Michael Lewyn
planetizen
New York, NY, United States
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Past articles by Michael:
Red Cities, Blue Cities, and Crime
In 2020, the national homicide rate rose 30 percent. Homicides continued to increase in most cities in 2021, but the tide of violence began to ebb last year. Naturally, this tragedy has become a political football, and at least two contending narratives have arisen to explain what went wrong. Republican media tend to favor a “bad blue city” narrative. According to this story, crime is the result… → Read More
Jane Jacobs and Zoning
A recent article by law professor Richard Schragger invokes Jane Jacobs’ Death And Life of Great American Cities (“Death and Life”) in defense of zoning. Schragger writes that, according to Jacobs, city neighborhoods flourish because of “the diversity of land uses in space” and that zoning should protect the desirability of such neighborhoods by “zoning for diversity,” which requires “limiting… → Read More
Learning Loss and Urban Schools
In 2020-21, most American schools went online in response to the COVID-19 virus. The conventional wisdom seems to be that online education was a disaster, with younger students allegedly suffering massive learning losses. Some commentators sought to use this learning loss as a political weapon, claiming that learning loss was a policy failure inflicted by Democrats and/or teachers' unions and/or… → Read More
Density As A Scapegoat
One common argument against new housing in urban areas is that new housing equals densification, and dense places are less affordable. For example, pro-sprawl commentator Wendell Cox writes that “There is a strong correlation between urban density and housing affordability, such that affordability is better where urban densities are lower.” Cox has a point in this respect: some of the nation’s… → Read More
Is Exclusionary Zoning a Good Thing?
In my last post, I criticized Judge Glock’s recent article on the relationship between suburban zoning and the national housing crisis. But Glock also makes an interesting theoretical argument about zoning that I think is worth discussing. Glock writes: “opponents of zoning need to explain not only why local governments keep making the same mistake, but why people of all races keep moving to… → Read More
Is Sprawl the Only Answer to High Housing Costs?
Since conservatives generally favor free markets, one might think that conservatives should oppose zoning. However, a recent article by Judge Glock in the conservative journal American Affairs suggests otherwise. Unlike supply skeptics, Glock admits that new housing benefits the public, and that some cities are overregulated- so I suspect we agree more than we disagree on housing issues.… → Read More
Ambulances vs. Pedestrians
One common argument against efforts to create street space for bicycles and other nondrivers is that emergency response vehicles such as ambulances need to drive very fast in case someone has a heart attack, and that therefore all streets should be as wide as possible so that ambulances can drive as fast as 100 miles per hour. But wide streets create a variety of negative side effects: by… → Read More
The Right to a Healthy Environment: Not as Healthy as One Might Think
Numerous state constitutions include “environmental rights amendments” (ERAs) creating a public right to a clean environment. For example, New York’s amendment, enacted in 2021, provides that “ach person shall have the right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” At first glance, these provisions seem quite innocuous. Who could be against a “healthful environment?” However, the… → Read More
A Legal Perspective on Transportation Safety
Most scholarship on pedestrian safety has been, I suspect, written by urban planners. However, legal scholars have recently become interested in this issue. In this post, I discuss three articles in law journals that might be interesting to readers of this blog. A 2021 article by Professors Sara Bronin and Gregory Shill focuses on the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), a manual… → Read More
Do Highways Frustrate Mobility?
Traditionally, the most common argument for new and widened roads seems (to me) to be that they will reduce congestion. In response, environmentalists and urbanists argue that induced demand may frustrate this alleged benefit—that is, that roads may actually increase congestion by making long car commutes easier and thus increasing the demand for driving. Pundit Matt Yglesias recently responded… → Read More
Short-Term Renters Matter Too
Hotels and short-term rentals, like regular apartments, have become something of a pariah land use in cities. The latter are heavily regulated, but even the former are often put in a separate zoning category from apartments, which means that to convert apartments into hotels or vice versa requires government approval. (In fact, New York City recently made new hotels illegal without a special use… → Read More
Book Review: Arbitrary Lines
The major purpose of Nolan Gray's new book, Arbitrary Lines, is to show that by limiting housing construction, zoning increases rents by limiting housing supply, accelerates suburban sprawl by reducing density and pricing Americans out of walkable areas, and slows economic growth by making it expensive for Americans to move to prosperous areas. On each count, Gray makes a persuasive (to me)… → Read More
Did the Supreme Court Gut Federal Power?
In the recent decision of West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court rejected the Clean Power Plan (CPP), an Environmental Protection Agency rule designed to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. Under the CPP, power plants would be required to use far less coal, and to use more natural gas, wind, and solar energy. The Court did not claim that the Clean Air Act directly barred the EPA’s… → Read More
Density and Driving: A Second Look
As many commentators have written, places with higher population density (more residents per acre or per square mile) tend to have higher levels of transit use and walking and less driving than lower-density areas. (For some examples of the relevant literature, see here, here, and here). One common counterargument is that this rule of thumb only applies to certain levels of density, and not to… → Read More
Don't Wokewash the Status Quo
Historically, American cities have relied on the police to enforce traffic laws. But police enforcement of traffic laws doesn’t always work very well, for the simple reason that even if the police are motivated to stop speeding, they cannot be everywhere. Moreover, police enforcement has an important negative side effect: sometimes police officers get trigger-happy and shoot innocent citizens.… → Read More
How Democratic Is Zoning?
Land use regulation in our country’s high-cost regions is typically governed by small suburbs and small neighborhoods in big cities. When a significant rezoning is proposed, a municipality gives notice to neighbors of the land to be rezoned. The rezoning often benefits the city or region as a whole by adding new housing or jobs. However, the immediate neighbors of a project have no incentive to… → Read More
The Political Compass of Housing and Urbanism
One idea that seems to have become widespread online is the political compass, a graph dividing political ideologies into four groups: Authoritarian Left (left-wing economically, but socially conservative and/or favoring a strong state), Libertarian-Left (also economically leftish, but more pro-civil liberties), Authoritarian Right (economically and socially conservative, generally favoring… → Read More
Traffic Deaths in Cities and Suburbs, a 2020s Update
About a decade ago, I wrote in Planetizen that urban cores had fewer traffic deaths than their outermost suburbs (although not necessarily more than their close-in suburbs). But in the post-COVID United States, traffic fatalities have risen in a wide range of environments. So I thought I would dig around and see if the most recent data shows any kind of city/suburb gap. I decided to focus on a… → Read More
Conservatives, Progressives, and Cities
I recently read Jessica Troutstine’s Segregation by Design. Like other commentators on segregation, Troutstine discusses segregationist policies such as exclusionary zoning and so-called "urban renewal." But she also uses quantitative analysis to address factors that are associated with "segregation ... between cities rather than within them"—in other words, "white flight" to suburbs. If I am… → Read More
Can High-Speed Roads Stop Climate Change?
I was recently reading the Reason Foundation's pro-road newsletter and came across a critique of induced demand: the idea that because wider roads increase demand for automobile travel, they actually increase, rather than reduce, congestion. The author, Baruch Feigenbaum, makes three interesting arguments.* His most interesting argument is that new roadway capacity "can reduce greenhouse gas… → Read More