My lonely existence as a libertarian urbanist
There's two things you should know about me, I hate urban sprawl, and I hate the government. Although these two things are not contradictory, people who like walkable cities tend to be on the left politically, and the biggest haters of walkable cities tend to be on the right politically. In this blog post, I will lament my lonely existence as a libertarian urbanist, as well as explain why more urbanists should be libertarians.
What do urbanists want?
Urbanism, for those of you that don't know, is the topic of everything involving urban culture. Urbanism has been growing immensely in popularity over the past few years, mainly thanks to YouTubers such as Not Just Bikes. The main thing urbanists want is good urban planning. Good in this case meaning properly maintained infrastructure that doesn't put cars above cyclists or pedestrians, and "missing middle housing" such as duplexes, triplexes, and midrise apartments. The main conflict urbanists face is living in America (and a few other countries like Canada, Australia, etc.). Unfortunately, American cities took a wrong turn after WW2, and now our cities suck. They are ugly, car-oriented, and financially insolvent. Urbanists want to fix American cities by using good urban planning practices.
What do libertarians want?
At the very core of libertarianism is the non-aggression principle. The non-aggression principle is a moral stance that opposes the initiation of force or coercion, asserting that individuals should not use force or fraud against others and should only engage in voluntary interactions.
tl;dr it means you want to be left alone
My issue
My first issue is, most libertarians fall under the category of unabomber larps, the type of people who say they're going to buy a cabin in the woods and live in isolation. While there's obviously nothing wrong with wanting to live a rural life, this does lead to an issue, most libertarians don't know about urban problems, and they know even less how to solve them. This is a problem because the majority of people live in cities. Regardless of what you think of cities, it doesn't change this very simple fact. Because most of the population is urban, urbanites have the highest influence over our culture and politics. Simply put, ignoring the urban population is a death sentence. In order for libertarians to gain any kind of cultural relevancy, we NEED to speak to the urban population
My second issue is, most urbanists are left of center. Now yeah, people are entitled to their own opinions and all that, but this means a lot urbanists end up making economically illiterate claims. Plus, all the tree hugging and REEE-ing over landlords just ends up rubbing people the wrong way. But the biggest issue here is that, because of this, our cities tend to lean left politically, which obviously means you will have certain rights violated if you live in the cities. Thankfully though, we have advocacy groups like Strong Towns which fall more under the fiscally conservative side of politics, and we have YouTube channels like Oh The Urbanity which take a more centrist approach.
Libertarianism is the solution to urban problems
I'll just come out and make a bold statement right away, almost every problem urbanites face is the result of leftist policies, and libertarianism is the solution.
The housing crisis
Let's take the biggest issue every city is facing right now, the housing crisis. The housing crisis is the direct result of government, plain and simple. Leftist conspiracy theorists will say that the housing shortage is the result of "big evil corporations" buying up vacant homes, or evil landlords charging too much, but, anyone who is even remotely competent in economics knows what the real culprit is, the housing crisis is a simple case of supply and demand. We have too many people moving into the cities, and not enough houses for all of them. What's the reason behind this shortage in housing? Why of course, it's the government!
A long time ago in America, a company called Ambler Realty wanted to build an apartment in a suburb of Cleveland, called Euclid. Euclid did not want an "ugly apartment building ruining the character of their neighborhood", so they introduced a zoning ordinance that banned anything other than single family detached homes. This really pissed off Ambler Realty, and took the issue all the way up to the supreme court, arguing that it infringes upon property rights (BECAUSE IT DOES), but the supreme court disagreed. And so, single family zoning was upheld by the supreme court, inspiring other cities in America and Canada to introduce their own version of that type of zoning, which urban planners call Euclidean zoning.
And that's the story of how America went from having the most advanced and developed cities in the whole world
Kansas City 1883
To cities that look like Ukrainian villages
Kansas City 2016
What does this have to do with the housing shortage? It's simple. Single family homes can house a considerable less amount of people than a condo, apartment complex, a duplex, or even just a simple townhouse. Single family zoning, and other urban planning policites like parking mandates and minimum lot sizes, create an artificial scarcity on housing. THIS is the real reason housing is so expensive in America, it's not evil corporations buying up all the homes, or evil greedy landlords overcharging for homes. It's just a simple case of supply and demand.
The leftist solutions to solve this problem have been half-assed socialist policies that just make the problem exponentially worse. Rather than getting out of the way and letting developers do their job, inner-city left-wing NIMBYs have created fake problems like "gentrification" to block new development, as well as ineffective laws like "rent control" that just drive up renting costs for those who aren't already renting. Some even more extreme leftists have even suggested taking the houses from the landlords by force and giving them to their renters. Disregarding the fact that this is a clear violation of property rights, it still wouldn't solve the issue as the amount of houses would stay the same, so you'd just be replacing the old landlords with new ones. Pretty much every urban planner agrees that there's no solution to the housing crisis, other than to just build more homes, and nothing can create new homes quicker and more efficiently than the free market.
Urban crime
Yes, libertarianism even has solutions for urban crime! While urban crime is a bit more complex than regular crime, one thing that tends to be at the epicenter of it all is gang wars. Inner-city gangs make their money from black market services, the most prevalent of these being the sale of illegal substances, but some gangs also make money from prostitution and gambling. The sale and concumption of illegal substances, prostitution, and gambling, are all completely voluntary affairs that every libertarian agrees should be completely legal. With these victimless crimes legalized, inner-city gangs would lose almost all of their profits and influence overnight, thus solving what is one of the main driving forces behind urban crime.
The second biggest driving force is deep rooted societal ills. This includes things like petty robberies, thievery, and homelessness. Most of these ills require heavy lifting from society to solve. Teach your kids not to steal and the value of life, help your neighbors when you see them in a time of need, etc. This means adding a few more laws won't magically make the problems go away. That said, I'll tell you what won't solve them, leftist policies!
Leftists love to romanticize urban crime and make you think it's either not a big deal, or something to be celebrated. They see a thief robbing a locally owned business, and defend the THEIF rather than the store owner! Even worse, leftists implement laws that punish the VICTIMS if they try to defend themselves! This creates the perfect environment for criminals. They're free to roam around the streets terrorizing civilians and ransacking stores, and will only get a slap on the wrist if caught, but if a civilian fights back, they will get a lifetime sentence. The libertarian solution to this is to remove these backwards laws and respect the people's rights to self-defense, as well as make our police do their job. The whole point of the government, at least in theory, is to defend natural rights, so our police's sole responsibility should be to stop aggression between two individuals. A police force that actually arrests criminals who've commited real crimes, and a populance who's rights to self-defense and private firearm ownership is protected, would help mitiage these societal ills.
Walkable cities are better for small businesses
Now we're moving away from bashing leftists and onwards to bashing more right-leaning people. Despite the right claiming that they love small businesses, they seem completely ignorant about how our bad urban planning policies hurt small businesses. Euclidean zoning by it's very nature favors retail stores and chain restaurants over local corner stores and family owned restaurants. There are a multitude of reasons as to why.
Big buildings require big money
Let's just put it this way, if you're a mom and pop shop, chances are, you're not gonna have the funds necessary to rent out a building the size of Walmart. In America, mom and pop shops have been pushed to the wayside, relegated to either strip malls, or whatever is left of the downtown that existed before urban renewal happened. Big buildings require big money, which small business owners do not have. This wasn't a problem when we had traditional downtowns.
Renting a small space in a mixed-use building
Is INFINITELY more affordable for a small business owner, than a building the size of a full city block
Being in a car forces you to be constantly moving
When you're a pedestrian in a downtown, you have the ability to walk forwards, then backwards, then stop completely, then do a Sailor Moon spin, do a few pushups, and finish it off with a backflip. All of this is just to say, you have the freedom to walk in any direction you want, and stop to really take-in everything around you. This is very different from a suburbanite in a car, who has to keep moving forwards no matter what. Usually when a suburbanite goes shopping, they already know which store they're looking for, so they're not gonna be looking around at all the stores available, and neither should they since their attention should be on the road. This greately decreases the chances of shoppers randomly stumbling upon a locally owned store. Even if they do glance at a locally owned store, chances are it'll be too late to stop as they've probably missed the entrance, and turning around is too much of a hassle to do on a car, so most suburbanites won't.
The architecture itself promotes big name retail stores
This one should be fairly obvious when you look at it. Shopping malls are designed in a way that promotes big name stores just by their very design.
"Anchor stores" as they're called, are the big stores like Walmart and Target that are usually the center-piece of a shopping mall. These stores require specific architecture that no one but that specific store can use, and said architecture tends to be the biggest and flashiest of them all, which advertises these big name retail stores above all the other stores in the mall. Now as the name suggests, these stores are supposed to lure people into the mall, where they would then theoretically be exposed to the smaller stores too. This somewhat does workout, but if the anchor store closes down, all the surrounding stores suffer as well. And because the building will be very store-specific, it'll take a long time before another anchor store can replace it.
Single family zoning makes home businesses illegal
Out of all the points in this section, this is the one that angers me the most. Despite America being founded on the principles of classical liberalism, we've made it a crime to run a business out of YOUR own property! You have a two story home and want to convert your first floor into a restaurant? Or you have an unused garage and want to turn it into a barber shop? Then guess what buddy, doing any of these things, makes you a CRIMINAL! If the biggest hurdle for a small business getting started is having a place where they can run their business, then running the business from their very home would solve this, but we've effectively made this a CRIME!
Roads are socialism
I hope that statement has made both conservatives and socialists angry, because that was the point. In America, roads and highways are funded with federal money. As it turns out, car infrastructure is insanely expensive to build, and even more expensive to maintain, as such, neither states nor cities can afford to maintain it themselves, not even with their current level of taxation. This essentially means car-oriented infrastructure is financially insolvent, and if it wasn't for the government artifically keeping it alive with stolen money, it would've stopped being built ages ago, left behind as a relic of that crazy era when we thought cars would make everything better. But instead, car-oriented infrastructure has been kept alive through lies and lobbying by the car industry.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying roads and highways couldn't exist without the government, but we would certainly think differently about what their roles are and how they should be built and funded under a voluntaryist free market society.
Also, as a final kick to the stomach, this reliance on federal funding for roads and highways is what's killed off federalism in America. Technically, a state's legal drinking age doesn't HAVE to be 21, but the reason why it is in every state, is because the federal government threatens to cut their highway funding to states that don't make it 21. This reliance on the federal government has essentially given it full reign to trample over state's rights without even having to pass new federal laws.
Conclusion and closing thoughts
So there you have it. I believe libertarianism would make our cities livable, safer, and cheaper. Urban sprawl is the result of top-down planning, whereas walkable cities are how a city naturally develops when the government gets out of the way.
I plan on making more blog posts in the future discussing my vision of the utopic libertarian walkable cities and how they would work, so stay tuned for that.
Also, sorry if this blog post came off as sour and condescending, but keep in mind this has been at least two years of built-up anger finally being released and seeing the light of day. I also want to say that despite all my rage against leftists shown throughout this post, I still think urbanism is one of those things that everyone can agree on, so if you're a leftist urbanist, I might disagre with you on economics, but at least we could have some fun trashing on urban sprawl and chain restaurants.