Tag Archives: social engineering

Resist the social engineering of mass transit but ignore the social engineering of suburbia

Posted on by

Mass transit in the suburbs is hard to accomplish but one of the biggest advantages of establishing mass transit now is that it can help shape future suburbia. Yet, a number of commentators mass transit efforts are folly even as they ignore how the suburban decentralized landscape came about. Example #1:

That was my first up-close encounter with the Cult of Transit. There is nothing wrong with expanding bus service and building new rail lines—provided they actually enable people to get where they are going. However, urban planners’ fixation on transit stems more from social engineering than transportation engineering. The latter develops projects that enable people to get from Point A to Point B. The former builds projects designed to change the public’s behavior—prodding them into getting around in ways the planners believe is best…

I think of my attempts to take transit to go from my exurb to downtown Sacramento. It would involve driving to a station 20 minutes away, paying for parking, buying a ticket and waiting for a train. It would take longer and cost almost as much as just driving downtown directly and parking. That train might make sense in the urban core, but not in the outlying areas, yet officials love to lecture us about our supposedly unsustainable reliance on driving.

This highlights the real problem with transit. Planners, not consumers, drive it. Real private enterprises—as opposed to firms receiving taxpayer-funded subsidies to build government-directed projects—would never build a rail system based on an “if we build it, they will come” model. They would build systems that meet customer needs rather than fulfill wishful fantasies.

Example #2:

Some propose to redesign American cities to serve obsolete transit systems: forcing more jobs downtown, building high-density transit-oriented developments in transit corridors, and turning highway and street lanes into dedicated bus lanes. Yet huge changes in urban form are needed to get a small change in transit usage, and the benefits are trivial. Transit isn’t particularly green, using more energy and producing more greenhouse gases, per passenger mile, than the average car.

Seattle has done the most to reshape itself into an early twentieth-century city. Draconian land-use policies and tax subsidies increased the city’s population density by 25 percent since 2000 and increased the number of downtown jobs from 215,000 in 2010 to 281,000 in 2017. These policies came at a terrible price: housing is no longer affordable and traffic is practically gridlocked. The urban area gained 58,000 transit commuters since 2000, but it also gained 190,000 auto commuters.

It is time to stop thinking that transit is somehow morally superior to driving and that it deserves the $50 billion in subsidies that it receives each year. Ending the subsidies would lead to a variety of private transit alternatives where people will use them and allow cities to concentrate on relieving congestion and making roads safer and cleaner for everyone else.

The suburban landscape based on driving and single-family homes did not come about organically or naturally; it was the result of government support (presidential statements, highway construction, socialized mortgages) and American ideologies. And it developed in nearly a century and a half from railroad suburbs to streetcar suburbs to mass-produced suburbs accessible by car.

Thus, I find the arguments against mass transit spending a bit strange. The suburbs occurred at least in part through direct intervention (what could be called social engineering) and over a long period of time. If planners and others wanted to change suburbia for the future, the elements of time and intervention would also be necessary. Mass transit construction in suburbs today may be much less about current results and instead about setting up an infrastructure that enables more suburban density and mass transit possibilities in the future.

All of this does not necessarily mean that planners and others want to destroy everything about suburbs. Higher densities in suburbs do seem attractive to a number of communities and residents as it allows for more housing options, more street life, and using less land. Suburban mass transit will likely not replace driving but it could enable some households to go from two to one car or provide new options and possibilities.

Trying to predict future suburban patterns is always difficult. My own research suggests planners, officials, and residents in the postwar decades had a difficult time envisioning significant growth. But, if we are looking toward the suburbs of fifty or one hundred years from now, is it so unreasonable to think some suburban areas will be denser and certain mass transit decisions made today helped guide some of those patterns? Wouldn’t we want to try to act with the future in mind rather than simply saying Americans prefer driving and sprawl now so that is the way it will always be?

Argument: regionalism = “play[ing] Sim City with residents’ lives”

Posted on by

One critic charges new regional plans in Minneapolis-St. Paul threatens a democratic way of life:

Here in the Twin Cities, a handful of unelected bureaucrats are gearing up to impose their vision of the ideal society on the nearly three million residents of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro region. According to the urban planners on the city’s Metropolitan Council, far too many people live in single family homes, have neighbors with similar incomes and skin color, and contribute to climate change by driving to work. They intend to change all that with a 30-year master plan called “Thrive MSP 2040.”…

While minority residents have been streaming into the Twin Cities’ suburbs for the past 15 years, the Met Council wants to make sure there is a proper race-and-income mix in each. Thus it recently mapped every census tract in the 2,800 square-mile, seven-county region by race, ethnicity and income. The purpose was to identify “racially concentrated areas of poverty” and “high opportunity clusters.” The next step is for the council to lay out what the region’s 186 municipalities must do to disperse poverty throughout the metro area…

The Thrive plan’s most radical element may be to evaluate all future development policies through the “lens” of climate change. Over time, this could give the council a license to dramatically remake the entire metro area…

Once implementation begins, however, Twin Cities residents will likely realize that Thrive MSP 2040’s centralized decision-making and Orwellian appeals to “equity” and “sustainability” are a serious threat to their democratic traditions of individual liberty and self-government. Let’s hope that realization comes sooner rather than later.

This is an argument several conservatives (another example here involving the UN) have made in recent years: the government wants to use urban planning as a means to control people’s lives, forcing them to live in denser areas with people they would not choose to live near. It violates property rights, individual liberty, local government, etc.

Here is an issue with these arguments: they tend to ignore the real issues present in metropolitan areas that involve both cities and suburbs. Adopting a free-market approach to planning, growth, and mobility leads to the outcomes we have today: ongoing residential segregation (both by race and class, affecting everything from school districts to health outcomes to location mismatches between employees and jobs), a lack of affordable housing, local governments that are numerous (and possibly inefficient), often can’t agree with each other and thereby hold up helpful projects or promote unhelpful competition (like a race for the bottom in tax breaks), transportation options that are expensive (whether maintaining a car or trying to make mass transit work in the suburbs), and a general defensive crouch of not wanting to deal with any problems outside of one’s immediate community. All of this reinforces existing inequalities in society: those with resources can afford nicer communities while those with less live in places where it is more difficult to move up.

Is there some middle ground here? To be honest, government is already heavily involved in local and regional decisions and conservatives probably like some of this (such as zoning). And some of the regional options allow for higher levels of efficiency by leveraging certain resources in effective ways. Maybe the real issue is that few residents of urban areas – whether conservative or liberal – want to live near public housing or affordable housing and/or want to retain the right to use their money to move to a more advantageous location should something not work out (like the neighbors).

As a final note, earlier versions of SimCity didn’t allow much control over the lives of individual residents. Similarly, the game was geared toward more urban environments as sprawling communities were more costly and didn’t provide the kind of density that would lead to better things.

Update on affordable housing debate in Winnetka

Posted on by

The Chicago Tribune reports on Tuesday’s meeting in Winnetka regarding a proposed affordable housing ordinance. Here is how the comments at the meeting were summarized:

Rick McQuet, a Winnetka resident, said at the meeting that the affordable housing plan is intended to help young families and recent college graduates.

“That young family was me about 15 years ago, a new degree in hand and aspirations of becoming a member of a truly great community,” he said.

Northfield resident June O’Donoghue received applause after she said she opposes the proposal because it interferes with the housing market.

“Housing is affordable to the people who can afford it. That is a simple thing,” O’Donoghue said. “I think you need a referendum for people to vote to see if they want to go through all this social engineering.”

In recent weeks, the plan’s opponents have said it amounts to “hand-outs” for people with lower income that could result in Section 8 housing, decreased property values and increased crime. Supporters have lashed out at the opposition as bigoted, arguing that the plan would allow teachers, clergy and other employees to live in the community in which they work.

Some thoughts about these comments (which may or may not represent everything that was said at the meeting):

1. The first comment I included above is interesting in that it refers to a common understanding of affordable housing in suburbs: it is not about helping the disadvantaged in society but rather “young families,” “recent college graduates,” and often elderly residents of the community. While this may be a good goal for a community (particularly if residents want their own family members in these categories to live in the community), this is a different understanding of “affordable housing.” Perhaps this is what has to be done in many suburbs order to counter the plan’s opponents who are quoted as saying this is really about helping lower-income people. But overall, there are needs for cheaper housing in society beyond people who might fit a profile of a community but simply don’t have the money.

The plan seems to play to this more suburban understanding of affordable housing:

The proposed plan would apply to new developments, in which 15 percent of owner-occupied units must be affordable to households earning at least $75,000 per year, while 15 percent of rental units would be affordable to those earning at least $45,000. Current residents and senior citizens would receive priority, the plan says.

According to the Census, the 2009 median household income was $49,777 so the part of the plan for people making at least $45,000 is still drawing from near the top 50% of American incomes.

2. “Social engineering” is always an interesting term to think about. In finishing my taxes for this year, I was reminded that our tax code is riddled with all sorts of “social engineering” in terms of promoting or incentivizing certain activities. We as Americans value homeownership so we have a home mortgage interest deduction (which some argue should be taken away). We give deductions for giving money to charities. Is all social policy “social engineering” or just policies that some people don’t like?

George Will on the Arizona shooting, sociology, and social engineering

Posted on by

The opinions are flying regarding the Arizona shooting over the weekend. Conservative commentator George Will enters the fray with some thoughts about sociology:

It would be merciful if, when tragedies such as Tucson’s occur, there were a moratorium on sociology. But respites from half-baked explanations, often serving political opportunism, are impossible because of a timeless human craving and a characteristic of many modern minds. The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience.

The craving is for banishing randomness and the inexplicable from human experience.

This does seem to be a common human desire: to establish order within the chaos of life. But I would make a distinction between his quick thought here that sociology and half-baked explanations are related. As a discipline, sociology seeks to observe and measure reality. Bad sociology leaps to half-baked conclusions while good sociology follows the scientific process, looking for evidence of causation. Bad sociology is really “pop sociology” or “armchair sociology” where commentators leap to certain conclusions without carefully considering the evidence or attempting to be objective.

Will then goes on to talk about what he thinks is behind the desire of the Left to blame the Right for the shootings:

A characteristic of many contemporary minds is susceptibility to the superstition that all behavior can be traced to some diagnosable frame of mind that is a product of promptings from the social environment. From which flows a political doctrine: Given clever social engineering, society and people can be perfected. This supposedly is the path to progress. It actually is the crux of progressivism. And it is why there is a reflex to blame conservatives first.

Using the term “social engineering” is an interesting choice. It implies images of 1984 or A Brave New World where a powerful government dictates what people should do in order to fulfill their own ideas of human perfection. Of course, there is a lot that could be discussed on the subject of human perfection (can humankind bring about its own redemption?), what kind of perfection is desirable (individualism or a Marxist collective?), and how to reach this point (and whether it has to be “clever” or not). And if we have some tools and knowledge that could help improve the social environment, available through disciplines like sociology, shouldn’t we pursue some of these options?

But by linking sociology and social engineering, Will is obscuring the fact that the social environment does play some role in influencing human behavior. It does not completely determine human behavior but there would be few social scientists who would claim this. Figuring out why humans do what they do is a complicated story involving both nature and nurture.

From Will’s point of view, do conservatives deny that the social environment affects human behavior? Do conservatives not try some social engineering of their own to advance particular ideas and policies?