What is Developmentalism?
And why I'm making this blog
I’ve been fascinated by cities basically my whole life. I grew up in (and still live near) New York City, and I was fascinated by the systems that make that kind of density function, from the MTA to the Subway System to its weird, distorted politics. By my own admission, most of my politics are a reaction to New York’s politics.
As I got older, and interacted more with the ideas of urbanists and think-tanks, my disappointment slowly grew. With people who interest themselves in cities, they tend to organize themselves into two schools of thought:
The first are the urbanist Democrats. They don’t like cars, because they’re (apparently) bad at any use case. Consequently, they perpetuate the “ban all cars” meme idea, which (like every Democratic naming scheme, apparently) doesn’t mean exactly that, but they are strongly against cars. They like transit, because it provides an “essential service”, and support making it free, or at least as cheap as possible. They usually justify this defense with the argument that cars are also subsidized, so transit riders shouldn’t need to pay anything either. Because they don’t like cars and like transit, it only stands to reason that they like density. However, density requires large developers, and these Democrats are usually really left wing, so they support lots of government housing. However, they’re usually just tolerant enough of businesses to allow developers to build buildings, so long as they also build “affordable housing”. These politics together don’t make sense from a market perspective, and require lots of government control. However, they do make the reasonable point that roads and services for sprawling cities are expensive and inefficient, and I have to concede that cities built this way would be efficient in their development patterns, if not their government.
The second are the (usually suburban) Republicans, who generally (and usually correctly) view city-center politicians as corrupt. As a result, they tend to think of anything city-like (including density) as bad, which doesn’t make sense. In keeping with the decentralized Republican tradition, they are also hyper-localists, favoring rules that protect their tiny suburb, usually at the expense of everyone else. If corporations made their rules this way, America would probably be a failed state, but since Real Americans™ are the ones making the rules, it doesn’t matter. These people usually also support state-assigned land uses (strictly prohibitive zoning laws). They also really, really don’t like paying for roads directly as they use them, viewing highway tolls as “harassment taxes” (these are usually the same people who think transit should make money).
None of these, to me, sound like particularly sound rules. I’m not a big fan of the Democratic view, because it’s generally anti-business and anti-efficiency. As far as cars go, they’re usually good for longer distance trips, especially in polycentric cities (like, for example, the Bay Area). I think that you should pay for all of the costs your car incurs, especially parking and highway usage, and I understand that highways have high externalities. Highways should all charge tolls and make money. Transit probably also should. (air travel, as an aide, is profitable without subsidies. Everyone involved makes money). I’m fairly libertarian, which means I think anyone should be able to do what they please, so long as they settle the externalities. That also applies to regulation: developers should be able to develop what they please, so long as it doesn’t cause an obvious problem. Zoning regulations have a reason to exist, but that reason is not how they’re currently used. I’m also not a big fan of the hyper-localism that Republicans champion. It means that the public school system, viewed at any vantage point outside of a town, doesn’t make sense. It also strongly limits school choice, because it blocks public school students from going to a different public school. Even worse (from my perspective), suburban use of zoning regulations to prevent new people from moving there seems like a clear-cut abuse of power. Zoning should be done at a higher level of government, where individuals can’t declare their plot of land low-density residential, forever.
Since I don’t agree with either side, I have my own ideology, which I’ll call developmentalism. I believe that regulation should exist only to minimize externalities where reasonable, and I think that economies should be free to develop. Therefore, I’m calling this blog “Libertarian Developmentalism”. I like free markets, and think land should be developed to the extent that makes sense. Generally, I think that regulations and governments should be reasonable. Is that too much to ask?