Many government interventions in markets though they are often justified in terms of the ‘public interest’ work to the disproportionate benefit of organised interests – often the rich or relatively rich – and at the expense of the unorganised and often relatively poor.
One area of public policy where this pattern is particularly evident is that of urban planning. In the United States, as Jane Jacobs showed so powerfully, the subsidised construction of luxury hotels, civic centres and highways has often paid precious little attention to the fate of the people and small businesses that have been ‘relocated’ to make way for politically high profile ‘regeneration’ schemes. The principal beneficiaries have often been large scale property interests who secure access to land on terms that would not have been available in a free market. In the United Kingdom meanwhile, large scale ‘slum clearance’ programmes in the post war era saw hundreds of thousands of low income people ‘relocated’ to high rise blocks – a process which often destroyed local community support networks but secured jobs for thousands of middle class local government housing managers and for large construction contractors which built what turned out to be some of the worst urban housing projects anywhere in the developed world.
As well as crimes against the poor in the name of urban renewal, urban planning has often prevented low income people from accessing housing in suburban and semi-rural areas where new and better paying jobs have been created. The primary culprit here has been restrictive zoning regulation – and in the British context the creation of development free ‘green belts’ around major towns and cities (now imitated by some US cities such as Portland). The effect of these controls has been to restrict the supply of land for housing forcing up the price well above free market levels. The major beneficiaries are of course existing home-owners in areas of high housing demand who benefit from increased property values and who use land use regulation to keep out ‘less desirable’ residents. In the UK specifically many analysts have pointed to a ‘drawbridge effect’ where the middle classes move out of the cities to rural and suburban areas and then promptly demand tougher regulation to ‘keep out’ the less well-heeled and the new building that would be needed to house them. Similar processes operate in the US where ‘large lot’ zoning ordinances that mandate minimum lot sizes of several acres in many states have been used to maintain neighbourhood exclusivity.
Read the rest of the article on the Pileus blog.
Dr Mark Pennington is the author of Robust Political Economy: Classical Liberalism and the Future of Public Policy.
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