with little investment in infrastructure. In the New World, the plow, and the wheel, and iron were absent, as were draft animals to operate the plow and the wheel. Yet the Mayans and Aztecs had civilizations that were remarkably similar to feudal and religious states in the old world.
Ed Reese presents this information to us the following way; "Over the past 25 years the top 5 percent of the economic ladder have gotten a lot richer, the bottom 40 percent have lost ground and those in the middle are running as fast as they can to keep their heads above water." This is the modern version of various forms of aristocracy being supported by peasants, and it is his way of getting around to the idea that education affects our ability to compete in the arena of Global economics.
He goes on to say that, "It does not take a Ph.D. in economics to understand that the United States has morphed over the past 50 years from bread-basket, mass producer and innovator to mass consumer and importer." which is another way of saying that we are the global aristocracy and we are being supported by the peasants of other nations. He fails to point out that it took a lot of Ph.D.s to put us in this situation. Ph.D.s in various forms of food production made being the breadbasket obsolete. By itself, this precipitated a mass change in settlement patterns, which has not yet been completely sorted out. Yet many people persist in claiming that we have to “save prime farmland” in the face of the fact that we only need a tiny fraction of our farmland for current and projected needs far into the future.
It is hard to see how this represents a failure in education or of economics, yet Risse contends that it results in the fact that "The U.S. not only imports consumer goods and low-end labor to do the bottom rung jobs but also outsources work and imports individuals with the technical and professional training to take the jobs that the education system is not supporting." Immigrants who perform low-end labor come here because they perceive that we offer more opportunity than where they come from, and that includes economic opportunity and educational opportunity. Education, it turns out, is one of our largest exports.
Students take our education home and then turn around and compete with us: it is not that our education is bad that causes economic dislocation, it is that others are willing to sell the fruits of education at a lower cost than we are. You can fly to India or South Africa for heart surgery for a fraction of what it costs to have here. The rate of medical related bankruptcies in the U.S. has increased by 2200% in the last five years. Faced with that statistic, who can say that traveling overseas for medical procedures is dysfunctional?
Our educational system is capable of producing highly skilled technical workers, however, so are other educational systems. Regardless of where the training occurs, if someone else is willing to sell us services for less than we are willing to provide them, how does that suggest that our failing educational system is putting us at risk?
That is all Risse has to say in support of his thesis. Risse barely touches on two of the five areas necessary to support his thesis and ignores the remaining three entirely. There is no discussion of what the risk is or how it relates to global economics and there is no discussion of a proposed alternative plan.
Instead, having postulated that a failing educational system puts us at risk in the global economy he digresses into a diatribe on what's wrong with the electorate. ( They are stupid and uneducated because they don't elect politicians who ascribe to my ideas, which every right thinking individual knows are the only correct ones.) Here is a (synopsized) sample. ". It is painful to read letter(s) begging governance practitioners to spend more money to solve contemporary societal problems. ...(and others) castigating governance practitioners for raising taxes to solve these same problems (of) commuting, school capacity, economic development, safety and security not to mention environmental sustainability."
This has exactly what to do with global economics? Then he goes on "It is even more painful to realize that over half the population lacks the information, ability or will to even address these issues in the most rudimentary ways: voting and civic participation. "
Only a tiny fraction of the population goes to the poll and votes. I prefer to believe that these are the ones who at least care about what is happening and are therefore the most likely to be informed. It might be just as likely that they don't go to the polls because the traffic is too bad, they'll get fired if they are late to work, they know that the wealthy aristocrats who can afford to run for government will do as they please anyway, and they are more interested in a ball game and a beer.
Whatever the case, at least the wealthy aristocrats of old had enough sense not to pretend to care what the illiterates thought about; at least until a revolt was imminent. I'm always amused when some campaign or another does not go well. The loser always claims that if more people had gone to the polls, then his side would have won. At best, all you can say is that either the people who didn't turn out didn't care one way or another, or if they had turned out, then the results would be more of the same. If we had a $10 or $25 fine for not voting, then either we could stop bickering about what people think, or else we would have enough money to build roads AND schools.
Risse concedes that a lot more money is needed for education: it just needs to be spent in more productive ways. Some would say the same thing about highways, some of which we could have built for the amount of money we spent fighting over them. Others would say the same about public safety - police and fire protection, etc. Others would say the same about social programs, economic development, and housing. There is a very simple method for learning exactly what it is that people prefer to spend their money on, and on that does not depend on the ballot box.
Every citizen with income or property files a tax return. We already have check-offs for various expenditures. All we have to do is put a form on the back of the return on which the citizen indicates in broad generalizations where the he would like his money to be spent. I submit that averaged over thousands of returns the result would not be too different from our current budget. By limiting the politicians from digressing from the results by more than, say 15%, the damage the politicians do would be limited to arguing over marginal results.
The results would be the most productive way of expending funds, by definition. Our funds would be spent doing what we want done.
To Ed Risse, more productive ways of spending education money apparently means any way that educates people to think the way that he does: "The 55 percent +/- who are now being "left behind" are unable to effectively participate in governance and contribute to civil society. The core question is: How does a society inform well intended, imaginative and concerned citizens to the point they can make intelligent choices in the market and in the voting booth."
As far as I know there is no requirement that democracy represents any simile of intelligence: we could democratically choose to elect a dictator for life if the conditions warranted such an act. We could democratically choose to eliminate the separation of church and state, or the requirements for the protection of private property, the prohibition of slavery, and require that the government provide economic redress for every bad decision we ever made in the past. It would still be democracy, bad as the results might be.
This quote about those left behind causes me a problem: where did the 55% statistic come from and who says uneducated people can't contribute to society? I have friends who can't read and write, but who are highly skilled in their profession and have raised their children well. Where is the failure? We have a democratic system that produced the education system we have, and an educational system that supports our Democracy. As one person put it (Ben Franklin?) “It’s the worst of all systems, except for all the others.” I’ll readily agree our education system can be improved, but saying it will change our condition in the world is a stretch.
Risse’s simplistic views on democracy resolve to black and white or, in this case red and blue. “The root cause of conflict between Red and Blue is a collective inability to understand and to intelligently make decisions that are in citizens enlightened self interest.” In America the choices other that red and blue are sharply limited, and pretty much to marginal causes. Therefore the root cause of conflict between red and blue is mostly created by the aristocrats in power, who gain primarily by opposing each other, the populace be damned. At the same time the phrase enlightened self-interest is an oxymoron. A move that is in my interest is in my interest, enlightened or not, but the real problem here is what Risse means by enlightened: this boils down to exactly what he believes. Anything else is uneducated stupidity at best and rapacious aggrandizement at worst.
In his view: “Citizens have no clue what they need to understand in order to be prosperous, happy and safe. A democracy cannot function with uninformed citizens.” I believe there are several hundred million citizens laboring mightily to provide for their families and provide various amenities for their community that will be surprised to hear that.
For myself, if someone proposes to instruct me on topics as basic as my own happiness, prosperity, and safety, it tends to raise a lot of red flags. The flags have words on them like demagoguery, thievery, control, and regulation. I am guaranteed the right to life, liberty and the pursuit (not attainment) of happiness. The logical extension is that I am guaranteed the right to do so without instruction as to what, exactly, that entails. I’m particularly skeptical if the instruction purports to be “enlightened”.
Risse presents the proposition that “There is plenty of room in this nation-state for those who crave simplicity… and for those who crave complexity and challenge. There is… not enough room for this diversity…if an uneducated population is baited into thinking that the problem is "those other people,… “ ut this flies in the face of his previous statements. It seems to me that some people choose to accept complexity in their lives in one area as a trade-off for simplicity in other areas: some people choose to commute all over creation in order to live where they choose, yet this is a fact that Risse concludes is dysfunctional.
He raises the question “How does a society inform well intended, imaginative and concerned citizens to the point they can make intelligent choices in the market and in the voting booth. “ and goes on to relate the development of students with a certain initial bent. He state that certain students raised in a Planned Community “get it”, whatever that means. By the time they are in high school (and presumably more adult) they are less susceptible to his particular brand of indoctrination. Later, when they are fully educated and engaged in government they are fully invested in ibelieving what he calls the “Myths That Blind Us”.
Evidently, and by his own example, education and experience leads us to believe that things are not so simple as Mr. Risse would have us believe.
He would have us believe that the epidemic and colossal failure of the entire educational system as led to”… immigration of low-end labor, the outsourcing of technical tasks and the relocation of important economic sectors. These forces result in persistent balance-of-payments defects, economic stagnation, uncivil conflict and environmental degradation.”
Other than protection of life, liberty and property, why do we have government, if not to solve societal problems? Well, the first reasons are for protection of life and property, but we have pretty much given up on the second one of those in favor of pursuing the public benefit, which is another way of approaching societal problems. The question is how many times can we decrement the value of private property and the pursuit of happiness in pursuit of the public benefit before we eliminate the benefit we are pursuing?
Labor and manufacturing is outsourced when it is economical to do so. As a result settlement patterns change to reflect economic conditions, and that includes conditions caused by governments failure to do its job. Settlement patterns reflect economic conditions, not control them. One indication this is true is that economic conditions change far faster than settlement patterns.
“Balance of payment defects” merely implies that we value the work of others more than we value the work of our own. Primarily we value their work more than our own because it is cheaper, just as we value homes on the outskirts of the cities more because they are cheaper, and the infrastructure costs are lower.
The fact that our economic focus is shifting means exactly that it is not stagnant. One reason work is cheaper to buy elsewhere is that others do not have to labor under the environmental rules we have, and sustainability is not an issue. In Japan, all the steel production is located at the northeast end of the islands; the Pacific Ocean is their emissions control system.
I don’t know what to say about Risse’s comment about uncivil conflict. Conflict may be economically driven but it is by no means the only cause: religion, race, and women have long been at the top of the list as drivers for conflict.
Frequently the cause of exporting business that we have passed enlightened laws in favor of sustainability that put us out of business as producers. We import primarily the stuff we can't afford to make. We can't afford to waste our time building junk because we have other opportunities that appear more valuable at present. This may be a mistake in the long run, but it's hard to make an NPV argument that suggests we will become richer by being poorer in the meantime.
However, it is probably true that we cannot continue to absorb most of the product of the world and that other countries can match our prodigious consumption without serious repercussions. Global warming is already upon us and won't subside until we endure a prolonged period of doing without things we now take for granted. The storms and rising sea level will cause changes in settlement patterns eventually, but in the meantime we are going to have to spen a lot of money on currently required infrastructure like sea walls and escape routes.
Among other things, the concept of sustainability probably implies more large lots in the country, not fewer.
In any case our unemployment is at all time lows, even though we have people to do high end and low end jobs, we have no where near enough. In Utah, they had a raid on the airport to exclude illegal alien workers from security sensitive jobs. This caused a crisis that nearly shut down the airport. Most of those people are back at their jobs now.
A major cause of our current social security crisis is that not enough workers are available to pay for the benefits of seniors: our population distribution has an hourglass shape. This can be easily and probably necessarily rectified by more immigration.
U. S. population growth is caused by fertility and immigration in roughly equal numbers. Apparently American parents feel secure in their ability to provide for new children and that they have a chance for a successful life. Immigrants come here because as bad as our success story is, the story where they come from is worse. Check out the figures for ownership of wealth in Paraguay to see a real imbalance in wealth. In spite of this, Risse claims the U.S. is not a success story.
School capacity, economic development, safety and security not to mention environmental sustainability are only a few of the areas where we have a disagreement on what the appropriate level of spending is for the services we get. I expect we will solve that disagreement democratically, and through the power of the press and sound reasoning. Each of these the problem boils down to, what do we want, how much are we willing to pay, and where does the money come from. The correct answers will have to be based on fact, not sound bites or endless self supporting rhetoric of the type Risse produces.
For example the statement that dysfunctional settlement patterns are responsible for traffic congestion is a statement that has been repeated many times, yet studies show this is only partially true. In no way is it clear what direction change in settlement patterns must take in order to partially alleviate transportation problems, but the evidence suggest we must choose a more sparsely developed pattern in order to take best advantage of the road systems we already have. This is based on the simple observation that most roads are not congested most of the time.
Changing settlement patterns is likely to be the most expensive, least workable and slowest way to influence transportation, for exactly the reasons mentioned in the Risse article: economic conditions change and economics drive human settlement. Because the built environment is so expensive and takes so long to construct, changing settlement patterns is likely to be the slowest possible way to alleviate transportation or school problems.
Withholding money from roads is not the solution to solving transportation problems any more than withholding money from schools improves education. We have been trying that solution for thirty years, and the current congestion problems in fully developed areas are partially the result.
The growth and success of home schooling, private schools, and private management of public schools suggest that we should get government out of education. As education becomes increasingly politicized we are increasingly subject to the dangers of state sponsored ideology of exactly the type cited in Risse’s article.
Together these issues suggest that either government should get out of the education business, or else that our educational "cells" should be smaller and more subject to local control. Either way, parents who are not satisfied with the ideology of their local cell would be free to relocate to a settlement that is more nearly to their liking. This would naturally upset the settlement pattern, which would then be in a constant state of change. Same holds for transportation. If we have local cells that support both living and working, then long distance traveling would be reduced. At present government promotes working (new jobs) and demotes living (new homes).
We have then a state of tension that is balanced by the costs of re-locating, school choices, cost of housing, and availability of work and cost of transportation.
Left to its own devices this system will achieve its highest collective level of entropy: each of us will input the least amount of energy to achieve the best level of existence. The problem is that government and other social forces prevent the applied tension from achieving the lowest and most sustainable energy state by causing various forms of friction.
Relocation costs are artificially high: the transaction costs are high and we have to move too much stuff. Living in mobile housing would solve this problem, but it is generally restricted and has high costs of it's own. School choices are restricted because we are required to support the state run schools, whether we use them or not. State run schools have operated with virtually no accountability, until the recent advent of SOL testing. Cost of housing in turn is highly driven by the taxes that support the local school system.
These costs go up if the student population increase and they go up more (on a per student basis) if the student population decreases, so it cannot be said that settlement patterns are a major cost driver here. As an example Arlington is currently dismantling English as a second language courses because they are no longer needed: poor people typified by those who cannot yet speak satisfactory English can no longer afford to live in Arlington.
Jobs tend to be centrally located for three reasons: historical, commercial, and market. Since the industrial revolution jobs have been centrally located where power was available. Because the built structures and settlement patterns change slowly this still tends to be true. This central tendency is augmented because businesses primarily do business with each other. Finally businesses locate in places that have enough labor and commerce to support them, or else they locate where these factors are increasing the fastest, as a means to ensure growth, or where labor costs are low.
Since central cities have had the most time for entropy to accumulate, the highest energy costs are absorbed to achieve growth there, together with the highest maintenance costs for infrastructure. These factors mitigate against new businesses locating in the central cities or in the far flung settlements except when far flung means economically disadvantaged: as a result most business growth today is in the new ring cities, or overseas.
To a casual or untrained observer, this constant flux, change, and adaptation appears to be dysfunctional chaos, yet history has taught those who will listen time and time again, the best thing to do with systems is not to disturb them. The results are unpredictable.
Ray Hyde
Delaplane, VA
For reasons I have not been able to identify, my comments are being duplicated when I only previewed them, and have not yet published them. My apologies for the problem. The first post here should be limininated as an error.
Ray Hyde
Delaplane.
Mr. Ray Hyde’s Commentary:
Having reviewed an number of Mr. Hyde’s Commentaries as well as e-mails he has sent S/PI directly and letters he has written to community news papers, it is clear that there are many points upon which he and S/PI agree. It is also clear that if the time were taken to differentiate facts from impressions and assumptions that many of the remaining differences would disappear.
What would be left are personal preferences. In a democracy with a market economy those preferences are sorted out by the market and at the voting booth. From what we have been able to determine of Mr. Hyde’s preferences they are not those most valued in the contemporary marketplace. That is fine so long as the true costs are equitably allocated and Mr. Hyde is willing to pay the full cost of his choices, especially his location choices.
Mr. Hyde’s ever more lengthy expositions of his views are laced with Business-as-Usual excuses, wild non sequiturs and demonstrations of profound geographical illiteracy. This makes it difficult to respond intelligently and sort out fact from myth and fiction. In an earlier response to Mr. Hyde, Jim Bacon observed that Mr. Hyde was essentially alone in the opinions he most often expressed about spacial distribution of urban activities. It appears Mr. Hyde now believes his only course of action is to filibuster. Our friends in the blogging business note that one of the shortcomings of this form of communication is “items” such as those generated by Mr. Hyde’s.
Like a Brown-headed Cowbird, Mr. Hyde has adopted a habit of laying an egg after each one of our posts. We assume his intent to be similar to that of the Brown-headed Cowbird. You may check our past posts and following his, we have documented the scope of his errors by commenting on a few of first sentences in his “commentary.”
Here we only need to quote his second sentence. “Here is a treatise that consists of a string of declarative sentences, ...” We thought this was an attempt to critique our post until we noted it describes just what Mr. Hyde posted. Had he looked at the first End Note of the column to which he responded, he would have found a reference to a book published in 2000 that contains the foundation for our work in human settlement patterns. The book has 60 pages of end notes and a reading list of 146 books. In the 2005 reprinting, we made 6 changes to correct typos noted by readers since 2001. We have received no communications that our data or conclusions are in error.
EMR
I concede, I have not yet read your book. Since you have received no communications that either the data or conclusions are in error I have to ask, has anyone else read it?
In your writings here you exhibit a tendency to reference your own writings in the end notes. This is not a very persuasive method of argumentation.
I'll also concede your comment that my declaratives are no more proof of fact than yours, however, I'll be happy to provide references to support my statements - references that do not refer to my own writing.
I have attempted in a few paragraphs, each, to describe what I think is wrong with your generally unsupported statements. Perhaps you have repeated them to yourself so long that you accept them as given. I do not.
While I have taken the time to address each of your comments that I feel are mistaken, you have merely dismissed mine as wild non-sequiturs, and and profound geographic illiteracy. I notice a similarity in your previous dismissal of public participation from those who have no idea what they are talking about and other planners being the blind leading the blind.
That being the case I have no prospect of changing your mind but only of opening a friendly discourse in which our readers may accept or reject the statements made based on the support provided.
Since you have so many unsupported statements my responses have been long, but I'm willing to proceed from the general to the specific. My purpose in doing so is exactly to differentiate facts from impressions and assumptions. I suggest we do that one at a time.
I'm particularly curious about what you say concerning accepting the full costs of my location choices. I own and have owned several different locations and I have detailed personal financial records going back many years. I'm pretty sure I know what my costs are, even including my own estimates of external or non-market costs.
I'd be curious to learn what you think a reasonable estimate is for my choice as compared to yours since we differ by only a few miles. Recently in the paper you stated that if rural dwellers had to pay their full costs, no one would live there. Yet this area is full of wealthy individuals who pay plenty exactly for the privilege of avoiding the kind of urban utopia you describe. How is it that you don't think these choices are supported by the marketplace?
At the same time my location "choice" provides substantial support to the outside society which you have eloquently but inadequately described. Since I am not compensated for these, how do you propose balancing my costs and my contributions?
In addition to the free services I provide according to county figures I pay $3 in tax for each $1 in services I receive. How much more do you think I should pay?
That is just one suggestion for a starting place. I'm perfectly willing to pick one from your five premises.
1. There is already too much land devoted to, and held for, urban land uses in the National Capital Subregion.
You have stated that all of Fairfax could fit in a space a third or a quarter of its size. I don't doubt that. What I doubt is that,as a result,the people would be as wealthy, have the same opportunities, suffer less congestion or be as happy, let alone sane.
As it is residents in those areas are already raising strong objections to more densification. As you point out preferences are demonstrated in the marketplace and the voting booth.
2. The National Capital Subregion's jobs are center-weighted now and will be center-weighted for the foreseeable future.
Here is where we seriously disagree. As a rule you oppose business as usual solutions, yet you accept this one, apparently because it supports your other motives. I can't see any reason that one of the Fundamental Changes should not be that we move the jobs once rather than moving the people every day.
People change jobs frequently but the jobs change seldom. Wouldn't it be more efficient and cheaper to move the jobs than rebuild the entire city? The choices people make are not as flexible as you seem to believe. It can take months or years to execute a successful job or habitation choice and the costs may not justify many possible choices.
3. Scattered urban land uses cause an irrational and untransportable distribution of trips which is the root cause of gridlock.
Fairfax and Montana have approximately the same population. Except for the urban centers you can drive for miles in Montana without encountering another vehicle. How can you say that scattered land use causes gridlock? It flies in the face of reality.
The usual trip from my home to my other home or my job is 55 minutes and 55 miles, even in this area. Only during rush hour is there a problem and it amounts to an extra 20 to 40 minutes. That time is evenly divided to delays in two locations where highway planners had previously proposed different solutions which were opposed by citizen input, partly at the behest of the PEC.
If I use public transit to avoid those delays it adds another 20 minutes and $6.00.
Just as in many other spheres of commerce minor delays or minor shortages cause severe disruptions.
If we can afford enough high end vehicles to clog the roads, surely we can provide enough pavement to serve them - up to a point. Then we have to spread out.
These are merely my observations, but I can provide references to professional highway planners who express similar observations more scientifically.
Despite what Bacon says, I'm not alone in this, as noted in the Sunday paper, and my references.
4. There must be an equitable distribution of the costs of services, not subsidies for those who create and profit from dysfunctional human settlement patterns as is the case now.
Metro is an enormous subsidy for developers who have profited from Metro frindly development, and it is a huge subsidy to the Metro users. Neither of these would exist under your premise.
Your statement is one of those that is repeated so often it is taken as true, but noted economists and planners not associated with any think tank or special interest group disagree.
There are even studies of how often it is repeated which purport to indicate that it must be true.
Then there is the issue of how to allow those who are prohibited from freely entering the market to participate in the benefits you claim your plan provides.
If you do not prohibit them from entering the market and allow them to build with full investment, those costs are reflected in housing and passed along to the populace in assessments and taxes, in case you haven'tread the papers lately. I can provide references that show our sugesttion passes more costs to existing residents than to bulders or new residents.
5. Without Balanced Communities within a sustainable New Urban Region, the future is bleak.
Here we agree, except for the new urban part.
What do you call sustainable? I think the Amish and Mennonite communities are as close as we come. Your version of urban utopia is heavily dependent on cheap, clean energy and long distance food distribution.
If something goes badly wrong, the cities will suffer first and most.
Pick a topic or blow me off, your choice. I'm anxious to seperate fact from myth.
Ray Hyde
Delaplane, VA
RESPONSE TO MR. HYDE
This is a response to your request in the blog comment #5 which you posted about our 14 February 2005 “The Mother of All Dysfunction” column.
PRELIMINARIES
First, there is a fundamental difference between our interests in the topics S/PI explores in lectures, books, reports, columns and blog posts and our interests:
o Working to understand and communicate science-based facts concerning the nature and impacts of spacial relationships in human settlement patterns is what we do professionally. It is what we do for a living and is based on 45 years of professional experience and training. The majority of this time was spent working for and with builders, developers, engineers, architects, landscape architects, contractors and large land owners who actually produce and sell the components of contemporary settlement pattern. A considerable amount of time has also been spent working as, for and with public officials and serving as an appointed board member in 20 states and commonwealths. During much of this time I also held full time or adjunct faculty positions in Schools of Architecture and Law at three universities.
o From your comments it appears that your participation in these discussions is driven by your personal interest and is an attempt to justify your personal locational decisions. You give the impression that you desire to participate in the political process in a way that will further your personal financial interest.
This does not make us automatically right but it does suggest that you need to try to understand what we say before you blast off ad hominem attacks based on superficial, although sometimes insightful, generalities and non-sequiturs.
We agree with a number of your observations. We sincerely believe that if enough time were taken we would find few fundamental differences between your views and our own save for individual preferences. Those preferences are your right and prerogative so long as you pay for the choices you make and do not try to impose them on others.
As noted in our response to your first largely complementary e-mail, it is hard to start from ground zero with someone who already has “a dog in the fight.” This is especially true for one who has, as you have, taken intrenched public stands on human settlement pattern issues and the impact of these patterns.
When you wrote the second e-mail to us in December 2004 it was obvious you did not just have a dog in the fight, you had a whole pack of dogs. There were yapping, snarling and fighting among themselves as well as attacking a number of the villains you identify. (By “fighting among themselves” I mean that if some of your beliefs are true then others cannot be correct because they are in conflict.)
S/PI is in the business of providing educational materials and presentations but upon receipt of the second e-mail, we determined there was little use in trying to help you understand your own enlightened self interest. Your continuing posts confirm this observation. Jim Bacon has observed in a response to you that from his broad experience as a journalist covering this area for decades you are “essentially alone” in some of your emphatically stated views about the relationship between settlement pattern and mobility. A number of other conclusions you have reached are also without substance. You are welcome to those opinions but do not assume they are widely held or that they represent a intelligent collective response to contemporary societies settlement pattern dysfunctions.
WHY BOTHER TO RESPOND?
Most who have observed your “commentaries” suggest it would be of no value to respond. We will try one more time.
You insinuate that no one reads, understands or believes what we write or say. We have received feedback from many who have read our work or heard our presentations and know that a growing number hear, understand and agree. Many are pleased to understand how organic human settlement patterns evolve and function, others say they came to the same conclusions long ago. Our contribution is to put these science-based realities into a comprehensive conceptual framework that can lead to enlightened citizen action in a democracy with a market economy.
We also know that some who have read our work or have heard our presentations do not agree with S/PI. Many who do not agree are individuals (or representatives of organizations) whose livelihood (economic interests) would be threatened by widespread citizen understanding of human settlement pattern realities. Of the many who read our columns we have received negative feed back from a total of three individuals over the past two years. We are sure there are more out there.
Many of the sentences by these protagonists are interchangeable and could be scripted by those who make the most short-term profit from continuing Business-as-Usual. All the negative comments are in defense of location decisions the writer has personally made. Without exception they now want someone else to change their activities or to bail them out by spending public funds. Research in Maryland and elsewhere documents that the vast majority of the really bad location decisions are made by only about 20 % of the population. How many of these would change if they understood they had an alternative or if public action was directed toward providing an alternative (e.g. the refocusing of the federal subsidy for housing) is not yet clear.
The majority of those who have considered the absence of well documented negative feedback received by S/PI suggest it is because those who know enough of the facts about the topics we discuss to respond intelligently also know that we are on sound scientific grounds. They believe that an open debate on these topics would not be in their short-term economic interest. I am sure many of those who profit from dysfunctional human settlement patterns are delighted to see you flailing away. It saves them the cost of more intensive disinformation campaigns.
It is for this reason we will try to respond to your request to identify why your observations are not reality. Others who may read your comments will understand that there is more to our work than “... a string of declarative sentences...” Some who financially profit from Business-as-usual will understand that just quietly hoping we will go away is not an intelligent strategy. I also hope you will realize that more ad hominem attacks will not meet your or anyone else’s goals. That may be too much to hope for by then I am an optimist. I was not an optimist I would have just retired and enjoy the fruits of a successful career.
PERSONAL LOCATION DECISIONS
It is next important to note the geographical reality of our respective location decisions.
We live within 18 +/- miles of one another. We both live in Virginia and both live well inside the boundary of the Washington-Baltimore New Urban Region and within the National Capital Subregion. We both reside in the disaggregated Beta-community of Warrenton-Fauquier.
That is where the similarity ends. We live in fundamentally different settlement patterns at the dooryard, cluster, neighborhood and village scales. Your failure to understand or acknowledge this is the root of many of your attacks that we suggest are based on gross geographic illiteracy.
We live inside the Clear Edge of the Beta village-scale urban enclave of Greater Warrenton in the Beta Community of Warrenton-Fauquier. From our front porch we can see the buildings on Main Street and the steeple of my wife’s church. Every hour we hear the bell in the Court House tower. Across the street from our front door there is a footpath that will take me in less than five minutes to a place to get bread and milk, the police station, my dentist, orthopedic surgeon, dry cleaners, a hardware store/lumber yard and a number of other businesses. I can also walk in that time to the emergency room and the “gourmet” café at the community hospital. If I could not walk there, the fire station and the ambulance dispatch center are nearly as close. In ten minuets I can walk to Main Street with our bank, Town and County offices, the post office, drug store, lots of places to eat and shop, etc. A short drive or a longer walk take us to most of our weekly and monthly needs. (This is a working definition of an Alpha Village except for the percentage of residents who commute - see “The Commuting Problem” 17 January 2005.) My work is 13 steps down from our living level and my wife’s is 13 steps up. We own two vehicles but drive them under 3,000 mile a year each and one is now for sale.
This is not a new context for me, for us or for S/PI. Since leaving Glacier National Park to attend undergraduate school 49 years ago I have chosen to live in places that meet most of these same criteria of work/service/home relationships. This includes 30 years living in three Planned New Communities one of which I helped design from scratch. I actively participated in the management and governance of four including two that I helped design.
As I recall you live in the Delaplane area outside the logical location for a Clear Edge around an urban enclave of any scale (in other words, you live in the Countryside). You have stated that you work in the core of the National Capital Subregion. You sometimes refer to Greater Marshall as the urban place you identify with. Marshall is a Beta neighborhood-scale enclave that is five miles from Delaplane on the map and the shortest route between the two is over US Route 17 and Interstate 66.
As you know we do not judge your decision “wrong” unless you insist we pay to subsidize your decision. In other words you should pay your own way. We also note that our decisions are the ones that are most favored by the market. More would make this choice if it were not for the high costs caused by dysfunctional human settlement patterns.
A word on vocabulary: You often the word “rural” to describe part of the Beta community we share. I noted in Thursday’s community news paper that only 15% of the local John Deere dealer’s business is related to agriculture. From the equipment they display, I suspect the rest is from gasoline powered implements to mow lawns and plow long driveways. We spell out the confusion caused by the misuse of words like “rural,” “city” and “suburban” in two of the Appendices in The Shape of the Future.
With this background we will try to address your questions related to:
o What you “should” be paying based on your location choices.
o Your comments on the “Five Realities That Shape the Future.”
WHAT YOU “SHOULD’ BE PAYING BASED ON YOUR LOCATION CHOICES.
First, there is no way, given what we know of your activities, that S/PI could suggest a numerical value for the cost of your location decisions.
What can be stated without reservation is an application of the 10X Natural Law of human settlement pattern. Before this can be done one must understand the derivation of this Law. It is based on an examination of land developed in the United States over the past 50 years. This derivation is summarized in The Shape of the Future. It is best proven by those who doubt the results reconstructing the derivation for themselves.
We start our presentations on the issue of location variable costs by outlining the first three Natural Laws: A= BR2, The Cost of Services Curve and the 10 Person Rule. We then present the 10X Rule with an example such as that which follows for the Hyde Neighborhood.
When we make these presentations to audiences of concerned soccer moms and dads it only takes about 10 minutes before we achieve an “ah ha” expression of understanding on the faces of 75% of the audience. When it is part of a lecture to planning students it takes longer. For hard core “I am only here because I have to” types in graduate classes or professional audiences who have one or more dogs in the fight some never admit that they get it even if they do. As suggested above, they would have to admit that activities not in their short-term economic interest would be in the best interest of the majority.
Here is the 10X Rule exercise:
Draw a boundary around the land area upon which 1,000 contiguous dwellings are located in Zip Code 20144 (The Zip Code in which Delaplane is located). Call this The Hyde Beta Neighborhood. Next choose 1,000 similar sized units that are arranged in a spacial configuration that forms an Alpha Neighborhood within an Alpha Community. Next compare for the two areas the total cost of the 40 +/- public and private services which vary by location and which the market determines are necessary to support contemporary civilization.
The Hyde Neighborhood costs per unit will be in the range of ten times that of the Alpha Neighborhood costs per unit. This means that for a typical family of four in the Alpha neighborhood, the total bill for location variable expenses may be in the range of $8,500 per year and the same family would spend $85,000 per year for the same level of location-variable costs in The Hyde Beta Neighborhood.
The 40 +/- location-variable costs that make contemporary life possible include utilities, energy, communications, health and safety, education and transportation as well as many retail and repair services. The costs include items such as energy and communication which are now charged on a flat fee basis dictated by government regulation. Electrical distribution is a very useful example to explore in the Cost of Services Curve derivation and in the 10X Rule derivation due to the physics of line loss. These costs also include the often overlooked externalities such as long-term cumulative impact of wells and septic tanks on water tables and downstream water quality.
Of course a key element here is the cost and physics of transportation. We deal with this topic often because “transportation is the canary in the minefield of dysfunctional human settlement patterns.” We will address this again in our next column concerning solutions to the intraregional and interregional failure of the Interstate Highway System.
There are many facts and definitions that need to be understood. I do not expect you to accept this application of the 10X Rule upon first reading. I also ask you not to try to reject it out of hand by citing some of your experiences and observations that are not relevant to the discussion as has been your practice when attacking us in the past. You need to understand the definitions used and the derivation of the metrics applied as well as the first three Natural Laws.
There are a number of qualifications and examples spelled out in the description of the Natural Laws in our lectures. For the 10X Rule this includes an explanation of why the typical “cost of sprawl” efforts carried out by municipalities and used to establish proffers and adequate public facilities guidelines do not even scratch the surface. Here are some other points:
The subsidies that contribute to the 10X difference include federal, state and municipal subsides as well as the results of enterprise and agency policies. Some are recent, some have been in place since the administration of Andrew Jackson.
These subsidies are a reason the strident wails of the opponents of the “nanny-state” ring hollow. Those who decry “nanny-state” policies to improve the lives of those lower on the economic food chain are happy to send a letter for 37cents regardless of how much it costs to deliver, they are happy to pay the same per kilowatt hour for electricity at the end of a 1,900 feeder as is paid at the end of a 20 foot feeder. They are happy to flash their ideas over an Internet that exists because of government sponsored military and academic research. All the Alpha community phone bills subsidizes the long lines serving 50 acre urban lots. The list is long, about 40 elements long.
Even though there are some very expensive estates are within Zip Code 20144, the value per square foot of built area will be higher in the Alpha Neighborhood than in The Hyde Beta Neighborhood. This is not because (as you have stated) it costs more to build but because the market is willing to pay more for those units.
The derivations of Regional Metrics and the Five Natural Laws of Human Settlement cited in The Shape of the Future are not based not on what someone thinks should be built but on what has actually been built and what willing buyers pay for these alternative patterns by the square foot and by the unit. They are calibrated by spacial distribution at the dooryard, cluster, neighborhood, village and community scales to insure that these components will create Alpha (Balanced) Communities which is the only scale of settlement for which a minimum sustainable density that has so far been derived from contemporary development.
The Alpha Neighborhood is not the way someone thinks others should live, it is the way well informed builders have configured their product in the creation of Alpha (Balanced) Communities.
Regional Metrics relies on simple physics, geometry and mathematics. One of our objectives for Property Dynamics is to convert these into simple do-it-your-self programs so every citizens can make their own calculation.
In summary there is no way to say how much you should be paying for your location decisions. It is safe to say that it is a lot more than you are paying now. In fact it is so much more that had you known what you should have to pay, you would never have decided that Delaplane was the place for you to live unless you want to become a household that is supported by extensive use of land. Even before you have to pay the full cost of your location decisions, if you understood the relationship between settlement patterns and mobility you would not be claiming that your decision was a smart one.
You are not alone in making the Delaplane decision. I have, however, met only a few who are honest enough, once they understand the context, to say “if I know what I know now, I would never have made this choice. Almost all who make these decisions want someone to bail them out by building facilities (roads, schools, fire stations, etc. are just the tip of the iceberg) to meet their needs. This is the tyranny of the minority which is hard to overcome when this campaign meets the goals of those who make more short-term profit from dysfunctional human settlement patterns.
THE FIVE REALITIES THAT SHAPE THE FUTURE
In the second half of your post, you attack our “Five Realities the Shape the Future” the subject of a 15 December 2003 column.
If you carefully read the first part of this response you will understand the basis for the first reality concerning the quality of the settlement pattern that could exist within Radius = 20 miles from the centroid of the National Capital Subregion. This pattern is what the market deems most valuable. It is the pattern of settlement that makes the most citizens happy and safe. Other choices are available, so long as those who choose them pay the full cost of their decision. The way to lower the cost of quality development is to build more of it, not to subsidize dysfunctional patterns and densities and put up roadblocks to these more desirable patterns. This is the result of current municipal, state and federal policy, programs, incentives and education programs (e.g. Fanny Mae, Freddie Mac, et. al.)
On the second reality with respect to job location, you reverse course by agreeing with S/PI that this is a reality but asking why we do not oppose it. “Oppose” reality. Excuse me.
If anyone has any doubt about the job locations reality, The Washington Post does a nice job of reinforcing this reality on a regular basis. On 14 February 2005 they published the latest CoStar data on page E-9. A few minutes spent on the table showing the amount of rent per square foot, the location and volume of new office space confirms the Subregional job location reality.
Now I will reverse course on you. We do need to put new jobs in the disaggregated Beta communities like Warrenton-Fauquier. To build a Balanced (functional) community the new jobs and new houses to create this balance need to be inside the Clear Edges around the disaggregated components places like Greater Warrenton, Greater New Baltimore, Greater Remington, Greater Marshall, etc. Those who chose to live outside the Clear Edge just need to pay for the total cost. Let the market and an equitable allocation of cost determine the settlement pattern.
Some folks like you may want to live in the Countryside: That is fine, just so long as they pay their full cost.
Do you see a pattern here? You should be able now to answer your own questions about the rest of the “Five Realities That Shape the Future.”
Finally, you have mentioned Fairfax County and Montana to demonstrate of your facility with of spacial reality. I suspect you did not intend this to be a clear indication of geographical illiteracy but it is.
As you know I grew up in Montana and lived for over twenty years in Fairfax County. I can assure you that the urban residents of Montana in places like Greater Kalispell, Greater Missoula, etc. face exactly the same problems you do, only on a smaller scale. The Texas A&M annual congestion survey documents that the bigger the urban enclave, the worse the congestion. S/PI has always contended that, so long as there is cheap fuel, “automobility” is a less unintelligent option for mobility in the small urban agglomerations found in Urban Support Regions such as the one of which the State of Montana is a part.
The cure to traffic congestion in Montana? Charge the full cost of location-variable costs. It would also save home from burning up in forest fires. (See our 3 November 2003 column “Fire and Flood.”)
You work in the core of the National Capital Subregion because you have said that is the best place for you to find the kind of job you want. That is true for the majority of the 8-million citizens in this New Urban Region and why there are so few citizens per acre in Montana.
I hope this effort will help you make more constrictive observation and perhaps better location choices in the future.
EMR
For some unaccountable reason, I am moved to enter this discourse. But briefly, and in response to Mr. Hyde's assertion "If we can afford enough high-end vehicles to clog the roads, surely we can provide enough pavement to serve them..." I would like to suggest that serving vehicles is precisely the problem. Human mobility should be the goal. People should be able to conduct a substantial portion of what they do without getting in a car and driving 10 miles. It makes economic sense on both the micro- and macro- scales.(And about 25% of us can't drive and are hence completely excluded.) The transportation governance arrangements that we have are centered not on people, but the cars. It doesn't work.
Mr Risse is right.
But I do want to drive with Mr. Hyde on his commute. When I try to make my way across NoVa, it's nothing like his sedate voyage. For me the speeds vary between 85 mph, bumper-to-bumper, and snail's pace, so I can keep reading the same bumper sticker in front of me. And it takes an hour or two, a major share of the drive time in from the boondocks.
I may be guilty of one of my non-sequiturs here. The idea I was getting at is that we may have spent too much on cars and not enough on roads. It is a misallocation of resouces issue, just like everything else, but good grief, look at what some of those cars cost.
My trip is no more sedate than yours, maybe its just me that is more sedate.
Timewise I leave my home at 5:30 AM to catch the 6:15 VRE to crystal city, then Metro to the Pentagon. I freely admit this is patently crazy, but I sleep for an hour on the train. I arrive at my desk at 7:45.
If I miss the train I can wait for the next one if I'm already at the station which costs another 25 minutes.
My other choices are drive to Vienna Metro, or drive to my brother's home in Arlington and take the Metro from there. Either of those choices clocks in at pretty close to two hours.
If I just drive in using the HOV until the Hybrid option goes away, its under an hour and a half. At night with no traffic the trip takes an hour.
It generally moves OK Except for 29 and 66, 50 and 66, and beltway and 66. It is still dumb, dumb, dumb. As soon as I can economically make another choice, I will.
Ray Hyde
Delaplane
Let’s start with where we agree:
“The very rich get on splendidly in some areas. …..Over the past 25 years the top 5 percent of the economic ladder have gotten a lot richer, the bottom 40 percent have lost ground and those in the middle are running as fast as they can to keep their heads above water.”
“Yes, smaller schools in better locations will cost more money.” and we agree on most of what you say about the benefits of smaller schools.
“This gap should not be filled by new or expanded taxes on property, income or consumption. These sources of revenue are already spoken for.”
“We agree with a number of your observations. We sincerely believe that if enough time were taken we would find few fundamental differences between your views and our own save for individual preferences. Those preferences are your right and prerogative so long as you pay for the choices you make and do not try to impose them on others.”
I think this is the crux of the matter “so long as you pay for the choices you make and do not try to impose them on others.” Where we differ is in the full application of this principle, or maybe only in how it is measured. If we cannot determine what the costs are, or what constitutes an imposition on others, then this discussion cannot be resolved. If it is not resolved, then the results you promote are unlikely to occur because our disagreement is multiplied many times over in the real world. In turn, if the results you promote are not going to occur, how do we make the best of the situation we have?
Response to preliminaries:
With regard to “having a dog in the fight”, I own property in Alexandria and in the countryside, therefore I have two dogs in the fight. If your ideas turn out to be correct anytime in the near future, my Alexandria dog is a winner, if not, my Fauquier dog is a winner. If we are both partially right, then both dogs win. Therefore, I’m more or less ambivalent as regards my personal interests.
I once worked with a scientist who was convinced that some members of a family of compounds would have anti-carcinogenic effects. After painstakingly synthesizing them, one after another, for forty years, it turned out he was wrong. All of your years of experience represent your dog in the fight: to find yourself wrong after so many years would be very painful. As a newcomer to this argument, I lose nothing by being wrong, and everything to gain if you can convince me you are right.
You say you agree with some of my observations and describe them as “insightful and shallow”. At one time I more nearly favored your arguments, and for the past fifteen years I have remained silent in local affairs. Over time, I came to observe that influential people in the community were making statements, policy, and regulations based on arguments that seem to me to be both circular in nature and at the same time internally inconsistent. Eventually I came to the conclusion that we are making policy and regulations based on premises that may be wrong, in doubt, or at least subject to learned disagreement. If that is true, then we may be making improper impositions on others, or subsidizing our desires at the expense of others.
I have no doubt that the current situation is supported by popular acclaim. To the extent that popular acclaim is equivalent to Democracy, so be it. On the other hand, if popular acclaim is based on what amounts to advertising from special interests groups, of whatever ilk, then there may be a problem. Recently Loudoun County elected a board of supervisors who seem to be aligned with development interests. Whether that board or the previous board, or both, was elected at the behest of special interests is subject to debate, but the fact remains that individuals cast the ballots. I have no allegiance or membership in any special interests groups.
By expounding on your experience and then claiming my arguments are based on self interest you are taking advantage of two logical fallacies, the first is called Appeal to Authority (in this case your own) and the second is called Circumstantial ad Hominem. I’ve already pointed out explicit cases of ad Hominem arguments in your writing, which you responded to by likening me to a cowbird. I deny making personal attacks on you, just your writing and ideas.
With your level of education, I would expect better. I deny that your experience makes you right or that my personal interests make me wrong.
We each have personal interests, but that need not affect the quality of our arguments.
Why Bother to Respond:
I think we agree there are more people watching “Everyone Loves Raymond” tonight than there are reading this blog. As a consequence, I doubt there is little chance of “widespread citizen understanding of human settlement pattern realities.”, particularly as you see them.
I have no doubt that many people have responded favorably to your writing. I thought your comments on what happened in and around Gainesville subsequent to the demise of the mouse were entertaining and cogent, except for the conclusions. I also agree with your comments about the benefit of small schools. There is much you have to say that I don’t understand, and I’ll concede that it is partly because I have not read all your writings and I have yet to absorb your specialized and sometimes invented vocabulary.
I’ve been a sailor all my life and it is as natural to me as breathing. When I am teaching sailing, it is extraordinarily difficult for me to have to try to explain what seems to me to be obvious. I imagine it is the same with you and human settlement patterns.
By saying many agree with you and those that don’t have special interests, you are using more fallacious logical arguments: Appeal to Popularity and Circumstantial ad Hominem. I agree with what you say about interchangeable statements. When I read diatribes that purport to be academic or scientific from interest groups lie the Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, Property Rights Organizations and PEC, I take them with a lot of salt. Circumstantial ad Hominem doesn’t imply that you should not consider the source. However, just because different individuals repeat statements in similar ways does not mean they are wrong.
As for my own writings, I, too, have supporters and detractors.
Personal Location Decisions:
Congratulations. You have an excellent situation and I envy you. I have lived in similar circumstances and I recognize the luxuries you describe and I previously enjoyed. It’s nice to be able to take a nap at lunchtime. I too grew up in a resort area, renowned for its natural beauty, but I have to say, there is nothing quite so close to a religious experience in this world, as Glacier National Park. Clearly, it would not be the same if it were scattered with hillside villas.
The town I grew up in had an opportunity to become part of the national park system, but the local populace turned it down – because of self interest. Instead, they elected to pursue a plan for conservation that was affordable and based on revenue produced within the economy. Therefore, the most conservation could be achieved by promoting the most commerce.
I confess that I have no idea what you are talking about when you describe the “Beta village-scale urban enclave of Greater Warrenton in the Beta Community of Warrenton-Fauquier.” or being inside the Clear Edge. When you talk about science-based fact and Natural Laws, I don’t see any references other than to your own writing, nor have I found any. Are the 10X rule and others your invention, or have they been synthesized by others as well? To most people, the Beta-blah-blah-blah is the Town of Warrenton, let’s leave it at that.
I will attempt to catch up on your vocabulary, but that said, if you use common words to mean other than what they are commonly understood to mean, it generates confusion. I don’t think Fauquier is rural anymore, either, but that is the way it is frequently described, so I go along.
It is becoming harder to get farm equipment serviced, and harder to find good used equipment at the same time the dealers are selling more “yard goods.” That may have as much to do with the profitability of farming as it has to do with rural vs. suburban. It may be that even farmers are sufficiently prosperous now that they can afford more yard tools. The question is, is the farm dealer’s business better or worse?
Your location has advantages and so does mine. I doubt very seriously that when the time comes you will walk to the emergency room, but if you call the ambulance you will get there sooner and have a better chance to survive. I accept the difference in cost. For myself, I try to avoid doing business with the police station, and the fire and emergency dispatch are as close as your phone, closer if you are fortunate enough to have cell phone service. The fact that you can walk to such places is meaningless. When I am your age I expect I will be retiring my vehicles as well, but if you are lucky you will be able to do it without moving. You have a great situation, but it not all that great, and it precludes many other possibilities.
You have a great situation, and I had engineered a similar situation for myself once. It lasted nine years before it was disrupted by outside forces. It has been disrupted several times since, and mostly reassembled once, since disrupted again. My current plan to re-assemble it may take several years and cost thousands of dollars. I might have made what you call better locational decisions in some cases, had I made it an overarching priority, but in each case the cost was too high compared to other alternatives.
I submit that your view of people’s choices is narrow and over simplified. It takes longer and cost more to make change than you allow. In the recent Post article it was noted that one third of survey respondents had made some change in their circumstance to accommodate or avoid increasing congestion. Not everyone is clueless, as you claim.
I currently live on my wife’s family farm, which has been in her family since 1836, and is only a few subdivisions removed from the original land grant to Lord Fairfax. Ashby Glen is a Virginia Century Farm, having been in continuous production for over a hundred years. It’s hard for me to believe that such an enduring institution represents dysfunctional human settlement. At the same time, I recognize that its current situation has very little redeeming economic value.
The farm today is almost exactly the size of the average farm in Fauquier County, but it would be almost fifty percent larger than it is except for some unfortunate situations outside of family control. Among these was the fact that construction of Route 66 took 60 acres of the farm, which you can count as one of the benefits the countryside provides or one of the costs we pay, depending on your viewpoint.
We believe that the first structure on the farm is well over two hundred years old and it is currently used as a guest cottage. No doubt it was built without benefit of plans, building permits, building code, or certainly without modern materials.
The main house is over a hundred years old and it is the third to be built on the same foundation. The first two burned down due to lack of fire protection, a cost which the family absorbed as part of living in the countryside. It is framed of natural grown oak, and God help you if you ever need to drive or remove a nail. However, when the current structure is eventually replaced the foundation will no doubt be deemed “not good enough”.
When friends and acquaintances at work learn where I live they inevitably, almost without fail, say to me, “Gee, I’d love to have a place in the country some day.” I look them straight in the eye and say “What, are you nuts? Don’t even think about it. Do you realize I have over a hundred horsepower in lawn mowers, weed whackers, hedge trimmers, chain saws, roto-tillers, wood splitters, etc., etc. And that doesn’t count the three tractors and four trucks or twenty pieces of farm machinery. I have 80 tires on the ground and. if I replace one a month, the first one will dry rot in the seven years before I get around to replacing it again.” They usually re-think their desires.
I’m sure we both had a good laugh at stories that appeared last year about people who moved out, and then moved back, because it didn’t suit. Part of my farm business involves helping those that stay, so I see additions to the countryside as revenue sources rather than intrusions, mistakes or additional costs. Besides becoming friends and neighbors they increase the utility of already existing infrastructure and lower my share of the costs. My wife asks why I’m working at their places when we have so much to do at home, and my response is that I get paid for working there. I expect the money I get paid from them, comes from their job in the city.
Those who desire to live in the countryside don’t do so on my account, but there are plenty enough of them to make a market. As it stands now, for any location decision I make other than the one I have now the cost probably involves a divorce, so it’s not much of a choice.
I’m happy for you, but if you are suggesting I’m in the wrong place, you are about a hundred years to late or fifty too early.
On Infrastructure Costs:
Let me see if I understand this: you claim I should be paying ten times more than I am in order to lower the costs of those in town, and you claim at the same time that any argument I make against being robbed blind is invalid because of my special interests.
County officials frequently say that farms pay $3 in taxes for every $1 in services they receive. Town residents, according to the figures pay $1 in taxes for every $1.20 in services. Based on just on county figures, one could say as a general rule people who live in my position are subsidizing those who live in your position, but the real problem is, we just don’t know.
I understand you to believe that people who live in places outside what you call the Clear Edge generate extraordinary societal costs, including non-market costs. You haven’t given enough information to complete the 10X rule exercise, so I can’t reach a conclusion. I suppose what you say about electricity costs is true, for example. If I live farther from the generation source than you, and we pay the same rate, then you are subsidizing me because of the excess power loss on the way to my house, and the excess costs of amortizing the additional power line, etc.
We have the history of the rural electrification programs, Fannie Mae and others you mentioned to thank for this. The Agriculture Department also has many programs designed around the idea that agriculture is no longer the economic engine of the countryside. It must be frustrating to have all thee organizations working against you. Apparently they feel that these “investments” are eventually recovered by increased economic activity, and even if not, that peoples lives in the “Public Benefit” sense are better off. How do you propose to undue all the effort that has been expended in these efforts and achieve your goals without causing an astronomical waste of previous investment, not to mention culture and happiness.
We pay a high price for satellite and cable, largely to support obscene sports salaries. We have the “choice” to do without the nature channel or become sports stars if we don’t like the subsidy we pay. If you think the countryside is so heavily subsidized, why not take advantage of it and move to the countryside? I don’t think anyone claims life is universally fair.
Many people claim that the countryside provides many benefits and much of it is non-marketable. Even you admit those benefits must be maintained by humans, so Your analysis of infrastructure is incomplete without considering costs and benefits. I can provide references to a number of professional planners and economists that say, “One cannot claim, as a general rule, that rural residential development is a net fiscal loss to counties.”
There are also many claims to the contrary, many based on Cost of Community Services analysis under a method developed by the American Farmland Trust. Using your own argument we might dismiss or discount them as having a special interest. Instead, I submit that the answer is unknown, or we have yet to agree on what algorithm to use in order to find an answer that is fair. I don’t think your simple computer program will do it.
I’ll need to consider your argument more, if the real data ever becomes available, but my offhand reaction is that your argument is a gross simplification, an exaggeration or both. Parenthetically, neither of us would probably have to worry about electric power if the power companies were not subsidized. They are not paying the full costs of their decisions. For example, I imagine nuclear power plants would have a hard time buying insurance on the open market, so they are “insured” by the government.
Your comparison of infrastructure costs is not so much one of location as it is of time: Georgetown was once the site of a dairy farm owned by ancestors of one of the areas major land developers, but now you point to Georgetown as a high value place.
On Full Cost Argument:
If we follow the idea that people should pay the full costs of their decisions, then we should remove the farm subsidies that make the countryside marginally useful, the tax subsidies that let the wealthy give away development rights at inflated prices and still keep the land, we should do away with subsidies for VRE, Metro, and public transit, especially those based on auto use.
People who walk or bike and advocate building sidewalks should pay the full costs too. A recent study shows that sidewalks decrease the value of a home by 2.9%, a result that surprises me. Considering that curb, gutter, and sidewalk costs almost as much as a lane of pavement, plus they concentrate the run-off necessitating more storm water control, sidewalks may be a lousy idea in some cases.
My Alexandria Neighborhood was offered curbs and sidewalks by the county, and on very attractive terms. I supported the idea but the neighborhood voted them down, and it turns out they were “right”.
Yesterday’s paper had several letters from people in the countryside claiming that their places with horses pay their way because of the value of the Horse Industry. They are going to very upset to learn that they should be paying ten times more. If some woman in town wanted a pool, they said, she should move to Fairfax where they have pools. Notice the similarity to the argument above, concerning location choice. Still, in other places and times, horses have been a bone of contention concerning property values.
The horse owners also claimed they should have more infrastructures in the way of riding trails etc., presumably funded partially by you and I who don’t ride. However, my view is different than yours on this because I make part of my income by selling hay. That hay is taxable and supports guess what – folks in town and folks in the countryside. How can I possibly know where the money goes?
The same article mentioned above on home improvements noted that a horse paddock improves the homes value by a whopping 24%. A large wooded lot increases the price by 11%. By comparison, some experts have concluded that al the extensive planning and construction that goes into new urbanism improves home values by 15%. You would argue that the increased infrastructure costs outweigh even these advantages, but that has not been proven. It appears that such amenities cost little in marginal infrastructure and therefore represent free money to the county, in support of the county’s cost figures.
An obvious and ridiculous “new revenue source” then would be to require that every home have a horse paddock, thereby increasing assessments and tax revenue. The problem is that they represent an added cost to those that have no use for them and the plethora of horse paddocks would reduce the value, thereby eliminating the extra income to the county. Where would be the “Public Benefit” in such a requirement any more than there is a “Public Benefit” in requiring curbs and sidewalk?
If we are to allow people to live in the countryside provided they pay their full costs, then the obvious corollary is that people who already live in the countryside must be allowed to sell, without having other peoples choices imposed on them. This condition does not exist today, and as a result, the costs of lots in town are artificially inflated. The argument might be made that someone who lives in town is arguing in their own self interest by proposing to artificially raise the cost of new land elsewhere.
In addition, those who own infill lots must be allowed the opportunity of holding their lots off the market for maximum future benefit; otherwise we are imposing our choices on him and causing him a disbenefit that we do not pay for. If the presumed lower cost of infrastructure due to infill is less than the disbenefit caused, then where is the public benefit? At present we can’t measure either the costs or the benefits, so we should keep our hands off.
Just as we charge landowners in the country full cost for their infrastructure under your idea we should charge developers who profit from transit friendly development the full cost of their infrastructure. That cost will of course be transferred to the homeowners and be reflected in their assessments and taxes. Those that ride metro would still bear the enormous cost of operating expenses.
By now you may be able to see that we just don’t know how to answer the question of who pays for what, but in some cases we may be learning, or be able to soon. When that happens, some of your ideas may come to fruition naturally. We are not far from being able to tax autos based on exact location and use., unfortunately recent experience suggests that even this advance may be co-opted by diverting the money to other uses.
One insurance company is already using GPS to base insurance charges, and auto rental companies use it too. Aside from the privacy rights problems, how this plays out is going to be interesting, and the results may not be anything like either of us expects. Incidentally, that insurance company charges more for going to town and still more for going to the bad part of town. That could seriously hamper redevelopment efforts, but they also charge more for longer distances. The final results are anybody’s guess.
The “Clear Edge”
All of these conditions tend to muddy the waters of who pays for what and consequently where is the “Clear Edge”. England has attempted to maintain a clear edge around the cities since 1947, and they are now in the process of changing there system to more nearly reflect market realities. One of those realities is that as people become more prosperous they desire more space, and not just indoor space. Studies there found that the price elasticity for “garden space” or what we call yards was 2.4 times as great as the price elasticity for living space.
Since their zoning regulations were designed around what was necessary, and not what was desired or affordable, enormous price disparities developed over the years. In addition, where planners allowed for the necessary it may not have been in the locations desired. Neither prices nor demands were considered in their decisions, only necessity, efficiency and control were considered.
In 2002 the Wall street Journal reported a 350 sq. ft. former London public toilet renovated into a stylish apartment and offered for sale at $200,000, and a beach hut 60 miles from London without plumbing or toilet for $92,500. Basically, over fifty years the English “Clear Edge” experiment was a disaster and resulted in housing prices so inflated that hundreds of thousands of Englishmen retired – to the French countryside. Major reforms are now underway.
It seems that striving for efficiency and necessity mindless of anything else may well result in dysfunction.
In researching this response I found a discussion of European Union planning for future development. Those planners use an eight level description for settlement patterns which is easily and quantitatively described. It uses three descriptors for urban areas and five for rural areas. Each kind of area blends somewhat with the others but there is no mention whatever of a “Clear Edge” or a need for it. Apparently some professional planners prefer to deal with what is rather than what should be if we ever get around to it.
On Price vs Value
You point out that the built areas of homes in the city are priced higher than the built areas of homes in the country, and therefore the value is higher. But value is usually perceived to be higher when the price is lower. That is why those presumably intelligent people with enough income to buy estates in the countryside do so. That, plus they want the space for their horses or whatever. Your argument is not only wrong, it is a Red Herring because you are not comparing the same thing.
How much would it cost to maintain a stable in the city? How big would you have to make the clear edge in order to include all the uses people desire?
You refer to the market as one market, but in fact there are many. Wealthy people who choose to live in the city or in the country have much more price elasticity than the rest of us, and the result is artificially high prices for desirable properties in either location, as they bid against each other. As you say, the wealthy do quite well in some situations.
For them, the downside is not so much an issue as the immediate benefits of their choices. But everyone else will carefully consider whether to buy a house that is already maxed out in price. You don’t want the “value” of the most expensive house on the block.
As for the rest of us there is no value at all in what we can’t afford. Our location choices come down to moving to less expensive locations or (gag) housing subsidies such as are currently being discussed in Arlington, Montgomery, Fairfax, and Prince William.
You claim that less expensive places are less desirable, and that is partially true, but they are the most desirable to those for whom it is the only option. They are also the places that are likely to appreciate most, because they have more upside as the market develops, and less risk if it doesn’t.
Not only is there more than one market, but the market changes with time. There is lag associated with new conditions, as people absorb the new facts and initiate new job or home locations. We never reach a state of grace, and change is endemic and ongoing. There is no Fundamental Change that will induce a steady state solution, and the more planning we do the less prepared we are for change.
On Building in the city
Having entirely re-built two homes in Alexandria and built one, I refute your statement that building costs are not higher there. It is true that the costs per square foot are only slightly higher as a rule, but that is not the only problem. The cost of bureaucracy is enormous. It took me 24 months and $7000 worth of engineering to overcome county objections to my building site, which I knew to be unfounded and were proven so in the final event. That was on an infillexisting lot with water and sewer already on site.
What was the point in that exercise? We would have been money and time ahead if the county had granted a conditional permit: dig the foundation and look; if there is a problem then punt, and push the dirt back. The county refused even to come to the site, or discuss the issue with my soils engineer, they simply rejected his professional report out of hand. I very nearly had to blast to get my specially engineered “unstable soils” foundation in the ground. In the end they cheated themselves out of two years tax revenue and me out of two years appreciation and use of the house. All costs and no gain is a funny way to save money.
Because the land costs are high any such delay amounts to a construction expense, and because there are so many potential complications, every move needs to be studied with caution. Complexity and density costs a lot of money, and it shows up in the tax structure, congestion and many other subtle costs.
On why we commute and shape shifting.
An increase in center city wages induces more people to commute and more people to move to the city. This increases the price of homes in town and increases them disproportionately due to the price elasticity of higher paid workers. As home prices increase it induces still more people to commute and fewer to buy in town. If home prices and wages increase together, more people will commute. If wages increase faster than home prices, more people will commute. If home prices escalate in town and elsewhere together then still more people will commute.
Every factor is biased towards moving outward except two: the time of commute, and business economics.
Higher home prices mean that businesses must offer higher wages to get people to move in. Eventually higher wages make the company less competitive and the company moves. The locus of jobs changes and people begin to make new location, commuting, and housing decisions.
If commuting time increases, then either the wage differential must be high enough to compensate or people will accept lower paying jobs elsewhere, which helps make the company more competitive if it moves. Policies that encourage economic development in BOTH places turn out to encourage population growth in the center city.
Mathematical models predict the cost of commuting an hour is just enough to raise city housing costs 10%, and about 30% of the population will choose to accept those costs. That pretty much corresponds to what we see, except some people are traveling farther because of exceptionally high housing prices caused by restrictive housing policies or exceptionally high wages in this market. People are making rational decisions on commuting time vs housing costs and those decisions are biased to moving farther out partly because of the price elasticity of the wealthier citizens who can afford to compete against each other for price.
What you say is true, the way to lower housing prices in the city is to build more of it. But my experience was, and my observation from reading the paper is that there is tremendous opposition to overcome: they don’t want more housing, they want more space, and they perceive more housing to be against their interests. They particularly don’t want affordable housing. Just removing barriers and subsidies to other activities won’t do it. It might help a little bit but the poor will still be out in the cold.
I have a job in the core of the region because that is where I found one when I needed it. Now that I have one I can work on getting it moved closer to home, preferably in-home. Failing that, I can move to the Alexandria house, but either task involves a lot of money and time and may take months or even years, and I planned for this eventuality by keeping the Alexandria house. Most people aren’t so lucky.
How will we pay for what we get?
If a new job develops in Warrenton perhaps I will take it and reduce by one the congestion on Rte 66. If we do that a few thousand times we can remove enough trips to make 66 bearable. Essentially we will have moved congestion from overcrowded roads to under used roads and thereby improved the use of some of our ALREADY EXISTING infrastructure and lowered its effective cost. We might have to build some other new infrastructure to compensate, but whatever it is it will be less expensive than what we are doing now. If part of that infrastructure is septic fields in the countryside, well, at least the users paid for them.
This is exactly the point I made when this argument started in your own words: “.I can assure you that the urban residents of Montana in places like Greater Kalispell, Greater Missoula, etc. face exactly the same problems you do, only on a smaller scale.” They have it on a much smaller scale precisely because they are more spread out. A collision in Montana is more likely to involve wildlife than people in cars. Congestion in Kalispell is nothing like congestion in Fairfax, and can’t be because they have fewer people in one place. I suspect that a similar reason at least partially accounts for Mr. Risse’s location in Warrenton rather than his former location in Fairfax, then again it might be some reason I have no way of understanding.
It is exactly the argument Mr. Risse makes for more and smaller schools in more locations. We need more and smaller job sites in more locations. But jobs follow housing as shown in Prince William. More and smaller infrastructure in more places allows us more flexibility and lower costs.
Part of what causes our current situation is enormous chunks of infrastructure that turn out to be in the wrong place or insufficient as new market forces develop. We spent $12 Billion to develop Metro in the 1970’s. At the time no one could have envisioned or planned for the Eastern Silicon Valley and the enormous growth in government which caused changes in living patterns not supported by Metro which is now pretty near a functional failure.
As one Senator said, anyone who thinks Metro is about transportation doesn’t know what’s going on. It’s a gigantic subsidy for various interests paid for by riders and taxpayers. At least it is a subsidy that some people can use and enjoy. Which is a good thing, because we can hardly abandon it, as we could some unused country road.
It is the changes that cause congestion whether road or rail, not a failure of a system that was designed for a different dynamic. Planning can’t keep up with changes, particularly if we spend all our time arguing over who pays for what, or who is subsidizing whom.
It also turns out turns out that a lot of congestion can be caused by a small and localized deficit in infrastructure, and those locations change due to market forces which are caused partially by congestion. Dysfunctional government that refuses to adapt to change is what causes these problems. All those road projects we put off on account of NIMBY and other problems have now combined to cause a larger and more expensive problem later. These small problems can be fixed (until market conditions change again) if we spend the money, but we have to realize it is a constant process. This is a key feature of the Texas Transportation survey that is frequently overlooked.
So where does the money come from? “This gap should not be filled by new or expanded taxes on property, income or consumption. These sources of revenue are already spoken for.” Well, I don’t care what you call it, there is only one source of money and that is income, and income depends on commerce. If we create more jobs, we’ll have more commerce, more cash flow, and more income and more to spend on stuff we want.
But jobs follow housing, and nearly anything that reduces housing induces stresses that reduce commerce.
Where is the housing going to go? The answer is wherever people choose to make it go, so long as they accept the costs that we can agree upon and are verifiable. Unfortunately that means no Clear Edge, unless one develops naturally, which I doubt. How can you have a clear edge if you allow people to do as they please, except for cost? These are mutually contradictory ideas.
This takes us to the problem with smart growth and new urbanism or whatever Beta-blah blah you call it: they both require legal enforcements of various kinds to make them happen. Legal enforcements represent a cost in themselves, which reduces the opportunity for commerce, but an additional cost to someone and a benefit to someone else: in violation of the pay your own way and don’t impose idea. If we go down that road we necessarily lose the “Public Benefit” that started all this, it turns out, you see, that the “Public Benefit” is just the sum of a whole lot of little private ones.
Ray Hyde
Delaplane
"District property values jumped an average of 14.6 percent last year, with the fastest appreciation occurring in some of the city's poor and working-class neighborhoods, according to an analysis of assessments scheduled to be released today.
Prices increased the most in Trinidad, a hardscrabble neighborhood in Northeast, which showed a nearly one-third increase in values since last year. Prices also rose more than 25 percent in Petworth and Columbia Heights, two fast-gentrifying neighborhoods in Northwest. "
I submit that this quote from todays Washington post indicates that even people who choose to live in town select the lowest price accomodations and not what Mr. Risse calls the "highest value" accomodations.
Ray Hyde
Delaplane, VA
Post a Comment