Kip’s Law:  “Every advocate of central planning
always — always — envisions himself as the central planner.”

The other day I posted about a strange new utopian vision of a city, The Line, that is super dense with 9 million people packed into just 34 square kilometres. It’s one answer to the sprawl of modern cities, of which NZ has its own great example, Auckland.

One of the most powerful arguments against the massive expenditure on trains in Auckland has been that the city is simply too sprawling for them to work as they do in older, foreign, cities like London, NYC, Chicago, Berlin, Moscow, Paris and Madrid.

More modern cities of Auckland’s vintage like Australia’s major metropolises, and American cities like San Francisco, LA, Dallas, Houston, and Miami, don’t have significant commuter rail systems and attempts to extend them in those places have not gone well, either in terms of cost or usage and especially not in their primary aim of shifting people away from using private cars on roads. At best in these cities trains are supplements to the main public transport of buses.

One of the joking, dismissive responses to Auckland trains has been to point out that for them to work the city itself would have to be re-engineered into a denser form like London or NYC, if not the extremes of The Line.

However, some years ago it became apparent that lobbying outfits like Greater Auckland, Public Transport Users Association, and Auckland government itself are treating that idea entirely seriously. They have implicitly accepted the power of the argument against rail – but instead of giving up, they’ve basically said “Ok, we’ll change the city to fit the trains”: the most common phrase is that the Auckland trains will run through “high density corridors”.

Typical Central Planning thinking; the Big Plan doesn’t work? Make it bigger! The real problem is that, as with myriad bicycle path failures, it’s less that these people love trains, buses and bikes than that they hate cars.

The private automobile is the primary technical reason why suburbs were created – especially in the USA after WWII, but across the Western world. But the driving force was that people wanted more space for themselves; detached houses they owned rather than apartments they rented, with some gardens around them.

There was also the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). Created by FDR to develop urban public housing, it ended up doing not that great a job but in the hands of Harry Truman it started a mortgage insurance program that took the risk out of home lending and made the long-term (25–30 years), low-interest home mortgage the national US standard, which multiplied the effects of cars and industrialised house building. See the superb article, Suburbanization in the United States after 1945.

It’s ironic then that many on the Democrat-voting Left hated suburbs right from the start:

On the other side were the critics, who believed suburbia was inflicting profound damage on the American character. Academics, novelists, filmmakers, and designer-planners, among others, blamed mass suburbia for some of the most disturbing social trends of the era. Homogeneous suburban landscapes, they believed, spawned homogenous people, who followed the dictates of blind conformity. 
…
Even suburban family life was lambasted, portrayed as the polar opposite of the carefree innocence depicted on popular television sitcoms. Novelists and filmmakers in particular depicted all manner of suburban domestic dysfunction: alcoholism, adultery, inept parenting, wounding anxieties, deeply troubled marriages, and fraught sexuality, all concealed beneath a smiling public face.

No better single example of this criticism exists than the song popularised in the early 1960’s by the old American Stalinist musician, Pete Seeger: Little Boxes (“They’re all made out of ticky tacky, And they all look just the same.”). What he thought of Soviet apartment blocks is not known. What a POS he was.

You should also note that this is all long before environmental or energy arguments arose to be used against suburbs and “sprawl”. New arguments for the same ideologues with the same goals.

However, there were a few on the Left who embraced the new suburbs:

After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before: people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human being in these islands could be “placed” in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent. This is no longer the case… In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor-houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist.
…
It is a rather restless, culture-less life, centering round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine… To that civilisation belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely of the modern world, the technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.

Orwell, of course, accepted the Marxist analysis of society, with its emphasis on economic class divisions and that, plus his own English experience, meant that he welcomed almost anything that would dissolve them. As he observed, soon as they could, people started escaping the old, dense cities, which had been built around different housing and transport technologies. This outward flow has continued into the 21st century:

Between 1982 and 2012, metropolitan regions ballooned in area, with real-estate development consuming 43 million acres of rural land, an area larger than Washington State…Even in comparatively slow-growing metro areas such as Pittsburgh and Detroit, rates of suburban sprawl outpaced population growth. By the early 21st century, Americans were driving more miles, spending more time in the car, and using more energy than ever before.

With the result that nearly three-quarters of metropolitan Americans now live in suburbs and roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home. There’s a reason why so many people are fleeing major cities for bigger parcels of land. Even in cities we seek the outdoors and fresh air and try as the planner might, that’s just not what a high density apartment block provides.

You can also forget the the claims about a swing back to urbanisation:

Progressive theory today holds [that] the key groups that will shape the metropolitan future—millennials and minorities—will embrace ever-denser, more urbanized environments. Yet in the last decennial accounting, inner cores gained 206,000 people, while communities 10 miles and more from the core gained approximately 15 million people… after a brief period of slightly more rapid urban growth immediately following the recession, U.S. suburban growth rates began to again surpass those of urban cores. An analysis by Jed Kolko, chief economist at the real estate website Trulia, reports that between 2011 and 2012 less-dense-than-average Zip codes grew at double the rate of more-dense-than-average Zip codes in the 50 largest metropolitan areas. Americans, he wrote, “still love the suburbs.”
…
Moreover, notes Kolko, millennials are not moving to the denser inner ring suburban areas. They are moving to the “suburbiest” communities, largely on the periphery, where homes are cheaper, and often schools are better. When asked where their “ideal place to live,” according to a survey by Frank Magid and Associates, more millennials identified suburbs than previous generations. Another survey in the same year, this one by the Demand Institute, showed similar proclivities.

As I noted at the beginning, such facts do not deter the Urban Planners.

Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost….The obstacles being erected include incentives for density, urban growth boundaries, and mounting environmental efforts to reduce sprawl…Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent...

Sound familiar? Actually it’s much of the political class, not just “Progressives” who increasingly want people to live differently. In fact it’s a whole bunch of people:

Banks, institutional investors, mega housing developers, international corporations, tech heavyweights, public utilities, and public agencies all prefer high density. Environmentalism provides cover.
…
The prevailing vision of environmentalism today, unfortunately, caters to a global oligarchy. They have decided it is in their interests, along with the interests of the planet—most definitely in that order—to preach imminent doom. Stack and pack, do it for the earth, and laugh all the way to the bank.

The architect Peter Cresswell pointed this out for Auckland, way back in 2005:

The same high-density planning imposition that Mother Hucker wants to impose in places like Glenn Innes and Panmure to make building slums compulsory are the same impositions planned for 51 ‘nodal developments’ from Pukekohe to Warkworth that are zoned for minimum densities greater than Central London, and these impositions come from the same planning mindset that is already making it virtually impossible to build at all outside the Metropopitan Urban Limit (MUL).
…
What’s new now is that the Auckland Regional Council’s planners have upped the stakes. With the so-called Smart Growth of ‘Plan Change 6‘ they’ve decided ‘Countryside Living’ — that’s the stuff you do outside the ‘growth boundary’ — is “unsustainable” because, get this, it “undermines public transport.” They mean it. This ‘plan change’ is in essence a plan to end countryside living and to make rural New Zealand a National Park.

Which you will be allowed to visit occasionally – assuming that your Social Credit score is high enough and that the trains are actually running.

Seventeen years later those densifying developments are proceeding apace, even as Auckland housing prices continue to rise and the Greater Auckland group blithely talks of turning us into Hong Kong. What’s also rising is crime in those areas, as I pointed out here:

Of course the idea where I live is that building lots of houses will obviously cure homelessness and thus reduce poverty and crime. So far the evidence is exactly the opposite. But it’s early days yet. As I said, the new houses look nice. My Chicago-born wife mutters “ghettos” as she drives through the areas.

As Joel Kotkin points out in his article, such plans are beginning to cause pushback in the USA, even – or perhaps especially – in Democrat Party areas:

Forced densification–the ultimate goal of the “smart growth” movement—also has inspired opposition in Los Angeles, where densification is being opposed in many neighborhoods, as well as traditionally more conservative Orange Country. Similar opposition has arisen in Northern Virginia suburbs, another key Democratic stronghold.

Or perhaps they just get the hell out of it all together and head for places like Pokeno, a once sleepy little SH1 town nestled into the Southern Bombay Hills. Seemingly abandoned when the Waikato Expressway bypassed it in the 2000’s it has exploded with new housing, with people commuting from there to both Hamilton and Auckland.

So after all this expenditure of human resources and money, the results, as usual for Urban Planning, have delivered almost none of their claimed goals, not even the environmental benefits of trains, for which all this city re-engineering is being done to Auckland:

Their mantra, a never-ending refrain, is more rail, fewer roads—and if in doubt, get motorists to pay more. “Rail, rail, rail, rail, rail.”

You’d think by their constant worship at the altar of rail that the environmental case for public transport was overwhelming!  That city’s could develop no other way. That rail really is the “highly energy-efficient means of commuter transport” the Greens website says it is.

But it’s not. Rail is far from the most efficient means of commuter transport, as figures from the U.S. government bureau of transportation statistics figures and the U.S.Dept. of Energy Transportation Energy Data Book demonstrate.  Brad Templeton looked at the figures from these sources and produced this handy graph, below, which shows that the average passenger uses less energy to travel a mile in the average car (with an average load of 1.57 passengers) than if he travelled in a diesel bus, a trolley bus, a heavy rail train, or a light rail train—and only marginally more energy than if he travelled by jet plane.

These people won’t stop unless they just plain run out of money or are overruled by Central Government. In the meantime the rest of us cope with their grandiose, “visionary” bullshit by:

…refusing to cooperate with their grand plans and escaping to places where the plans are not being effected.