Economist's View: "US Sprawl is not a Market Outcome"

Economist's View: "US Sprawl is not a Market Outcome"

I think John Stossel should be ignored when it comes to economics, he either doesn't know what he is talking about or he is willing to mislead people. For example, he was still claiming that tax cuts pay for themselves long after it should have been clear to any decent journalist that this was a false claim (he went so far as as late as 2007 -- long after the "Bush tax cuts paid for themselves" myth had been thoroughly debunked -- to say he wasn't sure the Bush tax cuts were desirable since the extra revenue the tax cuts generated will allow government to grow larger).

But whether I think John Stossel and his predictable libertarian views should be ignored or not, people are responding to his latest column claiming that urban sprawl is good (because, to a libertarian, it is very rare that government can improve upon market outcomes no matter how bad the market outcome might be). Richard Green explains how zoning laws discourage mixed use development and promote urban sprawl, and how zoning laws are used to keep the poor from locating in certain areas:

US sprawl is not a market outcome, by Richard Green: A discussion is going around the internet about John Stossel's "libertarian" piece on the virtues of sprawl. John Norquist, on the other hand, labels sprawl a "communist plot," and Matthew Yglesias notes how bulk zoning requirements promote sprawl.

A point John likes to make is sprawl is at least in part the result of government housing finance policy. The New York Times this morning:

I.R.S. requirement keeps the agency from acquiring mortgages made in buildings where more than 20 percent of the square footage is commercial — space that is used for, say, a hotel or a doctor’s office.

Mixed use development is not going to happen if it can't get financed. Most of Paris, London, large swaths of San Francisco (i.e., some of our best urban places) would not qualify for US housing finance rules. And of course, single use zoning would ban them all.

But most insidious is that zoning is used as a tool to keep low-to-moderate income people out of suburbs. The town next door to mine--San Marino--has zoning requirements so onerous that it is not possible to build small housing there. Even my town, Pasadena, which at least has a bunch of apartments, prevents construction of granny flats on lots smaller than 15,000 square feet. These rules keep out the poor, which reduces expenditures on social services, which makes property values higher, which keeps out the poor, which...

Of course poor people must live somewhere, and so they live in cities with old housing stock that was built before the era of stringent zoning. So cities with old housing stock are placed at a fiscal disadvantage, which induces people with means to leave, which puts them at a greater fiscal disadvantage, etc...