Alain Bertaud
About
Urban planner, Romer's colleague
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Claims by Alain Bertaud (20 of 101)
Labor Market Means Ability to Change Jobs
A genuine labor market is not merely having a job near your house for life, but the ability for an individual to constantly look at and change jobs, making tradeoffs among commuting time, salary, coworkers, and future interest; mere employment without choice—as in jails, or pre-reform Russia and China where enterprises owned housing near factories—is not a labor market and produces very low productivity even with an educated workforce.
Floor Space, Not Land, Makes a City
What makes a city is not land but floor space; by stacking floor space vertically (via elevators) and adding hidden dimensions below ground (subways and, increasingly, tunneling for underground highways as tunneling costs fall), cities can multiply density and viability and support more transport modes in dense areas.
Tlemcen Building Code Ignored Local Culture
As a young permit officer in Tlemcen, Algeria in 1965, Bertaud found that the French-derived Code de l'urbanisme prescribed large windows and setbacks suited to Parisian suburbs, while Algerian residents valued privacy and central courtyards better suited to the local culture and climate; applying the code would have forced people to build housing that made no sense for them, so he chose to use common sense instead of the regulation.
Housing Markets Work Despite Heterogeneity
Although housing is extremely heterogeneous (every house and location is unique) and buyers have imperfect information—seemingly violating the textbook conditions for competition—markets still work well in housing, just as they do in restaurants and clothing where one can find satisfactory options at radically different price points in the same block; the reason housing differs is regulation and inadequate infrastructure, not any inherent market failure.
Affordability and Mobility Are the Planner's Two Jobs
The two main jobs of the urban planner are affordability and mobility, both of which can be measured and targeted; other goals like sustainability, livability, and resiliency are nice but secondary, so a mayor should set explicit affordability and mobility targets and test whether they are met.
Zoning Density Caps Are Arbitrary
New York's residential zoning encodes a 'magic number' of square feet by which you divide a building's allowable area to get the maximum number of dwelling units, but this maximum-dwelling cap confers no advantage to the city—New York's density 80 years ago was nearly double today's, so infrastructure can clearly support more people; the number was set when household size was about 4.5 people but is now around 1.2, forcing developers to build larger apartments than demanded.
Historic Preservation Requires Gentrification
Keeping historic neighborhoods (like brownstone streets) intact necessarily produces extreme gentrification because maintaining a brownstone or any historical building requires wealthy occupants; when Harlem's beautiful brownstones were occupied by very poor people in the 1960s, many had to be demolished because they were so badly maintained they were collapsing, so the only way to preserve such buildings is to have rich people living in them.
Forty Percent of Manhattan Buildings Now Illegal
A well-documented New York Times article showed that 40% of buildings in Manhattan could not be built today—not for building-code or fire-safety reasons, but because they contain too many apartments or are too high relative to current zoning, reflecting arbitrary planner-imposed limits on the number of dwellings and businesses.
Urban Planners Largely Ignore the Book
Bertaud's perspective is unusual and met with general hostility among academic urban planners—one anonymous reviewer said a book based on his idiosyncratic personal experience should not be published—yet the book sells in the top 10-15 in economics while ranking only 50-80 in urban planning, suggesting most urban planners are not reading it, though Bertaud is optimistic that ideas percolate over time and that new information and transport technology will accelerate change.
Minimum Apartment Size Prices Out the Poor
When regulators impose minimum apartment sizes (e.g., requiring developers to build at least 60 square meters) in the name of helping households, they eliminate the large number of people who cannot afford that much floor space; the affordability crisis in New York and San Francisco is driven not just by hard-to-build restrictions but specifically by minimum-size and use-based zoning rules that price working people out of legal housing near their jobs.
Transport Speed Sets Land Tradeoffs
Transportation technology determines the geographic extent of the labor market: when people could only walk or ride horses, the city was constrained to within about an hour's travel, but modern transport puts the same hour's commute much farther away, allowing households with identical incomes to choose between a bigger house far out where land is cheap or a smaller unit near the center where land is expensive—a self-generated price mechanism that continually adjusts the housing stock to what people want.
Free Street Parking Wastes Prime Real Estate
Parking cars in the street year-round on Manhattan's extremely valuable real estate is a complete waste of space; cars should be moved into privately owned underground parking paid at market price, and street space should be devoted to pedestrians, taxis, ride-hailing, and moving cars, because allowing people to claim ten square meters of street space permanently for free on the world's most expensive real estate is indefensible.
Planners Think Norms, Economists Think Needs
Urban planners think in terms of norms (fixed prescriptions like an optimum housing size) while economists think in terms of needs and tradeoffs; planners decide what people need based on norms that, when applied where land or construction is expensive, eliminate many people from legal housing and push them into the informal sector rather than out of the city.
Households Make Location-Price-Size Tradeoffs
Every household makes a tradeoff between location, price, and size of housing, and these tradeoffs are made differently by different households; planners err by concentrating on size and quality while forgetting location, which is why so much subsidized housing is placed in terrible, inaccessible locations that become poverty traps.
Externality and Safety Regulations Are Legitimate
Regulations that address negative externalities (like good-neighbor rules against dumping water on a neighbor), structural building codes, fire regulations, and sewer connections are legitimate because individuals cannot assess these risks themselves; but regulations that affect consumption—minimum floor space, minimum lot size, building height, kitchen size—are arbitrary because people can see and judge those tradeoffs for themselves.
A City Is a Large Dense Labor Market
A city is fundamentally a large, dense labor market, and the efficient functioning of that labor market is the foundation for everything else people value in cities—including monuments, restaurants, and culture—because those were made possible by the efficient labor market; if people cannot get to jobs in a relatively short time the city economy fragments and becomes less efficient.
Regulations Persist Because Nobody Knows Why
Numbers embedded in building codes persist because people assume someone smart—an expert—put them there for a reason, even though nobody knows why, and they fear that changing them will cause something to collapse ('here goes the neighborhood'); Bertaud recommends regulatory audits to eliminate rules whose rationale is unknown or only valid a century ago.
Price Mechanism Recycles Obsolete Land
The price of land automatically recycles obsolete land use: as a city expands, demand pushes up the price of centrally located land that once held warehouses or old factories, prompting developers to redevelop it to higher density; in command economies like Russia and China where land 'belongs to the people' and has no price, removing an obsolete central-city factory appears as a cost rather than the benefit it is in a market economy.
Zoning Prevents Best Use of Land
Zoning assigns a fixed use to an area that may not be its best use, illustrated by the Wall Street area which was zoned for offices until after 9/11 firms left and demand for residential living emerged—now roughly half the land there is residential condominiums—showing that zoning ostensibly designed to protect against externalities in fact prevents people from having the choices they want.
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