Why Is A New U.S. Civil War Unlikely?

Trump has been trying to foment the seeds of a violent civil war in his followers.  A game designer, in a widely shared analysis, has even discussed four possible civil war scenarios. This is unlikely to happen. 

Why?

In the big picture, an election related civil war is unlikely in 2020 in the United States because civil wars almost always hinge upon disputes over the legitimacy of the ruler and the ruler's regime. As I noted in the linked post:

People do not fight wars because taxes are too high, or they disagree with the way money is allocated in the national budget, or for any other of the multitude of public policy sins that a government can commit. Public policy issues are relevant to which contestants in a war receive support of various kinds while it is waged, and to crafting solutions that will bring legitimacy to a new regime after a war, but are for the most part unimportant in causing wars to arise.

But the likelihood of an election result where the legitimacy of final election result is subject to bona fide dispute is low in our political system.

The Electoral College

I hate the Electoral College. It is grossly unfair. But it is also a powerful force to make succession more robust in the United States in the face of close and contested elections.

The Electoral College means that Electoral Votes are award in separate contests in 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, with the races in Nebraska and Maine decided on both a statewide level and in individual Congressional Districts - four Congressional District in Nebraska and two in Maine.

The winner is either the candidate who gets 270 electoral votes, or the candidate who wins a vote conducted using weird state by state delegation rules in the U.S. House of Representatives if there is an electoral vote tie (269 electoral votes for each candidate unless electoral votes are earned by a third-party candidate).

Most of the 57 different electoral vote contests will not be close.

From the FiveThirtyEight website.

Of the 57 contests, 56 of them are in elections administered by state and local governments, and the remaining one, in the District of Columbia, is the most lopsided of all of the 57 contests. The currently projected outcome in the District of Columbia is that Biden will get 91% of the vote and Trump will get 6% of the vote. So, there will never be a contested electoral vote dispute in the only contest in the Presidential election which is administered by federal officials.

Disputes regarding election outcomes in any given one of the 57 contests are only viable if a race is close. 

Even a two percentage point margin of victory is clear enough that it won't generate much controversy, and realistically, given polling and historic experience, only about one to six of the 57 contests will be that close.

Moreover, disputed elections in close races are only material if they occur in marginal contests that could determine which candidate gets 270 electoral votes.

For example, in today's polling averages of Presidential election polls in battleground states at Real Clear Politics, the states that are within two percentage points of a tie are North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Iowa. But none of those states are likely to be necessary for a Biden victory, if Biden wins. Biden leads by 3.8% in Pennsylvania and 4.4% in Arizona, which are much more likely to be marginal states and are margins that if reproduced a few weeks from now on election day, would be too large to give rise to a plausible dispute over who won the election, even if Biden's electoral vote margin was a small one and not a landslide. 

It is, of course, possible that the actual election day margin for the winner of the Presidential race on November 3 in marginal states like Pennsylvania and Arizona could end up being razor thin and produce disputed election results in those particular and pivotal states. But if voters voted on election day the way that they are leaning now with only a small shift towards Trump relative to current polling that is similar across the board nationally, the outcomes of the election in North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Iowa aren't going to matter.

It doesn't take a landslide result for a candidate to avoid a disputed election. It just takes a 2% margin of victory or more for the winning candidate in the state that delivers that candidate his 270th electoral vote.

Usually, if the margin of victory in the marginal states is more than 0.5% there isn't a recount and the election result is clear enough. The odds of the Presidential election this year hinging on a recount, according to 538 is about 5%. 

Overall the odds of Biden winning according to 538 are about 77% and the odds of Biden winning the popular vote but not the electoral vote are about 11%, while the odds of Trump winning the popular vote and the electoral vote are about 12%, with almost no chance that Biden wins the electoral vote but not the popular vote. 

Biden leads in national poll quality weighted polling averages from 538, as of September 23, 2020 by 7.2 percentage points.

According to 538, the odds of no candidate receiving an electoral college majority and Congress deciding the election are less than 1% this year.

How Election Disputes Play Out

Even in those circumstances, where there is a disputed election, resolution of the dispute is limited to the states with narrow margins of victory that in the first instance (certainly less than two percentage points, and realistically, much closer), play out with state and local election administration officials (usually primarily a state secretary of state and county clerks who are elected on a partisan basis) conducting the count.

A federal court case that starts in a federal district court in a state and could work its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, or a state court cases that could conceivably work its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, could follow.

Ultimately, however, resolution of Presidential election disputes is vested in Congress. The federal government's executive branch has no role in the process of resolving a disputed Presidential election.

The mere fact that there is a clearly delineated process that is widely disseminated, even if it is arcane, in and of itself, disfavors violent action because there is a long formal process to contest in through the January after the election, a time period during which passions over unfair election outcomes that are allegedly fraudulent can cool.

And, the fact that this is mostly a state and local matter, and that it is confined to specific electoral process disputes in a handful of states, also discourages the kind of outrage that leads to violent political protests from spreading nationally, because it denies protestors a shared national level political cause.

Late Counted Mail-In Ballots Won't Flip A Trump Victory To A Biden One

Trump’s supporters expect two large-scale riots in the fall. One will come right after Election Day, when Trump will be ahead in the vote count. This is because we’re in a pandemic, and Republicans will vote in person while Democrats will vote by mail (in fact, several Democrat-run states mandate it). Trump will be ahead on election night if this holds. The second riot will come when the Democrats “discover” millions of mailed-in ballots which will give Biden the win, which (according to them) will be fraudulent.

From here. 

While Democrats are more likely to vote by mail, and Republicans are more likely to vote in person, the scenario in which early results show a Republican victory in a marginal state, and Democrats surge ahead in late counted mail in ballots, is unlikely.

Most states that conduct elections by mail-in ballot require those ballots to be received by election officials by the time that the polls close on election day. A couple of states, including Washington State, count mail-in ballots that are merely postmarked on election day. But that states that allow that are all safely Democratic states in which there will not be disputed elections.

The only battleground states this year are likely to be close and could conceivably be marginal, outcome deciding states are Florida, Maine, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, New Hampshire and Michigan. Most of them have elections better administered now than Florida's was in the 2000 election.

Colorado's mail-in ballot system, in which ballots must be received by election day by election officials is much more typical. And, in that system, the first announced election results mostly include mailed in ballots, because all ballots received by election day by election officials (which is usually the lion's share of all mail-in ballots) are counted before the polls close, with results ready to be announced immediately. 

In contrast, election officials generally don't start to tally up votes cast in person on election day until the polls close and those results tickle in over the course of election day evening and into the next day or two.

So, this year, any flip in results is much more likely to go from a Democrat who received strong support in mail-in ballots to a Republican who did better in election day polling, than the other way around.

What Triggers Violence?

As I've noted before at this blog, the United States, historically, has extraordinary low rates of informal street protests and strikes and violence in its democratic process.

In many countries, France to name one prominent example, national general strikes that can spill over into conflicts in the street between law enforcement and protesters are common. Many countries have long histories of politically motivated killings of candidates and political party officials. 

The U.S., by and large, does not. There hasn't been a significant street protest over election results in the 20th or 21st centuries, even in close and controversial elections like the Bush v. Gore election dispute over a very close outcome in the marginal state of Florida that was ultimately resolved in an unprincipled and partisan decision of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The predominant reasons that people on the left in the United States hold in the streets protests are alleged incidents of excessive use of force by local law enforcement officials, most recently, the Black Lives Matter organized protests this year over the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and also several other police killings like Elijah Woods in Aurora, Colorado.

For the most part, political violence in the United States is a tactic of the political right, that is usually deployed to suppress the vote (as in a recent effort by Trump supporters to scare of early voters in Virginia), not to protest the outcome after the fact.

One reason that there aren't a lot of after the fact election result protests involving national elections, is illustrated by the Bush v. Gore case. In the United States, at this moment in time, it doesn't feel like it makes sense for someone in Texas or Illinois, for example, to conduct a protest in their home state over vote miscounting atrocities made by state and local officials in Florida.

While the election result is divisive nationally, the United States is fairly well sorted politically along geographic lines. We have Red States and Blue States. We have red counties and blue counties within Red States and Blue States. 

There are relatively few places in the United States where fierce disagreements with your neighbors are common, and you only get a war when there are two sides to tango. Urban areas are liberal. Rural areas are conservative. And, where it is most likely to happen, in the suburbs, zoning laws and history have created a low density environment with few places well suited to large gatherings and a culture of privacy that is ill suited to rioting and urban warfare.

There are places in the U.S. where renegade sheriffs might be inclined to cast their lot with an anti-Biden insurgency, although there are none where law enforcement would join an anti-Trump insurgency. But the only places where this would happen would be rural counties with tiny sheriffs departments that have no sway over the masses who live in urban and suburban areas in large metropolitan areas. And, if they fired a shot at state police or National Guard troops brought in to restrain them, the tiny size of their departments would lead them to be crushed and collapse in an instant.

National protests need national organization and a common demand. The biggest plausibly advanced national cause that Trump has encouraged is opposition to mail-in voting. But this hasn't triggered marches and demonstrations in advance of the election so far, and fights over election laws after the election has already happened don't make a lot of sense as a cause either. It is hard to build consensus around a demand that the double digit percentage of the electorate who actually did cast votes by mail in the most recent election, many of whom voted your way, shouldn't have their votes counted after the fact.

Low Income Housing Policy

The federal government devotes an immense amount of money to housing subsidies.

About $40 billion of it goes to quite ineffectual mean tested programs, about $6 billion of it goes to tax credits for low income housing developers, and about $600 billion comes in the form of tax loopholes and subtle assumed guarantees of federally owned mortgage wholesalers that mostly benefit the middle-middle to upper-middle class.

Despite the programs in place, people still die because that can't find affordable housing with standard utilities for their families.  This week, a man who worked in a restaurant kitchen and his seven children in Maryland died in their sleep of carbon monoxide poisoning, when they resorted to putting a space heater in a poorly ventilated kitchen of a unit that had no legitimate electricity service when the utility company cut off their electricity service from their pirated electricity meter.

Marginal Revolution notes a new NBER paper on the subject.

Some of the biggest barriers to low income housing are local.  Zoning and building codes limit where small square footage, high density, more affordable housing can be built, while trying to atone for these barriers by mandating that developers build money losing affordable housing in order to gain the right to build large subdivisions with unaffordable housing.  Usually, these codes make the best the enemy of the good, confusing minimum standards of habitability and public safety, with mere cramped conditions and aesthetic concerns.

Tax subsidies to mortgage holders are also not shared by renters.

Black Forest Fire Most Costly In Colorado History; Royal Gorge Fire Decimates Venue

Black Forest

Firefighters on Friday will continue to battle the Black Forest fire north of Colorado Springs that has consumed 15,700 acres and 379 homes since it started Tuesday.  Some 38,000 people are impacted in the mandatory evacuation zone that covers 24 square miles, stretching from Elbert County to the northern part of Colorado Springs. . . . The number of homes destroyed makes the fire the most destructive in Colorado history. The Waldo Canyon fire in 2012 destroyed 347 homes.

Maketa said at a news conference late Thursday afternoon that firefighters found the bodies of two people in the rubble of the Black Forest fire. The bodies were discovered in what was the garage of a home that the blaze leveled. They were next to a car with its doors open. The car's trunk was packed full of belongings.

From the Denver Post.  A statement in an earlier blog post on the fire based on a breaking news Denver Post story that the Black Forest fire was 48 square miles was incorrect.  The 15,700 acre burn area is 24 square miles and the mandatory evacuation zone size in the quoted language above is probably underestimate since it includes some areas that have not yet been burned.   The fire is currently only 5% contained so the damage is likely to be greater when it ends.  A back of napkin estimate of the damage done by the Black Forest fire is a hundred million dollars or more.

(This photo is one of 165 at the Denver Post from the collection linked above and is posted as a claimed fair use for the purpose of discussing the political issues associated with the used of government funds to protect private property in high risk areas sometimes called "stupid zones.")

True to its name, the exurban Black Forest subdivision is ensconced in a scrubby, arid west, pine forest - as the late Colorado op-ed columnist Ed Quillen liked to call it, a "stupid zone."  He had argued for a consistent libertarian approach towards developments in these areas, i.e. that they be permitted, but that government resources not be used to protect property in these zones (as opposed to human life) from the natural dangers that people building there assumed, or to subsidize development in these areas.  In particular, it may not make sense to use disaster relief funds to rebuild structures in disaster prone areas.

Authorities say the Black Forest fire was probably started by a person (not necessarily intentionally) and is now being investigated as a homicide.

Royal Gorge

Royal Gorge Bridge and Park in Fremont County is operated by the Royal Gorge Company of Colorado which employs 40 permanent staff and many more part-time seasons  workers.  It is a a standout Colorado attraction of the Route 66 era, including a bridge over one of the deepest bridge spanned canyons in the nation, that I've been to with my kids.  The 3,100 acre Royal Gorge fire this week has devastated this relic of 1950s tourism. Their cable cars have (literally) gone up in smoke and the cable has fallen into the canyon.

[Cañon City] Mayor Tony Greer toured the Royal Gorge Bridge and Park and even drove across the bridge Thursday.

"As devastating as some of the damage appears, it seems to have created a wonderful opportunity for us, as well," he said. "This national treasure that we've been charged with — the bridge itself — is intact and it's safe."

Of the more than 1,000 planks on the bridge, only 32 were burned on the south end of it. But of the 52 structures on the property, only four remain.

From the Denver Post.

The attraction will be virtually starting over from scratch and have to re-imagine itself.  Presumably, the remainder of this year's season will be a lost cause for the attraction.  The city had been considering a redevelopment of the attraction anyway, however, and the many millions of dollars of damage are mostly insured, although the jobs lost won't easily be replaced in the short-term.

Rezoned

Denver completely overhauled its zoning code Monday night. Some places are more easily developed now, some face more restrictions on development. Many neighborhoods that are basically similar in zoning require more nuanced adherence to established design standards. The movement to legalize Granny flats made considerable progress, although not as much as supporters had hoped.

The change was the biggest overhaul since 1956 and leaves Mayor Hickenlooper with that major task accomplished.

College Graduate Density and Economic Growth

Denver has more than 1,023 college graduates per square mile.

Six cities have at least twice as many college graduates per square mile:

San Francisco 7,031
New York City 6,357
Boston 3,871
Washington, D.C. 3,395
Seattle 2,853
Chicago 2,542

Richard Florida, a regional development economist (known for his "Creative Class" concept) who compiled the data, thinks that this matters:

[S]pillovers in knowledge that result from talent-clustering are the main cause of economic growth. Well-educated professionals and creative workers who live together in dense ecosystems, interacting directly, generate ideas and turn them into products and services faster than talented people in other places can. There is no evidence that globalization or the Internet has changed that.

If Professor Florida is right, it is bad news for most of the Midwest (except Minneapolis-St. Paul and Chicago), the South (except Atlanta and Miami), and is bad news for Arizona, Nevada and Utah. But, it is good news for Denver, the major coastal cities and a handful of major urban inland cities (listed above). It is also probably good news for small towns that are homes to colleges or hospitals.

It also suggests that pro-infill zoning policies may actually seriously promote economic growth.

There are, however, issues with how you calculate the slippery concept in a meaningful way, because the way that one draws urban boundaries greatly impacts population density. For example, New York City would be no less vibrant if its boundaries also included 1000 square miles of water adjacent to it, nor would Denver be less vibrant if it also included 1,000 square miles of virtually uninhabited farmland, despite the dramatic change this would cause to the statistics.

International urban geographers often look a small areas (e.g. square kilometers), define the "defacto city" based on the area with high population density, and then look at the total population of the city. This is not an easy thing to do with publicly available statistics, however, and poses cause and effect loop issues when you are trying to measure the impact of [educated] population density, if not done carefully.

Detroit Clears the Decks

In most central cities, the goal is "infill development." Detroit's goals, however, are a little different. You might call it "empty out development." The goal is to remove dangerous havens for drug dealers, and has strong community support. Federal stimulus money is being used to help fund the project.

[Detroit] officials announced plans to demolish about 450 of the most dangerous structures within the next two months. . . . Detroit's mayor wants to tear down 10,000 vacant houses over the next four years and, with them, evict the illegal drug and weapons operations that often move in after residents move out.

[Many of the houses are] dilapidated structures along a street dotted with vacant, weedy lots. . . . There are about 33,000 vacant houses spread across Detroit, while another 50,000 homes are in foreclosure, Mayor Dave Bing has said. . . . About 660 have been torn down since January, compared to 860 that were demolished in all of 2009. The 450 houses targeted by Wayne County are among 3,000 on Bing's demolition list this year.

Detroit religious leaders were asked to compile a list of abandoned houses near their churches. . . . Vacant houses have been a nuisance to communities and police for years in Detroit[.] . . . The number of abandoned and foreclosed homes has risen as Detroit's population plummeted. The 139-square-mile city was built for two million people, but could dip below 800,000 when 2010 Census numbers are collected.

Denver's urban planners have be struggling with ways to consolidate its reduced population. In a city like Denver, infill development is economically and environmentally attractive because it uses existing infrastructure to serve more people. In a city like Detroit, the cost of maintaining infrastructure built for a much greater population has created a burden, and narrowing the city's developed footprint is one way that the city would like to provide urban services to its residents at a lower cost.

Detroit's task isn't one that they usually teach urban planners, where the focus in the literature is overwhelmingly on how to manage growth, rather than on how to gracefully downsiize.

Ordering The City

Prawfs blog has a great compendium of posts inspired by the book "Ordering the City," by Nicole Stelle Garnett. I sum up some key insights form those posts below:

* Urban planning is best by baby steps and should be aware of discrepencies between the views of urban elites and the other people who live in neighborhoods subjected to urban planning.

* Neighborhoods are perceived as more disorderly than they are when they have a higher percentage of black residents, even by the black residents themselves.

* Zoning regulation is authority to be used particularly cautiously because it often has effectively irreversible consequences manifested in the built environment. Other forms of regulation of urban disorder can be more easily reversed if these approaches turn out in hindsight to have been ill advised.

* Even when single use zoning reduces crime, it comes at the high cost of trapping people in their limited neighborhoods or even their homes, and excessively stratifies the community.

* Urban vibrancy that looks like harmful disorder in poor neighborhods can sometimes actually be helpful economic and social capital building activity. Informally ordered activity is often more structured than it seems. But, making vibrant areas safe for people to be out interacting may require more aggressively interventionist policing strategies.

* Encourage small scale economic activity in cities (including home businesses). . . preserve non-conforming uses . . . reduce regulation of mixed-use zoning and [reduce regulation of] the rehabilitation of vacant buildings.

* [A]n organic order tends to be superior to a government-imposed one; "commercial land uses stabilize poor neighborhoods and destabilize wealthier ones," "fear of the police is also a major predictor of fear of crime" and

[U]nder-policing is a serious problem in poor minority neighborhoods, and minorities exercise their increasing political power to demand that urban officials prioritize public safety. . . .[but] foot patrols and community policing do the most to reduce the fear of crime . . .[not] militaristic “swat team” strategies, which tend to alienate community residents. . . . an obsessive focus on crime statistics likely generates bad incentives for police . . .

an emphasis on . . . “aesthetic order” likely works to the detriment of minority neighborhoods. . . . the aesthetic of the day—new urbanism—is clearly an elite one (despite promises of . . . community involvement galore). Moreover, the new urbanist’s regulatory alternative to zoning (“transect zoning” or “form-based” coding) increases development costs and could well dampen development hopes in poor communities, which arguably need less land-use regulation, not more. . . . the intersections between perceptions of disorder, race, and urban policy arguably weigh in favor of devolutionary approaches to both land-use and policing policies . . . the ability of police officers to exercise force, combined with the possibility that the exercise of force will be unjust and discriminatory, is a reason to approach questions of police discretion with great caution. But, I am not sure that . . . these realities weigh in favor of planners rather than the police officers as disorder-controllers.

UPDATED (3/24/2010) to add a link to a new post in the series:

"[I]t’s difficult, if not undesirable, to rescue cities from obsolete historical forms (including past planning mistakes) through incremental changes. . . former industrial zones, decommissioned ports, and failed, late 20th century commercial centers—occupy big swathes of land that require “big planning” to transform these areas into living neighborhoods. These sites often require decontamination, dramatic aesthetic rescue, and infusions of a critical mass of population to create conditions for safety."

Oil Demand Inflexible

Oil demand is far less responsive to increased prices than it used to be.

compare two decades in which the price of crude oil has quintupled: 1973-84 and 1998-2008. After the price increases of the 1970's, per-capita demand fell by 19% for the OECD and by 13% for the world as a whole. In the past decade, with oil price increases similar to those of the 1970's, per-capita demand fell only 3% in the OECD; worldwide it actually increased, by 4%.

Why Is Oil Demand More Inflexible?

Oil demand is less responsive to price than it used to be because in most situations where there is a good alternative to oil with current technology, the switch has already happened.

The factors most responsible for reducing demand since 1971 cannot be repeated. Almost all the low-hanging fruit has now been picked; it cannot be picked again. The OECD has already done the easy fuel-switching, away from oil used in electricity generation and space heating.

Non-transportation uses for oil has declined dramatically. Only Hawaii and Alaska use oil as a major source for electrical power generation. Home and business heating rarely use oil outside the Northeast, and this use is becoming increasingly rare there. Plastics and fertilizer have never been a big part of the total. Per the U.S. Energy Information Administration's 2008 data:

As of 2008, 42% of U.S. industrial energy consumption was petroleum, making up 23% of petroleum used. Residential energy consumption was 16% petroleum(fuel oil and propane), making up 5% of petroleum used. Yes, only 1% of power sector consumption was petroleum, and 95% of transportation was petroleum.

In theory, one can use biofuels, natural gas, and electricity to power vehicles, and can reduce oil demand with reduced vehicle use and a shift to more efficient vehicles.

In practice, alternative fuel vehicles aren't quite ready for prime time yet. There simply isn't the fueling infrastructure or industrial capacity to switch to them in numbers that have a big impact on our economy's demand for oil. There is some room to drive less and use more fuel efficient vehicles, but it isn't huge and any vehicle switch takes more than a decade to work its way through the existing stock of vehicles.

We are close to being able to make progress in reducing oil demand.

There are several firms developing plug in electric vehicles, and the several major automobile industry firms are looking into them as well. There is one firm, Smith Electric Vehicles that makes commercial trucks intended for use in fleets dispatched from a depo. There are viable short range prototypes and limited production vehicles in existence. My intuition is that the price range where it makes sense to switch from gasoline or diesel powered vehicles to electric vehicles on a purely economic basis with existing technology is in the vicinity of $8-$16 a gallon gasoline prices.

There is a niche industry of natural gas fueled vehicles out there. Natural gas is also a stop gap solution. Peak natural gas is more distant than peak oil, but not that much more distant. Demand for natural gas as a cleaner alternative to oil in many applications is straining supplies of this oil related resource, which trades in a market that is more regional, at least until new technologies for shipping it receive wider use.

There are many vehicles that can drive on ethanol or biodiesel, but there is little infrastructure to make these fuels available and a limited fuel capacity to use this infrastructure. Options like making oil substitutes out of coal also exist technologically, but the capacity to do so isn't in place right now and the environmental concerns are substantial.

There are also a variety of small more fuel efficient vehicles on the market, many using modern diesel engines or hybrid systems to increase fuel efficiency. But, the gains are fairly modest.

Interest in both freight rail and passenger rail as fuel efficient alternatives has spiked. Even buses, which receive far less attention than they should given the amazing fuel efficiency per passenger-mile, have gotten more attention.

Zoning laws and real estate trends are also increasingly sensitive to the virtues of density and reduced travel time.

Organic farming, which makes less intense use of oil resources than conventional farming, has gone mainstream with organic produce now making up a meaningful share of the produce sold in non-specialty grocery stores, and organic oriented grocery stores seeing their market share rise.

In industry, apparently: "Most of the petroleum consumed (still gas, etc) in the industrial sector is consumed in the refinery and chemical sectors to create process heat/steam." If so, there are good alternatives that aren't petroleum based, although coal as a replacement raises serious environmental concerns.

But, we aren't there yet. The changes left to be made take a considerable amount of time to implement, measured in decades, and an oil price spike may well hit before we have them in place.

Arguments Against Zoning

Various arguments against zoning are collected at Richard's Real Estate and Urban Economics blog, which notes, via the New York Times, that not only zoning, but also Fannie Mae regulations discourage mixed use development.

Suburban Ghettos

Until the advent of the automobile, city fringes were were the poor lived, and the better off people lived closer to the core of the city. This situation hasn't vanished. There are currently many cities that have refused to annex low income neighborhoods, leaving them in unincorporated areas with minimal government services despite their urban nature, as discussed in the linked article.

Detroit Still Downsizing

Mayor Dave Bing is proposing to abandon large swaths of the city, move the few people remaining to more functional neighborhoods, tear down the buildings left behind and let what's left become forests, pastures and farmland.
The consolidation, aside from eliminating square miles of eyesores, would cut the cost of services like police, fire, snow removal, water and sewage.

Already people are said to hunt pheasants in abandoned neighborhoods, and Detroit-grown produce is sold in farmers markets. The markets are important because not one national grocery chain has a store in the city. Soon, if the city wants to have food, it may have to grow its own. . . .

Between 1970 and 2000, 161,000 buildings were demolished. There is estimated to be 40 square miles of vacant property, with 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant lots.

From here.

Detroit has a city budget deficit of about $350 per person, an average house value of under $80,000, below average incomes and lots of resiidents who live the city to shop, all making it very hard to bridge the tax gap.

Greater Denver, meanwhile is having more success attracting grocery stores. A California chain is snapping up half a dozen former Albertson's sites in Colorado from Longmont to the South suburbs and Sunflower, a small natural foods grocer, is looking into a new grocery store in North Denver which lacks them.

A former Cub foods location in Glendale, Colorado (which is surrounded entirely by Denver) is still a big vacant hole in that urban village.

Billboard Luddites In Denver

A group called Scenic Colorado has organized in Denver mostly, it seems, to push for a ban on electronic billboards that the City and County of Denver is considering acting as an ordinance.

Earlier this week, I got a flyer for them, warning me that without my action, billboards everywhere could be replaced with electric ones.

My reaction? "So what?"

There is an electric billboard right outside my Cherry Creek office. It isn't any more or less noticeable than the non-electric one that was there before, except that the advertising changes more often, so it isn't as boring. Presumably, it also puts some people in business of printing overside billboard posters and the people who put them up on polls out of work. But, I really see no way to care one way or the other and simply do not see what is so noxious about this new technology.

Their FAQ is singularly unconvincing.

There may be an argument for limiting the locations where billboards can be put, but there is no legitimate reasons to prevent billboards from being electronic in places where ordinary billboards once went.

Denver Blog Watch

The Denver Infill blog is midway through a nice top ten list of the most important land use/transportation decisions that have been made in the past decade.

I recently discovered the blog of Julien Riel-Salvatore, an anthropology professor at the University of Colorado at Denver: A Very Remote Period Indeed. The quality of its posts on are a par with other top anthropology blogs on the net, and it also offer a steady beat of local happenings pertinent to the field so that you can personally connect to the global community of people who are studying our prehistory.

Vestal Vespa is inching towards coming out of hiberation, with three posts in the last two months after a long hiatus of only sporadic posting.

Against Industrial Zoning

The fights in the trenches of zoning law (i.e. local government limitations on land uses in particular areas) are usually about housing density in residentially zoned areas. Generally, developers, urbanists and some environmentalists are pushing for higher residential densities. Generally, existing local residents, believing that it will improve their property values, favor lower residential densities.

The details of the disputes vary. It may be between large lot single family housing and small lot single family housing. It may be between small lot single family housing and small lot single family housing with granny flats. It may be between single family housing and duplex/townhouse developments. It may be between duplex/townhouse developments and low rise apartment buildings. It may be between low rise apartment buildings and high rise apartment buildings.

I'm personally skeptical about the benefits of government regulation through zoning of residential density. I acknowledge that some regulation is needed. An apartment building that does not have adequate parking gobbles up the government owned commons of street parking. Buildings that are taller than local fire equipment can handle puts residents and neighbors at risk. Development without access creates an irresistible urge to trespass. But, I personally would favor zoning based on externalities, rather than simply based upon land use or building type ("form based zoning").

The evidence that high density housing is bad for neighboring low density housing as a general rule is weak. The main difference between a handful of unzoned cities and the overwhelming majority of cities that have zoning, is that housing density is more mixed. Commercial and industrial uses mostly segregate themselves even in the absence of land use regulation, because of the fundamental economics of the real estate market. Shops create commercial traffic that benefits other shops. Many factories want land cheaper than it is available subdivided into housing lots in a residential subdivision.

Even people who aren't worried about townhouses tainting neighborhoods with single family homes, often believe that commercial development needs to be regulated. One of the main accomplishments of the New Urbanist movement has been to remind people that residential and commercial developments are not inherently incompatible. A coffee shop in otherwise residential neighborhoods, a la the Wash Perk coffee shop at Ohio and South Emerson in my neighborhood, or a main street style development with ground floor retail and top floor residential development of the kind common in my home town of Oxford, Ohio, can mesh easily and comfortably into a more vital neighborhood.

But, even the radicals of zoning reform usually hold fast to one of the earliest principals of zoning that took hold long before more comprehensive "Euclidian zoning," named after Euclid, Ohio, that city whose case established the constitutionality of the practice) in the 1930s: Industrial uses should be separated from other uses.

There is reason to doubt even this bedrock principal of zoning theory.

Significant recent scholarship has looked at industrial zoned areas in New York City. In New York City, commercial and residential property values have historically been very high. Lots of people want to live in New York City and have offices there. Nobody wants to build new factories there and the factories are remain are increasingly marginal. Effectively, these are subsidies for industrial uses that are sited in places that have much more value with non-industrial development.

Some commentators, like one in this week's Newsweek magazine, think this is good, because it keeps the local economy diverse, buffering it against catastrophies like a financial sector collapse by giving it other sources of jobs of tax revenues, and bemoan the loss of New York City's factory jobs. Others use this situation as evidence that it is not economically sound to keep residential and commercial developers who are willing to put up with stink and noise, out of industrial zoned areas.

On the other hand, lots of uses that are classified as industrial aren't nearly as bad neighbors as they used to be.

Downtown Denver, a stone's throw from city hall and high end residences in the Golden Triangle and LoDo, has a factory that employs four hundred people and produces about half of the nation's supply of the product it produces. This involves processing metal and goes on twenty-four hours a day, five days out of seven every week. It draws almost no complaints from neighbors. It is the U.S. Mint. You could easily confuse it for another court house or government office building. Right next door to the U.S. Mint is another land use that terrifies neighbors despite being mostly benign, a jail (with a new jail under construction).

One of most noxious land uses in downtown Denver is one you wouldn't expect: Civic Center Park, which is a favorite for vagrants, truants and open air drug dealing. When a festival or serious protest isn't in progress, Civic Center Park can feel decidely unsafe, despite the fact that the state capital, state judicial building, central branch of the Denver Public Library, Denver court house, municipal headquarters, Denver Post headquarters and corporate office buildings ring the park.

I have a dairy shipping center in the middle of my own West Washington Park neighborhood that is similarly benign. The Celestial Seasonings tea factory in Boulder may generate a bit of noise and traffic, and have a faint aroma, but is a far better neighbor than a dog kennel.

Modern factories aren't silent and do operate at night creating some traffic. But, the lessons of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" have been almost fully assimilated. A large share of modern factories have little or no smokestack emissions. They are clean inside and out. They have about the same rate of occupational injury as office work. Their workers are healthy, reasonably well paid adults, not exploited children and marginal sweatshop workers. The heavy work is done by sophisticated machines and a good share of the people who keep those machines working are technically skilled professionals. Many modern factories are better neighbors than supposedly bucollic farms, gas stations, dive bars widely permitted in residential neighborhoods, or a house full of college students. Your average urban interstate highway provides far more externalities than your average factory.

Sure, there are still some industrial uses that most of us would not want to live near. The pet food plants between downtown Denver and I-70 cast a stench that not infrequently wafts all the way to urban residential neighborhoods half a dozen miles away when the weather is wrong. Oil refineries not only stink but sometimes produce horrific and dangerous accidents like a recent incident in metropolitan Denver where a truck full of gasoline tried to race a train and lost. A coal fired power plant is not a good neighbor for an elementary school, despite modern emissions scrubber technology.

But, the share of industrial uses that are seriously problematic to their neighbors is much smaller than they used to be, and the amount of a buffer needed to make these uses tolerable is much smaller. Most factories these days do not look like the now closed Gate Rubber Plant that is poised between West Washington Park and Platte Park, which is now a brownfield development that will be used for residential and commercial purposes.

Given the reality of the modern factory, an externality control based approach to land use makes more sense, even for properties that would normally be zoned industrial, than traditional Euclidian zoning for these uses. The same conclusion applies to warehouse uses often confined to industrial zoned areas. Warehouses may actually be better neighbors than many kinds of residential and commercial use.

Aside from an increasingly thin class of heavy industrial activity, that doesn't even include most modern automobile assembly plants, zoning isn't a very good way to regulate modern land use. And, the touchstone for identifying which activities do need to be set apart, likewise, should be tangible externalities like air pollution, vibration, water contamination, smell, noise, and demands on city services, rather than older taxonomies. A modern feedlot behaves more like a oil refinery for land use purposes than most modern factories.

How Much Impact Do Zoning Laws Have?

Do zoning laws really have much of an impact?

In my experience, developers who want to build in undeveloped or blighted areas not zoned for a proposed project are often effective in securing zoning law changes. Zoning laws may stifle innovation and change in more prosperous, already developed areas. But, most of the time, that is not where developers want to build, because the cost of acquiring improved land and scraping or renovating the improvements on it area so high. Denver's recent wave of scrapes, pop tops and other infill development is an exception to the usual state of affairs, and even then, more often than not, development has gone forward until a very recent wave of downzonings.

But, then again, I've never lived in California. According to a March 4, 2009 op-ed article in the Los Angeles Times by Edward L. Glaeser, a professor of economics and director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government at Harvard University (hat tip to the Volokh Conspiracy):

Although California is a populous state, it still has plenty of land. Santa Clara County, the home of Silicon Valley, only has about 2.2 people per acre. Even in denser places, such as Los Angeles, there is plenty of room to build.

California’s growth has slowed because the state has made it increasingly difficult to build new homes. There is an almost perfect correlation between the growth of an area and the amount of housing that is permitted in that area. California has some of the toughest land-use regulations in the country, which are often justified as environmental measures. When high housing demand is met with restrictions — not construction — California homes become unaffordable and new construction goes somewhere else.

I'm skeptical of, but fascinated by, this claim. I know that growth boundaries have had bite in Portland, Oregon, but wasn't aware that zoning laws had so much bite in California, and I'm still not convinced that they do.

One way to think about a zoning law is as a democratic veto on land use innovation. Permission for unanticipated uses will often be granted when someone comes up with a new use for land, but only after a politically appointed planning board or local government governing body approves the decision. While federal and state governments tend to pass laws with general principals in mind, municipal ordinances are frequently directed at a very small number of cases, and spot zoning is just the most notable example of this tendency.

Perhaps, California simply zones almost all of its land so that it can't be developed, but routinely approves just in time rezonings for new developments. Zoning often simply ratifies the status quo, and rezonings are routinely approved if everyone who owns impacted land agrees. This would lead to the "almost perfect correlation between the growth of an area and the amount of housing that is permitted in that area" even if rezonings are routinely approved.

It is also possible that earlier large lot subdivisions have swallowed up available land, and that the owners of the land in unblighted areas have either been unwilling, or not permitted by private land use covenants, from further subdividing their land without prohibitive transaction costs. Turning 160 acres owned by a single farmer in an unincorporated part of a county on an urban fringe into a subdivision isn't that hard to do, even if it isn't currently zoning for housing. Turning a 160 acre subdivision filled with five acre multi-million dollar ranchettes that are part of a covenant controlled development with an HOA into higher density housing is a much more formidable task, even if a dozen of the ranchette owners are agreeable to selling out. The fact that low density uses can't easily be converted to high density uses doesn't necessarily imply that zoning is the main culprit.

There are three reasons, at least, that I'm skeptical of the implied claim that command and control style land use restrictions in California are a drag on its ability to increase its housing stock.

One is that so much of California has a low population density. If buildable land were really scarce, one would expect to see the high housing densities of Manhattan, of Portland, Oregon, of San Francisco, of Tokoyo and of Hong Kong, where natural boundaries (or international borders) make developable land scarce. Los Angeles and Silicon Valley don't show the kind of densities one would expect if land were scarce and as a result land values were so high.

A second is that I suspect that county level population density figures in California are deceptive. California has counties with very large land areas that don't closely track the boundaries of urban development, and a large share of California's land has mountains or other geographical features that make it unsuitable for development.

A third flows from the housing bust in California. We know now, as many people including myself had suspected for a long time, that high housing prices in California were the product of a speculative bubble that outstripped the economic fundamentals. California has a large excess inventory of new housing whose construction was fueled by that bubble. Post-bubble housing prices are more affordable than they've been for many years, foreclosures are rampant, and California's landscape of dotted with empty, often half finished, new housing developments. This is not the mark of a housing market that has been unduly constrained by zoning and environmental laws from building new units. The drivers behind new housing development and the current brake that has been placed on new construction appears to be driven by the financial sector's follies, not state and local land use regulation. While the author argues that because of California's land use restrictions, "new construction goes somewhere else," I'm curious to ask where. Construction has not gone somewhere else. It has ground to a halt, nationwide. New construction certainly hasn't relocated to Nevada, Arizona or Florida.

None of this, of course, shows that California's zoning laws are good. It simply suggests that they may be irrelevant in the cases that drive that state's population and housing stock growth, in which case, the cause of California's economic woes (and the solutions to them) must be found elsewhere.

DPS Weeds, Sows and Repots School Lineup

At the level of a school board in a District like Denver's with more than a hundred school programs and 70,000+ students, it doesn't work to have the board micromanage daily school operations. Its main jobs are to higher and fire senior district administrators, and to make big decisions on issues like opening schools, shutting schools down, and relocating schools to make better use of its sprawling real estate portfolio. The District has enough vacant classroom space to house almost 30,000 students and their teachers.

These decisions are made in the late fall so that there is time to implement these major changes in good order. We are currently in the 2009-2010 school year. Many of the changes will take place effective for the 2010-2011 school year, and the school choice program for the district is already well under way, with the rush to win over students well in progress, and a choice form deadline looming in January.

DPS has announced its plans. The existing school board will vote on the proposals on November 30, 2009.

Northwest Denver's Lake Middle School will undergo a complete reboot from scratch, similar to the one the the District undertook at Manual High School in North Denver. Central Denver's Greenlee K-8 is also going to be rebooted, shedding its middle school grades and getting a new focus on comprehensive literacy in its curriculum.

Programs at an elementary school and at a high school are scheduled to close, although isn't clear if this means that the schools will shut down, or just one of multiple programs currently conducted at those schools will be shut down (many DPS schools have more than one curricular programs within a single school building). An e-mail from City Councilwoman Marcia Johnson, whose District 5 includes the elementary school, makes clear that Philips Elementary School is shutting down. Philips "was recently rated the lowest performing school within DPS, and will close to neighborhood students. It will now house the Odyssey Charter School, currently co-located at Westerly Creek Elementary, where prior Philips students will have preferred enrollment. Children who live within the current Philips boundaries will be assigned to either Park Hill or Westerly Creek Elementary schools. A third Stapleton elementary school will be built to open for the 2011-12 school."

Two underperforming charter school have effectively been placed on probation.

Several new charter schools are slated to open include a foreign language immersion school and a new "Green" school. A couple of the new schools in the works, one in Stapleton and one in Green Valley Ranch, don't even have names yet.

Many schools will relocated to vacant and soon to be vacated DPS school buildings.

Lake Middle School in northwest Denver [is] the third-worst performing school in DPS and the district's worst secondary school. . . .The district . . . recommended . . . the continuation of Lake's [International Baccalaureate] program with a new principal, a new staff and a smaller group of students. The program would be halved to serve about 300 students. West Denver Prep's middle school would share Lake's campus, also serving about 300 students. Lake's current enrollment boundary would be split between the new Lake and West Denver Prep. . . .

DPS's recommendations would close programs at Philips Elementary and Skyland Community High School.

DPS would give P.S. 1 Charter School one year to develop a high-quality program or face closure. And it would require Northeast Academy Charter School to find a management organization to help it improve its academic rigor. . . .

Three schools may locate at the new Green Valley Ranch campus under construction: Denver School of Science & Technology (6-12), SOAR Charter School (K-5) and a "multiple pathways" school to help students who have fallen behind gain credits they need. The district intends to build six such schools in three years. . . .

A new K-8 will be built in Stapleton to open in August 2011 with construction costs shared by Stapleton's developer, Forest City, and DPS.

Odyssey Charter School would move from its current home at Westerly Creek Elementary to the building currently occupied by Philips Elementary.

Denver Language School — a full Mandarin Chinese and Spanish immersion charter school — would be located in the recently closed Whiteman Elementary School.

The Denver Green School would be in the recently shuttered Fallis Elementary School building. . . .

Greenlee K-8 would become an elementary school with a program focused on comprehensive literacy.

For one year, the second West Denver Prep would be in the building now occupied by Emerson Street alternative school. Emerson Street would move to a shared campus with P.R.E.P. alternative school at 2727 Columbine St.

What is the Green School?

FALLIS ELEMENTARY will be the new location for the Denver Green School in 2010-11, where it wants to stay and grow. Curriculum will emphasize project-based learning with an emphasis on environmental sustainability. Denver Green School is a DPS performance school that will serve grades K-8 at build-out, but only ECE-2 and 6th grade in its first year. By 2012-13, the school will have to co-locate its older grades with another nearby facility (possibly George Washington High School).

Denver Green School will be a boundary school, taking students from the Mayfair Park, George Washington, Rangeview, and Park Forest neighborhoods.

Thousand of students and staff will be affected by this round of reshuffling. DPS deserves kudos for finding new instructional uses for so many of its existing buildings, and for being willing to shut down some failing programs while giving other promising new initiatives a chance. It would have been easy for the Board to be far less bold, with a more mediocre result.

The bold moves are particularly notable in light of the fact that Michael Bennet's successor as superintendent at DPS (upon Bennet's appointment to the U.S. Senate) has mostly kept a low public profile. Many outsiders had assumed that this meant that this was to be merely a caretaker administration.

Neighborhood Charter Schools

Three charter schools would be required to accept all children who apply within an attendance area, just like other DPS schools do.

Those impacted are "two new West Denver Preparatory charter schools that are expected to be located within district buildings, and Manny Martinez Middle School, which is operated by the EdisonLearning charter school company and located in West High School." Four other charter schools will be examined to make a similar transition.

Now, all charter schools accept students only through the school choice process, which implicitly limits students to those whose families buy into the school's concept and aren't bureaucratically inept.

In other words, DPS is also taking the bold move of blurring the line between charter schools and magnet programs in traditional neighborhood schools.

The Bad News For West Wash Park

I live in West Washington Park, home to Byers School on Pearl Street, which previously was the home of the Denver School of the Arts. When the University of Denver closed its North Denver campus to consolidate itself in one location, DPS snapped up the old DU Music School for the Denver School of the Arts, and nothing has replaced it. The new campus is a good one for a program that was conceived from the beginning as a magnet school, and also is convenient to the growing Stapleton neighborhood. But, nothing has filled the hole in West Washington Park created when it left.

The fate of Byers School was probably sealed when the district sold the school yard, a dismal gravel covered city block caddy corner from the school itself. It is hard, although not quite impossible, to have a state approved PE curriculum without a school yard. But, the massive historic building will require tremendous renovation before it is suitable for any purpose other than education.

In an ideal world, the school might be replace the architecturally interesting, but basically generic office building that houses DPS administrative offices at 900 Grant, or serve as a new home for a community college, trade school or small college. These uses would require only more parking where there are now ballcourts.

Realistically, however, in a neighborhood with lots of apartment buildings already, it will be either scraped, or converted to apartments, condominiums or lofts. This kind of conversion project has been very successful at other former churches and schools in Denver, but this school is an order of magnitude bigger than those projects at a time when the housing market has cooled and has lots of a major high rise projects coming onto the market.

Better still would be a mixed use building. It might house a pre-school, shops, galleries, offices, residences, and even a small church or theater, all under one roof. But, even if zoning and similar regulations did make this possible, finding a developer with the vision and money to make this happen would be a long shot. The Denver Public Schools, of course, perennially struggling to get the cash it needs for capital investments in places where city is growing, need to get a good price for the property, which is one of the largest undivided parcels in this urban residential neighborhood.

Colorado Tax Mix Typical

A study of the relative importance of different kinds of taxes, like sales taxes, property taxes and income taxes, in the overall state and local tax basis, finds that Colorado is typical of the nation.

State And Local Tax Mixes Vary Widely

There is no one right way to do state and local taxation. Few areas of law show more variety between the states, and even regional trends are elusive.

Washington State is at one extreme, with 62% of tax revenues coming from sales taxes, and no individual or corporate income taxes.

Neighboring Oregon State is at the other extreme, with sales taxes providing less than 10% of state revenues, while individual and corporate income taxes provide 44% of state tax revenues.

Alaska, which has no statewide sales or income tax but relies heavily on natural resource taxes, also has seen a sharp revenue decline as oil prices have fallen. According to the Tax Foundation, Alaska draws a nation-high 52.6 percent of its state and local revenue from a group of taxes that includes severance taxes on natural resources, stock transfer taxes, estate taxes and fees for hunting, fishing and driver’s licenses. Other states that rely heavily on this category of taxes include Delaware (34.1 percent), Wyoming (30.1 percent), North Dakota (20.7 percent) and Montana (18.8 percent).

Besides Oregon, Maryland (39.7 percent), Massachusetts (35.6 percent), North Carolina (32.7 percent) and New York (31.8 percent) are the other states that are most reliant on individual income taxes.

Sales taxes bring in 62 percent of state and local revenue in Washington state, more than in Nevada (58.2 percent), Tennessee (56.8 percent), South Dakota (54.1 percent) and Arkansas (53.2 percent). The sales taxes counted by the report include general sales taxes as well as “selective” taxes on products such as gasoline and cigarettes.

Property taxes, meanwhile, bring in 61.3 percent of New Hampshire’s combined state and local revenue, far more than in the next four states that rely most on property taxes: Vermont (42.1 percent), New Jersey (41.7 percent), Texas (41.6 percent) and Rhode Island (41.1 percent).

Colorado Is Typical

The breakdown in Colorado is (followed by the national average and difference from the national average):

Property Tax 30.4% (30.1%, +0.3%)
General Sales Tax 27.1% (23.5%, +3.6%)
Selective Sales Tax 8.2% (10.9%, -2.7%); Sales Tax subtotal 35.9% (34.4%, +1.5%)
Individual Income Tax 25.8% (22.6%, +3.2%)
Corporate Income Tax 2.7% (4.7%, -2.0%); Income Tax subtotal 28.5% (27.3%, +1.2%)
Licenses and Other Taxes 5.9% (8.2%, -2.3%)

Analysis

The Trends Don't Capture Conventional Wisdom About Colorado's Unique System

Given the strong incentive created by TABOR to use licenses and users fees that might be counted as taxes for the purposes of this study, it is surprising that Colorado raises a considerably smaller share of its revenues this way than other states. Colorado would have also been on obvious candidate to be high in this are as it has considerable resources subject to severance taxes. But, its economy is more diversified than the states that rely more heavily on these revenue streams.

It is likewise interesting that despite Colorado's constitutional limitations on property tax values for residential real estate created by the state constitution's Gallagher Amendment, which shifts the property tax base from residences to businesses, that property tax levels in Colorado are very close to the national average as a percentage of state and local tax revenues. Many observers had perceived that Gallagher encouraged local governments to favor sales taxes over property taxes.

Colorado is more prone than most states to favor general sales taxes over "sin taxes" and fuel taxes.

Colorado's corporate income tax collections are surprising low (almost half as large as a percentage of individual income tax collections). compared to its individual income tax collections. This is surprising given that it uses the federal tax code with little modification as the source of taxable income in each case. The cause could be something simple, like a much more widespread use of pass through tax entities in Colorado than in the average states, or an economy disproportionately made up of privately held companies than can use tax planning to reduce or eliminate corporate level taxes. But, it could also signal that Colorado lawmakers have been unusually generous in dishing out corporate tax breaks and have understaffed their ranks of corporate income tax collects at the Colorado Department of Revenue.

Colorado's Revenue Stability

Since general sales taxes are highly cyclic, and income taxes are somewhat cyclic, and Colorado relies upon these taxes to a greater degree than more stable sources of revenues like property taxes, Colorado's revenues follow boom-cycles slightly more than the would in a typical state.

The numbers available don't distinguish between the more stable components of income taxes, like taxes on payrolls, and less stable components of income taxes like capital gains, that have provided such a hard hit to New York State's state income tax collections. The numbers also don't distinguish between highly graduated state income taxes found in the East, that are more responsive to shifts in income among high income workers, and flatter income taxes like the one use in Colorado, the response to shifts in aggregate income without much regard to who is impacted by it (although the Colorado income tax base is still quite progressive, so income losses by the working class and poor have little effect on its tax collections).

The biases in Colorado's revenue mix, however, are mitigated somewhat by its diversified economy. Natural resources economy driven states like Alaska, are heavily impacted by commodity prices. New York State's tax revenues are deeply influenced by Wall Street's health which has a huge fiscal impact on the state even though it involves only a modest share of the state's total population. Michigan's economy is dominated by the manufacturing sector. Colorado, after periods when its economy was dominated by gold and silver, by coal, by farming and by oil and gas, has finally achieved a diversified economy that isn't thrown off by a single industry bust. Its diversified economy and diversified tax base, together, have put it in a better than average position in the wake of the Financial Crisis.

Where Are The Interesting Colorado Tax System Stories?

Colorado is interesting not because its mix of revenue sources is odd, but for two other reasons.

First, TABOR has kept state tax collections low. This has kept state spending on programs like education, and in particular high education, low and has encouraged deferred maintenance of state infrastructure. The lack of state funds has also encouraged local governments to secure revenue (particularly sales tax revenues) that, in most states, would be collected at the state level and distributed to local governments through state grants. Colorado's local governments, as a result, have more economic autonomy, but also more cyclic revenue streams than most local governments.

Secondly, the Gallagher Amendment and the heavy use of retail sales taxes as a revenue source by local governments makes the revenue interests of municipalities and businesses deciding where to locate within a metropolitan area particularly intense. Residential developments with their artificially low property tax valuations and lack of a retail sales base, are artificially unattractive to existing local governments, since the services that these communities need exceeds the level of taxes that they generate. Retail sales developments, which provide sales tax revenues and inflated property tax valuations, a highly sought after by competing local governments. Office and manufacturing developments which pay property taxes at above average levels but don't generate sales taxes are relatively neutral, but still generally generate more tax revenues than it costs municipalities to provide them with services.

The land use contests between local governments play out in a variety of ways, but tax issues are frequently drivers of that drama in Colorado.

Implications

One state and local tax proposal that I have favored for Colorado, for a variety of reason, is a revenue switch. In my view, municipalities should give up their sales taxing power to the state in lieu of increased use of property taxes, school districts should discontinue property taxation in lieu of state funding, and the state should use some combination of increased sales and income taxes to make up for funds that school districts would lose if they go out of the property tax business.

My revenue switch proposal keeps total state and local sales and property tax revenues, and government funding at all levels, very similar. But, this would give the State of Colorado a single sales taxing authority, which would provide administrative advantages, simply interstate sales tax collection efforts, and reduce the revenue uncertainties faces by local governments that don't have the resources to do elaborate economic projections and consider contingencies in their budget processes. It would also discourage intrastate competition for sales tax revenues that can lead to an excessive focus on developing new residential areas in unincorporated areas and excessive efforts to attract new mall developments even when the metropolitan area as a whole is overbuilt with respect to shopping malls.

The demise of school property taxes would allow most municipalities to replace the lion's share of their lost sales tax revenues with property tax revenues. Some municipalities would have to charge higher property taxes than others to provide services, based upon the size of their property taxes bases, but these disparities are less troubling at the municipal government level than they are in the state's K-12 education system where there is an expectation that every child in the state should have equal educational opportunities. Municipalities provide the every day basics of life, and a stable tax base for municipalities would insure that basics like police and fire department services, street cleaning, trash collection and the like could continue without regard for economic boom and bust cycles, given the state a solid foundation.

Near complete state funding of school districts would allow Colorado to travel down a path it has already gone far down where statewide school choice is the norm, and every child is on an equal footing regardless of where that child lives. Children unlucky enough to live in a place with a weak property tax base shouldn't have inferior educations. Increased states sales tax revenues acquired from municipal governments, and the generally broad, if regulated, power of the government to collect taxes, would be well suited to this task.

A shift of school district funding away from municipal governments (and removal of school board members from the property tax collecting system) would also cause decisions about school attendance to be less entangled with decisions about zoning and home buying. While geography obviously influences the school choices that parents make, in a purely state education system, it would play a much less dominant role than it does today.

This plan wouldn't change the basic mix of state and local taxes in Colorado, which isn't the problem. Colorado is typical on that front. But, by better matching taxes to the entities that are best suited to impose them, Colorado tax policy could produce more sensible school funding, more stable municipal finances, and intergovernmental competition for development could return to fundamentals rather than artificial tax issues.

Denver Zoning Reform Timeline

Per the Denver Post, Your Hub section today, the timeline for Denver's overhaul is as follows, pursuant to a schedule adopted 11-0 by the City Council:

* Late October - Publication of Semi-Final Draft
* By Third Week In November - At least two listening sessions and/or prehearings for public comment held jointly by City Council and Planning Board.
* December 22, 2009 - Department of Community Planning and Zoning shall submit to Blueprint Denver Committee of City Council the final draft of the new zoning code and map.
* By December 22, 2009 - Publication of final draft at www.newcodedenver.org
* A single bill for the an ordinance adopting the new zoning code and map in one legislative enactment will be filed by the Department of Community Planning and Development.
* January 6, 2010 - Planning Committee public hearing.
* January 13, 2010 - Blueprint Denver Committee will consider final draft of zoning code and map.
* January 21, 2010 -- Ordinance introduced by Department of Community Planning.
* January 25, 2010 -- First Reading of Ordinance by City Council.
* February 22, 2010 -- Final vote on Ordinance after formal public hearing.

In other words, the basic outlines of Denver's zoning code proposal are a done deal. A last round of meaningful modifications within the basic outline of the proposal will be considered for good cause between late October when a semi-final draft is proposed and Thanksgiving.

The final two months of the process will give Denver a chance to know what is about to hit them and to propose trivial modifications through January 25, 2009. The Ordinance will be adopted with only slight modification on February 22, 2010 unless a tidal wave of opposition has surfaced to the proposal.

UNRELATED NOTE: In a few days, ballots for the November 2009 election are going out. It will contain school board contests (one at large and district seats in about half of the districts. It will also contain one ballot initiative, Issue 300.

Issue 300 is an anti-immigrant, anti-civil liberties, anti-police proposal to require mandatory car impoundment of certain people. The last one was found to be unconstitutional in some respects. The one is opposed by the City Council and just about everyone else. It is a bad proposal. Vote No On Issue 300.

We Don't Understand What Makes Cities Great

We know in our guts what makes a city great, but analytical efforts to determine this often go far astray.

When you ask people where the best places in America to live are, there are usually a number of contenders: Honolulu, Manhattan, Beverley Hills, San Francisco, maybe Austin, Texas or Aspen, Colorado, depending on the person’s preferences, the kind of places where TV shows, movies and novels are set. However, when magazines issue their annual Best Places to Live lists, as they do each year, they usually end up with a very different set of cities.

Kiplinger's Magazine's 2009 list declares that Huntsville, Alabama is the best city in America to live in, followed by Albuquerque, NM. Bert Sperling, a city rating guru, has Gainesville, Florida ranked in the number one spot in the most recent version of his book Cities Ranked and Rated, while New York City comes in 241. For small cities, the lists are no less surprising: Money Magazine ranked Louisville, Colorado, a small commuter town of little renown between Boulder and Denver, as the number one small city in the US, and a snowy, suburb of Minneapolis, Chanhassen, Minnesota number two, outpacing by a huge distance popular places like Monterey, CA, Redmond, WA and Nantucket, MA. . . .

[T]hese lists . . . measure the places to live that combine the worst neighbors and the best conditions for home builders. . . . they are symptomatic of an impoverished understanding of the economic life of cities and what makes local government laws and policies efficient. The vision of urban life reflected in these lists infects both our legal and political thinking about cities and the content of urban public policy. In order to understand how we might think about urban affairs in a better way, and how we can make cities more productive (and nicer) places, a good place to start is figuring out what's wrong “Best Places to Live" rankings.

From here.

Bingo.

Farm Subsidies, Land Use and Health Care

[G]overnment is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup. . . . [C]onfined feeding operations . . . are encouraged by a farm policy that subsidizes the commodity crops fed to meat animals. If grain were more expensive, farmers would be encouraged to shift to grass feeding rather than feedlots.

More here.