Articles by Andy Brett

Literally!

One of the charges leveled against New Urbanism and the idea of planned development in general is that it tries to sculpt cities in a way that the planners feel is appropriate, with little regard to what the people actually living in the cities might think. Ideally, perfectly informed people would express their preferences through a perfectly informed housing market, price signals would be sent and received, and the "correct" amount of "greenness" or sustainability or whatever would be determined by how much people were willing to pay for such things.

Of course, no such situation exists, in the housing or any other market. One part of the housing and development market that just screams "externality" is the issue of blight. Clusters of abandoned property are often seen as unrecoverable by the private sector, unless you're Donald Trump and have a lot of money to sink into it. I was at a lecture earlier this spring with a speaker (can't remember the name -- he worked in Trenton, NJ) who said that on half the property in Trenton, if you put a $100,000 house on the lot the property is still worth less than than that, usually around $75,000. I don't remember specifically that blight was the force at work there, but there are significant impacts on a lot when everything around it is abandoned; National Vacant Properties Campaign has some good statistics on the matter.

So, in a case of extreme blight we have a market failure on our hands. As long as government intervention is necessary anyway, why not let the "sculptors" go to town (!) and do some things that the free market doesn't do that well on its own, like plan for the long term and make things renewable? (Besides the fact that it's much, much easier said than done, that is.)

Move over, Big Apple.

One thing that the sustainability rankings didn't take into account was cost of living in a particular city, and perhaps rightly so. But cost of living is likely to have more of an effect on where people choose to live than any sort of sustainability ranking. And it turns out that the Big Apple, while still the most expensive city in the US, is not such a heavyweight when compared to the rest of the world's cities. In the Mercer Human Resource Consulting annual cost of living report, which you can download here, New York City ranked 13th, while Japan's top two cities, Tokyo and Osaka, grabbed the top two world slots.

“Africa: Up In Smoke?”

Many of the effects of global warming will fall disproportionately on those nations that

• contributed to it least, and
• are the least able to adapt to it.

Africa is the prime example. A new report [PDF], "Africa: Up In Smoke?" makes the case that efforts by developed countries to fight poverty in Africa might go to waste if climate change is not addressed. The New Economics Foundation has a summary if you're not up for the full 44 pages (it has pictures!).

Life in the suburbs.

At the presentations I attended last week, one of the speakers made a comment to the effect of, "everyone wants to go home to their leafy green suburbs."

Needless to say, it really jumped out at me. If everyone wants to go home to their leafy green suburbs, where does that leave cities?

Even if cities are sufficiently leafy green, there's a bigger issue here. It's about individual decision making vs. group decision making. The line of thinking often goes: while it may be fine for me to live in a city instead of a suburb, and deal with some of the resulting inconveniences or grittiness, and bike to work, and only eat (and pay extra for) local, organic food, this isn't really a reasonable thing to expect from other people. In particular, this isn't really a reasonable thing to expect from a potential mate or my offspring.