Local ties

Here's a really interesting post from Kevin Harris about the forces that fostered strong local ties in the post-war years, creating the kind of dense social networks where everyone knew everyone else:

Here are some contributory factors that come to mind:

- routinised lifestyles and a high proportion of mothers as housewives
- lower car ownership, with playable streets
- more local employment and local schools, to which people walked or cycled
- availability of local trade, ditto
- ties that overlapped in the spheres of leisure and workplace as well as home environment
- a heritage of deference to authority (which depended often on unhealthy, disempowering relationships)
- housing that people valued.

Sounds about right to me, and it highlights how an era that many seem to hearken back to resulted from a unique conjuncture of historical trajectories, some of which we probably wouldn't want to turn back even if we could, the lack of autonomy for women being an example.

I think it's particularly important to emphasise the geographically circumscribed nature of society and the economy at the time: overseas trade was much less significant in the 1950s and 1960s than today (see chart below, from here), which meant that effectively more people were producing for their neighbours, near-neighbours or compatriots, while both transport and communication technologies were more expensive and less widely available. That all meant that people devoted more time and attention to those nearby and so local ties were stronger, but partly because there was just less choice then. We've got much more choice now in what we consume and where we go and who we talk to - the potential spatial scope of our social networks has grown massively, so it's no wonder that local ties have weakened.

That's obviously not to say that the change has been unambiguously good. Maybe we've unwittingly crossed a threshold whereby the strength of local networks has collapsed more than we would consciously want. And anyone who wants to foster the desirable aspects of strong local networks probably needs to work a lot harder at fostering them (Kevin has some ideas), because I don't think the economic and social conditions that produced them in the post-war years are going to come back any time soon.

Rent is too damn high

Good news - Matt Yglesias is to write a book about housing policy, provisionally entitled 'Rent is Too Damn High' (see also). I'm fairly sympathetic to the broad Yglesian position on housing policy, which I understand to include the following points:

Pareto improvements are extremely thin on the ground in housing policy, more so than in most areas. This means that it is very difficult to please one group of people without severely displeasing another. For example, loose housing supply in a local area benefits newcomers but harms existing owner-occupiers, while tight supply harms (by excluding) newcomers but benefits existing owners. Existing owners tend to be economically self-interested and more politically powerful than would-be newcomers, so supply tends to be tight. Also, fragmenting land ownership arguably creates a kind of 'anti-commons' wherein individuals can block changes that would benefit society as a whole.

Housing supply decisions have economic, environmental, aesthetic and social ramifications, often in different directions - but very few of the actors involved in debates over housing have any incentive to take all of these into account, let alone the ability to do so. For example, a block of flats in a nice area might be undesirable on aesthetic grounds but provide cheap accommodation for those who need it. There are real and important dilemmas here, but they often seem to go unacknowledged. Another way of saying it is that housing policy affects the distribution of many important resources as much as income does, yet its distributional role seems to go mostly undiscussed.

London Transport Data blog

Together with some associates, I have started up a new blog which will cover London transport data. We gave it the witty name London Transport Data, and you can find it here, with a mission statement of sorts here. Expect some cross-posting, starting today.

Trends in motor vehicle traffic in London

The Department for Transport published new estimates of motor vehicle traffic yesterday, covering the years up to 2010 and quarters up to Q1 2011. There are a range of accompanying data tables but we have picked out a few trends specific to London. All the charts below show indexed trends, with 1993 set to 100.

Traffic in London and England
Overall motor vehicle has fallen for three years in a row in both London and England as a whole, but in London this was preceded by a nine-year stretch of basically flat traffic levels, while traffic continued to grow quite strongly in England as a whole.


Traffic in Inner and Outer London
Within London there has been a clear divergence in the traffic trend between Inner and Outer London. Between 1999 and 2007 traffic grew slightly in Outer London and fell slightly in Inner London, while since 2007 traffic has fallen in both areas, but faster in the inner city.


Car vs non-car motor vehicle traffic in London
Car traffic in London as a whole has been falling since 2002, while non-car motorised traffic continued growing strongly until 2007, from which point it has dropped sharply in the last three years.


You can download the data for the charts in CSV format here.

Originally posted at London Transport Data.

See something or say something - Eric Fischer's flickr/Twitter maps

I was going to write up some thoughts on what we can learn about cities from Eric Fischer's beautiful new maps of tweets and flickr photos (London above), but this interview with Eric pretty much covers it. I would just add that 'flickr density' might be a useful proxy for amenity value in economic or geographic analysis.

You should also go enjoy the full set of maps here. The man's a genius.

Where the NIMBYs are

NatCen have a new report out summarising the results of a survey (commissioned by the previous government) into attitudes towards housing in England. There's lots of interesting stuff in there about tenure aspirations and so on, but I wanted to focus on the section about attitudes towards new housing supply.

Survey respondents were asked whether they would support or oppose more homes being built in their local area. The headline result is that only 29% of respondents support more homes being built in their local area, while 46% were opposed and 23% were neither supportive or opposed. But I'm more interested in the underlying factors, so the charts below break down the results by a variety of categories, with those who neither supported nor opposed new housing excluded for the sake of clarity.

It's pretty striking that opposition to new housing supply is highest in Outer London and lowest in Inner London. Inner London is the only part of the country to have a substantial plurality in favour of new supply.

In general, it is in larger urban areas where support for new housing is highest and in suburbs, small towns or the country where opposition is strongest. But are attitudes just a function of geography or does that mask some other more important factors?

We can't really isolate causation from this data but the breakdown by household income is rather suggestive. It shows that the poorest households are the most supportive of new housing supply and those in the upper half of the income distribution the most opposed.

Finally, there are stark differences according to the current housing tenure of the respondent. People in social housing are on average in favour of new housing supply, people who rent privately are basically split, and a large plurality of owner occupiers are opposed.

The fact that Inner London has a higher proportion of low income and/or renting households probably goes a long way to explaining why it has the highest support for new supply in the country. The tenure comparison also supports the case for an economic rationale behind attitudes to new supply. Owner occupiers would tend to have the least need for new supply and the most to lose if new supply brings down house prices, while social housing tenants have little incentive to worry about lower local prices and are more likely to know someone who needs a home or be in need of one themselves. And perhaps private renters are somewhere in the middle.

As a final point, I'd just like to emphasise that we tend to think of attitudes to new housing supply as a personal matter, but it has potentially huge implications for the lives of other people. If we succesfully oppose new housing supply in our local area we make it more difficult for people to find a decent, affordable place to live. We may not ever meet those people or even be aware of their existence, but they exist alright. This is in large part a moral issue, and I think we should be willing to discuss our attitudes to it in terms of their moral consequences.

Cycling journey times are very reliable

A couple of sources on cycle journey time reliability. First there's TfL's report of August 2009, which finds (para 10.4) that:

journey times are very consistent per rider, and far more independent of traffic conditions than [for] larger vehicles such as cars. Cyclists do not travel in the main traffic stream and therefore avoid the main barriers (barring signals) that other road users face

Then there's a survey done by the Chartered Management Institute in 2004, which doesn't appear to be available itself any more but is referenced in a few places, notably this Haringey Council document:

According to a Chartered Management Institute survey (2004) of 4,000 of their members, cyclists are more likely to arrive at work on time, and are more productive and less prone to stress than their counterparts arriving by car or public transport. The Institute found that 58% of cyclists say they are never disrupted by traffic, compared to only four per cent of drivers. Nine per cent of cyclists say they are stressed by their journey to work, compared to nearly 40% of drivers; almost a quarter of motorists feel their productivity is affected by the stress of their commute, compared to zero percent of the cyclists.

The upshot is that cycling journey times are very reliable, much more reliable than car journeys, because cyclists can usually filter through stationary traffic. This implies that if more people switched from cars to bikes then overall journey time reliability would go up, all else equal. But if your main measure of journey time reliability excludes cyclists and focuses only on motor vehicle traffic, as TfL's does, then the risk is that your attempts to improve reliability for motor vehicles will come at the expense of a mode which will always be much more reliable.

"Exponentially diminishing collective returns"

The New York Times is hosting a discussion on the somewhat over-hyped distinction it has drawn between European cities supposedly out to make motorists' lives a misery and American cities which are not. I like Tom Vanderbilt's contribution best, as I think it puts the idea that cities should be remade around cars in its proper historical place:

The idea that a city like New York could be made wholly compatible with the car looks increasingly antique, a paved-with-good-intentions fever dream now as obsolete as the idea of tower-block housing projects. As Michael Frumin, a transportation expert, once observed, if the morning subway commute were to be conducted by car, we would need 84 Queens Midtown Tunnels, 76 Brooklyn Bridges or 200 Fifth Avenues.

The car, with its exponentially diminishing collective returns — for example, traffic — is not the solution to mobility in the increasingly crowded cities of the 21st century. The sooner we put this flat-earth belief behind us, the faster we can get along with ideas for more efficient forms of mobility.

I love that phrase - exponentially diminishing collective returns!

NBER papers on transport and labour economics

The NBER publish some good economics! Here are a couple of new working papers I liked the sound of :

Pounds that Kill: The External Costs of Vehicle Weight
Michael Anderson, Maximilian Auffhammer

Heavier vehicles are safer for their own occupants but more hazardous for the occupants of other vehicles. In this paper we estimate the increased probability of fatalities from being hit by a heavier vehicle in a collision. We show that, controlling for own-vehicle weight, being hit by a vehicle that is 1,000 pounds heavier results in a 47% increase in the baseline fatality probability. Estimation results further suggest that the fatality risk is even higher if the striking vehicle is a light truck (SUV, pickup truck, or minivan). We calculate that the value of the external risk generated by the gain in fleet weight since 1989 is approximately 27 cents per gallon of gasoline. We further calculate that the total fatality externality is roughly equivalent to a gas tax of $1.08 per gallon. We consider two policy options for internalizing this external cost: a gas tax and an optimal weight varying mileage tax. Comparing these options, we find that the cost is similar for most vehicles.

(See also my post on external accident risk)

The Incidence of Local Labor Demand Shocks
Matthew J. Notowidigdo

Low-skill workers are comparatively immobile: when labor demand slumps in a city, low-skill workers are disproportionately likely to remain to face declining wages and employment. This paper estimates the extent to which (falling) housing prices and (rising) social transfers can account for this fact using a spatial equilibrium model. Nonlinear reduced form estimates of the model using U.S. Census data document that positive labor demand shocks increase population more than negative shocks reduce population, this asymmetry is larger for low-skill workers, and such an asymmetry is absent for wages, housing values, and rental prices. GMM estimates of the full model suggest that the comparative immobility of low-skill workers is not due to higher mobility costs per se, but rather a lower incidence of adverse labor demand shocks.

In other words, policies that protect against unemployment and poverty also reduce mobility, which obviously doesn't mean the policies aren't worthwhile but does tend to increase the likelihood of both spatially concentrated and temporally extended unemployment.

Nicer inner cities might be a mixed blessing for people on low incomes

Ben Rogers, writing in the Standard, gets to the heart of dilemmas around aspirations towards 'mixed communities' in the face of economic forces that seem to be acting against them. Read the whole thing, but here is an extract:

As property prices go up, lower earners will be squeezed out. In the absence of a massive house-building programme in central London, the capital will become to feel more like Paris, with a rich centre and a poorer outer-ring. Rent policy can slow or hasten this process but not reverse it.

Should we care? Instinctively I want to answer "yes". I look on with misgivings as the Highbury street on which I live becomes steadily fancier - even though I know that I have contributed to that process and stand to gain from it financially.

It has been an article of faith among socially-minded reformers since the days of Joseph Rowntree and Ebenezer Howard that "mixed communities" are a good thing and income segregation bad. Yet the evidence in favour of mixed-income neighbourhoods is weak. Poor children from rich neighbourhoods do not seem to do any better in life than those from poor neighbourhoods. LSE economists Paul Cheshire and Henry Overman argue that there might even be benefits for poor people living in poor neighbourhoods: shops are cheaper and public services tailored to them.

The evidence on the impacts of mixed communities is indeed fairly mixed, and the point about costs is an important one, but I'm not sure it's the whole story. If the cheaper areas of the future are going to be in the suburbs then the cost of transport for the poor to get to city centre jobs is going to be higher. School quality and environmental amenity are also likely to be lower in cheaper areas - that's part of the reason why they're cheaper, after all.

So I think the benefits to the poor of being 'squeezed out' of affluent city centres are still fairly ambiguous, even leaving aside the very large transitional costs facing anyone who does make such a move (as demonstrated by the fact that the people affected by the cuts to housing benefit generally seem pretty unhappy about it).

More broadly I think these dilemmas highlight a very important shift in how our cities function. To simplify massively, in the past when cities had lots of dirty industry they had dirty environments as a result, particularly towards the centre. That encouraged richer people to move out of inner cities as soon as they could afford to and transport allowed. On the other hand, poorer people could save on transport costs by living in the centre, close to the jobs but also close to the pollution.

But over time, as incomes rose and as environmental regulation strengthened, cities lost most of their dirty industry (and associated crime, perhaps). Inner city environments improved drastically, which meant that the rich have started to come back in, lowering their transport costs at the same time. That pushes up housing costs in the centre. So the poor have to choose between staying put and paying higher housing costs, or moving out and paying higher transport costs. That's if the poor rent in the private sector, anyway. If they own their own place or live in social housing, they get to benefit from an improved inner city environment without higher housing costs. So there's an argument that inner city social housing is of increasing benefit to the poor as city centre environments improve. You can also see why it's of increasing interest to those who think we should sell it off.

Obviously that's a very broad sketch with quite a few simplifications and assumptions thrown in[1]. But I think the link between 'greener cities' and displacement of the poor is real enough.

[1] E.g. it assumes that the centre still has the lion's share of the jobs, which is the case in many European cities but not in some US ones.