Zoned Out

Regulation, Markets, and Choices in Transportation and Metropolitan Land Use

Jonathan Levine

• Publisher: RFF Press
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136526688
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Researchers have responded to urban sprawl, congestion, and pollution by assessing alternatives such as smart growth, new urbanism, and transit-oriented development. Underlying this has been the presumption that, for these options to be given serious consideration as part of policy reform, science has to prove that they will reduce auto use and increase transit, walking, and other physical activity. Zoned Out forcefully argues that the debate about transportation and land-use planning in the United States has been distorted by a myth?the myth that urban sprawl is the result of a free market. According to this myth, low-density, auto-dependent development dominates U.S. metropolitan areas because that is what Americans prefer. Jonathan Levine confronts the free market myth by pointing out that land development is already one of the most regulated sectors of the U.S. economy. Noting that local governments use their regulatory powers to lower densities, segregate different types of land uses, and mandate large roadways and parking lots, he argues that the design template for urban sprawl is written into the land-use regulations of thousands of municipalities nationwide. These regulations and the skewed thinking that underlies current debate mean that policy innovation, market forces, and the compact-development alternatives they might produce are often 'zoned out' of metropolitan areas.

In debunking the market myth, Levine articulates an important paradigm shift. Where people believe that current land-use development is governed by a free-market, any proposal for policy reform is seen as a market intervention and a limitation on consumer choice, and any proposal carries a high burden of scientific proof that it will be effective. By reorienting the debate, Levine shows that the burden of scientific proof that was the lynchpin of transportation and land-use debates has been misassigned, and that, far from impeding market forces or limiting consumer choice, policy reform that removes regulatory obstacles would enhance both. A groundbreaking work in urban planning, transportation and land-use policy, Zoned Out challenges a policy environment in which scientific uncertainty is used to reinforce the status quo of sprawl and its negative consequences for people and their communities.

CHAPTER ONE

MARKET FAILURES
AND PLANNING FAILURES

The low-density, car-dependent development that characterizes most U.S. metropolitan areas—”urban sprawl”—has been implicated in a host of societal ills. These have included pollution, congestion, greenhouse gas emissions, traffic crashes, and excess energy consumption because of the intensive automobile use that this urban form demands. Poor physical fitness has recently been added to this list, along with an obesity epidemic stemming from the inactivity of a car-reliant lifestyle. Sprawl's territorial appetites have been linked to loss of habitat, wetlands, prime agricultural land, and the beauty of open spaces. A stunted community life is the ostensible product of the lack of casual, face-to-face interactions in lively public spaces. And this organization of our metropolitan areas has been accused of leaving low-income carless households isolated in job-poor central cities. The literature arguing for the presence of these impacts is immense, matched only by the countervailing studies questioning the causal link between metropolitan form and any particular set of outcomes.

Underpinning this debate are notions about markets, regulation, and the conditions that justify governmental intervention. According to a story broadly accepted on both sides of the debate, urban sprawl is primarily a product of free markets in land development. The scarcity of compact, mixed-use, walkable and transit-friendly neighborhoods (termed here “alternative” development forms) in areas developed or redeveloped since the mid-20th century is a function of market disinterest or inability to provide such alternatives. Since most Americans prefer low-density living, the free market offers few profits for those who would build compact, mixed-use, transit-accessible neighborhoods. Urban planning interventions seek to constrain the market's sprawling tendencies through regulatory tools aimed at fostering development forms that the market is otherwise incapable of providing.

To some observers, these interventions are warranted as responses to the market failures of sprawl. To others, they are unjustified impositions on households’ freedom of choice, with scarce evidence of benefit in reducing pollution or congestion. Yet for both camps, the justification for planning interventions rests on the quality of the evidence of benefits of the alternative development forms. Scientific confidence that the alternatives to sprawl reduce driving, increase walking, spur transit use, curb obesity, promote cleaner air, or demonstrate other benefits tends to justify planning interventions into the workings of the market. By contrast, ambiguity in the scientific findings tends to undermine the rationale for planning intervention; if we do not yet know enough about the relationship between land use and transportation, public health, or other policy realms, we ought to refrain from seeking gains in these areas through land-use interventions.

There is an internal inconsistency with that account of U.S. metropolitan development, however. It supposes that planning interventions tend to counter any sprawling tendencies of the land-development market. Yet empirical social science research into the impact of land-use regulation on metropolitan development patterns (Chapter 3) suggests that zoning and other municipal interventions actually do the opposite: they lead both to development that is lower in density and to communities that are more exclusive than would arise in the absence of such regulation. This should hardly be surprising; zoning ordinances typically limit building heights and lot coverage and set minimum parking space requirements for a development, and engineering standards determine roadway-width minima. Empirical research suggests that rather than mitigating the market's sprawling tendencies, the ubiquitous interventions of municipal land-use regulation actually exacerbate them. Current regulatory approaches are certainly not the sole cause of urban sprawl; the interaction of household preferences and developer tendencies would almost certainly generate vast areas of low-density, auto-oriented development even if municipal regulation did not compel these development forms. But the empirical evidence suggests that the “American way of zoning” truly does make the suburbs of U.S. metropolitan areas more spread out than they might otherwise be (Fischel 1999a). If this is the case, land-development markets are capable of producing more compact development than is currently observed but are thwarted by municipal regulation.

That finding would suggest an entirely different paradigm regarding the relationship between urban sprawl and the free market. In this alternative story, although the private market may well have sprawling tendencies of its own, it is capable of producing alternatives but is impeded by municipal regulations that lower development densities, separate land uses, specify wide roadways, and mandate large parking areas. Under these circumstances, an easing of some governmental interventions is a prerequisite—a necessary though perhaps not sufficient condition—to the flourishing of the alternative development forms. The thrust of policy reform on behalf of compact development would not be market forcing but market enabling; it would seek to overcome regulatory impediments to compact, mixed-use development so that these neighborhood forms can be provided where they are economically feasible.

This framework also suggests an entirely different rationale for land-use policy reform, justified on the basis of increased individual and household choice in transportation and land-use. Where compact, mixed-use development is no longer zoned out, people who prefer these alternatives would be able to get more of what they want in their transportation and land-use environment. Compact development may well have benefits in travel behavior, public health, or other realms, but policy reform would not hinge on scientific proof of these effects. Ambiguity in the scientific data would not undermine the rationale for reform, since policy change would be based on removing obstacles to choice, rather than on scientifically proven benefits of alternative development forms.

It matters greatly which of the two competing paradigms governs our policy environment; it influences both our planning prescriptions and the degree to which metropolitan areas provide alternatives to low-density, auto-oriented development. Within the first paradigm, the burden of proof of benefit falls on those who favor compact, mixed-use alternatives to sprawl; proponents must establish the transportation, environmental, or public health advantages of compact development. Within the second, ambiguity of scientific data would not be an obstacle to the promotion of alternative development forms. (See Table 1-1).

Table 1-1. Alternative Paradigms of Metropolitan Land-Use Policy

	Paradigm 1	Paradigm 2
Explanation for scarcity of alternatives to sprawl	Market disinterest	Regulatory barriers that exacerbate market tendencies toward sprawl
Thrust of regulatory reform	Market-forcing regulations	Lowering of regulatory barriers to alternative development forms
Justification for regulatory reform	Scientific proof of benefit of alternative development forms	Expansion of household choice

Under the first paradigm, only where proof of benefit is reasonably conclusive are the alternatives to sprawl justified. Where proof of benefit is lacking, metropolitan development reverts to the default condition—the sprawling status quo. In other words, the current degree of sprawl is a default choice, the way in which development proceeds if alternatives lack sufficient basis in science. Within this paradigm, scientific uncertainty regarding the benefits of compact development forms becomes a reason for maintaining the status quo. If it were easy to figure out the relationship between land-use patterns and travel behavior, this might be of little consequence. But in fact the relationship is notoriously complex and has resisted precise quantification over decades of research. Travel behavior and public health benefits of compact, mixed-use development forms are not amenable to laboratory experimentation: researchers cannot assign control and experimental groups randomly to different neighborhood types in order to assess their impact on people's behavior. Instead, research in these realms rests on quasi-experimental designs that use statistical controls to account for real-world variability. These studies are given to more varied interpretations, and as a consequence, the benefits of alternatives to sprawl remain controversial. In this scientific environment, the question for urban planning and transportation policy will remain the identification of desirable institutional arrangements in the face of continued uncertainty.

If uncertainty is indeed pervasive, policies built on the assumptions of the first paradigm will tend to replicate the status quo of sprawl with relatively few alternatives. Many land-use and transportation alternatives may never arise because science is incapable of proving them superior to sprawl. By contrast, policies under the second paradigm—linked to choice expansion rather than proven travel behavior modification—could introduce transportation and land-use solutions that are needed or desired by significant sectors of the population, even in the face of scientific ambiguity. To the extent that municipal regulatory requirements limit the development of more affordable housing forms (Chapter 4), such policy reform could improve housing affordability as well.

Which of the two paradigms better captures development reality in the United States? The empirical research on the impact of land-use regulation seems to point toward the second paradigm. And many of the reforms proposed—such as those allowing denser or mixed-use development—seem to be market-enabling rather than market-forcing, since they lower the barriers to alternative development forms. Even land-use regulations specifying minimum densities cannot compel development in line with their prescriptions; if private developers are not interested in developing compactly on a particular site, they will simply shun the area and invest elsewhere. Yet in policy debates, the land-use status quo is often treated as the product of a more or less free market. Policy reform to facilitate more compact and mixed-use development forms is similarly construed as a market intervention requiring justification in scientifically proven benefits (Chapter 2).

How could such a disjuncture arise? One explanation might be lack of awareness of land-use regulatory processes and their tendency to exclude more compact development forms from close-in areas and to compel a sprawling metropolitan form. This is the simplest equation between sprawl and markets. This hardly seems plausible, however, since observers on all sides of the debate refer extensively to these exclusionary processes, often under the “not-in-my-backyard” (NIMBY) label. Instead, a much more fundamental reinterpretation is taking place in transportation and land-use policy debates and scholarship. Municipal land-use regulation is itself interpreted as a market force, or at least as something other than governmental intervention into the workings of the private market. Where this reinterpretation occurs—and it pervades the debate—the American status quo of extensive municipal regulatory prerogative in land use is treated as a “free-market” state of affairs.

The view that municipal control of land use is more akin to a market force than to governmental regulation of economic activity finds considerable basis in both economic models (Chapter 3) and legal scholarship (Chapter 5). Moreover, once municipal land-use regulation is reinterpreted in this way an important redefinition has taken place: even if land-use regulations are understood to exacerbate sprawl, action at the metropolitan or state level to limit the capacity of local governments to enact these regulations can still be considered intervention into the workings of the free market. In other words, the reinterpretation of local regulation as a market force puts policymaking squarely in the first paradigm, even if zoning spurs sprawl and suppresses its alternatives. Unsurprisingly, the reinterpretation is broadly accepted by those who would defend the status quo against what they see as the draconian interventions of proponents of smart growth.

It is somewhat more surprising that proponents of compact, mixed-use development alternatives often appear to accept the same reinterpretation. At times they do so explicitly (Chapter 2). More commonly, they accept the framework implicitly with research that seeks to justify compact, mixed-use development by proving that it causes people to reduce their driving and increase their walking, cycling, and transit use. The very framework—justifying a certain development form through travel behavior benefits—implies the existence of a default development form, should their evidence fall short. The statement that policy reform is warranted because compact development reduces vehicle miles traveled appears to imply its converse: if compact development does not reduce vehicle miles traveled, policy reform is unwarranted. But the latter statement is meaningful only within the policy assumptions of the first paradigm. Researchers within this tradition see their work as a relatively straightforward application of objective social science to a current policy issue. But this construction implies acceptance of the first paradigm, which is actually quite hostile to the very reforms they propose.

This book argues for the second paradigm. Despite its pervasiveness and academic pedigree, the reinterpretation of municipal land-use regulation as a kind of market force is unwarranted. In part, this is because the reinterpretation fails the classic “duck” test of the late Cardinal Cushing: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck” (Bartlett 2002). Municipal land-use regulation constrains outcomes that the free market would otherwise have produced and employs the power of the state to this end—a virtual textbook definition of governmental regulation. This book develops this simple observation further, examining the bases for economic and legal reinterpretation of municipal land-use regulation as a kind of market force, and finds them wanting.

None of this is to suggest that municipal regulation of land uses is undesirable, or that a laissez-faire approach is called for (or even possible) in metropolitan land-use policy. It does argue, however, for recognizing that municipal regulation that zones out the alternatives to sprawl is neither a preordained state of nature nor the free market's invisible hand, but a governmental decision to constrain market processes. As such, it does not deserve the “default” status it has attained in debates over transportation, land use, and metropolitan development.

THE POLITICS OF TRAVEL BEHAVIOR RESEARCH

Implicit to the social scientific debate over the transportation impacts of land use is a compound question that fuses scientific and policy dimensions: “Do alternative forms of development improve travel behavior with sufficient magnitude and certainty to justify the policy interventions required to bring these forms about?” In evidence of reduced automobile use and increases in the nonmotorized modes associated with particular urban designs, analysts supportive of land-use alternatives find justification for such planning interventions. Others question these findings, pointing out that people's self-selection into neighborhoods may affect observed differences in travel behavior more than physical variables like density, mixing of land uses, or accessibility. This uncertainty is construed as evidence against policy interventions on behalf of these alternative development forms.

The differences may extend beyond assessment of the scientific evidence to competing philosophical conceptions of the conditions justifying government intervention. An assessment that planning for alternative development lacks sufficient transportation rationale can stem from a perception of weak or ambiguous travel behavior effects, a determination of a high threshold before policy intervention is justified, or both; the inverse is true for positive conclusions. An analyst inclined to governmental intervention into markets may conclude that available scientific evidence is sufficient to justify such action; another less inclined towards public action may reach the opposite conclusion even from an identical reading of the evidence. In some cases, these questions may even fuse, such that the perception of the quality of the data is colored by the policy conclusions observers hope to draw.

Although researchers split sharply over the answer to the question, they write largely as if the...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• About Resources for the Future and RFF Press
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Market Failures and Planning Failures
• 2 Travel Behavior Research and the “Market”
• 3 Marketlike Interpretations of Land-Use Controls
• 4 The Harms of Regulatory Exclusion
• 5 Is Zoning State Regulation or a Local Property Right?
• 6 The Limited Power of Smart-Growth Regulation
• 7 Developers, Planners, and Neighborhood Supply
• 8 The Demand for Transportation and Land-Use Innovation
• 9 A New Foundation for Policy Reform
• Notes
• References
• Index