Building a Conservative Urbanism

The concept of “civilization” is based on the economic and cultural exchange enabled by cities. However, the American “inner-city” has widely become a euphemism for dysfunction, exacerbated in the last decade by the “Great Awokening.” Those urban areas not rendered uninhabitable by crime and possessing the rudiments of urban cultural amenities and attractive architecture are often unaffordable, hindering young Americans in building wealth and starting families. Furthermore, many major cities are bastions of the radical left, substituting Neo-Marxist anarcho-tyranny akin to Orwell’s Barcelona for the rule of law and abusing their jurisdiction over so much of American life for law-fare. However, policies such as school choice and zoning reform could help to foster red-state cities as an alternative to the Scylla of urban anarcho-tyranny and the Charybdis of sterile suburbia, enabling conservatives to overcome their present marginalization as pagani and shape the future of American civilization.

I. Why We Need Conservative Cities

Why are American cities so left-wing? There are three main reasons that I can discern.

First, Anglo-American culture has traditionally been oriented to rural or small-town life (the former especially among the Scots-Irish and the latter among Yankees), which can be traced to the Teutonic folkways of feudal Europe in contrast to the Mediterranean’s poleis and later centralized monarchical and ecclesiastical empires. Indeed, even as Britain and then America precociously industrialized, WASPs chased a Romantic pseudo-rural ideal, exemplified by country clubs. As America spread west, new states, inspired by Jeffersonian ideology, intentionally but deleteriously separated their college towns and state capitals from emerging commercial centers. Notably, the metropolitan area where conservatives have recently shown the most strength, the “Gold Coast” of South Florida, is heavily populated by middle-class Latin Americans and other immigrants (in particular Jews from the former Soviet Union) from cultures where urban life has traditionally been prized.

Second, crime, public disorder, public sector union parasitism, the racial spoils system in the public sector, heavy taxation and regulation of productive citizens, and left-wing ideology in education have driven out middle class families and led suburban residents to resist rather than seek urban annexation, characteristically leaving the only underclass, city workers, gays, and young transients rebelling against their parents. While this process may be devastating for a city’s long-term prospects, it often serves individual politicians’ interests by expelling the opposition’s base, a phenomenon known as the “Curley Effect” after Boston’s early-20th century Irish mayor, whose policies and rhetoric promoted the replacement of the city’s WASPs.

The third reason is that many remaining livable cities have become unaffordable for most families aspiring to American norms of living space and financial independence. This is largely attributable to restrictions on market-rate construction, with new development often catering either to the wealthy or “affordable housing” set-asides. The reasons for these restrictions range from historical or environmental preservation to basic small-c conservatism (often very suboptimal from an aesthetic or functional perspective, since American zoning often simplistically focuses on limiting densities and segregating uses) to politicians’ interest in the corruption and social engineering enabled by selective zoning variances, a classic “bootleggers and Baptists” coalition. In local politics, concentrated opportunities for rent-seeking and loss-aversion-driven “NIMBY” concerns about disruption alike usually prevail over the more dispersed benefits of lower rents and hopes of higher land-values in up zoned tracts. It should be noted that this collective-action problem also implies that zoning is not a conspiracy of homeowners; in addition to the fact that up-zoning can actually boost local property values, most Americans only own one home (limiting their ability to profit from high real estate prices, as housing is a necessary expense) and have a stake in affordability to the extent that they have both more children than houses and a “bequest motive.”

However, even well-intentioned policies preventing land from being put to its best use lead to the nationwide externality of pricing workers out of the metropolitan areas where agglomeration economies enhance productivity and wages. Doubtlessly in part because of the high cost of raising children, America’s most dynamic cities are also often low-fertility “IQ shredders” with negative effects on future social dynamism. The gratuitous difficulty of homeownership and family formation has also very likely exacerbated young voters’ political radicalism, with the UK representing an extreme example of this phenomenon. However, conservatives can also benefit if they credibly seek to remedy this problem; Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives appear set to win the youth vote in the next Canadian election, in part by promising pro-housing policies.

The flight of middle-class families, the bulk of the conservative base, to the suburbs has come with high costs. The suburban lifestyle is expensive, both in terms of inefficient land use and mandatory automobile ownership. Indeed, it is often intentionally expensive since affluent families, regardless of political ideology, generally seek to price out the underclass and, especially, to ensure a safe and learning-conducive environment in local schools. This dynamic leads to an exclusionary zoning “prisoner’s dilemma” which results in a mostly unchanged socioeconomic geography, albeit more strictly stratified between adjacent classes on the margin and with many promising low and middle-income students having less access to good public than private schools, but with costlier housing for everyone. Furthermore, the suburban lifestyle, with its lack of walkability, harms both human health and the environment. Finally, suburbs lack the cultural opportunities of cities. As Jane Jacobs and Bronze Age Pervert have argued, suburbs are a matriarchal “longhouse” in which “free-range parenting” is impossible (as it is in unsafe cities) and working mens’ lives are divided between bosses and wives, contributing to anomie and ceding cities’ vital cultural and political territory to the activist Left.

As such, fostering red-state urbanism should be a central conservative priority for multiple reasons. First, it could promote a traditionalist cultural renaissance; it is an embarrassment that a wealthy city like Midland, Texas, has not converted its fiscal windfall into something akin to the Manaus Opera House. Second, it could promote blue-collar employment in both construction and industry, help young middle-class families build wealth, and permit conservative “elite human capital” to have careers in communities reinforcing their values. Finally, the rise of more politically-diverse commercial and cultural centers may preempt the Left’s use of cities for mob action and law-fare. Despite its claim to provide a synthesis between urbanity and nature, contemporary suburbia generally fails to adequately deliver either as well as historical American urbanism a la Daniel Burnham or Frederick Law Olmsted with its extensive boulevard and park systems, and conservatives’ exurban escapism is not particularly well-suited for either preserving traditional culture or shaping modern civilization.

II. Policies for Red-State Urbanism

How can conservatives reform American cities? In my view, universal school choice is the most powerful tool. Of course, this is not the only reason to enact school choice, which all red states should adopt to expand opportunities for better, more tailored, and more classical education. However, no longer requiring middle-class families to pay twice for a good education would make urban living more viable for the conservative base, while weakening the teachers’ unions that are a significant base for the urban far-left. This could begin a virtuous cycle, since a better-run and safer city would tend to attract more middle-class families. School choice could also attract college-educated conservative-leaning blue state emigres who desire both urbanism and a classical or religious education for their children, both promoting economic and cultural development and balancing out the political consequences of urbanization. Red states’ adoption of universal school choice (without restricting selection, income, or tuition as in Cleveland and Milwaukee’s previous schemes), covering urban areas including South Florida, Phoenix, Tampa Bay, Charlotte, Orlando, Raleigh-Durham, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa, will be an experiment in urbanism as well as in education.

It is also imperative for red-state urbanism to promote an affordable cost of living for middle-class families. Anti-density rules are generally counter-productive for this purpose, as demonstrated by the experience of the Bay Area and Southern California; laws reserving land for detached single-family homes may reduce their relative cost, but can increase their absolute cost (especially for larger houses and plots appealing to families with multiple children) when apartments and townhouses to efficiently satisfy the needs of singles, empty-nesters (especially the growing retiree population), and families privileging convenient access to urban amenities are scarce. Some on the Right may claim that immigration restriction is sufficient to lower housing costs, but this conflicts both with pro-natalism and the priority of building conservative-oriented economic and cultural centers receptive to primarily internal migration.

Since our social and political system cannot be expected to produce urbanist philosopher-kings a la Baron Haussmann (and, in addition to its expensive and not very family-friendly land use, in my view even Paris is diminished by its monotony), the best system for America would probably be to end zoning wholesale and return to market-directed neighborhood development. Similarly, transportation infrastructure could be provided through privately-operated tollway and rail networks like South Florida’s Brightline. However, cities would still have a role in providing boulevards (with rights-of-way for private transit and infrastructure concessions), parks, and civic buildings and monuments, and incentivizing marginal developers’ adherence to a pro-circulatory grid-based plan (with sidewalks and tree canopy to combat the “urban heat island” effect) as a condition of benefitting from the infrastructure and service scale economies of annexation. In late 19th and early 20th century America, such a planning regime allowed growing cities like Chicago to combine deed-restricted family-friendly neighborhoods such as Beverly and Kenwood, “gentle density” through courtyard apartments and walkable neighborhood business districts, apartment towers along Lake Shore Drive, and early industrial parks such as the Central Manufacturing District.

The city that most closely follows this classic American form of urbanism today is Houston and its unincorporated environs, where land use is primarily controlled by market forces and private deed restrictions instead of zoning and tollways facilitate growth. Admittedly, Houston is not an urbanist utopia; for example, instead of cross-subsidizing sprawl through parking mandates, the city should manage traffic through congestion pricing (or at least dynamically-adjusted parking meters if that’s not practicable), using the funds raised to expand (and better police) public transit. Still, Houston’s unique experiment has allowed for selective densification (distinctively in the form of townhouses) to ensure comparative affordability while preserving the option to settle in stable HOA-regulated family-friendly neighborhoods like River Oaks, Tanglewood, and The Woodlands, while also promoting blue-collar industries.

That said, there are valid objections to simply imposing Houston-style “YIMBYism” nationwide. Many 20th century neighborhoods were developed in reasonable reliance on the notion that homeowners would continue to be able to control zoning through local politics, and developers would have otherwise incorporated the deed restrictions common in zoning-free Houston (or residents would not have allowed them to lapse where they did previously exist). Therefore, homeowners could complain with justice about a simple ex post abolition of zoning laws, since the number of property owners in many neighborhoods is too large to plausibly engage in Coasean bargaining to attach new rules with unanimous consent. Furthermore, historic districts do help to preserve the cohesion and beauty of many urban neighborhoods, and, albeit rarely, some (usually old-money) towns’ zoning policies do ensure basic standards of architectural taste and coherence.

A more viable approach than complete YIMBYism might be for states to permanently preempt most zoning rules on unincorporated land to foster the rise of new cities like the proposed California Forever project. If reasonable deed restrictions (amendable by majority vote and requiring periodic renewal, per a public policy of putting land to its best use) boosted a tract’s long-term value, developers could attach them to subdivisions or bargain with adjacent landowners. Environmental regulation and nuisance law would also continue to limit major negative externalities for which reliance on bargaining between property owners is impractical. Regarding existing cities, there is a strong legal argument that city zoning ordinances could be converted into neighborhood deed restrictions under the above rules (or lapse if property owners decide that the HOA fees to fund enforcement would not be worth it); for larger tracts already controlled by a single landowner or HOA, they could simply be abolished. Jurisdictions seeking to continue historic or natural preservation efforts would have to negotiate with property owners to buy property or attach easements instead of imposing such regulations as an unfunded mandate with unseen and dispersed costs.

More ambitiously, utilizing the precedent of Kelo v. New London to strengthen rather than undermine property rights, it might also be possible for states to privatize the right to use eminent domain to assemble large tracts of rural land or urban blocks for coherent re-development by granting that power to special districts, along the lines of Texas’ Public Improvement Districts, established with the consent of a super-majority of affected property owners by both number and valuation. Developers could secure such approval by offering a substantial premium over fair market value and a right of first refusal for plots or units in the new development. This would work similarly to the “land readjustment” system utilized in Germany, Israel, and Japan, among other countries. Of course, this mechanism could be especially powerful if it were paired with zoning preemptions as proposed above.

More modestly, states could enact targeted land-use reforms aimed at addressing collective-action problems inhibiting urban development. For instance, they could emulate Florida in ending “Euclidean” zoning and legalize medium-density residential or mixed-use development in all commercial zones (except for state-designated historic districts), effectively tying the economic and fiscal advantages of commercial zoning (such as the right to collect sales taxes) to expanding workers’ housing options. Furthermore, states could permit medium-density mixed-use development (with no parking mandates) within walking distance of regional transportation networks like South Florida’s Brightline. As well as being a reciprocal quid pro quo for the benefits of state-facilitated infrastructure, this reform could make such networks (with their broad-based regional benefits) more viable in the first place by enabling infrastructure providers to build complementary real estate, following the example of Japanese railroad companies. Crucially, developments under both of these targeted zoning reform laws should be market-rate and subject to generally-applicable aesthetic rules and impact fees to maximize the benefits and minimize disruption for affected communities. Ideally, these reforms could appeal to both market-oriented conservative urbanists and environmentally-conscious Democrats.

Finally, to counteract the “prisoner’s dilemma” dynamic that fuels restrictive zoning, states could establish a municipal funding pool to replace a portion of existing city property taxes financed by, say, a penny sales tax, but condition disbursement on localities either meeting a statewide standard of rent affordability or expanding their housing supply by a certain percentage (with partial credit granted). Such a reform, which could potentially assemble a cross-partisan coalition representing affordable rural areas, expanding exurbs, low-income localities, and reform-oriented cities, would effectively impose a price for engaging in negative-sum exclusionary zoning. Localities’ responses to this incentive could include greenfield expansion, permitting lot splits, allowing duplexes and ADUs, increasing height limits in multi-family zones, or more comprehensively adopting “form-based codes” (like Coral Gables’ “Mediterranean bonus”) focusing on stylistic coherence rather than curbing density and segregating synergistic commercial and residential uses.

Whichever policies are ultimately adopted, school choice and the land-use reforms detailed above would utilize market incentives to promote the growth of affordable family-friendly metropolises with the economics of scale and scope necessary to challenge incumbent coastal cities.

III. The Promise and Pitfalls of Georgism (A Digression)

Another policy frequently associated with YIMBYism is that of replacing property taxes and other forms of local and maybe even national taxation with a land value tax (potentially at a confiscatory rate), termed “Georgism” after its advocate Henry George.

Georgists advance two principal arguments for LVTs. First, they argue that since the supply of land has been largely fixed since the closing of the frontier, LVTs are perfectly efficient and merely transfer revenue from landowners to the government, while property taxes reduce investment in structures and are therefore passed on to renters and workers. However, the LVT’s neutrality only holds if land values are exogenous to landowners’ actions, and large landowners, developers, and homeowners (via HOAs, which cover the vast majority of new American developments, and participation in small units of local government) often do capture spillovers from their investments and activities. Therefore, an LVT would deter landowners’ activities to boost land values, especially in cities that follow a free-market land-use policy.

Hence, especially under the developer-led planning system sketched out above, the maximally-efficient LVT rate would be well below confiscatory levels. Also, incentivizing farmers to maintain and invest in their land favors relieving farmland. Furthermore, the moral, social, and financial-systemic arguments against retroactively confiscating paid-in home equity means that only the “increment,” or future real growth in land values, should be taxed. These factors imply that the optimal LVT rate would raise far less revenue than is believed by many Georgists, especially under a free-market land-use regime that keeps land price growth in check. Therefore, while there is a strong case for a moderate LVT (structured as a real estate capital gains tax, with a rollover option a la 1031 exchanges to reduce “lock-in” effects and provide a rough offset to taxation of inflationary gains), an LVT cannot serve as the workhorse of local, much less national, revenue generation.

The second main argument for an LVT is that since local land prices are responsive to demand from mobile residents and businesses, an LVT taxes the passive beneficiaries of local services. However, individuals and businesses are not fully mobile (especially in the case of large cities) due to local economic and social networks, implying that they (and not only landowners) capture the benefits of local governance, and to the extent they are mobile, all categories of local taxes are capitalized into land prices. Since the benefits of local government are shared between residents, businesses, and landowners, it is sensible to impose taxes with a likewise incidence (such as on property and sales). This is particularly the case in large cities where renters dominate the local electorate and where, paradoxically, the LVT’s relative economic efficiency could encourage local governments to engage in socially-wasteful spending at landowners’ expense.

While Georgism is flawed, the property tax is still an attractive local revenue source due to its stability (especially for backing long-term capital investment), its ease of collection and difficulty of avoidance, its function as a user fee for local property protection in the form of police and fire services, and its role as direct compensation for new development that at least some residents may consider a disruptive eyesore. However, it also has its drawbacks. First, it discriminates against the agricultural, construction, industrial, and in-person retail sectors, promoting “virtualization” of the economy. Second, it is highly “salient” for homeowners, since it must be paid directly, is inevitably imprecise and unpredictable, and does not vary with household income, potentially leading to underinvestment in the public goods essential for urbanism where (as in most places) homeowners predominate in the local electorate. As such, cities, especially more consolidated cities where cross-border shopping is less of a concern, should be allowed to additionally collect a local-option sales tax.

Finally, one decidedly non-Georgist tax policy that could help urbanism succeed is expanding cities’ power to provide homestead exemptions, which shift the tax burden from resident homeowners to renters and commuting workers in jurisdictions such as large cities where the latter are plentiful. This policy would encourage middle-class homeowners, the centrist and conservative base in urban politics, to remain in cities. Taking after many South Carolina cities in levying a penny sales tax and using the revenue to provide a pro rata homeowner tax rebate would provide an automatic sociological stabilizer, since the rebate would increase if the proportion of homeowners fell. Statewide homestead tax breaks, especially for school taxes (which are often revenue-equalized across school districts by state aid) as in South Carolina, could be used to shape interstate migration and ensure that urbanism does not radically alter a state’s political character.

Conclusion: A Time to Build

Of course, any family-friendly urbanist program presupposes law and order, especially to make characteristically urban amenities like public transit and beautiful public spaces viable. To this end, red state governors should assert control over their legal creatures, exemplified by Ron DeSantis’ removal of leftist DAs, and increase criminal penalties. States should also actively preempt cities from imposing burdensome taxes and regulations (including rent control and “inclusionary zoning” mandates). Finally, if states fund public universities at all, architecture schools are a prime candidate given their concrete externalities, and they should promote the traditionalist architecture widely favored by the public to ensure that such externalities are positive. While political incentives have traditionally leaned against spending political capital on urban issues, the GOP and centrist forces in urban politics have shown growing promise with non-traditional (especially immigrant) voters on issues such as crime, public order, and education.

Where it proves impractical to transform existing cities into hospitable environments for conservative-leaning middle-class families, another potential path is for conservative investors to develop beautiful mixed-use family-friendly communities that could serve as the nucleus of future urban development. The Ringling family’s role in guiding the development of Sarasota, Florida, is an excellent example of how a traditionalist vision of urban culture can be realized in the modern world (although in contrast to retiree-heavy Sarasota, future projects should target young families). Notable examples of New Classical urbanism that could serve as models for larger future projects include Carmel outside Indianapolis, New Albany outside of Columbus, Florida’s Baldwin Park and so-called “Redneck Riviera” (Alys Beach, Rosemary Beach, and Seaside), Louisiana’s River Ranch, England’s Poundbury, and Guatemala’s Ciudad Cayala.

Regardless of which path is taken (or ideally both), conservatives must get in to cities if they want a role in building the future of American civilization.