Progressive housing policy generally understands conditions that restrict urban population growth to be bad for the economy. Forcing folks to live further and further away from urban centers is costly in time — people have to spend more of their day commuting to work, shopping for groceries, taking kids to school, and so on — and time is one of the most valuable real resources we have available to us. As Matt Yglesias writes, “We have a finite supply of time per day, and no real prospect for increasing the amount of time that exists in a given day.”
One of the prescriptions typically given by housing progressives, therefore, is to change policy to allow more people to live closer together in and around urban centers, the premise being that greater population density enables more varied and specialized economic exchange, which is a boon to the overall economy. As Yglesias points out, the elevator is an efficient technology that could be used to a greater extent to increase population density and economic output in cities without substantially reducing quality of life. It’s better to have a two-minute elevator ride from the top of your high-rise apartment building, that is, than to have to drive forty-five minutes to get to the city.
This kind of thinking makes sense if we assume that the service economy is here to stay — that barbershops, nail salons, restaurants, shoe stores, and the like are going to carry us into the next phase of our economy — and that consequently we need to do everything in our power to set the conditions for a more robust exchange of services. Service businesses do indeed require high population density, primarily because they need lots of customers, and it’s true that they are more likely to prosper in a downtown urban area than in some distant suburb. But I don’t think those actually are the businesses of the future, nor do I think there is much growth potential in the service sector in general. No matter how many more people you pack into cities, and no matter how efficiently you do it, there simply isn’t going to be a substantial increase in the rate at which people cut their hair, get their nails done, buy groceries, or buy new shoes.
Thus I don’t see how it makes sense to suggest that elevators and tall apartment complexes are the key technologies of the future economy, and that policy needs to change to accommodate more of these things in our cities. Engaging in a massive political fight over housing and zoning laws — and crowding more and more people into cities — in order to rescue an economic paradigm that doesn’t stand much chance of significantly growing, just doesn’t seem worthwhile to me.
If you look at the trend of the past few decades, one assumption that seems genuinely bankable is that technological advances will continue to save us more and more time — almost no matter what we do. Compared to just a few years ago, more and more people are working from home, making from home, buying and selling from home, and interacting from home, and the methods for these types of economically critical exchanges will surely continue to improve in the coming years. It thus seems far more sensible to me to continue the trend of people spreading out, making better use of the land resources we have available to us, and utilizing the seemingly infinite potential of technology to push our economy into a new phase.
What will this new economy look like? Admittedly, we will still have plenty of remnants of the bygone days of the manufacturing economy and the service economy. Factories won’t suddenly disappear, nor will typical service businesses. But more and more people, I suspect, will begin to engage in high-tech, low-carbon-footprint commerce. This means more people creating, marketing, and exchanging digital goods and services, more content delivery and storage devices, new authoring platforms, and so on. And the more that people can do this without getting in a car — or an elevator — the better.
To some extent, I think this trend towards a digital economy has already begun, which is why I think it makes a lot of sense to focus our energies on how to grow it quickly and sustainably, and why it makes little sense to try to save the elevator and and the automobile for the sake of the quite possibly tapped-out service economy.
Mack Lannahan 