Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan: buy open space yourself, don’t tax others

If you want open space, buy it. Don’t tax others.

Billboards tarnish the Flatirons while houses climb the foothills to meet them. This is what “city planners believe the Flatirons could look like today if the city had not enacted restrictive land-use policies,” reported the Daily Camera. Boulder’s Department of Community Planning and Sustainability spent your tax dollars on such images to convince residents that only its authoritarian land-use restrictions can prevent such a dystopian scene.

Not so. For over a hundred years private land trusts have preserved open space — not with government force — but through voluntary cooperation and donations.  The Land Trust Alliance lists 34 local Colorado land trusts.  “Land trusts have protected over 1.57 million acres in Colorado, more than 80% of all conserved land,” reports the Colorado Coalition of Land Trusts. This is four times the acreage that local Colorado governments restrict through forced open space policies.

Leonard May of PLAN-Boulder County refers to those with a “philosophical objection to (government and) restrictions” to whom he “can’t explain” the benefits of open space. He ignores the difference between preserving open space through land trusts versus doing so through legal restrictions.

Land trusts depend on voluntary cooperation, taking responsibility for promoting one’s own values, and respecting the rights of others to pursue theirs. Compare this with government-enforced open space, which forces everyone, willing or not, to fund it. It’s elitist legislation that effectively excludes poor residents from town by propping up homeowners’ property values.

The Boulder Daily Camera printed this article on December 4, 2010.

For more on open spacing and planning, see the work of Randal O’Toole and R.J. Smith.

Photo credit: The Daily Camera article on the Boulder Valley Comprehensive Plan.

Daily Camera reports misleading statistics on Boulder County incomes

Last week the Daily Camera reported that median Boulder County household incomes had dropped “nearly 12 percent” since 1999.  But the Camera did not mention the less alarming news — that per capita incomes have increased over the same time period by 1.5 percent, adjusting for inflation.  This is according to two reports by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis: “Personal Income for Metropolitan Areas for 2009” and “Local Area Personal Income , 1998-2000.”

This sounds strange, but household income figures can mislead. Higher per capita income can decrease household income.  As economist Thomas Sowell notes, “Increased real income per person enables more people to live in their own separate dwelling units, instead of with parents, roommates, or strangers in a rooming house.”

Per capita income statistics aren’t perfect, either. The city or county could pass more zoning laws that inflate housing prices. These exclude poor people, and hence per capita income increases.

If you want to more accurately compare 1999 with 2009 incomes, look at income mobility, which compares the same flesh-and-blood people each time. For example, the Tax Foundation reports that “nearly 60 percent of households in the bottom income quintile in 1999 were in a higher quintile in 2007.”

But income mobility doesn’t tell the whole story either, as it neglects the value of employee benefits. “Health insurance costs relative to payroll increased 34 percent between 1996 and 2005,” write economists from the RAND Corporation.

A version of this article was printed in the Daily Camera on October 2, 2010.

Thanks to Linda Gorman for the link to the RAND study.

For further reading, I recommend Thomas Sowell’s article “Income Confusion.” He discusses the issue in dept, including income inequality, in his book Economic Facts and Fallacies.

Boulder land use restrictions undermine rights & personal responsibility

The Daily Camera reports:

The Boulder City Council on Tuesday night agreed on the details of new house-size regulations in Boulder, and are likely to approve the ordinance at a special meeting Thursday night. This week, they eased some of the earlier suggestions – for instance, they will allow a single-family home to cover up to 35 percent of a lot, up from 30 percent – but some opponents and two former mayors are still against the measure.

My response in the Daily Camera, September 18, 2009:

The City has no right to restrict the size of a home on a property owner’s land.  The land does not belong to the city. If the City Council, or anyone for that matter, wants to prevent construction on part of a home lot, they should go about it peacefully, without threatening people with political force.

Here’s an idea: buy the land with your own resources.  It’s called an easement. To quote a dictionary definition, an easement is “a right held by one property owner to make use of the land of another for a limited purpose.”  If you want to prevent construction on someone else’s lot, then offer to buy an easement on part of the lot.  If cost is an issue, you can pool money from like-minded neighbors and entice the lot owner with a generous offer. To learn more, do a web search for “how to buy an easement.”

Other alternatives to government prohibitions on land use include Homeowners Associations and, to use a legal term, “covenants running with the land.” You can look this up, too.  If Boulder laws stand in the way of HOAs, easements, or covenants, then perhaps they need revising.

To generalize my point I’ll adapt JFK’s words: Ask not what your government can force other people to do for you.  Ask what you can do for yourself, and how you can cooperate with others on a voluntary basis to achieve your values.

Free-market alternatives to zoning

The Boulder Daily Camera published my piece in response to Boulder’s proposed  “pop-and-scrape” land use regulations:

Government has no right to legislate how you build on your property.  However, if you’re concerned that your neighbors will block a scenic view, or paint a mural of Elvis on their house, there are ways to deal  with such potential conflicts without empowering government to make
one-size-fits-all legislation.

One approach involves what Professor Robert H. Nelson calls “Privatizing the Neighborhood:” buying a home affiliated with a homeowners’ association (HOA) that has an architectural rules
committee. [See here, here, and here] Unlike a government, HOAs cannot extend their jurisdiction to homeowners who have not opted in. Since HOAs are very local and small, participants are often neighbors and hence have incentive to settle disagreements in a civil manner. You would also have more influence on your HOA than on Boulder City Council.

A different approach uses common law rather than legislation. Under English Common Law’s “ancient lights” easement, neighboring property owners could own the space above a neighboring property. For example, if they are long-time owners and construction of a tall building would block light from reaching their property. A developer wanting to build a tall building could conceivably offer to purchase the easement for a negotiated price. Conversely, concerned citizens could negotiate a light and air easement over a property.

Compared to the proposed “pop and scrape” legislation, HOAs and common law traditions allow for variations in individual preferences and  situations and allow creative methods of conflict resolution. Rigid  legislation does not allow for that, and just rouses political conflict.

(Thanks to Ari Armstrong, Paul Hsieh, Ralph Shnelvar, and Randal O’Toole for their suggestions.)