How to be an Urban Planning Advocate
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- čas přidán 28. 02. 2022
- Thoughts on how to dream bigger, how to filter out unhelpful movements, and seven housing solutions that are not tied to the private market.
Sources:
Community Land Trusts
nextcity.org/urbanist-news/de...
coopersquare.org/
shelterforce.org/2021/07/12/u....
groundedsolutions.org/strengt...
Repeal the Faircloth Amendment
www.nytimes.com/2021/01/04/op...
govtrackinsider.com/ocasio-co...
www.congress.gov/bill/117th-c....
Some housing programs to expand
www.hud.gov/program_offices/p...
ruralhome.org/rural-rental-ho...
nlihc.org/explore-issues/proj...
COPA and TOPA
www.sfccho.org/blog/2019/2/11...
shelterforce.org/2020/07/24/g...
allincities.org/toolkit/tenan...
ebclc.org/topa/
Rent Control
nextcity.org/urbanist-news/re...
newrepublic.com/article/16473...
Homestead Act for the 21st Century
rooseveltinstitute.org/public...
Homes Guarantee
homesguarantee.com/
• We need a #HomesGuarantee
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Photo of abandoned Pittsburgh:
www.flickr.com/photos/real00/...
Photo of abandoned Detroit:
www.flickr.com/photos/slumtou...
Photo of abandoned St. Louis
www.platformspace.net/home/ur...
HOW??? How am I finding you just now?! You're my new urban planning fav! 🤩🤩🤩
Education & critical consciousness raising IS advocacy, my friend!!! I would say this video suggests you are, in fact, an advocate yourself :)
Very high quality videos. Thanks for the work you put into these!
Great video. So much information is available right now, we must educate ourselves to our highest potential.
Thanks for making this vide. It can be overwhelming and hopeless for people who are just getting started. Thank you for making this
I have subscribed. You are marvelous🙂🙂🙂🙂
I came across your series. Enjoying it. Allan Heskin
Thank you Allan! Your work is foundational to the channel!
Thank you. I hope that you continue this series.
Another amazing video! I’m just binge watching all these today.
Came from Mike from Pa, great content man, keep it up!
"... there are no landlords; that all these neighborhoods are at peace with each other because the resources that our city intentionally keeps scarce have been given to them for their own needs." This sounds consistent with Georgism. The people who literally own the city (landowners which range from individual home owner-occupiers up to big corporate landlords) have a financial interest in keeping these resources scarce because the system is structured in such a way that ownership of the resource in an asset (financialized rent, i.e., residual land value) rather than a liability (socialized rent, i.e., land value tax). And in many cities, the resource which is intentionally kept scarce includes land use rights (the ability to build more through increased height limits, more floor-area-ratio, and reduced setbacks) and public spaces (parks, sidewalks, bike lanes, public recreational facilities, etc).
I think that georgism has a lot of similar ambitions to the marxist approach I subscribe too, but ultimately I can't get on board with georgism for two reasons - 1. it does not inherently solve the exploitation of labor as marxist land policy would (though georgism would be much better than what we have right now) and 2. the radical changes that our government would have to undergo to begin providing surpluses to the public rather than to support capital and the violent protection of capital is so unfathomable to me that I can't see it happening a revolution much the same as a fully socialist economy shift would. You seem passionate about a georgist approach so I am interested in hearing what you think of those two points I hold. Thanks for watching!
@@radicalplanning If you're on board with the Marxist approach then I've got to remind you that step 1 from the communist manifesto is literally "Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes". To your 2 points about Georgism, of your 7 suggestions from the video (CLTs, Repeal Faircloth, Fund public housing, COPA/TOPA, Rent control, 21st century homestead act, and homes guarantee) none of those directly address labor either. Most Georgists I know also don't see it as a panacea and we favor macroeconomic policies that lead to full employment, strong UI benefits, unions, and other pro-labor policies. Reducing the cost of housing is probably one of the most important indirect pro-labor goals as it leaves workers with more time and/or discretionary income to spend organizing or searching for better conditions, pay, etc. As for "radical changes that our government would have to undergo" I'm not saying it's easy but it's certainly not radical to suggest adjust property tax rates down on building values and way up on land values. Many of the 7 policies you list are also supported by Georgists: community land trusts (separating building and land values and leasing the land) is a very Georgist idea, the only problem I think they have is that they require lots of external subsidy to grow because they are (almost) exclusively used for low income housing. They could be a very successful non-profit social housing model if they weren't so averse to generating internal subsidy from tenants and lessees willing and able to pay market-rate rents. Universal public housing (in the sense that everyone has an opportunity to live in it regardless of income) where above-cost rents from higher-income households cross-subsidize below-cost rents for lower income households is pretty much a direct land subsidy which is very Georgist. Many would even consider rent control to be Georgist in so far as it also reduces the landowner's ability to claim increases in location rents and gives an imputed rent subsidy directly to the tenant (there's an argument to be made that it's not very selective on which tenants receive the subsidy but I still think it's a good policy to ensure there wont be huge/sudden rent hikes for long-term tenants). I don't think any Georgist expects any type of "revolution" where we get full land value tax overnight or even within a year or a decade. Financialization of land means that it is tightly woven into every aspect of our economy. Every mortgage is land rent debt (plus interest going to a private bank instead of to public use) so it would have to be done slowly to prevent a disaster not unlike the 2008 financial crisis. But I believe it can be done over time, especially if we use multiple approaches like public land banking with ground leases (basically a municipal CLT rather than a private non-profit CLT) but it has to be properly funded to grow over time. Land taxes that get marginally higher over time (and other forms of property taxes like transfer taxes) mean that a municipal land bank could grow even more quickly as these higher taxes would significantly reduce the purchase price of land over time. An even better way to grow would be to target these newly acquired municipal land bank parcels for upzoning which has the potential to greatly increase the amount of land rent they can collect to both subsidize housing and go into a land acquisition fund.
That reminds me... none of those 7 policies form your video seem to really be about city planning. They are tangential, sure, but nothing that informs *where* to build housing, transit, etc, and how much. I would love to know what you think of Alain Bertaud.
@@ASMacman To quickly clarify, I didn't provide any marxist solutions here because i was specifically offering alternatives that could happen in America today. I don't think that I made those seven seem radical, but maybe from the outside it could look that way. So I do still believe in point 1 of the manifesto but I don't think that I have the capacity to do anything about that right now (haha). Revolutionary ideas are great as a guide, but not especially helpful if we aren't working for interim solutions as well (I think we agree here).
You seem to be describing tax policy changes that fall short of a LVT, so my question is: when would you say that property tax reform crosses into georgism? I am in favor of significant tax changes for a short term solution, but still hold marxist values in private property so I wouldn't align with georgism long term (unless used as a means to transition into a socialist government). I also support your listed pro-labor movements, but my primary concern is how fragile things like tax polices and labor protections are against capitalist lobbies. I don't think we can have both capitalists and a socialist-like redistribution of wealth for an extended period of time. Also, as I asked in the prior comment, how do you ensure that government would redistribute the tax to people and not to fund capital? For me that's the hardest thing to believe could happen without a radical change of governance.
Finally, radical planning as a concept is a type of anti-planning that is people-focused and from the ground up. I don't plan to offer ideas that an urban planner would employ. As a planner myself, I would say that even with the best of intentions, planners cannot fully support people over profit. Nearly all sources of funding are directly tied to growth, which translates to expanding capital. In many ways, centralized urban planning is private capital's most useful tool. The focus of my work here is to highlight how things like the private housing market or high speed rail or transit oriented development or any of those sexy bits of pop planning are intended to benefit capital. There are plenty of other youtube planners that obfuscate this fact so I will leave it to them to continue that sort of work. I am not advocating to stop development, to stop high speed rail, or to stop the construction of walkable neighborhoods. I intend to provide the alternatives that have been wholly abandoned in favor of the private market building everything.
On Alain Bertaud, I am aware of him but have not read any full work of his. From what I know, he is a planner's planner (no shade). I'm trying to be the people's planner at this point so I haven't been reading much in that vein. Is there a work of his you think is particularly relevant?
@@radicalplanning Re: "how do you ensure that government would redistribute the tax to people and not to fund capital? For me that's the hardest thing to believe could happen without a radical change of governance."
I could ask the same question about some of the policies highlighted in this video like building public housing, a 21st century homestead act, and guaranteed right to housing. We can't propose policies and then say "well, that could never happen in our society anyway". Who's to say there wouldn't be some market-based, neoliberal grift version of these things? Then what kind of annoys me about CLTs and COPA/TOPA (though I agree they're still good) is that focusing on these policies too much seems to say "we can't rely on government to do these things but maybe we can rely on government to fund non-profits to do them instead."
Getting our government to spend funds on the things we want in the way we actually want them to be done requires a major shift in how our society views housing which is still happening one person at a time. In many cases, the way to do it is to start out small ... to prove to voters and lawmakers that these model works better than the status quo and deserves additional funding.
Re: "when would you say that property tax reform crosses into georgism?"
Any policy that is fundamentally about capturing economic rents for public good, at any scale, is georgist in my opinion. It does not have to be about land and location rents, either. It could be carbon taxes, severance taxes for oil and mineral extraction, monopoly/antitrust regulations, intellectual property reforms, etc. These are all forms of "economic rent". Some also believe that we could tax these things and simply shred the money collected and we would be better off simply by not having a huge sum of socially created value continue to be amassed by a rentier class. It'd also be a good way to control inflation if you subscribe to modern monetary theory. But while there are people in need of help, we should use that money to help them directly with cash assistance or build state capacity to provide the infrastructure and services needed. If done right, this also creates more valuable location rents to be collected in a kind of virtuous cycle.
Dreaming big it’s important for leftist urban planners to connect deeply with the labor movement. In Building dual power and eventually replacing the state it’s going to be important to have control of the raw materials and construction industries to shape our physical space. Connecting to radical unions and movements within construction and mining are so important and there is a lot of work that can be done to build these networks out into something that can eventually be shaped into a radical economy
Dude, you are so crucial, that takedown of YIMBYism was very helpful to me.
Do you have much to say about Bookchin's libertarian municipality, or David Harvey's forwarding of the notion of "the right to the city?"
Thank you! It feels sometimes that when a leftist enters a realm that they don’t have fully developed ideas in (like urban planning) they default back to neoliberal ideas. I’m hoping that I can provide some alternatives or insights. I do seem to face a lot of hostility over this though, oh well!
Right now I’m focused on fees and fines, which will be my next vid (hopefully sexier than that sounds!) but I have a couple Bookchin works on my reading list. I’ve seen him quoted or reviewed in other works and I really like the sort of decentralization he proposes.
I want to begin to incorporate right to the city concepts in my work. I am debating an entire video on the subject alone versus just making it an overt part of all of my subsequent works. It’s a great concept and it has a lot of ways that we can build off of it.
Again, thank you for the comments and stay tuned!
@@radicalplanning I think concepts like "participatory economics") (Porto Alegre in Brazil) might be helpful. Archon Fung's work, Deepening Democracy is also very helpful.
@@radicalplanning Getting a little into the lingo of this area of knowledge -- is there any way to incorporate the whole "missing middle" approach to development within the context of a socialist/social democratic/public finance ethos? I feel like there's some overlapping interest in what's touched on by liberal development people on CZcams (Not Just Bikes), in terms of an increased variety and "walkable" life, and the socialist interest in collectivizing ownership.
@@stephenwallace8782 Not Just Bikes, Climate Town, City Beautiful, and most other urban planning youtubers do a great job at providing an ideal form of development and I mostly agree with what they lay out in terms of form. But as you've already gathered, they do not adequately address the neoliberal reality that this sort of development is inherently inequitable and is used as a tool to transfer wealth and power from the lower and middle class to the rich.
That being said, missing middle is probably the most compatible with a socialist housing policy rather than what we have today. Developers are not likely to build that scale of housing at any measurable significance. Worse is that few are wealthy enough to build missing middle themselves (single family developments are often poorer and are still rapidly growing poorer than dense areas, something completely lost in the neoliberal vilification of the suburbs). Consider Minneapolis, who implemented the YIMBY dream of eliminating single family housing with the hope that single family neighborhoods would see massive conversions into duplexes and triplexes (the missing middle). This isn't really what happened though - only three triplex conversion permits were issued the first year and now it is looking like corporate landlords are buying up properties in low income communities where they will likely raise rents with minimal improvements. As I tried to illustrate in my first video, the market is not actually free and because Minneapolis did not provide any financial incentive besides a change of zone, developers remain largely uninterested in the conversions to duplexes and triplexes.
A shift away from funding large private developers and corporate landlords through tax incentives by redirecting those monies to middle class property owners and community builders could start a process of decommodifying housing within our existing framework. I think this would be a step forward towards a more robust, socialist housing system and offer the sort of walkable, climate-friendly urban development that many planners dream of. This is more or less the gist of the Homestead Act for the 21st Century (but that is more specific to housing markets that are losing population). As I said in this video, it's not all about a single revolution so collective ownership, while the ultimate goal, is still probably a long-term goal. We need to make more incremental, short-term changes when we can such as redirecting incentives away from monopolizing corporations.
Sources for the Minneapolis piece above:
www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/9/2/what-if-they-passed-zoning-reform-and-nobody-came
www.planning.org/blog/9219556/measuring-the-early-impact-of-eliminating-single-family-zoning-on-minneapolis-property-values/
@@radicalplanning Thanks, friend. I'm active in Sunrise Movement, trying to formulate how urban planning could be brought into its concerns, so your perspective has immediate application for me, talking to some YIMBY types, who have ideas I like, while also trying to uplift a notion of beautiful public housing (at the very least).
You're great, man. An old professor has recommended me Neil Smith and Dom Mitchell to look at, so I'm really hellbent on learning me this stuff. All I can really say in the meantime is Thank You.
What are your thoughts on co-production of housing?
Awesome stuff. Thank you for these.
Question: In the context of your statement at the beginning regarding leftist action and using the market, what is your opinion on Market Socialism?
Thank you!
For the purposes of this video, when I say "using the market," I mean the market as our existing neoliberal economy (especially private property and the privatization and commodification of human needs). The solutions I provided aren't too applicable in economies that have socialist housing policies (like market socialism would) and are intended to be alternatives for this present time.
I do not personally consider market socialism to be a means of achieving "utopian" visions but I do think that it is much closer to where we need to go than to where we are today. I would think of it as a sort of mid-term solution that prepares society for a more decentralized approach. The biggest turn offs to market socialism for me are that a supply and demand economy (even if it is more fair) still fosters a system of winners and losers and that it can maintain the system of artificial scarcity we have today. But would I object to policies and movements that get us to market socialism? No, in most cases I would not disagree with that approach.
Essentially the Market Socialist approach would heavily involve community land trusts and Co-ops on top of that.
hey there! echoing what others have said by saying that this was a well-spoken, well-produced video with some good information!
a talking point that I've picked up on from following along with urbanist/urban planning debates is the need for market & social housing to work hand-in-hand to create more housing supply for all. to me, that seems like a practical solution - by working within the already-existing market economy to build housing, private developers increase the total housing supply, which would then reduce demand for housing and lower rents across the board as a result. meanwhile, public housing can fill in the cracks for people where paying market-rate rent might still not be viable.
my question is: do you think there is any room within a leftist solution for the housing crisis for private, market-oriented development or does any advocacy from the left need to start at public ownership?
If revolution is nonsense and working within the system is absurd, we must be absurd until we can be nonsensical.
You most certainly are an advocate bruv
Hey man, did you see the Jacobin video here? Kinda felt like lowkey YIMBYism -- this could be your chance to frame a rebuttal!
czcams.com/video/-v9gJPJ2HDw/video.html
I tried my hand at a response, which you can see in the comments. But this is where your special expertise would be greatly needed as Jacobin tries to work out what is realistically possible and what's not.
Thank you for the link! I just spent my morning watching it and crafting a comment. While watching, I was confused at why you linked me - everything was going as well as I would hope. But then I got to that horrible call to action at the end - it really but the video into a different context for me.
I wish I had more time right now to deliver a proper response, but I am in the middle of finishing a couple scripts for my next videos. I did leave a response in the comments, though.
I thought this was a video on the *how* to physically be an advocate/supporter/whatever not a list of policy reforms you should support with no way of doing that. You say you can work within the system by supporting an individual for office, then totally discredit it by saying that's working in the system and while temporary basically its hopeless. So what is the "correct" way to do it??? Drives me absolutely insane. How do I take something like this to my city council, how do I find like minded individuals in my area, what are successful ways to get people on board, unsuccessful ways. This is the problem with left movements, you guys provide all this academic bullcrap while right leaning conservatives are all about actual action. They have resources, they have actual infrastructure, they have the actual drive to push for what they want but the left literally has what they "feel" is a correct solution, what the "facts" say, etc but they have no real physical infrastructure or capital (human or monetary). They just wish on a shooting start for a "revolution". That's why left wing politicians bow to moderates at the highest and lowest levels of government and you see right wing advocates (who are a minority) create nationwide discussion on things even if they aren't popular but it creates the conversation. You don't see right wing politicians back down or give into the established players in these roles. In any right political theory video they would give you the name of an organization (whether local or national) that you can physically join and or donate too and or follow. Being someone who agrees with a lot of what the left says, it is infuriating to see a lack of action, infrastructure, and a spine to be more direct and actually answer a dang question.