While the latest installment of DC’s record-breaking winter snow has passed over the area, the mountains of snow lining streets and piled on sidewalks appear to be here to stay for the time being. These problems, unusual this far south, are testing residents’ patience with their neighbors.

DC law states that residents are responsible for clearing the snow from sidewalks on their property, but the monumental task that this poses after two major storms has left some unwilling or unable to face up to the task.  The Washington Post discusses the problem:

It was fully 48 hours since the flakes of Snowmageddon had ceased falling, but by midday Monday, many residents and merchants in Adams Morgan still had not cleared their portions of public walkways, disregarding the District’s law mandating that property owners clear snow and ice from their sidewalks within eight hours after the snowfall’s completion.

Through the Mid-Atlantic, rules regarding sidewalk shoveling vary from the mere expectation of courtesy to fines up to $100 for homeowners and business owners who do not do the right thing.  While these municipal rules vary in how well they encourage citizens to maintain sidewalks, this issue might be better dealt with at a neighborhood rather than a city level.

In Understanding Institutional Diversity, Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom examines community-based efforts for solving collective action problems like sidewalks covered in snow. She suggests that shunning can be very effective in encouraging community members to follow rules. Imagine being publicly embarrassed at a neighborhood meeting for failing to shovel your walks in a timely manner.

Robert Nelson of the Mercatus Center explains in Private Neighborhoods and the Transformation of Local Government that the rise of private Neighborhood Associations is helping localities deal more effectively with such collective action problems.  

In another snow-related economic conundrum, vehicle owners struggle to protect their rights to parking spaces that they have laboriously shoveled.  In Boston, drivers can legally save their cleaned spots with lawn chairs or cones, but no such official rule exists in DC. However, an unscientific Washington Post poll found that 76% of respondents favored the right to reserve parking spots, effectively suggesting that the effort of shoveling is worth a guarantee of property rights.

The collapse of Detroit’s auto industry and its related population loss have left the city with a large supply of vacant land, some of which has been returned to its historical use as farmland.  The LA Times reports:

Large gardens and small farms — usually 10 acres or less — have cropped up in thriving cities such as Berkeley, where land is tough to come by, and struggling Rust Belt communities such as Flint, Mich., which hopes to encourage green space development and residents to eat locally grown foods.

In Detroit, hundreds of backyard gardens and scores of community gardens have blossomed and helped feed students in at least 40 schools and hundreds of families.

While a widespread return to agriculture is unlikely to improve any American city’s prosperity, these cities demonstrate that flexible zoning and land use regulation allow entrepreneurs to find the most valuable use for any piece of land, benefiting local residents accordingly.  For areas where labor is relatively inexpensive and land is widely available, urban farming could be a viable short-term answer to economic growth.

Hantz Farms has found a way to profit amidst the economic turmoil and change in Detroit, profiting as a company and creating jobs simultaneously.  This success story demonstrates that job creation comes from the private sector. Producer profits lead to both new jobs and consumer surplus, whereas government “job creation” merely redistributes wealth, resulting in a deadweight loss.

However, Detroit city officials maintain reservations about urban farming.  The Times article explains:

Their concerns include figuring out who would pay for cleaning pollutants out of the soil and removing utility infrastructure, such as gas and sewer lines; how to rewrite the city’s zoning laws; and how to adjust property tax rates and property values to allow for commercial farming.

The massive layoffs within the auto industry have exacerbated housing problems in Detroit, but by many accounts, the city has been in decline for decades. While the population loss and unemployment in Detroit is much more severe than in most parts of the country, central city decay is not unique to Michigan. Because the auto industry’s collapse has made Detroit’s situation worse, Time has established a blog for local writers and photojournalists to document their perceptions of their city.  Daniel Okrent writes:

Detroit fell victim not to one malign actor but to a whole cast of them. For more than two decades, the insensate auto companies and their union partners and the elected officials who served at their pleasure continued to gun their engines while foreign competitors siphoned away their market share. When this played out against the city’s legacy of white racism and the corrosive two-decade rule of a black politician who cared more about retribution than about resurrection, you can begin to see why Detroit careened off the road.

Okrent identifies the problems consistent with the Bootleggers and Baptists theory in political decisions.  While policies may seem benign, they are often backed by special interests who have their own benefit in mind at the expense of the general population. This phenomenon is particularly visible in the city’s zoning and land use regulation, which many blame for the common pattern of inner city decline. In Detroit, this was witnessed as low-density, relatively expensive housing in the suburbs, with higher density housing and a shrinking population of generally lower-income residents left in the city center.

Because the city has now been losing population for decades, the housing stock is greater than necessary, and some occupied houses are surrounded by  abandoned ones. As suggested in Flint, a city with a similar problem with vacant homes, some people propose that Detroit should use its eminent domain power to buy out neighborhoods that include vacant houses and turn them into green space.

While this program might sound like it would benefit the city as a whole, zoning’s controversial history should caution Detroit residents against supporting a policy that will necessarily benefit some residents at the expense of others.  Across the country’s urbanities, we have seen that zoning is subject to abuse by policy makers and wealthy or well-connected citizens, making it difficult or impossible for the land use market to serve others fairly.

Rather than looking to the political process to improve Detroit’s neighborhoods, residents should acknowledge the myriad opportunities that the city’s relatively cheap housing, capital, and unemployed labor offer to future investors. In Flint, home buyers have already purchased low-priced historic homes for renovation. Detroit is full of opportunities for entrepreneurs, provided its history of corrupt politics comes to an end.

A growing trend has emerged across the country of raising chickens in residential neighborhoods. A New Yorker article suggests that the 2000 movie The Natural History of the Chicken helped spur the popularity of chicken raising, but media coverage in Utah, Wisconsin, and Kansas indicates that the practice has reached a tipping point this year. Chicken raising is now so widespread that a market for Amish coops has developed.

News anecdotes indicate that most backyard chicken farmers raise chickens as pets or to take part in the environmental and local food movements. Many cities prohibit agricultural land use in residentially zoned areas, so advocates are working with their city councils to change these laws.

Backyard chicken coops have really taken off in Asheville, NC. The Mountain Xpress quotes the city’s Mayor Jan Davis:

We’re a progressive community, and that’s the thing to do right now, so we’re going to keep chickens. But neglected chickens is something I think we’re going to have a big problem with.

Tolerance for chickens in city limits may be growing because of the current popularity of progressive sentiments, and the chicken movement is certainly good news for homeowners’ property rights. However, it is easy to understand that not everyone wants their next door neighbor to own chickens. Chickens most likely come along with externalities worthy of study by Ronald Coase; for chicken owners the right to have livestock at their homes is a benefit, but to their neighbor who smells and hears the chickens, it is a cost.

This issue provides a clear case for regulation at the neighborhood, rather than the municipal level.  While it may be too difficult for neighbors to work out this zoning issue on an individual basis, saying “yes” or “no” to chickens in neighborhoods city-wide is also unlikely to be an optimal solution. Here in Washington, DC, for example, it is easy to imagine that residential chickens in Takoma would make residents better off while in Bethesda backyard chicken coops would make most people worse off. If neighborhoods were allowed to permit chickens by a super-majority vote, however, a good balance of individual liberty and social practicality could result.

The Chicago Tribune reports that Mayor Daley and the City Council have given unanimous support to fund any expense overruns should Chicago win its bid to host the 2016 Olympic games. This decision gives the city a fighting chance to be selected to host the games, keeping it in the running with Madrid, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo, all of which have secured similar financial guarantees.

Afterward, aldermen and Mayor Richard Daley gave themselves a standing ovation. The vote reauthorizes Daley to sign the Olympics host city contract in advance of the Oct. 2 vote in Copenhagen by the International Olympics Committee on which of four finalist cities gets the Summer Games in seven years.

This decision by the city’s leadership may not represent the desires of Chicago citizens who, a Tribune poll shows, have dwindling support for the city to host the games, largely because of concerns about taxpayer liability.

After the vote, many of the aldermen gave quotes to the press:

Ald. Ray Suarez (31st) said he initially ”had some reservations.” But Suarez said he now feels the Olympics would bring jobs, housing and a new global reputation to Chicago.

“It will make Chicago a world-class city,” he said.

Of course, Chicago residents and leaders may have many reasons for wanting to host the 2016 Games, but it is uncertain that the event would be an economic boon to the city.  A study conducted to analyze the potential economic effects of the 2012 London Olympics found that historically while some host cities have benefited economically, others have suffered losses as tax dollars used to fund the games are not always recouped during the course of the event.

Adam Blake of the University of Nottingham Business School found that the event was likely to benefit London in 2012 and that increased growth is likely to last until 2016, but that in the years before and after this bracket the results are less certain.

Short-lived, costly events such as the Olympics often result in the construction of facilities that will have limited use after the games are over.  For example, the Bird’s Nest that became symbolic of the 2008 Beijing Olympics is today underutilized, making revenue today only from tourists who wish to see where the athletes competed.

A USA Today reporter speculates:

In other countries, the Bird’s Nest might be revealed as a white elephant — an expensive possession with little commercial value. But in China, the government and state-controlled media are unlikely to advertise the fact and citizens will never know the real cost.

Ex ante, we do not know if the 2016 games would benefit or harm Chicago in the long run, but looking to past cases gives reason to question whether or not host cities benefit in the long run.  Perhaps a more reliable policy to promote economic growth and tourism in the city would be to lower its notoriously high taxes. The Economist recently found that Chicago has the greatest tax burden for tourists of any American city.  The cities’ leadership would be wise to consider how this tax climate would impact potential visitors’ decisions to attend the games before speculating that increased tourism would certainly benefit residents.

A South China Morning Post editorial suggests that if more Chinese urbanites used bicycles for their commutes, the severe traffic congestion in China’s cities could be eased. Currently, Guangdong is considering limitations on vehicle use to help reduce crowding on its streets.

Unlike mass transit and road construction that take time and money to construct, bicycles can offer an immediate respite from traffic for individuals. However, expecting government to create incentives for increased bike use may be unrealistic if they clash with car manufacturers and commuters:

Conflicting interests are difficult for any government to deal with. In the mainland’s case, it involves balancing a policy of using vehicle production to boost industrial growth with ensuring that cities are liveable and function properly. The car industry is the catalyst for a plethora of spin-off industries that boost job creation, meet consumer demand and lay the groundwork for export markets. But cities are where factories, offices and workers are located and they need to be efficient and safe.

While bicycle commutes in many cities can be faster than car commutes as observed in Birmingham, England, congested roads that are not well-designed for shared use of bicycles and automobiles often pose dangers to riders.

Vauban, Germany has instituted a unique, local solution to city transportation, creating a community where car parking is very expensive, and only available on the outskirts of town. CBS’s Jim Sciutto, in a Good Morning America segment, suggests that Vauban’s solution is representative of the “city of the future.”

The New York Times reports:

Vauban, home to 5,500 residents within a rectangular square mile, may be the most advanced experiment in low-car suburban life. But its basic precepts are being adopted around the world in attempts to make suburbs more compact and more accessible to public transportation, with less space for parking.

The article states that only 30 percent of Vauban’s residents own cars and suggests that many of them view this lifestyle as an improvement for their health and well-being. It remains to be seen whether this policy will be successfully adopted in other cities, but University of California-Davis Professor Jeff Loux suggests that this city’s policy could successfully be transferred to the United States, but adjusting to increased housing density would be a big change for many Americans.

Whether or not the Vauban policy is adopted by other cities remains to be seen, but it is an example of successful use in policy variation between cities. If increased bicycle were mandated or incentivized in Germany at the national level, it would be extremely costly with benefits accruing only to those who wanted to give up their cars for bicycles. Vauban was completed in 2006 after 20 years of planning, and all of its residents selected to live there with the knowledge of its policy environment; decreased car use was not forced upon any residents.

If any US communities opt to follow a model similar to Vauban’s, they should do it at the local level and follow their example of allowing residents the opportunity to live in car-free communities rather than implementing “the city of the future” from the top down.

A sign of the times in New York City: the Wall Street Journal reports that coffeehouses are limiting laptop usage to discourage loitering over a latte for hours, taking up space.

As one coffee shop in Brooklyn puts it, “Dear customers, we are absolutely thrilled that you like us so much that you want to spend the day… [but] people gotta eat, and to eat they gotta sit.”

For now the trend seems limited to NYC’s independent coffeehouses. Bookstore chains like Barnes and Noble don’t plan to follow suit. It makes sense. Just like restaurants, coffeehouses make money with customer turnover. NYC real estate is expensive.  The rent isn’t cheap and neither are the chairs occupied by leisurely sippers and surfers. It’s not much different than a diner asking you to shove off to the New York Public Library if you’re gonna read the paper and not buy anything.

Big bookstores, like Borders and Barnes and Noble, are a different ballgame.

Borders charges customers for WiFi; Barnes and Noble doesn’t. But more importantly, given the change in how people buy books — and read them — these store may have a niche market: bibliophiles and freelancers without offices.

Can Kindle cubicles with coffee be far behind?