On the Need to Minimize Government

By Dom Nozzi

I’m now fully convinced that the biggest reason, by far, that houses are way more expensive than they should be is that we have way too many (often useless and often counterproductive) regulations at all levels of government. The more we can get the government out of the way, the better and more affordable our lives will be.

One significant obstacle to getting government out of the way is that nearly all of us – government workers and regular citizens – are firmly convinced that the government is always striving to achieve noble, ethical, necessary, socially desirable ends when they adopt regulations or impose fees or fines. And that leaving things to the private sector is ruinous because the private sector is greedy, lawbreaking, unethical, and cold-hearted. That most of us – especially the poor – will be destroyed by the private sector.

All of history shows irrefutably that this thinking is complete nonsense. The opposite is the case in every single nation over the past century. The more government, the worse the national conditions. The less government, the happier and more prosperous and affordable the nation becomes.

It sickens me that my career in public sector (i.e., government) town planning did so much to perpetuate the costly, counterproductive over-regulation of our world.

Indeed, I now believe that the only noble thing I did as a town planner was to rein in the heavily subsidized, socialized motor vehicle.

The Use of Design Codes for Buildings: Are They Enough?

By Dom Nozzi

May 21, 2006

The following thoughts were penned after I read a newspaper article today about tacky buildings and Design Codes.

I had just returned from Santa Fe NM — perhaps the city in North America most known for having strong building design codes to ensure consistency (even the Hilton Hotel and Exxon Gas Station use adobe design there).

My take on their building consistency efforts is that while it is certainly impressive, visually, I don’t believe that such a regulation is the be-all-and-end-all of retaining unique character, ensuring quality of life, and avoiding the Anywhere USA syndrome. Even in their compact, fairly walkable downtown area, Santa Fe has a number of recent buildings that are pulled WAY back from the street by a huge asphalt parking lot out front. There are also a number of large surface parking lots at street intersections (perhaps the biggest urban design blunder a community can make, and one sure to destroy place-making).

I’m sorry, but even if the Hilton uses beige adobe for its building facade, the fact that it joins a number of other buildings downtown by being behind a sea of asphalt trumps all efforts to be walkable and unique through consistent building design.

The BUILDING DISPOSITION (how a building is sited on the property) is the urban design imperative. Give me a building abutting the sidewalk. The exterior appearance is much less important. Buildings at the street create unique, walkable places. This is NOT achieved by calling for “attractive,” “consistent” buildings. Such buildings can easily end up only being designed for happy cars.

Note, too, that a community that requires buildings to be properly located at the street typically create sufficient civic pride. Because of their quality urbanism, they usually have citizens who know that they have a unique place to be proud of. One that will attract visitors and investors and quality immigrants. One that does not have businessmen who need to lower themselves to creating novelty by building cartoon buildings. It is the quality urbanism that creates the attraction.

Santa Fe
has blundered by thinking that building consistency is the key to walkability and uniqueness. By not regulating building and parking location (and having too many high-speed six-lane roads), they are little more than a Disney cartoon that is best seen by car.

Even if the Shell gas station looks like a Pueblo.

 

Stopping Development or Ensuring Quality Development is Fair to All?

By Dom Nozzi

Stopping growth and development, despite the conventional wisdom, is mostly what planners and elected officials try to do in high-growth areas.

They try to find as many fees and regulations as possible to punish developers and stop them. But we do the opposite of what we should be doing, because the typical “punishment” is that we force them to build huge parking lots, huge landscape setbacks, and a strict separation of residential and non-residential land uses, while the government spends billions to widen roads. All this does is ensure that everyone is forced to drive a car for everything and guarantees that the development will be loved by cars and despised by people.

No wonder we have a nationwide NIMBY epidemic where neighborhoods fear all new developments. No wonder we have intolerable traffic congestion that gets worse and worse every year. No wonder our governments are bankrupt. No wonder our public planners have no credibility and our developers are the most hated people on earth.

What we need are developers, planners, and government officials who return to the timeless, traditional ways of building communities that are designed to make people, instead of cars, happy.

Sure, things are more difficult when your rate of growth is higher, but a high rate of growth can be wonderful for our quality of life if our design is for people instead of cars. I am strongly pro-growth if it is designed to make people happy by using timeless principles. So no, I do not believe that my position is that we just “stop sprawl,” although that certainly needs to be part of it, since sprawl is part of the make-cars-happy paradigm.

We have workable solutions.

They mostly focus on having growth pay its own way, that it be sustainable, and that it contribute to the overall quality of life. Currently, car-happy dispersed suburban development promotes lifestyles that externalize and export their costly, negatively-impacting behaviors on all of the rest of us with their cocooned “McMansions” on isolated cul-de-sacs (which belch a relatively high number of car trips on the rest of us, and make it more costly to serve).

I am not saying that certain lifestyles should be prohibited. I just want to see that those that enjoy those lifestyles are paying the full cost for them, instead of having me pay some of the cost through higher taxes or a lower quality of life. We also need more choices in housing and transportation, since increasingly, our only choice is the isolating, community- and environment-destroying auto-dependent suburbs, where everyone enjoys subsidies not in the public interest, and everyone is forced to drive a car for every trip.

Let’s return to the days of striving for choices and quality of life for people.