Austin Contrarian

This is funny

Stuff White People Like.

Oh, and it turns out my favorite baseball blog is written by a bunch of TV writers.

Richard Florida says the Internet hurts place-based interaction

I usually agree with Richard Florida's perspective on urban issues, but not here, where he argues that technology (particularly the Internet) tends to curb our interaction with our own neighborhoods and cities: 

If I'm writing this blog (something I love to do), I'm not mixing and mingling on the street, if I order my groceries from an on-line store, I'm less likely to go to the store.  All of these things lessen and limit human interaction.  Of course, they increase the efficient allocation of time. But they also limit real, human contact, and the chance of random happenstance interactions. Heck, my GPS makes it less likely I'll ask for directions; my on-line catalogue and reviews give me little need to ask a shop-owner for advice. Technology makes me more house-bound (something I sort of like) and yes more efficient at work. I can go to the office less, the store less. I can "work" more, interacting with people and commerice on-line.  My main source of human energy are my walks in the ravine. As beautiful as it is, it's certainly not Hudson Street. The internet and the social media, for all the great things they bring, damp down human interaction and certainly limit the chances of random connections. I'm a big fan of all this, don't get me wrong, but I think the effects on places, cities and communities cut several ways.

Face-to-face communication may be richer, but interaction online is still human interaction no matter how one defines it.  The alternative to interaction online is frequently not face-to-face interaction, but none at all.  For example, I'm interested in land-use issues, but my wife just rolls her eyes whenever I bring them up; if I put the TV on the City Council channel, she'll just get up and leave the room.  My two-year-old cares about urban issues only when they involve trains.  My co-workers, at least the ones I see regularly, don't care either.  Without blogs, I wouldn't talk to anyone about this stuff; I would be interacting a lot less than I am.  (And how much more random could the connections you make online be?)   

Plus, it's not like I spent my time before blogs hanging over the fence gossiping with neighbors.  The time I spend online is mostly time I used to spend watching TV or reading.  I go out about as often as before, I just spend my time inside differently. 

But even if the Internet reduces "place-based" interaction, is that necessarily a bad thing?  Don't get me wrong:  face-to-face communication is valuable, and most people crave it to one degree or another.  But there's also a lot of drudgery in having to interact with people just because they're at hand. One of the good things about growing up was getting more control over whom I had to interact with.  I had no freedom at all when I was in elementary school.  Whom I walked to school or shared classes with was dictated by place -- whomever happened to live nearby -- rather than congeniality.  Things were a bit better in junior high and high school when I got a little say over class scheduling and extra-curricular activities, and thus some control over whom I associated with.  Things got even better in college and, for me, better yet in law school and work.

Online interaction is just an extension and intensification of this happy trend.  I interact with people who share my interests, if not my opinions.  I "bump" into strangers who have interesting points of view.  I'm exposed to things that I never knew existed.  If that means one fewer conversation about the weather now and then, that's fine with me.

Update:  Richard Florida's rebuttal.

My favorite baseball blog

Fire Joe Morgan.  Written by a bunch of statheads who really hate Joe Morgan and every baseball writer who is proudly ignorant of sabermetrics.  It's the only blog on any subject that makes me laugh out loud every time.

Andrew Blum on urbanism and modernism

I love Jane Jacobs, especially The Life and Death of Great American Cities.  Jacobs understood that the vitality of a city emerges spontaneously and organically, and can not be created by fiat through urban planning.  Of course, she was also the first "urban naturalist"; she described almost scientifically what gives cities and neighborhoods vitality and what saps it.  Ironically, this has made her the patron saint of modern planners, who seem to view Life and Death as a recipe for good planning, rather than a rejection of planning.  (You can't sit through a City Council meeting without hearing about the need for "eyes on the street.")  She has also been canonized by neighborhood activists who fight change of any type.      

Andrew Blum has written a great piece on urbanism that captures the increasing tension between these views in the modern, global enviornment:

Yglesias and Postrel on zoning

This one from Matthew Yglesias is good, if a bit naive.

This one from Virginia Postrel has a good summary of the research documenting the steep price of California-style zoning:

Some of the higher price of L.A. real estate does reflect the intrinsic pleasure of living there, as I’m reminded every time I walk out my door into the perfect weather. Some of the price reflects the productivity advantages of being near others doing similar work (try selling a screenplay from Arlington, Texas). All of these benefits—and the negatives of traffic and smog—are reflected in the price of land.

But what exactly is that price? Consider two ways of computing the price of a quarter acre of land. You can compare the value of a house on a quarter acre with that of a similar house on a half acre. Or you can take the price of a house on a quarter acre and subtract the cost of the house itself—the price of construction. Either way, you get the value of an empty quarter acre. The two numbers should be roughly the same. But they aren’t. The second one is always bigger, because it includes not just the property but the right to build. Expanding your quarter-acre lot to a half acre doesn’t give you per- mission to add a second house.

In a 2003 article, Glaeser and Gyourko calculated the two different land values for 26 cities (using data from 1999). They found wide disparities. In Los Angeles, an extra quarter acre cost about $28,000—the pure price of land. But the cost of empty land isn’t the whole story, or even most of it. A quarter- acre lot minus the cost of the house came out to about $331,000—nearly 12 times as much as the extra quarter acre. The difference between the first and second prices, around $303,000, was what L.A. home buyers paid for local land-use controls in bureaucratic delays, density restrictions, fees, political contributions. That’s the cost of the right to build.

And that right costs much less in Dallas. There, adding an extra quarter acre ran about $2,300—raw land really is much cheaper—and a quarter acre minus the cost of construction was about $59,000. The right to build was nearly a quarter million dollars less than in L.A. Hence the huge difference in housing prices. Land is indeed more expensive in superstar cities. But getting permission to build is way, way more expensive. These cities, says Gyourko, “just control the heck out of land use.”

(Read it for this.  I don't agree with her "red-state/blue-state" theory of zoning.)

Update:  Postrel has posted a follow up to her article with some neat charts.