Livability and All That
12th November 2010
Well it turns out I was living the livable life style when I was growing up in Queens, New York in the fifties and didn’t know it. Here all along I just thought we were poor.
In my town of College Point, Queens when the factory whistle blew a few thousand walked in the gate and out again when the whistle blew in the evening. People don’t live outside the factory gate anymore and haven’t for awhile. Again, specialization and division of labor are the main factor. Job groupings are far smaller today, and the rate of job turnover means more people won’t/can’t move every time they change jobs. Moreover, about 70% of workers live in a household with other workers – whose job will they live next to?
There remains, of course, lots of room now within the existing land use distribution to make it easier for those who wish to live closer to shops, jobs or entertainment. People also are free to go to the nearest store or nearest doctor. The fact that so few do so reflects the oft-forgotten fact that people have their own notions of what is most important. Trying to coerce them to live the way government – particularly the upper bureaucracy – thinks they should live holds many perils. The American people have no obligation to live in ways that make it convenient for government to serve them. Government isn’t smart enough to know how people should live or to order their lives in more “convenient” arrangements.
Turns out that government buzzwords are a substitute, not a tool, for thought.
It’s on the practical side that the concepts of livability really fail. The central failure inheres in what the Europeans call subsidiarity, proposes that any necessary activity of an authority should be conducted by that level of governance closest to the problem that can effectively address it. Having livability rise to become central principle of federal transportation investment planning is an egregious failure in our historical system of decentralized government. If sidewalks and bike paths are federal then everything is federal.
The problem here is a total disconnect between what people in a diverse democracy want, and what the central bureaucracy, and their academic allies, wish to impose. The livability agenda may be popular in the press and among pundits, but for most communities and people it’s neither popular nor remotely democratic.