"Let the neighbors decide!" Not.

Peter Gordon has the idea that if you let neighborhoods decide, everything will be just fine:

....San Francisco politicians now want to keep chain stores with eleven or more stores from setting up shop in any of selected SF neighborhoods. They argue that they are doing what they can to protect the cities prized neighborhoods.

What is wrong with this picture? Why not let the neighborhoods decide? Let them secede and hammer out their own rules. Top-down one-size-fits-all has never quite worked. Besides big-city politics is less likely to cater for local tastes and more likely to be hijacked in the name of various agendas that have little bearing on neighborhood life.

I won't examine the merits of the specific San Francisco proposal. It sounds a bit goofy at first; and if you actually read the flimsy article -- Neighborhood Pride Prompts Effort to Limit Chain Stores -- you will get only the vaguest picture of what the ordinance actually requires. But enough does seep through to suggest that the ordinance might indeed be reasonable -- merely a design-review system to make a chain drop enough of its "trade dress" to make every Main Street look different. At least I think that's the theory, as essentially harmless as it may be mis-guided.

I am more fascinated by the idea that anyone still believes that it's fine for "neighbrohoods to decide." Why not simply say "let business decide."?

Neighborhood NIMBYs can be just as narrow-minded as their business opponents and with whom are joined at the hip by a singular though opposing devotion to respective factional interests. Neighborhoods are made of neighbors, not altruists; proximity produces interest, not wisdom.

Moreover, we do let neighborhoods decide; it's called voting for city councils and mayors.

Further, if you really did balkanize a city into neighborhoods with separate zoning powers, you would no longer have much growth anywhere at all. Now that may be fine, in fact, if you like the idea of freezing things as they.

But it's pretty funny when hard-core pro-market academics who usually sneer at liberal do-good environmentalism and its urban no-growth progeny turn around and urge on us a neighborhood-based decision-making system which would give us yet more liberal do-good neighborhood protectionism.

Comments

[winifer skattebol]

Interesting points. I refer you to the LIVABILITY DIGEST issue on "Urban Amenities and Economic Development", put out 1982 by Partners for Livable Communities in DC.
See also Beverly Willis' site for some ideas on neighborhoods in cities of the future:

http://www.architect.org/

[Laurence Aurbach]

You're exactly right, David. I challenge anyone to come up with an example of neighborhood zoing control that has resulted in more freedom for landowners to build as they wish, more diversity of land uses and building types, or more pedestrian vitality on the street.

Randal O'Toole has been advocating this for years. How anyone can consider this a libertarian idea, I can only ascribe to a massive tolerance for cognitive dissonance.

[JRoth]

I'm confused by your comment, "Why not let businesses decide?" We know what businesses decide. When suburban businesses locate in urban neighborhoods, they will, almost without fail, construct buildings that violate every one of the 3 Rules - unless the neighborhood (or city) prevents them. I haven't been to Seattle, but I find it hard to believe that your drug store chains are better urbanists than ours in the East. Windowless, set back from the street, parking out front.... Your entire book is about that damage that suburban-style design does to urban fabirc, but your comment here seems to demand that bad design be allowed to rule. Am I missing something?

[Brian Miller]

Thank you, JRoth! Businesses decide 1. Absolute lowest cost 2. What some 28-year old "marketing expert" tells them should be done. I'm sorry, David, North Seattle's commercial strips reflect "what businesses decide," and they ain't pretty (as well as violating all the rules)

[Laurence Aurbach]

Didn't either of you read the paragraph following that quote? David makes it abundantly clear that business interests alone should not decide zoning rules.

[Brian Miller]

Me Bad. :/