O'Toole on Zoning: News Miner 60
Property taxes, racist taxation, equal pay, paint nannies, and more.
O’Toole’s Ridiculous Argument against Zoning Reform
Randal O’Toole’s latest “arguments” against zoning reform allowing the replacement of single-family homes with multiple-family structures are ridiculous. (I’ve already addressed his broader claims.)
In essence, O’Toole suggests that government should continue to forcibly prevent people who own residential properties from redeveloping the land into multi-family structures because most people say they prefer a single-family home.
But it is not government’s proper job to dictate to people how to use their own property, even if bureaucrats happened to know better than a given property owner the most profitable way to use that land. Freedom entails the freedom to make mistakes. O’Toole instead backs central planning.
Beyond that, O’Toole’s economic case against reform is pathetically weak. Here is his main claim (with his embedded links):
Surveys show that 80 percent of Americans want to live in single-family homes. Recent census data reveal that more than 80 percent of the residents of 14 states do live in single-family homes. . . . Census data also show that more than 80 percent of the residents of more than 30 percent of the nation’s urban areas live in single-family homes.
Even if we were “only” talking about 20% who prefer multi-family structures, that’s a huge fraction of the housing market! But there’s no good reason to think that the 80% figure is indicative of real demand in many urban and suburban areas.
Given that many localities explicitly forbid the development of anything other than single-family homes on large tracks of land, the sort of development there indicates little about underlying demand. Anyway, there’s no reason to think that demand is or should be the same in all parts of the country.
What about the survey data? Here O’Toole relies on a decade-old survey that reflects wishes, not reality-based economic choices. The cited article also says, “53 percent would like to live in an area that is ‘away from it all,’ versus ‘in the center of it all (34 percent).’” Sure, we’d all like to live on our thousand-acre private ranch with helicopter access to the big city, but, in the real world, people make trade-offs involving costs and convenience. Lots of people who might otherwise prefer to live in a single-family home might change their tune if they could instead live in a nice four-plex at a substantial discount.
O’Toole seems to forget (or seems to wish his readers would forget) that we are talking about marginal changes here, not a whole-sale replacement of single-family homes with multi-family structures. Even if it were legal for everyone who currently owns a single-family home to replace it with a multi-family structure, that wouldn’t mean everyone would do so. Most people wouldn’t, obviously. (The bill in question, as amended, proposes far more modest reforms.)
O’Toole makes the separate point that Denver, Boulder, and other cities create “green belts” where no housing may be built. That is a separable issue. I do want to point out, as I have before, that green belts (open spaces, whatever we want to call them) are not worthless to people. Arguably they are highly valuable to people who live near them and count as a “public good.” So it’s very plausible that the most economic use of land involves trade-offs between the cost of single-family houses and the availability of open spaces that many people who live in an area deeply enjoy. What we’re basically talking about here are regional governments buying up open space.
Regardless, whether and to what extent cities should provide open space is entirely separable from whether government should respect the rights of current owners of single-family houses to redevelop their property.
O’Toole also points out that denser housing often is more expensive. But O’Toole confuses cause cause effect. In places where lots of people want to live, people compete up the price of housing, and in response developers build more dense housing (where they can). O’Toole makes the numbskull suggestion that density drives the costs, when the reality as Noah Smith points out) is that high demand drives both. Given that demand, denser housing eases the cost of housing, relative to what it would be otherwise.
People do not only care about what is inside their housing unit; they care about where they live relative to other people and developments. The relative housing density of certain cities provides large “network effects” where people can build vibrant overlapping industries. So for O’Toole to look only at housing costs apart from the other values that people care about is silly.
Again, the key point is that owners of properties have the right to decide how to use that property. That is the issue that too many conservatives choose to ignore in this context.
Property Tax Updates
Kyle Clark called out Jared Polis for proposing to reduce property tax increases partly by reducing our Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights refunds. “We aren’t dumb,” Clark says.
But it gets worse. According to the Independence Institute’s Ben Murrey, the proposed “fix” eventually would permanently end taxpayer refunds under TABOR, on top of permitting a massive property tax hike.
The legislature continues two tweak its proposals. As Marianne Goodland reports, there’s a bill “to equalize TABOR refunds to about $660 per person,” contingent on passage of the proposed ballot measure regarding property taxes and TABOR refunds. The situation is, as they say, fluid.
Quick Takes
Property Rights: Ed Sealover reports, “A bill that would make Colorado the first state in the nation to give local governments a first right of refusal on many apartment complexes that go up for sale received its long-delayed approval from the Senate late Saturday following a sometimes-rancorous debate.” This is a shameful violation of property rights.
Racism: Denver Democratic Socialist Candi CdeBaca proposed that government collect “extra taxes from white-led businesses from all over the city and redistribut[e] them to Black and brown owned business.” Kelly Maher with understatement calls this proposal “very problematic.” See also the 9News story.
Police: The Boulder City Council removed Lisa Sweeney-Miran from the Police Oversight Panel because she is . . . too critical of aspects of policing. Sweeney-Miran called the decision “unlawful and unethical.”
Equal Pay: Ed Sealover has the latest on the so-called “equal pay” bill. My take: This bill will not better-ensure equal pay for equal work; instead, it will give those who are unwilling or unable to do equal work the legal ability to harass their employers into paying them the same as more-productive employees. Notice that the leftists who cry “equal pay for equal work” never articulate the corollary, “unequal pay for unequal work.”
Crime: George Brauchler is not happy about Bill 1249: “Intensely controversial HB 1249 would grant immunity to 12-year-olds who rape children, attempt to murder classmates, and repeatedly commit other violent crimes, as well as diminish consequences for the criminal conduct of 13- to 17-year-olds. It is a bill opposed by data, precedent, common sense, and every stakeholder in the juvenile justice system . . . except the criminals.” I haven’t studied the details of the bill sufficiently to have a solid opinion.
LGBTQ: Remember Erin Lee, the Colorado mom who says her daughter was pressured in an after-school club to come out as transgender? She and her husband, along with another couple, are suing their children’s school district over allegations that teachers and administrators encouraged their daughters to join an LGBTQ club and keep its activities ‘secret’ from them,” Fox News reports.
Delivery Fee: Ed Sealover reports, “Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday signed into law Senate Bill 143, which aims to fix what many businesses identify the most problematic aspect of the fee—that they must break out its cost on each bill and require their customers to pay the fee. Beginning on July 1, the businesses can pay the 27-cent fee themselves, and any company that did less than $500,000 in sales the previous year is exempt from having to pay the fee at all.”
Paint Nannies: Mitchell Byars reports that Voodoo Doughnut painted its new Boulder shop its “signature pink,” but that “was a code violation,” so the business had to repaint in grey. See also the Camera article.