The Unitec Opportunity

Exactly – just ignore him.

User Guideline 3 is regarding ad hominem attacks. I don’t see any c) or (ii) under user guideline 3 either. So I don’t get your point.

I have said many times that what I am opposed to is the UGB and the resultant forced cramming of people inside it, the massive hikes in land prices and rents, the loss of local amenity (it is all very well to “utilise land” but the Auckland Planners calculations incompetently do not even preserve school playing fields) and the unintended consequences. The unintended consequences include that none of the gains alleged from the planning, happen anyway, other than via socially unjust mechanisms such as robbing ordinary people of discretionary income, which robbery is not even captured as useable tax revenue – it is captured by the rentier capitalist class.

It is sooo ironic that so many people on the Left regard this kind of urban planning as a matter of faith, yet they claim to be opposed to inequality and to capitalism. And there is capitalism and there is capitalism – what they are acting as useful idiots for is the absolutely damnable kind, the kind that straight-out “gouges” without creating any wealth like productive entrepreneurs do.

My policy platform would be: no UGB; land taxes; shifting the burden of local taxation off buildings (if you want people to build “up”, don’t tax it); road pricing; and other properly targeted infrastructure user pricing. This would actually work towards the desired objectives of reducing resource consumption, only without creating massive economic “rent” – Google “economic rent” if you don’t know what I mean.

In a city under the system I suggest, you might well get a redevelopment like the above Unitec one, but the decision to do so would be based on pure functional efficiencies, not the capturing of a share of the zero-sum economic rent that is being sucked from out of the pockets of all renters, first home buyers and new business start-ups and expansions, from here to eternity. Redevelopments to higher intensity happen in Houston, you know, and it is everything to do with functional efficiency and nothing to do with grabbing a share of a big land price gouge.

But there are dozens of cities in the USA where average commute-to-work times have not only remained stable for decades, but are below first world average, where they have been growing rapidly at low density for decades.

The only difference in “opportunity” between those moving to one of those cities, or moving into a denser core like the few in New York, Chicago, San Fran, Washington or Philadelphia; is the type of job one gets. Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Charlotte and Raleigh have been the fastest growing cities in percentage terms for the last 20 years; none of the legacy core cities in the USA have grown anywhere near as fast in spite of all the hype about their rebound, which is relative.

People don’t move to the low density rapid growth cities “in spite of” monster long commutes; they don’t GET monster long commutes anyway. Not by necessity (as is the case when housing is systemically unaffordable). Jobs sprawl roughly matches housing sprawl. In fact all the academic literature that has ever looked at “splatter” development patterns of growth (versus contiguous carpet growth due to strict boundaries) has concluded that they are more efficient because there is so much scope for the infill of the leftover bits to be devoted to very efficient co-uses depending on what is already in the vicinity. In fact agglomeration economies of specialised types are MORE likely to form because there is land to spare, and at affordable prices. It is commonly accepted among urban economists that nothing like Silicon Valley could have evolved without the availability of cheap exurban land.

Government does NOT need to “plan” jobs-housing balance – it happens anyway. Government involvement has ALWAYS been in the direction of PREVENTING it – and of course it is perfectly justified to keep certain types of urban activity separate from each other for health and safety reasons. But modern day planning has gone way beyond that to actively obstruct the free market process that results in the best jobs-housing balance of all, in most US cities. The most misguided policy prescriptions of all are the “city centre first” planning policies in the UK. Attempting to increase the centralisation of employment as they are, self-evidently will increase both traffic congestion (by focusing travel into radial patterns in and out) and the “pricing out” effect on workers. The more centralised employment is, the steeper the urban land rent curve and the more spatially “sorted” the population is by “ability to pay”. The poor get the fringe ghettoes and the monster commutes, the rich get the Edwardian mansions nice and close to the Head Office.

Ironically, in the USA where they still have blighted areas in the core cities where the poorest people are mired in the worst poverty and social breakdown, no-one seems to suggest that these people are enjoying a natural advantage of proximity to finance sector Head Office jobs. Unfortunately the jobs they need are mostly out in the suburbs now. It is essential to look at what kind of local economy you have, and what is the scope for being another London. The UK has only one London even though Cargo Cult planners think that planning is the key – if that were remotely true then the UK would have dozens of mini-Londons, which it patently does not. For unexceptional cities like NZ’s (and most other cities of the world) that policy package will reproduce Liverpool, Newcastle, Luton, Birmingham, etc etc – NOT London.