Conclusion: How Government Regulation Forces Americans Into Their Cars
08/27/07 • Posted in: Activism, Suburbs, Transit by Joey Marchy No Comments »
This is part five of the series “How Government Regulation Forces Americans Into Their Cars”, where I publish a recent paper by a local professor Michael Lewyn. Read the other parts: part one | part two | part three | part four | part five.
Does Regulation Matter?
It could be argued that Jacksonville’s regulations have little effect on the city’s urban form because those regulations might just mimic what the market would do without government interference. [FN60] To be sure, there is no way to know exactly what a city’s land-use pattern would be with less intrusive regulations. However, developers throughout the United States believe that government regulation frustrates compact, pedestrian-oriented development. [FN61]
In 2001, the Urban Land Institute (”ULI”) (a developers’ trade association) [FN62] conducted a survey asking developers about the impact of zoning upon “‘alternatives to conventional, low-density, automobile-oriented, suburban development.”‘ [FN63] 85.4% of developers surveyed agreed that the supply of such development was inadequate to meet market demand, [FN64] and 78.2% of developers identified government regulation as a significant barrier to such development. [FN65] So, if Jacksonville resembles the rest of the United States, its regulations are an obstacle to more pedestrian-friendly development.
Moreover, Jacksonville’s most walkable neighborhoods have experienced significant price appreciation–evidence that there may be substantial unmet demand for such environments. In San Marco and Riverside, two older, relatively walkable areas, [FN66] property values increased by 50% and 68%, respectively, between *852 1992 and 2001 [FN67]–an appreciation rate higher than the 37% region-wide appreciation rate during that period. [FN68]
CONCLUSION
Attempts to reform urban sprawl are often met with charges that critics of the status quo seek “to force people out of their cars.” [FN69] But in Jacksonville, the government arguably forces people into their cars through heavy-handed zoning, parking, and street design regulation: not just through traditional zoning regulations directly limiting land use and density, but also by enacting parking and street design regulations that force pedestrians to go out of their way to cross the street, by making those streets too wide to be easily crossed, and by mandating the creation of moats of parking between those streets and the ultimate destination of a pedestrian or bicyclist.
Footnotes
[FN60]. Cf. ROBERT BRUEGMANN, SPRAWL: A COMPACT HISTORY 105 (2005) (suggesting that this is generally the case in United States).
[FN61]. See JONATHAN LEVINE, ZONED OUT: REGULATION, MARKETS, AND CHOICES IN TRANSPORTATION AND METROPOLITAN LAND-USE 128-29 (2006).
[FN62]. Id. at 125 (describing ULI as “the premiere national organization of land developers”).
[FN63]. Id. at 126.
[FN64]. Id. at 128.
