He isn't alone. People identifying as urban progressives increasingly find their own goals stymied by laws and regulations, and they're demanding that these restrictions be overturned or limited. Unexpectedly. But only for certain, progressive issues.
In other areas of city policy, though †typically, when they don't hold a personal stake †they often push aggressively for ever more regulations and a more intrusive government. Call it a libertarianism of convenience. What these part-time freedom lovers don't understand is that, absent a wider culture of liberty, calls for selective liberty will probably go unheeded.
Writing in The Atlantic's CityLab, and sounding more like Milton Friedman than a traditional left-liberal, Hertz noted that overuse of zoning had produced a pattern of "micro-regulations of the urban space, in which the size, function, number of windows, orientation, number of inhabitants, number of parking spaces, color, lawn space and a million other details of every single building in the city came to be a legitimate state interest."
Yep. That's exactly what you wanted. The only problem is, it ain't your particular view of the world.
Nowhere has the liberal big-government, pro-regulation consensus weakened more noticeably than in housing policy, especially in New York and San Francisco, where housing prices have soared. Zoning †particularly rules limiting density †has become a regular target.
Left urbanists also decry zoning that requires city developers or businesses to include a minimum number of parking spaces before moving forward on a building or an opening, rather than leaving that decision to the market. Streetsblog decried parking space mandates as "absurd." The Walking Bostonian commented on high minimum parking requirements at, of all places, bars: "It's almost as if there's a kind of sickness which seems to get into city planners' heads whenever the topic of parking comes up, and it causes all common sense to fly out the window."
You mean your particular version of common sense.
The urban left's sudden love for libertarian ideas goes beyond housing. When hip food establishments run into red tape, progressives and the press jump into gear. For example, the regulatory travails of Chicago's Logan Square Kitchen attracted a series of articles in the alt-weekly Chicago Reader, which observed: "The minutiae of this licensing confusion are mind numbing." The food industry is ready for deregulation, too, many on the left argue.
De-regulation? Or re-regulation?
Urban progressives' enthusiasm for deregulation proves to be highly selective, however. Indeed, in many policy areas, they're pushing for greatly expanded regulation. This is often true on the economic front. Advocates have pushed hard for local minimum-wage hikes in cities from Chicago to Seattle, for instance, and they try to block chain retailers from expanding in many neighborhoods.
One set of regulations for me and another set of regulations for thee, as P2K is fond of saying.
Their inconsistency can lead liberals to seek more regulations in sectors of city life that they've elsewhere said should be deregulated. While they've assailed density limits, height restrictions, minimum unit sizes, and other housing regulations, for example, they have celebrated New York's access-to-buildings law, which mandates that commercial buildings allow bicycles on freight elevators.
Inconsistency? Among liberals?
Similarly, while car parking minimums have drawn fire, sites like Greater Greater Washington have simultaneously embraced bicycle parking minimums in the District of Columbia. And progressives' call for food freedom abruptly reverses itself when trans fats, genetically modified foods or large sugary drinks are in question †they think all should be banned or strictly regulated. They also support the micromanagement of school lunches and requiring restaurant menus to list calorie counts.Why ... this suggests liberals are petty, childish, self-centered tryants who want it their very own way.
These contortions reach absurdity with smoking policy. On the one hand, the left champions the legalization of marijuana in states like Colorado, Washington and Oregon. Legalized pot is variously said to be a great source of tax revenue, jobs and even a key part of an emerging startup culture. Yet while smoking weed is encouraged, smoking tobacco remains Public Enemy No. 1, with progressive cities piling on further restrictions to this already highly taxed and regulated activity.
What explains these contradictions? A charitable explanation is that urban progressives †typically on the younger side †are just beginning to experience how excessive regulations can suffocate life in the city. After getting entangled in bureaucracy in the District of Columbia when he wanted to rent his condo (legally), Yglesias grumbled in Slate that "I've been to three offices, filed five forms, spent $200, lost a day of work †and I'm not even close to getting the simple license I need." Such red tape, he added, is "a large and needless deterrent to the formation of the humble workaday firms that for many people are a path to autonomy and prosperity." It appears that he'd never before understood what small businesses go through to operate in D.C. or in many other American cities.
Why should anyone be surprised the POTUS wants more regulation?
But it's hard to avoid thinking, too, that some of the inconsistency reflects elite biases. The things that liberal-minded city residents like and want to do †eat from hip food trucks, smoke dope and other "bourgeois bohemian" pursuits †should be left as free as possible, consequences be damned (raw-milk advocates play down the nearly 1,000 cases of illnesses caused by it from 2007 through 2012). Those that they consider déclassé †Big Gulps, Marlboro Lights, McDonald's †should be restricted or even shut down. It's regulation for thee but not for me.
I think I said that a while back.