Community and the Tieboutian Hypothesis
Probably the most interesting class I'm taking this semester is my Land Use seminar. Part of the reason I went to law school was specifically land use policy, and in particular, how it could be used to restructure municipal areas to foster community. This past week, I read a paper by Lee Anne Fennel, who was writing on how land use actors (she was mostly writing to the legal field) could use aspects of the Tieboutan hypothesis to address negative externalities created by exclusionary land use controls. She was essentially saying that governments should be imposing a tax on formal exclusionary controls to spread the negative impacts on problems like white flight and inner urban deserts.
For a quick breakdown, Tiebout (pronounced Tee-beaux) created his hypothesis in resonse to theories by prominent economists in the 1950s who claimed that local governments would always be inefficient in terms of satisfying consumer demand. Tiebout countered that people have choices and that they actually shop for government services in a market setting - people using their feet as consumer-voters.
So Fennel was essentially arguing that exclusion can be an attractive element in the bundle offered by a local government. At the same time, exlcusion keeps people out of a full range of choices and we learn less about their true preferences. Obviously, there are some major differences between consumers of products and consumers in this homebuyer context, which she addresses. As an editorial moment - I cannot stand when people turn to an economic model to explain citizenship and community - there are some things that just cannot be quantified. The Tieboutian hypothesis, although an interesting and brilliant response, is naturally over simplified. Some things are too complex for that system and to try and box them in is to degrade and flatten those aspects. But aside from my problems on an essentialist level with this approach, I thought that her theory was interesting.
What Fennel is advocating is that each consumer-voter is also a producer of a public good in the bundle. Each person makes a pretty big difference until there is a critical mass to achieve enough "quality enhancing users" to achieve a particular public good. So this is also assuming a linear function (that everyone is contributing roughly equal amounts) - of which we have no empirical evidence mind you. Of course, it's not possible to have all the residents preferences fulfilled, but there is the tendency that once a critical mass has been achieved in a community, it tends to equate with money and white suburbia - and suddenly there's a common resource dilemma when we start talking about associational entitlement rights to equal public goods despite the community (like public schools, for example - see D.C. v. NoVa). What happens is that the upper class white community starts to take over a community and then impliment exclusionary practices to ensure that others coming in are like them (single family home zoning, no low income housing, no public transportation, etc.). The idea is that this imbalance is actually creating an overall loss because once the critical mass is achieved, it would be more effiecient for the quality enhancing users to move to other communities instead. But there is no incentive for governments to curb exclusionary practices.
Enter the tax.
I actually, despite my hatred of the economic method, like this. I think that imposing a tax on exclusionary zoning practices will actually fill in some gaps with regard to currently underutilized antidiscrimination laws. Because, basically, I think most of those zoning laws are just a proxy for keeping a community rich and white. Which, other than being gross, is illegal. So all in all, I think that it is a worthy thing to explore. of course, there are times when I think exclusionary practices can be good things - so it's a tough issue.
For example, I think that developers often go into communities without regard to what is most beneficial for that community in terms of growth, but rather what is going to make them the most money. So, for example, what used to be single family homes are being turned into absurdly expensive cluster housing complexes. This does not provide for diversified community members, but rather saturates an area beyond its capabilities and can generally turn a tigh-knit community into an anonymous shopping district. Not good. I am hesitant to say that we'll know a bad exlcusionary practice when we see it, but it seems like there is room to create a list of protocals for taxing exlcusionary practices without disarming neighhood alliances from protecting the integrity of a community against developers.
It's certainly an interesting topic, and I'd love to see a pilot program in the works. Fennel starts at Chicago law school next fall, so we'll see where she goes with it.
cross posted at Phocus and Francis
For a quick breakdown, Tiebout (pronounced Tee-beaux) created his hypothesis in resonse to theories by prominent economists in the 1950s who claimed that local governments would always be inefficient in terms of satisfying consumer demand. Tiebout countered that people have choices and that they actually shop for government services in a market setting - people using their feet as consumer-voters.
So Fennel was essentially arguing that exclusion can be an attractive element in the bundle offered by a local government. At the same time, exlcusion keeps people out of a full range of choices and we learn less about their true preferences. Obviously, there are some major differences between consumers of products and consumers in this homebuyer context, which she addresses. As an editorial moment - I cannot stand when people turn to an economic model to explain citizenship and community - there are some things that just cannot be quantified. The Tieboutian hypothesis, although an interesting and brilliant response, is naturally over simplified. Some things are too complex for that system and to try and box them in is to degrade and flatten those aspects. But aside from my problems on an essentialist level with this approach, I thought that her theory was interesting.
What Fennel is advocating is that each consumer-voter is also a producer of a public good in the bundle. Each person makes a pretty big difference until there is a critical mass to achieve enough "quality enhancing users" to achieve a particular public good. So this is also assuming a linear function (that everyone is contributing roughly equal amounts) - of which we have no empirical evidence mind you. Of course, it's not possible to have all the residents preferences fulfilled, but there is the tendency that once a critical mass has been achieved in a community, it tends to equate with money and white suburbia - and suddenly there's a common resource dilemma when we start talking about associational entitlement rights to equal public goods despite the community (like public schools, for example - see D.C. v. NoVa). What happens is that the upper class white community starts to take over a community and then impliment exclusionary practices to ensure that others coming in are like them (single family home zoning, no low income housing, no public transportation, etc.). The idea is that this imbalance is actually creating an overall loss because once the critical mass is achieved, it would be more effiecient for the quality enhancing users to move to other communities instead. But there is no incentive for governments to curb exclusionary practices.
Enter the tax.
I actually, despite my hatred of the economic method, like this. I think that imposing a tax on exclusionary zoning practices will actually fill in some gaps with regard to currently underutilized antidiscrimination laws. Because, basically, I think most of those zoning laws are just a proxy for keeping a community rich and white. Which, other than being gross, is illegal. So all in all, I think that it is a worthy thing to explore. of course, there are times when I think exclusionary practices can be good things - so it's a tough issue.
For example, I think that developers often go into communities without regard to what is most beneficial for that community in terms of growth, but rather what is going to make them the most money. So, for example, what used to be single family homes are being turned into absurdly expensive cluster housing complexes. This does not provide for diversified community members, but rather saturates an area beyond its capabilities and can generally turn a tigh-knit community into an anonymous shopping district. Not good. I am hesitant to say that we'll know a bad exlcusionary practice when we see it, but it seems like there is room to create a list of protocals for taxing exlcusionary practices without disarming neighhood alliances from protecting the integrity of a community against developers.
It's certainly an interesting topic, and I'd love to see a pilot program in the works. Fennel starts at Chicago law school next fall, so we'll see where she goes with it.
cross posted at Phocus and Francis
posted by The Marpepps! at 11:58 PM
6 Comments:
Very interesting post. I have to admit that I don't know much about land use or housing law, but the little I overheard from working at a Bay Area (CA) civil rights litigation firm this past summer creates some questions. In the Bay Area, the State has created "fair share" statutes that require local municipalities to provide their fair share of low-income housing. The problem that my firm, and I would imagine others, were trying to address is that many municipalities (primarily wealthy white suburbs) would implement zoning and anti-growth restrictions that essentially made the construction of any significant amount of low-income housing to be constructed.
I was told that there are three parts to building low-income housing: 1) money to build the housing (provided in the Bay Area by not-for-profit low-income housing builders), 2) land to build on (which tends to exist in the suburbs), and 3) building permits granted by local government. In the municipalities sued by my firm, the first two requirements were more than fulfilled. Even more than that, the municipalities were the sites of large concentrations of jobs; not surprisingly, most of the people who worked at those jobs lived elsewhere and commuted in. The barrier was the building permits/zoning laws.
So my question is, how would taxes on exclusionary laws help fix the shortage in low-income housing? Even if the taxes were directed toward building the housing elsewhere, is it possible that the problem is also a lack of land to build on? And if these consumer-voters are wealthy white people, is it the case that this tax won't act as a deterrent but rather as just an additional cost for not having to live in a diverse community?
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I'm going to agree with hsuper's inference in his/her questioning at the end of his/her post. the theory summarized by the main post is nice and academic; practically, I don't think it has much merit. we know by hypothesis that these white "consumer-voters," by which we mean residents, are willing to pay high costs for their exclusionary lifestyle. in order for a tax to work changes in the zoning laws or living patterns of these people, the tax would need to be so high as to equal the "costs" these "consumer-voters" are avoiding by not living in many of the neighborhoods they have consumed-real-estate/voted-with-their-feet/resided their way out of. These costs re quite high: they include the real and perceived costs of racial and class diversity, population density, urban schools, increased security/police, light and noise pollution... While the ramifications for "equity" aren't satisfying, it's true that most white-flighters have made what is, at its core, a personal choice motivated by valid personal socioeconomic considerations. Trying to balance those considerations with a tax on rational but un"equal" actions is (a) likely to be difficult due to the cost of the tax, and (b) is a highly indirect system designed to legislate against market-based considerations in favor of
The solution needs to be more direct. You could simply legislate against exclusionary zoning at the federal level. Instead of trying to use roundabout attenuative techniques to modify the incentives to create the exclusionary system, just exercise the basic function of a legislature: call something bad policy and make it illegal. Or you could challenge these laws or other municipal practices on Constitutional grounds. For instance, the case of Thompson v. HUD (See 404 F.3d 821 for a relevant report) will likely have a transformative effect on Baltimore's public housing, sans any roundabout tax on exclusionary zoning, just direct protest against unequal conditions.
You should read "Zoned Out" by Jonathan Levine, a planning professor at Michigan. He has a great discussion of Tiebout (pointing out that Tiebout's theory rests on a variety of unreal assumptions, most of which are ignored by people who try to apply his argument to the real world).
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