Policy not Preference

David Edmondson, writing for The Greater Marin, had a great post exploring the effect policies have on cities:

Suburbanization, and the policies that encourage it outside and within cities, is to blame. The layers of regulation banning increasing density; the hundreds of billions invested in roads to speed suburbanites into the city in cars; the parking lots to store all those cars that destroyed buildings and the city’s fabric; and the zoning codes that locked uses into place have released bizarre forces on cities. Where suburbanization has been restrained, city living is so valuable but so difficult to accommodate that housing is squeezed into every nook and cranny of developable space, and there’s not a lot of that. Where suburbanization runs rampant, cities collapse under the weight of regulation and outright destruction.

His thoughts about the emerging discussion of micro-apartments being a symptom of decades of bad policy rather than a solution for meeting extraordinary demand were particularly compelling. One effect of Euclidean zoning is a lack of flexibility - a lock-in of sorts. Without up zoning, a neighborhood has no chance to change - to mature and grow up as neighborhoods traditionally have. Without the ability to mature, neighborhoods are legally prevented from adjusting to meet demand which leaves only sporadic opportunities for growth or vast unmet demand. With the latter, we begin to talk of cramming more people into smaller spaces. It’s an interesting angle on an increasingly prevalent topic.