A long piece — too long for me to read at this time of day — but this part was pointed to by Tyler Cowen.
Home Economics – New York Times:
In the years since coming to Harvard — and in the years that have preceded his current work on real estate — Glaeser has methodically examined how transportation, education, crime, weather and sprawl affect the fortunes of America’s cities, as if turning over tarot cards one by one. He isn’t the only economist to look at these subjects, but he is arguably the most original in assimilating careful and highly mathematical economic research. His lecture, given to an audience of about 90 people, first discussed the historical trends that have shaped urban growth. Until recently, cities existed to economize on transportation costs — hence their locations near industries or agriculture to reduce the expense of shipping products by sea or by train. Yet because transport (mainly trucking) costs dropped significantly during the 20th century, location has become irrelevant. In Glaeser’s view, cities now exist so that people can have face-to-face interactions or be entertained or consume products and services. For businesses, cities are a place to benefit from a spillover in ideas and to reduce costs by being near other companies.
OK, this is the old density/propinquity argument, that deals are driven by face-to-face meetings more than by new-fangled connectivity (machines can talk to each over wires, but their owners like to see each other’s faces).
This evolution, of course, has coincided with a vast American migration toward regions of sun and sprawl. Glaeser likes to point out the close correlation between a city’s average January temperature and its urban growth; he also notes that cars per capita in 1990 is among the best indicators of how well a city has fared over the past 15 years. The more cars, the better — a conclusion that seems perfectly logical to Glaeser. Car-based cities enable residents to buy cheaper, bigger houses. And commuters in car-based cities tend to get to work faster than commuters in cities that rely on public transit. (The average car commute is about 24 minutes; on public transportation, it is around 48 minutes.) While many of his academic peers were looking at, and denigrating, how the majority of Americans have chosen to live, Glaeser (though no fan of the aesthetics of sprawl himself) didn’t think an economist should allow taste to affect judgment. “You shouldn’t go around thinking that all these people are just jackasses for deciding to drive an automobile,” he says.
But is that sustainable? Or even universal? My experience in Atlanta (living there) and NYC visiting suggest otherwise. Especially is the real estate needed for roads is already claimed by buildings that suit the density model. There’s no mention of the distances traveled: do people cover the same distances in those 24 and 48 minutes spans? Or are the drivers coming from close in (ie, small drivable cities, like Atlanta was if you lived and worked downtown) while the transit riders are coming from another state (like Connecticut or New Jersey)?
In any case, Glaeser discovered that there can be more to urban success than cars and palm trees. For a city without warm weather and a car-friendly environment, skills are destiny. That is why New York and Minneapolis, with vast numbers of college graduates, have done so well. “Boston would be just another declining, cold, manufacturing city if it weren’t for its preponderance of human capital,” Glaeser says. And his studies suggest that the more skilled a city’s population, the more skilled it is becoming, as entrepreneurs attract skilled workers who in turn attract entrepreneurs. Americans, as a result, are sorting themselves through education and geography more and more with each passing year.
Shades of the Creative Class argument . . .
The process yields losers as well as winners. Late last year, Glaeser wrote a controversial article that made a case against rebuilding New Orleans. He has since become an intellectual leader to a tiny, unsentimental, let’s-not-rebuild-the-city faction. “There’s some small core of the city that should be there,” he says, “but the city itself has been in decline for 50 years and in relative decline for 150 years relative to the U.S. population as a whole. It’s not a great spot to have a city; it’s incredibly expensive to build the infrastructure to keep it there. You can’t possibly argue that New Orleans has been doing a good job of taking care of its poor residents, either economically or socially. And surely some of the residents are better off by being given checks and being allowed to move elsewhere.”
[ . . . ]
Glaeser, for his part, says he feels the same about New Orleans as he does about many cities of the Rust Belt. “I believe very strongly that our obligation is to people, not places, and I think we certainly have an obligation — ethical, economic, what have you — to the residents of Detroit,” he told me. But he sees no economic or geographic reason to have a large city there anymore, and he views the prospects for any rebound as dim. (Detroit ranks last among cities with more than 500,000 residents in percentage of college graduates.) The city produced the cars that produced the sprawl that helped destroy the city; such tragedy might have been lessened had it produced more universities too. “There are no reasons why it can’t, and shouldn’t, decline,” Glaeser says. “And I would say that for many other cities. There’s no reason not to let decline go forward.” The greatness of America is dependent in part upon regional evolutions and migrations, he adds. “Places decline and places grow. We shouldn’t stand in the way of that.”
I need to read this in full: there seem to be too many ideas that seem contradictory (a car-based culture and higher-ed — a concept that I associate with density and foot-scale movement — seem not to work together). My skim of this suggests a lot of contrarian or provocative ideas in search of a theme: perhaps it’s there and I didn’t see it.
<update> Another aspect of this came to me as I was walking Green Lake this morning. So much of Seattle was developed in concert with the spread of street car lines: as the traction companies pulled their lines out further from downtown, developers would plat and sell the land around and on route to the terminus. Public transportation does have a role in the building of cities. Picture New York or London without their subways and surface lines. Would they command their status without making it possible for people in outlying areas to access their job markets? I think transportation is a Great Leveller: where getting to and from a job might take pocket change in a transit-served area, the same task requires investing in a disposable asset — cars don’t hold value, after all — for no other purpose than to get to work to pay for it. Surely that money would be better spent on education or housing or even on entertainment in the community. I’d rather spend a car payment as a bar tab than as a car payment with the attendant expenses on fuel, maintenance, insurance, etc.
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